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Courageous Voice

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Doug Motel | “Courageous Voice” | connect.faith

by , | Jun 13, 2022 | connect.faith, Courageous Voice, Listen

“My life purpose is to laugh while I’m learning and show other people how to do it.”
Doug Motel

Tune in while we chat with Doug Motel, actor, storyteller, painter, coach and fellow joy spreader for lots of laughs, insights and inspirations on approaching life through humor and the evolution of
artistic expression.

In this episode we talk about:

  • Playing the game of life
  • Exploring and creating space for our inner “characters”
  • Sharing joy and healing through performing and visual art
  • Hawaiian spiritual philosophy: The Aloha Spirit

Bonus: Doug is giving away FREE prints of his Blue Remedy Series!
Get yours at www.blueabstractpaintings.com

You can connect with Doug on Instagram and Facebook
@dougmotelart and on the web at www.dougmotel.com or www.dougmotel.art

If you’d like to meet Doug or join his retreat the first week of 2023 in Ka’a’awa, Hawaii, visit retreats.dougmotel.com

Today is the day you vow to follow your heart and not your fear. If only it were that easy! The Courageous Voice podcast chronicles international artists, creatives, plus a handful of scientists, and their stories of fear, courageousness and creativity. Hosted by singer, storyteller and self-proclaimed joy spreader, Chanda Rule, The Courageous Voice inspires us to share our voices courageously in spite of our fears through courageous conversation and community.

Transcript

[00:00:00]

Chanda: Okay, we are back. Welcome back listeners. I hope you all are doing well. I am so, so, so super honored and excited. Doug, you’re already laughing, let me introduce you.

Doug: Just so happy to see you.

Chanda: Me too, [00:01:00] again.

So ladies and gentlemen, please welcome Doug Motel to the Courageous Voice Podcast. Doug is a father, he is a husband. He is a multi-talented artist. He paints, he writes, he acts. Doug is a coach. I’m sure leaving out things. A workshop leader. But Doug, what I ask everyone, since everyone wears so many hats, is, who are you bringing today to the Courageous Voice Podcast?

Doug: When I was 19, I wrote my life purpose statement. So I was 19 and I wrote "my life purpose my -purpose in life – is to laugh while I’m learning and to show other people how they could do that too."

Chanda: Wow.

Doug: Yeah. And so I have found that over the decades, there certainly have been times when I did not do that,[00:02:00] when I was not on purpose, as it were, but, whenever I’ve been faced with any kind of a situation, like a job interview, or dating, or anything, if I remembered that life purpose – to laugh while I’m learning and to show other people how they could do that too – everything just becomes easier. It’s there’s a framework for what I need to do instead of just completely trying to improvise it. So I would say the answer to your question, what’s up for me right now on this podcast is to laugh while I’m learning and to show other people though they can do it too.

Chanda: So I love how you came up with this when you were 19.

Doug: I know, I was a very precocious 19 year old.

Chanda: Yeah. But it’s so cool that this has really stuck with you, it seems.

Doug: Definitely.

Chanda: I have been Google stalking you even more.

Doug: Oh boy. There’s a lot of stuff out there.

Chanda: Oh my God, there’s so much. But the core of everything has been exactly what you said. And I think that’s [00:03:00] just amazing because so many of us, so many people, will have these brilliant life statements when we’re 19 and then, either they change five years later, or 20 years later, they become something else. And so that’s really awesome how you have just kept that at your core.

Doug: Yeah. I think that the trick was in making it wide enough. Because when I was 19, if you’d ask me, you know, "what do you want?," like on a more superficial level, it was, "I want to be famous and I don’t care how I get there."

I did not have a great childhood and, when I was 19, I was still, wafting in the detritus of the trauma of my childhood. And it was like, still everywhere. And I’ve had a lot of cringy moments looking back at working through a lot of that stuff even into my twenties and thirties and forties, even. But something inspired me to make that life purpose statement wide enough, bigger, [00:04:00] than so many of the sort of smaller things that were, running me at the time.

So yeah, I would say that’s the reason why that life purpose statement has been enduring for me is that it was wider. It was a bigger picture. It was a much bigger aspirational picture for me.

Chanda: Okay. All right. I’m like, where do we start? There is so much, I have notes. I have notes. There’s so much, there’s so much. And today, actually, my last foray into Doug Motel, today I started with Mind Salad. And the reason being is because I was looking for your podcast, because you told me about your podcast before and that you were having these conversations and you were playing all of the characters.

