Meet Tom Snow, author of the Set the Captives Free trilogy, who joins Mind Over Matter to discuss why willpower alone isn't enough to break repetitive thoughts.

Listeners will hear Tom's story of illness and recovery, and his take on finding a steady voice beneath overthinking.

About the Guest:

Tom Snow is a computer scientist turned author and founder of the Just To Be Clear teaching series. He wrote The Daily Stand, Set the Captives Free, and Set the Captives Free Too.

Key Takeaways:

• Tom describes overthinking as competing broadcasts — thoughts, other people, the world — drowning out a quiet voice.
• A recurring mental loop often has roots beyond the mental, including emotional, physical, or spiritual layers.
• If someone is in crisis, seek real, trusted help first.
• Once stable, he encourages seeking a felt sense of peace, rather than reasoning a problem away.
• His turning point came through a personal faith experience, which he credits for lasting peace despite hardships.
• He frames rumination not as weakness but as a signal worth examining rather than pushing away.

Connect With the Guest

Website: just2beclear.com

Substack: https://substack.com/@just2beclear1

Books: three titles including The Daily Stand and Set the Captives Free

Episode Chapters:

• [00:00] Welcome to Mind Over Matter & Meet Tom Snow (approx.)
• [03:00] Tom's Story: Facing Terminal Illness as a Teenager (approx.)
• [08:00] Why Willpower Alone Can't Quiet a Racing Mind (approx.)
• [13:00] What's Really Driving Repeated Mental Loops (approx.)
• [18:00] Practical Steps When You're Caught in a Loop (approx.)
• [22:00] Seeking Help First, Then Seeking Peace (approx.)
• [26:00] Tom's Books & Where to Find His Work (approx.)

🎙️ Want to Be a Guest on Healthy Mind, Healthy Life?

Send me a direct message on PodMatch.

👉 DM Me Here: https://www.podmatch.com/hostdetailpreview/avik

🌱 About Healthy Mind By Avik™️

Healthy Mind By Avik™️ Global Mental Wellness Podcast Network - focused, credible, no more identity clutter.

👉 Subscribe and be part of this healing journey.

Refer a Guest

Know someone who would be a great fit for one of our podcast shows? Email us at [email protected] with the subject line “Refer a Guest.” Requests without this subject line cannot be catered to.

Support Our Podcast: Support this Podcast

📬 Contact & Links

Brand: Healthy Mind By Avik™️

Contact Us

Based in: India & USA

🎧 All Podcast Shows

🤝 Be a Guest

📩 Newsletter Substack

👉 Join the LinkedIn Community

📌 Disclaimer - This episode is produced for educational and informational purposes only. All views expressed by the guest are their personal opinions alone and do not represent the views of the host or Healthy Mind by Avik™. The Network does not verify, endorse, or assume responsibility for any guest statements. Nothing in this episode constitutes medical, legal, financial, or professional advice, please consult a qualified professional before making any decisions. Listeners are encouraged to engage critically and independently with all content do not consume blindly. Use this content as a starting point for your own reflection and research, not as a substitute for professional guidance. Third-party content is referenced under fair use for informational purposes only. Guest speakers are solely responsible for their own statements.

If you have concerns about any content, please contact us here

By listening, you acknowledge and accept this disclaimer in full. Read detailed disclaimer here.

#podmatch #healthymindbyavik #podhub.club #mindovermatter #overthinking #mentalloops #faithandhealing #innerpeace #mentalwellness #ruminationrelief #spiritualwellness #findingpeace #christianfaith #personalgrowth #healingjourney #mindsetshift

00:00:08 Ria: Hello, listeners. We all know that feeling. The worry that circles back at three a m, the overthinking that follows you through, that follows you through the day like a shadow. The mental replay of a conversation you had about three weeks ago. We tell ourselves to just stop thinking about it, but somehow the loop tightens. What if the way out isn't about pushing harder against your own mind, but understanding what keeps pulling you back in the first place? Welcome to Mind over Matter. I'm Rhea, and this is where we explore the psychology behind the patterns that shape our lives. The invisible forces that keep us stuck, and the grounded practices that help us move forward with intention and clarity. Today I'm speaking with Tom snow about the mental loops we create and how we can learn to step outside of them without fighting ourselves in the process. Hi Tom, thank you so much for being here.

