JesuÌs Christ wasnât nice
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[00:00:00] Hello and welcome to the Bars in Hell. I am Danielle Gates. This is episode three and I'm calling it Jesus Christ is Not Nice. So side note. This is not what today's podcast is supposed to be about. I have these periods where I have zero creative ability and I have other days where I get up at
6:00 AM and I sit in front of my computer and I'm there for 13 or 14 hours banging out newsletters and social media posts and all of that stuff.
And then I have other days, like today where I have all of this stuff to do. I have four retreats coming up. I have a community that I'm building and a website that I'm changing, and so many things happening and I have no creative energy. And I also realized I had my niece here with my goddaughter this weekend, and I was just really enjoying having this beautiful little baby with me.
She was so cute and such like an easy child. She just eats and sleeps and talks to you, and she's very adorable. [00:01:00] But it was a lot of energy. I don't usually have people around me all the time, like 24 hours a day. And so I think also it's like my brain doesn't know how to recover from that. So I needed like a day.
But in realizing that I haven't posted on social media for a day and a half, I still wake up or every time I come back from a task, and I look at my phone, I have a million notifications of people offering me feedback. On an old social media post on something that they saw, an article that they saw or asking me about Johann, or, it's just I'm constantly receiving feedback and I feel like I handle it very well.
I feel I dialogue with everyone, even if someone is just trying to troll me and trigger me, I still will dialogue with them for a couple of reasons. One, because I see it as me telling the universe that like. No weapon formed against me shall prosper. And this is an important conversation that I obviously need to have, so let's have it.
That's how I see it. [00:02:00] And also, I feel like I offer a lot of feedback. And so one of the things that I always said to my kids when I was in the classroom, and one thing that I talk to my clients and my students on my retreats and even my colleagues is if you are looking for. A nice spiritually bypassing kind, always soft swami teacher.
You're not gonna find her in me, but if you're looking for someone who's gonna offer you feedback and tell you the truth as I see it. Then, join me every single time someone wants to come on a retreat. I tell them that we have to have a conversation first, like a Zoom conversation or a phone conversation if they're close to me, an in person conversation, because I really want people to understand, 'cause people come to me from.
90 day fiance, they come to me from yoga teacher trainings. They come to me from social media, they come to me from all of these different places, and then they get to me and they have expectations based on how they got to me for what [00:03:00] they should experience with me. And many people are very surprised when they realize that they're signing up and paying thousands of dollars to get feedback from me.
And some of that feedback feels good and some of that feedback doesn't feel good. And I recognize that like I get a lot of feedback. A lot of it is nonsense, but a lot of it is valid. And like I use that feedback to grow. And I say my experience on 90 day fiance was the best self-development, better than entrepreneurship, better than any course I could have taken in college,
because every hard thing about me, every shadow, everything I judge about myself, every, iota of shame that I have about anything that I've done or experienced or been in my life is exposed as a result of being on reality tv. And in order for me just to survive. After doing that for now four seasons with diaries, like I have to have very thick skin.
[00:04:00] And so because I have thick skin, I have this assumption or expectation that anybody who comes to me is also gonna have thick skin. And I'm very surprised when I find that they're not. And so I titled this Jesus Christ was not nice because I feel like a lot of people have this expectation even when I did the cameo on the tell-all, she said that, like shekinah said, she teaches yoga and meditation.
Like how is that possible? Because I got angry. Because people have this idea that spiritual leaders are never supposed to get angry. They're never supposed to have rage. They're never supposed to lose their cool. And when you think about like where are people getting that information? How is it possible that this is what people are thinking because there's no historical basis.
Jesus Christ flipped tables. Moses was feared as much as he was respected. Muhammad was a warrior. He enforced spiritual discipline. He'd led [00:05:00] revolutions. John the Baptist was very famously confrontational. Krishna, even though we think of him as this little sweet little cherub, who's all about love.
Bhati is all about love. But Krishna put our June through like psychological warfare and forcing him into this conflict where he had to think about killing people he loved. There's no spiritual leader, especially in the yogic tradition that doesn't value very strict discipline. To the point where you live in an ashram, in an austere life, like devoid of any distractions or luxuries or attachments in order to learn about God and therefore yourself.
So if that's what spirituality looks like in reality, both historically and in our modern world, why do we assume that someone like me who's leading a yoga class or a retreat, or is a teacher and by. Just by that [00:06:00] definition of being a teacher, you know that I'm offering feedback. Why would you assume that I'm gonna be nice and kind all the time?
