What Drives Me To Share My Soul Online? | Ep 251
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Part product of the past, part vision for the future, part desire to live a meaningful life, part belief that I can make a difference …
In this episode I break down the reasons why I feel compelled to share my soul online, discussing the journey I took to get here and where I am hoping to go.
If you are wanting an in depth look at ‘my why’, this is for you.
Links mentioned:
Under The Influence, Reclaiming My Childhood
How To Get Your Sh!t Together
Poetry, From A Dark Night Of The Soul
Click play below to listen or scroll down to read the transcript:
Why Do I Share My Soul Online?
Why do I share what I'm doing here? Why do I share my soul online? With my poetry, with my podcast, with the stories and the explanations and the divulgence of my mental health journey? Why do I talk about sex, sadness and spirituality so candidly?
What is driving me?
This question comes up a lot with what I'm doing here, and I wanted to take this opportunity to share, to explain myself, to give you in an extended format, the sort of deeper reasonings as to why I'm doing what I'm doing here.
Because there's multiple and sort of conflicting, but also collaborating reasons as to why. There's no simple answer. But it, like everything, sort of comes from a function of my past.
You know, all of us are just in a way, looking at things at least, the accumulation of life lessons and circumstances that got us to this point. So I guess the natural point is to start off with my life story, my journey.
My Journey
Now I've talked about this in depth all across my website, but the simple summary is I moved out of home at 16. I had a challenging childhood. My father was an addict, a drug dealer, a chronic hoarder, a paranoid schizophrenic. And life in his house was not safe to say the least and I wasn't able to live there, and nor for other reasons was I able to live at my mother's.
In what has turned out to be a typical me response, I decided to flee. I ran and I've been running ever since, you know, and I like to say that I first ran from real problems, then from remembered problems, and finally from imagined problems.
This is the journey of surviving a traumatic situation and then dealing with the mental health ramifications beyond. And over the past 20 odd years I've gone in and out of different therapies. I've tried different medications and different approaches to ‘healing’. I've tried to live a normal life where you get a education, you get a job, and you just sort of do what the regular folk do.
But perhaps as a function of my personality interlinked and intertwining with my past, perhaps in an eight drive, perhaps some of the other things that we'll get into later in this post, for whatever reason, I wasn't able to cope or survive or thrive in those situations. I couldn't keep working the nine to five job that I had. I trained to be a teacher and I was enjoying the work in some instances, but for the most part, I couldn't handle it.
I couldn't handle turning up day in and day out. I couldn't handle the lack of control. I didn't see the overarching point. It was never explained to me. Or rather, the reasons given didn't align with my innate disposition. The stuff that I was teaching, the stuff that I was sort of forced to teach, didn't really resonate with the things that I felt that students would need in their life.
And specifically and explicitly the students that had a similar past and experiences to me, the stuff that they were learning just wasn't relevant. They were dealing with similar issues and yet they were forced to learn stuff that at the best of times is tangentially relevant to a normal person's life.
I got sick, I got stressed, I got overwhelmed and I moved on. I moved down into the path of martial arts, primarily Muay Thai and Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu. This helped me to feel a bit stronger and safer in my body.
Under The Influence
I looked into spirituality and meditation and at one stage or another, I decided to write down my past, write down the collection of the most sort of traumatic and embarrassing and other issues that arose in my life. I called this book, it turned into a book at least, Under The Influence: Reclaiming My Childhood. I wrote it for myself, ostensibly as a form of healing, as a form of therapy.
I was sharing it with a couple of close friends and they said, you know, Zac, you need to share this with the world because what you're saying here is poignant and other people will benefit from hearing this. And, perhaps for whatever reason, those words stuck and, given my personality, given my disposition, whatever, I'm able to put myself out there and not feel the same level of embarrassment or attachment to the story that other people have.
Now, that could be a function of my past, the dissociation, you know. You deal with trauma in many different ways, and perhaps the way that I dealt with trauma was to block myself off, was to pretend like it wasn't real. So initially, at least, me sharing, it felt like I was sharing someone else's story. I'd check into my story, share a bit more of it, write a bit more down and then sort of dissociate out.
