Finding the leader within with Luke Iorio

Carolyn Swora  03:44
Yeah, yeah, for sure. Either. reached out to her too. Yeah. So just it’s just great. Like, I love doing this work. Because I get to meet people like you who like put that, you know, put me in touch with people like her and it’s just you know, we can build this community and just keep absolutely keep growing. So all right, well, reporting progress. And I believe I know how to pronounce it. Aye. Aye Oreo. Got it. All right. I like the way you put that on the on the page. It’s like talk about cookies and and seeing the cookies. Yeah. Alrighty, so, Dan, this is the episode with Luke Iorio. And here we go. Welcome listeners to evolve a new era of leadership. I’m your host Carolyn Swora. And today I’m really excited to have our guest Luke Iorio on the show. Welcome, Luke.

Luke Iorio  04:45
Thanks for having me, Carolyn. We’re looking forward to it.

Carolyn Swora  04:47
Yeah. So now beyond the fact that you have a really cool last name that has the word Oreo in it. You are also doing fascinating work that I just wanted to talk to you about, you know, this this work that you’re doing around helping people really connect with who they are, and I know you have your own podcast. So I’d love to hear a little bit about what inspired you to start this podcast and really help people on this journey of self awareness.

Luke Iorio  05:15
Sure. Well, the podcast on this walk really started just out of my own personal journeys. So I had a really kind of wonderful career very fortunate career, running one of the very world renowned Coach Training Institute inside of the coaching space. And after I’d gotten the point of being CEO for about five years and being in this work, right of personal development and focusing and looking at ourselves and all the different angles right to keep us optimized and keep us into wellness. And, well, the emperor had no clothes, and I burnt out. So I was so focused on achieving the things that I had set out to achieve, which was a kind of an old way of operating a part of my old identity. And I was so clear that I was doing work that was meaningful in the world. I was aligned because it did have a lot of purpose to it. And I was still achieving under a lot of that old paradigm of I’ve got to have more meaning I’ve got to achieve the next thing for myself. The next thing for the company, I’ve gotta hit the next goal. And so I was on that hamster wheel that just kept going. And what led me to the podcast what led me to the work I’m presently doing was in that moment of burnout, even though I had had so many things that were going really well and looked great from the outside looking in. I hadn’t taken the time to recognize that I was no longer that person. And so while that future that that time that I was living was a future that it didn’t did been envisioned when I was in my early 20s, mid 20s. And I had set out on that vision and thankfully a lot of those things ultimately came to pass. But then when I’m now in my late 30s And I’ve been CEO for five, six years now, my values had started to change the things that I wanted out of life started to change. And I didn’t feel that deeper sense of connection to that part of myself. That truer part of myself. I didn’t feel a connection to anything beyond me meaning more from the spiritual aspect of things. I didn’t feel the depth of connection there. And it became very clear to me that it was time for me to start looking and reflecting on my journey myself in a very different way. That led me into all sorts of different fields of study and different paths, things I’m sure we’ll get into today. But it was after that now that’s going back maybe about eight years ago when I started to go through that process. And now as I started to share that with clients share it with some colleagues share with some friends I had podcast had in the past and it just kind of came together like we want to hear more like there. Yeah, whatever it is that you keep talking to us about. There’s something here that is very rich, and very much. Maybe it was a personal experience, but it seems more universal than that.

Carolyn Swora  08:06
Yeah. And I mean that’s the beauty of doing this work, podcasting and sharing stories and really, you know, I find it helps people connect to sort of the the humanity that we all share, right? Our stories might have different themes to it, but there’s sir sorry different details, but the themes are relatively the same. Now you referenced burnout, and that’s a that’s a big word. A word that I think a lot of people can identify with and what I what I caught and heard in your story was this recognition of disconnection so did like how long did it take for you to realize you were in burnout or heading towards burnout?

Luke Iorio  08:47
It was so for me it ended up being one of those blinding flashes of the obvious. I was it honestly it was my my business partner who reflected back to me I had gone through a very difficult year. I was actually headed out to my fourth funeral in 10 months. And this one happen to be for a pretty big influence when I was growing up. And I just happen to be on the phone with my partner that’s that morning talking about a project that wasn’t going really well. And he paused me in the middle of it. He’s like what is going on? You’re very off. And I explained to my ex, I’m I’m literally leaving here. I’m a pallbearer at the next funeral. He’s like, Good lord, you’ve had a year like yeah, it’s been interesting. And he’s listened to project whatever. We’ll talk about that in a week or two. That’s just not that’s doesn’t matter today. And he goes, however, when you get back, let’s chat because you’re starting to display all the classic signs of burnout. Wow. And when he reflected it, and it didn’t take me long. I mean, I had another experience that day and then just over the coming weeks of reflection of yeah, this is I’m I’m tapping it. I’m draining it at a physical level, emotional level, mental level, spiritual level. It’s just I’m running on empty coming everywhere. Yeah. So I mean, you can we can talk about it from the physiological which was states of incoherence and dysregulation all the way up to just the emotional, mental and spiritual stress that was inherently obvious of what I was going through.

Carolyn Swora  10:14
I I’ve had my own experience with burnout. I wasn’t as wise as you unfortunately, because I denied it to the people around me until I was pretty much unable to walk and and that’s how that’s really stuck. I was because I just felt like I had to like power through and I can do it and I can do it. Yeah, it was

Luke Iorio  10:38
for you. What what do you what do you think you were holding on to right in terms of there’s a reason when we create that, right? It’s because we’re holding on to something I know what it was for me. I’m curious next year that in a minute, but I’m kidding. Well,

Carolyn Swora  10:49
you know what it was? I was I didn’t realize I was holding on to trauma. And the trauma was in my body. And candidly, I didn’t want to I knew that my family needed me to not fall apart. So cognitively I had managed the rest of my life Mike, this is no different. I can get through hard times I’m a strong person. And so you know that that’s that’s how we got connected. You know, because I’m doing this podcast and really it was understanding what that word meant, but if my body hadn’t shut me down, I would have kept going. And yeah, so I mean, the body stores that trauma. So what what

Luke Iorio  11:31
that sits with me as well for me from the from the perspective of holding on because of people depending on me, etcetera. But for me, I use that as a piece of identity. And so what what I could only articulate much later than this was that if I in fact was burnt out and needed to go on a new path, it was not only a matter of giving up what I knew then, but it was a matter of giving up the entire imagined expected future that was supposed to come from it. And so like all of a sudden, that whole time collapses, and that’s what you’re walking away from.

Carolyn Swora  12:07
And and so it’s really interesting. You said, because I had no choice, right? Like, you know, the experience I’m talking about when my burnout happened. You know, my husband was four years into his illness, which was terminal. I had to two young toddlers. And so I was trying to hold on to like, damn, this wasn’t supposed to happen to our family. So I’m gonna hold on to like this reality of having you know us as together as a family for as long as I bloody can because this really sucks. So there’s like a lot of I’m not gonna say stubbornness, but I think a lot of resistance to accepting and surrendering to what is and trying to willfully push through because I’ve always been strong. And and, you know, the wisdom now that I have so many years later is like, man, your body doesn’t lie to you.

Luke Iorio  13:02
It doesn’t. It doesn’t right is it’s amazing to me how, you know, no matter what, right if you are and I heard somebody actually give this example the other day of you can logically sit there and look at somebody who you feel has done something to you and you can forgive them right? And you say, I forgive you. But you’re going to know in your body, whether or not you actually have forgiven them. Right. There’s your body just it will be the lie detector. And I just use that as an example. So at any given time, we can try how often we try to tell us No I’m fine now I can push myself through it. No, I’ve got the you know, I’ve got it all figured out. I’m good. I’m good. The entire time. Your body is just screaming like you do not man. i You are a mess right now. Your house is all over the place your nervous systems all over. The you can’t sleep your mind is all over. And your body’s just like you got to come back to me and the only way you can do that is you got to simplify. Yeah, your time you got to get back into simplifying what’s going on to be with what is

Carolyn Swora  14:00
absolutely and you know, the power of somatic work in this leadership spading familiar with and I mean at the time for me, I was like no, I can power through this. And literally if if my body hadn’t shut me down because it did I couldn’t get I couldn’t walk. I couldn’t get out of bed and move through the world the same way. I was like, Oh my gosh, wait, wait, wait a second. So like, can you talk a little bit about you know how like how somatic work and is involved in your practice and what you what you do

Luke Iorio  14:30
that? Sure. So for me how I was exposed to it and then and then how it shows up now. Originally I went in. So as part of being burnt out. I started looking at different paths and I ultimately landed on mindfulness is kind of that next step for me. And thankfully, I chose it intentionally with two aspects in mind. The first is I did want it grounded in the spiritual tradition itself. I did not want a secular mindfulness program. I did want a spiritual mindfulness program. And because of the way that I chose it, it and the tradition that we’ve connected to it brought me into not only a somatic approach to mindfulness, but also a very compassion based approach to mindfulness. And so when I combined those two things of compassion and empathy, with greater awareness being brought to my physical space, my physical structure, my physical being, all of a sudden it was like discovering, I had a body live from right. How often do we hear that phrase of living from the neck up? Well, that’s what it felt like, right? And so all of a sudden, I started to gain this very different appreciation and connection. To what was going on in my physical being. And I started to receive a different level of ease, a different level of felt spaciousness, that was in my body. And of course, when you go into that type of direction, it meant that I started with chi greater coherence from a heart rate variability standpoint. So my whole nervous system started to fall back into sync and regulation moving back into parasympathetic more often than not, yeah, and what happens? Now you’ve got greater connection to your executive function, you’ve got greater connection to your intuition, to your felt sense of things. And it felt like certain things were coming alive again, in ways that had been offline for a very long time. So that was that was a kind of a fundamental part of an a foundational part of my path of kind of recovering as it were, and I use that very often now, almost always with my clients. Because I find same thing and it’s, it’s, again, the nature of, of the path I’ve been on and therefore the nature of some of the clients that I tend to attract and work with. They’re very familiar with that path of a lot of high achieving, they’re familiar with living from the neck up they are familiar with the fact that they’re now fighting them space selves in a space and life. That it’s like what I used to know and what used to bring me happiness, what used to bring me fulfillment doesn’t seem to be working anymore. But they’re trying to think their way out of it. Yes, that doesn’t work anymore. And so we’ve got to get reconnected to the rest of who we are because we’ve got bodies, we’ve got emotions, we’ve got all of these senses we can tap into including inner senses we can tap into, so we’ve got to get more fully connected that way, and then everything comes back online. Then all of a sudden, it’s like things are are there in front of us. The last piece which I’ve just mentioned, and I think you could speak even in much greater detail to this, but it’s the recognition that whether it’s trauma, or whatever degree of hurts and pains that we have been through within our lives, get stored inside of our bodies and get stored inside of our nervous systems. And we don’t realize how often we end up repeating patterns and repeating loops, because we don’t have a clear it. We don’t know how to face it. We don’t know how to release it. And a lot of it is it’s not. I don’t want to say that it’s not it because it’s not necessarily easy. But it’s also not rocket science, meaning that it really is truly being able to create a safe container a safe space for us to go there in a manner that allows things to actually be brought to completion from a physiological standpoint, and that creates a profound effect of healing as well as release. So I use that some of those types of techniques and practices and understanding inside of my practices as the whole of as part of the whole of everything I do.