What I did not know is that you were playing more than one character at once. So you’re actually interviewing several people at the same time. Amazing. And so I wanted to start here because first of all it’s amazing. And then also when I did [00:05:00] look to find more podcasts, I found that this was actually a workshop series. And I was so curious how you were putting this into a workshop, because, again, it was back to this core message of healing through laughter and comedy and how we deal with, I wrote it down here. I said "Mind Salad: the workshops use comedy, and then, I added, wisdom and lived experience for healing and using the power of the present. And so I wanted to talk about that a little bit.

Doug: Well, it’s a really interesting story, I think. I was living in Los Angeles and I had just moved from New York, where I was really getting more into writing solo pieces for the theater performance, where I would play all these different characters.

And I had met the director, Michael McKiddy at a party. And I was being a little bit pretentious and I was saying, "Yeah, I’ve got notes on a solo play that I’m planning on writing. It’s really about the inner critic, and the [00:06:00] voice that judges us, and it’s about a man’s relationship with, the inner critic in and a journey that he has and then healing that he has."

And he was like, "Oh, that sounds really interesting. Could you read some of it for me?"

Part of me thought "I’m never really going to write that. That sounds too hard."

So then he said, " I can come in two weeks and hear what you’ve got." And I said, "Okay". And so I spent that next two weeks really trying to see if I could make it funny, the relationship that we have with the voice that basically hates us, and is always telling us that we’re not doing good enough and we’ll never be good enough.

So I decided to make this sort of a story about a screenwriter from London who moves to LA and the hope of escaping from his ego. So I’m supposed to write a show about why would you go to Los Angeles to get away from your ego where it’s built on ego? So I I created this, guy, the screenwriter who moves to LA , and then I played his inner critic like a Robert Morley character from the old film.

Inner Critic: "Do you see those people? Do you see these people whispering?

Screenwriter: "Yeah, what about them?"

Inner Critic: "They’re whispering [00:07:00] about us."

Doug: So it’s really like a dialogue between him and that voice that’s always telling him, "You’re not enough. You’re never going to be enough." And then it gets played out that I play all the different people.

I play the studio head, who he’s trying to pitch a series to. I play the dating life and all that kind of stuff. And so next thing I knew Michael was scheduling readings, public readings. I was like (stammers) "okay…" and then we found a producer and then we have a theater and then suddenly it was up and it was running at the Coast Playhouse in West Hollywood.

And the critics came and I was absolutely, incredibly nervous. I had nightmares the night before opening, cause I thought, "Nobody is going to get this. This is a man talking to his mind." But I got all these really great reviews and I was nominated for an LA Weekly Award, and I got a lot of attention and a lot of meetings and an agent and TV stuff.

But then the really interesting thing is that there was a woman [00:08:00] who came to see it. Her name is Cheryl Morris. And she said to me, "this play is a workshop." And I said, "what do you mean?"

And she said, " What you’re doing here is that you’re making it funny and easy to understand, but what you’re inviting people to do is to have a moment where they could step back and step away from the voice of fear." She said, "I think that this is a workshop and it just so happens that I’m a manager for new age or new thought performers. And if you are interested, I could set up places for you to do this workshop. If you develop the workshop."

I really got into it. I really thought of all these different exercises. They were based on the exercises that I do all the time for myself to try to disrupt the habitual dialogue of–let’s call it what it is–self hatred. I had always been interested in hacking that process; that habitual process of self hatred.

And so I developed a workshop. And I started doing it for people with [00:09:00] cancer, people with AIDS, people in recovery, and, all kinds of different places. And yeah, what started out to be just a little conversation about how I wanted to make something funny about the voice of fear and criticism did evolve into something that turned out to be bigger than I anticipated.

Chanda: Wow. So what sorts of things would you do in a workshop like this? Maybe, because I’ve seen some of the video clips, I can picture the show, but I’m just wondering, in a workshop setting, did you invite people to create their own characters or…?

Doug: Exactly, exactly, yeah.

Chanda: Really? And so they got to do what you do. Or try.

Doug: Yeah, it’s not a performance workshop. It’s personal discovery workshops. There was no pressure for anyone to have to perform or even share any of the characters that they were doing.