But over time, as I got better, as I healed, I started to reintegrate with that story, and I realized that, to my surprise, I'm still able to continue sharing. That's one of the reasons.
The other reason that I choose to share, and this is moving into the book, How To Get Your Sh!t Together, but I wanted to provide a resource, use the skills that I developed as a teacher to create something that could help other people. And sure, Under The Influence was a first attempt at that. But going a bit deeper, I thought, well, what has helped me to process and survive and to begin to thrive in my life?
I've read a bunch of books, I've done a bunch of therapy, I've done some seminars, all of these things, listened to gurus and teachers and wise people. But no one's book summarized all of that sort of stuff in a way that worked for me.
So I decided to write that book myself.
Here is a collection of all of the tips, tools, techniques, tricks, et cetera, that have helped me to deal with my mental health problems, get organized, and start following my dreams. Initially I decided to put it out for free because I wanted to say, ‘hey, here you go, person that is me in the past, me at 15, 16, struggling, me that didn't have much money, that was living off charity and government handouts, and part-time work just to get through school and to pay the rent. Here is a resource’.
So I put it out chapter by chapter online for free. But of course this was being written and occurring at the time that I'm being a teacher and sort of moving out of that space. So I needed to make a living. I was thinking, what can I do to earn money that also fulfills my soul, that makes me feel good, that gives me purpose? This is an interesting question for someone that has dealt with trauma, that has dealt with neglect, that has dealt with abuse. Because a lot of the time you build up a personality that's in opposition to what's going on.
It's like, well, I won't become like my father. I won't be like my mother. I won't do the things like this person in my life. I won't be that person. But all of that's a negative disposition. It's like, I won't be them. It's almost like you're turning away from, as opposed to towards, what you want.
So what do I like? What do I want? What brings me joy? What comes naturally to me? Well, poetry. Which was an absolute shock horror for me. In high school, I was very left brained, mathematical, logical. I think I was so much that because it made sense. It was order in a world of chaos.
Tying I All Together
But when I met my now wife, she was a poetess, she's released a book, and she shared her poetry with me and explained poetry to me in a way that just resonated and connected. And two things happened instantly. The less eventual one, or the less monumental one, was I realized just how poorly poetry and expression and art is taught in schools. But more importantly, it unlocked writing, it unlocked creativity, it unlocked flow.
And, you know, to date, to point of recording, I've released eight poetry collections sharing my inner space, the sadness and spirituality aspects of my life, and another three collections of erotica, talking about the sexuality aspects. So a lot has opened up.
And I've started studying a Master of Counselling. These things all coming together have sort of shown me the benefit, the healing benefits, the reconnection with the self, the shadow work benefits of writing, expression, and sort of connecting to the muse. When I write, I feel good. So I'm like, okay, how can I present that to the world?
Well, now we need to talk about the sort of solopreneurship, the entrepreneurship, the way that I can make money to survive whilst thriving, doing something I love. Because there's this balance here of I could find another job, I could become a teacher again, I could do these jobs that give me money to live, but without a point, there is no point. And that would lead down a dark path of depression. So I combine all of this, my innate ability to share; the talent that I have with words and my desire to help other people.
And I put all of that together into a collection of resources and books and podcasts and video courses and work and classes on Insight Timer and Skillshare and all of the different things that I'm doing in the online space, the YouTube, whatever. And say, hey, here is my truth. Here is the reality. Here is what works for me.
And if you like what I'm doing here, grab a book, sort of thing. If you like what I'm doing here, let's have a coaching session together. If that's something that you think would help. That's the sort of approach that I'm taking here is this connection of all of those sort of different component parts. It's funny, being a sort of artist entrepreneur, because it's almost like there are different parts of me that need to be expressed that are driving.
All of me needs to eat. All of me needs to pay the rent. All of me needs to do the business side of stuff. But the artist, the innate beauty seeker, the poet in me is desperate to just create and share and resonate and connect more. That's one of the reasons why I'm doing all of this. But of course everything is interspersed with mental health and my disposition and my life circumstances and experiences. Part of me still wonders if all of this stuff that I'm doing online is still sort of like a shadow career.
