The Kindness Matters Podcast
So. Much. Division. Let's talk about how to change that. Re-engage as neighbors, friends, co-workers and family. Let's set out to change the world. Strike that. Change A World. One person at a time, make someone's life a little better and then do it again tomorrow and the day after that, through kindness.
Kindness is a Super-Power that each of us has within us. It is so powerful it has the potential to change not only your life but those around you, too. Let's talk about kindness.
The Kindness Matters Podcast
Embarking on a Spiritual Journey with Alex Regan
Get ready for a soul-stirring conversation with our special guest, Alex Regan. A trans man, an interfaith minister, a transformative spiritual coach, and a published author, Alex opens up about his journey from growing up in a conservative family to embracing his spirituality and identity. In an intriguing chat, Alex shares his insight on lowercase 'g' god and what it means to discover the "God Within". We dive into the importance of being true to oneself and how we can all find our unique connection to the divine.
The conversation takes an interesting turn as we address the impact of technology on our communities and personal relationships. We question if technology, in its rapid growth, has hardened our attitudes and led to a decrease in communal spaces. From churches transforming into political stages to the urgent need to differentiate politics from spirituality, we cover it all. Alex also enlightens us about his book - a guide to processing trauma and speaking one's truth, and how to navigate the complexities of life by tapping into our inner divine. This episode is not just a conversation, but a journey towards finding oneness and becoming better versions of ourselves. Tune in, and let's explore this journey together.
You can find everything about Alex and his beliefs and insightful message on his website.
Feel free to reach out to me, as well. Find all of my links here.
Kindness. We see it all around us. We see it when someone pays for someone else's coffee or holds the door open for another person. We see it in the smallest of gestures, like a smile or a kind word. But it's different when we turn on the news or social media. Oftentimes, what we hear about what outlets are pushing is the opposite of kind. Welcome to the Kindness Matters podcast. Our goal is to give you a place to relax, to revel in stories of people who have received or given kindness, a place to inspire and motivate each and every one of us to practice kindness every day. Hello everybody and welcome to the Kindness Matters podcast. I am your host, mike Rathbun, and my guest today and honestly I feel blessed and honored is Alex Regan. Alex is a trans man, an interfaith minister, a speaker, a transformative spiritual coach and, as if that wasn't enough, the author of the bestselling book what Needs to Be Said? Speak your Truth, release Shame, find Oneness. Welcome to the show Alex Did.
Speaker 2:I get it all right. I think so, mike. I think so. Thanks, I'm so excited to be here with you today. I appreciate it. Thanks for having me on.
Speaker 1:It's. You know, and I was kind of I started to get into your book. We could probably spend a good hour just talking about that, because there's so much there to unpack, is there not? Yeah, definitely.
Speaker 2:Definitely. I've been in lots of conversations where I'm like how long do you have today to go in this podcast? Exactly, it's going to be multi-parts, or what are we talking here?
Speaker 1:And so just to give the listeners a quick rundown on your background, would you mind?
Speaker 2:Yeah, totally. So I grew up in a pretty evangelical, conservative family. Knew as a little kid, okay, I think I'm a lot different than they think that I am or should be. I definitely didn't have the language for it then. I wouldn't have known to say that I was trans then, but I probably knew as early as six that I was like I'm pretty sure I'm a boy and you keep calling me a girl. That took a lot more years under my belt before I actually came to understand what that meant and was able to come out. But by my teen years I knew, okay, I definitely am attracted to girls. So again, we're coming up with some confusion because they're telling me I should be attracted to boys.
Speaker 2:There was a lot of not following their rules and their way of doing things. I kind of, as they say, march to the beat of my own drum. After coming out in college I just sort of left all that behind. I had a lot of people who said, oh, I can't be your friend anymore because you're gay or you're queer or whatever. Oh, brother, yeah. And I had a lot of people then who did try to also still include me, but it just felt like I had to kind of take a clean break and just do something else.
Speaker 2:So I really got out of everything to do with Christianity for quite some time. I just kind of left it all behind and renounced all that and went on a trail of I'm an atheist now, which came back to eventually I'm an agnostic I don't know what's out there, but maybe there is something and eventually just kind of led me back down some interesting paths where I got into all sorts of things from astrology to tarot, the Akashic records. I started listening to Abraham Hicks, you know just kind of found this whole different way to get to God. And then I ended up getting into shamanism and eventually went to seminary and became an interfaith minister as well. To top that all off, as if that wasn't all enough I mean it kind of said.
