Capsule #2: The Most Heartbreaking Story You Will Ever Hear: A Saga of Love, Betrayal, and Redemption

Dive into the riveting narrative of Munir Harb, whose life begins to resemble a cinematic romance when he finds himself ensnared in an emotionally charged relationship. As Munir navigates the complexities of love and empathy, he becomes deeply invested in his partner's life-threatening health battle, experiencing the agony and emotional burden as his own.

However, the path leads to unexpected revelations that challenge everything he knows about trust and deception. Faced with profound betrayal, Munir embarks on a transformative journey across continents—from the depths of despair in Poland to a profound period of self-discovery in Lebanon. This gripping tale explores themes of identity, healing, and the power of human resilience, leaving viewers to uncover the shocking truths hidden beneath the surface.

WATCH THE FULL EPISODE:

🔴 YOUTUBE : https://youtu.be/HK1nfpW-_8U?si=W0fEMr-DRzXrOoOi

🟢 SPOTIFY: https://open.spotify.com/show/1pmZ4zWzryf5QMSC88sxs2

⚪️ APPLE: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-kamal-jahid-show/id1684081392


MUNIR HARB:

https://munirharb.com/

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:00

Yeah, I got caught in this crazy scheme. It was almost like a movie where I was dating this girl who, over the course of a year, through very subtle means, through hacking my trust and my naivety, while at the same time love bombing me, as people love this word. Yeah, over the course of a year, her health began deteriorating and, you know, the cancer diagnosis sprung up. She was losing her hair, she was losing weight. A lot of tragedy was happening in her life and again, because of my lack of boundaries at that time the boundaries of the side where I wasn't able to stop myself from getting involved in her hardship, I got deeply involved and I took it very to heart and I began to really suffer. I think through some sense of heightened empathy, I took on a lot of her pain and a lot of her suffering and I began to suffer myself and I began to get sick and my body began to fail, because this was the first kind of flash of darkness I'd had in a long streak of light. Wow, and in that flash of darkness it wasn't something I could fix. I was so used to solving problems like that easily. This one's bigger, a bigger one. What do you do with cancer? Cancer man, what do you do with cancer? I don't have a yeah. So that was a long time, and we grew very close over that period. A lot of things happened, but tragedy did occur, and it wasn't that she had died or something along those lines. But I found out that, through an almost unbelievable scheme, she was lying oh my god about the cancer thing, about cancer, what about the falling hair? And she was just all fake in it, correct, oh my god.

Speaker 1: 1:58

Even though this experience was a loss of innocence moment for me and it caused me true hell mentally and physically, it also cultivated in me an ultimate sense of forgiveness because, yes, there are people in this world that you have to defend yourself against, but that should always be a reluctant thing. Boundaries shouldn't be reluctant, because ideal humanity is connected. Ideal humanity is almost one, one heart. We want to. We shouldn't be a part of each other's lives as much as humanly possible, because we need each other. We thrive like that tribe. So, boundaries, when you do have to put them down, they shouldn't be reluctant, and you shouldn't want to, but you you just have to, in the same way that if somebody breaks into your home, you don't want to kill somebody. You don't want to hurt anybody, but you have to, you have to.

Speaker 1: 2:54

So how did you take that experience about all these lies and what was your reaction to it and how did you grow from that? Well, see that story. Yeah, it took a long time. I won't lie to you. I I left poland.

Speaker 1: 3:11

I was extremely hurt, to the point where I had a mental health crisis because it wasn't actual. There were many layers of what had been hacked in me to allow that lie to happen my ego, this superhero sense that I was doing something good for her, this sense of duty that I've always had toward my mother to take care of her. Since the beginning of my life, I can only remember this sense of duty that I have to take care of my mom, which we also share culturally. And, having been in Poland, I think that I carried this guilt that I was away from my mom. So this opportunity to help her fill that gap. You see. So after I had lost my confidence, lost my pride, felt like a fool, but also was physically ill, the betrayal man I cannot imagine I left Poland, which had been my happy place, right. So you said like okay, no more Poland or I went back to the US. I spent a couple of months just being back with my tribe, right, being in a bowl of chicken soup. That's what I had to see. I needed mom, I needed friends, annoying taxi drivers, familiarity, right, familiarity meant safety. And after that period, I decided I was in the US for two months. I decided that my brother, he, was in the US as well, also going through a transitional period. So we decided to go to Poland and try to play music together, right, and that's what we did. We formed our little band.

