Daniel M - Roots and Branches

What does it mean to grow through fatherhood while navigating shame, rage, grief, and joy? In this week’s Quiet Connection, Chelsea sits down with Daniel, a musician, creative coach, and father of three, whose story is as lyrical as it is raw.

From becoming a dad at 18, to navigating rage and self-abandonment, to grieving his father’s death while welcoming a new baby, Daniel shares his journey of learning to surrender, to love himself, and to root deeply in order to rise higher. With vulnerability and poetic honesty, he reminds us that transformation often happens in the tension between love and sorrow.

🔑 Key Takeaways

1. Parenthood is transformation: From teen fatherhood to parenting three children, Daniel describes fatherhood as the “purifying fire” that shaped him.
   
   
2. Roots and branches: Healing requires rooting into messy truths (shame, grief, anger) in order to rise into wholeness.
   
   
3. The rage monster: Daniel once battled explosive anger and shame, but through honesty, humility, and his wife’s guidance, he’s learning new ways of being.
   
   
4. Love and sorrow are inseparable: The greater the grief we hold, the greater our capacity for joy.
   
   
5. Marriage as transformative fire: His wife’s honesty and insistence on change became a catalyst for his growth as a father and partner.
   
   
6. Self-love as legacy: Daniel hopes his children inherit not perfection, but the ability to love themselves fully — roots, branches, and all.

🎧 Soundbites

• “Parenthood is the purifying fire that smooths you like a river stone.”
  
  
• “My son’s willfulness either enrages my monster or brings out the best person in me — and that’s the gift.”
  
  
• “The roots are messy, but they’re what allow us to rise higher.”
  
  
• “Blessed are those who weep, for they will be comforted.”
  
  
• “There are no bad parts. Even rage and shame can be our allies when we bring them into the light.”
  
  
• “My hope for my children is that they love themselves fully — from their highest branches to their deepest roots.”

 To learn more about Daniel, visit his website or Instagram.

Transcript

Chelsea Myers (00:38)
Hello, today I'm here with Daniel. Daniel, how are you?

Daniel (00:42)
I'm doing really well, how are you doing?

Chelsea Myers (00:44)
I'm doing pretty good. I am already like trying to chill out because your vibe is so chill this morning. And I'm trying to take a little bit of that. I'm a little amped for a Friday morning.

Daniel (00:53)
Hmm

⁓

We can balance each other out. Let's co-regulate this.

Chelsea Myers (01:04)
I like that. really do. just for listeners, I was telling Daniel before we started recording. love he's got guitars behind him. He's got a daily prophet behind him. Like these are all good signs. So I'm excited. I'm excited to Daniel, I could

go through and list off all of the wonderful things about you that I have in my little notes, but my listeners would much rather hear from you. I'd love it if you could introduce yourself and let us know who you were before you were a dad.

Daniel (01:39)
wow, okay. So, I've for a very long time have been a creative. Grew up in a family of creatives. My father was a photographer, so I learned that trade right off the bat. I to this day am a photo video storyteller by day. And over the past several years I've taken up the hat of creative coach.

which has really just been a way for me to work with people in the kind of natural intimate setting that has been a part of who I am since I was a kid. ⁓ I remember ⁓ feeling a great sense of pride when people would tell me, don't ever tell this to anybody, but I'm gonna tell it to you. had aspirations of becoming a counselor or a therapist, but it didn't turn out that way and instead turned out to be that

Chelsea Myers (02:17)
Mmm.

Daniel (02:30)
I already had ⁓ an education through the process of songwriting, of delving deeply inward and translating that inner world into some form of lyrical or musical art. And that came to light over the past few years in a program called Song for the Soul, which I'm sure we'll get into later. ⁓ But essentially that was just a, that's the current articulation that is an outward offering to the world or something that I've been doing since I was a kid.

Chelsea Myers (02:51)
Mm-hmm.

Daniel (03:00)
of taking in the world and basically humming a tune to it and putting it to music and lyrics. And so you can imagine me following my father's footsteps of picking up a camera when I was in my teens and even before then sitting at his side at the piano learning to play and then spending many, many hours alone with music.

I'm just completely obsessed. You know a musician because they're sitting in the corner making sounds on an instrument. Whether they've played it before or not, there's something extremely exciting to a musician about making noise with something they've never even heard before. So ⁓ I know my people pretty quickly. And that's who I've been. Then when I became a dad at 18, my world was turned upside down.

And I moved from Arkansas to California and became a very small fish in a very, very big pond. And ⁓ that's where I learned, that's where I say I learned to drive ⁓ because you, you, do have, it's another, it's another level entirely, which is basically just a fractal of everything else that you experience. You learn to do things at a much larger scale out there. And so about six years of that, I was very eager to get back.

to Arkansas, where the green trees were, where the simple people were, where the smaller roads and lesser traffic was. But the transformation into fatherhood was basically one of suddenness and extreme in nature.

Chelsea Myers (04:43)
Yeah, which kind of the journey into parenthood is. ⁓ No, not at all. And that is such a huge culture shock going from, well, going from non-parenting to parenting and going from Arkansas to California. ⁓ And what you are describing too as like your happy place. I'm in Vermont.

Daniel (04:47)
Yes. Yes. There's no way around that.

Chelsea Myers (05:10)
Like we've got the green trees and the rolling hills and the, like, I can't imagine myself anywhere else. So that's resonating with me for sure. Also, what drew me to you initially was how your life has sort of evolved and revolved around creativity and creation and music, especially. I'm also a music obsessed person.

Daniel (05:11)
you

Yeah.

Chelsea Myers (05:37)
and kind of chronicle my life that way as well, although I'm not talented in writing music. I wish I could. ⁓ but yeah, that so, and that plays into, into your fatherhood journey as well. So all of these things are, are so cool. And I'm so excited to dive into them a little bit, but starting from the beginning of fatherhood.

you mentioned you became a dad at 18. So a question that I ask a lot of my guests is, was being a parent always part of your plan? And it tells me more, it's more than just like, well, did you plan to have kids? It tells me a lot more than just that. Did you always kind of envision yourself being a dad or did that just kind of happen?

