INTRO
I traveled to Cincinnati, Ohio to meet up with Daniel Epstein a marketing and innovation consultant based in Toronto Canada. Searching to fill the God-sized hole in his own life, Daniel created Portraits in Faith, a project which combines his passions of global travel and photography with
helping others heal and bringing people of different faiths and cultures together.
BUMPER
I am Tajci.
At 19 I was a superstar and I was lost inside. I left it all behind, switched continents and started all over. Years later I found myself lost again. This time in the American dream.
This is a story about awakening. About living the life you were created for. About going inward and discovering the joyous and purposeful person you and I are both meant to be.
This is “Waking Up In America.”
TAJCI
I’ve been waiting so long for this moment Daniel, thank you so much.
DANIEL
Thank you
TAJCI
I was on your show Portraits in Faith and when we first, when I first heard about you through a friend I went and watched the videos and these beautiful stories and I spent several hours crying… in tears realizing just how beautiful it is what you’ve done collecting these stories of faith that
prove to us and show to us how connected we all are. And now you are on my show! Thank you! So let’s set up for our audience what led you to the point where you started with the Portraits in Faith.
DANIEL
Well I think it’s best summarized what a psychiatrist once said to me. He was referring me to another psychiatrist and he described me as a young man who wasn’t happy about much.
So I think my story starts with a lot of false beliefs about myself that I think many people have. Some of my false beliefs were shouldn’t have been born. I was a mistake. I’m a victim. Nothing in life is fair. How much longer? I was never really suicidal but I often thought about death and I think a lot of how I felt was, how much longer? Please, how much longer? And I think that there’s nothing so unusual unfortunately about that. I think that the way my story played out was a lot of failed relationships, a lot of me using other people particularly women in relationships to…
I somehow thought that if I could surround myself with other people I would keep from going crazy. And of course it’s hard to love somebody who doesn’t accept themselves or love themselves. So I think I was just a pretty miserable self-focused person for a long time.
TAJCI
And what was your life situation at that time?
DANIEL
Well I’m a professional. I had gotten my business degree, my masters I was working in a big company, so I was trying to be successful but I found that even my interpersonal relationships at work suffered to some degree in the same way that my relationships, my personal relationships did.
TAJCI
And we hear this so many times and on my show it seems every guest, a lot of guests who say… and whose lives looked perfect on the outside, it’s what we… if you check all the marks it’s there… why aren’t you happy?
DANIEL
You know I think that I have a theory. Now in my professional work I’m a marketing consultant and I do work with cognitive and behavioral science and you know unique to human beings is the prefrontal cortex of the brain and that’s the part of our brain that plans and can’ think about the future. Animals don’t think about the future. And I figure that the neurosis that comes from the prefrontal cortex, the over worrying about the future, the anxiety about the future, the depression about the past, the things that this prefrontal cortex uniquely allows us, it comes with this neurosis that can only be overcome by the spiritual journey. Even the non religious spiritual journey and that… you know…
I believe that there are two false beliefs in life that summarize this whole story of what ails us and I think that is the belief that we are not enough and the belief that we won’t have enough. And I think everything’s a variation on that story and I had both of those and I still struggle with those. Am I enough, will I have enough for the journey?
TAJCI
Universal thought… I don’t want to say desire but…
DANIEL
Craziness. Personal universal craziness and I believe that some kind of journey, for me a spiritual journey was necessary to examine those false beliefs and call them out and say that’s not true. I actually am more than enough and you know what? I’ve got a lot. I’ve got a lot.
TAJCI
So were you, in your career in your path… was it something that you designed or was it influenced by your parents or by the society or how did you end up in this place?
DANIEL
Well professionally I ended up there probably because of the fear of not having enough or not being enough so I was… I have a very analytical mind. My father was a professor and I think my mind is like his mind and I did very well in professional subjects. I was a CPA first and then had my MBA in International Marketing. I think I was gravitated to these organizations that were up or out promote from within, because as a way for me to externally demonstrate that I was enough.
TAJCI
Right.