So, that play Mind Salad changed my life. What happened is the more I would get in front of an audience and act out the different [00:10:00] voices that we have within us, the easier it became for me to assign a negative thought to an external character.

I’d be like, oh, that’s Mr. Fears. So like Mr. Fears was the character that it was always: "You do realize there’s only one thing worse than a has been. That’s a never was."

When I would hear those kind of thoughts, I would do what the character learns to do at the end. The character has an evolution and transforms his relationship with that voice because he realizes that if you try to kill that voice, you’re in for a life of spiritual tyranny and mind tyranny, because you can never kill that voice. It’s there. But what you can do is transform the way that you react to being conscious of that voice. You can change the way you hear it.

But the first step is to, separate from the voice. And again, like you’re not really separating from the voice, but it’s a way of taking, like, the old saying, you’ve got a thorn in your foot, [00:11:00] you can use another thorn to pick it out.

So you’re not really, there is no separate, voice of the inner critic, but you could use your imagination to create one. So that’s one of the chief exercises. At the very least what you want to come away with from the workshop is to name it; name that character. And then I try to get people to draw it.

There are art supplies and I get people to draw because the more specific you can be– what is it? Is it human form? Is it a male or female, or, an animal or a Chimera or whatever. If you can be really specific, then that can make it even easier to ascribe the negative thinking to that separate character.

And then, so one of the other exercises is to – and this often can feel very intense – is to really unpack what exactly is that character saying to you. So that’s one of the other things we do.

And then we also play like the [00:12:00] Russian nesting dolls: you open one doll, then there’s another doll inside, and another doll inside. We tried to get what’s at the heart of that thing that it’s saying to you? And then can you go even deeper and deeper?

I’ve done this workshop for people all over, and, for probably thousands of people now. And there’s one absolute universal thing that always comes up. And when I first realized that it was going to be the case, that every workshop I did, it was going to be this, I was really fascinated. The underlying thing for most people in that voice, the message of that voice is: you are not enough.

Chanda: Okay. Wow, this is like a universal thing that you’re getting.

Doug: It has been every time.

Chanda: This is so interesting because I guess on an individual basis, when you talk to people, everyone kind of feels like they’re the only ones still. You know, We keep getting this message, but we still feel like we’re the only ones. And so this is amazing.

Doug: Yeah, I think when you’re born, the universe says, "Hey, here’s a [00:13:00] body and here’s a voice to tell you that you’re crappy."

Chanda: Oh gosh, okay. This is funny. I was talking to somebody about this today. We were talking about talent and the gifts that we’re born with. And that the universe gives us these gifts, and then they give us something to keep us on our toes in reminding us that this is something special. And so maybe this is part of it. Like it keeps us working towards this and pushing through something. I guess which, scientifically, would make it even more brilliant,

Doug: Yeah. The message of the play, the end message of the play, is that the whole thing is set up as a game.

It’s just a game. This entire life is a game and if you can bring the same attitude that you have when you are playing Cards Against Humanity with a bunch of your best friends, or volleyball with your best friends, or anything where you’re engaged… you want to win, but you’re doing it for the fun of it… if you can bring that gamification [00:14:00] attitude…

Chanda: Hashtag gamification!

Doug: Hashtag gamification! If you can see it as a game, anything that you want to accomplish is then possible because you are actively involved in the playing of it. Your focus is not exclusively on the winning or the end result. Another way to describe it is to be process-oriented. But for me saying that it’s a game goes even deeper because it brings in an element of play.

Chanda: Yeah. Yeah. And I will say that I am loving this about your coaching style. I take everything so seriously. It’s been very welcomed, I’d say, that usually we’ll start with " ha ha isn’t that funny?" But not " ha aren’t you funny?"

But you’re adding that, that thing, that gamification and that humor and being able to look at life and look at the goals as a game, as a fun game to play and enjoy.

Doug: Yeah. You’re moving your little player across the [00:15:00] board, and you’re going to get all kinds of different discoveries and treasures. And you can be going for something and thinking, "oh, I’m going to move my little man, across the board here." And then something may come up in your life and it may be very clear that you’re meant to go in a different direction than what you set out to be. It’s like chutes and ladders or whatever. You get sent in a different direction, and if you’re smart, you’ll pay attention, and realize "that the thing that I wanted when I was 16- it’s no longer what I really want, and I’m going to move my little board piece over here. But I love coaching you because you are so willing to have fun. You have a very silly side.

