Mike Capuzzi: Welcome back to another episode of The Author Factor Podcast. My guest today is Dean Graves. Dean is a renowned meditation teacher, mental health counselor, and multi book author with over 20 years of experience in the field. Through his expertise in mental health and deep spiritual understanding, he provides a holistic approach to healing and growth. Dean just published his fourth book, enigma of a spiritual exploration of humanity's relationship to creation. Congratulations, Dean. Welcome to the show.

Dean Graves: Thank you, Mike. Delighted to be here. Thank you for having me.

Mike Capuzzi: Yeah, and actually, you were just telling. You're working on number five, right?

Dean Graves: Working on number five, yeah.

Mike Capuzzi: So you're one of those, you got bit by the book author bug and you just keep going forward. So that's very good.

Dean Graves: Well, I keep learning new things, and when I keep sharing those with the audience that's interested.

Mike Capuzzi: Yeah, yeah, I get that. I totally get that. So, Dean, very brief introduction for my audience, share a little bit more about your background, what you've done, and if you could just bring us up to today what you're doing today to serve others.

Dean Graves: Well, I. In very brief summary, for the first 50 years of my life, I lived a conventional life. I couch it as being remarkably unremarkable. And I began a journey at about 50 years old that was not an unusual journey for people. I had what was an awakening, which is a misunderstood event. That is a point in our lives where we come to the awareness that all the stuff that we've been doing isn't making us happier. And so we began to look around for alternatives. And that's all an awakening is, is just that awareness that you need to do something different.

Dean Graves: And so I began a period of research, and the research was intense for a long period of time. I learned, I applied to myself the things that I was learning, and the time came to become a teacher. So I started conducting groups, I started doing keynote speaker addresses, started two podcasts, as I say, four books, all of which are different levels of the same topic. The fifth topic will be. Fifth book will be the same topic, just a continuation of the same sort of thing. And my objective with this most recently published book, which just actually came out September 1 to the bookstores, is to hopefully have that serve as a trigger for a new age of enlightenment, which I understand is a very bold statement. But in order, if you look at the first age of enlightenment, what was transformative was information and people's awareness of that information. And consequently, we have made some progress.

Dean Graves: We've backslided in a lot of ways from that awareness period. But it's time for a new age of awareness. And the purpose of the book is to provide the nucleus of that information for others and begin the process of self healing and advancing their consciousness evolution.

Mike Capuzzi: So, again, congratulations, because we're talking literally just a few days ago.

Dean Graves: Yeah.

Mike Capuzzi: And again, congratulations on the book you're working on, too. So thank you, Dean. I always like to ask my nonfiction book author guests, you know, who should read their book, right? Because there's someone listening to this podcast that, or hopefully several people listening that ought to read your books. But when you wrote the most recent book, Enigma of consciousness, who did you write that book for? What is that person either experiencing, not experiencing. What are they feeling that should cause them to want to read this book?

Dean Graves: Stress. They're experiencing, and everybody experiences stress. Stress is our teacher. But we misunderstand stress and its purpose and learning what stress is. Learning to become aware of stress is providing the opportunity that stress is providing us with dispelling the erroneous hegemonies that pervade our culture as a world population and providing people with a basis of understanding of the nature of creation and our relationship to it. And that, for me and for those who I have been working with for a number of years now, has been transformative because it gives them license to explore, to surrender their false perceptions of self and begin to recognize and release their authentic self.

Mike Capuzzi: So, does someone who is someone who's listening to this right now, do they have to be on that journey of awakening that you were at age 50? Or could they be hearing this for the first time, and they're still like, do you have to be on that pathway, Dean, in order to be open to this? Or can it just be literally hearing the message in the book and really being that in transforming you like that?

Dean Graves: Everybody's on the path, whether they're aware of it or not. Enlightenment is synonymous with the process of consciousness, evolution. And enlightenment is a misunderstood concept. We perceive because the successes that the Buddha had and where obviously famous, we perceive enlightenment as a destination. But enlightenment is the path, and so everyone is on the path. Some people are aware of it. Most others are not aware of it. And so, consequently, becoming aware that you're on the path, if you're not experiencing, if you're not getting happier day by day, then you're off in the weeds.

Dean Graves: And so, consequently, the objective is to bring more people to the path, get them out of the weeds, and allow them to pursue to the degree that they are willing and able to follow the path.

