Know Thyself
E146 - Cory Muscara: Former Monk: “Stop Missing Your Life!” Here’s the Key To Lasting Happiness
Tue, 13 May 2025
Cory Muscara shares profound insights on achieving lasting happiness and fulfillment in the present moment. He discusses his transformative journey from awakening to monastic life, emphasizing the importance of breaking free from cycles of internal distress. Muscara challenges common misconceptions about meditation, urging listeners to confront rather than escape emotional pain. Throughout the episode, he offers practical strategies for tuning into inner wisdom and strengthening intuitive knowing. Try Pique Life tea and save 20% for life & get a free frother:https://www.piquelife.com/KnowThyselfAndrés Book Recs: https://www.knowthyself.one/books___________0:00 Intro 1:39 Stop Missing Your Life9:00 Finding Fulfillment in the Present Moment13:43 Awakening & Becoming a Monk25:32 Breaking the Cycle of Internal Distress32:41 Stop Meditating Your Way Out of Emotional Pain41:40 AD: Pique Life Save 20% for Life45:46 The FACE Model - 4 Steps to Presence 51:04 Truth About Self Love57:13 The Desire for Safety Controls Your Life1:00:36 Practice to Tune Into Your Inner Knowing1:06:53 Commitment & Romantic Relationships1:27:42 Strengthening Your Intuitive Knowing1:31:25 IFS Process for Healing Stuck Parts of Yourself1:53:43 Finding Stability in Surrender1:58:00 Conclusion ___________Episode Resources: https://corymuscara.comhttps://www.instagram.com/corymuscara/https://www.instagram.com/andreduqum/https://www.instagram.com/knowthyself/https://www.youtube.com/@knowthyselfpodcasthttps://www.knowthyself.oneListen to the show:Spotify: https://spoti.fi/4bZMq9lApple: https://apple.co/4iATICX
Chapter 1: What does it mean to stop missing your life?
Most of our negative patterns, relationship woes, insecurities, they are not the result of not having enough will, energy, or patience. They are the result of old, stuck pain.
If you're someone struggling with this and you feel like there's something in me that comes up, I would start by, and this is where so many spiritual practitioners get stuck, is do you believe you are fundamentally whole or do you feel like you are fundamentally broken? If you are fundamentally whole, then your practice is about subtraction.
My direct experience has been we are fundamentally whole. And that is why I often say you need to descend if you want to transcend.
Corey Muscara. Thanks for being here, dude. Thanks, Andre. Yeah. One of my greatest joys on this podcast is getting to see these different individuals online who are sharing similar inspiring content around meditation, mindfulness, spirituality, and getting to connect in person and feel like, oh, we're going to be great friends off the bat. Yeah, likewise.
Yeah, it's really cool to dig into your story too and see your life as a former monk and becoming a best-selling author, cultivating quite the audience online and proliferating wisdom in these modern times. Something that really resonates with me, also the name of your book titles is this idea of like how we can stop missing our lives
think as you start to realize what a gift this life is, you realize to the degree we've been unconscious for so much of it and living life through the perception of our own conditioning. So that phrasing of like, stop missing your life really resonates with me because I feel like
for many different periods of my life, I've been keenly aware of the passing of time and how aware I am and present I am during those periods and the times that I really haven't been. And it's painful to realize those times you haven't been because you see what a gift this life is. And so what comes to mind when you hear that phrasing, stop missing your life?
And why was that so kind of motivating for you?
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Chapter 2: How can we find fulfillment in the present moment?
the first thing that comes to mind is uh how much i don't like the title of my book actually so i'm i'm grateful that you that that speaks to you and it does for a lot of people there's something confronting about the title as you're already acknowledging people can sense how much of their life is spent unconscious on autopilot and it is the reason we went with that title
But the title I wanted to name my book was Permission to be Human, because I felt like that was actually the journey to coming back into your life. And as most authors know, there's a bit of a wrestle between the creative and the publishing company, and we wanted something that kind of stood out to people. But it's a phrase that I would never say to someone.
If I was inviting someone back into their life, I wouldn't say, stop missing your life. I might say something more like, what's it like to be you right now? Which is the line that I open the book with, really meeting people very specifically where they're at at this point in time, which is going to be different for everyone. As you already alluded to, the process of
being out of touch with your life, like actually missing your life to coming into awareness it's not easy. I mean, for a lot of people, there's a grief process. And a lot of people have good reason to want to stay unconscious. It's painful to wake up to the things that have been motivating you to stay unconscious.
Chapter 3: What was Cory's journey to becoming a monk?