Carolyn Swora  18:23
Yeah, one of the words you said said there was receive and it really stands out to me because I think we can have a hard time receiving a lot of things, but receiving the grace and the compassion for ourselves. So can you comment a little bit on your journey with self compassion

Luke Iorio  18:50
Oh, that’s a good one. Put it in context. When I was five and a half years old, my childhood home burned to the ground. And I went from being a very curious very explorative very weird, fun, playful, imaginative little kid to being incredibly serious and incredibly self reliant overnight. Wow. And I stayed that way for another several decades, started to come out of my shell after some experiences my 20s but it was I always still had this very hard view of the way that I needed to show up in life. Because if I didn’t, I wasn’t safe. I wasn’t going to be protected. So I had to be the one who would take care of everything and I couldn’t rely on on other people beyond a certain point because then I’d be exposed I wouldn’t be safe. Right? And so I didn’t have a lot of room for compassion level and self compassion in my life because that would have felt like I was making myself on. Right. And it was later on and it was mindfulness and compassion. Based mindfulness work specifically, that introduced me to not just the concept of empathy, but the actual feeling of empathy, where I could actually genuinely feel what was going on me genuinely feel what other people must be going through. And in that space for me, it was actually more helpful for me to feel that compassion, empathy for others, and then that was able to create the space for myself.

Carolyn Swora  20:32
So it was it was through others that you and at first,

Luke Iorio  20:35
it’s that’s how it worked. That’s yeah, that’s how it worked for me and how it made it. It became so clear that I would be willing heart was open and so willing to extend that commission to others because I feel their desire to be free from pain. I could feel their desire thing more than happiness within their life. No matter how they end up going after it without agree with whether what they do or not doesn’t matter. I could feel where it was coming. From. And if I was willing to extend that space and compassion to them, because whatever it is that they’ve been through in their lives, is still seen through the lens of them doing the best they can, because they want happiness and they don’t want pain. And the more that I could extend that compassion to them, it became kind of that question of well, if you can do this for them, why aren’t you part of that same group? Hmm. And there are specific practices that I had learned at that time in mindfulness that you do incorporate yourself into that space of loving kindness, right? And all of a sudden, I can actually feel it and I can, I could feel where I was at that time. I could feel the compassion I had for myself as a five and a half year old boy losing his home as I could feel myself having compassion for any number of experiences that I’d been through in my life as well as how hard I’d been on myself. Yeah, and but I had to go through for me the lens of seeing that for others that cracked open the door to say, yeah, you’ve got to wait. If like you really truly want to have full compassion for somebody else. You can’t do that. If yours your cup is empty. Yeah, you’ll extend that from yourself. That’s how it’s gonna act on you.

Carolyn Swora  22:04
And when you I know you do, a good deal of your work is with is with men, correct. And so this notion of compassion I’m curious because I’m a man, I am married to one. And, you know, I’ll sort of throw out one of those, you know, these sort of sociological beliefs that have been ingrained into our society is that you know, to be strong, you have to be like controlling and and like, Where does compassion? How do you help your clients find the self compassion that we all need, regardless of our gender or our identity in the world?

Luke Iorio  22:42
It’s interesting because I think certainly some of the practices that you have used and been manifest with me I do share but in the context of that for most men, when they find this type of work, where they want to do some type of exploration for bringing out more of who they are, or more purpose or meaning or what have you in their lives. When you have a conversation with them, about what are the present stereotypes of men that they see and that they feel and that are even painful for them to witness and yet feel the constraints of? Yeah. So when they look at that, and they define, as you said, You know what, what it means to be strong as you can’t be vulnerable. You can’t be weak, you can’t display emotions. You can’t do this. And then you ask them so when you feel that when you go through like literally what are you feeling in your body, not emotionally going off to go there? Yeah, just what are you feeling in your body? And they’ll start it well, I’m feeling the tension. I’m feeling the stress, I feel myself tighten up. I feel the constriction of that. And it’s a way of them beginning to get a felt sense of what those old images and definitions are doing to them. And when they start to feel that you can, you can ask them in in many instances, not always true, but in many instances, a lot of men that I work with happen to be parents. And that’s also a great source of leverage, especially with with what’s true for men and women just in different ways. is to be able to say so if if your son or your daughter was going through something like this, and you can feel like what they were experiencing, what would you feel for them? And they’ll just like and what would you want for them? What would your hope be for them? What would you want them to be able to see or to be able to acknowledge that they could lay this down? And I mean, the the the wisdom just starts flowing from them. And now it’s taking them back and say, Okay, so now, how can we extend that to you? Yeah, as you just displayed everything that it means to be compassionate. So it’s, it’s finding bridges. That’s just a I’m giving a little bit of an example, but it’s finding bridges. And very often it starts with acknowledging what is which we said before and acknowledging what is has to do with a lot of the stereotypes, a lot of the broken definitions that we still carry around for ourselves. In this context, we’re talking about men but this could be true of any role that we feel like we have to take on for ourselves when the mask that we happen to pick up. Yeah, and once they can see that they can start to separate from those stereotypes. And that creates an open space, which we can then plan.

Carolyn Swora  25:17
Yeah, and I love the fact too, that you’re making it very like felt that felt sense. You know, we’re back to the wisdom of our body of our nervous systems and feeling that calm and safety unfold when when you can cross that bridge with them. Think it’s vital.

Luke Iorio  25:33
It’s so easy. And again, I’ll speak as man I’m not saying this isn’t true for women. So I’m just speaking it this time for my experience with men. It is so easy for us to get trapped in our heads to figure things out, and to cut ourselves off from if we cut ourselves off from emotion because we are trying to figure it out and we believe or had been taught that that is a weakness that is not going to make us as strong as we need to be. Well as soon as you connect yourself off from your emotion, disconnect from your emotions, disconnect for your body. You disconnect from your faults and it’s such a dichotomy to split from the wholeness of who it is that we are. And so the more that we can start to bring that back in and get that felt experience get the Cymatics working in our favor. It quite literally feels like coming home as it does and so you feel like I’m at home again. In my body and in my own skin. And that again, just it builds the buy in the motivation, the engagement to say, Well, can I actually like kind of live this way like a lot more often? Like

Carolyn Swora  26:37
a lot more often? Yeah, like it can be this easy, like wait, one

Luke Iorio  26:41
can. And it’s the reminder just to use that as a different point. It’s the reminder for anybody whenever your mind is racing, whenever you’re caught in a story or the details of what’s going on, even the emotional swirl that’s attached to those stories. Best thing you can do is find a way to get into your body, get present with a breath to get present with some type of a practice, even to go out for a run or something that is a little bit more physically taxing. So you have to concentrate in your body when you’re doing it. Going out in nature and going out on a nature walk or a hike or something like that to it it just connects you and all of a sudden things start to drop away and you gain space again. And it’s it’s like you know being in the shower and all sudden the idea appears. Same thing happens, right? We’re on the long drive. We’re on a long hike, we’re in the shower or whatever because you’re just focused on the presence of what we’re doing. And then all of a sudden is like, oh, that story’s not real. Oh, all that mental chatter. Actually 90% Of it is just, it’s garbage. It’s not even happening. I’m worrying about things that are imagined right now. And then you look at the 10% that’s there and go Well, I could just do this. Yeah. And then you move forward.

Carolyn Swora  27:54
You know that that part of the story I was telling you with my burnout when I couldn’t like actually walk. It had happened after I had done a 10k run. Now, for anyone listening who knows me personally, I’m not a runner. Unless I’m chasing after a basketball or baseball. But I had found this I actually had found for a few years running to be like Butik way to cope with what was going on, which I still laugh at because it’s altering and here’s what I confused is when I physically like and my body was shutting down, but I didn’t attribute it to the trauma that I was going through. Oh, clearly. I’m being too hard on my body physical perspective. And so I went and then I just stopped doing anything, because I thought oh, clearly like I didn’t it just wasn’t the right thing to do. So I just I share that for any of the listeners out there because when we are on this hamster wheel of going and going and going and doing we might be getting signals crossed. And for me, my signals were crossed all over the place. I wasn’t able to really understand what my body was trying to tell me

Luke Iorio  29:10
when in what you also just highlighted and exhibited is beginning to get curious about what’s the energy underneath any of any of the actions and the stories anything that you happen to be going through at any given time. Because you know this is we tend to look at the surface is exactly you said is oh my god is breaking breaking down because I went too hard. I went too far. So now I’m gonna go in the complete opposite direction. All of that is actually what’s happening in the external the outside of our lives. It’s this the what we can see we need to be able to get to understand as well what am I not seeing? Meaning what’s actually going on in me and not just physiologically that’s a big piece of it, physiologically, emotionally, mentally, spiritually relationally what are all the things that are actually going on? Because if we see in an effect inside of our lives, something that’s changing, that’s just a symptom. And so we’ve got to be cautious of just treating the symptom. We’ve got to use that as an internal exploration and a systemic exploration of looking at the whole of everything that’s going on that might be contributing to this in a given time.

