#17 - Andre Crabb - The path of least resistance: engineering lasting inner change

It's been said that one person’s magic is another person’s engineering - and that’s exactly the bridge we build here. I’m joined by Andre Crabb, a former Silicon Valley software engineer who left tech after deep misalignment and health decline, then rebuilt his life around somatic healing and energy work. Andre brings a rare mix of grounded logic and lived experience, translating big spiritual ideas like oneness into something you can actually work with: stress, tension, and “resistance” in the body.

We dig into what resistance really is, why brute-forcing change can backfire, and how trauma often isn’t the event itself but what gets trapped inside the nervous system afterward. Andre explains the biology behind stored survival stress, including why animals naturally shake it off and what happens when humans don’t. From there, we go surprisingly practical with physics, using the laws of thermodynamics to frame emotional stress as energy that can be transferred and transmuted rather than ignored away, and entropy as a reminder that inner chaos grows when we never act on the system.

Andre also breaks down Dr David Hawkins’ levels of consciousness, why courage is a turning point, and how raising your baseline starts with releasing what keeps you stuck. We then get specific about Mindworks, Andre’s step-by-step, self-guided practice that looks like meditation from the outside but focuses on agency: what to do with awareness so change actually happens. If you’re a high achiever dealing with burnout, overthinking, people pleasing, weak boundaries, or a noisy mind, you’ll leave with a clearer map and a more grounded way to start.

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Transcript

When Science Meets Spirit

Peter Kolakovic 0:02

Hello everyone, and welcome back to another episode of My Best Life. It has been said that one man's magic is another man's engineering. What looks like magic is often nothing more than a beautifully tuned system that works in perfect harmony. My guest today, Andre Crab, is here to help us unlock that harmony. On today's episode, we are exploring the intersection where logic meets the soul. Some people think that science and faith are incompatible, but others believe they actually point to the same truth. As the old adage says, shallow science fights spirituality. Deep science becomes it. Surface math can seem very cold, for example, but deep physics reveals pure wonder. Andre Crab brings a very unique perspective to this conversation. He's a former Silicon Valley software engineer who spent years working with complex code and data, but he chose to turn those analytical skills inward. Today he works as a somatic coach and energy guide. Through his platform, Top Human, he helps high achievers find true alignment. He knows the rules of technology, but he also knows how to listen to the body. Engineers have a special way of looking at creation. They see beauty and how things fit together. Leonardo da Vinci once famously said that the human foot is a masterpiece of engineering and a work of art. If a single foot holds that much artistic genius, imagine your entire spirit. Our guest used to build digital platforms. Now he focuses on the living systems inside of us. The shift reminds us that science explores the world as it is, while engineering creates the world that has never been.

Peeling Back Layers Toward Oneness

Peter Kolakovic 2:33

How does your engineering mind interpret concepts like oneness or universal energy?

SPEAKER_00 2:41

Hey Peter, thank you so much for having me on the show today. Really happy to be here. And to answer that first question it takes a long time, I think, for someone to journey through their own soul and spirit and internal landscape to arrive at something that feels like oneness. And I say that because a lot of people can have a lot of things in the way. And I'm sure we're going to get into it in the podcast. But the stress we carry, the tension we carry, all that is noise. And all of the noise is what gets in the way of this oneness, right? This universal spirit or soul. We become more in the physical of us versus them, of we're separate, we're all different. When you start to peel back the layers of the onion, when you start to take off the lenses that we've been given by our parents, our teachers, society, our coaches, our bosses, whoever, as you start to take those off, you arrive closer and closer to this idea and I hopefully one day for you, a feeling of oneness. Not everyone likes to take off those lenses. Not everyone likes to peel back those layers. So it's the mystery, it's the big mystery everyone's trying to answer. It's what all religions try to answer and share with their people, right? It's what modern-day spirituality tries to share with in some non-dogmatic, you know, non-religious form. And I don't have the answer. Of course, nobody does. But we're all trying to look towards the same truth. And the fact that the oneness exists is true. The fact that something connects us all is true. It's a question of to what degree? And to what degree can we all individually see it? And that's what's different. And that's why I think there's a lot of argument and discussion and debate around all of that as well.

Peter Kolakovic 5:15

Okay,

Leaving Silicon Valley And Seeking More

Peter Kolakovic 5:16

wonderful. You talked about, you know, peeling back the layers. So I wanted to ask you when when you were still working in Silicon Valley as a software engineer, what pushed you to start that exploration? What was it that convinced you it was time to leave Silicon Valley and to try something completely different?