Speaker 1:When you say it like that, it kind of sounds like a natural progression, doesn't it?
Speaker 1:And you start here and you work your way down and eventually you work your way up to where you find your own divine Exactly.
Speaker 1:And I think, yeah, I think all of us, I think, have been on that path of one form or another. Maybe not all of us, but, yeah, I was raised Roman Catholic and there was definitely a point where I went I'm not so sure about this whole three people or one my mother and I used to have conversations like that and they're like, well, if he didn't want us to question it, why did he give us free will, right? But yeah, I think, maybe your journey is probably more similar to a lot of peoples than even you realized at that point, because your book really resonates with a lot of people, I think and again, I just got into it, I'm into the introduction and it's so well written, it's so good, because, basically, what you're saying in the book is there is a God and I love the whole small G part. There's a God inside each of us and you just have to find the one that resonates with you so that you can be your true self. Did I nutshell that even close to?
Speaker 2:Yeah, I think that I do try to just say throughout the whole book that this God we're looking for outside of us.
Speaker 2:That's great and fine. There's a lot of people who have found their way to some sort of happiness and fulfillment by going to church or going to temple or going to all these different spaces that have worked for them and their families, religion, etc. But I know for a lot of people that doesn't work and I think there's a possibility to recognize that actually God's not outside of us, god is not separate from us, that God resides within us. And so I kind of coined that to be called the God within and really tried to. Really that's how I got back in touch with my own connection to the divine, by calling it sort of a different name, I guess, in a way, and sort of removing. As you mentioned, I don't ever capitalize God in the book, I always lowercase it, and that helped me to sort of put a new spin on it for my own psyche and my own mind, really to remove it from what I had known God to be in my upbrain.
Speaker 1:And for those listening and you hear that and maybe your initial reaction is to stop listening. Read the book, you will understand and it will make perfect sense to you. But so I was flipping through the other day and maybe this is applicable and maybe it's not, but it was an article in the Atlantic about, and the article was about why Americans are not going to church anymore. And they talk about they talk about a lot of things actually, and boy, I'm going to have to do some. But the one thing they quote from a book called the Great De-Churching and it hasn't even been I don't think it's been published yet and what they found and yes, we hear a lot about abuses in the church Southern Baptist Convention certainly has their share of that and of course, the Roman Catholic Church has their share of that but that a much larger share of the people surveyed indicated that they left the church for more banal reasons and that the defining problem driving out most people who leave is just how American life works in the 21st century.
Speaker 1:And I'm quoting right from the article here. It says contemporary America simply isn't set up to promote mutuality, care or common life. Rather, it is designed to maximize individual accomplishment as defined by professional and financial success, and there was even a line in there that I really liked and apparently I didn't. The problem in front of us is not that we have a healthy, sustainable society that doesn't have room for church. The problem is that many Americans have adopted a way of life that has left us lonely, anxious and uncertain of how to live in the community with other people, and I think that goes a lot towards this lack of kindness that we see in the world today. I mean, certainly COVID didn't help, right, because we all had to stay away from each other. Did we, over the period of one or two years, just go? I hate everybody and I'm not going to be nice to anybody anymore.
Speaker 2:I mean, I think in some ways that amplified a larger problem. That's been happening for some time now. If you think about who we were even 100 years ago as a community. But if you go back further and further than that, we're a people that is built to be in. Essentially we're animals. We're built to live in packs, we're built to live in community. We used to live in villages and small towns and we aren't even built for the information that we're receiving nowadays. We aren't built for immediate tragedy that happened across the world in South Africa today or that happened in Australia. We aren't built for that kind of information. When we used to get information, we might not hear about something for weeks that happens even just a town or two over, because it might have taken that long for the news to possibly be heard.
Speaker 2:Yeah, to wait until the Pony Express came to town, exactly, exactly, and so I think part of that has been the growth of how the internet and everything has taken off exponentially. Our minds have not seen that kind of evolution, right. Our nervous system has not had that kind of evolution. I think I saw something that was like we have grown in the last decade more so technologically than we did in the last, like 100 or 150 years, like some crazy amount you know, like combined into just a decade, and unfortunately our minds are not catching up to that right. Like we're not built to just digest and take in basically trauma 24 hours a day, seven days a week.
