Scott has become a hypnotherapist, a reflexologist, practices Native American teachings and rituals, and continues his work as a recovering alcoholic. He is an integral part of The New Way, a progressive spiritual community where diverse individuals come together to spread a vision of world peace and love.
I am really excited to have with me today just a gem of a guy. Scott Donat, I love being in his presence. He’s got this quirky solidity to him. It’s an interesting juxtaposition, but when you really feel into it, it’s absolutely perfect. He wields it so well because the power that he has is so strong. It allows the rest of us to get it in a really cool and unique way. He does a lot of amazing things in the world. He’s known as The Foot Guy, reflexology, absolutely amazing with his hands. Without further ado, please join me in welcoming Scott to the show. Welcome, Scott. Thanks so much for joining us.
Thanks for having me. I’m really excited to be with you today.
We like to just throw people in there, what are your superpowers?
Just as I mentioned, when we met, I’m a demon killer. It’s my definition of the dance that we do through The Way Through Workshop. Those demons, of course, aren’t the horned Hollywood-style demons. We’re talking about guilt and shame and abuse and trauma and the pains of life that ultimately, because of our inability to cope in the moment, later in life becomes something to get in our way. My thing, my power, my gift, my tool is I help people to go back and deal with those demons and reclaim their power and move into who they’re supposed to be. That’s a choice. That’s our ultimate goal, is to get people stripped back down to choosing who and how they want to show up in their world.
Sometimes our biggest challenge is the concepts of the journey and everything else people go through in their self-actualization processes, it’s very abstract. It’s very vague. The idea of demons and using that as that analogy is perfect, because sometimes it does feel that way. I did a show here recently on chaos and darkness and a lot of people ask me all the time if I believe in dark forces. It’s a really fascinating thing to explore at different levels. I think that the truth in that changes as people grow. Have you had that experience?
When you have an unexposed demon that you haven’t dealt with, there are powers out there that use those your demons against you.
Yeah, in and of themselves, I don’t think they have power. But when you have an unexposed demon that you haven’t dealt with yet, there are powers out there, there are people out there who are aware of those things and use those things against you. Are there dark forces? There are people who are using your demons against you. Yes and no. It’s not a force. It’s the people. If I’m not presenting those buttons for you to utilize to manipulate me, then the only thing that I enter into in any way of manipulation is something by choice. It empowers me to walk around my world being conscious.
Give me an example of one of these demons.
My demon was rage. It still is to a certain degree, although the great big fire-breathing dragon is now what my wife likes to call the little two-inch snort. Although it’s still there, it’s much more manageable. When I arrived to do my work in 1991 in Melbourne Beach, it was at the direction of my therapist who sent me there because she was stuck. She didn’t know what to do with the rage and the anger and the alcoholism and the family trauma that I was showing up with. It was so bottled up. I had held onto it for so long that I needed something to rattle that loose. When I went down and worked with my mentor, Art Sellers, he rattled that loose. I was able to release this massive amount of energy that I was utilizing to hold all of this stuff inside that was eating me up. My best example is me. I was this twenty-something-year-old who, in my alcoholism, believed that I was a superhero because I would beat up skinheads because I thought I was doing a good thing.
There, I am, performing these evil acts. I say evil, take that for what it is. It’s this thing that goes against my moral compass. There I was doing these things in the name of goodness. It was just a lie. It was my anger and it was my rage trying to express my core. My core was I wanted to end racism and everybody to love each other, but it was coming through this spectrum of rage and anger and hurt and disappointment. When I was able to clear those demons, clear those energies, clear that emotional energy, then I became just an empowered man. Then my love was able to come through clearly. Then my passion is about truth and honesty and about being conscious of the vulnerable. All which came shining through in that good and balanced and beautiful way.
Sometimes we do fool ourselves, maybe these stages and part of the journey for most people is that you start off being unaware. We move into being hyper-aware. We move into just being. In the hyper-aware place, we are trying to get a foothold. We are feeling into what do we stand for and what do we stand against and creating a lot of these battles that really just representative of the battle that happens within us. It’s difficult to see because we live in a society that will absolutely affirm that there are bad things that happened and you have to take a stand. You could stay in that cycle forever, many, many, many lifetimes, and most of us do, because so much of what we are inundated with affirms that.
One of the core principles that we function from is it’s an inside job. It’s an inside job to the point where it’s an inside job every time, no matter what. It’s always an inside job. If I always come back to, no matter where I end up in my following that dance out there into that world, when I find myself there, I know how to come home because it’s an inside job. I took myself out there. I can bring myself back.