Mike Capuzzi: There's so many questions I have okay, when you speak of enlightenment, I'm sure a lot of listeners are not really sure what you're specifically referring to. And you're right. Maybe they picture Buddha or something like that. Can you share a little bit more, Dean, what you mean by that?

Dean Graves: Well, we are consciousness. Consciousness is a renewed popular topic with philosophers particularly, and they’ve established a subcategory of philosophy and philosophy of the mind. So enlightenment is the process of healing in that we are designed to create a false perception of self, a hierophant. We exist within a range of consciousness, and that is an inherent characteristic of this range of consciousness universe wide. And we learn by analogy, which is comparison and contrast. So we have experiences through the lens of this hierophant that we create. And almost invariably, we experience a lot of what we don't like. And the purpose of that is to know what we do like when we do encounter it.

Dean Graves: And so anyone experiencing stress is experiencing life through the lens of their hierophant of their false perception of self, false values, yada, yada, yada, so on and so forth. The process of healing is becoming aware, essentially in a two step process that are not mutually exclusive. They're parallel. First, to heal the emotional baggage that we've collected as a result of the stress and or slash suffering. Suffering is just repeated, stressed, and healing that emotional baggage which heals a lot of our distortions of perception, and then becoming aware of the beliefs that we've incorporated into this hierophant, into this ego, into this false identity. All the same thing, no difference. There's just different names for the same thing. And as we do that, then we begin to become aware of our authentic self that is already there.

Dean Graves: We're not getting anything. We're getting rid of stuff. And so the healing process is healing these false perceptions of self, recognizing and being our authentic self, and propelling ourselves farther along the evolutionary path which is purely spiritual, has nothing to do with physicality. Physicality is a result of our mind. Our mind tells our body, which includes our brain, how to be. And so as humans, we experience a lot of physical difficulties, physical illnesses, so forth. Almost all of that is as a result of how our mind has told our body to be. So as we heal, then our body heals, our perceptions heal, and we experience greater happiness.

Dean Graves: If you understand that bliss is the absence of stress, bliss is a condition of being. It's how a person is. So the less stress you experience that creates a void in our beingness, which is automatically filled with greater happiness. So happiness is not something that we can get. It's something that appears automatically when we reduce our stress, thereby reducing our false perceptions of self.

Mike Capuzzi: So this book that you just published is the fourth book. Are your previous three books, Dean? Is it sort of a sequence? Are they all individual books on specific topics? I looked at your website on Amazon. Tell me a little bit about your author journey. When did you write your first book? How long ago?

Dean Graves: 2012? Actually, I wrote a few books before that that were horrible. I'm not a good writer. I'm one of these people that has to go back over it and over it and over it and over numerous times. Some people have friends. They sit down and write, and it's perfect the first time they write it. But I don't have that luxury. So I have to go back and rewrite and rewrite. Oftentimes have a scenario where I'll be writing at night and I think, my God, I've just written the greatest piece of literature that there ever was.

Dean Graves: And then I go to sleep and I get up the next morning and read what I wrote the night before. And I swear a third grader snuck in and rewrote what I had written the night before. So I have to redo it and revise it and improve it. And that's the work process of writing. You have to live with it for a while, go back and digest what you've written, and then rewrite it to how you want it to be. And how frequently you do that is really how adept you are you have become at writing by doing the process. In other words, you can become more diagnostic as you write, the more frequently you write.

Mike Capuzzi: So in the context of your service to others, your business, how important are these books? Obviously, you're writing, getting ready to write your fifth one. But how, you know, in the context of your business, because, again, the purpose of this podcast is to inspire others to maybe write that first book, maybe write that fifth book, but to share, you know, to share whatever it is they're meant to share, you know? Why do you keep writing books, Dean? Like, what is it about book authoring, book publishing, book readers? That's, you know, having you. Because it's not easy, right? It's not easy to write a book. And you just said you're not, you know, maybe you're not the most natural, right?

Dean Graves: Well, you get to go to work in a, you know, a polo shirt or sweater in winter so that, you know, there's that.

Mike Capuzzi: There is that.

Dean Graves: Or you can stay in your fuzzy slippers all day if you there is that, for sure.

Mike Capuzzi: But why books? I always like to ask that, like, especially nowadays, right? You could have. You do have two podcasts, there's YouTube channels. But why are books important to you as an author?