Daniel (06:33)
knew I wanted a family. I was the youngest of four kids. ⁓ My bumper sticker now is I just want to be a kid in the big family. Basically, that's my call to return to the village. ⁓ I feel most at home in a big community, and so it makes sense that I would have a big family of my own. And so we just had our third, actually, just about a month ago, our third baby. ⁓

Chelsea Myers (06:42)
Yeah.

Congratulations.

Daniel (07:00)
you know, after the first kid came so early, there's a part of me that fantasized about the idea of being done with parenting and being done early and moving on to what life is like after parenthood. But now that baby number three has come and my eldest is about to move away to college, it's very clear that I'm a career parent, ⁓ that I'm in it for the long haul, that I'm starting all over again.

Chelsea Myers (07:21)
Yeah, yeah. ⁓

Daniel (07:26)
you know, third time's charm. I was quite ready for it this time. Completely surprised the first time. A little bit more prepared, but a new level of self-awareness birthed by my second, my son Rowan, who is now eight. And now Elijah, born one month ago, has really set the stage for what I feel like is a completely new chapter as a father, one in which I have taken it on soulfully, willingly, with

with the capacity to genuinely give myself to it rather than one foot in, one foot out the door, which is kind of a subconscious state that a lot of people live in. You can think that you want to be apparent and then you get hit with the truth of what it really is, which is perpetual service to someone else and loving someone more than yourself, so much so that you are concerned for them basically all the time, low level all the time, which is what helps keep them alive.

Chelsea Myers (08:26)
Yeah.

Daniel (08:26)
It's part of the benefit of this species is that we love our children so much that it hurts. And it has deepened me and opened me up to a greater capacity. It has matured me more than anything else. And basically I would, I like the person that I am today. I can't say that that's always been a true statement. I've for much of my life did not like who I was. And it is the purifying fires of parenthood.

Chelsea Myers (08:46)
Hmm.

Daniel (08:56)
fatherhood of being in love with your kids and then testing every potential rough edge until you're smooth like the river stone there's nothing that compares as far as the transformative ⁓ power of parenthood and so I'm I don't know what I thought truthfully then because it couldn't have been very informed although there was always the flicker of of course you know

I want to have a family. Of course I want to be in love with a bunch of people as we all grow old together. And it's more true now than ever.

Chelsea Myers (09:32)
⁓ That is, I think, one of the most beautiful ⁓ explanations of the journey through parenthood and the journey through adding children into your family that I've heard in a very long time. ⁓ It also ironically reminds me of a line from a song by Brandi Carlile ⁓ called Welcome, it's called The Mother, but it says, to the end of being alone inside your mind.

Daniel (10:01)
yeah.

Chelsea Myers (10:01)
⁓

and just once you have children, it's just all consuming and that's all you think about. so yeah, I'm, it's not often that I am lost for words, but that was that honestly, that was beautiful. That was. Yeah. ⁓ and I'm also going to blame mom brain on a Friday morning. You, you, you.

Daniel (10:06)
Yes.

yeah. You can use that all day long. You

can use that for the next however many years. Yeah.

Chelsea Myers (10:32)
Forever. ⁓

So like you said, you mentioned ⁓ the person that you are today is someone that you really like and that you're really proud of, but that wasn't something that was always true. Can you talk a little bit more about that and how it relates to how you view yourself as a dad and just as a person, just as Daniel?

Daniel (10:58)
Yeah, well, was, you know, just having a conversation with my daughter yesterday as we were driving around, she's telling me how excited she is to move off to college at the end of the summer. she was talking about, you know, her, her, her self love ⁓ mixed in with her pride and with her ego. And, and, you know, it came to me really clearly to express what I had learned in the, in the metaphor of the tree. You've got a root down.

in order to be able to rise high. And your roots are where it's wet, it's messy, it's painful, it's uncomfortable. This is my shame, but I don't hate it. We gotta be able to bear our less profitable angles of our own story.

Chelsea Myers (11:41)
Mm-hmm.

Daniel (11:55)
in order to have the whole story, in order to be whole, have to include the parts of ourselves that we would have basically just shrouded in shame and never spoken of and buried low, low, low beneath our ascension and our glamour and the things that we want to project to the world. And so I spent many years just projecting and...

I mentioned earlier that I had aspirations of being a therapist and it had a lot to do with the fact that I was very attuned to people. I was the youngest of four. There was a lot of mental illness in my family and I became very aware that as a little observer of what it meant to see other people deeply, see things that they hid from others. So I became very aware of others and so much so that I would regularly engage with people in a way that I was attuning to them.

and almost entirely neglecting myself. And in that process of, I mean that was a protective strategy as a young child to keep mama happy, to placate the siblings in order to fit in and to get love, I just abandoned my own needs and I flexed infinitely in order to make sure that everybody else was happy because that meant I was happy. At least that was my inner story. If others are happy, I'm happy. ⁓ I don't know if you've ever... ⁓

delved into the enneagram, but there's the enneagram nine, and the nine is more like every other point than they are themselves. They're the peacemakers, so they're willing to completely conform in order to make peace externally, but what happens is a very unpeaceful inner world. And so that's where my shame and resentment built up is the places I refused to look inside myself to recognize that I was regularly abandoning my own voice. The parts of me that were too rough or too edgy.

Chelsea Myers (13:22)
Mm-hmm.

Daniel (13:41)
you know, just one point away from the nine is the eight, which is the challenger. And that's the person I love being around, challengers, because I get to absorb a little bit of their fire and unwillingness to waiver according to their own will. They do not want to have their freedom infringed upon. And I many ways believe my son is either eight or eight like in that he is the externalized version of everything I repressed. All of the anger that was inside for me is on his outside. So he immediately shows you his anger.

Chelsea Myers (14:02)
Hmm.

Daniel (14:08)
He immediately tells you what he will and will not do. And he's eight years old and we've created a bubble around him where he's been allowed and encouraged to be a sovereign individual. But raising a sovereign individual, let me tell you, is some kind of hell. Because you can't just tell them what to do. You have to, it's basically all carrot, no stick. Because it's not bribery, it's more just I love you and it would be best if we worked together on this. But I understand that I can't force you to do anything.