I'm speaking to a microphone right now. And people are listening to this podcast right now. But should I be up on stage? Should I be doing workshops and seminars and sort of in front of people doing it? Because wouldn't that be an even more direct and personal way to connect And it is, and it is something that I'm moving towards. So I guess what I'm saying here is that my journey is not complete.
Authentic Expression
What you see here on my website, what you see here in terms of what I've been talking about here is just the stepping stone. Stepping stone towards my version of greatness, my mountaintop. I don't know exactly what that mountaintop is going to look like, but I know that it will feel good. I know that it will help people. Why do I share my soul? Why do I share what I'm doing here? What is the point?
If we go to the things that I talk about, I had this sort of introspective moment. What am I connecting with? What do I resonate with? What do I talk on? And putting it all into three words is sex, sadness, and spirituality, and I hope to write a book or do some sort of big project with that title.
And why those things? Well, it's sort of like the chicken and the egg. I share in those areas, and I realize that I'm sharing in those areas. I share my sadness because that's what's coming up. I share this spirituality because that's what I'm sort of heading towards and driving forward, and that's what calls me. And sexuality is a deep component of all of our live It's an innate urge. It's a craving. It's biological. It's human. It's life, right?
So I can sort of categorize all of my work into those three aspects. And what I realize is that all three of those aspects are oftentimes hidden from the world. It takes a rare person to share any one of those aspects of themselves. You know, talk about your sexuality. It's personal. Talk about your deep mental health concerns. It's personal. Talk about your spiritual practices. It's personal, right?
But I like the idea of sharing it because this sort of leads into a discussion about the issue that I have with modern society and social media and this sort of content culture of which I'm hypocritically a part of right now. You see the hypocrisy in just consuming this content that I'm producing what's within this system. I get it.
But a lot of the time, it seems to be that there is a lot of fakeness in the world. You know, social media is a highlight reel. It's a highlight reel of the choice moments that we choose to share and put out there. And you can scroll endlessly online and get sort of contrived and fictionalized and sort of highlights of people's lives, hyper-stylized. You know, here's the wedding, here's the travel, here's the new partner, here's the baby, here's all of these amazing things. The promotion, the win, the victory. Yes, yes, yes. Right?
And it's hyper-stylized in the sense that you've got filters and graphics and music and all of these things, quick cuts. But that's not real. And the more that society goes down this path and I get it, it's entertainment. I understand it. But I think that I can be a point of just here's my own truth. This is the reality of one person's life. My poetry is an expression of a feeling of emotion of a moment in time or in place or making you feel something that's real.
But obviously there's the sort of inherent contradiction there of presenting that to the world in a way that does fit the narrative enough to be seen, but not enough to be separate from or enough that I can separate myself from it all. And be like, hey, this person's different. I share videos on TikTok and Instagram reels, and I often get people saying, hey, your content here is real and it's such a good break from the bullshit that we're seeing online. And that's the sort of niche, that is the sort of the meaning that I'm trying to share.
Escaping The Rat Race
One of the other reasons why I'm doing all of this is because I believe that it is possible to escape the rat race. I believe that if you put in the effort, you can become more. It's not easy, but you can do it. And I want to prove it. I want to prove it to myself.I want to build a legacy. I want to have a income stream coming in that doesn't rely on me slaving away day in and day out. And if I get sick or if I can't work or if that business breaks down, then the money stops.
Why am I dwelling on money here? Well, it's not very spiritual. It's not very poetic in one sense, but really in another sense it is. If someone chooses to buy your work, they're voting with their money. They're voting as an exchange of energy. They've put their effort in to something. They've been rewarded with a token of energy, which is the money. And they're saying, I'm going to exchange this token of energy for a product that you've created.
So when people buy my books, it's like, this person is offering me a gift of their energy, of their labor, because they believe that what I'm doing here is worthwhile. And beyond that, it's sort of a self-fulfilling, self-perpetuating sort of prophecy here. The more that that happens, the more I can do. The more I can do, the more people I can help. The bigger I get, the more people will come across books like Under The Influence and How To Get Your Sh!t Together and see that they are not alone.
