It is time to rip the cover off what really works to ditch addiction, depression, anger, anxiety, and all other kinds of human suffering. No, not sobriety. We're talking the F word here. Freedom. We'll share straight from the trenches what we've learned from leaving our own addictions behind and coaching hundreds of others to do the same. And since it's such a heavy topic, we might as well have a good time while we're at it.
(00:35): Okay, folks, we're back. And it's story time. Once upon a time you were a tadpole. Ah, okay. This is legit real. Like a lot of people that talk about evolution, they want to talk about evolution in terms of geologic time and ages and how many millions of years it must have taken for the planet to evolve the human species and where we might have come from. And they've taken their cues from Charles Darwin. And while I'm not here to argue any of that, a lot of people talk about us being stuck in our brains because our brains we're dealing with millions of years of evolution that we're fighting against and all of these other things, those are stories, those are explanations that have nothing to do with what's actually there. Most of the time, you and I do not have a 3 million year old brain, I'm sorry, unless you have managed to defy everything that anybody else thinks is possible and have been living throughout the age of the dinosaurs and possibly a couple of other things going on.
(01:35): This, you don't have a 3 million year old brain. If you're 30 years old, your brain is rough. A little bit less than that, right? It was around when you were born, so 30 years, sure. And then it was developed somewhere along the way in the womb. So you don't even have 30 years in nine months. That's how old your brain is. And all of the development that it's been under has been because of its interaction with another nervous system, your mom's first, and with other types of nervous system stimulants, a K A, the environment you were born into, the sounds that were spoken, the language that was spoken. Was it a city? Were you out in the country? Were you on a farm? Did you grow up around people that cussed a lot or didn't cuss a lot? Was it a religious family, a non-religious family?
(02:18): Did you have an iPad when you grew up or not? I grew up, I didn't, the internet wasn't around until I was like 14, 13, technically 13. My dad was one of the early dabblers in the whole thing. And I remember those little modems that made all the weird noises, bang, bang, all that stuff, and they'd have to dial up and send bits of text and whatnot through the inter we interwebs. Oh dude, they didn't even call it that back then. Whatever. And nowadays, we have what we have. So I was 13, 14 when that showed up. And so my brain was not stimulated by that environment. So it didn't develop those types of skills. Nowadays, skills with technology and stuff, kids pick it up earlier. That's not the result of millions of years of evolution. It's the result of stimulation. And the human brain has been able to adapt to that. If a human brain 200 years ago could have adapted to it in a similar fashion, perhaps if the environment, if it was an anomaly in the environment like some random tech dude in the middle of a feudal Europe, maybe that would've been weird and it would've had to adapt to a lot more than what we're adapting to right now. I keep thinking Eye Castle or something like that.
(03:29): Yes, we have a new movie and the new screenplay in the making. The point is you did evolve. You evolved according to what your genetics have programmed you to grow up at. And then you also evolved your skills and capacities cognitively, according to whatever stimulation has been around, what entertained you has trained you. So how did this evolution go? We are in the womb and there was only womb for one of us unless you were a twin. It Was not a womb with a view. I should hope not. And we started out as a single celled organism, that cell began to divide. And at a certain point, as the cells were dividing, they formed what was what's called sometimes called the primal streak. And that became like a noord. And it was the beginning. We didn't have nerve cells necessarily, but it's the beginnings of where the nervous system would be. And what happens is that this lines up with two lines of cells on either side and it goes from the bottom to the top, and on the bottom would be where your butt hole would be. And on the top ironically is actually where your heart would be. And then what happens is that top bit folds around and then descends down, creating a little hole in the middle, which starts to become the ventricles of the brain later on, and then it descends back down to sort of the center of that piece, which is where your heart would reside.
(04:52): So your heart has this connective tissue streak all the way up to the brain and up in the background to the spinal cord and it's all connected in that way. Even now, the tissues of your heart hang off of the sphenoid bone, which is right behind your eyeballs. So there is a lot of connectivity there. And what started out as the tip of the antenna then became the center point of the human body. Now, I think that this is important before the human body grows around this. I think this is important to recognize that the tip of the antenna becomes the center point, right? The tip of the antenna was your heart. The thing that would have the largest capacity for perception so to speak, was the heart, not the head. And if you look at the electromagnetic field of the body, what you have is that the heart, even though it only has 40,000 neurons in the atrioventricular node or something around that number, and each human being's probably going to vary to a certain extent one way or another.