And it's painful to wake up like 10, 20, 30 years later and realize like, wow, much of how I've been living is based on protective patterns that were trying to get me safety, connection, and love. So that phrase, like missing your life, I think there's like two chapters to it. At least there were for me.
And the first chapter is just recognizing that there's a being who can be aware of their life, not being identified with your thoughts and your emotions. I still remember the first time in college where that came up for me. I was Well, I didn't get into this work for any noble or spiritual reasons. I was trying to impress a girl. I had a hippie girlfriend in college. She was in a meditation.
I wanted her to think I was cool. And that's what prompted me to start meditating.
I love it.
Yeah, no happy ending on that one. She broke up with me a couple weeks later, but... Not even one happy ending. The real happy ending was that it was the pain of that breakup that actually troubled me into trying to figure out how to get out of the torment of my mind and my thoughts and my emotions. And I was seeing that the meditation, which I did not know what I was doing at the time, right?
I was 20, 21 years old. I would just lie in my dorm room bed, put my hands on my belly, focus on my breath, go inhale, exhale, inhale, exhale. And I was just trying to be as present as possible. But In a short period of doing that, I quickly became aware that there was this place that could watch the thoughts that were judging me, the emotions that felt overwhelming, the pain that was gripping me.
And that was the first stage of seeing like, oh, there's a being here that is bigger. I wouldn't even use the word being at the time. I was just like, there's something going on here. And nobody ever taught me this before. And the more I zoom out and identify with that place of observation, the less torment I feel with the experience. So that's like mindfulness 101.
But the next stage of really stepping into your life is once you connect to the resonance of freedom of awareness, that space of like what some people might call true self.
what does it mean for that to express itself in all facets of your life that to me is is the real work a lot of people can have awakening experiences but it quickly gets caught in the gunk of their conditioning and so they like wake up here and then they're you know they're their 14 year old self
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Chapter 4: How do we break the cycle of internal distress?
Absolutely. It's a messy, windy road and the synthesizing and integration of both paths isn't really talked about as much as I think I would like to. And I think it's getting more and more light, you know, but I think we're really familiar with the spiritual insight of waking up beyond the illusion of your thoughts and your emotions and, uh,
those meditative practices that can really support in waking up beyond the identification with those processes internally. And then, of course, the Western psychotherapeutic approach of parts work and healing your traumatic wounds and daddy issues and like, you know, really familiar with that too.
And I love to see the coming together of how they both support one another and are incomplete in and of themselves. And so we can continue to dive into that. I think a theme throughout this conversation is I want to pull from some quotes of yours, either from your posts online or book, and we can expand on it because I think they're articulated really well.
One aspect of internally feeling like we're not present for our life is this continual...
sort of orientation that our ideal life is somewhere in the future that is aka not now and and so this quote i think hits on that really well the belief that there is some future moment more worth our presence than the one we're in right now is why we miss our lives and so if you want to kind of share about your journey awakening to that realization uh because it's such a pervasive and persistent one i think throughout all culture
Yeah, the belief that there is a future moment more worth our presence than the one we're in right now is why we miss our lives. That has been a piece of writing that has both resonated with a lot of people and has also been hard to understand for a lot of people or activating for a lot of people.
Because some people hear it and they hear it as the belief that a future moment is going to be better is the reason we miss our lives, which is not what this is saying. The recognition that a future moment is going to be better is wisdom. It's the recognition of impermanence, that whatever suffering is here will shift and give way to something else.
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Chapter 5: Why should we confront emotional pain instead of escaping it?
But the belief that there is a future moment more worth our presence that we can finally show up to and like really let ourselves sink into, that is the trap we get into. where we develop this push-pull relationship to our experience, where we're grasping at the things that we want, pushing away the things that we don't want.
And it's an inherently non-spiritual relationship to our experience, to our life, because it is layered with the pre supposition that there is only gold in something that feels good or something that matches the blueprint of our personality structure and my experience with like the greatest transformations that i've ever had i mean almost all of them have
been during the most painful experiences, the experiences where I'm most confused, where I'm most tormented, and where I don't want to be in that moment. And I use, I have used my distraction and suppression strategies to avoid that thing and try to buoy myself above it. That never works. I... I always have to come back to whatever that thing is that was asking for attention.
And when I do, when I allow myself to soften into it, when I like almost make it a devotion, just like I trust that there is a reason you are here and I am going to soften the protective layers that don't want to touch this as long as I feel ready, right? There's wisdom sometimes to protection and saying not right now. But knowing that we come back to it, it's like, I'm here to feel this.