I don’t know if your listeners know that. You have a very silly side and you also have characters and stuff that you do.

Chanda: Okay. So if anyone’s listening to my voice, they know that I am definitely not silly.

Yes, I’ve always been a silly, silly one. You know I did a similar exercise and one of the first characters I drew out was [00:16:00] called Scratch. And yeah, this was in like a very emotional moment, but yeah, like this character was Scratch, and I scratched it out, and Scratch has – she’s still there – she has a clap back. I don’t have clap back. Everybody who knows me knows I don’t have any clap back at all, but like Scratch is so fierce. And yeah. She’s also very fiercely critical, but yeah, it was interesting to separate this character. And I just never forgot that. It was a very eye-opening and slowly healing. And yeah, we spent a lot of time together dissecting each other.

Doug: There’s an interesting book that I think you might like called Embracing Our Selves by Hal and Sidra Stone. It was actually someone who saw me perform Mind Salad who came up to me and turned me on to it because he was like, " you’re basically embodying this."

Their theory is that basically we all have all these different voices within, and you can [00:17:00] be the person that you are when you go to a cocktail party and you run into somebody that you actually have a secret crush on.

Chanda: That never happens.

Doug: That is a totally different person than the person who just looked in the rear view mirror and saw that the cops are pulling them over. And so we’ve got these different aspects of the different characters within us, and when you can play with that and you can be like, "oh, none of the characters need to die. I don’t really need to kill any of them. I just need to keep developing the Maestro within, the orchestrator, or the conductor."

Because those characters are… essentially all they want is some attention. They just want to be heard. And the more you ignore them, the more they go underground.

Chanda: Oh my god.

Doug: Did that resonate?

Chanda: I just love how, let me tell you, I always get like this word. [00:18:00] Yes, yes. This is so amazing because yes. I was with my therapist this morning and we were talking about just this, but specifically about like things coming up, and I’m like "I want to heal that, and maybe it just wants to be seen."

And like you’re using the word to allow these things to be seen and held and this is amazing. I love how you worded that.

Doug: Yeah, because otherwise what you’re doing is you’re setting up a conflict for yourself and the old expression, "what you resist persists…" what you have no space for, and you will not allow, becomes much bigger. Ironically, it becomes bigger, not smaller.

Chanda: Yes. Okay, okay, okay. And there was something else that you said about your workshops, and this was drawing, and this is great because over the past two years, the shift that has come with the pandemic and all that, Doug started [00:19:00] painting. And so, I never asked you, and what I want to know is, were you doing anything similar? Were you doing any visual arts before?

Doug: Oh yeah. That’s what it all started for me. My first identity, that I ever noticed that I had an identity as a child, was that boy who can draw.

And that got me some sort of societal currency, if you will. I actually came from a pretty abusive family and my father was abusive physically, psychologically, emotionally abusive to me. When he was paying any attention to me at all. But I remember, once when I was 10, I had been working on a political cartoon. It was of Hubert Humphrey, and the presidential election. And I went to go get my drawing and it was gone. It wasn’t in my pad. And I said to my mother, " My drawing is missing? Do you know what happened to it?" And she said, "Your dad took it. Dad took it to the poker game last [00:20:00] night."

And I said, "why would he take my drawing to the poker game?" And she said, "because he wanted to show it off to everyone." I had no idea that my father even knew that I drew. I didn’t even know that he knew that I was doing this and this was this important thing to me, but I remember that moment very distinctly.

And I thought, "oh wow, my father is showing this off. Okay. There’s something here that I have some power, I have something of value." And so I really cultivated that, and I began showing my paintings when I was 12, actually, exhibiting in art shows when, even though I wasn’t old enough to be in them, I would lie my age because you had to be 14 or older.

And I remember one time there was this TV show in our area called The Captain Lippy Show. And that I used to watch. It was like a kid’s show, and I was 12 and I was exhibiting my watercolors and Captain Lippy came, and he and his wife were there, and he was like, "are you the artist?" And I said, "yes, Captain Lippy." And he [00:21:00] said, "you are very good, would you like to be on my show?" And I was like, "oh yes, Captain Lippy." And so I got to be on The Captain Lippy Show. And so I started out as a painter. I started out as an artist.