Chelsea Myers (14:28)
Mm-hmm.

Daniel (14:37)
And that's the hell of a thing to have to go through, especially if you were the kind of kid that was raised not as I was, but I was the kind of child that would just go with the flow in order to make everybody happy. And that broods a major, major anger, a major resentment inside your being. And that is the part of me that I was most ashamed of and refused to let other people see it until I had no control over it and it would explode, mostly on those that I loved most.

because they're the ones that were inside the wall. They're the ones who are regularly there and regularly pushing my buttons. And so I had this thing that was in me, I would call it the rage monster, that would explode out of me. And when you have that and you know that there's really violent thoughts in your head and you have really aggressive moments where your hands are doing things you don't want them to do, where your voice is doing things you don't want them to do, it kind of feels like you're possessed or that you have a part of you that you want to

kill or cut out of yourself. And so my level of shame, I would say, was at the extreme end. While I had the extreme end of calm and peace on the external, I had the extreme end of anger, rage, resentment, and shame on the inside. So I'm a good test case, a good limit case of what it's like on both ends of the spectrum to be able to coincide with others in the midst of chaos and at the same time to be utterly chaotic inside.

And the journey of coming to love that aspect of myself was one of humiliation, of humility, of bearing that truth in the face and eyes of my wife and my children and my friends, my men's circles, my coaches and myself, just me and God. You know, I really just had to

regularly and I do to this day get get down on my knees or sit and meditate and That process of being humbled Is what I was referring to with my daughter when I was talking about the roots is that if you go if you humble yourself There's this scripture that's been coming to my mind lately ⁓ Blessed are those who weep for they will be comforted and I find that to be profoundly true because I weep

Chelsea Myers (16:59)
Mm.

Daniel (17:03)
on the regular. There is no shortage of things for me to weep, whether it's the loss of my father, which happened just a few months ago, whether it's recognizing that my daughter's about to go away to college and that her childhood is over and something new is beginning, or just watching my son, who I love painfully, grow from this amazing fairy-like dream-like state of childhood into

young adulthood where he's becoming more aware and more conscious and his hands and his feet and his body are changing and I don't ever get to hold that plump little baby that he was. Now fortunately I do get to hold his little brother Elijah and he's getting to be a big brother now so it's just the depth, the greater that sorrow carves out of your being the greater your capacity for joy. That's a Khalil Gibran quote that means a great deal to me. Love and sorrow are the same.

They're two ends of the same stick, they're the roots of the tree, you know? And coming to be humbled is holding myself in my tears and recognizing that I don't have control, I don't know what's going to happen, I can't force others into loving me or into loving themselves. My main work and my greatest work is simply just loving myself every day and loving myself like God loves me, loving myself like I love my children.

and that kind of unbridled forgiveness of the things that I'm not proud of and holding them in that light of loving awareness.

Chelsea Myers (18:37)
Yeah, you hit on so many topics that are so often stigmatized and not just in life, like if we narrow it down step by step, they're stigmatized in life, they're stigmatized in parenthood, they're stigmatized.

motherhood and they're even more stigmatized in fatherhood and in men specifically and you just so honestly and and like freely shared about these things that we are told we are supposed to keep which

Daniel (19:01)
Hmm.

Chelsea Myers (19:20)
I'm so thankful for. like the things that I particularly, that particularly resonated with me, are your ability, was your ability to just say like, ⁓ I weep on the daily. Like there are reasons to cry all the time. ⁓ and that is not something that is easy to admit for anyone, but I feel like it's such a natural thing. And for those of us that are criers, including myself, like,

Daniel (19:48)
you

Chelsea Myers (19:50)
There's nothing wrong with it. And the tears, like you said, like, ⁓ joy and sadness are two ends of the same stick. why, just the ability to just cry and to just be in it is, I say this all the time, but beautiful is my word. I say I need to get a thesaurus because all I ever say is beautiful. But that's so beautiful that you've learned to, or that you just have allowed yourself to.

Daniel (20:11)
You

Chelsea Myers (20:19)
let that be and live in that. And to also talk about so freely to talk about your own struggles with, you said the rage monster, I think is what you called it. ⁓ That I'm such a visual person too. So for you to put a description on it, we're going through a very similar thing with my nine year old that you are going through with your eight year old. And I think it's that.

that age, right? Where they're learning and they're growing and they're, raising very assertive and empowered kiddos. But it comes out sometimes and you're like, oh my gosh, all I want to do is just have you do the thing I asked you to do. Could you just please do that? If only, yes. And instead, it's why

Daniel (21:05)
If only.

Chelsea Myers (21:11)
and I don't think that's fair and this is why I don't think I should have to do it in any way and big outbursts. So.

The overarching point that I'm getting at is that the things that you're talking about so freely, like I hope that you realize are not things that are easy for anyone to talk about, but especially fathers and in my experience, the dads that I've spoken to. And so this is me like thanking you and honestly, and just like sitting with you in this moment and saying like,

thank you for allowing me into that space with you. Because that's the goal, right? The goal is for us to be able to be and be present and talk about these things and not feel shame. Just like you were talking about with your daughter who's going to college. Like, you've got to be able to acknowledge these things, as well as the other really cool things that are going on. I hope that that wasn't too much of a ramble.

Daniel (22:17)
No, no, I mean, you're, you're speaking directly to something of deep significance to me. ⁓ and this is, it's really a deep significance to everyone. We carry so much inside us all the time. And when we're around someone that has freed that space within themselves, that part of us,

is almost magnetized to that person because we long for that kind of freedom. I have a song called Honest and Free and it was about a time in my marriage where we had gone through a dark night of the soul and I had a lot of things that I needed to get off my chest. And I didn't know that I hadn't quite said them as clearly and as honestly as I needed to. But there became a point at which I lost all capacity to lie.

there was no strength left in me for the illusion. ⁓ That part of me was ready and willing to die, quite literally. And when I began to speak, it scared her and it made her want to leave the room immediately. And that would have previously caused me so much pain and discomfort because I had been seeking love from her as my source, as my source of love.