Carolyn Swora  30:18
Yeah, yeah. Yeah, to have these brilliant, quite your client. They’re very lucky to have you, Luke, because you asked very deep questions and, you know, you really, you really demonstrating that we have this wisdom and it’s not about other people telling us it’s about allowing us to find space and again, I come back to that time. I absolutely had people in my life that were trying to help me and trying to show me and I mean, my mom in particular like had sat me down a few months before and said like, you don’t know what’s going on around you. And and this is where the trauma comes back in. I was so so guarded, trying to protect myself and you know, probably just so afraid. I couldn’t see what was actually around me at all. And so, you know, again, we can’t do this work on our own. We’re a species that needs to be together and support each other. And so, you know, I wish I had listened to a little bit more I eventually did. And I’m very grateful that those people in my life did not walk away from me. But you know, we’re getting we’re back to compassion, compassion for each other, as well. What do you

Luke Iorio  31:23
think would have helped you? Meaning a little bit earlier to be aware of the support that it was actually all around you?

Carolyn Swora  31:32
Um, well, what I think would have helped me is what I ended up writing about. I wish I’d understood what the word trauma meant. Because had I understood that it is essentially it’s not an event. It’s how you cope with an event. I think that that would have just given me permission to like, Ah, okay, um, you know, that just hadn’t hadn’t been how I had moved through life and there were a whole lot of like, you know, big tease, little tease big T, big, big trauma, a little trauma. But to me trauma was an event and you know, when you get hit over the head and a lot of blood comes goosing was external, right? So I don’t know what helped me it was a different time. You know, like we were raised in different times. The research is very different now. And I just like to think everything happened in an order in in a way that it needed to Yeah,

Luke Iorio  32:32
yeah. No, I very much. I believe that as well, that it you know, it happens in the manner that it’s, it’s kind of meant to happen and help with the unfolding of where you are and what your journey happens to be. And at the same time, I think it’s why you’re in the space that you’re in, which I’m in is how do we spread information that we believe people might be able to hear and adjust or integrate at just that, you know, even if it’s just a couple of days, couple of weeks, couple of months, you know, earlier than they would have normally and certainly right now the you know, this understanding around trauma and the way that it’s evolving in the last the understanding of it, how it’s evolving. It’s just even the last five to 10 years is becoming a lot more helpful.

Carolyn Swora  33:15
Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. No, I’m curious. One more One more question, or I guess space to move into is why like the work you’re doing your podcasts, your coaching. Why do you feel that this work is so desperately needed? Right? Right now, like if I guess it’s sort of the passion behind your purpose, why is it so passion? So passionate for you right now?

Luke Iorio  33:42
You know, it’s there are so many individuals that I’m connecting to right now. That are getting this sense that the way life has been meaning way they have worked, the way they’ve related the things that they have thought were important for them to be able to achieve or to obtain within life. None of that’s holding true. They’re checking the boxes of what was supposed to be the happy life and the good life and however we want to define it in they’re getting there and they’re saying, but I still feel a sense of emptiness. I still feel like something’s missing. I still feel like I’ve done this but is this really why I’m here? Like was it was it to draw a paycheck and to make a difference at this company? Or, you know, what, what, what’s the real reason? Like there’s there’s something more here? Yeah. And so they’re at there’s a lot of people that are asking that question. I think it’s because we’re at, we’re at a time of paradigm change. I mean, the for better or worse. The pandemic gave us a period of time that the whole world was not focused on all the externalities and busyness of everything going on, and instead, there was a lot of time for reflection. There was a lot of time for being at home. There’s a lot of time for spaciousness, and there’s a lot of pain and hurt, obviously, that went with that. But it’s also usually during those times that there is that deeper reflection that comes out. And there’s a lot of people right but are really questioning. How do I redesign my life around what I think really truly matters, as well as the difference that I want to be able to make in my life. And when I say like, what difference I’m going to make I don’t mean like big and global, it can be around your family or your kids, your community or your home, your neighbor doesn’t it? It’s whatever whatever context is appropriate for you. What what calls to you you know, for me, it was this this happened before the pandemic but I keep going back to it because I I just don’t think I’ve got a better reference point for this, which is that however many years ago, probably while I was burning out, I had read the article by brawny where palliative care nurse called the Top Five Regrets of the Dying. Yep. And it stuck with me. It’s I’ve referenced that probably every week, in some way, shape or form. And that number one regret is I wished I’d had the courage to be true to myself as opposed to the expectations of others. Yeah. I think when you consider what’s going on in the world right now around the expectations of others. From a social media standpoint, news media standpoint, political standpoint, economic standpoint, environmental standpoint, round and round and round we go. We have got technology and platforms built in such a way that we are surrounded by the expectations of others. Yeah. So we right now have this pressure cooker. And that is actually the regret. Instead, we want to have the courage to be true to ourselves. And for me, the one way I would I’d frame it, even though I know this was what was intended by the statement. But I would say the courage to be true to our true selves. making that distinction that it’s not just on any given day. How we feel and what we’re upset by or what we’re happy about or whatever. That’s more of the surface us that’s the what we present to the world. But it’s how do we go deeper and get to know the truth of who we are beneath the assumptions, the illusions, the limiting beliefs, the identity, and actually get to know this is actually the core of who I am and what I care about in the world. And the way I want to show up in the world for all the people around me. And when we get in touch with that. We want to have the courage to be that to be congruent to that part of ourselves. And I see more people than ever before are turning towards that and what they’re looking for not although more people than not are starting to find that language. I’m passionate about because I think that’s something that’s going on that is also going to help upgrade our humanity.

Carolyn Swora  37:40
I I couldn’t agree with you more Luke. I do think people are realizing that is the way through all of this. And you know, when I look at just you know, if I look at our workplaces because so much of our identity is tied up in that you know, the best leaders out there are the ones who will take the time invest the time in themselves to deepen that self awareness and like I always say, self awareness is not a destination. It is a journey.

Luke Iorio  38:15
Most definitely most of them and and that is a key piece of this is for anybody who finds myself in a position of leadership and now let me clarify what I mean by that. If you have a heartbeat, if you have a pulse and you are still breathing, then you are going to have some level of influence and impact on somebody else including yourself inside of your life. And if that is true, then you are leading. Whether you want to call yourself a leader or not. So for all of us, we’ve got to recognize leadership ability that we do innately have and we have whether we choose it or not. It’s there. Yeah. And the more that we can start leading into bringing out that true authenticity in somebody else, the helping them find the courage to be who it is that they really truly are. And to help them show up in the world the way that they’re meant to show up in the world to give their gifts to the world. The more we can embrace that as a society and leading and supporting each other in doing those things. I think we evolve faster. I think we innovate quicker, I think get more creative. I think we’re going to start solving some of the major issues that are actually out there right now. And we’re going to solve them from a place of human ingenuity, not ideology. And it’s going to come from a very, very different place. But we’ve got to stop saying oh, it’s up to those leaders to make the difference. It’s up to those leaders to make the change. We’re somebody right. I always I always thought somebody should do something about that. And I realized one day I’m somebody

Carolyn Swora  39:42
Yeah. You know, the other thing that comes to mind when you say that, too, is the ingenuity and and the, the authenticity. I think you know, the ego can take on many forms and one of the things that I’ve learned in the past few years is my ego showed up in a way that didn’t make sense to me, like how does helping others. How is that an ego? And and so, you know, again, this is why people like you and I do this work is to help people understand that an ego isn’t just a big loud voice at the front of the room. Absolutely. It is it’s the quiet voice or the loud voice inside that’s not coming out or it’s you know, not giving yourself the space or time to reflect or think I mean, there’s so many things that are tied up in that word ego. And so I’m guessing you’ve seen that with your clients as well as sort of deconstructing what that word actually means.

Luke Iorio  40:38
Oh, completely. And I love to say that, you know, I do a lot of that work with my clients. But the truth is, I’ve done a lot of that work with me and it’s, you know, it starts it starts here. And for me recognizing that my ego was it’s my attachment to identity. Yeah, ego is my attachment to safety. It’s my attachment to certainty and control. It’s, you know, an ego is is the way in which we see ourselves. It’s this image, the self image that we hold in the challenge is is that self image is actually something that is very malleable, it’s it’s evolving, it’s ever changing. But the ego doesn’t want change. The ego wants something that’s very, very static and stays the same because that’s how it stays in control. Yeah, it’s what feels safe. And that’s okay. It part of it developed out of this loving place of wanting to keep us safe. Yeah, we’re a couple 1000 years past that at this point. We need we need an upgrade in this you know, we need an awake ego we need a conscious ego that can help us create it can help us have an identity but not attached to it. Right attached to it having to be a certain way. And so yeah, the the ego comes up in many different ways. I taught you have many different ways of presenting it I’ve talked about it even on the podcast is the masks that we wear is one of the ways to look at it and all these different roles and faces that we were in and even time had another episode I’m not sure if you ever run across the disempowerment triangle, but it talks about this triangle of the victim, the perpetrator and the rescuer, which is our guide. Okay, so yeah, you’re familiar with this power dynamic that we enter into. And one of just to make this clear, one of the places that I actually get into a lot of conversation around ego is actually this role of the rescuer. When when we feel like we need to rescue at homes through a really noble place like this is a beautiful, noble, caring, loving, compassionate place, but what it ends up doing is it ends up locking that disempowerment dynamic in place because it says to the victim, I don’t actually believe you have enough power to get out of this yourself. I don’t think you have the answers that you need for yourself. And so I’m going to step in to try to solve this for you. That’s ego Yeah, what it is so it’s not ego can do and I wanted to bring that up just because the point you made ego isn’t just the loud, brash talking head, right? Yeah, it can show up in a lot of ways and at times can even show up in noble ways. Yes, we still need to be aware of at the end of the day, the ego simply wants its worldview.