They'll read a poem and go, Oh my God, wow, that's speaking this truth. What else does this person have to say? Oh, they're telling me not to kill myself. Let's look into that. You know, like on the topic of self-harm and suicide, I've been there. I've lost many relatives to suicide. I've gone down dark paths myself. So part of what I'm doing here is trying to turn that tide, you know, for everyone, but particularly for young men, right?
Try Everything First
Because statistically speaking, in Western countries, the leading cause of death for I think 15 to 45 year olds is by your own hand. That is insanity. There is something fundamentally going on in our world that is causing that to happen. I want to make a change. I want to fix that or at least help move the needle. So if you resonate with something, if something I say speaks to you, is a deep truth, maybe I can put a little bit of thought in there.
Here is a shining light. Here's a little bit of hope. Here's something you can do. And if you're wondering what you can do, the single best piece of advice that I've got for you is try everything first. Try everything first because you're not going to do anything that's going to cause you to give up anything you weren't already willing to give up, right?
Try everything first.
Break up with the person, ask the person out, sell your stuff, buy an investment property, travel, do whatever you need to do, apply for a job. It doesn't matter. Try it all first. Take the medication. Do the TMS treatment, right? Go to a meditation retreat. I don't care. Try it all first. Join a gym. Have an MMA fight. Right?
You see what I'm saying here? It all doesn't, like, just do anything. Try it from a triage perspective. Yeah, they treat and they do things to keep people alive. Be that person for yourself. Triage your problems and try with a goal of trending upwards. More socialization, more income, more functionality, etc. makes sense. And I suppose this is the sub note.
Reach out, hit me up on social media, email me, whatever, connect, and, you know, say something first. Have the awkward conversation in the DMs before, you know, there's the awkward conversation in the obituary section.
Why do I share my soul? What am I hoping to do here? This sort of relates to why I share stuff online for free. I'm aiming to put at least all my books, all my poetry, all of these things, chapter by chapter, poem by poem, online for free. So you can scroll my website and find it all. That's a slow process, and it's one that I'm still working on refining, but it is getting there. I've got hours and hours and hours of this podcast.
Making A Lasting Impression
I've got thousands of words, hundreds of thousands of words of blogs and of poems and all of these things. Why? Well, like I said, I want to have those resources out there for free. I want them spreading and I want people to see that there's hope. I want my poems to act like thought worms. You know, when you read a book or a short story or a poem or music or something like that, and it just speaks to you and you keep coming back to it, 10, 20, 30 years later, it keeps resonating and you share it with the world.
You share it with people like, man, you need to see this. I want my poems to be like that. I remember distinctly the short story called The Egg by Andy Weir, and I'm doing it right now because it's incredible. That's a short story that I think everyone should read. It's a bit pithy. It's a bit cute. It's sort of, Eastern spirituality reframed into a short story, but it's beautiful and it's lovely and it's incredible, and I've shared it with countless people. So when I found that Andy Weir, the author, had written a couple of books like The Martian and Hail Mary and a few other things, I'm like, yeah, hell yeah, I'm going to go see that movie.
Hell yeah, I'm going to buy that book based on nothing alone other than the fact that he created one piece of content that was incredible. So what if I shared 10,000 poems? They convey an emotion that resonates with 10,000 people and they start sharing it. There's something powerful there and beyond that, what if those poems and those things that I'm sharing have an intrinsic beneficial value to the world? I'm of the belief that if we were more accepting and understanding and relating to ourselves, if we could accept ourselves truly, if we could embrace our sexuality, our sadness and our spirituality, we'd be better people.
I talk a lot about spirituality in different places. I teach it, I do it, practice it daily. And a lot of it is radical self-acceptance of the self, of the moment, of the things arising. And it's sort of looking at emotions that come, for example, jealousy. Not as good or as bad, just as something arising. It's a way to reframe things that are happening. It's like a gratitude practice. I've got so many things to be grateful for, but my mind just sort of gravitates towards negativity. We all do that.
Desire, want, lust, anger. Can we better process that? Spiritual practices can help. So if you like what I'm doing, and then you come across something else, you're like, ooh, maybe you know something about something here. I can help you to not be so angry. I can help you to be a little more self-aware. Just a 10% different sort of thing. If I can spread that to the world, then the world improves.