But then I got much more interested in performing. When I was about 13 or 14, I started doing theater. And then I was doing professional theater when I was in high school, even, but I also had a job as an illustrator when I was in high school.

So I worked as an artist, as an illustrator. And then I ultimately decided to pick. I moved – I dropped out of high school actually – and I moved to New York City. I auditioned for a play like the day after I arrived and I got cast in a play. And so I thought, "oh, this is going to be easy."

Chanda: The day after you arrived in New York, you got cast in a play. Okay, alright, magic.

Doug: Yes. I thought, "oh, magical life. This is going to be easy. Why, I shall have a Tony award by the time I’m [00:22:00] 21." It did not work out that way. Let me tell you. But yeah, so I think a lot of it was being– getting attention. Like I felt so ignored. I felt like nobody knew, nobody paid any attention to me. There are people, when I was a child, who thought I was a mute because I didn’t speak. And when I discovered performing the attention was very intoxicating. Having people applaud me.

Actually it was in a talent show in kindergarten in front of grownups. And I made them laugh by pantomiming to a song and I thought, "wow, this is good stuff here." But yeah, so even though all these years, my focus has been on the theater and some film and television, not a lot, but some film and television, and then doing these workshops and coaching, I would still paint on the side.

But it was always hyper realism portraits. I would do portraits as gifts for people. Some people, like Barbara Streisand, has one of my pieces.

Chanda: Wait, Barbara Streisand has one of your pieces.

Doug: [00:23:00] So, a friend of hers gave her a portrait that I did of her, and I got to go to the recording studio and––

Chanda: Get out!

Doug: Yes, I got to go into the recording studio to give it to her. She’s a hard worker, let me tell you. And then she wrote me the most beautiful note.

Chanda: Oh my goodness.

Doug: I was always doing art, but really very much on the side. And then, like you said, the pandemic happened and the pandemic pivot hit me, and I just woke up and I just thought it’s time for me to paint again. It’s time for me to come full circle.

I had a whole bunch of things lined up for 2020. I was doing a lot of working with businesses to help them tell their story, and it was really an offshoot out of my writing for the theater. I created an opportunity to take those skills of how you tell a story. Just traditional story telling principles. How to engage people emotionally and grip them; all that stuff [00:24:00] that I had to learn how to do as a playwright. I started helping businesses to do that. And I started 2020 with some plans. They weren’t completed, but there was some really good plans moving forward to do a bootcamp for businesses in Cuba. And help Cuban businesses tell their story. Helping the Open Center tell the story about some of their programs- the New York Open Center. I just finished doing a retreat in Hawaii, and I was speaking at conferences in Idaho, conferences all over the U.S.. Like, I had a big schedule. And I was really excited about it, cause I thought, "wow, this is exactly the schedule that I’ve been planning for years." And March came and within 10 days, every event was canceled.

Chanda: Can I tell you that literally I think almost everyone that I’ve interviewed has had the same. I had more gigs than I’ve ever had lined up for 2020, and then… bam. Yeah, it’s an [00:25:00] interesting thing. Okay, so 10 days happen and then you’re like, what?

Doug: I guess I just, I don’t know, it’s funny. I can’t say that there was anything that I would even describe as an intellectual exercise or a, even a choosing that even happened, as much as I woke up one day and I discovered, "oh, I have time to paint. I have time to paint." And then some very interesting things overlapped.

My entire life, I had painted or drawn primarily portraits. And mostly realism. So my thing was, since I’m that boy who can draw and I can make it look exactly like the person, that’s what I should do. Like I can do that, so that’s what I’m supposed to do. But I came across a book that sort of revealed to me the early influences of Western abstract art.

So in the early [00:26:00] 1900s, there were a lot of philosophers like Madame Blavatsky and Rudolph Steiner, and people like that who felt that the second Industrial Revolution had made everyone far too materialistic. And they were worried about the planet, and they thought that everyone was becoming too concerned about the things that you can see and touch and consume and buy.

And they felt that the solution was artists. So they began to use what I call the bat signal. Like the commissioner puts the bat signal up there in the clouds and Batman sees it. They said, "Hey, artists! You got to come up with something that gives people an experience of their soul. That brings people back to the moment. It’s all well and good and beautiful that you can paint meadows and bowls of fruit and things like that, but try painting something that isn’t a thing. Try painting in a way that engages the viewer to figure out for themself [00:27:00] what it is, so that they can look to themselves.