Carolyn Swora  43:03
Yes. Yep. Yeah. What would you like? What would you say would be a theme out of all the podcasts that you’ve done with your guests, you know, current podcasts and maybe maybe once before? Is there a theme or like a common connection between all of your guests and conversations?

Luke Iorio  43:26
I think the one I probably say the one theme that is, by far the one that we’ve returned to the most is the recognition of learning how we can listen to within. Because you set up before we have and we possess such extraordinary wisdom. And I’ll even say that it’s not just what we possess, it’s what we have access to. Yeah, because when we can be in that deep state of meditation, or coherence or whatever, we want to describe it as we have access to that that collective unconscious. That’s where those incredible ideas come from the ether, right? I really want to talk about it. And we have access to that. And then we pull it through our lens, authentically who we are so it’s how does that wisdom mean? something personal to me. That if we could cultivate that, like if I you know, to me that should be a one on one to a one and three, a one starting in elementary school? Yeah, because the more that we could look within, for our real guidance and by looking within it means looking beneath our biases, looking at neath our assumptions, looking beneath our blocks. All the things that get in our way, so that we can access the real us the real wisdom, the real truth, the real consciousness. If we could get down into that and stop looking outside of ourselves, the number of problems that we have, would fade away. We wouldn’t feel inadequate we wouldn’t feel incomplete. We wouldn’t feel broken. We wouldn’t have feel like we’ve got to stack up and compare ourselves to it’s out there. Because we know the truth of the wholeness and fullness of what we are and how to access it. How to connect there. Yeah, it would change a lot of things. And thankfully that’s it. That is a consistent recurring theme that I say almost every episode at some point, touches on that at least briefly. Some touch on for the whole episode.

Carolyn Swora  45:24
Yeah, well, kind of like this one. We touched on it for most of the episode. We’ve been here the whole time. Yeah. Well, I you know, look, I’m really grateful that you came on the show and and shared your insight and depth and just how you’ve described I mean, I’m still sitting with how you described ego. Yeah, you just had a really a really interesting way of of shedding insight and in the way you’ve described some of these things. It’s very, it’s really, really helpful, I think, thank you very much for coming on.

Luke Iorio  45:56
I appreciate it very much. Yeah, I enjoyed this a lot. Now before

Carolyn Swora  45:59
we close out though, Luke, two things how can our listeners find you if they’re like this slip guys? Like I want to hear more him or like, I want to talk to him myself? How can they find you?

Luke Iorio  46:11
First thing is my podcast is on this walk. So wherever you’re listening to this search up on this walk, you’ll find me the website is just that as well on this walk.com And you can find me There you’ll also find all my socials if you if you look up D as in Daniel Luke Iorio on any of the socials, you’ll go find me.

Carolyn Swora  46:29
All right. Now before we let you go, Luke, we have three questions. For you every every podcast we end with these three questions of an evolved leader. So the first one is about self awareness. And specifically Could you share a moment with us or a time where you develop some really interesting insight? Perhaps it was in a time of a lot of unclearly it gave you an insight into who you are?

Luke Iorio  47:00
Yeah. Interestingly enough, I struggled to launch my podcast because I wasn’t I knew I wanted to be very vulnerable in opening it up because that’s that’s what people were responding to in the stories and client work or anything else I was sharing. And so I struggled with with putting it out there for a while and then I decide to and I’m only a couple of episodes into it and I can feel the struggle of I don’t know where this is gonna go. I don’t really know what I’m doing. Where am I supposed to head with this, this whole process? And I sat down with two friends back to back, one of which I actually recorded and ended up releasing as a podcast episode where it was effectively me coming to this realization that for my entire life, one of my major control mechanisms was I had to have that detailed plan to know where things were going and I needed to have that kind of all figured out. And one friend this was I mentioned it but it was not on the recorded episode. It turned back to me and said, you know, you read all these incredible people and these incredible thinkers, incredible traditions, everything else and he does use somebody like Carl Jung, you know, totally archetypal, quite literally in who he is. He became Carl Jung. After 789 years of journaling and reflecting and not even knowing what he was doing and creating at that time. And then afterwards, he birthed this whole psychoanalytic approach to psychotherapy, and it revolutionized everything he was you’re trying to figure out how are you going to have those insights without doing the 789 years of journaling and everything else? He goes, just put it out and just do it, just put it out of the podcast and see what happens. Yeah, and so I brought that into an actual episode where I had a friend of mine, a facilitator, hold space for me for an hour, and I actually released it as an episode of me literally talking about the whole wow, I was thinking I think if people look it up it’s it’s I think it’s maybe episode eight or nine with me and the facilitator is Aaron kalo. And it’s just it’s, it’s, yeah, it was it was one of those things that I knew I was gonna have to do and I said, I’m gonna hit record because I need this for me. And after we recorded I said, I can’t believe I’m gonna release this I’m actually gonna release this as an episode

Carolyn Swora  49:16
so I’m just having a look yeah, let’s stay with it. And yeah, I mean, it’s it’s you know, when you think of on that unlock like, that’s a beautiful title to to the podcast, so

Luke Iorio  49:27
thank you. Yeah, yeah, it’s it came out of it came out of a there’s a lot of there’s a lot of meaning to that. Yeah, there’s there’s some good of just being on the on this walk with friends on this walk with conversations we’ve had. But honestly, it was an indigenous friend of mine, who they refer to being in this life is on this walk of life, meaning on this go round in life on this time through this thing we call life. And so it Yeah, something about it really stuck with me. And I want to pay, pay homage to that.

Carolyn Swora  50:01
So a second question. Well, I don’t know if you can be I don’t know if you can answer the second and third one any better than the first one? What is it practice or ritual that keeps you in a calm state or returns you to a calm regulated state?

Luke Iorio  50:17
Here’s a few that I use. I want to be a little more specific than just saying like meditation, but In medicine of them is that actually I was just having this conversation with somebody earlier today. Very often, we undertake a practice for the benefits we believe we’re going to receive. So for instance, part of mindfulness meditation became so popular because it was stressed it was stress reduction. Right. And that’s how Jon Kabat Zinn popularized mindfulness in that sector very widely, right. What I began to recognize what changed for me was meditation now is about connecting to where do I want to fuel myself from not what I’m doing it for. And so, I want to be able to live from a place of peace to live from a place of love, live from a place of truth of groundedness. And so when I meditate, it’s actually a meditation to connect with that fuel source with that energy source. And then I marry that feeling once I feel like I’ve achieved or connected to that state. I tend to marry that state with a breath pattern. So that at a later time, I’m able to repeat those couple of either deep breaths whether they’re deep and diaphragmatic, or whether it’s a very specific heart centered breath where I can feel my energy there. I kind of mirror it to something physiological so that I can recreate that state. And, and so that’s, that’s one of the practices.

Carolyn Swora  51:50
Very nice, very nice thing to think about when I’m doing so. My I’ve and I’ve recently come to that place. Well, in real estate that sort of fell out of favor for me for what Yes, exactly. Yeah, yeah. And last but not least, what is a song or genre of music that makes you feel connected to others or part of something bigger than yourself?

Luke Iorio  52:13
It’s not just a song as an artist, is that I tend to always go back to Mr. James Taylor. And there is something so folksy and connected about his lyrics, and they’re simple. They’re not you know, they’re not the poetry of Bob Dylan or anything like that. But they speak to me and they seem to be matched with a specific, you know, tone and quality in the way that he sings. It feels like experiences that a lot of us have shared. Yeah. And that’s, you know, when I, when I find myself in those kind of moments with, you know, that little bit of melancholy or whatever it is, and even even at times when it’s just happiness. I can go back and find a James Taylor song that connects me deeply. And for me personally it my wife, and I’ve listened to James Taylor for decades together. And so it always it always connects us and makes me think a lot of memories we’ve shared is through the through the years.

Carolyn Swora  53:17
Is there a particular James Taylor song that’s coming up for you right now?

Luke Iorio  53:28
That’s not the name of the song I’m thinking of. Not at the moment.

Carolyn Swora  53:34
I know that the one that I share the one that always I mean, there’s few like you’ve got a friend I think he wrote that one writer to Carole King, right that one. I know they’ve both they both saying it has a friend. You’ve got a friend.

Luke Iorio  53:47
Yeah, you know, honestly, I don’t know which one wrote it. I think Jake Taylor did write that one. But yeah, they, they were both connected to the hip on that.

Carolyn Swora  53:54
That one. That one was huge for me. In a lot of ways. I won’t get into that. But I think back to fire and rain. Yeah. And that brings me back to high school and I just there’s just a warm feeling whenever I hear that song. So that’s what came up what you said James Taylor. I thought of those two songs.

Luke Iorio  54:16
Yeah, yeah. There’s a lot of them. You know, those of those who have always connected me knowing some of the story about how he wrote sweet baby James for his nephew that was born he wrote it on the road on his way to see the to see his nephew. Yeah, Carolina on my mind, and just a lot of a lot of those tunes just dropped me into a different space. Fire, fire and rain. I every time I listen to it, I can feel just the deep emotion behind what he was.

Carolyn Swora  54:42
Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. Well, Luke, an absolute pleasure to have you on the show. This has been a wonderful hour of conversation. And hey, I’m glad that I’m glad I found you along the walk of life.

Luke Iorio  54:56
Likewise. Glad to have this conversation. I’ve thoroughly enjoyed our time. And yeah, I hope it’s of great value to your listeners.

Carolyn Swora  55:03
Yeah. Well, thanks to all the listeners for tuning into this podcast. And please let us know what you think by responding with some comments to us. Thanks. Again, and we’ll see you on our next episode.