00:01:05 Tom Snow: Hello. Thanks for having me.

00:01:07 Ria: Will you please tell our audience a little bit about yourself and your journey?

00:01:12 Tom Snow: Sure. Well, um, I won't go into the whole story. It's in my first book, but, um, when I was sixteen, I was dying of cancer. Uh, terminal liver cancer. My mother had just died the year before from terminal liver cancer. Um, and I was faced with eternity and faced with death, and I was scared. I think anybody would be scared, but I was a teenager, and, um, I had some wonderful experiences. My mother was a believer. She had met the Lord and she had prayed for her boys. I'm the youngest of three. And, uh, it's in the first chapter, my first book, The Daily Stand. I won't in the end, I'll tell you that the books. But, uh, I was basically facing death and I was seeing visions and I was just. It scared me for what I could see. Eternity was going to be. And it ends up that I heard the audible voice of God. Uh. True believers can hear the still, small, quiet voice of God anytime. But, uh, I got a Moses burning in the bush, audible voice of God and shook the room. And, uh, he told me he loved me, and someday he'd provide my perfect mate for me. And I felt the love. The room was full of love. It was amazing. And so through a series of events ends up I find out how to meet the Lord. I asked him to come into my life. I, uh, when I did, he gave me a perfect peace that was no longer fear of death. I. I knew I was dying, but I was no longer afraid. And you know, it just. I understood where my. Why my mother wasn't afraid because now I was facing death. And a tumor grew inside of me from the size of a heart, as a rock, as a little walnut to larger than a football. Hard as a rock. And, uh. But I wasn't afraid. Ends up that, um, through a series of events in the book won't won't take. I can spend a half hour, forty five minutes telling you all the details. Won't, won't do it for today since it's a short half hour show. Um, and so by his wonderful grace, uh, I was learning to hear his still small, quiet voice. And one day he laid out some scriptures for me and he said, you know, he had completed everything at the cross. And he asked me if I wanted that healing. And at this point I, I was I had accepted death, I wasn't afraid, I knew where I was going. And so it was like it was kind of nonchalant. I was like, yeah, whatever. And I said, sure, whatever. In that moment, I felt a change within twenty four hours, that rock hard tumor larger than a football melted and dissipated, gone in twenty four hours. And so that's the beginning of a journey, walking with the true living God for the last fifty six years. Um, life is not easy. Not at all. I've gone through a failed marriage. I was in leadership in churches and saw church abuse, and I got kicked out of two churches because I stood up. Even though I was in secondary leadership, I stood up to the primary leadership and said, we're not going to we're not going to lie. We're not going to carry on. We're not going to hurt people. And I don't believe, you know, I believe in telling the truth. And if that hurts, it hurts. So life's not easy. I've gone through, uh, in not only cancer, early days, in later time. I've gone through three years ago, congestive heart failure, just recently gone through prostate cancer. Those have been taken care of medically. God doesn't always do the miracle. I mean, if he did, why wasn't my mother healed? If anything, I have a little side for like, why did I get healed? My mother didn't. You know, there's so many people who pray and ask God to help them. And God does help us, but it doesn't always answer prayers the way we think they should be answered. He answers them, but it's not the way we think. So that's that's the beginning of my of my journey.

00:06:08 Ria: Thank you so much for sharing something so personal. I think that was so inspiring to hear. Um, especially you having to face such difficulties at such a young age, I think must have nurtured a kind of wisdom that only comes through lived experience. I think it was also magical about how the tumor disappeared and how you've healed and, and how you've persisted throughout all of it. Uh, is your relationship with God something that has taught you how to break free from mental loops and stuff like that?