I think it already exists. But with collective consciousness, it’s hard to tell. I was threatening to write a book called “Own Your Shit and It’s All Your Shit.” It’s hard to see because it’s so easy to justify. I work with clients all the time. It’s always, “He said this. She did this.” I was like, “Every time those words come out of your mouth, just stop and go, “I said this. I did this.” It’s one of the first ways I know to really crack through that illusion of “maybe that’s not real.” I tell people, everybody’s just a little avatar playing in your game. Because when you can see that way, it really does get over that and rid the world of that “me against them” concept.
Remember that it’s not a switch. It’s a process. It’s work. You’re going to find yourself out of the canoe. You’re swimming around beside the canoe and everybody’s, “What are you doing? Get back in the canoe.”
We get into the superpower conversation, people are fascinated with it. They want their superpowers. They want to have telepathy and telekinesis and be psychic and all these things. It really is a phenomenal hook, because it does appeal to that playful child-like piece in all of us. Almost inevitably, there’s a little bit of a falling out with folks when they realize that the only way to get those in any degree of reliability is to do the process. It’s a constant thing. People ask all the time, “How long is it going to take?” I was like, “It’s not a time thing. It’s a diligence thing.” You have to be willing to stare things in the face and deny their existence in every moment. You have to really be willing to change what seems so obvious, yet when you look just under the surface it’s not obvious anymore. It gets really fuzzy. You get to choose what you want it to look like. You can’t do that until you willingly address. You talked about willingly, looked every single one of your demons in the face, and said, “Wait. It’s okay.”
I work with Neva, our daughter, on the concept of her gremlins. She hugs them and cuddles them and turns them from raging red to these white friendly little creatures. It reminds me of your fire-breathing dragons. Ultimately, everybody just wants to be heard, to include all your little pieces and parts. They all have fears and they all think that theirs is most important, and the sky is falling and all this other stuff. You just have to listen and own them and bring them up, but it takes work.
First of all, you got to be willing to give all of those parts a voice, a moment in the chair, if you will, on the stage. For most of us, there’s a line of folks all the way to the back door waiting to sit in the chair because they haven’t been heard for so long. That in itself, just that simple piece of all parts of you being heard without getting any work done at all, just allowing everyone an opportunity to be heard, reveals gifts, reveals energy that’s been stored which should have been used to facilitate your gifts, your superpowers, from coming to the forefront. Because you’re here to do a job, everybody is.
My advice is, first, everybody is here to do something. I was like, “Maybe I can say that everybody who’s coming into awareness at this stage in the game has agreed to aid in this conversation in some way.” Recently, it struck me because I talk a lot about the abstract frequency and what it looks like to be playing your own little game and to really rid yourself or remove yourself from the constructs and the matrix and everything else and move into that space. I operated under really specific bias that said everybody secretly wants that. I’ve really had to go back and forth on that because I’ve met up with people who are like, “No, I’m good.” They really just want to accept some degree of the matrix and be happy with it. Like in the movie itself where the guy is eating the steak and he’s like, “I know this isn’t real.” Everything in me is like, “I don’t think you can do that. I don’t think you can plug yourself back into the matrix.” You can pretend for a little bit, but ultimately what I see is disease, mental illness. I see something occurring that will shake you out of it. It may take a few times. Ultimately, I’m not sure we can relax back into the matrix. I’ve used the phrase, “You’ve just gone too far.” You know too much. You can’t un-know what you know. But I don’t know that that’s true.
Here’s my thought on that. Let’s use the matrix then as our metaphor and go back to the pill moment; the red pill or blue pill. In that moment, that’s where I have found people where they’re like, “I want to take the blue pill. I don’t want to wake up. I’m cool.” We call that a tuck-in moment. You get to somebody and you nudge them away and you say, “Dude, where you are is not real. Wake up.” They’re like, “No, man. I want to sleep.” You fight with them for a moment, but then you realize they’re choosing to stay asleep. It’s a tuck-in moment. You pull the covers up, you tuck them in, you give them a kiss on their forehead and you hope for a better choice for them next time. Because you are wasting your time, because they don’t to wake up.
I had a friend of ours, a few years back, share with me. He said, “The world is triage. Heal the wounded and keep moving.” There’s a lot of wounded. He was a combat medic. I’ll actually give him a shout-out, Michael Pritchard. He’s a veteran. He’s an actor, good friends with Robin Williams. He won an Emmy. He’s a great guy, a huge bear of a guy, neat person. He said that and I’m looking at him, “That doesn’t sound very loving. That’s not a very good description.” I really had to sit with him for a while. I see exactly what you’re talking about, where I learned it. I could spend two weeks with somebody who really just wants to be tucked back in and “waste” that time there. Or I could call it out, see it for what it is, plant the seed, tuck him in, move on. There are 50 other people I could have worked with in the process.