SPEAKER_00 5:37

Yeah, it's a good question. And I'll have to answer this in two different ways or two different periods of time, right? So there was what led me to actually leave California physically, right, and start looking for more. And then there's what I think you're asking is letting having me leave the profession entirely and really start this new career. So when I decided to leave Silicon Valley physically and like leave California, I was in an unhappy place. I was unaligned. I was just had gone through this kind of heartbreak and relationship that ended that I was really attached to. And in my mind, I was like, okay, I'm not even like in a relationship with who I want to be. I'm not doing the kind of work I want to be doing. I'm not, I don't want to be in this environment, this society with like the coworkers that I have. They weren't the people that I enjoyed really spending time with and commuting and going to the bar and drinking and like all this stuff. Like this wasn't the life that I wanted to live. So when that all kind of hit me, I was like, okay, let me get out there and look for something different. And that alone, that mindset has been a huge part of my journey of like, let me look for more. Not everyone looks for more. And so being a seeker is key to really making progress along this journey, right? Otherwise, you just accept what people tell you and you stay in the life that you've been given, and you don't take forward progress for what might be more aligned for you. So I left Silicon Valley physically, but I was still working in tech. You know, I had a remote job in 2017 before COVID. So I was still working, and over the course of the next year or a couple years, there was a series of events that happened that started to really degrade and affect my health, my physical health, my mental health. I had decided I wanted to start a business to eventually get out of working in corporate America. And so that led to this whole entrepreneurial journey. And anyone who's been on the entrepreneurial journey knows that it is a spiritual journey. Like there's a lot of things that will come up for you. And so, long story short, trying to solve and fix those physical and mental and emotional problems, issues, whatever you want to call them, the state that I was in that was declining. As I started to solve that myself, because a lot of Western medicine wasn't helping, therapy wasn't helping, meditation wasn't helping, all the conventional tools weren't doing it for me. And so I was like, okay, well, I'm going to figure this out myself. And eventually I discovered what I now know to be a form of self-somatic energy work. And I wasn't sure what it was the first even year that I was doing this practice. But I knew that the more I did this work, the more I did this process on myself, the better I felt, the lighter I felt, the more emotionally clear I started to feel. And it was very repeatable. And I could go back and do this process over and over and over again. And my mindset started to shift. I stopped stuttering because I had started stuttering. And after I don't call it a year of going through that process, I decided I need to learn what this is, teach to other people, and help people help themselves. And that was many years ago. It's taken me a long time to actually refine and learn the physics and biology behind a lot of this. And then also receive mentorship from different people in the field who have mastery in different submodalities of energy work, but ones that are more practical and grounded and actually answered the questions that my logical brain has. So it's been a long, sorry, long, long story, long journey to get to that decision from the initial curiosity. But now I've reached a point where it's like, okay, I know what I'm doing now and I know how to teach this.

Peter Kolakovic 10:23

Okay. Well, we're certainly going to dive into, you know, exactly what that, let's call it, methodology is a bit later. But before we get to that, you know, when people are going these profound life shifts, they can face, well, we all face a lot of internal resistance, right? All sorts of fears come up, self-doubt, inertia. You know, it's just safer to do the job that I'm doing because, you know, it's, it's, uh, it's a safe and easy paycheck. I mean, all of these doubts come up. So my my question for you is, you know, as you're going through this shift, how are you overcoming that resistance?

Resistance As A Physics Problem

SPEAKER_00 11:06

Yeah. The short answer is I already have. Right. That's that's how I developed. That was a big, let me put it this way. A lot of the work that I did and what this work does is dissolving resistance. And people have different levels of resistance. I myself personally, my mind, the way that my human system developed over the you know, three decades of my life, there was a lot of resistance for sure. And so the resistance, think about it electrically, right? If you know what resistors are on a circuit board, electricity runs through from whatever power source, the battery, the outlet, whatever, and then it gets routed through the circuit board based on where resistors are put. And resistors are put in certain places to make there be more resistance, more friction, and harder for the electricity to actually flow through those parts. And so energy takes the path of least resistance. That is just the way electricity works and energy works. So what the way to get through the resistance, or the way that I did it, is you have to look for it. And you have to want to look and feel for it and then dissolve the resistance because you can spend your energy trying to force your way through the path that you're resistant to. And that can work. And think of that almost like an exposure therapy type of approach, a brute force type of approach. Life gets so much easier as you start to dissolve the resistance. And you let learn to let go of the things that are blocking you from where you want to go. And so there's you, there's questions you have to ask yourself. Do I really want this thing? Like, is this really the way I want to go? And there's just this resistance, there's this belief, there's this doubt, there's this self-image that I have, there's this voice in my head that's just in the way. And so I actually need to get rid of it. Or is this thing that I'm trying to do actually not aligned with who I am? And my and I'm actually going in the wrong direction. And that's why there's all this resistance, because I'm making it harder on myself. So there's different lenses depending on the individual and the specific decision or journey that they're on. But the idea of resistance, I love how you brought it up, is so core to human existence, right? It's this kind of physics-level idea. And it's it's so crucial because life is so much easier when there's less resistance, for sure.