00:06:39 Tom Snow: Yeah. It's, uh, it's, it's the core to my, my being. It's the core to my life is my relationship with who I call Papa God. Um, the scripture says ABBA, father, that means papa. And so, uh, the depth of my life, everything that I do goes from that relationship. I'm not religious. I'm not spiritual. Uh, my first book again tells you how I was broken out of fake spirituality and fake religiosity. Um, I wake up in my day begins with asking Papa how he's doing what he wants. He asks me the same. We chit chat. We can have a still, small, quiet voice. We can know by the peace of God that rules in our heart and unknowing. Uh. A level that peace that passes understanding. And we need that because we're going to walk through life. And life is not easy. Anybody who thinks it's a bowl of cherries and it's bunny rabbits and rainbows hasn't lived or bought into some baloney. And it's not the truth. Life is difficult. Life is hard. That's okay. We can. But if we know if our core. If our foundation is tied into the one and only true and living God who spoke the world into being, who holds the world together by the word of his mouth. If we're in tune with him, we can walk through hell and back. And that's the core of my life. So it's the foundation for all the good, the bad, and the ugly.

00:08:29 Ria: Mhm. Absolutely. Also, Tom, when people go through life in addition to the hardships that they actually face, a lot of people are constantly stuck in a mental loop, like ruminating, replaying, spiraling. And the instinct is to try to stop thinking about it. But this hardly works. Why is that so?

00:08:52 Tom Snow: Well, they're depending on mental gymnastics. And while God gave us wonderful brains look, it's hard to tune out the garbage. Okay? There are Voices that we hear like we we can hear the voice of God. But you have to learn how to how to hear that. It's it's a still, small, quiet voice. And it's the most quiet of all the voices that are broadcasting around us. If you imagine a radio and all the stations were blaring at you at once, how do you tune in to the one quiet one? That's a whisper while these others are blaring, right? And our own thoughts are one of the loudest broadcast systems we have, our whole thought process. We're just constantly, as you're talking about going through these mind, you know, exercises, gymnastics, trying to figure it all out and it's just blasting. And then we have the world, you know, doesn't it? It could be friends and family. It can be people we look up to and they're blasting. And then you got the world who some are good and some are bad, and they're blasting. And there's all these these radio stations blasting at us. So it's really hard for mental gymnastics to do it, you know? And while I appreciate all the value of good psychology and good mental, you know, learning, it's still not enough to do by ourselves.

00:10:28 Ria: I understand. Um, I agree, I think to recognize, to recognize what's happening in your mind is this broadcast of the, the various stimuli that we keep on receiving in this world and to identify and to actually make an active effort to find the small voice that you're telling us about can be very, very transformative. Um, when someone finds themselves caught in these loops repeatedly, not just once in a while, but almost like a pattern, what's usually driving that underneath? What makes the mind latch on to certain things and then refuse to let go.