And so much of this was really based in Eastern philosophy. And I had no idea. Western abstract art, I personally would always avoid when I went to the art museum, because I thought, "I don’t know what’s happening over there, but it doesn’t look like they can draw…"

Chanda: Yes.

Doug: Because I didn’t understand what it was about. And then once I read that, I thought, "oh my gosh, that’s so fascinating."

And at the same time, I also stumbled upon an article about a city in Japan that was experimenting with using the color blue as a tool to give people a sense of calm and reassurance. So they took a train station and they put blue lights everywhere and blue images and blue signs. And they found that the suicide rate went down 80% in that area.

Chanda: 80%.

Doug: Yes. And then I discovered there are other [00:28:00] neuroscientists who were exploring the color of blue and they believe that it has something to do with our attachment to the sea and the sky.

It’s a little bit of a treasure hunt, life, it’s like a game. And sometimes you come upon things that you hadn’t expected, but these two pieces of information – the early abstract movement’s connection to Eastern philosophy and the neurological benefits of the color blue – those things merged for me. And I began painting abstract improvisational paintings, only using colors from the sea.

Chanda: Wow. I love this. Blue is my favorite color, so many shades of blue. Really. And it’s so beautiful. It’s so beautiful. You all can actually see and buy prints. We’re going to have your website in the show notes.

Doug: Actually, I’m giving them away right now.

Chanda: You’re giving them away?

Doug: Yes.

Chanda: How do we get one?

Doug: You go [00:29:00] to blueabstractpaintings.com

Chanda: Get out. Are you serious?

Doug: I’m serious. I’m giving them away because I think that if everybody could have a little blue painting in their house, then people will stop fighting each other. So go to blueabstractpaintings.com.

Chanda: Wow. Wow. That is gorgeous. I love that. That reminds me of something else that I read. I think I read this on your website, because you’re talking about how we are with one another. There was something about what we’re passing on to one another. In this particular thing, you were writing about fear, and you were writing that one way to get over the fear that we’re passing on to each other, because we’re living in this fear, was to pass on joy and fun first. And this is one way, that you already brought up, through the visual arts. What you said about the Western abstract art is amazing and I’m going to be researching that. What are some other ways we can do this?

Doug: One of the things that’s been really interesting for me that’s happened over the [00:30:00] past few years is connecting with my Hawaiian relatives. My grandmother was Hawaiian and we used to homeschool my daughter. We used to use ancestry.com as the history starting point. So we would use ancestry.com to study times of history and places in the world based on her actual lineage.

And so we did a DNA test and the DNA test included that she’s part Polynesian and we put that you can upload it. And then we started getting messages from people saying, "I think I’m your cousin." So I’ve been connecting with my cousins in Hawaii. And the Hawaiian culture, honestly, was very new to me at the time, but I’ve been taking a much deeper dive into it for myself. And so much of what the Hawaiian culture, Hawaiian philosophy, Hawaiian spiritual philosophy is steeped in, is stuff that I’ve always believed [00:31:00] in my own life, which is "be here now."

And especially Aloha spirit. So, Aloha spirit or Aloha, in my understanding of it, is that place within where you’re grateful for just simply being alive. Your light within, or your joy within. And it’s not based on accomplishing anything, it’s just the joy of living, or being the sperm that won. You won, you gotta beat everybody else out. And the rest of it’s just gravies.

Just, and that idea of filled with Aloha Spirit has been a great discovery for me. And also, something that Hawaiians refer to as your mana or spiritual energy. So . M-A-N-A. I actually have a teacher that I work with, who is helping me to understand a lot of this — her name is Alihi — and has encouraged me to make a mana list, which is a list of the people, places and things that give me energy – spiritual energy.

And we all know what it’s [00:32:00] like to hang out with people that, when we leave, we feel completely drained. Or we leave and we feel really energized. Or little objects; we just love looking at that little thing. It’s just a little vase that we bought at a yard sale, but there’s something about it. When we look at it, it makes us happy. That’s mana. That’s spiritual energy, and surrounding yourself with the people, places, and things that give you spiritual energy is also part of this journey for me. And that’s what I feel like I’m trying to do with the art. I’m trying to make a little something for people’s mana list.