Ep 21 – Luke Iorio
Mon, Apr 17, 2023 3:52PM • 57:11

Carolyn Swora  03:44
Yeah, yeah, for sure. Either. reached out to her too. Yeah. So just it’s just great. Like, I love doing this work. Because I get to meet people like you who like put that, you know, put me in touch with people like her and it’s just you know, we can build this community and just keep absolutely keep growing. So all right, well, reporting progress. And I believe I know how to pronounce it. Aye. Aye Oreo. Got it. All right. I like the way you put that on the on the page. It’s like talk about cookies and and seeing the cookies. Yeah. Alrighty, so, Dan, this is the episode with Luke Iorio. And here we go. Welcome listeners to evolve a new era of leadership. I’m your host Carolyn Swora. And today I’m really excited to have our guest Luke Iorio on the show. Welcome, Luke.

Luke Iorio  04:45
Thanks for having me, Carolyn. We’re looking forward to it.

Carolyn Swora  04:47
Yeah. So now beyond the fact that you have a really cool last name that has the word Oreo in it. You are also doing fascinating work that I just wanted to talk to you about, you know, this this work that you’re doing around helping people really connect with who they are, and I know you have your own podcast. So I’d love to hear a little bit about what inspired you to start this podcast and really help people on this journey of self awareness.

Luke Iorio  05:15
Sure. Well, the podcast on this walk really started just out of my own personal journeys. So I had a really kind of wonderful career very fortunate career, running one of the very world renowned Coach Training Institute inside of the coaching space. And after I’d gotten the point of being CEO for about five years and being in this work, right of personal development and focusing and looking at ourselves and all the different angles right to keep us optimized and keep us into wellness. And, well, the emperor had no clothes, and I burnt out. So I was so focused on achieving the things that I had set out to achieve, which was a kind of an old way of operating a part of my old identity. And I was so clear that I was doing work that was meaningful in the world. I was aligned because it did have a lot of purpose to it. And I was still achieving under a lot of that old paradigm of I’ve got to have more meaning I’ve got to achieve the next thing for myself. The next thing for the company, I’ve gotta hit the next goal. And so I was on that hamster wheel that just kept going. And what led me to the podcast what led me to the work I’m presently doing was in that moment of burnout, even though I had had so many things that were going really well and looked great from the outside looking in. I hadn’t taken the time to recognize that I was no longer that person. And so while that future that that time that I was living was a future that it didn’t did been envisioned when I was in my early 20s, mid 20s. And I had set out on that vision and thankfully a lot of those things ultimately came to pass. But then when I’m now in my late 30s And I’ve been CEO for five, six years now, my values had started to change the things that I wanted out of life started to change. And I didn’t feel that deeper sense of connection to that part of myself. That truer part of myself. I didn’t feel a connection to anything beyond me meaning more from the spiritual aspect of things. I didn’t feel the depth of connection there. And it became very clear to me that it was time for me to start looking and reflecting on my journey myself in a very different way. That led me into all sorts of different fields of study and different paths, things I’m sure we’ll get into today. But it was after that now that’s going back maybe about eight years ago when I started to go through that process. And now as I started to share that with clients share it with some colleagues share with some friends I had podcast had in the past and it just kind of came together like we want to hear more like there. Yeah, whatever it is that you keep talking to us about. There’s something here that is very rich, and very much. Maybe it was a personal experience, but it seems more universal than that.

Carolyn Swora  08:06
Yeah. And I mean that’s the beauty of doing this work, podcasting and sharing stories and really, you know, I find it helps people connect to sort of the the humanity that we all share, right? Our stories might have different themes to it, but there’s sir sorry different details, but the themes are relatively the same. Now you referenced burnout, and that’s a that’s a big word. A word that I think a lot of people can identify with and what I what I caught and heard in your story was this recognition of disconnection so did like how long did it take for you to realize you were in burnout or heading towards burnout?

Luke Iorio  08:47
It was so for me it ended up being one of those blinding flashes of the obvious. I was it honestly it was my my business partner who reflected back to me I had gone through a very difficult year. I was actually headed out to my fourth funeral in 10 months. And this one happen to be for a pretty big influence when I was growing up. And I just happen to be on the phone with my partner that’s that morning talking about a project that wasn’t going really well. And he paused me in the middle of it. He’s like what is going on? You’re very off. And I explained to my ex, I’m I’m literally leaving here. I’m a pallbearer at the next funeral. He’s like, Good lord, you’ve had a year like yeah, it’s been interesting. And he’s listened to project whatever. We’ll talk about that in a week or two. That’s just not that’s doesn’t matter today. And he goes, however, when you get back, let’s chat because you’re starting to display all the classic signs of burnout. Wow. And when he reflected it, and it didn’t take me long. I mean, I had another experience that day and then just over the coming weeks of reflection of yeah, this is I’m I’m tapping it. I’m draining it at a physical level, emotional level, mental level, spiritual level. It’s just I’m running on empty coming everywhere. Yeah. So I mean, you can we can talk about it from the physiological which was states of incoherence and dysregulation all the way up to just the emotional, mental and spiritual stress that was inherently obvious of what I was going through.

Carolyn Swora  10:14
I I’ve had my own experience with burnout. I wasn’t as wise as you unfortunately, because I denied it to the people around me until I was pretty much unable to walk and and that’s how that’s really stuck. I was because I just felt like I had to like power through and I can do it and I can do it. Yeah, it was

Luke Iorio  10:38
for you. What what do you what do you think you were holding on to right in terms of there’s a reason when we create that, right? It’s because we’re holding on to something I know what it was for me. I’m curious next year that in a minute, but I’m kidding. Well,

Carolyn Swora  10:49
you know what it was? I was I didn’t realize I was holding on to trauma. And the trauma was in my body. And candidly, I didn’t want to I knew that my family needed me to not fall apart. So cognitively I had managed the rest of my life Mike, this is no different. I can get through hard times I’m a strong person. And so you know that that’s that’s how we got connected. You know, because I’m doing this podcast and really it was understanding what that word meant, but if my body hadn’t shut me down, I would have kept going. And yeah, so I mean, the body stores that trauma. So what what

Luke Iorio  11:31
that sits with me as well for me from the from the perspective of holding on because of people depending on me, etcetera. But for me, I use that as a piece of identity. And so what what I could only articulate much later than this was that if I in fact was burnt out and needed to go on a new path, it was not only a matter of giving up what I knew then, but it was a matter of giving up the entire imagined expected future that was supposed to come from it. And so like all of a sudden, that whole time collapses, and that’s what you’re walking away from.

Carolyn Swora  12:07
And and so it’s really interesting. You said, because I had no choice, right? Like, you know, the experience I’m talking about when my burnout happened. You know, my husband was four years into his illness, which was terminal. I had to two young toddlers. And so I was trying to hold on to like, damn, this wasn’t supposed to happen to our family. So I’m gonna hold on to like this reality of having you know us as together as a family for as long as I bloody can because this really sucks. So there’s like a lot of I’m not gonna say stubbornness, but I think a lot of resistance to accepting and surrendering to what is and trying to willfully push through because I’ve always been strong. And and, you know, the wisdom now that I have so many years later is like, man, your body doesn’t lie to you.

Luke Iorio  13:02
It doesn’t. It doesn’t right is it’s amazing to me how, you know, no matter what, right if you are and I heard somebody actually give this example the other day of you can logically sit there and look at somebody who you feel has done something to you and you can forgive them right? And you say, I forgive you. But you’re going to know in your body, whether or not you actually have forgiven them. Right. There’s your body just it will be the lie detector. And I just use that as an example. So at any given time, we can try how often we try to tell us No I’m fine now I can push myself through it. No, I’ve got the you know, I’ve got it all figured out. I’m good. I’m good. The entire time. Your body is just screaming like you do not man. i You are a mess right now. Your house is all over the place your nervous systems all over. The you can’t sleep your mind is all over. And your body’s just like you got to come back to me and the only way you can do that is you got to simplify. Yeah, your time you got to get back into simplifying what’s going on to be with what is

Carolyn Swora  14:00
absolutely and you know, the power of somatic work in this leadership spading familiar with and I mean at the time for me, I was like no, I can power through this. And literally if if my body hadn’t shut me down because it did I couldn’t get I couldn’t walk. I couldn’t get out of bed and move through the world the same way. I was like, Oh my gosh, wait, wait, wait a second. So like, can you talk a little bit about you know how like how somatic work and is involved in your practice and what you what you do

Luke Iorio  14:30
that? Sure. So for me how I was exposed to it and then and then how it shows up now. Originally I went in. So as part of being burnt out. I started looking at different paths and I ultimately landed on mindfulness is kind of that next step for me. And thankfully, I chose it intentionally with two aspects in mind. The first is I did want it grounded in the spiritual tradition itself. I did not want a secular mindfulness program. I did want a spiritual mindfulness program. And because of the way that I chose it, it and the tradition that we’ve connected to it brought me into not only a somatic approach to mindfulness, but also a very compassion based approach to mindfulness. And so when I combined those two things of compassion and empathy, with greater awareness being brought to my physical space, my physical structure, my physical being, all of a sudden it was like discovering, I had a body live from right. How often do we hear that phrase of living from the neck up? Well, that’s what it felt like, right? And so all of a sudden, I started to gain this very different appreciation and connection. To what was going on in my physical being. And I started to receive a different level of ease, a different level of felt spaciousness, that was in my body. And of course, when you go into that type of direction, it meant that I started with chi greater coherence from a heart rate variability standpoint. So my whole nervous system started to fall back into sync and regulation moving back into parasympathetic more often than not, yeah, and what happens? Now you’ve got greater connection to your executive function, you’ve got greater connection to your intuition, to your felt sense of things. And it felt like certain things were coming alive again, in ways that had been offline for a very long time. So that was that was a kind of a fundamental part of an a foundational part of my path of kind of recovering as it were, and I use that very often now, almost always with my clients. Because I find same thing and it’s, it’s, again, the nature of, of the path I’ve been on and therefore the nature of some of the clients that I tend to attract and work with. They’re very familiar with that path of a lot of high achieving, they’re familiar with living from the neck up they are familiar with the fact that they’re now fighting them space selves in a space and life. That it’s like what I used to know and what used to bring me happiness, what used to bring me fulfillment doesn’t seem to be working anymore. But they’re trying to think their way out of it. Yes, that doesn’t work anymore. And so we’ve got to get reconnected to the rest of who we are because we’ve got bodies, we’ve got emotions, we’ve got all of these senses we can tap into including inner senses we can tap into, so we’ve got to get more fully connected that way, and then everything comes back online. Then all of a sudden, it’s like things are are there in front of us. The last piece which I’ve just mentioned, and I think you could speak even in much greater detail to this, but it’s the recognition that whether it’s trauma, or whatever degree of hurts and pains that we have been through within our lives, get stored inside of our bodies and get stored inside of our nervous systems. And we don’t realize how often we end up repeating patterns and repeating loops, because we don’t have a clear it. We don’t know how to face it. We don’t know how to release it. And a lot of it is it’s not. I don’t want to say that it’s not it because it’s not necessarily easy. But it’s also not rocket science, meaning that it really is truly being able to create a safe container a safe space for us to go there in a manner that allows things to actually be brought to completion from a physiological standpoint, and that creates a profound effect of healing as well as release. So I use that some of those types of techniques and practices and understanding inside of my practices as the whole of as part of the whole of everything I do.