It took a little bit though to get over that. I really had to call myself out on and realize that was more about me than about them, and if not me, somebody else. Some of us plant the seeds. Some of us get to harvest the seeds with that person. But we’re all doing all of it. We love the harvest-the-seeds moment because that’s those a-ha moments. That’s when somebody looks at you and is like, “You changed my life.” The only reason those happened is because somebody else tucked them in and planted the seed somewhere along the line. We just got them at the point in time when they were really ready to hear it.
We all have to do all of that work, in my opinion. Planting the seed sometimes is the hardest one because there is no a-ha. Sometimes they look at you like you’re nuts or you’ve got two heads or worse, really get very angry with you. What I find is the universe is a funny place. God’s no slouch. The process typically goes, people wake up to their gifts. They connect with a bunch of people who are like, “You’re amazing. You changed my life.” They get all the affirmations. That’s the universe dangling the carrot. Then I settle into, “This is the real deal. I can do this work. I’m good at it. This is what I came here to do.” Then comes the wave of people that don’t agree with you. Now that you’ve committed to it, now you get the harder cases. It’s so funny to watch this process for people because it’s like, “Wait a second. Let’s go back to when it was fun and everyone was like, “You’re so great. Everything’s great.” Even Jesus got crucified. This is a continuum of being in that space. I love the analogies.
One of the side effects of doing your demons is that you wake up your gifts.
Back to what you were just saying, there’s that time of grace when you first wake up. I think that’s really important for us who perhaps bend on the road for a while to remind these folks who are just waking up. It’s like, “Listen, I know this sounds crazy because everything is on fire right now and you know stuff you didn’t know before, all very groovy. You’ve got to work right now. You’ve got to work really, really hard right now because six months from now, the heavy duty stuff is coming. Your demons are going to get in your way.” While this is really on fire and feeling really groovy and yummy, do the work. Do that work where you go in, and at least address the fact that there are in fact demons to work on. Not that you’re going to get through them because it’s a life dance. One of the side effects of doing your demons is that you wake up your gifts. All that energy now is free and available for what divine really wanted you to be doing in the first place. That was making a better place to live in.
I talk about that all the time, that you really don’t get to use and hone your superpowers in any degree of reliability until you choose to use them for good. I think that’s that conversation and you have to get over some of these other pieces. By then, they only really come online with any degree of reliability when you no longer need them to. Now, you just utilize them in the work that you’re doing, but you’re not defining yourself through them. Again, it’s attractive to be like, “I can do this and I can do that.” Just what you’re talking about. That’s still an identification with them and feeling better about yourself or identifying yourself through them from that space. You may get lucky. I see this with a lot of folks in the psychic healing realms, is that you may get lucky because obviously you’re getting information. Obviously, you’re open to things. But if you don’t work on your demons like you’re talking about, then you seize to be effective at some point. The information then gets tainted with your own stuff. It’s really hard to be able to be clear in those moments. It’s only when you totally commit to using them in a particular fashion and continue to do the work that maybe is never-ending. I don’t know if there’s an end game. They become really truly usable tools for the collective. But it’s work.
If you look at it from the place of that information that’s coming through to that psychic, that medium, that person who’s connected into the universal consciousness. As that stuff’s coming through, it’s coming through you. You’re the filter that that information is coming through on. Is your filter clean? Is it grind-up with your demons, your stuff, your illusions, your goo? Are you cleaning that on a regular basis? Because the work you do is going to go deeper and deeper for the people that you’re coming in contact with, and therefore, for you too. You’re goo is going continuously. To your last point, I don’t think it ever ends. I think you must continually clean your filter in order to be a viable and effective tool in the game. If I’m a filter, I got to keep me clean forever.
We try and do a workshop a month in community as we grew this thing. One of the benefits of doing the work and creating this in your community for you, as we look to do this around the country, is you start creating that community where people come back and you open up that opportunity for them to come back monthly or every six weeks or bi-monthly and assist for free. Now, they come and support the next group of people coming to do their work. In coming to support them, they clean their filters. It grows and it feeds. It’s a beautiful dance.