DANIEL
Those professions paid better than my parents’ teaching professions so that gave me the sense that I would have enough. Now I have to say, I mean that those fears of not being enough or having enough do have some payoffs, right? I pushed myself to be successful in my career.
TAJCI
Yes and what happens so often is that we disconnect from the spiritual, from the true value, where our true value is, and so much emphasis becomes on this external validation and external “I have enough. I matter enough to this company.” “My bank account shows that I am valuable that I’m… that I have worth.” And that has been a challenge for where we are and you know you have places in the world obviously, where people are saying what are you talking about? I don’t have even basic security, even that basic need is not covered and maybe there there’s more spiritual connection and I’ve seen that in your work which we’ll talk about when we come back.
BREAK
TAJCI
I’m talking to Daniel Epstein, a marketing consultant and founder of Portraits in Faith.
And so, we’re at the point where, you have a great, successful career and you are at the point where like you said, you’re saying when is it gonna stop?
DANIEL
It mainly showed up for me in relationships. I think I really struggled to… to know what I wanted and to be honest with other people about what I wanted. So I… what is somewhat affectionately or unaffectionately referred to is taking hostages. I would be in these long relationships that never went anywhere and I felt over time that I was lying about my intentions in relationships, and I went through a series of these in a short period of time and… I remember being at breakfast one morning with a friend of mine in Boston and I just said… and a couple of events had happen but I just said to her, this friend of mine, I said Jodie, I need help and I don’t know what it is. I just need, I need help and I say that that was my first authentic prayer.
TAJCI
You asked for help. You actually showed your vulnerability, you admitted to another human being that you needed help.
DANIEL
And it wasn’t even necessarily just to my friend that I was saying it. I think it was just an… I think… I think I was just tired… a saying that friends of mine have is like: I was sick and tired of being sick and tired. And i just… i just felt in a way it was hitting bottom for me but it was more of an emotional hitting bottom I wasn’t an alcoholic in a gutter, or drug addict with needles in my arm, but I was just like that but inside emotionally.
And I felt like something needed to change. And I feel like that’s when shifting began to happen in my life. I wanted to heal. You know it’s interesting I once…
I once was given a hand analysis by someone, a friend of mine who is into palmistry and hand analysis and the teacher said, Oh you want to heal. And I said heal myself or others? And she said you want to heal. You want to reclaim every part of yourself and in so doing you won’t be able to help but heal others.
TAJCI
Oh, beautiful
DANIEL
And I think that you know, so what happened for me there was no big thunder clap at that moment when I said that to my friend Jodie. But what happened is, I was, I feel like the universe started making available to me healers and ways of healing. Therapy, different healers, I’ve worked with group work and I started to realize that I was the source of my problems.
TAJCI
And on your website Portraits in Faith, in your bio, your story, you mentioned that you grew up Jewish.
DANIEL
Yes
TAJCI
So you had some foundation.
DANIEL
You know I had religious foundation and I was quite active in the Jewish community. I worked in the Jewish community but I can’t say that I had a spiritual base. I don’t think I really ever understood spiritually what it was knew religiously, and so in some ways I had to start from scratch and also I have always believed in many paths.
I grew up Jewish in the South, I got very exposed to the affect of the Praise the Lord, very outward affect of African-American Christianity. I was at camps with African-Americans, Catholics, Christians in the seventies just at the end of the peace era, and I’ve always believed in many paths.
So when I came upon this time where needed spiritual help I didn’t just look to my Judaism. I looked anywhere I could find it. Because as that teacher said I wanted to heal I wanted to reclaim every part of myself.
TAJCI
Okay, so your waking up moment is a stretch over time where you gently waking up
DANIEL
Yes. Actually one of my favorite… I have a couple favorite monks. One of them is Anthony de Mello who is no longer alive but he says, the first thing you need to know about waking up is you don’t want to wake up
TAJCI
Oh, powerful!
DANIEL
It was shown to me that I was not a very grateful person and I had so much to be grateful for and so I think that was the first disease that had to be cured something I still struggle with today whether or not I am fully grateful for all that is in my life.