Speaker 1: 4:49

I realized that if I had to fix Mind you, those two months were not easy for me. This was nightmares very often, a lot of darkness. I started to have what can only be described as a mental health crisis. Where, imagine this person. You thought you were this great man, this good man, this smart, sharp guy who can navigate the world and has been like a traveler and just like kicking ass throughout your twenties. And then suddenly you get humiliated and betrayed and you realize you're not as great as you thought you were. It was a massive hit to my ego, massive to the point that I you know, as we know in in spiritual traditions shedding the ego, so to speak, is the way. Death of ego is the way to enlightenment, it's the path to enlightenment. And I think in the Christian or Catholic tradition, these moments where you take such a huge ego hit that you fall apart mentally. This is known as the dark night of the soul.

Speaker 1: 5:54

And I went through my dark night of the soul and it was not a night, it was many months, nights, many nights, um, and it took a lot of recontextualizing to to decide that, one I didn't want to lose my happy place, which was sopote. I had to take it back. Ah, the glorious sopote, I had to take it back. And two, I wanted to go there with a little bit of familiarity, which was my bro, and you know, me and Sammy have always been close and we both played music. So we thought let's have our little adventure. So by the end of those nine months that we spent, we had become experienced musicians. Sammy had become a confident singer. He went off to Warsaw, went on the Voice of poland and became quite a popular singer here today.

Speaker 1: 6:37

Semi-files, yeah, yeah, I decided that in that year this dark night had just kept getting darker and darker. But also I was emerging with like an identity, kind of a paradigm for the awakening I was going through and I recognized that I'm so full of residual, a residual sense of self that doesn't exist anymore, that was destroyed, this idea of a Munir who's you know strong and an ego and he's cool and he's you know whatever dominant. He was dead. He was just, he was just dead. And I was still clinging to him and looking back at him and clinging to him was just hurting me more because it wasn't me. So I decided that I had to actively start from scratch and I tried in the most literal way possible. I stripped my entire life of almost all pleasantries, of pleasant things, desires.

Speaker 1: 7:37

I went full monk, you went full Ramadan, full-time Ramadan. I moved to Lebanon. So ancestrally I'm from Lebanon. I had not lived there or really been there since we were kids and I always had an estranged relationship with my dad because my parents divorced early on. I wanted to know his story and I wanted to understand if he went through what I'm going through now.

Speaker 1: 8:05

So when I went to Lebanon, it was in a state of being totally on a vegan diet. I was exclusively taking cold showers. I was 100% celibate, completely, you know, no alcohol, no smoking, absolutely nothing. And also, and how long did you do that? That was a little over a year. Whoa, you're a gladiator man and it was incredible, you know, wow, massive respect. So I have to tell us how did you manage, man, like, as you were going through? Now you're fasting, right, yeah, but like, but once you like Disneyland of what you did. Once you kick it off, though, it's very easy, because nothing feels better than that lightness you get from a reset, or just feeling what felt like purity at the time, right.

Speaker 1: 8:54

Anyway, in Lebanon I I bonded with my dad to a degree that I look back on it as the greatest decision I've made in my entire life to go back and get to know him, because not only do we have a relationship now, but we have a. You know if, in part of the hero's journey, this mythology arc, you're supposed to reconcile with the dad or kind of just know his place in your life and reform it. That's exactly what happened and to this day, my dad and I are just like friends and he, he takes me seriously, you know, I think I he looks to me as his confidant. More importantly, he feels that I understand him and I do. I saw his side of things.

Speaker 1: 9:38

So after that monk year, you know, and, mind you, that monk year was almost like a I don't want to call it a disorder, but it was very self-flagellating, it was very much I should deprive myself, because I spent all these years partying and, you know, enjoying my life and, look, it led me to that disaster. That was my, my like, my comeuppance. I had it coming. I had this cancer situation coming. I had it coming. I had this cancer situation coming.

Speaker 1: 10:20

So when I deprived myself of all those things, it was almost my way home in Lebanon alone, for weeks on end, in deep silence, that I started to hear the compass again.

Speaker 1: 10:28

Wow, and I think that's what a lot of people, that's why a lot of people, lose track of the compass that we talked about earlier, the one that sets you on your hard path, which I believe is the closest you can get to whatever idea of God you have. You know, if God has a plan for you, it is in listening to your heart, quite literally, the urges of that compass. I got back in touch with it in such a strong way that I really stopped doubting any step of my life. You know, it just went to. I just started to have a series of events that led me to my current work, and then the amazing situation I have and the amazing business partner that I have and I'm a lucky person, you know and almost all of that happened in passivity, not in an active effort. I simply said, if the compass is pointing that way, we say yes and we let it happen.