Trauma Stored In The Body

Peter Kolakovic 14:01

Absolutely. Well, let's continue on this theme of resistance for for just a bit longer. You know, I'm familiar with some other work that's out there. I believe there's this very well-known book. What is it called? The Body Keeps the Score. I'm not sure if you're familiar with that particular book. Oh, yeah. But it's all about, you know, how we hold traumatic events, how they're manifested in different parts of our body. And so my question to you is you know, what physically happens to our muscles and our nervous systems when we choose to ignore or block a traumatic event when we resist?

SPEAKER_00 14:40

Yeah. Really good question. And I was looking for this kind of specific answer somewhat recently, because I knew that the body does get affected physically. And it took me a long while to eventually actually find the answer. And I think it's fascinating. So the let me go back to your question, the way, just the way it was worded. We don't necessarily block these experiences, right? They happen. And they just happen because they do. If you're alive, you're going to experience some type of traumatic event. And it can be a big thing, like the things we all think about, capital T, traumatic events, or it could be a lowercase T, a small thing, or small things over time that can happen, that can be a traumatic event. I'll just share. The first time that one of my therapists told me that I had symptoms of PTSD, I was surprised. And then the more I researched it, the more I was like, this actually makes sense. Whoa, dang, okay. I didn't know I carried all this stuff, that I'm in this state. So the trauma that we carry builds up over time. And what trauma actually is on a physical level, it's not the event itself. It's not the experience and the moment. It's what happens internally inside the body. And what happens, super short version way I can explain this is what happens inside the body is the energy gets trapped and stored within the body, kind of like a battery or like a sponge that just soaked up all of this stress and tension and all of this energy that was supposed to be used for fighting or or fleeing, right? Fight or flight. If the body enters that freeze state, that kind of resistance, if you if you kind of shut down during that event all of the energy that the body had to fight back, to yell, to argue, to do whatever your body felt like it wanted to do, so many times in society for so many different reasons. And of course, of course it depends on the event. We hold that back. We hold that in. And what happens when we do that is the energy gets held in and absorbed back into the muscles and the ligaments and the bone, like everything. And over time, that degrades uh the soft tissue. It degrades this the human system, or not even the human system, the animal system, because we're animals first and we're humans second. And so the actual answer to your question biologically is basically something called capture myopathy. At least that's what they call it in the literature. And what capture myopathy is, is a phenomena, they say, that when an animal in the wild gets captured, let's say for research or science purposes, if they don't allow the animal to literally shake off its stress, that all that energy that it absorbed, if they don't allow it to literally shake off that stress and that energy, then it will eventually die. And it dies because of this quote unquote captured myopathy, myopathy, myo meaning muscles, opathy meaning there's a problem, and it basically breaks down the muscles and it basically stops the heart. And if you think about the number one cause of death in, or at least one of the main causes of death, in America today, which is heart attacks or heart failure, heart disease. And one of the main causes of that is stress. It doesn't take a genius to put two and two together that animals in capture myopathy are dying for the same reasons that humans are dying, and that we don't shake off our stress. We don't shake off that energy. Naturally, animals do in the wild. But we don't. And so that trapped, that bound up, that stored energy messes with our system in so many different ways. And because it's such a low-level fundamental thing, it comes out and manifests in so many different dis-eases, symptoms, whatever you want to call it in the body. But that's what's happening at the biological and physical level.

Thermodynamics And Emotional Stress

Peter Kolakovic 19:35

Okay. Thank you for that. That that's fascinating. And I noticed, you know, on your website where you talk about the science behind your methods, that you you mentioned that research in particular on how wild animals shake off survival stress. You also mention the laws of thermodynamics, which I'm hoping you can explain to a you know a non-science person like me. So can you explain how the physical laws of thermodynamics, which state that energy cannot be created or destroyed, only transferred? How do you apply those laws to emotional stress stored in a person's system?