And it sounds laughable to think, but if the population of the world was less reactive emotionally, if the population of the world was less internalized, less selfish, less focused on the biological needs that just drive them and are more detached in a positive way, more aware of their interactions and how they impact the world, more mindful of their impact upon the world in terms of environmentalism and in terms of the energies they're putting out. And I don't mean energies in a spiritual sense. I mean energies in like a, if I treat you well, you're more likely to treat the next person well sort of thing, a pay it forward sort of idea. Then that's a positive. So if I can help people not to kill themselves, if I can help people to connect with themselves, then that's a good thing.
So why do I share my soul? Why am I having this conversation with you right now?
I could be doing any number of other things, but I'm choosing to speak in front of a microphone right now in front of you. Why? Well, I'm doing it because I see value, because maybe I'm going to speak to one person here, and that one person will do something differently in their day, and there will be a positive cascading impact upon the world. Like I said, everything is intertwined. You know, I need to eat to live, and I know that I could do a regular day job, but I think that I will have a better impact upon the world doing this.
I think that I will be able to share my story with the world better doing something like this. Is there selfishness here? Do I deserve to, for example, live off the royalties of my work? The capitalistic, the meritocracy idea in me suggests, yes, I've put in the work, I've sacrificed, I deserve to be rewarded. The spiritual part of me sees the value equal to everyday life. The humanist is upset and concerned for the plight of people that don't have the same opportunities that I do. And I sort of find myself in this sort of contradiction of action.
I believe that I can do something more than the run of the mill. So I'm choosing to try. And my hope is that by choosing to try, I can help you to choose to try in your way. I don't think that you should do what I'm doing here. It won't suit you. Your disposition is not mine. Maybe you could do an aspect of it, but you might be able to do, you know, five, 10, 20, 50, 75% of what I'm doing. But your unique twinge, tweak, change needs to be put in there because that'll make it unique to you and beautiful to you and resonate with an audience of yours, right?
Now, you might find that, okay, like the only thing that you take from me is the poetry or a morning meditation routine or just the acceptance of the self unashamed of who and what you are. Small or big, that resonance I hope to connect with, I hope to inspire, I wanna be a catalyst for change. I wanna help you see the person in the mirror for who and what you are in this moment right now. That's what I want.
I want you to be able to live your fullest. Because I believe that if you are living your fullest and everyone is, we will be a better species to ourselves, to others, to the world. I feel compelled to share with you the idea of what success means. And I've alluded to being able to live off my art for lack of a better expression. But a lot of people I talk to and they're like, oh, but you know, the chances of you becoming a best-selling author are, you know, and they sort of share the stats or basically it's very easy to try and put someone's goals down.
But the reality is, is that I'm not trying to be the best. I mean, I am trying to be the best that I can be, but I know that I don't need to be the best to be successful. Let me dive deep or reframe that. I am trying to be the best version of myself I can be. I'm trying to write the best poetry. I'm trying to release the best content. I'm trying to do what I can do as best as possible, but I don't need to be the best in each category or even one category to be successful because what does success look like?
Success doesn't mean me taking the equivalent of an Olympic gold or becoming a New York Times bestseller or having a movie made based on some book that I've written. I don't need to be at the pinnacle to be successful. What success is for me is to be able to live off my art comfortably. Now to do that, that's actually a lot more attainable. I need an audience. I need a group of people who like what I'm doing that when I release a book, they buy it, right?
But I don't need to have the world listening because that will spread, the message will spread. I had this thought, this idea that sort of encourages me to keep going. I don't need 100% of people to like me in a room of 100 people, if only one person likes me out of that whole 100. That's success, why? Because we're not in rooms of 100 people. We're exposed to potentially billions of people online.
If there's a million people and only 1% of people like you, that's 10,000 people, 10,000 people liking you. So if you expose yourself, as I'm doing here, sex, sadness, spirituality, you're deep in a truth, and you can convince one out of 100 people that you were worthy of listening to, success will come. Because that will spread and resonate, and those people that like you will know other people that will like you, and it will grow and spread, and you will find your tribe.