(05:48): So people who are really big hearted, maybe they just happen to have more neurons clustered in the heart than other people. Just like some people who are really good with their sense of smell might have a few more neurons in the olfactory bulb than other people. And so the heart there, even though it only has that small number of neurons compared to 86 billion, 40,000 versus 86 billion, come on, that's 40 over 86 million. That is, oh, how do you do that? That's four over 860,000. That's a small percentage. Okay, two over 43, 400 30,001 over 215,001 in 215,000. That's the lineup guys. That is not the kind of odds you want in a basketball game, , okay? And even though it only has that small number, the electromagnetic field of the heart extends out past the body 10, 15 feet in any direction, and it's possible that it could extend even more and we just haven't been able to measure it.
(06:50): The Heart Math Institute has done a lot of research and calculating, measuring this, looking at cardiac coherence and all of these other things, and we could talk at length about all of the things that go on with it. Suffices to say that it's a huge field. The brain for all of those billions of neurons has a much smaller field of action and a field of activity. It's controlling so many things in the system. It has a tremendous capacity to do wonderful things. But in terms of being the tip of the antenna, in terms of being the theme that can perceive what is or is not dangerous in terms of being the thing that can help you out in terms of perceiving and interacting with the world, it's your heart actually that interacts with the world first. So in ancient cultures, the heart was commonly thought of as the organ of understanding.
(07:36): In Hebrew culture, I think even in Chinese culture, the heart is, the house is the true shin or the true spirit of the individual. It was the organ of understanding and the organ of thought. And I think this is really, really critical as a man thinketh in his heart. So Izzy not as a man, thinketh in his brain. So Izzy, and this is critical because so many people think you only think with your brain, but you got neurons everywhere in your sister, in your system, and every action that a neuron takes is in a sense, a thought, and your body is thinking, the way it tries to open a bag of chips is your body thinking just without words. And so the way that you are is a series of thoughts that all started with the heart. So even light, it comes from the sun, the first thing it does, all of that ultraviolet spectrum and everything else that comes in, it passes through the electromagnetic field of the heart first.
(08:31): And as it does so, the heart then reacts to that light, whatever that light is or whatever those patterns of light are according to its past history with them and what it's learned, because every cell in your body has a memory now, then the heart reacts, and as the heart reacts, there's a chain reaction that runs through the rest of the system. The atrial ventricular node of the heart actually sends more information to the brain than the brain sends down to it. So it sends some information up to the brain also, it's also attached and strapped down to your diaphragm. So as soon as the heart changes its coherence pattern and its beating pattern and all the other structure, the diaphragm gets involved. That affects the rib muscles, that affects the breathing patterns that starts to pull up on the internal organs that cascade chains down along the rest of the internal viscera and whatnot, while the brain is also sending messages down the spinal column to the rest of the body for action.
(09:22): The first thought that you have with response to anything in your environment comes from your heart, not your head. All of the senses and sense information that you're gathering. It's your heart first. And then of course, yes, the eyes pick things up, and then of course, yes, the skin picks things up. So also do the ears and the nose and the tongue and everything else that goes on. All of that information gets sent to the brain, and all of that information is tainted by, distorted by or informed by the initial response of the heart. So when Christian circles and other religious circles are talking about receiving a change of heart in a very practical way, what they're saying is you bring a new heart to the situation. When the heart stops reacting in a negative, a depressive and an anxious way to its environment, the brain no longer has that to make sense of.
(10:18): It doesn't get that building block. And all of a sudden your thoughts change. When your thoughts change, your behaviors change, your emotions change, and everything else changes because we've shifted the heart. How do you change the heart? This is something I've worked a long time to figure out how to do, and I'm not going to say that I've figured out all the nitty gritty pieces of it all the way yet. And yet I've seen tremendous strides from all of the thousands of people I've been able to interact with and talk to in terms of shifting up how their heart behaves, how their initial responses are to a situation by engaging with the neurology physically, with physical movement, physical pressures and physical, so many other things, as well as with perception and challenging all of what they're actually seeing. Like we talked about in the last episode when we were talking about learning to see, we're sitting here talking about looking at and trying to get back down to the stream of information that's going up to the brain instead of only reacting to the stream of information that's coming down from the brain.