TAJCI
Yea, interesting you say that because gratitude is actually one of the responses that we that’s really accessible to all of us and it’s easy to start small you know, you can be grateful for your cup of tea. You can… you don’t have to… you can be grateful for a tree outside that doesn’t belong to you.
These little little things we can be grateful for which then teach us, help us to get better and better at gratitude and gratitude shifts us toward that awareness that, that waking up, when we live in the gratitude then we are accessing the grace. We are aware of the grace in our lives.
DANIEL
I believe that too and that’s why I think it’s not necessary to believe in God to be on the spiritual journey, because I believe that gratitude is the essence that overcomes the craziness of the prefrontal cortex. I believe that I believe that as you just said I believe that gratitude is the grace that permeates our lives regardless of whether we believe in God or not.
TAJCI
And it’s such a connecting point. It can really connect the nonbeliever, the secular and really truly religious people. We can all… that’s the point: gratitude and grace in which we truly connect.
DANIEL
Absolutely.
TAJCI
So when we come back we’ll talk about now what happened after you’ve awakened.
BREAK
TAJCI
The first thing that you have to know about waking up is that you don’t want to wake up. Isn’t that so true? I’m not a morning person, and I do not like to wake up. But when you know that it’s a part of waking up, that change is hard, that this is going to be… nobody ever said it was easy… but when you accept that this is the part of the journey and a gift and you become a grateful for that very pain that you have to go through as your waking up, that then brings us to the grace and really everything… like I’ve heard somewhere, the naked tree becomes this magic, this beautiful gift that you don’t see a naked tree, you see the change of season.
So now, you are there in the process and how did you then come up with Portraits in Faith?
DANIEL
I needed to feel that’s something was bigger than me. I needed to… weather was honoring my parents and not criticizing them but honoring them and saying that they were bigger than me. Whether a Divine Spirit was bigger than me, I needed to allow myself to be small and so I start praying on my knees and I’ve done that twice a day for let’s call it ten years.
TAJCI
How did you get to that idea?
DANIEL
You know what? I just heard about people hitting their knees and people who didn’t know how to pray which I was certainly someone like that, just start with ‘please’ in the morning and ‘thank you’ at night. So I have adopted many different practices from many different faith traditions, non-religious traditions, one of the things that really helped me at one time, given that I said to you I felt like a mistake for a long time, was I learned from my shaman friend that in the shamanistic tradition it takes the decision of seven ancestors for a child to be born.
So there could be no mistakes in that universe. So I just picked and choose… and chose from different traditions anything that would help me put myself back together and see through the lies the spiritual lies I told myself that I wasn’t enough and that I wouldn’t have enough.
And as part of that journey I was once at a summer photography workshop where you had to come up with an idea and start shooting right away and the idea of Portraits in Faith came to me and it wasn’t so unusual. I’ve done a lot of interfaith work in my life being Jewish from Atlanta, but the idea of this project that I would go interview people about their spiritual journeys and make a black-and-white portrait of them was born at a workshop in Maine, I believe it was over 10 years ago now.
TAJCI
And these portraits are beautiful. The stories are just… really enlightening. when you see so many different faiths and backgrounds and yet you recognize what’s so unifying about all of them.
DANIEL
You know the most spiritual thing I’ve ever seen is not even from my own project. It was an IMAX movie about the Hubble telescope, where they show you these images of millions of galaxies even beyond what we… and all of a sudden the unfathomability of the divine became more in some ways more understandable to me. That the Universe is infantismal, it’s just beyond any comprehension. And yet we are here.
In fact there is one of my favorite little stories from Judaism is that in every person’s pocket, each pocket we should have a different slip of paper. In one pocket it should say “for my sake the world was created,” and then the other pocket it should say “from dust I was created to dust I’ll return.”
And you know, we are great beyond any understanding and we are infinitely small and insignificant at the same time. And I think that the spiritual journey for me has been a balance of my greatness and my insignificance and to just to know that that is the journey.