SPEAKER_00 20:15

Yeah, I I kind of love talking about this because not a lot of people, I don't, I think, bring the laws of physics into healing and being a better human, right? And working on our mindset and releasing our stress. So the first law is energy cannot be created or destroyed, only transferred or transmuted, right? And so, and I'm going to talk about the first and second law. So the first one basically is kind of what we just talked about. The human body absorbs the stress, and so now it's there. It cannot be destroyed, it can only be transmuted. And it didn't just come from nowhere. There's no like, oh, this mystical thing, just this energy just popped out of nowhere. You know, it's energy is there, it's constant. It always is, it always was, and it always will be. It just manifests in so many different ways. And it's an invisible thing that makes it harder to talk about. Invisible things are tricky. Not everyone sees them, not everybody looks for them, right? Not everybody calls them the same thing. And so we're talking about the energy that runs through the human body, and it can't be created or destroyed. So it comes from somewhere, and once it's stored in the body and it doesn't get shaken out, it's still there, and so it needs to be transferred or transmuted in some way. And so the second law of thermodynamics is, I think, the more interesting one, where it talks about the concept of entropy and how and what entropy means basically is that the law states entropy increases over time in a system. Unless you do something to the system. Unless it's acted upon by an outside force. The system will break down over time. Entropy is chaos. And so entropy increases over time. Chaos increases over time. Things degrade over time if you do nothing. If you do something, you can keep entropy from increasing. And so think about the human mind. A lot of people let their minds just do their thing. And what is the number one complaint that people have when they try to meditate? Their mind is too loud. They can't quiet it down. They couldn't just sit there, right? There's all this noise. And so the human mind is a system that, if we do nothing to it, it will get louder and become more chaotic over time. Meditation can be a good tool. It's how I started. But it's not the best tool, I don't think, because it wasn't made for the modern world. Let me put it that way. There's other things in the way that they didn't have when meditation, you know, really, really got started. And so the concept of entropy and the laws of thermodynamics basically state these are laws of the universe. And if we want to master ourselves and live our best life, then we need to understand the laws of the game that we're playing in. And we are playing in the game of life and the universe. And so if these are laws of the universe, it definitely benefits us to understand how they affect us and our lives. And knowing that if you do nothing, things decay over time, it should then beg the question of, okay, well, then what can I do to whatever system is breaking down so that it doesn't break down more or so that it doesn't continue to break down. And if you're trying to live your best life, in my opinion, your mind and your body are two things that will definitely break down over time if you do nothing, and that definitely benefit you to start doing something about them. And doing so at the level of energy is the most fundamental level you can work with, especially once we know, as we just talked about, it leads to a buildup of stress and a lot of disease.

Levels Of Consciousness And Courage

Peter Kolakovic 24:34

Okay. Sticking with this theme of science, you also refer to Dr. David Hawkins and his research on levels of consciousness. So can you talk a bit about how you use his work to help clients track and raise their physical energy frequencies?

SPEAKER_00 24:56

Yeah, so his research was very interesting and it's relatively new in a lot of the things that I've studied. What he talks about is levels of consciousness. And at the bottom of the scale, there's things like shame and grief and anger and a lot of these negative heavy emotions. And let's not even just call them emotions. Let's actually call them states. Because they're levels of consciousness that people live at. So it's not even a state. A state is a short-term thing. A level is somewhere that you spend days, weeks, months, years in again, if you do nothing, right? So if you're at these lower levels, and I'm no different, I've definitely lived there before myself, then you have a certain view of reality and a certain view of the world and of your experience of life. And it's not a fun place to be. There's not a lot of optimism. There's not a lot of self-belief, right? There's a lot of self-doubt and a lot of blame that can happen at these levels. And at the top of the scale is things like enlightenment and love and joy. And if you ask a hundred people, I'm sure a hundred people are going to tell you they would like to live in love and joy and peace and enlightenment. That's the destination people want to reach, right? And so to get through to these different levels, we need to do some type of work. And the type of work is to release what is keeping us at the lower levels. About halfway through the scale, it's the frequency level 200, is what he numbers it. Is courage. And so when you get to the point of courage, that's where the scale starts to tip. It can be a lot, it can be a big jump for someone to go from living in shame to suddenly feeling courageous to make these changes in their life and to let go of their past and to forgive these people and to do all these things, right? And so you're not going to get people from one level to another level just in one conversation, let's say. And so the work over time is to help people level up in their levels of consciousness. And the way to do that is to start to release the bound-up energy that we talked about, the stress, all the tension that we carry, all that bound-up stuff that's literally blocking our brain, our nervous system, our system from processing data differently. If data, let's say you have two people, right? One person is living in enlightenment and love and peace and joy, and another person is living at the bottom where they're in shame and guilt and anger. And let's say they walk through life literally side by side. They are going to be experiencing pretty much the same data. Their body is going to be receiving the same views, the same sounds, the same smells, all of that, right? People talking around them. They're going to experience the same data, but internally their bodies, their systems are processing it in totally different ways because of the level that they're at. And so in the work that I do, there's there's two things that I do. There's one, there's one service there where I work on somebody energetically. They lie on my table and I work with their system in a quantum level. It's super, super cool. I'm sure we'll get into it. And the other one is where I coach someone and teach somebody how to actually start to dissolve this energy themselves within their own system. And the goal for each of them is basically the same, where we want you to start, we want your system, your body, to start dissolving and letting go and transferring and transmuting the old bound up stuck energy into something where it just gets dissolved and lets and let go of. That's that kind of first law of thermodynamics. And it's the second law where we're doing something to the system to let stuff go. And as we let stuff go, the inner chaos calms down, we get more clarity, we reach a state change where we feel a little bit better that day or whatever. We feel more lighter, we feel you know more clear. And as you have these little state changes over time, not only is it like, oh, I had this nice experience after I did this session, but it that session actually literally physically released some of that bound up energy in your body. And as you do enough of that over time, it starts to literally shift your consciousness and your level of consciousness increases, especially if you start to specifically target specific resistances that are keeping you from things like courage and things that are keeping you from things like love. And so as you dissolve the energy, the bound-up energy that's in the way, it helps dissolve the resistance and you move up the levels of consciousness up that ladder that Dr. Hawkins talks about. So it's all very cool and all sounds pretty abstract. And he's put science and a lot of research and measurement behind it, which really is quite fascinating, to be honest.