00:11:04 Tom Snow: Well, I think that there's there's different, different things we have to look at. Uh, is it mental? Emotional, uh, is it physical things, you know, are things that are just driving that thought process or is it a spiritual? And so yes, there's all these mental things that are, we're dealing with and, um, we get triggered and we repeat, you know, by a trigger and then we'll think all about it again, right? We'll just like you say, we'll keep going into this, this repeat cycle. And we have people and they'll say things they can trigger. But I think one of the things that we don't recognize as much is that there's a very large spiritual component out there, and there's really only two sources of power in the universe. Now, I know people would argue there's ten thousand. And I understand that, and I'll explain it. But there's two real sources. There's the God of the universe. Papa God, who created heaven and earth, who spoke it into being and holds it together by the word of his mouth. I am a science major. I'm not a religion theologian. You know. I'm a computer scientist. I ran my business for forty five years. I'm very pragmatic, very mathematical and science based. And I proved by the atom in my books, by the very structure of the atom, why God's Word is true, that he holds everything together by the word of his mouth, why he spoke the world into being in six sentences over six days. And so if that's true, and if the atom, which is the base of everything that holds us together, if all that's true, that his word is true. Therefore, he is the one and only true and living God. When he says the other power is the devil who was kicked out of heaven, the God of this world. And he took a third of the angels with him all the what we call demons, but they're angels of light, and they look. They put on a big masquerade, a big front that they're telling the truth. And so they are actually ten thousand options. There's God on his side. Then there's ten thousand options on the devil, on the ruler of this world side, all this demons that are giving all these spiritual masquerades, appearing as angels of light and trying to sway people spiritually to fall into one way or another. It doesn't matter. There's ten thousand options of this, what I'll call false spirituality. And there are false angels. False. And they're telling you, well, get all this ancient wisdom and, and, and you get wisdom from aliens and you get wisdom from this. And you can hear the ancient masters and you get all the, the religions. And the problem is it's just ten thousand masks masquerading. But if you study it and it's in my third book, my most recent book, I'll, you know, it actually, their goal is to mess with humans like they hate God. They were kicked out of heaven. And their goal, they know where they're going. In the end, they're going to the pit and they're actually trying to ruin humans because God chose us as his special beings, right? Angels, they get to see God. They don't have to believe. They don't have to have faith. They don't have to. They see him as presence. We don't. And so, you know, we have to walk a walk by faith. Well, that is totally different. And the enemy, the devil and his demons hate us. And they put on these ten thousand fronts, these ten thousand mass masquerades, and they're trying to lead people down the path. And here's the thing. People who follow these spiritual paths think, oh, but I'm so enlightened. I'm so much smarter than those dumb Christian people who who just follow the Bible and think that that's just the truth, because we're so much smarter, because we have just delved into all this, you know, spiritual realm. And they even go into quantum math and they go into the extra ten strands of DNA. And we're just so smart. Well, they bought into a whole bill of goods. The thing is, is that all of this masquerade of light is demonic forces behind it that actually want to kill us as humans want to destroy us, and they're leading us down a path, and they lead us down the path. And then we find out, well, you know, we had universal energy, we had Reiki, but that now that's not working. So let's do let's go into the ancient Masters. Well, let's go into. And then the next one fails and then let's try something else. And the next one fails until people get into a point of depression. So here's a place that goes back to your whole thing of repeating in the mind is we're our own worst enemy we can be. You know, we've got all these people around us who can influence us for good or bad, but a lot of it can be negative. But then you got to think there's a whole spiritual entity out here that wants to just mess us up. So you gotta think, oh my God, this is not like the the cards are stacked against us. You talk about going into mental loops like the devil and his cohorts have a great time bringing us into confusion. And and I hate to say it, but what happens is it gets to a point where people begin to. When all these things fail, then the enemy likes to do this, pull the rug out from underneath them, and then people go into a deep depression and they go, they see darkness around them, and all of a sudden what they thought was light now is darkness, and the enemy has an evil goal. It's really to ruin us. So I'll let you ask instead of me just talking on.

00:17:39 Ria: Thank you for that. That was that was very insightful. I think people rarely sit and think about what what the cause of their thoughts really are. Um, if there's someone who acknowledges this, who can acknowledge this idea and understands that there are forces that are causing him or her to think in a particular way, but is unable to turn that understanding into an active action to better his or her life. When someone recognizes that they're stuck in these loops, what is the practical or reflective approach that you would suggest for them?