Carolyn Swora  18:23
Yeah, one of the words you said said there was receive and it really stands out to me because I think we can have a hard time receiving a lot of things, but receiving the grace and the compassion for ourselves. So can you comment a little bit on your journey with self compassion

Luke Iorio  18:50
Oh, that’s a good one. Put it in context. When I was five and a half years old, my childhood home burned to the ground. And I went from being a very curious very explorative very weird, fun, playful, imaginative little kid to being incredibly serious and incredibly self reliant overnight. Wow. And I stayed that way for another several decades, started to come out of my shell after some experiences my 20s but it was I always still had this very hard view of the way that I needed to show up in life. Because if I didn’t, I wasn’t safe. I wasn’t going to be protected. So I had to be the one who would take care of everything and I couldn’t rely on on other people beyond a certain point because then I’d be exposed I wouldn’t be safe. Right? And so I didn’t have a lot of room for compassion level and self compassion in my life because that would have felt like I was making myself on. Right. And it was later on and it was mindfulness and compassion. Based mindfulness work specifically, that introduced me to not just the concept of empathy, but the actual feeling of empathy, where I could actually genuinely feel what was going on me genuinely feel what other people must be going through. And in that space for me, it was actually more helpful for me to feel that compassion, empathy for others, and then that was able to create the space for myself.

Carolyn Swora  20:32
So it was it was through others that you and at first,

Luke Iorio  20:35
it’s that’s how it worked. That’s yeah, that’s how it worked for me and how it made it. It became so clear that I would be willing heart was open and so willing to extend that commission to others because I feel their desire to be free from pain. I could feel their desire thing more than happiness within their life. No matter how they end up going after it without agree with whether what they do or not doesn’t matter. I could feel where it was coming. From. And if I was willing to extend that space and compassion to them, because whatever it is that they’ve been through in their lives, is still seen through the lens of them doing the best they can, because they want happiness and they don’t want pain. And the more that I could extend that compassion to them, it became kind of that question of well, if you can do this for them, why aren’t you part of that same group? Hmm. And there are specific practices that I had learned at that time in mindfulness that you do incorporate yourself into that space of loving kindness, right? And all of a sudden, I can actually feel it and I can, I could feel where I was at that time. I could feel the compassion I had for myself as a five and a half year old boy losing his home as I could feel myself having compassion for any number of experiences that I’d been through in my life as well as how hard I’d been on myself. Yeah, and but I had to go through for me the lens of seeing that for others that cracked open the door to say, yeah, you’ve got to wait. If like you really truly want to have full compassion for somebody else. You can’t do that. If yours your cup is empty. Yeah, you’ll extend that from yourself. That’s how it’s gonna act on you.

Carolyn Swora  22:04
And when you I know you do, a good deal of your work is with is with men, correct. And so this notion of compassion I’m curious because I’m a man, I am married to one. And, you know, I’ll sort of throw out one of those, you know, these sort of sociological beliefs that have been ingrained into our society is that you know, to be strong, you have to be like controlling and and like, Where does compassion? How do you help your clients find the self compassion that we all need, regardless of our gender or our identity in the world?

Luke Iorio  22:42
It’s interesting because I think certainly some of the practices that you have used and been manifest with me I do share but in the context of that for most men, when they find this type of work, where they want to do some type of exploration for bringing out more of who they are, or more purpose or meaning or what have you in their lives. When you have a conversation with them, about what are the present stereotypes of men that they see and that they feel and that are even painful for them to witness and yet feel the constraints of? Yeah. So when they look at that, and they define, as you said, You know what, what it means to be strong as you can’t be vulnerable. You can’t be weak, you can’t display emotions. You can’t do this. And then you ask them so when you feel that when you go through like literally what are you feeling in your body, not emotionally going off to go there? Yeah, just what are you feeling in your body? And they’ll start it well, I’m feeling the tension. I’m feeling the stress, I feel myself tighten up. I feel the constriction of that. And it’s a way of them beginning to get a felt sense of what those old images and definitions are doing to them. And when they start to feel that you can, you can ask them in in many instances, not always true, but in many instances, a lot of men that I work with happen to be parents. And that’s also a great source of leverage, especially with with what’s true for men and women just in different ways. is to be able to say so if if your son or your daughter was going through something like this, and you can feel like what they were experiencing, what would you feel for them? And they’ll just like and what would you want for them? What would your hope be for them? What would you want them to be able to see or to be able to acknowledge that they could lay this down? And I mean, the the the wisdom just starts flowing from them. And now it’s taking them back and say, Okay, so now, how can we extend that to you? Yeah, as you just displayed everything that it means to be compassionate. So it’s, it’s finding bridges. That’s just a I’m giving a little bit of an example, but it’s finding bridges. And very often it starts with acknowledging what is which we said before and acknowledging what is has to do with a lot of the stereotypes, a lot of the broken definitions that we still carry around for ourselves. In this context, we’re talking about men but this could be true of any role that we feel like we have to take on for ourselves when the mask that we happen to pick up. Yeah, and once they can see that they can start to separate from those stereotypes. And that creates an open space, which we can then plan.

Carolyn Swora  25:17
Yeah, and I love the fact too, that you’re making it very like felt that felt sense. You know, we’re back to the wisdom of our body of our nervous systems and feeling that calm and safety unfold when when you can cross that bridge with them. Think it’s vital.

Luke Iorio  25:33
It’s so easy. And again, I’ll speak as man I’m not saying this isn’t true for women. So I’m just speaking it this time for my experience with men. It is so easy for us to get trapped in our heads to figure things out, and to cut ourselves off from if we cut ourselves off from emotion because we are trying to figure it out and we believe or had been taught that that is a weakness that is not going to make us as strong as we need to be. Well as soon as you connect yourself off from your emotion, disconnect from your emotions, disconnect for your body. You disconnect from your faults and it’s such a dichotomy to split from the wholeness of who it is that we are. And so the more that we can start to bring that back in and get that felt experience get the Cymatics working in our favor. It quite literally feels like coming home as it does and so you feel like I’m at home again. In my body and in my own skin. And that again, just it builds the buy in the motivation, the engagement to say, Well, can I actually like kind of live this way like a lot more often? Like

Carolyn Swora  26:37
a lot more often? Yeah, like it can be this easy, like wait, one

Luke Iorio  26:41
can. And it’s the reminder just to use that as a different point. It’s the reminder for anybody whenever your mind is racing, whenever you’re caught in a story or the details of what’s going on, even the emotional swirl that’s attached to those stories. Best thing you can do is find a way to get into your body, get present with a breath to get present with some type of a practice, even to go out for a run or something that is a little bit more physically taxing. So you have to concentrate in your body when you’re doing it. Going out in nature and going out on a nature walk or a hike or something like that to it it just connects you and all of a sudden things start to drop away and you gain space again. And it’s it’s like you know being in the shower and all sudden the idea appears. Same thing happens, right? We’re on the long drive. We’re on a long hike, we’re in the shower or whatever because you’re just focused on the presence of what we’re doing. And then all of a sudden is like, oh, that story’s not real. Oh, all that mental chatter. Actually 90% Of it is just, it’s garbage. It’s not even happening. I’m worrying about things that are imagined right now. And then you look at the 10% that’s there and go Well, I could just do this. Yeah. And then you move forward.

Carolyn Swora  27:54
You know that that part of the story I was telling you with my burnout when I couldn’t like actually walk. It had happened after I had done a 10k run. Now, for anyone listening who knows me personally, I’m not a runner. Unless I’m chasing after a basketball or baseball. But I had found this I actually had found for a few years running to be like Butik way to cope with what was going on, which I still laugh at because it’s altering and here’s what I confused is when I physically like and my body was shutting down, but I didn’t attribute it to the trauma that I was going through. Oh, clearly. I’m being too hard on my body physical perspective. And so I went and then I just stopped doing anything, because I thought oh, clearly like I didn’t it just wasn’t the right thing to do. So I just I share that for any of the listeners out there because when we are on this hamster wheel of going and going and going and doing we might be getting signals crossed. And for me, my signals were crossed all over the place. I wasn’t able to really understand what my body was trying to tell me

Luke Iorio  29:10
when in what you also just highlighted and exhibited is beginning to get curious about what’s the energy underneath any of any of the actions and the stories anything that you happen to be going through at any given time. Because you know this is we tend to look at the surface is exactly you said is oh my god is breaking breaking down because I went too hard. I went too far. So now I’m gonna go in the complete opposite direction. All of that is actually what’s happening in the external the outside of our lives. It’s this the what we can see we need to be able to get to understand as well what am I not seeing? Meaning what’s actually going on in me and not just physiologically that’s a big piece of it, physiologically, emotionally, mentally, spiritually relationally what are all the things that are actually going on? Because if we see in an effect inside of our lives, something that’s changing, that’s just a symptom. And so we’ve got to be cautious of just treating the symptom. We’ve got to use that as an internal exploration and a systemic exploration of looking at the whole of everything that’s going on that might be contributing to this in a given time.