TAJCI
And then you have such wonderful platform, wonderful way of passing that on through your project Portraits in Faith.
DANIEL
Yeah, and Portraits in Faith is four hundred and fifty black-and-white portraits and stories from 27 countries. I was very lucky to have a global job with the big company so I’ve traveled the world many times over and I would hire producers as I went to each of these cities and said, I’m gonna be in your city or your country on these days, could you please find 4-5 people a day that I could interview about their spiritual journey and make a portrait of them. And at the beginning this was not about publication.
This was my own healing. And I figured because I believed in many paths, I figured if I could just hear people talk about their divine journey, their transformations, that I could draft off of those and it would somehow heal me.
And I don’t know if I could have articulated that at the beginning, but that’s just what happened, and so it felt good. I felt more and more whole the more these stories and people I met… very intimate connection. I mean I don’t think there’s anything more intimate that one’s spiritual story and I just love doing it and so I healed as I interviewed people.
Then two years ago I made the decision at much urging to begin sharing it and I was very lucky to get guidance from Ken Burns the award-winning documentary filmmaker and he said, have the courage to say this isn’t a film and… you know, everybody wants to make a PBS film.
TAJCI
Right, ’cause it was originally… was supposed to be documentary.
DANIEL
Yeah, that’s what I was thinking but you know if you have four hundred and fifty people you don’t make a documentary so, I wanted… and I didn’t want anyone to end up on the cutting room floor so I… we started a website and so we build the website over time one person’s portrait is added to the website every week and that’s PortraitsInFaith.org and people can sign up for Portrait of the Week or you can look through the 60 or so that we have posted so far.
TAJCI
Yes, and thank you… really thank you for doing that and for making it available for us. And one thing I noticed you know when I was… you interviewed me and then a year and a half later I’m watching it, previewing it and I’m thinking but I’ve grown. I already see the changes and so… it’s a moment because the spiritual journey is always expanding, always evolving and you know, in the Catholic tradition that growing closer to God, but it’s beautiful to just see these moments when these people were at the time that you capture them. That’s what’s Portrait is about right?
DANIEL
Yes and, I think the tough thing can be realizing that if you believe in this approach to life, if you choose the spiritual approach to life than every part of life is on the spiritual journey even when we weren’t where we ultimately want it to be.
Even the person who I might judge who is doing behaviors X, Y and Z… And I have to remember to bless everyone on their journey and some people may not even like that language. They are like: I don’t want your blessing but I still need to honor their journey and know that they are exactly where they’re supposed to be on the journey.
TAJCI
I like to connect music with the stories of my guests because music to me represents an expression or maybe sometimes even a trigger for opening up your heart, your awareness and allowing music to inspire and trigger the awakening. Or maybe you already started to wake up but you don’t want to really wake up, you know, then music helps you get out of bed right?
So… yea… I asked you to share something significant to you.
DANIEL
Yea, well I was brought up singing Hebrew melodies on the Sabbath and leadings you know I was very active in youth group and so one song I really love is “Eli atah v’odeka” which means, You are my God and I am grateful to you. You are our God we will praise you.
And again for me, that’s not an old white man with a beard in a chair it’s… When I say Eli atah v’odeka , it means I’m grateful for it all.
I’m grateful for all that is. And by the way I should mention, given my history with relationships that this journey has led me to my beautiful and wonderful wife Heidi, getting married for the first time at 51 but it’s just a blessing. I have two stepsons, so… I don’t know how this story ends but so far it’s better than I ever thought possible. And so, this is what I’m grateful for is that the journey has taken me to a place I never expected. So I’ll sing this simple tune for you.
SONG
Eli atah v’odeka, elohai aromemeka.
(From Hallel, Psalm 118)
TAJCI
Thank you for who you are and not for what you’re doing but your being is bringing to us.
DANIEL
Thanks so much
TAJCI
To replay and share Daniel’s story and check out many more visit us at WakingUpinAmerica.net and do visit Portraits in Faith.org
Until next time, thank you so much for watching.
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