00:18:17 Tom Snow: Well, you know, I would say that, you know, it kind of depends on where they're at. I mean, if they're at the point where they're ready to, if they've hit their bottom and they're ready to end it all, you know, there are some people who hit the bottom of the bottom and they're just ready to leave this world, seek counsel, seek help, get some help, you know, tell people where you're at, find good people you can trust. But I also say Once, you can kind of get your mind back a little bit, you know, from this deepest depression is you've got to now seek God himself. You need to find him because if you can get past, remember all the radio stations and all this garbage noise that's just bombarding our brains. If you can get past that and you can find that small quiet channel, and you can meet the true and living God, and you can get a peace that passes understanding, guarding your heart and your mind. And you have love that fills you. Then all of a sudden, even though the problems aren't gone, you now know you can face them because you have something from the inside that gives you a confidence that says, I can face this. I don't know the answers yet. I don't know how to solve it yet, but I now have a deep confidence in the true and living God. And I can face this stuff. I, I don't know the answers, but here's the nice thing. The God whose Scripture says he has every hair on our head numbered. And you got a lot more numbers than me because the mind's fading out. I'm, I'm, I don't have as many hairs as when I was younger. But, you know, he still has them numbered. And when you comb your hair and I comb my hair and everybody out there listening combs your hair, and you take the hair out of the wad of the comb or the brush and you throw it in the trash. Did you know that God actually knows every number of every hair that you just threw away? Out of the fifty thousand hairs on our head average, he knew every number. But he knows us that intimately. Then he the true and living God over the whole universe. If he's that intimate with us to know every hair, then why can't he have that deep relationship with us, Each one of us every single day. So I would say that's the goal to get to. But yeah, if you need some mental counseling first, if you need some help, get that help because you can't get on to the next thing if you're contemplating suicide, right? If you're if the rug pulled out from underneath you, if you're in such dark place, find someone you can get some counsel. But the goal is then you keep the counsel, keep counseling, but find the deep relationship. And I'm telling you, after fifty six years, that's never gone away. And you know, all I'm saying is. And I know it's never going to go away for all the rest of my days, you know?

00:21:29 Ria: Thank you so much for that. I, um, I completely agree. I think that when you say to find or to find God himself and that once that has been established, a relationship with the higher power, it settles into your chest, a kind of confidence that you may not know how to solve a problem, but you know that you'll be able to do it since you have been backed up by a power that is far much greater than you. So I completely agree. I think what we can take away from this conversation is that for all our listeners, is that the loops we create are not science weaknesses. And what they ask from us is to actively recognize what's causing them and to deliberately create a relationship with God or a power much higher than us, and to eventually live a more fulfilled, a more content life. Tom, for anyone who wants to go deeper into your work or wants to connect with you further, how can they do so?

00:22:24 Tom Snow: Okay, well, you can go to my website just to be clear dot com. And it's the number two. So just number two, be clear dot com. And there I talk about my three books that I've released in the last year and a half, and ten more that are in the queue to be written. Never thought I'd be an author, but, um, the big the big man upstairs has a different plan for me. And, um, but in those books, it will take you through a whole lot and teach you help you get through all these things. And I mean everything from how to learn to walk with him, how to hear him, how to get through, uh, church abuse, leadership abuse, how to learn the difference between all the voices out there, how to learn, how to hear his voice, how to distinguish against the ten thousand masquerade things that are out there. The three books are the Daily stand, set the captives free, set the captives free to. They're kind of a trilogy to go together. Um, there, you know, I there on all the major platforms I off on my website, you can take you to Amazon, uh, once a month. I have the ebooks typically on a weekend for ninety nine cents. So if you don't want to pay for ninety nine. I'm not here to get rich. I don't care about the little small commission that Amazon gives me. It's really, you know, I, I, I earn my living by computer science. Now I'm developing a healthy foods company after congestive heart failure. I've got a healthy foods company that's one hundred percent salt free, one hundred percent sugar free, uh, that still tastes good. That sauces and condiments, things to make food taste good again. Uh, because salt and sugar is what kind of kills a whole lot of us around the world. You know, it's hurting us. So, um, if in your contact information description for your show notes, I can give you the links to the sites. If you want my social media, contact my Substack. So that's how people can get Ahold of me.

00:24:45 Ria: Thank you so much for joining us in this conversation. I think it was really insightful for listeners who are currently struggling with these thoughts. And I think and I think your novels would be a great way to start for people to understand themselves more and to understand how to build a relationship with God and to, and to find peace in their lives. So to all our listeners, I'm so glad that all of you are here today, and whatever loop has been circling in your mind, please know that you're not alone. Noticing is the first step. And as Tom said, your. There is always the possibility and the possibility of connecting with a power of connecting with God and that resulting in this beautiful relationship with yourself. Please remember, you are more than the thoughts that repeat in your mind. And until next time, please take care of yourselves. This is mind over matter. Thank you.