Mindworks Explained As Self Practice

Peter Kolakovic 31:13

Okay, well, let's start moving from the abstract to the more concrete and talk more about this specific modality that you've developed. You talked about courage quite a bit there. And you know, you you, in your own personal journey, you found the courage to leave a job, to leave a career that was no longer serving you, and and to do something new that felt more meaningful to you. And so you developed, well, uh first you were doing this work on yourself as as you as you noted earlier, and over time you felt the call to start sharing what you were learning with others. And so you developed something called mindworks. What is mind works exactly?

SPEAKER_00 32:01

Yeah. So as we kind of just talked about, mind works is the self-guided version, the self-practice that somebody can do, that they can learn. There is a learning curve. A process to start to dissolve this internally stuck and bound up energy themselves. And it looks like meditation on the outside, right? You're sitting down, you're doing this internal process. Internally, though, there's very specific Jedi mind tricks, for lack of a better word, right? There's specific things we're doing internally with our attention, with our awareness, with the voice in our head. And there's all these exercises that I teach, right? This is all part of the process to get someone to go from saying something like, I can't meditate because my mind is too loud, to at the end of the program being able to say, I'm, I can actually feel this energy transmitting or transmuting and changing and releasing. And I'm literally seeing changes in my life that I'm not actively directly working on, but they are happening because of releasing this energy. And so it's a it's a program I teach people that there people can go through it self-paced if they want to, but you learn how to start to feel and sense the energy in your body and physically actually let it go. And you can do it literally just sitting on your couch or on your bed, and it takes minutes a day.

Peter Kolakovic 33:47

Okay.

Engineering Lessons Applied To Healing

Peter Kolakovic 33:48

Well, sounds fascinating. I'd you know, I'd certainly love to hear more about it. And I'm curious to know to what extent did your background in software engineering influence that, you know, the system that you eventually developed. Like what were the lessons learned in your previous career that carried over?

SPEAKER_00 34:10

Yeah. So two things come to mind there. As a software developer, we get paid well to fix problems is what we do. We build stuff. And to be honest, a lot of building stuff is introducing new problems. Any software developer who joins a new company, right? Yes, building new things is part of what we do, but maintaining existing and legacy software and doing what's called refactoring, where you go in and you completely rewrite something to make it more efficient and more effective is also a big part of what we do. And squashing bugs, which is basically fixing problems in the code. And there's two things that make a good software developer. You don't want to just put a band-aid fix. And a band-aid fix is just a surface-level, quick fix that gets the job done for now, but it doesn't really solve the root of the problem. And so you want to get good at solving the root of the problem. And so that's the first thing. The way you solve, or the way you find the root of the problem, is you have to learn to debug. And debugging just means a process to eventually find what the actual problem is. And so you're digging through the code base, you're looking for signs and symptoms or things that can point you to where the actual problem might be. And so taking that mindset of wanting to solve at the root and being okay and wanting to dig through whatever I need to dig through and getting past whatever superficial layers are in the way so that I can actually find the root and acknowledge and realize when I have found the root, that is the skill that came over from software for me. And so I did that process, or I took that same philosophy to find a process that matched that internally in my mental, emotional psyche to get through and debug and eventually do the refactoring, do the changing, do the releasing, working at that lower level of in code, it's ones and zeros, right? Let's be honest. We're not always getting to ones and zeros as developers. We rarely do. But you want to get to the bottom of the root problem. And in being a human, the ones and zeros is really just this energy. And there's a lot of other, for lack of a better word, superficial, there's all these other layers in between us and the energy, right? A big tool that a lot of people use to try and solve problems these days is language. Talk therapy, for example, it's language. And that's not always the best tool, right? It's not always going to get you down further into the actual root level of things that actually need to transmute or shift for you to feel like something has actually changed. Meditation uses your awareness and keeping it in a certain way. Meditation talks about, like, obviously, there's a lot of different ways to meditate, of course. But they say, you know, ignore your thoughts and clear your mind. And using your attention to try and clear your mind is another tool. And a lot of people have have issues with that approach, right? It doesn't stick. So I knew there had to be a way, and I kept on digging and experimenting and trying different things, different exercises, until I found something that actually worked at the root level. And what came out of that was Mindworks.

Peter Kolakovic 38:10

Okay. I would like to say, you know, for full transparency, that I am a meditator myself. And I've been meditating for a while now. And you know, as you as you pointed out, there are many different ways to meditate, many different lineages, many different modalities. And I think in my experience, it certainly took me some time to find the one that really resonated with me above all others. But, you know, I certainly understand the point that you're making about how in the modern world it is increasingly difficult for so many people to meditate because our world is is is full of so many distractions. But yeah, so I guess what I'm getting at is I'd like to understand how you think the method that you've developed is if I'm understanding you correctly, and please correct me if I'm if I'm wrong, but it sounds like what you're what you're saying is it's it's an even better way to meditate, or is it a complement to meditation, or or how does it relate exactly?