Speaker 1:Absolutely right, yeah, and my wife and I were watching the news the other day and she's like is it just me or is like the whole world on fire now? And you think back? Okay, for me it was watching news with my parents and it was the Huntley Brinkley reporter or Walter Cronkite Yep, you saw the big stories. You saw Vietnam. Probably maybe Watergate was in there. You didn't see the story about somebody's house who exploded in Mississippi. Exactly, yeah, and you're absolutely right. I think that level of trauma 24-7, has it hardened us, do you think, or just made us? I don't know.
Speaker 2:I think it's a combination. I think in a way, we've felt like we have to put this armor up, and so it's this perceived hardening where we are kind of like, hey, keep out of my way and I'll keep out of yours. It is this very much like we don't know how to be in community because we don't know how to stomach and really transmute all of this trauma and all the information that we're getting. I always make a joke that if the Titanic was sinking today, we would see it live, streamed by someone floating on the raft, being like, oh my God, this is happening live and we would just be seeing all these people jumping out. We would watch it live, like we did 9-11.
Speaker 2:And we're not built for that, and I think so, in turn, we have sort of started to move away from community, thinking that community is causing me more harm or me to hold on to more trauma and pain. We're not listening to each other in the same way, we're not holding space for one another and what we go through. And I think, in turn, the church is less effective because the church is built around the sort of communal coming together in this community space and if people are like, hey, this is too much for me. Not to mention that churches have gotten. In my experience they've gotten a lot more political than they ever have been in the past and that's a real shame to see because that space it doesn't belong there and it's like no place is safe then from somebody's ideological ideas and we should be able to safely be in communion together and not have XYZ guy knocking us over the head with whatever his own fears and hatreds are, et cetera.
Speaker 1:Oh, yeah, for sure. I remember my dad was not a big scholar or a deep thinker, but he said to me once he says no, but he said don't let a preacher tell you how to vote and don't let a politician tell you how to pray. And I think we've blurred that line and I think that is to the detriment of all of us really, because it has, it's made us hardened and it's plus, when I was growing up and I don't know how old you are, it doesn't matter, but odds are, when you were a young man, you didn't have. Did you always have the internet when you were growing up? No, no, I'm an exer yeah.
Speaker 1:Oh OK.
Speaker 2:I came into it as college was in the last year or so. It was like what is this thing Just starting to be where we had email, and it was this whole other world all of a sudden opening up.
Speaker 1:Yeah, oh, for sure, for sure. I think I had an AOL account Me too. Oh yeah, yeah, and I think the rise of that and this goes along with what you were saying about the technology is that it has allowed people to anonymously act out and speak out their most primal stuff, for better or for worse.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:So yeah, but we can get past that, right, Right.
Speaker 2:Yeah, definitely, because there's also a plus side to this. Right now, we happen to be communicating. We don't live anywhere near each other and we're thousands of miles away from each other and we're able to talk.
Speaker 1:True that.
Speaker 2:On the podcast the other day that was in, she was in Australia and I was in New Jersey.
Speaker 2:Guys, hey, you couldn't have done that 20 years ago.
Speaker 2:And so I think we have to also see the benefits of what this has done for us and then try to find a way to amplify that, because what is being amplified right now is sort of the negative effects of, like you said, people are kind of deciding oh, I'm free to just say whatever I want on here, and I kind of always follow.
Speaker 2:Speaking of parents, or my grandpa was used to say you know, if you don't want anyone to know, blah, blah, don't write it down, because that's what they used to say back in the day. Well, now it's like well, don't put it on the damn internet. You know, like, if you don't want, you know. And there is just this lack of realization that there are people on the other side of these little tiny avatar graphics that show your little face or don't even show your face, show your dog or whatever, right, and so there are people on the other side of that, and I think that's where the hardening has come is that we've disconnected from recognizing. You know, there's no place where you begin and I end, right.
Speaker 1:Right For sure. Yeah, you see a profile picture, as it were, and you take the humanity out of that picture. Yeah, and yeah it's sad, but there is hope, because I think just as much as technology is harmful and I'm not saying technology is horrible, because it does have some good points, just as you pointed out so it has the, it has the ability to bring us together as much as it drives us apart.
Speaker 2:Right, we just have to choose which we want in this situation. Oh for sure, yeah, and that's the key.
Speaker 1:What's that? Yeah, that's the key. What do you find? So now, when you you say you're an interfaith minister and that means you basically now can you practice all religions or do you preach, how does that work?