When that gives way, life moves through again. And then you are on like the pulse of your life, the natural flow of your life. waiting for some future moment that fits the blueprint of what you want is a very surefire way to really disconnect from the aliveness of your life.
And it's a mistrust in why things are showing up the way they're showing up and what opportunity there is for you when you actually let yourself touch it.
It's pretty amazing to feel the radical transformation in our present moment when we can, yes, acknowledge that there is maybe a certain arrangement of conditionings or a certain amount of money or relationship or health that is someday in the future we want to attain to, and we can have those.
But to recognize that part of having that and part of actualizing that and to form in the manifest is not having it. And that's the journey that we're currently on. And so like not being on our path or feeling lost is our path.
is is part of the whole journey um and so yeah finding that acceptance in the moment that maybe we want something to change but in the moment realizing that it is our current life right now and allowing us to land in this moment fully is is so much of our work and it's so tough to do that when we're so heavily identified with our own thoughts because we believe them to be true
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Chapter 6: What is the FACE model for presence?
If that's not the path I want, what is it that I want? And I just started exploring like things that I thought I wanted. I want a family. Well, why do I want a family? It'll give me meaning. Why do I want meaning? Well, that'll make me happier. I want money. Well, why do you want money? Well, then I go on more vacations at free time. And what will that do? That will make me happier.
I want to be married. What will that do? Give me love. What will that do? That will make me happier. So everything was like, when I really looked at it, I spent months, not a long time, but at the time it was a lot just like, what are all these things I'm pursuing? What are they reduced to? And it was just this, this desire to feel a certain way.
And it just was so clear to me at the time, like if that's at the heart of everything, figure out what that is. Because all these paths, like how many people do you know who are married and miserable? How many people do you know who make so much money, but they're completely enslaved to the process and they feel dead inside? Or if kids and like they resent their children, just like
you just going on those paths is not going to guarantee this thing that your mind is subconsciously pushing you to. And I didn't really know what that thing was or how to get there or how to reverse engineer. I did just know though, at the time, I was meditating and it was anchoring me into a place within myself where the peace that was arising seemed less contingent upon the external variables.
I'd be walking around campus And, you know, after a couple of weeks of doing this and I just noticed myself smiling more or things would happen that would typically cause stress. And they would just like brush off like water on Teflon. And so that that spoke to me. That made me curious. And I am like as type of a personality as you can get.
My mind goes, all right, you're doing it 15 minutes a day. It's going really well. What would happen if you did 15 hours a day? Like, where can you go to do something like that all day long? I had known of like Eat, Pray, Love and that sort of thing. So I thought I was going to go. There's still like jokes because I was in a fraternity at the time, like fraternity members and sorority people.
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Chapter 7: How does self-love relate to happiness?
Chapter 8: How can we strengthen our intuitive knowing?
Most of our negative patterns, relationship woes, insecurities, they are not the result of not having enough will, energy, or patience. They are the result of old, stuck pain.
If you're someone struggling with this and you feel like there's something in me that comes up, I would start by, and this is where so many spiritual practitioners get stuck, is do you believe you are fundamentally whole or do you feel like you are fundamentally broken? If you are fundamentally whole, then your practice is about subtraction.
My direct experience has been we are fundamentally whole. And that is why I often say you need to descend if you want to transcend.
Corey Muscara. Thanks for being here, dude. Thanks, Andre. Yeah. One of my greatest joys on this podcast is getting to see these different individuals online who are sharing similar inspiring content around meditation, mindfulness, spirituality, and getting to connect in person and feel like, oh, we're going to be great friends off the bat. Yeah, likewise.
Yeah, it's really cool to dig into your story too and see your life as a former monk and becoming a best-selling author, cultivating quite the audience online and proliferating wisdom in these modern times. Something that really resonates with me, also the name of your book titles is this idea of like how we can stop missing our lives
think as you start to realize what a gift this life is, you realize to the degree we've been unconscious for so much of it and living life through the perception of our own conditioning. So that phrasing of like, stop missing your life really resonates with me because I feel like
for many different periods of my life, I've been keenly aware of the passing of time and how aware I am and present I am during those periods and the times that I really haven't been. And it's painful to realize those times you haven't been because you see what a gift this life is. And so what comes to mind when you hear that phrasing, stop missing your life?
And why was that so kind of motivating for you?
the first thing that comes to mind is uh how much i don't like the title of my book actually so i'm i'm grateful that you that that speaks to you and it does for a lot of people there's something confronting about the title as you're already acknowledging people can sense how much of their life is spent unconscious on autopilot and it is the reason we went with that title
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