Meditation Versus Agency And Awareness

SPEAKER_00 39:18

Yeah, great question. And I used to meditate too. You know, I would still say, you know, I could call it meditating. The the difference that I like to the difference that I like to mention in this case is the difference between awareness, asking, and agency. Let's start with asking. And and this is just stating differences, right? They all have different levels of effectiveness depending on the person. But here's what I've noticed and how I've started to categorize this. So I wouldn't say that mind works is necessarily better than meditation. It's just different. It falls under the agency category as opposed to the awareness category.

Peter Kolakovic 40:07

Okay.

SPEAKER_00 40:07

And it doesn't it depends on what the person is after. And if you have a lot of experience and you have something that works for you, then that's awesome. Uh there's no need to change that, right? Unless you're looking for something more and the meditation isn't working. So, real quick, there's a I'll go over the agency asking and awareness. And then there's another point, which is meeting people where they're at. So if I if we talk about asking, many people in their spiritual journey might ask for change. They are asking their God. They are asking the universe, they are asking something or someone, they're praying, and they're asking for something to happen. They're not necessarily putting in the effort that they need to. What I've noticed is yes, you want to ask, and it's a it's a dance, right? You have to kind of do your part and ask the universe. And that's just my what I've come to believe and to realize works for me. But some people stay in that purely asking category. And then the awareness category is where things like meditation and somatic experiencing, for example, fall under, where you become aware of the thing that you want to change, but you don't necessarily do something with it or about it. In many meditations, they teach you just watch your thoughts go by like clouds, or just watch your breath. Or in somatic exercises, a lot of times it's, you know, can you find the feeling? Okay, now just put your awareness there, just be aware of it. And that's kind of where that line ends. And so mindworks falls under the agency category, which takes it one step further and says, yes, we want to be aware of these things. And I'm going to teach you what you can actually do about it at that same level that you've built your awareness to actually change things and to cause the change to happen and to have that energy transmute. So that's one difference. It's kind of categorically in a different place. And then where I think a lot of people choose or decide for them that meditation doesn't work, which it's not that meditation doesn't work, it's that it didn't work for that person. The biggest reason why is people say I couldn't do it because my mind was too loud. And just when I started meditating, I literally had to sit on my hands. Like I'll just put that out there, right? My mind was so loud, right? I would fidget, my mind was racing. I literally had to make myself sit on my hands so that I could just like really pay attention and focus because I really wanted to master this. And so what I've done is as I've developed mind works, I have it be very baby steps, very step by step, so that it meets people where they're at, rather than just kind of throwing them in the deep end saying, you know, go sit and just focus on your breath or only your thoughts for a little bit and just practice bringing it back and bringing it back. I think that might have been more effective hundreds of years ago when we didn't have all this distraction and stimulation, like you mentioned. But we live in a world where there is all this distraction and there is all this stimulation, and our bodies are carrying more than ever before. We do have more stress, we do have more energy all built up. And so Mindworks has step by step exercises to meet you where you're at, which is for a lot of people in a very noisy, restless, somewhat Chaotic to some degree, mind and body, to eventually get you to the target of having agency over being able to release and let a lot of that energy go. So that's the difference. Does that make sense?

Peter Kolakovic 44:16

It it makes sense. Yeah. Thank you. Leads me to my next question.

Results For Andre And His Clients

Peter Kolakovic 44:21

So, you know, as as you're developing this system and seeing that it's benefiting you and you're convinced that you need to share it with others, I'm curious about well, what are the practical benefits that you saw that convinced you that I'm on to something here? I I really need to share this with others.