Because sometimes the things that people have to hear aren't gonna feel good. They're not gonna feel nice. And I think that me as a teacher, people come to me because they know I'm gonna tell the truth at least. I hope that's why they come to me. And if they weren't beforehand, maybe I have to make this podcast a requirement, a prereq for all of my retreat guests because I think it's important that people realize that anybody who comes to me in any area of my life, whether it's personally or professionally in a romantic environment, my close friends, my colleagues, my students, like every single person who's in my life knows that.
I truly believe at my core, avoidance is harm. Enabling is harm. Silence is harm. And so anything that I see that could potentially cause harm [00:07:00] to me, to you, to anybody around us, I see the world as my universe of obligation. I'm going to say something. If I see something, I say something. And it could be a very toxic trait.
I remember sitting in a staff room. And two of my colleagues who were also friends were sitting there and one of them said that he appreciated how unapologetic I am. And my other friend said, that's just a nice way of saying she's an asshole. I've been called an asshole many times in my life just because I say things very directly, very straightforwardly.
Not to hurt anyone, but really because I'm a teacher and I want people to be better. I, myself included, like I want everyone in the world to wake up tomorrow better than they were today. And so if I see something that I feel could make you better, if you knew it, maybe it's something you're not aware of, I'm gonna share it.
And I'm really working on not doing that so much. 'cause unsolicited advice [00:08:00] is never a good idea. And b. It's damaging to my relationships. 'cause not everybody's ready to hear feedback and that's not, I can't expect that's what everyone's signing up for when they choose to be in any kind of relationship with me.
Whether it's personal or professional. And I just wanna offer people a different perspective than spirituality is supposed to feel good. And God is always supposed to feel good. It's always supposed to feel like love and light because that is complete. Fiction, healing, transforming your life, letting go of attachments, getting out of toxic environments, feeling safe.
All of that comes from suffering and lessons and hard things. That doesn't mean everything has to be hard. But you're never going to be able to get through life and feel fulfilled if you don't hear hard things sometimes, and you don't get uncomfortable [00:09:00] and sit in your bullshit. Sometimes I get really triggered when.
My friends tell me that I talk to them like they're my students. And I was sitting the other day with a friend who is a teacher and I was telling her that, she's really? She's I don't think that of you at, at all. And it's because she's a teacher. And when I think about like how I learned to communicate,
I learned to communicate by learning to be an educator. I didn't learn how to communicate from my parents. I didn't learn how to communicate from my friends, my school, none of that. I learned when I went to school to be a teacher, I had to take human development classes and communication classes, and that's where you were taught a, how to prove an argument using evidence and how to have debates.
Because in the classroom you have to have Socratic seminars and fishbowls. You have to teach kids how to have hard conversations. And teach them how to speak publicly and teach them how to resolve conflict between each other. Especially, I taught mostly at the high school level, mostly juniors and seniors.
You [00:10:00] were teaching these kids how to be people. It wasn't about teaching them like historical facts. Even though I was a history teacher, it was about like, what happens when you disagree with your classmate, because punching them is gonna get you in trouble. So what are some other ways we can handle this?
Or when you have a group of kids doing group work and they don't like each other, like how do you get them to work together anyway? That's teaching them how to be people. And so that's, I had to learn how to do that myself with my own colleagues in order to be able to teach that. And so what a lot of people in my life who are not teachers, my family, friends that I've met and other ways, like not through teaching, maybe through a yoga spot or something, when I try to have hard conversations with them, and I remember my grandmother said this to me, you think I'm one of your pupils?
And I was like, why does everyone say this in my family? Why do all these people say this and who doesn't? And it really is that like people don't know how to have hard conversations. They don't know how to give [00:11:00] feedback and tell someone that they hurt them or they did something wrong or correct a mistake, and they don't know how to receive that information themselves.
And when I say to you that Jesus Christ wasn't nice, and we think of him as Lord and Savior, he still flipped out. When he saw hypocrisy, . And so I think that it's important. To recognize that the people in your life who are offering you feedback, if they're doing it with love and they're not doing it to hurt your feelings, and they're doing it because they wanna see you grow, sit with it for a moment.
Even if it feels uncomfortable, don't react. Say, huh? Why is this triggering me? Why is this making me feel a type of way? What is the truth I see in that? Because chances are, there's something about what that person said that you believe, and that's why it's so offensive to you. [00:12:00] So please don't expect that this spiritual leader is going to be nice all the time.
Because I'm not. I'm always going to be very direct, and that's okay. Because the people who can hear it are the people who are supposed to work with me. And the same thing is true for you. So I want you to take with you from this very random podcast that kind of went in a million different directions.
That feedback is a good thing, and if there's any pain that comes with it, it's because there's some truth in it. That is all for today, kids. I hope you have a beautiful rest of your Monday.