That was the sort of logic that went through my head as well. So like I said, trying to pin down all of the different reasons why I'm doing all of this, is quite challenging and quite hard, because where does it all come from? What's the purpose? Where are we going? It gets bigger and bigger and bigger. But ultimately, it's a function of personality, of disposition, of the past, of unique talent sets, and of this moment in time.
The technology exists that allows me to do this. I have a skillset that allows me to do this. I have a personality disposition that allows me to do this. And it makes me feel good. And it will provide benefit to the world. And it's working, right? So it's sort of this unique sort of connection down all of these paths. Where are we going moving forward? So the purpose of this episode was to be placed on the home section of the website.
So if you're listening to it and you've discovered it and you've played through and you've listened, hello, welcome, welcome to what I'm doing here. I'm gonna release this as an episode on the podcast, but also to be placed as sort of a revamping, a constant revamping of the website. It needs to be more personal. It needs to be sort of sharing more true to my personality of what I'm doing here.
Because the website is sort of like a record and sort of a way that you can look at all the different things that I'm doing. But it also needs to be personal and sort of feeling the emotionality that I bring. So that's one thing. It's gonna be on the front page. But what am I doing here? Well, like I said, the main topics that I'm talking about that I'm wanting to sort of move into, just broad strokes, ‘sex, sadness, spirituality’. At some stage, I wanna bring a book to the world that has that title.
It'll be sort of a poetry essay discussion, sort of elaboration on all of those aspects and how they interlink and how they interlinked with life. There's something coming there that I can tell, so stay tuned for that. But in general, what I'm doing here, if you'll check out my website, you'll see links to the books that I've got, you'll see links to the poetry and the fiction and the blogs, the podcast, the YouTube channel, my work that I also put out there on Insight Timer and Skillshare, like meditation courses and instructions and all of these things, personal development courses.
There's a variety of different things. That's what I've got on offer at the moment. I'm everywhere across social media, sharing my story, sharing my journey. Like I said, I'm on YouTube, a whole variety of things. I'm everywhere. If any and all of that is of interest to you, have a scroll through the website, check it all out, zachary-phillips.com, and just, yeah, consider, because there will definitely be something there for you.
Moving forward, I hope to just double down on what I'm doing, continue to connect, continue to resonate, and like I said, in the middle of this talk, bring myself out into the world more. That means more public speaking, more group seminars, more workshops, and more face-to-face interactions with people in the real world, because I think that that's the next step. Doing something here online is great, but there is more, there is more that I can be doing.
So if you are able to offer those sort of things to me, if there are sort of in-person speaking opportunities or workshops that I could attend in real life, I'm from Melbourne, Australia. So, you know, geographically speaking, that's where I am, unless you want to fly me out, or digitally, you know, digital seminars and that sort of stuff, where I'm speaking to someone else's audience, hit me up. That's something that I'm keen to move into moving forward.
A Message Worth Sharing
Regardless of all of that, why do I share my soul? I share my soul online, my personality, the depth of what I've got going on, because I believe I have a message worth sharing. I believe that I can help, help people to first survive, and then begin to passionately thrive, help them to find the tips, tools and techniques to do so. Meditation, exercise, writing, personal therapy and interventions, and a whole variety of other things can help down those paths.
Not to just get through the day, but also to start looking towards discovering your divine purpose and seeing something beyond just the day to day grind, and finding a life and a lifestyle that works and resonates for you. Yes, bad stuff has happened, but good stuff will happen too. Particularly if you step forward and move towards it. So either way, I thank you for coming along with me on this journey and for being here with me for what I've been doing over the last eight years. It's a slow, long grind, but it's lovely. Particularly if the act of doing the work fills your soul.
You know, and I'm since even just doing this talk with you here, I'm feeling good. And what I hope to do is help you, guide you, show you a path where you can find a life, where a day-to-day life helps fill your cup in the same way that the work I'm doing fills my cup. Because like I said, if all of our cups are full or filling up, we have hope, we have connection, we have love. That may be sounding like very airy, very hippie, but you know, there's something there to that space. Because what's the alternative, just giving up to the apathy and the sort of ennui of existence?
It's not for me. Try everything first, right?