Chanda: Yeah, I totally get that because I have one of your pieces. I have a piece which is mana for me. I love this piece of the mother. I feel it’s also amazing because it makes me think about the biblical stories of the Old Testament and the mana from heaven for the Israelites. And of course when we dig a little bit deeper into that text, it is like this same thing, right? The spiritual energy;[00:33:00] what’s feeding your spirit. So I find that really interesting, especially linguistically.

Doug: I know, linguistically. I love when that happens. That happens a lot, actually. There are words that they’re the same sound in different languages and they mean the same thing. Fascinating. And I use all of this by the way. Not to make a plug, but––

Chanda: We’ll make it, I’m gonna make it for you. So you can go ahead and do it.

Doug: I’m thinking of it as an invitation. I invite all of your listeners to join me actually in Hawaii, in Ka`a`awa on the Windward side of Oahu.

Chanda: Could you say that again, please? That was just a melody?

Doug: I love it. It’s in Ka`a`awa, which is on Oahu and in Hawaii.

Chanda: When is it?

Doug: It is January first, second, third, fourth, and fifth of ’23.

Chanda: Wow.

Doug: It’s actually called Playing the [00:34:00] Game of 2023, An Aloha Spirit Retreat. And we’re going to take a little trip through ’22 and really have a very powerful closure of it. Looking at the wins and the losses, the unmet expectations, the surprises, the terrific stuff, and the good, the bad and the ugly.

The retreat center is one block from the sea and it’s also down the street from a beautiful hike into a rain forest. So we’re going to, spend a couple of days just unpacking and powerfully releasing the previous year, and then inviting in the energies of the year that we would like to see. Some people might think of it as like a goal-setting retreat. It’s much more than that really.

Chanda: Okay. So where can we get more information about the retreat and like how to sign up and plan for this?

Doug: Yeah. So it’s retreats.dougmotel.com. [00:35:00] You can always email me, doug@dougmotel.com and I’ll be happy to jump in a zoom and talk to you about it.

And by the way, anyone who does take me up on my offer for a free print of one of my paintings from my Blue Remedy series, you’re automatically invited to be a part of an exclusive Facebook group. So it comes with it, free. And the Facebook group is a chance to keep exploring Aloha Spirit. It’s actually called the Aloha Spirit Facebook Group, and it’s about looking at all this stuff together. And I love doing it because I make it really clear that I’m not teaching anything. I am just sharing my notes on what it is that I’m learning. I’m like your fellow classmate who might be a little bit more busy in their notebook, maybe, than you are about the stuff.

Chanda: No that’s beautiful. [00:36:00] That’s beautiful. Okay, okay. So we can find out about your retreats, you said. And if someone just wants to find out about your storytelling or other workshops or coaching, where would they find you?

Doug: So, it’s so funny, like I have all these websites now.

Chanda: It’s alright, I’m gonna list all of them.

Doug: So if you want to buy my paintings, you can go to dougmotel.art. If you want a free one, you can go to blueabstractpaintings.com. If you want to learn about my coaching, you can go to dougmotel.com. If you want a book, The Mind Salad Workshop, you can go to mindsalad.com. And if you want to know about the retreat in Hawaii, in Ka`a`awa, you can go to retreats.dougmotel.com

Chanda: That’s beautiful. And are you on social media also?

Doug: Oh, yes. I’m on the gram @Dougmotelart, and also Facebook- Doug Motel Art.

Chanda: Okay, beautiful, [00:37:00] beautiful. I have enjoyed you. I sound like my grandmother. I have just enjoyed you.

Doug: (imitading grandm voice) You’re just adorable. You brightened up my day.

Chanda: You did brighten up my day.

Doug: You brightened up my day, you always do.

Chanda: You’re my mana.

Doug: You are on my mana list.

Chanda: You my mana. Thank you so much.

Doug: I loved it, it was great.

Chanda: Yeah, me too. So y’all reach out to Doug and get a painting, sign up for the retreat. Maybe I can get my little coins together and be in Hawaii, who knows.

Doug: It’s pretty affordable.

Chanda: Especially now, we have time to plan. We’ve got a whole half a year.

Doug: Yeah, good. I’m glad you feel that way.

Chanda: All right, Doug. Thank you so much.

Doug: You’re very welcome. Great to see you.

Chanda: You too!

[00:38:00]