(11:15): And most people are stuck in this stream of information going down from the brain, which is why they believe their stories are true instead of really catching the information first from the heart if they can, and if not from the heart, at least from the senses. Now, if the heart really is this electromagnetic hub, this dynamo, think about it. The earth has an electromagnetic field and there are people that have developed the ability to know where north is no matter what. And it's not just a linguistic feature, although there are some languages that demand that they've put them in magnetically sealed rooms and all of a sudden the person can't tell where north is. But if they get rid of the magnetic seal, the person can tell where it is every time, their ability to perceive what their heart is already engaging with because they've tuned into that information.
(11:59): Your heart's already got the information too, but you just haven't been trained to tune into it because that's not what our society trained us to do. If that's the case, it's not just about finding your sense of direction, the sense of direction in life as well, detecting when there is a signature, an electromagnetic signature that might be dangerous or lethal to the body, then your heart can tell you when to move. And when your heart says to move, then you follow that right man's looking on the outward appearance. He's already too late in the game. The Lord looks on the heart. He knows when you are evil, when you're coming after him for a certain reason, he can pick up intentions. And this is what's starting to build the process of intuition. Why am I telling you this story that is now 12 minutes long and counting?
(12:47): Why am I going taking you from tadpole to primal streak to node chord to heart, heart sliming like sliding down the spinal column in this with leaving its trail of connective tissue like a slug to be the thing in the center of your body instead of up at the head. Why am I telling you this? Most people live by their head, not their heart. They think that because the heads at the top of the body and because the eyes are up there and everything else, that somehow the head is the thing that creates the powerful life and that enables a person to experience the best of what life has to offer. And don't get me wrong, there's a ton to be said for really honing the intellect and developing your ability to cut through what's there. But in the end, it's the heart that is designed to lead and designed to tell you the most about engaging with the outside world.
(13:39): And your head is a servant. Then I used to think when I went to India the first time, and I was sitting there in the room, and maybe you and I, Lee could talk a little bit about this and you can ask some questions, but when I was sitting there the first time, eight days, eyes closed for the most part, I could kind of squint them a little bit to make it to the bathroom without running into 10 people in a few walls, and stuff. And so I was allowed to kind of squint and look kind of halfway through, half litted eyes at the ground, but eight days, eyes closed. I didn't have a name. Everybody was dressed the same. I had one spot on the floor that I was sitting there for eight days and outside of meals and bathroom time, I slept on that spot.
(14:21): I did yoga stuff on that spot. I sat and meditated in that spot, I chanted in that spot. I just sat there in that spot. Whatever else was happening was right there in that spot, in that room for those eight days. And in the middle of that, my mind made all kinds of stuff happen where in the previous eras of my life, I would have visions that were Christian in origin. Now I had visions of Shiva coming down and cutting me in half with this big trident and into nine different pieces and then putting me together and laughing, laughing and cutting me apart again. And I had these other strange otherworldly kind of visions. And don't get me wrong, these are not, and this, I wasn't on psychedelics or anything. This was just me getting stuck with my eyes closed for that long and breathing and all this other stuff.
(15:05): And I felt like big things and important things were happening, but I was still emotionally in turmoil. In the end, I would say looking back on that experience, that nothing significant actually happened. I just created a bunch of experiences with my mind while trying to make something happen because I had gone in with the story that I needed to be fixed at the end. We had a chance to send in some questions for Sud guru who was the one running the program to answer. And I wrote in a question, I was like, if the mind is the problem, then what is the point of having one in the first place? Because the more I learned about what was going on in the system to produce the suicidal ideation and the depression and the anxiety and everything else, the more I was like, what is the point of having a mind if all of this wretchedness, if all of this human misery is produced by the mind?
(15:59): And I didn't have an answer and he didn't answer the question because, well, he got 3,500 of them and Joe just chose whoever picked the question for him to answer, just picked one. And I didn't get an answer. And so for a while I was just thinking that the mind is a big problem and that we would've been better off being just animals. I remember even looking at it, all the things that humans brag about other animals do. There are spiders that have pet frogs. Yes, folks, spiders have pet frogs. There are ants that farm fungi, yes, folks, ants farming. There are animals that build sort of armatures and cloaks and use camouflage not just in their skin, but an octopus does it and they grab shells and work themselves around shells or pretend to be something that they're not. There are animals with social systems like baboons and wolves and whatnot, and they experience stress and all of these other things.
