Do as I say, not as I do.

Photo by Carine L. on Unsplash

Next Monday, the 27th, Lisa McCourt, Karen Salmansohn and I will be holding our free, two gathering called The Uplift. Come get loved up. Register for free here.

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Hi Friends,

Have you ever had anyone in your life tell you Do as I say, not as I do? For me, it was my dad. I remember him saying this often but can’t remember the circumstances around which he said it. Likely smoking, I don’t know. Maybe gambling, but probably not. He encouraged gambling.

I don’t remember much of my childhood before my parents died when I was fourteen. I don’t really remember much about them either. When I think of my dad, I mostly recall hating him, and I know it was because he paid me no attention, and chose gambling over fatherhood, and promised me every year to take us to Florida but never did. I blamed him for allowing my mom to work at their fruit market in an unsafe area of Detroit, and ultimately blamed him for getting them killed at said market, so my hatred of my father extended well beyond his death.

I feel none of that hatred now, and haven’t for many years. My dad was much more than just a shitty father. Plus, I really do believe that people do the best they can, and though I wasn’t able to see that in my youth, and though his best fell far short of providing me with a loving and attentive father, I’m able to reflect on him with a lot of compassion and love. Just not many memories.

It’s mostly the same with my mom. I remember being somewhat of a mama’s boy (or at least that’s what people insinuated), but I also don’t recall my mom being a particularly integral part of my life. When I think of my childhood, I remember spending a lot of time alone, or with friends, but not much time with my older siblings or parents. It was the 70s and 80s though, so that was the norm for a lot of us. Which doesn’t make it healthy, of course.

I loved my mom though, I’m clear about that. But I don’t remember what she was like. I have a vision of her in a purple two piece terry cloth ensemble that she wore often, with a cigarette hanging out of her mouth, but I can’t really feel her energy. It makes me sad not to be able to connect with memories of them. I know that it’s common to repress traumatic childhood memories, but I often feel like I lost many of the good ones as well. And I know there were good ones.

I got a big surprise a few years ago when both my parents visited me in three separate breathwork journeys, each of which offered a profoundly healing experience, connecting me even more deeply to my compassion and love for them. I have never been one to connect in this way with the dead, and these visits were a deeply healing and hugely surprising gift.

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I found it frustrating when my dad would say Do as I say, not as I do. I remember that, at least. It struck me as unfair, like what the hell with that hypocrisy? When I replay those words now, I can’t help but think of basically everyone who guides others in relation to spirituality or personal growth. Myself included. There’s a whole lot of us offering guidance that we ourselves are often neglecting to do.

I’m more intentional than ever about sharing when I’m out of sync with what I preach, which is often. And, I believe in what I’m sharing, which most often comes back to how powerful love and self-love are in our individual and collective lives. Much of the time, what I believe is aspirational. As in, I’m not there yet. For example, I have tasted and therefore see the real possibility of deep acceptance of myself and others, even when I’m unable to connect with it. And, sometimes-to-often, it’s a lived experience, which is why I remain so connected to the message. Acceptance feels really good.

I recently listened to Elizabeth Gilbert’s new book, All the Way to the River, which I found devastating and horrific and deeply profound and beautiful. In it, she shares about her wildly co-dependent and destructive relationship with her partner Rayya during Rayya’s final year and a half before she died from pancreatic and liver cancer. Liz also speaks in great detail about her realization that she has long been a sex and love addict. As I listened to Liz recount her and the relationship’s extreme dysfunction, I was struck by how out of sync what she shared about herself was with how I experienced her to be through her writing and interviews and ted talks.

I struggled to connect the woman in the book with the woman, who, at the end of Eat, Pray, Love and beyond, really seemed to have her shit together. Even though, apparently, in many ways, she really didn’t have her shit together. Liz acknowledges this…contradiction? discrepancy? reality that what she has discovered in the last five years of devotion to her 12-step program is akin to what she realized after her countless hours meditating in India nearly 20 years ago. And then life intervened, as it always does, and pulled her away from her inner knowing. Some time after Rayya died, Liz found her way, through different and similar means, back to a sense of grounded peace, authenticity and freedom.