I tell people you have to be willing to move in to the role of the teacher and remain the student. I see people get stagnant in that role as a student. They’re constantly working on themselves and they get really frustrated because it’s unfulfilling. There’s this misconception that it ends, that the process stops. It never stops. Now, you’re just moving to how do you contribute to the world while you continue to do that work? In my opinion, it actually expedites those processes and it’s a great reminder. I think that’s why collaboration and community are so crucial, and so many of us got that message. You have to figure out how to come together and do this work. As individuals, it’s easy to slip into our old patterns and to give those demons voices. If you don’t have any accountability or anybody being like, “Are you hearing yourself? Do you want to be done with that story?” It really requires that ooey-gooeyness of groups and of people really coming together under that auspice.
It was lost when our culture started to move away from initiation, rites of passage.
It was lost when our culture started to move away from initiation, rites of passage. That place where we move through our life. We move through that student, warrior, young teacher, uncle, who teaches everyone, to grandmother, grandfather, to be a partner of her wisdom, and the teacher of the gifts and the joy and the wonder. You have a place where you move through your community and you learn these things. These things are imparted and given as the beautiful and wonderful gifts that they are. We embrace them as these incredible, valuable, more than gold and frankincense, these experiences of the people in our community.
I see it especially in westernized cultures. We have these prolonged adolescent periods, because there is no significant moment. Even here in the States, you’ve got sixteen to drive, eighteen to vote, 21 to drink, 25 for insurance or whatever. I remember even after getting married and having our daughter, I don’t know that I felt like an adult. At what point am I going to feel autonomous? It just felt like this prolonged thing. It took quite a while before I was like, “Now, I get it. Now, I feel that way.” There was a good decade or so in there or probably even longer where I could honestly say I didn’t feel like I had arrived into adulthood. There was nothing to signify it. I’m like, “How do you know?”
When do we I know I know? When have I been imparted the right information? At what juncture, what ceremony, what ritual was there created where it said, “Now, you know X, Y and Z. That’s what it takes to be an adult, a parent, an uncle, an aunt in this community. Here’s what your responsibility is back to the community. Here’s what the community is going to give you while you’re in this part of your life.” There’s this whole give and take that happens from community where you’re fed and you feed. It’s gone. We don’t do that with each other. It’s part of what we’re trying to recreate and re-establish as we flounder for ourselves here over these next few years.
For your community where you have these programs and then you invite people to come back and assist, that’s a clear delineation. Now, you’re not just a student. Now, you’re a student-teacher. Within Super Power Experts, in the net membership, I’ve always been very clear that we need levels, not from a hierarchy, but there needs to be progression, because you take on different responsibilities. Somebody’s got to say, “Now, you’re there.” When I was doing my intuitive coaching work, which really set the stage for all of this, it finally dawned on me. I would ask people, “What do you expect to happen? What is it that you think is going to occur that indicates to you that you get it? The heavens open up? The angel appears to you? What is going to happen?” You realize that people really have this pre-conceived idea that something would occur. I was like, “I see you already there. You already exist where it is that you think you want to go. Just be there. Just be in that. It’s a choice to do that.” I think people were waiting.
It’s almost like waiting for permission. I was like, “I’ll give you permission. Hominus dominus, you’re ready now. Go.” They’re like, “Okay.” It made all the difference. I’m like, “Who am I to give you permission?” We’re taught that it’s egotistical. Who are we to think this? We have all these fears and insecurities about it. It really sometimes does take somebody saying, “Here’s the checkpoint. Good job, you checked it. Now, you’re this.” That’s part of the reason why I started telling people what their superpowers are because, for whatever reason, it started switching. “I do have those.” Now, they start using them responsibly because it’s like, “I have these.” It’s so bizarre what we do to ourselves mentally.
When I started on this dance, I was the “turtle guy.” I was very earth-bound. All my medicine was very earthy, very turtle-y. I say that from a Native American perspective. I hung out with Reiki masters and psychics and mediums and telepaths, and people who could just pull cancer out of your body. I was just Joe guy, who was just full of rage and anger. When this work arrived, it opened up to me an opportunity for me to make a difference in the world where I didn’t need a superpower. I came into this dance from the perspective of, “I don’t have a superpower. I’m going to learn this thing from the ground up.” What happened in that process was I do have a superpower. In fact, I have several. They were revealed to me as I was willing to do the work because I wanted to make a difference.
Again, people would be like, “That can’t be my superpower. I just do that all the time.” I’m like, “That’s why it’s your superpower. It’s the most natural thing in the world.” It’s so beautiful. Then we have abilities. That’s why we delineate between predisposed superpowers versus unique superpowers. There is a little bit of a difference. I was just having this conversation last night about, are we just calling out natural abilities as a superpower? I was on a show being interviewed. The host asked me that. I said, “On some level, yes. It’s very purposeful because, yes, it might be the most natural thing in the world for you to do. If it is, then that means that there’s a way that you can up-level it.” You may be using it at a level one.