(16:53): They certainly copulate when the time comes. And there's so much that happens that humans are proud of ourselves for our achievements. But in reality, most of what we do is just an amplification of basic animal nature. We're trying to survive, but we're trying to survive a social structure too. And we've just developed more devious or more complicated or other ways to do it. We're trying to have pleasure and so are animals. And so I was sitting there with this really dismal view of human life. And then suddenly over, not suddenly over time, it started to dawn on me that the reason I felt like the mine was such a problem was because I was trying to lead with the mind instead of let the mind be the servant, I was trying to perceive my outside environment with my mind, thinking my way through things, planning, strategizing and everything else, interpreting and guessing at things and making experiences that way and building emotions instead of allowing the heart, not the emotions, the heart to lead, instead of tuning into that sense of what life was.
(18:03): And as I started shifting toward let me develop these other senses that are very real in human system, let me start to tune into them, which are practices that we start to teach people at the retreats. They're very subtle, like sensitivity building practices that involve slow movement. And they involve paying attention to sensations in the skin and underneath the skin and where things are going as you're doing these slow movements or as you're standing in place so that you can start to detect the difference between muscle power and fluid rushing through the system and this sense of tingle or life and everything else. So there's simple movement practices that build sensitivity. And as I started moving in that direction and questioning it, what I realized was if I put my mind in the capacity of the Satan in the Book of Job, his job was to make sure that God was honest, right?
(18:58): He was a member of God's court and he wasn't out against God. It was his job to be the accuser. That's what the word Satan means. And it's one of the few times where the Satan, Satan as a thing shows up in the Hebrew Bible. Satan, if you want to list, look at the episode on the history of Satan, you can get more information about that. So he shows up and his job is not to be against job, but rather to make sure that the decision made by God as a decision that was actually a solid decision. So my heart may have learned to be afraid of something. Let not your heart be afraid. You remember those verses in scripture. My heart may have learned to be afraid. The that's where the mind can come in, like we talked about last week and question it.
(19:44): What is actually going on? What's really happening here? What is really there? Learning to see, learning to sense? What does it feel like is really happening? Can I actually see that? Can I actually see that my story is the truth? Or am I making up something that is a little bit beyond or a lot, a bit beyond what is actually there starting that process? Now, the mind becomes an incredible servant. It's job is to question the heart so that the heart can actually engage with its environment, electromagnetically better, which produces more cardio. Coherence, which cardiac coherence means that all the four chambers of the heart are beating in correct coordination to the extent that we're not having backflow of blood and chambers getting stuck open and then stressed out ventricles or atria and blood flow not going where it needs to in the cardiovascular system as that coherence is built, which can be done also with breathing patterns and other things.
(20:39): But if it's just there naturally, that's even better. And as that is built, then stress goes down inside the human system. And as the human system is no longer experiencing stress chemicals, it stops amplifying some of the quote stressors that are not out there in the environment anymore. And now all of a sudden you're able to use rational thinking and clear headed perception as a way of guiding yourself through life. A and as a way of questioning the heart. The clear headed perception is on what is the heart feeling? What are the other senses feeling? And then from there, you can work your way through life. If you or someone is looking to drop the F-bomb of freedom in their life, whether that's from past trauma, depression, anxiety, addiction, or any other host of emotional and personal struggles, but they just don't know how or want some help doing it, head on over to the freedom specialist.com/feel better now and check out some of the things we've got in store for you or book a call so we can look at your unique situation and get you the help that you're looking for.
(21:45): This is really fascinating. I mean, in some ways I don't want to be the brain. He's getting a lot of input or whatever the case may be. But I remember in part of my training that the stomach actually has enough neurons to have the contemplative ability of a small cat or dog. And then also, I know you don't like the title of this book, but the body keeps a score in there. They're talking about equine therapy. And this woman, this young girl had gone through lots of abuse, whatever had not spoken, and they put her with a horse. And you can speak more about the electromagnetic magnetic field there. But eventually, as I understanding the young girl's heart began to beat at the same rhythm of the horse because of the electromagnetic field. And within a couple days she began speaking. But so there, there's all that happening as well. So I'm here, I'm sitting here thinking about the brain, and there's probably another podcast in the sense of you say make the brain your servant who's making the brain the servant, which is another podcast. But I'm also thinking there's so much input coming, stomach, heart, and all the heart, the hearts of first thought and all this stuff. And so the brain is like, he's a poor sucker set, sitting in a control room trying to make sense of all this.
