Hello everyone. Welcome to the Sex, Love and SuperPowers podcast show. I am your host, Tatiana Berindei, and I’m really looking forward to our conversation today with James Purpura. We are going to be talking about overcoming addiction and the power to change. I’ve been looking forward to this conversation for a while. Let me just give you a little intro to James so you can know why I’m so excited. power to change
James has experienced some of the most extreme moments life can offer. 15 years ago he was an inmate struggling with life in solitary confinement, placed there as a result of his actions while homeless and addicted to drugs. While in prison, he reconciled his life and developed a personal philosophy. Once released he found his wife, created an amazing family, a beautifully prosperous life, and became inspired to share his knowledge with the world.
I want to thank you so much for coming on the show today, James.
Well, thank you so much for having me. I’m excited for this conversation as well.
Before we dive into our topic, will you please tell our listeners what your superpowers are?
I’ve always found my superpower to maintain love in the face of hate.
That is a super superpower, I think, especially in today’s climate.
How I think about it is this idea of betrayal. Can somebody betray you? My answer to that question is no, it’s impossible to be betrayed because as long as you’re giving in love and you maintain that love, then the only person the other person can betray is themselves.
Where betrayal comes in is the idea that you go down to meet them where they’re at and then you’ve betrayed yourself because giving is receiving. When you give and you give in love and you give with good intention and a good heart and that is going to come back, it very rarely comes back from person to give to anyway. The only betrayal in this situation is if you meet them where they’re at and you betray yourself by changing your state from love to fear and therefore that gift returns in fear.
You just said so much. Like there’s like a whole book in what you just shared with us. One of the reasons I really wanted to have you on the show is because I think that your story is … These are concepts that we hear a lot in the personal development world about taking ownership and taking responsibility for your life. Right?
Right.
For me, there’s giving lip service to that and then there’s people who have actually lived that and I feel like you are such an incredible example of someone who has come through, really about his rock bottom as you can hit in our culture. You’ve come through to the other side to be able to say something like what just came out of your mouth. I don’t want to put foofy words on it, but for me that’s huge. You’re a living, breathing, walking example of the power of change.
Well, thank you. I really appreciate that.
You brought up the personal development space and I remember, I don’t know, it was back in 2007 and I was actually talking to a gentleman named Neale Donald Walsch. Neale told me that, he goes, “Well, what do you want to do?” And I said, and I was just starting my rebuild process, and so I said, “Well, someday I want to rebuild my life and I want to be able to figure out what are the mechanisms by which we create our lives, our existence, happiness, wellbeing, things, creativity on the outside, money, those things. Then when I get there, I want to teach that, those principles to others.” He said to me, “Well, why are you waiting? You should just start teaching.” I said, “Well, I don’t have anything to say.” He goes, “Well, you learn what you teach.” I said, “You know, Neale,” I said, “the last thing this space needs is somebody who makes it by teaching something they don’t know,” right?
Yeah.
We actually debated for a few minutes. But that was my point, is that I wanted to go out and I wanted to live in the rawness of what it meant to be alive, what it meant to create my existence, what it meant to foster happiness and wellbeing. Then through my experience, not through reading a book, I wanted to take principles, apply them to my life, see what worked. I wanted to be standing on top of the mountain and I didn’t want to get on the mountain being, standing there by trying to teach other people what they should do, because I think that’s the world’s full of a lot of parrots where they just take information and keep regurgitating it. Everything that we write in our book and put in our movies is written through experience.
I really, I have a lot of respect for that because I agree. I think this industry is chock full of people who don’t have an embodied experience of what they’re talking about. I think that that can get really dangerous because it, all it takes is two degrees off-center to be sharing and teaching something without the full embodied understanding of it for it to go haywire, right? Or for it to just not work and then for people to throw out the baby with the bath water.
Well, yeah. The “run faster, work harder” approach to personal development only works if you’re already going in the right direction, which few people are. The other thing that I really have a challenge with is the fact that they make it all about the individual. “You aren’t doing this, you aren’t doing that.” Reinforcing the idea that somehow there’s a problem with them. That there’s something wrong with them. It’s like, “I have to change because there’s something wrong with me.” We have a whole narrative that you wouldn’t have seen in the book or in the movie because I developed it after that, but it’s this idea, we like to tell people that you’ve never made a bad decision. When I tell people that they generally go, “No James, I feel like I’ve made a lot of bad decisions.” What do you think of that narrative?
power to change
Right. Well, I mean, it depends on how you slice it. Because there is being able to look at bad decisions that you’ve made or “bad decisions” that you’ve made and say, “I want to do things differently,” and the whole thing that you present in the book around taking ownership, taking personal responsibility, right?
Right.
Because that can be a very empowering stance to take. I also very much hear what you’re saying and can see that other trajectory and have sat in it myself and counseled people through it, of understanding that there is an enfoldment that’s occurring and to judge it as wrong keeps you in the suffering.
We take it a little bit differently. What I like to tell people is, “You’ve never made a bad decision. Not only that, you’re not even capable of making a bad decision unless you’re a sociopath or your mental ill.” And people are like, “Well, what are you talking about?” What I would say the difference is that you’ve only ever made decisions with bad information. So, you might think that’s phonetics, but it’s not and there’s a really important reason why it’s not.
power to change
What you need to understand is we all make decisions the same way. We literally examine all the information that’s around us at any given point in time and we make the best decision we can with the information that’s available to us. A bad decision would be, “I’m going to make a decision that I know at the time I make the decision is against my best interest and I’m going to do it anyway.” That’s not what we do. We’re only ever doing the best we can.
The problem is that the information that we use to make our decisions is often wrong or lacking and the reason that’s important is to understand that there’s nothing wrong with you. All the listeners, “I’m going to take you off the hook. There’s nothing wrong with you.” If my life is something that you aspire to have then and you look at me, it’s not because I’m better than you. It’s only because I had better information when I made decisions. I mean, it’s not no secret, better information, better decision. What it comes down to is it’s an information problem. We’d like to say that if your life is not how you want it to be, it’s not because you’ve done anything wrong. It’s because you made the only decisions you could with the information that’s available to you. It’s an information problem.
A big part of what we’re trying to do is to teach people where they access and get the information for which they make the decisions and that’s where everything comes back to perception. I want to let everybody that’s listening to my voice off the hook today. I’m going to tell you once and for all, “Stop beating yourself up because there is nothing wrong with you. It’s just information. When you have good information, you make good decisions that empower your life and move your life forward. When you have bad information, you make decisions that don’t turn out so good.”
There’s so much that I want to unpack in what you’re just talking about. We do have to go to a quick break though and we’re going to dive much deeper because there’s one thing in particular that I caught that I really, really want to go deeper into.
Before we go to the break, will you tell our listeners where they can go to find out more about you and your work?
Yeah, they can go to our website, powerful-u.com. We have a movie, we have a book, we’ve got an assessment, we’ve got events. Go check it out, engage with our content and thanks, we appreciate you coming by.
We are talking with James Purpura today about overcoming addiction and the power to change. This is going to be a very juicy conversation and there’s more to dive into when we get back, so stay tuned.
To listen to the entire show click on the player above or go to the SuperPower Up! podcast on iTunes.
Music Credit: All instruments played by Amanda Turk. Engineered and produced by Tatiana Berindei and Daniel Plane reelcello.com
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