Chelsea Myers (23:35)
Mm-hmm.

Daniel (23:36)
And when I realized that there was no way in which I could shake that tree in order to get that fruit, there was no way for me to get what I was looking for in another human being. It became so clear that I had nothing but to dissolve my whole life's patterns around getting love from mama broke down, not with the dissolving of my relationship with my mother, but with the resolving of my relationship with my wife.

I left my mother assuming that I could then go find more fulfillment. This is all unconscious. This is a subconscious thing that everyone does. They have their ImigO partner where they're trying to find the things in another person that they need to rectify with their primary caregiver. This is like the way we're shaped as a puzzle piece and we're looking for someone that fits us in this other particular way. We don't know that we're attracted to these things until suddenly it all breaks down and you have nothing but the gears that you're grinding against each other.

When you, this is basically a part of individuation, ⁓ Carl Jung would call it, but he would also recognize that this is indistinguishable from a spiritual process of recognizing that there's no other source for you to get love or life from than God, than love or life itself. To recognize, know, the Buddhists would call it consciousness, that there is a deep well of infinite loving awareness inside of each one of us.

Chelsea Myers (24:51)
Mm-hmm.

Daniel (25:02)
if you were to just sit and be present with it, your cup would run over. You would be totally full. And we have so much in our minds and so much in our pockets and so much on our to-do list that we don't recognize that we're chasing every aspect of life in order to just get back to what we had from the start. And when I was down at the bottom of my grief is when I learned this truly. I'd sat and meditated and prayed for years. had filled my head with all the great books and thought,

I knew the answers and I thought that it was something I could hold in my mind. thought God was something I could describe with my mind. All to come to realize that it was essentially, I had to come back to that ineffable, wordless place of emptiness, as the Buddhists would call it, and recognize that down at the bottom of my despair, past all of the tears, past all of the grief and the depths of sorrow that I could hold, there was an

open and down energy in my body. Open and down. Where there was nothing to hold on to anymore. My mind couldn't come up with a story about how we were going to fix this. It was basically certain that all was lost and that we were going to die. That's just basically what I felt in my nervous system. I'd been through the fear and anxiety of that fear of death that part of me was facing, Then after it died, the story died.

Chelsea Myers (26:15)
Mm-hmm.

Daniel (26:26)
rather than me having to die. I felt a profound freedom. Unlike any I had experienced before where I no longer was beholden to a story or a set of patterns of chasing love externally. Where I needed somebody else to fill my cup, somebody else to tell me that I'm great, somebody else to tell me that I'm doing a good job, to pat me on the back, to love me, kiss me, hold me.

Chelsea Myers (26:44)
Mm-hmm.

Daniel (26:53)
And when I realized that I was actually searching, when I realized what it was physiologically, I had studied those years, I I studied to become a yoga teacher and there was a deep philosophy aspect of it that it was actually the main pull to it. It wasn't actually that I wanted to move my body in a particular way. It was that I wanted to understand how to be a whole person, how to be a perfect person. And I had the ideas in my head, but then I had to go through the journey of dissolving.

this story with me and my wife that we weren't going to be able to fulfill each other in this particular way, the story that we were totally incompatible and that I became miraculously aware that I was going to chase, that this is what my heart wanted most, that I was going to chase this person, whether it be my wife or another person that had a similar set of characteristics, I was going to chase this kind of person until I resolved this issue within myself. So there was no solution to the story other than me letting it die and me learning to love.

Chelsea Myers (27:28)
Mm.

Daniel (27:51)
myself to let love in. I say it's like let the river onto your property so that it can flow into somebody else's you know it's like you have to let it in and at the bottom of despair at the bottom of grief at the bottom of all of my stories and all of my tears was emptiness and in that emptiness was just a very profound and satiating awareness a loving self. Dick Schwartz in

Chelsea Myers (27:53)
Mm.

Daniel (28:20)
The internal family system calls it the higher self or the capital S self. Whereas we have all these small parts like the rage monster is one part. And he's got a book called No Bad Parts where he recognizes that none of these parts are actually inherently bad. We just treat them as such and then they become exiles and then they become basically out of control. And they begin to control our meeting my capital S self, my loving generative adult,

spiritually akin to meeting God because it's the highest angel inside you, it's the highest consciousness inside you, it's the one who wants the best for you and for everyone. There's just nothing to it that is anything but acceptance and like a generative awareness.

But all that's these are fancy words to put to describe something that has no words. And they it doesn't have a location other than it's pretty much at the center of you and expands outwards. And it's relevant for us to talk about this circling background because everyone has it. They all have the gift of infinite love, truly infinite love. And we can feel that to some capacity with our children. But even there we hold on to resentment and resistance and

Chelsea Myers (29:13)
you

Daniel (29:38)
and truly it's in the surrendering of grief and sorrow and of humility and shame that these things are not the worst thing in the world, that they're actually our ally to allow us to descend downward into our roots in order to taproot the infinite well of life swelling up from the earth at all times. And so this is the kind of metaphysical words that I use to describe something that's really energetic, really non-verbal.

really fundamental to what it is to be alive. And I can't help but to draw my attention there because it's actually the source of where I gain peace and love each day. And then I go and give it to my family. And anytime I'm trying to get it from them, I'm lost in my mind and in my patterns. And that happens every day, which is why I have a practice each morning of reconnecting, of grieving, of weeping. And just on my way to work, I was weeping because my son...

open then close the gate for me to go out of the drive and he gives me the sign language symbol for I love you as I'm driving away and you know it's like a movie scene and the light is glorious on him and I'm taking this mental picture like this is one of the last times I'll ever see that. He's gonna be different tomorrow. He'll be different by the time I get back. This is one of those precious moments and his hands will be bigger. Something about that just gets me right in the heart.

Chelsea Myers (30:41)
Mm-hmm.

Yeah.

Daniel (31:02)
And so I'm just weeping on the way, way to work. Yeah, you almost run into a car doing that. So you guys, you got to stop and like, make sure you got your seatbelt on and you're paying attention. at the same time, uh, blessed are those who weep for they will be comforted. And I was just deeply comforted by my love for him the whole way here.