(23:13): In many ways, the brain's the security guard. He doesn't get to enjoy the outside world. He's sitting there in his uniform, eating, I don't know, whoopi pies and whatever else, and counting calories and just staring at a bunch of screens all the time. And we're talking, there's a lot of estimates that I've read about the amount of information that goes from different parts of the body to the brain, from the eyes alone. It's like 10 million bits of information every second. And that is already heavily compressed. Cause there's 130 million neurons in the eyes, light sensitive cells in the eyes, and that gets compressed to 10 million. So that's already 130 million down to 10 million. We're a significant one in 13 kind of proportion. And so already that information is lost. What the eyes experience of the outside world and of the light that's coming in is lost down to 10 million.
(24:11): That's what the brain gets. The brain gets a digitized, compressed feed from the brain. And so from the eyes and that, that's just the eyes and that's actually operating at a slower rate than the ears. The, it's like 20 times slower than the ears are, or 10 times slower than the ears are processing data. So ear information or sound information comes into the body, both through the skin as well as through the nerves and the ears and the inner ear that gets processed in the brain, the electromagnetic stuff of the heart, it goes in. And so all of that, the brain's already trying to create a picture. You think about it, it's like someone coming up to you and they're going, you hear a sound, and then from that sound, they go, oh, crinkly, rough, and then slimy. And you're having all of this information, it's a crinkly, slimy, rough round.
(25:07): And then at the very end it's like green or whatnot, and you're like, oh, it's lettuce, right? And you are trying to pick up the information. That's the way your brain has to do it. It's listening to somebody's say a sentence, hi, okay, I know what that word means, but I go the you don't know what's next. So your brain has to hold the, and then you say, squirrel. Oh, oh, squirrel, right? And then your brain's like, oh, squirrel. Squirrels in, but you don't know anything about the squirrel. And then the next word is eight. So now you have to modify the squirrel in your head so that it's eating. And then you go okay, it's eating one thing. Okay, cool. And so you're imagining a squirrel with a nut, and then you're like, trashcan, what? And then lid. Oh, just the lid. Oh yeah from, oh, from, okay, my sister's.
(25:58): Your sister's, what a trash can lid from your sister's toy set. Oh, it's a small trash can lid. Oh, okay. And so now all of a sudden that took your brain for a ride to be able to put that together, and that's what it has to do with all the sensory information. So your brain has no clue what's happening in the outside world at all. And yet we've focused almost all of our education and all of our public life on the brain, on entertainment, on stimulating the brain on neural feedback so that we can get the brain to behave in all these different ways. And we've missed out on the uncompressed stuff that's happening on the outside world. Now, can we tap into what it's like to see in an uncompressed way, possibly? I don't know. But I have had experiences on psilocybin where colors have shifted and the way my brain has produced that has changed some things.
(26:51): I also have had experiences where, like I said, mentioned last time about how Jasmine's face changed in her eyes. They look different. And I've also had experiences where the world seemed a lot duller and flatter for a while, and now it feels a lot more vibrant because all of my thoughts about it have started to dissipate. And so now the sense data is just coming in less distorted. So is it possible for us to get to a totally distorted view? I think we have moments where that happens, you know, pass out and you come back and before your brain starts to kick into high gear, you're just soaking in color and sound and stuff, and it doesn't have any meaning or edge or anything like that. So yeah, the brain has a lot to do. And what's cool though is to notice this, that to guide your life to safety only requires the 40,000 neurons in the heart. It doesn't actually require all that brain power for you and I to be safe and secure in life if we're really willing to trust and tune into and learn to understand the messages that are coming from that direction.
(27:59): I was just listening to an interview of a lady who was working at a store where there was a shooter, a live shooter, and she said she walked in the room and she goes, she just knew, I just knew that I should stay standing. And she ended up standing by a door when things started to go down. She was able to get out. But how many people stories have I've heard for sure of people they talk on the other side of, they just knew. They just knew on whatever level. And especially with women who've been in abusive situations, they've handled that as a matter of shame. I knew I knew and I didn't do anything. I didn't follow that, I didn't listen, that kind of stuff. So there is some advantage to listening to the heart, and there's some advantage to maybe the way the brain has functioned and having to make quick decisions. I can imagine a prehistoric self seeing mammoth fur or something and your brain going danger. And so it jumps to that and there's something that's helpful there, but there's also a disadvantage to some of those things that the brain has done as well. I'm wondering what if you'd speak to that?