SPEAKER_00 44:42

Totally. Man, that's taking me back to when was it? 2019? No, 2020 is when I did a lot of my process back in the day. The first thing is the first thing that I felt was an immediate shift in my emotional state. And so a little backstory. When I was in 2017, when I left California and was starting to live life on my own terms, right? Working remotely, traveling the world, still being a software developer, but I was doing it in South America, you know, with a bunch of friends. My dad was diagnosed with brain cancer like three months into that life transition. And so it was a huge family emergency. I stopped traveling and I helped caretake my dad for four months. And family alone can be very stressful for people. And in this scenario, with the medications he was on, his behavior changed. It was a very, it was the most stressful period of my life that I've ever experienced. And the amount of stress and kind of emotional toxicity that my body onboarded was just off the charts. It was crazy. And I carried that for years. And I eventually felt it as this like toxic sludge feeling that I carried in the center of my chest. And I knew it wasn't anything physical. It was, yeah, I knew it wasn't this like emotional, like, oh, I'm just holding this stuff in. It was this kind of staticky, clingy, sticky, sludgy, just bleh feeling that I had. And so the first time that I realized I was doing something, I felt a little bit of that dissolve. And I felt better for that day. I really, really did. But then that feeling came back the next day. And so I went back and I tried to do that what became mind works, right? I did mind works again and I dissolved more of it. And I felt better that day again. And it kept coming back. But eventually I didn't feel it for a couple days. And then I didn't feel it for a week. And then I didn't feel it for a month, and then several months, and then a year, until eventually that feeling just didn't come back anymore. And that heaviness had so many other things that came with it. I used to stutter. Well, I didn't used to stutter. And then I did start to stutter after all this, after all the health issues that started after 2017. And my stuttering went away. And I would look at myself in the mirror on some days, and I would just, I could just see that my face was, I, it felt like I looked older than I really was. You know, and you've seen probably some people that like they age or they're young and they just look aged and they look older than they should be. And then some people just have this vitality. They have this brightness, this lightness to them. And the more that I did mind works, I would look in the mirror and I could tell I look different. And my mind was getting quieter. I was releasing the energy that drove the self-doubt, the energy that drove the self-criticism. I was, I had a huge, a very strong inner critic. And this process is a major, if not the biggest, piece that actually started to dissolve that inner critic, that inner voice, right? Having a more calm psyche, having more inner peace. Out of all of the things that I've done over the years to better my overall wellness and just holistic well-being, I kept coming back to mindworks because it was the one thing that was consistent, repeatable, and actually delivered the results.

Peter Kolakovic 48:56

As you eventually start working with clients and sharing mind works with others, what types of benefits are you seeing for them? And then what learning are you experiencing yourself?

SPEAKER_00 49:11

Yeah, totally. And it's a great question. And there was a lot of learning for me to do, for sure. And I struggled with believing for a while like, is this something that someone else can learn? And it wasn't until I had my first couple clients that I would realize, yes, this isn't just an Andre thing. This is a human thing. So the benefits that someone experiences, we kind of touched on a little bit earlier, but as you dissolve and release and discharge the bound up stress and tension and the bound up energy, it can change and it can manifest in various benefits for different people. A lot of people that I've worked with tend to be people pleasers. They tend to have lived a life for somebody else. They tend to not have very strong boundaries, they tend to have either kind of like noisy minds or very kind of quiet, passive minds. And as you start to go through the mind works process, you one, you start to quiet the noise and you start to feel more like yourself. And as you start to feel more like yourself, you start to make decisions differently. And those decisions could be behavior changes that your behavior just changed and you thought differently than you thought before, or you reacted less, or you reacted differently, or you weren't as triggered by something. And your your reactions and these decisions tend to be more in line with what you actually want as opposed to what your previous people-pleasing behavior would have made you do. So that's a big thing that I've seen. Some people feel more connected to their heart. They feel more connected between their mind and their heart, and they're able to then live a life that is more heart-centered and heart-led rather than mind-led. So that is a big one for sure. Having this be a daily practice, of course, but people there's several exercises within Mindworks. And my clients have found parts of it. Like they're, it's like riding a bicycle, right? There's many pieces. And they'll take either the whole thing or they'll take a piece of it and they'll use that more regularly throughout the day because it helps them keep on track with who they want to be, because they're already on their journey. Couple clients specifically have said this has helped me let go of past traumas that I didn't know were still affecting me. And that's a common clue, that's a common key that I've heard from many clients is like it helps them realize that things are still holding them back or things are still affecting them that they didn't know were still affecting them. And so building that awareness has been absolutely huge. And again, not only does it build the awareness, it gives them the agency, it tells them how to actually make the changes and how to actually shift that and transmute that as well.

Reaching Skeptics With Science

Peter Kolakovic 52:40

Andre, how do you work with people such as yourself who come from a science background and may not buy into the quote unquote the woo that a lot of this discourse around energy and energy work and related disciplines like yoga and breath work and meditation, like there are a lot of people that just kind of roll their eyes, which is fine. But how do you talk to those people and and convince them that there is something here worth exploring?

SPEAKER_00 53:16

Yeah, and that goes back to kind of the biology and the physics of it, like we talked about earlier, which is this is what stress is. Stress is energy trapped in the body. Trauma is energy trapped in the body. And we can interact with it and we can let it go if we are taught how. And we're not taught how because we forgot as humans, as a society, for whatever reason, well, for a couple of reasons, right? It's it's not, we talked about shaking earlier, right? It's not acceptable in society to just start shaking. You know, people are going to call 9-1-1 and think something's wrong with you. When in reality, what you could be doing is just literally shaking off some stress. So I approach it from, I don't usually start with energy. It depends on where I am, who I'm talking to. But coming at it from a lens, it's it's again just like the how the mindworks process works. You have to meet people where they're at. If someone is into the woo, if they're into the energy and the spirituality, great. Let's talk about that, right? If someone's not, if they're more science, then cool, I'm a software developer or was, I've got that logical background. I come from that world. It's stress, it's tension, it's overthinking, it's burnout, it's trauma, you know, whatever, wherever it is that they are, that's the way in because this is literally what I've come to realize is stress in the physical world is energy trapped in the body. And that's the that's that root level, that's that root cause. We can't go any further than that. We can't go any lower or less abstracted than talking about energy, because that's what makes up this entire universe, right?