Chelsea Myers (31:23)
Yeah. So clearly you are a lyricist. ⁓ Truly though, because I am such a visual person and a music lover, this is this is the first time I've ever done a recording session where I am continuously lost for words because I just want

to hear you talk more. Because that may be because the way that you're able to describe these things resonates so deeply. And like you said, you're describing something that there's no words for, but you are giving them words. And I am following you. I don't know. Here I go with beautiful again, but.

Daniel (32:18)
That's a good word.

Chelsea Myers (32:18)
Yeah,

I mean it is a good word. I just need to come up with a new one because it's all I ever say.

Daniel (32:28)
You know, you could read ⁓ Khalil Gibran's The Prophet. You know, instead of reading the thesaurus, I would say read a great poet because then a word will stick out in extreme meaning because you'll know it when you feel it. And then you might find some words that will go along with beautiful.

Chelsea Myers (32:32)
Okay.

Hahaha

That's true. That is an excellent suggestion. ⁓ I need to like tune in. like, this is like therapy for Chelsea. Like, my goodness. Well, no, we're here for you, Daniel. ⁓ And again, so like tying a couple things back into fatherhood, had a couple, I had like certain questions popped up when you were talking about this journey.

Daniel (32:56)
Hehehehehe

That's what we're here for.

Chelsea Myers (33:15)
because obviously it wasn't like an overnight thing or maybe it was a culmination. I'm thinking particularly of your oldest child and did your oldest, it's your daughter, correct? Was your daughter able to witness this transformation in you? Like did this happen as she was getting older or was this something that happened like when she was super, super little?

Daniel (33:29)
Mm-hmm.

Chelsea Myers (33:44)
you what I'm getting at? Did your parenting perspective and perspective on yourself change and was she able to witness and be a part of that?

Daniel (33:46)
Yeah.

Absolutely. And I would say it's like a gray scale, a gradient, you know, it's, it's, it's a little bit closer to love and consciousness each day. And there's like two steps forward, one step back, you know, I will still have moments of just slipping right back into, into old patterns. And my family has given me a lot of grace and a lot of love. And that's the, that's one of the

Chelsea Myers (34:03)
Mm.

Daniel (34:21)
really powerful and restorative aspects of my relationship with my daughter is that no matter how mean I was to her, she was always so in love with me. And that'll break your heart right there. And for me to just bear in my shame the fact that she still loves me, even though I was the worst person to her than I was to anyone, because I was resentful and a teen parent and I was alone with her.

Chelsea Myers (34:29)
Mm.

Mm-hmm.

Mm.

Daniel (34:49)
and she was wanting basic things from an adult and I was not fully equipped or willing to give it to her. And that's because there was so much grief in me. Grief of losing my young adulthood, of my freedom, of my ideas of myself and my life and the potential and you know, I just was angry instead of

feeling the sorrow beneath that. And usually what you have is a protector, an anger protector, so that you don't have to feel your sadness, or that something is wounding you, so therefore let's use anger in order to create a boundary. And my daughter mainly just experienced the boundaries. And for years I really give a lot of credit, or maybe all the credit, to my wife for coming into my world and basically telling me no.

It's not okay. You can't treat your daughter that way. And that was when I knew I could really trust her and that I needed her. I needed her in a way that I didn't want to admit because when you're angry, anger is both a positive and negative emotion. It has a self-righteous aspect that feels good. And so I would give life to my anger in a way that was ⁓ inappropriately authoritarian. And my wife would

my girlfriend at the time would tell me no and that you're doing it again and that's unnecessary and she would show me a different way and my wife is one of the more one of the most natural with children people I've ever met she has an intuition about what their needs are super super empathically connected to our children and this was a wonderful re-education rehabilitation from that that that

top-down control aspect within myself that my daughter bore the brunt of from for many many years of her childhood and I still catch myself doing it from time to time but it's never as severe and it's much faster to alleviate because I can see myself and I know the patterns and I know the words for it I know the ways out whether it's take a breath walk away if I can get to I'm sorry and under a minute we're doing really well

our day's gonna go well because my children will always forgive me. They will always give me another chance. even my son in his eight years has, the majority of this transformation I would say, has cropped up over the past five to seven years. And that came with the, that coincided with, well it was a gradual change in trying to become a better person, but ultimately it became really, really apparent the depths of my self abandonment when my wife and I had the beginning of our disillusionment.

Chelsea Myers (37:26)
Okay.

Daniel (37:40)
where we began the process of individuation. And I thought it was the beginning of a divorce. But it was actually just the process, well, simply because we chose to stay with each And that was very, very hard. Like I said, we felt we were totally incompatible. And this is a state, think, that virtually every partnership has to go through, to some degree or another, whether it's their first seven years.

Chelsea Myers (37:58)
Mm-hmm.

Daniel (38:07)
or the second or third cycle of seven years, you're going to go through a guardian of the gate moment where you have to ask the question, do I want to keep going in this direction? And my wife at the first seven years said, no. And I need to get some things off my chest. And so she told me a bunch of things that shook me and shook her and opened us up to a new level of honesty and capacity that was very freeing for her. And then I learned that pattern from her yet again.

She claims to have learned a lot of things from me and I believe that that's true but I attribute my greatest catalyst for transformation are her telling me the truth that I didn't want to over and over again daily from the big things to the little things. this is the value of a life partner. It's not that they are the easy source of infatuation type topical love. It's that this is the transformative fire of love.

that someone's going to watch you get old, watch you get sick, watch you transform from being an adolescent to a mature adult, and know everything that you had to go through in order to get there, and can hold your baggage with lightness and the freedom to forgive and forget. And there's nothing, I'm sorry, but there is just nothing that compares to that kind of quality of relationship, aside from your relationship with your children.

and that no kind of hookup culture or no kind of, ⁓ you know, leave this marriage for that marriage for that marriage or partner for partner, you know, there's something about sticking it out with a person that is, you can't understand it until you have it over a long, arduous period of time. So yeah, much of my transformation is thanks to her.