(29:18): So I think that's where we got it a little bit wrong. It's not the brain that's saying danger. It's the body that's saying danger and the brain picking up on the signal and then amplifying the signal slash distorting it. And so if the body has learned danger and hasn't been able to release that tension pattern and that reactivity from individual cells of the body, the brain isn't saying danger. Now the brain will say danger if you just start thinking about stuff and then start thinking about stuff that feels dangerous, and then that sends that signal back down to the body. So it can come from the brain, but in instantaneous situations it is body picks up something and we train this with some of the movement. We haven't done a lot of it at the retreats, and maybe we'll do a little bit more of it as time goes on where you're waiting for your to become aware of when the body is uncomfortable with the situation.
(30:06): And as the body becomes uncomfortable, then if you allow your body to move with that, move from that discomfort into a place that feels more comfortable, you find that you've avoided a knife, you've avoided a punch. And I used to do this with blindfold sparring and all this stuff for years with kung fu as well as in CTE work and some of the other stuff where the body really does know, and it does become uncomfortable. It's just that the mind has put this like, oh, don't react to that, or Don't ignore, don't listen to that information. So we've learned to filter out the information, but the body knows. There's a wonderful book that I read years and maybe 15, 20 years ago called, yeah, it was probably 15 years ago. It was, it's called The Gift of Fear and it's by Gavin de Becker. And his job was to go hunt down serial killers.
(30:51): Have you read this book? No. His job is to hunt down serial killers. And in his job, he we're used to seeing people on the news going, I never saw it happen. I didn't know he was such a nice guy. Who would've thought? And all the stuff that shows up on the news articles, because nobody wants to admit that they can think like a serial killer, but he makes this point. You make high stakes decisions like that every single day. You're driving down the road and even though the card hasn't car in front of you, hasn't turned on, its blinker that they're turning, they're going to change lanes. You slow down and they change lanes. How is it that your body's picking up on things left? So the name of the book is The Gift of Fear, and I think the title is a little unfortunate in that I think it's a great title, but it confuses emotional fear, emotionally, mentally created fear with bodily sense of danger.
(31:44): And the difference between fear and danger is a huge thing, right? Fear is not very helpful unless it's going to motivate you to move out of danger, but it has to be real danger. And so being aware of danger, you don't need to experience fear. If you're aware of danger and respond to it every time, then your body doesn't need to produce fear anymore. Well, he's interviewing all these people that have survived these sociopaths and these serial killers and rapes and all these other stuff. And invariably he sees this pattern where there is just a moment where they know I need to get out of here. And so even though they're stripped naked and stuck in a certain spot and the guy left the room for a second, or they walk into a room and something feels off, so then they just run across the hall and they talk to a neighbor or they do something and they get out of there and they just, I just know something just felt deadly wrong and I needed to get out of there.
(32:32): And that's the heart talking. What would happen if we could shut our brains up enough? The constant chatter in the back of the room that are not paying attention to the teacher life. What would happen if all of a sudden we shut down the brain enough or we stopped the needless chatter? Because it's always going to be chattering something. It's got to watch a lot of screens and pay attention to a lot of stuff. But if the needless chatter ended and what we could tune into was what the heart was picking up all the time, then we wouldn't have to wait for scary moments. We would know, don't get on that plane. We would know stand up by the door. We would know, oh wow, I feel like I need to call this person. It just seems like they could use a call. And people are like, wow, you just came to mind.
(33:18): That's your heart speaking guys. That's not out there. It's not woowoo, it's not like unscientific. It is very, very much the way the human system is built. And we have so far denigrated that process that we haven't have people who have trained it enough to be consistent with it, unless they're spies or they're being trained through closed doors and they don't reveal their training secrets and everybody else is left with, oh yeah, that's woo woo, or me you're praying, or that's energy. And they have all these weird terms for it that make it sound like something that a rational person wouldn't engage with. A rational person only builds their reason on what the body sends them, and that includes the information from the heart. They have no reason if they don't have contact with the outside world. It's just the security guard talking to himself in a room without screens on. And too many of us have the screens that are the most important turned off.