And isn’t that the way of things? We remember who we are, and then we forget. We intentionally create more peace in our lives, and then spin out in endless chaos. We make authentic choices, and then retreat back into our conditioned responses. We live bravely and then from fear. Clearly and then from confusion. Again and again we spin through these cycles. If there is one guarantee on the path to greater consciousness, at least for most of us, it’s that we will find ourselves spending a lot of time in deep awareness of how extraordinarily unconscious we actually are. Shout out to acceptance once again, because acceptance of this frustrating certainty makes living it a lot easier.

I appreciated Liz’s raw candor. And in the book, I didn’t feel she was telling us to do as she said or did. She simply shared where she had been, where she is now, and how she had gotten there. I also want to acknowledge that we’re all projecting our opinions and understandings on each other, and those who are public figures get more than their share projected onto them. Even those who are living and teaching from a place of integrity, or most-of-the-time integrity, are still human and unlikely to stay rooted on top of the pedestal onto which their fans invariably place them.

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Over the years I’ve often wished that those of you who have a positive experience of my work could be inside my mind for a few hours, not because I want you to see how kind and loving I am, but because I want you to see how absolutely insane my mind is. Just like yours, I’m guessing. I think what connects us most deeply as humans is our capacity for profound love and our capacity for wholly irrational lunacy. I generally find the only times I’m truly shocked by someone else’s behavior is when I’m not willing to be honest about the place within myself that, if left to its own devices, just might do some version of the same thing that I find so shocking.

I was in a cult and had a guru for many years. I ultimately left because there was just too much Do as I say, not as I do coming from the guru. Not in those words, but the implication was there. He often referred to himself as a puppet of God, and that if we, his disciples, objected to what he said or asked us to do, then we were objecting to God’s will for us. In short, he was never wrong. According to him.

That’s the catch, with him, and with other self-help gurus who act like they have it all figured out when they don’t: it’s disingenuous and often more harmful than helpful. Not to mention completely out of integrity.

I’m working harder than ever these days to stay in integrity with my words and actions. Which is to say, I’m working harder than ever to be completely honest, with myself and others. I’m a pretty honest person. Honestly. But once I started bringing more awareness to the ways in which I’m not wholly aligned with what feels most authentic, most true, I couldn’t ignore all the ways that fear keeps me from expressing myself with complete integrity. To avoid being judged, and misunderstood, and hurting feelings. Complete integrity, too, is aspirational.

I guess, in a way, everything I share here regarding love and self-love and acceptance, and all of it, is aspirational, because I’m not living it more often than I am living it. At least in my head, which is where I still spend most of my time. When I’m in my heart, which is regularly but not (to my impatience) often enough, aspiration becomes reality. The heart knows only compassion and love.

Either way, I’m not here to tell you to do as I say, even when what I say is pretty awesome, and even when I’m doing it. I’m here to encourage all of us to listen to our hearts, and to return to love, as often as possible, because I know and you know that when we do this, we inevitably create for ourselves and each other more peace, love, connection and joy. That’s just how love works, and there’s no denying it. At least as far as I understand things.

What the heart says, the heart does. I find peace in this consistency. I find complete integrity there.

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Thank you all for your presence here. If my work here is touching your life in a good way, and you have the means, I’d like to invite you to become a paid subscriber. It’s just $5/month, or $50/year, and really makes a positive difference in my life. Thanks for considering it. And huge thanks to those of you who already have paid subscriptions.

As always, sending each of you Big Big Love.

xoxo…Scott

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UPCOMING EVENTS:

THE UPLIFT — Monday, October 27th: Join me, Lisa McCourt and Karen Salmansohn for a free two-hour gathering to connect with other open-hearted souls. This month’s theme is Navigating Fear. Register here.

SOUL RENEWAL RETREAT — June 6th - 13th, 2026: Join me and David Gandelman for our Soul Renewal Retreat in Sardinia, Italy. No words for how excited I am about this one. Details and registration here.