Chelsea Myers (40:04)
Yeah, and you talk and I'm gonna ask a question and if you don't want to talk about it, let me know But I don't know if this coincided with that period in your life but you mentioned that you and your wife had experienced a loss, a pregnancy loss. ⁓

Daniel (40:25)
Mm-hmm.

Chelsea Myers (40:27)
Was that prior to, during, after that sort of breakdown of where your relationship was at and did it impact it at all?

Daniel (40:39)
Yeah, well it was prior to and it was actually before we got married and it was a moment where we found out we were pregnant. thought what would this be like to say yes to this and which would mean saying yes to each other for life and that was an invitation for us to really take a hard look at each other to take a hard look at our three years of being boyfriend girlfriend.

Chelsea Myers (40:45)
Okay.

Mm-hmm.

Daniel (41:09)
and to make a serious decision and it was to say yes. We said yes to that baby. We even picked out some names, had a few ultrasounds and then went back for an ultrasound and there was no heartbeat. And it was a really scary moment. It was a really, really scary moment because we had kind of allowed our hearts to leap in this particular direction. And it was the catalyst for us beginning to say yes to each other for life.

And then here it was, this life ended. And you don't know how quickly you begin to fall in love with a person. You know, even just the idea of a person, you can begin to fall in love with that. And that's something to grieve when that trajectory changes. And fortunately we were fairly early into the pregnancy, but there was

it was still enough of a recovery from it that it was pretty substantial for her and then there was lots of grief after that and I would actually say that it was that process of falling in love with the babe and then grieving its loss together that deepened what we had experienced together enough for me to say there was enough overlap in our souls and our hearts for us to say yes to each other for life anyway so I proposed after that and we got married and

Chelsea Myers (42:30)
Mm.

Daniel (42:37)
Very soon after that our son Rowan was born. So it was a catalyst to say the least.

Chelsea Myers (42:47)
so it was a catalyst in your story. It just I was curious if if it was part of that, that breakdown that you were talking about, but actually it was

kind of the birth of your story. It was, yeah, it's... And ⁓ something that you said too, like, well, thankfully it was pretty early on in the pregnancy. I hear so many parents say that and just acknowledging like, it doesn't matter how early it was, just like you said, like you don't know your capacity to love someone or something.

whatever your beliefs are in terms of when life begins or all of that stuff, I think, and just like you said, like when a pregnancy, when you get that positive test, your brain starts imagining things and it starts creating things and it starts writing a story. And no matter when the loss happens, it's the end of that story and grief is valid and...

And so whenever I hear someone say, well, thankfully it was early. It's like that still existed. That story still existed for you. And like you said, you and your partner went through that grief process together and it opened up doors to where you are now.

The other question that I had tying it backwards again, we're doing a lot of time hopping. But you talked a lot about how your wife sort of showed you the patterns that you were following with your daughter ⁓ and was honest and truthful with her or with you about that. Do you and your daughter talk about that at all? Is that something that you've that you've processed?

Over the years.

Daniel (44:44)
Very much so and yet still there's more to come. You know, she's been open about the fact that she has memories she doesn't have access to. But as far as our relationship, we have a very substantial candor with each other. And I am this way with all of my family and all of my children. I'd rather just say the

the whole truth, nothing but the truth. So my daughter reflects that. She reflects it and she seems to cherish it in her own way. We love our deep conversations and they always encapsulate, you know, the roots to the rise I find it's, they're inextricable.

Chelsea Myers (45:15)
You

Daniel (45:40)
to be able to talk about anything positive, it's in relationship to the lessons that we learned and the hardships that we faced and the people that we were and the things that had to die along the way. And so my daughter is a pretty substantial, special, enigmatic rainbow of a human being. If you ever met her, you'd probably realize that I'm understating dramatically how...

Chelsea Myers (46:09)
you

Daniel (46:10)
amazing she is, but she holds herself in her own shame or grief or sorrow as well as she does hold herself in her own self-affirmation and encouragement and appreciation for her gifts and her qualities. And that's why that conversation was so

that we had just yesterday was a continuation of an ongoing dialogue between the two of us in order for me to give her my gift of encouragement to be her fullest self. Nothing to hide from, nothing to be ashamed of other than the things that are relevant for her to bring to the light because we naturally hide them. So our dialogue around this is ever ongoing and

a big part of the healing process, a big part of the maturation process of continuing to bear myself, hold myself accountable, to speak the full truth, and just try to be as genuine from the heart up as possible.

Chelsea Myers (47:25)
Yeah, what I have loved the most about hearing you talk about your journey, and I'm only getting a small piece of your journey. Like I'm getting the piece from when you were 18 to bits and pieces to today, and little bits from before. But what I've loved is that it's

It's as if you are describing it, and I actually love this metaphor. It's a story, it's all a story, and that there are chapters. because one chapter happened doesn't mean you don't go to the next chapter. And when a chapter ends, you can grieve that chapter and then look forward to what's coming next.

And so like you said in the very beginning, like something that's so important to you as a creative and as a musician and as a person and as a father is storytelling and and I swear to you, this is not just because you are a musician, but like song lyrics keep coming up for me in this session.

And again, another lyric, as you were sharing about your relationship with your daughter was from a carbon leaf song, love, loss, hope, repeat. it's, and it's, and it is, it's that cycle of seeking love, feeling loss, finding hope, repeating. I guess to sort of like, tie us back around because you've had three opportunities now.

to explore the different sides of yourself as a person and as a father.

what were the most profound ways that you've shifted with each iteration of you as a dad?

Daniel (49:16)
⁓ It's an interesting way of distilling the major themes of transformation from child to child.

Chelsea Myers (49:25)
Right? It's cut, it's, it's a really broad question, but it's, I feel like it's those chapters.

Daniel (49:33)
So if you'll allow me, I'll go out of order. With my son Rowan, like I said, I told you he's ⁓ extremely willful. And I came to realize, you know, there's a great parenting book, Rest Play Grow. That one has taught me so much. And one of the things that I got from that book,

Chelsea Myers (49:37)
Yeah.

Daniel (49:59)
is don't draw their attention to things that you want them to do.

Chelsea Myers (50:04)
Mmm.