Speaker 2:It depends. I don't necessarily practice all the different religions. During seminary we certainly, every month that we set in a different world religion, we certainly were asked to participate in one of the religious. You know things that you would do for that month, whatever the religion was, whether it was Islam or Judaism. I don't necessarily feel like I have a practicing religion, quote, unquote. I really just believe that I have a connection and spirituality I really.
Speaker 2:So I really kind of steer clear of words like religion still Right, because it just it tends to put people off too, who also, especially LGBTQIA plus people who tend to come to me frequently. It's not always like ooh, I don't know about that, I'm going to go another direction, you know, when you start using that kind of language. So you know, my spiritual practices and things really are kind of a conglomeration of all different types of modalities that I've studied, like I said, from shamanism and other things that I've studied, and that's sort of what mine looks like. It's sort of a hodgepodge of everything. And then, as far as practicing, yeah, I do preach at Christian churches predominantly, and then I preach at or talk, do talk, set other events, businesses. I'm doing like a healthcare symposium in a couple of weeks for big healthcare, a hospital system, you know. So it's just it can be for businesses, you know. Whatever, it's a pretty broad group of people.
Speaker 1:Going to my announcer voice here for booking information, contact Alex Rieken. There you go. We will have all that stuff in the show notes and all the links to your book and to your website. Awesome, I would you're so easy to talk to. I mean, I and I got this from From a review of your book and it's so true because you and I have talked a couple times. Yeah, everyone should have an Alex in their life. Do you know who said that?
Speaker 2:Yeah, Reverend Barber had soul.
Speaker 1:Yep, yeah, yeah, and it's true. I mean, you are such a A, you're like the best friend, the best of all my best friends rolled into one, because you're you're not afraid to say what needs to be said and you can teach the rest of us how to say what needs to be said. Your book is not so much even just a memoir, it's more of a, a guide. Yeah, because you have sections in there that a person reading your book and go through in journal Yep, right.
Speaker 2:Yep, yeah, I have all kinds of practices, so it's really built on. It's built out of unlike three parts, which is the origin, struggle and emergence. So in each of those parts I do talk about my own story, but then I also go into at the end of each chapter, there's a writing prompt for you to do, for the reader to do. Then, at the end of each part, I have a whole section that's basically geared towards Okay, how can you work through things in your own origin, how can you work through things in your own struggles that you've gone through? How can you, you know, advance and move even beyond your own emergence of things? So, yeah, it's. It's basically like a self-help book slash memoir, so it's kind of a little bit of both.
Speaker 1:How do you sell that on Amazon? It's like self-help slash, mental health slash.
Speaker 2:Yep, it's like in a whole bunch of different. This weekend I got up to like number three in LGBTQ, like it was. I don't even know what the topic was like, I'd never even seen. It was like Demographics studies or something and I was like, okay, I don't even know what that genre is.
Speaker 1:But I would have stopped at number three. I think the furthest I've been up with any of my books on Amazon is. I think I was like 1900 worldwide on something or other, I don't know what it was, but yeah, and so I'm like I say yeah, I would have stopped at number three and just Win, take the win.
Speaker 1:Take the win, alex, I'll take it. So yeah, I as hateful as the world has become. I think we have hope and if each of us strives to Be better people and one way to be a better person is to read- what needs to be said what needs to be said speak your truth, release shame and find oneness, and that's how you can be a better person. And yeah, thanks so much for being on, alex. I really, really, really appreciate it. I appreciate your insight and I hope we can speak again sometime you got it.
Speaker 2:I'd love to be back anytime. You just let me know. Thanks for having me so much. I appreciate it.
Speaker 1:Fantastic. Take care, we'll talk. Sounds good. Full disclosure here. So I was looking at the time and we were recording on zoom, alex and I, and I thought I was running out of time, so if the ending of that episode sounded hurried, it probably was. I promise to have Alex Regan back on the show. We'll discuss all the stuff we want to talk about Without rushing. How about that? It was great to have Alex on the show. A lot of great insights from a man who has seen, I'm sure, more than his share of hate and and Yet he remains optimistic and hopeful. So I I think that's my one takeaway from this entire episode. Thank you so much for joining us on this episode. We will be back again next week with a new episode. And you know the drill Be that person who roots for others, who tells a stranger they look Amazing and encourages others to believe in themselves and their dreams. You've been listening to the kindness matters podcast. I am your host, mike Rathman. Have a fantastic week.