Carolyn Swora  30:18
Yeah, yeah. Yeah, to have these brilliant, quite your client. They’re very lucky to have you, Luke, because you asked very deep questions and, you know, you really, you really demonstrating that we have this wisdom and it’s not about other people telling us it’s about allowing us to find space and again, I come back to that time. I absolutely had people in my life that were trying to help me and trying to show me and I mean, my mom in particular like had sat me down a few months before and said like, you don’t know what’s going on around you. And and this is where the trauma comes back in. I was so so guarded, trying to protect myself and you know, probably just so afraid. I couldn’t see what was actually around me at all. And so, you know, again, we can’t do this work on our own. We’re a species that needs to be together and support each other. And so, you know, I wish I had listened to a little bit more I eventually did. And I’m very grateful that those people in my life did not walk away from me. But you know, we’re getting we’re back to compassion, compassion for each other, as well. What do you

Luke Iorio  31:23
think would have helped you? Meaning a little bit earlier to be aware of the support that it was actually all around you?

Carolyn Swora  31:32
Um, well, what I think would have helped me is what I ended up writing about. I wish I’d understood what the word trauma meant. Because had I understood that it is essentially it’s not an event. It’s how you cope with an event. I think that that would have just given me permission to like, Ah, okay, um, you know, that just hadn’t hadn’t been how I had moved through life and there were a whole lot of like, you know, big tease, little tease big T, big, big trauma, a little trauma. But to me trauma was an event and you know, when you get hit over the head and a lot of blood comes goosing was external, right? So I don’t know what helped me it was a different time. You know, like we were raised in different times. The research is very different now. And I just like to think everything happened in an order in in a way that it needed to Yeah,

Luke Iorio  32:32
yeah. No, I very much. I believe that as well, that it you know, it happens in the manner that it’s, it’s kind of meant to happen and help with the unfolding of where you are and what your journey happens to be. And at the same time, I think it’s why you’re in the space that you’re in, which I’m in is how do we spread information that we believe people might be able to hear and adjust or integrate at just that, you know, even if it’s just a couple of days, couple of weeks, couple of months, you know, earlier than they would have normally and certainly right now the you know, this understanding around trauma and the way that it’s evolving in the last the understanding of it, how it’s evolving. It’s just even the last five to 10 years is becoming a lot more helpful.

Carolyn Swora  33:15
Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. No, I’m curious. One more One more question, or I guess space to move into is why like the work you’re doing your podcasts, your coaching. Why do you feel that this work is so desperately needed? Right? Right now, like if I guess it’s sort of the passion behind your purpose, why is it so passion? So passionate for you right now?

Luke Iorio  33:42
You know, it’s there are so many individuals that I’m connecting to right now. That are getting this sense that the way life has been meaning way they have worked, the way they’ve related the things that they have thought were important for them to be able to achieve or to obtain within life. None of that’s holding true. They’re checking the boxes of what was supposed to be the happy life and the good life and however we want to define it in they’re getting there and they’re saying, but I still feel a sense of emptiness. I still feel like something’s missing. I still feel like I’ve done this but is this really why I’m here? Like was it was it to draw a paycheck and to make a difference at this company? Or, you know, what, what, what’s the real reason? Like there’s there’s something more here? Yeah. And so they’re at there’s a lot of people that are asking that question. I think it’s because we’re at, we’re at a time of paradigm change. I mean, the for better or worse. The pandemic gave us a period of time that the whole world was not focused on all the externalities and busyness of everything going on, and instead, there was a lot of time for reflection. There was a lot of time for being at home. There’s a lot of time for spaciousness, and there’s a lot of pain and hurt, obviously, that went with that. But it’s also usually during those times that there is that deeper reflection that comes out. And there’s a lot of people right but are really questioning. How do I redesign my life around what I think really truly matters, as well as the difference that I want to be able to make in my life. And when I say like, what difference I’m going to make I don’t mean like big and global, it can be around your family or your kids, your community or your home, your neighbor doesn’t it? It’s whatever whatever context is appropriate for you. What what calls to you you know, for me, it was this this happened before the pandemic but I keep going back to it because I I just don’t think I’ve got a better reference point for this, which is that however many years ago, probably while I was burning out, I had read the article by brawny where palliative care nurse called the Top Five Regrets of the Dying. Yep. And it stuck with me. It’s I’ve referenced that probably every week, in some way, shape or form. And that number one regret is I wished I’d had the courage to be true to myself as opposed to the expectations of others. Yeah. I think when you consider what’s going on in the world right now around the expectations of others. From a social media standpoint, news media standpoint, political standpoint, economic standpoint, environmental standpoint, round and round and round we go. We have got technology and platforms built in such a way that we are surrounded by the expectations of others. Yeah. So we right now have this pressure cooker. And that is actually the regret. Instead, we want to have the courage to be true to ourselves. And for me, the one way I would I’d frame it, even though I know this was what was intended by the statement. But I would say the courage to be true to our true selves. making that distinction that it’s not just on any given day. How we feel and what we’re upset by or what we’re happy about or whatever. That’s more of the surface us that’s the what we present to the world. But it’s how do we go deeper and get to know the truth of who we are beneath the assumptions, the illusions, the limiting beliefs, the identity, and actually get to know this is actually the core of who I am and what I care about in the world. And the way I want to show up in the world for all the people around me. And when we get in touch with that. We want to have the courage to be that to be congruent to that part of ourselves. And I see more people than ever before are turning towards that and what they’re looking for not although more people than not are starting to find that language. I’m passionate about because I think that’s something that’s going on that is also going to help upgrade our humanity.

Carolyn Swora  37:40
I I couldn’t agree with you more Luke. I do think people are realizing that is the way through all of this. And you know, when I look at just you know, if I look at our workplaces because so much of our identity is tied up in that you know, the best leaders out there are the ones who will take the time invest the time in themselves to deepen that self awareness and like I always say, self awareness is not a destination. It is a journey.

Luke Iorio  38:15
Most definitely most of them and and that is a key piece of this is for anybody who finds myself in a position of leadership and now let me clarify what I mean by that. If you have a heartbeat, if you have a pulse and you are still breathing, then you are going to have some level of influence and impact on somebody else including yourself inside of your life. And if that is true, then you are leading. Whether you want to call yourself a leader or not. So for all of us, we’ve got to recognize leadership ability that we do innately have and we have whether we choose it or not. It’s there. Yeah. And the more that we can start leading into bringing out that true authenticity in somebody else, the helping them find the courage to be who it is that they really truly are. And to help them show up in the world the way that they’re meant to show up in the world to give their gifts to the world. The more we can embrace that as a society and leading and supporting each other in doing those things. I think we evolve faster. I think we innovate quicker, I think get more creative. I think we’re going to start solving some of the major issues that are actually out there right now. And we’re going to solve them from a place of human ingenuity, not ideology. And it’s going to come from a very, very different place. But we’ve got to stop saying oh, it’s up to those leaders to make the difference. It’s up to those leaders to make the change. We’re somebody right. I always I always thought somebody should do something about that. And I realized one day I’m somebody

Carolyn Swora  39:42
Yeah. You know, the other thing that comes to mind when you say that, too, is the ingenuity and and the, the authenticity. I think you know, the ego can take on many forms and one of the things that I’ve learned in the past few years is my ego showed up in a way that didn’t make sense to me, like how does helping others. How is that an ego? And and so, you know, again, this is why people like you and I do this work is to help people understand that an ego isn’t just a big loud voice at the front of the room. Absolutely. It is it’s the quiet voice or the loud voice inside that’s not coming out or it’s you know, not giving yourself the space or time to reflect or think I mean, there’s so many things that are tied up in that word ego. And so I’m guessing you’ve seen that with your clients as well as sort of deconstructing what that word actually means.

Luke Iorio  40:38
Oh, completely. And I love to say that, you know, I do a lot of that work with my clients. But the truth is, I’ve done a lot of that work with me and it’s, you know, it starts it starts here. And for me recognizing that my ego was it’s my attachment to identity. Yeah, ego is my attachment to safety. It’s my attachment to certainty and control. It’s, you know, an ego is is the way in which we see ourselves. It’s this image, the self image that we hold in the challenge is is that self image is actually something that is very malleable, it’s it’s evolving, it’s ever changing. But the ego doesn’t want change. The ego wants something that’s very, very static and stays the same because that’s how it stays in control. Yeah, it’s what feels safe. And that’s okay. It part of it developed out of this loving place of wanting to keep us safe. Yeah, we’re a couple 1000 years past that at this point. We need we need an upgrade in this you know, we need an awake ego we need a conscious ego that can help us create it can help us have an identity but not attached to it. Right attached to it having to be a certain way. And so yeah, the the ego comes up in many different ways. I taught you have many different ways of presenting it I’ve talked about it even on the podcast is the masks that we wear is one of the ways to look at it and all these different roles and faces that we were in and even time had another episode I’m not sure if you ever run across the disempowerment triangle, but it talks about this triangle of the victim, the perpetrator and the rescuer, which is our guide. Okay, so yeah, you’re familiar with this power dynamic that we enter into. And one of just to make this clear, one of the places that I actually get into a lot of conversation around ego is actually this role of the rescuer. When when we feel like we need to rescue at homes through a really noble place like this is a beautiful, noble, caring, loving, compassionate place, but what it ends up doing is it ends up locking that disempowerment dynamic in place because it says to the victim, I don’t actually believe you have enough power to get out of this yourself. I don’t think you have the answers that you need for yourself. And so I’m going to step in to try to solve this for you. That’s ego Yeah, what it is so it’s not ego can do and I wanted to bring that up just because the point you made ego isn’t just the loud, brash talking head, right? Yeah, it can show up in a lot of ways and at times can even show up in noble ways. Yes, we still need to be aware of at the end of the day, the ego simply wants its worldview.