Daniel (50:05)
And what that allowed me is the opportunity to be influential rather than demanding. And it's kind of a nutshell example of one way and of this larger principle in action. With my son, I learned how to let go and not try to control another human being, but to try to love them towards their own good.

That letting go of control literally means dropping my shoulders, relaxing my brow and my jaw, taking deeper breaths and being more patient and realizing that I cannot rush this along. I cannot force him into doing anything. I cannot coerce him or demand. It won't work. It just simply won't work. And trust me, I have tried. And no amount of my will dominating his will would work.

Chelsea Myers (50:55)
You

Daniel (51:01)
And so he taught me by sheer force of his own will that I was going to have to become a loving, compelling, respectful individual to the least amongst instead of just expecting the least amongst us, who because you're fed and you're sheltered and you're clothed and you know, you should just do what I tell you, right? You should just respect me because I'm big and scary, right?

No, I should actually be... I should get on my knees and I should look him in the eye and I should let him know that I feel his heart and I know that he's a sensitive person who has his own rationale for things and he's deep in play and he doesn't want to stop and come inside for dinner but I should let him know that I love him and that I'm interested in his imaginative inner world and that I have just...

prepared something delicious for him that I think he's going to like and I'd love for him to tell me all about it at the dinner table.

Chelsea Myers (52:00)
I love that.

Daniel (52:02)
which is a completely different character. So my son literally by sheer force of will is either going to ⁓ perpetually enrage my inner monster or he's going to bring about the nicest person I've ever met out of me. And it's my wife who leads by modeling this. So I'm no saint on this regard. I literally just have a really good body mirror in the house who I can just turn to and watch and then go, okay, well that's really frustrating that I have to do that.

Chelsea Myers (52:24)
You

Hahaha

Daniel (52:30)
but I'm gonna take a breath and I'm gonna do my best. And that's my son transforming me. My daughter.

My daughter in many ways continues to unfold her story and I think it's most deeply around shame and that she loves me through my shame. In many ways she's taught me how to love myself like God loves me, love myself like I love my children. She just continues to love me no matter what and that's like the deepest octave in me, you know? And that continues to broaden because I see

more and more of myself in her and her chaos and her ADD ADHD and her extreme explosion of creativity on everything in her life. And I realized, ⁓ that's me. And I used to be so frustrated at her because of all of these things that were just like me. And it was, was, I used to think we were opposites. And as it turns out, my inner tyrant wishes that it was an opposite of my inner creative and my inner ⁓ space cadet.

Chelsea Myers (53:16)
You

Mm-hmm.

You

Daniel (53:36)
⁓ But the deeper I recognize my love for her and her chaos, the deeper I recognize her love for me, the more I'm able to encapsulate all the ways in which we are the same. And that love is reflected back.

And now with Elijah, one month old, what has he taught me?

to surrender.

My wife, we had just moved onto our new land, moved our house onto the land. We had built this house to live in and then to eventually move to land and we did it. After six years, I was working underneath the house when my wife squatted down next to the house and said to me, well, it looks like I've been pregnant for a while.

So I'm literally under the house when this is happening, which is a good analogy for that whole phase of last year in my life. Entering into the father's house has been a big theme of my life since my father got sick with Alzheimer's and passed away this So many things came to a head at the same moment. Towards the end of this pregnancy, the babe was breech and my dad was sick and was about to die.

And there was a storm coming and all this kind of stuff was happening. It was an unbelievable series of acts of God. Like it was so overwhelming that it was like, I have no choice but to surrender. I mean, I literally have no idea what to do other than what's right in front of me to do. And now that the babe is here, I say it's third time's the charm because the first time I was a resentful 18 year old, the second time I was trying to get my wife to be my mama.

Chelsea Myers (55:00)
Yeah.

Daniel (55:14)
And so this time I finally realize that I'm the dad and that I can give to them almost endlessly and still have that be a part of what fills my cup rather than just being empty at end of the day. So long as I continue to love myself, nurture myself, stick to my practice, feed myself, nourishing foods, but also to feed them all day long and to take care of them and all of their needs and continue to surrender and be humble with my son.

and encourage him rather than discourage through bad temper. to just be present, to actually want to be there, to not be high on something, watching or listening to podcasts or filling my face with something endlessly, I basically ran into a digestive issue where I couldn't eat things anymore. was basically like everything kind of came to a head where it's like,

Now it's time for you to go through your saint training. You're going to be a monk. You're not going eat sugar. So for all this past 40 days for Lent, I have not been eating sugar. And today I could eat sugar, but I have chosen not to, which means that something has happened in me, which is transformative in itself. So it's a surrender to a kind of love that is generative that starts with me and it's all for them.

Chelsea Myers (56:25)
Mm-hmm.

Yeah, You did a wonderful job of like when I asked the question initially, it seemed like a really broad question and a really simplistic way to like boil it down. But I see those different versions of you. ⁓ Even though I didn't know, I'm just meeting you today. ⁓ And

Yeah, again, that love, loss, hope, repeat thing keeps playing in my head over and over again. ⁓ my gosh. mean, yes. Yes. Well, used to... Side note, I don't talk about myself much on the podcast, but like that music, my whole life, music is the medicine for the soul is what I've always said. ⁓

Daniel (57:08)
That's the value of a good lyric right there. That's why there's potent medicine.

Absolutely.

Chelsea Myers (57:27)
And I do, live my life through music and I live my life through lyrics. I wish I could write. I sing, but I can't write. But so this has been a, this has been one of the most deeply impactful, like recording sessions I've ever had, but also one of the most challenging because I just want to hear you talk more. Like,

Daniel (57:46)
Hmm.

Chelsea Myers (57:54)
Because it's like a song. Like you're speaking in lyrics, you're speaking in poems, you're from your heart and from your soul. And I just, I could sit here all day and just listen, ⁓ except that I can't.

Daniel (58:11)
I appreciate that. I appreciate

that. And I just want to push back on one thing that you said twice now is that you can't write. And the reason I want to push back on this is because this is not a unique trait to you. This is something that I encounter in almost everyone at some capacity or another. Even great songwriters that I know. I have a band that I started this past year called High Country Hymnal. And it's me and three other people. And one of the members is a brilliant lyricist.