Dean Graves: Because you can put into writing much more detail and explain in much more depth what it is that you're trying to convey than you can do in the spoken word or in a video. For someone to sit down and watch a video that you've done that may contain the same information that you can put into a book, they'd be sitting watching for two weeks. The video with the same content and the resource, you can make notes in it, you can go back and reread it, you can compare it to other contexts that you may be considering. And it's just an invaluable tool. There's been a revitalization of interest in books, and bookstores are thriving as a result of the additional interest or the renewed interest in books. So people are reading again. I don't know why, but they are reading again. And it's made books much more of a viable medium to transmit information than it was for a number of years.

Dean Graves: You know, 2030 years, we just had a void of people that read. And so that's transformed again. And it's a very opportune time to be putting quality product out there.

Mike Capuzzi: Yeah. Now, are you self published, dean, or are you working through a publisher?

Dean Graves: Well, working through a publisher, it's actually a London publisher that creative inks is the name of the publisher. They're a very large publisher, they're international, and I just found them. The way every author finds a publisher, you just send out enough notices and ask them to look at it, and one of them will click.

Mike Capuzzi: So I always like to ask this question, especially for multi book authors. And your book author journey now spans 14, almost 15 years. What have you learned, Dean, on your author journey? Whether it was from your first book, maybe even your most recent book, that you're not gonna do in your fifth book. What have you learned either during the writing process, the publishing process, even the process after the promotion, marketing. That is something you'd wanna warn someone who has yet to go through that process, who has yet maybe write that first book or market their first book. What is a lesson that you've learned along your author journey?

Dean Graves: Well, it's not a warning, but I was naive in my expectations of what a publisher will do for you. And so consequently, you know, I thought, well, you know, I've written this wonderful piece of work, and I give it to them, and then that's all I have to do. And it doesn't work that way. You become the primary marketing agent for the book even though you have a publisher. I mean, they can do their connections with all the wholesalers and bookstores and all that stuff, but you're the one that is actually selling the book. And so that ongoing marketing and the life of the book is dependent upon you also. So, you know, it's not a matter of, okay, I got the bookshelves full, you know, with my book right now, and I've done little marketing, so I'm going to leave it alone. If you do, the book will die.

Dean Graves: So consequently, you have to continuously market the book. Personal appearances, all the media that we have, the social media, and all those advertising marketing vehicles that we have. The more that you spread the word, the more it spreads itself. In other words, word of mouth is actually what you're looking for to spread. Unless you've got a lot of money to do national advertising, which most often.

Mike Capuzzi: Right, right. Yeah. You're the first person who's shared it in such a way, you know, instantly connected with you. You're right. You know if you stop that promotion, that marketing, the book will die. You know, there's, you know, untold number of stories of authors who have stacks of boxes of books in their closet. So, you know, very powerful analogy. And I always share it on this podcast.

Mike Capuzzi: Like typically, I believe writing the book is the easy part, even doesn't mean it's easy. But relative to what you're suggesting about the consistent, persistent use and promotion, that's the challenge because that's the long game of it, of being a book author. So, Dean, first of all, I appreciate again, your time today, multi book authorization. You've impacted a lot of folks. You're on the author Factor podcast, which is all about that special ripple effect that is created by creating a quality book. What is the author factor meant to you?

Dean Graves: Well, I am very grateful for what you're doing, not just for me personally, but providing people with guideline guidance and their own efforts, giving them possibly confidence in order to write that book and undergo the process, but to understand the business a little bit better in what all is involved with marketing the book, writing a book and becoming an author.

Mike Capuzzi: Very good, Dean. How can my listeners learn more about you? And I know your books are on your website, but where's the best place to buy your books?

Dean Graves: Any bookstore. Amazon. You know, so many people use Amazon. The bookstores don't like Amazon to sell the same book, but they're so huge. You know, all the publishers send all their books to Amazon as well as sell it through all the distributors and so forth. All of my books are available in either ebook form or print copy through Amazon or through your favorite bookstore. And I highly encourage people to support their local bookstore because that's the ultimate point of sale for any author.

Mike Capuzzi: Well, Dean, I appreciate your time today. Congratulations, and I hope this fourth book is a great success. And good luck and best wishes on your fifth book.

Dean Graves: Thank you, Mike. I enjoyed our conversation.