I use the word, compassion. To say compassion is a superpower, it’s great. That’s awesome. Everybody then has it. But not everybody relates to that. Not everybody resonates with the word “compassion.” If you do, I guarantee there’s a way for you to harness that and utilize it and challenge yourself to use it at higher and higher levels. When you do that, it does have a huge impact. What’s the ripple effect of operating in the world through compassion first? That’s a huge world changer in my opinion. Most people who feel compassionate, “I just like people. I’m a people person.” We try to disregard that. Yes, but why? Why you? I don’t feel that way. Why do you have that? We make the assumption that everybody has it. Everybody uses it the same way. It’s just not true. Over time, I’ve just seen too many examples of something that comes really easily to somebody being really powerful when they step into that space.
They’ve always been powerful from that space, but because they’ve always been powerful, for them it’s like watching grass grow. “This can’t possibly be my superpower. This has always been me.” I’ve got probably one of the most important FootGuy clients that I have. She’s been in the military her whole life. She has the ability to draw people to her and focus their attention on their own personal growth and healing, even when they don’t want to, because they just do what she says. “I’ve always thought of myself as a bit bossy. I always looked at it as my military career.” I said, “The divine put you in the military because it was going to allow you to become an empowered woman so that you could teach young women how to do this when you’re now.” She comes and does the workshop, dumps a ton of grief and realizes on the other side that her superpower is bringing people together, is directing people to their health and their well-being and their wonder. What’s going to happen to her? What’s going to happen to the people she loves? Wow. Just excited to see what’s going to happen in this woman’s world.
I love playing the role that really affirms that for people. I think it’s an important work to do. Tell people that they’re amazing. Tell people what you admire about them. We had a guy come the other day, amazing guy, a massage therapist. I just looked at him and he has this air of confidence to him that allowed me to relax into the work he was doing. It was phenomenal. I looked to him in the face and said, “I really appreciate that about you.” Again, he’s probably learned that that’s a tool that he wields well, and so it helps in his work. It’s so much bigger than that, and affirming that for people, because we rarely see that in ourselves. It does take that reflection from others. That’s really cool work in the world. I wanted to ask you if you have a live-in-your-power story you want to share with our listeners of a time when you got that intuitive guidance and you took action to what happened because of it.
For me, it’s a fairly recent one. I recently entered into my second marriage about three years ago at the end of this month. About six months into my marriage, I came home, whining and fussing about my job. I’ve been in the restaurant business at that juncture for about 38 years, from dishwasher, delivery boy, to restaurant owner. I’ve been everything. She said, “Can you just quit your job? Is there not something else that you can do?” In that moment, something happened. All of the doubt that I possibly could muster came running out of my mouth. As she squelched one thing after another after another after another, all I was left with was, “I’m afraid.” She said, “That’s okay. We can do it anyway.” Embracing the feminine, embracing my wife’s knowledge and trust in what I was and what I could do and what we could do together, and just having faith in knowing that from that place of the divine feminine I could just trust that I was in the right place. I just quit my job that day. I started FootGuy. I started doing workshops again. Here we are, two and a half years later, with things blowing up, hopefully getting her into a place where she can retire in the next couple of years.
It’s so important to heed that advice. You take the nudges, and, of course, there’s fear. One of my favorite quotes from Dr. Strange is when the Ancient One says, “We never get rid of our demons. We just learn to live above them.” You do it anyway. It’s easy to take action when it feels good and it’s super simple. Are you willing to take action when it scares the crap out of you? That’s a powerful story. I appreciate you sharing it with our listeners.
It’s a certain level of faith that the right tool will arrive in the perfect divine order.
When fear would have you stop, breathe and move anyway, is what you end up with coming out the other end of the way through. It’s not about ,“I have all the tools.” It’s a certain level of faith that the right tool will arrive in the perfect divine order and I’ll intuitively know how to handle whatever comes up as long as I breathe and step forward anyway. Just not freeze. Just don’t stop. Keep walking.
Where can people find more about you?
We are at www.TheWayThrough.org. Website is still under construction, but there’s a cover page there available for contacts. I’m also available at www.TheFootGuy.rocks, which also has information on the workshop and everything else that I do. That’s my main, personal website.
Scott, thank you so much for joining us today. It’s been delightful talking with you.
Thank you so much for having me. It’s been a lot of fun. I really enjoyed it. Thank you.
To all of you out there, as always, we appreciate your loyalty. Until next time, go out into the world, uncover your superpowers, and then change it. Take care, everyone.
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