Chelsea Myers (58:24)
Mm.

Daniel (58:41)
And when I met her, she just thought of her like little poems that she would write to herself and she didn't think much of herself. And we're all just stunned at the things that are coming out of her. And not to say that is like an example of comparison, but just a reminder that even greatness is hidden behind our own limitations, our own self-limiting beliefs. And so I, as a creative coach, have gone after that, the inner critic that says, I can't, it's basically saying, I won't. And the,

Chelsea Myers (59:07)
Mm.

Daniel (59:10)
The thing that I always get people into, whether they're non-musical or whether they've got a ⁓ writer's block, is I get them into something from the artist's way called the morning pages, where you write, for 15 minutes, write three handwritten pages. The morning pages are an opportunity for you to basically get the gunk out of your mind and start putting words down on paper, regardless of any expectation of what it's going to be. It doesn't matter if you're a lawyer,

or if you're a writer or if you're a doctor, whatever it is, you have the opportunity to get something moving in you verbally out on page and this frees you up energetically. It's like pulling the cork out of the bottle. Things begin to flow, whether it's prose, whether it's a to-do list for your day that actually clears up your mind so that you feel less stressed or it's a story that you didn't know or it's the dream that you had last night or it's a letter to your father who you wish that you could still speak to.

those things are in us waiting to come out and when we say I can't write or I can't be creative or I can't sing we prohibit ourselves and what I want to say is I see you critic and you are welcome in the editor's room but not the writers room. In the writers room it is free game like a playground and we don't prohibit the children we don't give them 15 minutes to go and play and then they got to come back in order to do their math. No. You give yourself as much time as you need to let your soul have free reign.

Chelsea Myers (1:00:23)
Mmm.

you

Daniel (1:00:38)
because that is why you were born. So let whatever is in you to come out regardless of what the critic says and then let the critic come be a useful tool to help you sharpen it and get a little bit better. Say what can I do with this? What could we how could we expand on beautiful? What are five other words for beautiful rather than saying ⁓ you you got a you need a thesaurus. It's like well well maybe I just need to just speak and hear myself speak or write more.

Chelsea Myers (1:00:54)
Right?

I need a-

Daniel (1:01:05)
So I just encourage you and everybody listening to recognize that you are a creative being to start. And anything that gets in that way needs to take a backseat.

Chelsea Myers (1:01:16)
I always say that I meet people when I'm supposed to meet them through quiet connection. And anyone who has done podcasting knows that it's an endless cycle of scheduling and rescheduling and scheduling and rescheduling. And like you said, we initially scheduled this

Daniel (1:01:20)
Mm-hmm.

Chelsea Myers (1:01:33)
over a year ago. And we're meeting today. And you don't know this. But I am I write, like I write, I'm a writer, I'm a writer for, for a Vermont mom blog. And I just write like op ed pieces and things. But my confidence in I've always wanted to write music.

Daniel (1:01:34)
Yeah.

Mm-hmm.

Chelsea Myers (1:02:01)
So my confidence in composing and even in college, I took music theory, I took guitar lessons, I took piano lessons, I did all of these things. And you're right when I say I can't, it's because I try it and it doesn't immediately work. And I'm like, okay, so this isn't what I'm supposed to do, I guess. But.

Daniel (1:02:15)
Mm-hmm.

The only difference between the master and the student is that the master has failed more times than the student has tried. And it's basically, that's why I say a musician is a music obsessed, they're obsessed with making noise. It's basically, do you love the process of making noise so much that you're willing to be terrible for years? There's no way, I mean, I've been doing this 25 years. The things that I can play today would have just

Chelsea Myers (1:02:29)
Yes.

Daniel (1:02:50)
I'd just my socks off when I started. But now I'm also looking higher up the mountain of people that I admire and I could compare myself to them but I'd rather just say, you know what? I'm just gonna keep going. So enjoy your chopsticks on the piano, enjoy singing or humming to yourself in the shower. Do it with reckless abandon in your car where nobody's listening. A dance like the camera is off is what I tell people. Just do it because your soul wants to and any expectation that it should be something other than what it is is a critic.

Chelsea Myers (1:03:00)
Yeah.

you

Daniel (1:03:18)
and it's not actually the thing that generates in you. That's a stopper. And what you are trying to connect to is the endless well of creativity that is desperate for your time and attention. So I say, you can, and you are. And I'd like to hear you sing more.

Chelsea Myers (1:03:35)
You

This is what my soul needed today. ⁓ It really, really did.

Daniel (1:03:39)
Hmm.

Chelsea Myers (1:03:43)
because I could sit here and listen to you talk all day and get deep, it's my favorite kind of conversation. Unfortunately, I don't have the luxury of that kind of time and I don't want to monopolize your time either. I typically have two questions that I...

end an episode on and I save them until the end so that I get to know the person, I have a completely different question for you. I don't do this often.

Daniel (1:04:16)
Excellent.

Chelsea Myers (1:04:19)
I want to know and we've talked a lot again like fatherhood is very it's a dynamic topic for you in terms of like your relationship with losing your father and seeing him go through what he went through and these different iterations of fatherhood for for you. ⁓

When all is said and done, what do you hope your children?

take away from your life story.

Daniel (1:04:48)
they should love themselves.

that they have no restriction on being able to love ⁓ their highest branches to their deepest roots.

that they give themselves the capacity to feel their lives fully through that. No limiter filter, no restrictions on being who they are. Learn to love yourself fully so that it can flow into other people's lives. And you can resonate at the capacity that you were born to.

Chelsea Myers (1:05:28)
think you are living and breathing that. I think you are setting an amazing example of that, especially with accepting the highs and the lows. ⁓ And just meeting you today, I have full confidence that your kids know that because of you and your wife. So yeah. So, Daniel, thank you. Thank you for being you.

Daniel (1:05:47)
Thank you so much.

Chelsea Myers (1:05:54)
Thank you for sharing this space with me, letting me in, and thank you for sharing your story.

Daniel (1:06:02)
Thank you so much for having me, for doing what you do, and for creating a space like this. I know that it means a lot to a lot of people.