Carolyn Swora  43:03
Yes. Yep. Yeah. What would you like? What would you say would be a theme out of all the podcasts that you’ve done with your guests, you know, current podcasts and maybe maybe once before? Is there a theme or like a common connection between all of your guests and conversations?

Luke Iorio  43:26
I think the one I probably say the one theme that is, by far the one that we’ve returned to the most is the recognition of learning how we can listen to within. Because you set up before we have and we possess such extraordinary wisdom. And I’ll even say that it’s not just what we possess, it’s what we have access to. Yeah, because when we can be in that deep state of meditation, or coherence or whatever, we want to describe it as we have access to that that collective unconscious. That’s where those incredible ideas come from the ether, right? I really want to talk about it. And we have access to that. And then we pull it through our lens, authentically who we are so it’s how does that wisdom mean? something personal to me. That if we could cultivate that, like if I you know, to me that should be a one on one to a one and three, a one starting in elementary school? Yeah, because the more that we could look within, for our real guidance and by looking within it means looking beneath our biases, looking at neath our assumptions, looking beneath our blocks. All the things that get in our way, so that we can access the real us the real wisdom, the real truth, the real consciousness. If we could get down into that and stop looking outside of ourselves, the number of problems that we have, would fade away. We wouldn’t feel inadequate we wouldn’t feel incomplete. We wouldn’t feel broken. We wouldn’t have feel like we’ve got to stack up and compare ourselves to it’s out there. Because we know the truth of the wholeness and fullness of what we are and how to access it. How to connect there. Yeah, it would change a lot of things. And thankfully that’s it. That is a consistent recurring theme that I say almost every episode at some point, touches on that at least briefly. Some touch on for the whole episode.

Carolyn Swora  45:24
Yeah, well, kind of like this one. We touched on it for most of the episode. We’ve been here the whole time. Yeah. Well, I you know, look, I’m really grateful that you came on the show and and shared your insight and depth and just how you’ve described I mean, I’m still sitting with how you described ego. Yeah, you just had a really a really interesting way of of shedding insight and in the way you’ve described some of these things. It’s very, it’s really, really helpful, I think, thank you very much for coming on.

Luke Iorio  45:56
I appreciate it very much. Yeah, I enjoyed this a lot. Now before

Carolyn Swora  45:59
we close out though, Luke, two things how can our listeners find you if they’re like this slip guys? Like I want to hear more him or like, I want to talk to him myself? How can they find you?

Luke Iorio  46:11
First thing is my podcast is on this walk. So wherever you’re listening to this search up on this walk, you’ll find me the website is just that as well on this walk.com And you can find me There you’ll also find all my socials if you if you look up D as in Daniel Luke Iorio on any of the socials, you’ll go find me.

Carolyn Swora  46:29
All right. Now before we let you go, Luke, we have three questions. For you every every podcast we end with these three questions of an evolved leader. So the first one is about self awareness. And specifically Could you share a moment with us or a time where you develop some really interesting insight? Perhaps it was in a time of a lot of unclearly it gave you an insight into who you are?

Luke Iorio  47:00
Yeah. Interestingly enough, I struggled to launch my podcast because I wasn’t I knew I wanted to be very vulnerable in opening it up because that’s that’s what people were responding to in the stories and client work or anything else I was sharing. And so I struggled with with putting it out there for a while and then I decide to and I’m only a couple of episodes into it and I can feel the struggle of I don’t know where this is gonna go. I don’t really know what I’m doing. Where am I supposed to head with this, this whole process? And I sat down with two friends back to back, one of which I actually recorded and ended up releasing as a podcast episode where it was effectively me coming to this realization that for my entire life, one of my major control mechanisms was I had to have that detailed plan to know where things were going and I needed to have that kind of all figured out. And one friend this was I mentioned it but it was not on the recorded episode. It turned back to me and said, you know, you read all these incredible people and these incredible thinkers, incredible traditions, everything else and he does use somebody like Carl Jung, you know, totally archetypal, quite literally in who he is. He became Carl Jung. After 789 years of journaling and reflecting and not even knowing what he was doing and creating at that time. And then afterwards, he birthed this whole psychoanalytic approach to psychotherapy, and it revolutionized everything he was you’re trying to figure out how are you going to have those insights without doing the 789 years of journaling and everything else? He goes, just put it out and just do it, just put it out of the podcast and see what happens. Yeah, and so I brought that into an actual episode where I had a friend of mine, a facilitator, hold space for me for an hour, and I actually released it as an episode of me literally talking about the whole wow, I was thinking I think if people look it up it’s it’s I think it’s maybe episode eight or nine with me and the facilitator is Aaron kalo. And it’s just it’s, it’s, yeah, it was it was one of those things that I knew I was gonna have to do and I said, I’m gonna hit record because I need this for me. And after we recorded I said, I can’t believe I’m gonna release this I’m actually gonna release this as an episode

Carolyn Swora  49:16
so I’m just having a look yeah, let’s stay with it. And yeah, I mean, it’s it’s you know, when you think of on that unlock like, that’s a beautiful title to to the podcast, so

Luke Iorio  49:27
thank you. Yeah, yeah, it’s it came out of it came out of a there’s a lot of there’s a lot of meaning to that. Yeah, there’s there’s some good of just being on the on this walk with friends on this walk with conversations we’ve had. But honestly, it was an indigenous friend of mine, who they refer to being in this life is on this walk of life, meaning on this go round in life on this time through this thing we call life. And so it Yeah, something about it really stuck with me. And I want to pay, pay homage to that.

Carolyn Swora  50:01
So a second question. Well, I don’t know if you can be I don’t know if you can answer the second and third one any better than the first one? What is it practice or ritual that keeps you in a calm state or returns you to a calm regulated state?

Luke Iorio  50:17
Here’s a few that I use. I want to be a little more specific than just saying like meditation, but In medicine of them is that actually I was just having this conversation with somebody earlier today. Very often, we undertake a practice for the benefits we believe we’re going to receive. So for instance, part of mindfulness meditation became so popular because it was stressed it was stress reduction. Right. And that’s how Jon Kabat Zinn popularized mindfulness in that sector very widely, right. What I began to recognize what changed for me was meditation now is about connecting to where do I want to fuel myself from not what I’m doing it for. And so, I want to be able to live from a place of peace to live from a place of love, live from a place of truth of groundedness. And so when I meditate, it’s actually a meditation to connect with that fuel source with that energy source. And then I marry that feeling once I feel like I’ve achieved or connected to that state. I tend to marry that state with a breath pattern. So that at a later time, I’m able to repeat those couple of either deep breaths whether they’re deep and diaphragmatic, or whether it’s a very specific heart centered breath where I can feel my energy there. I kind of mirror it to something physiological so that I can recreate that state. And, and so that’s, that’s one of the practices.

Carolyn Swora  51:50
Very nice, very nice thing to think about when I’m doing so. My I’ve and I’ve recently come to that place. Well, in real estate that sort of fell out of favor for me for what Yes, exactly. Yeah, yeah. And last but not least, what is a song or genre of music that makes you feel connected to others or part of something bigger than yourself?

Luke Iorio  52:13
It’s not just a song as an artist, is that I tend to always go back to Mr. James Taylor. And there is something so folksy and connected about his lyrics, and they’re simple. They’re not you know, they’re not the poetry of Bob Dylan or anything like that. But they speak to me and they seem to be matched with a specific, you know, tone and quality in the way that he sings. It feels like experiences that a lot of us have shared. Yeah. And that’s, you know, when I, when I find myself in those kind of moments with, you know, that little bit of melancholy or whatever it is, and even even at times when it’s just happiness. I can go back and find a James Taylor song that connects me deeply. And for me personally it my wife, and I’ve listened to James Taylor for decades together. And so it always it always connects us and makes me think a lot of memories we’ve shared is through the through the years.

Carolyn Swora  53:17
Is there a particular James Taylor song that’s coming up for you right now?

Luke Iorio  53:28
That’s not the name of the song I’m thinking of. Not at the moment.

Carolyn Swora  53:34
I know that the one that I share the one that always I mean, there’s few like you’ve got a friend I think he wrote that one writer to Carole King, right that one. I know they’ve both they both saying it has a friend. You’ve got a friend.

Luke Iorio  53:47
Yeah, you know, honestly, I don’t know which one wrote it. I think Jake Taylor did write that one. But yeah, they, they were both connected to the hip on that.

Carolyn Swora  53:54
That one. That one was huge for me. In a lot of ways. I won’t get into that. But I think back to fire and rain. Yeah. And that brings me back to high school and I just there’s just a warm feeling whenever I hear that song. So that’s what came up what you said James Taylor. I thought of those two songs.

Luke Iorio  54:16
Yeah, yeah. There’s a lot of them. You know, those of those who have always connected me knowing some of the story about how he wrote sweet baby James for his nephew that was born he wrote it on the road on his way to see the to see his nephew. Yeah, Carolina on my mind, and just a lot of a lot of those tunes just dropped me into a different space. Fire, fire and rain. I every time I listen to it, I can feel just the deep emotion behind what he was.

Carolyn Swora  54:42
Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. Well, Luke, an absolute pleasure to have you on the show. This has been a wonderful hour of conversation. And hey, I’m glad that I’m glad I found you along the walk of life.

Luke Iorio  54:56
Likewise. Glad to have this conversation. I’ve thoroughly enjoyed our time. And yeah, I hope it’s of great value to your listeners.

Carolyn Swora  55:03
Yeah. Well, thanks to all the listeners for tuning into this podcast. And please let us know what you think by responding with some comments to us. Thanks. Again, and we’ll see you on our next episode.