Peter Kolakovic 55:17

Sure, sure.

Simple Steps Toward Alignment

Peter Kolakovic 55:19

So, what advice do you have for people who were, you know, maybe in the same position that you were in a number of years ago before you started this journey? People who were, you know, living with various challenges in their lives and want to make some changes, not sure where to start. You know, what advice do you have for those people in terms of some simple steps that they can take to start rediscovering a sense of joy, a sense of purpose, and you know, starting to live their best lives?

SPEAKER_00 55:55

Yeah, definitely. There's a there's a handful of things that come to mind. The first thing is kind of a mindset piece, which is be curious and stay curious and keep on looking for more, you know, for more answers or for something that feels more aligned rather than just accepting whatever it is that the world or society gives you. It's of course a balance, right? A level of acceptance of reality is required to live a joyous life. And we can continue to strive for more. That is a key mindset shift that I had to realize is how do you be happy with where you are and accept where you are and want more to have a more abundant future or whatever, right? A lot of people are unhappy with where they are because they don't have those things and they haven't been able to accept where they are. So entering that balance of accepting where you are while maintaining curiosity and hunger and desire for more, having both of those at the same time was important for me. And getting to that acceptance piece was crucial. So when you have that acceptance and that curiosity for more, where no one else really leads you to is start doing a couple things. One, start questioning, right? Be curious and actively question why you do the things you do, why you do them and the way that you do them, why you speak the way you speak, you know, why have you chosen the job that you've chosen. And then start to try to make decisions differently that are more in aligned with what you want. And then one of the first, or one of the overall concepts that Mindworks teaches and talks about is to build the mind-body connection. And this is important for a lot of reasons. But one of the main things that building the mind-body connection does is it helps build your somatic awareness. And the reason why this is really important is because it helps connect you back into your body rather than just living in your head. And in society, we get rewarded for being smart, for being intelligent, and for using our brains to do stuff. And a lot of this, a lot of these issues that we've been talking about today happen because we get disconnected from our bodies and we are more in our heads and we don't feel as much as we used to. The opposite of thinking is feeling. And so as somebody has that curiosity, they're seeking more, they start to question things, they want to live more in alignment with who they are, and they start to make those decisions. A lot of the answers to make those shifts are going to live in the body. And that's what we've been talking about today. And to get back to that connection is to actively build the mind-body connection. It does take time, it does take intention. The mind works process teaches that. And I've also had some people come in, and the only people that have really not gotten the results in mind works had such a large disconnection between their mind and body. That that's I'm finding you you asked earlier about what have I learned about teaching mindworks to others. And that was the one of the biggest things I've learned is having that somatic awareness, having that mind-body connection is huge for doing this work and for ascending your levels of consciousness and for going through and progressing on your wellness journey. This piece is absolutely crucial. And so whatever you can do, and I'm I want to build out some just free out there, you know, YouTube videos or resources. I've got one at least to help people build that mind-body connection because that is kind of a stepping stone. And it's absolutely crucial for progressing in this way.

Defining Your Best Life

Peter Kolakovic 1:00:27

Great. Well, we can certainly put a link to those YouTube videos in our show notes. Andre, as we come to the end of this conversation, I have just one final question for you. The theme of this podcast is living our best lives. So, my last question for you is what does it mean to you to live your best life?

SPEAKER_00 1:00:53

Yeah, I love it, Peter. And, you know, thank you so much for the time today. Really, really great questions. What I think my best life means to me is an aligned life and living in that space of courage, living in that space of accepting where you are and striving for more, whatever more means to you, and doing so in a direction on a path that is authentic to you and aligned with who you are, because you only get one life. And if you're living somebody else's life, if you're living a life that is not what you want to be doing, you're probably like I wasn't, I wasn't enjoying my time. Even if I was traveling and on, you know, some tropical island in South America, I wasn't doing the things I wanted to do with my time, with my life. And so I was not happy, even though I was in what other people would consider paradise. And they've done studies on several, of course, on the people that live the longest. And it's their mindset about life. It's they lived aligned, they left lived a life true to who they actually are. And that to me is how you live your best life. Some of us have to question more. Some of us maybe are born with living more authentic from the day we're born. But for me, I had to do a lot of questioning, a lot of digging, a lot of breaking through resistance, a lot of transmuting energy and directions and decisions to eventually get to something that feels aligned to me, where now I can truly say that I am living my best life. So that's what that means to me. And I hope more people choose to walk that path.

Peter Kolakovic 1:02:57

I hope so too. Andre Crab, thanks very much for joining me on the podcast today. I've really enjoyed our conversation.

SPEAKER_00 1:03:06

Thank you so much, Peter. Me too.