There's a version of this episode where we say "okay, we're spiritual" and move on with the day. This is not that one.

Cam almost didn't go to Phoenix. He didn't want to travel, we were in the busiest season of our lives, and the whole thing was a hard no, right up until it became a very clear yes. So he rented a Corvette (a dramatic departure from our decade-old dented Kia Soul, who has never once failed us) and flew out to a workshop with eleven strangers, most of them Phoenix real estate people twenty years older than him.

What happened in that room is the story he tells here. He cries telling it. He almost never does that.

We get into:

- Muscle testing: what it is, how his chiropractor father used it on him as a kid with a bag of cheese, and how a room of high performers used it to locate the exact event underneath a lifelong block

- Why a release can take two minutes instead of two years, and what has to be true for that to actually work

- Why we have never said the words out loud, even though our entire life is the practice

And then the part I've been chewing on for months: what it costs you to keep the most alive part of yourself in the shadows, and who never finds you while you're busy doing it.

Consider this our lovingly passed-along call-out.

For the ongoing version of these conversations, explore The Board: https://www.theboardwalks.com/the-board

Someone on the walk was asked what self-love means to him. His answer: volunteering. Helping the church, helping the homeless, getting out of his own head. Beautiful things, all of them. But is that self-love, or is it the most socially acceptable way to never sit with yourself?

That question opens the whole episode.

We came back from a two-week hiatus mid-upgrade, shedding skins, and this is the conversation that wanted to happen. Not the bubble-bath version of self-love. The version where you notice you cannot pour from a cup that's empty, and that what festers in the depletion isn't generosity. It's resentment, martyrdom, and a very tired face you can spot in a Best Buy.

Some of what we get into:

- The two kinds of selfishness, and why the light one buys back your entire calendar

- Why we've attended roughly ten events in four years, and why no one who walks with us owes us anything

- The relaxation crisis: how doing nothing became a skill you have to build tolerance for

We talk about the obligations so quiet you'd never flag them, the ones decided in microseconds. We talk about your head as an old MacBook with the fan going like a lawnmower, and what we'd do for the laptop that we won't do for ourselves. Elle shares a practice she learned in Sedona in 2021 involving tapping, gratitude, and moving energy out of the head and back into the belly.

We end in one minute of silence. Actual silence. Bring your shoulders down for it.

For the ongoing version of these conversations, explore The Board: https://www.theboardwalks.com/the-board

Cam went on YouTube one afternoon and every thumbnail he saw was a version of the same video: why I went no contact with my family. That observation sat between us for two weeks before we sat back down on the couches to actually pull it apart.

What we found underneath it was not drama. It was obligation. The Sunday Zoom call somebody set up out of love that quietly curdled into dread. The parent who cries "why are you trying to leave me" and means it. The crab pulled back down into the bucket by people who genuinely think they are helping.

We also went somewhere I did not expect: that this whole wave is only possible because a generation finally got what their parents said they wanted for them. You raise a child to stand on their own two feet, and then they may use those feet to walk away. Nobody planned for that part.

In this one:

- Why cutting someone off is almost always easier than telling them the truth, and what the one honest sentence actually sounds like

- The flashlight analogy, and why consequences are a form of teaching rather than punishment

- The friend I finally told the truth to four years ago, what I said, and the response I never got

We land somewhere neither of us expected, on whose job it actually is to ask the question when someone starts drifting. My answer changed while I was saying it out loud.

For the ongoing version of these conversations, explore The Board: https://www.theboardwalks.com/the-board