(34:12): It's interesting that we have denigrated the information that the body is telling us as woo woo, and it's really kind of sad. And at what point does the bodies be like you know what? I'm not even going to pass this information on anymore because they're not going to listen. I think that that's a great question and it's a great point. One thing I didn't mention, even though Malcolm Glad Gladwell's work comes under scrutiny sometimes for being a little selective in terms of what research he does, everybody's work is selective in terms of what research has done. His, in his book Blink about how we make split second decisions. It's very, very clear in there through a lot of research, and this is people that are assessing marital situations, just a single facial expression. They pick up micro expressions in the face and they can predict with pretty darn good accuracy whether or not that couple's going to survive for how many years or whether they're going to end up divorced just because of facial expressions in an initial interaction. The body is always telling the truth. It can't lie in that sense. It keeps the score.
(35:14): The difference is it's not like a ta an accumulative story, it's just always telling what's, what's really there. Can we shut that off? I don't think we can ever shut it off, but I think we can a tourniquet, we can create enough tensions in the body of trying to keep ourselves perfect and trying to keep the perfect world and the optimistic worldview in place that it's like squeezing the nerves. You pinch a nerve and then that one nerve stop sending, stop sending information, or you get the opposite, which is chronic pain where the body's just screaming all the time. And so now it drowns out everything that's on the outside like la, I can't hear you. And that also is not a comfortable thing to go through. The person who's numb to life, you are going to have to learn to relax. The person who's in chronic pain, they're going to have to learn to relax too, but they're dealing with razor blades going up their blade, their bones every day, the feeling of it, whereas somebody else is just kind of half numb and it's trying to keep themselves in that worldview.
(36:13): So I think we can, a tourniquet turned the body off in terms of tension, but I think to the extent that it is just a living thing, it will always be responding to the environment the best way that it can. And then so what's the way to open that back up? Well, it's going to take admitting that we're usually wrong, and we're definitely behind the times in terms of what we actually think is happening, where at least milliseconds behind in terms of what the eyes are picking up and the ears are picking up and stuff, and reality's already moved on. And being able to get closer and closer in touch to the stream of information as it's ascending to the brain from the other senses instead of as it's already been processed and then descended back down. That allows us to make more decisive actions that are timely all the time.
(37:02): There was a retreat where you asked me to help do a demonstration at the beginning of the retreat that illustrates some of these things and in the form of stick work. And I noticed half hour, 40 minutes before the stick work, I started to like, oh my gosh, I'm going to do this and it's going to hurt or whatever. And there came a point where I was like, wait a minute, what if there's no story associated with what's about to happen? What if I could just be present to what is? And you were always asking, what are you feeling? Where are you feeling it? And do you want to feel it anymore? And I went into that thing and that demonstration with the mindset of just trying to be really present to what was, and it was amazing when I would just try to stay present to what actually was that the stories when they were not encouraged, they just fell away. And I had a totally different experience. It was amazing, and it felt really good. I was actually picking up on some of the things that you were teaching and it was transformative. And I've been able to take that feeling. Maybe my brain has into other situations and say, this is an opportunity that you can question what's actually happening.
(38:17): I think that's the critical point about making a physical experience out of what's going on to let the body learn it instead of just show up as a concept. Those of you listening to a podcast, not podcasts aren't bad. They can point the way, but they're just words. They're just sounds flapping in the breeze. And until the rest of the cells of the body get it, until we get in tune with what the rest of the cells of the body are actually thinking, feeling, doing on that sort of biological level, not necessarily in words, then our ability to invite that into something different is basically null and void. Waiting on happenstance. Will it happen? It could happen for some people. It couldn't for other people. And that's why there are so many therapies in healing, healing of modalities and approaches that just seem like a few people get it, and a lot of people don't.
(39:08): And that probably is the case for the stuff that I've taught. Until we can really get it into their body and bypass the mind entirely, then the mind doesn't get a say in that. And as a result, it has to build a new reality out of what the body's experiencing. And so in that sense, what I was really seeking for myself and for everybody is to literally have a change of heart, not in the sort of sappy sense of, well, you need to forgive this person or that person. Forgiveness is a byproduct of just seeing things clearly. The stories fall away, like you said, it's literally that the heart that enters the situation and the body that enters that situation is a renewed body. It's like a baby again. It no longer comes with all the prejudice. Only the benefit is we still have the mind that has some sort of backlog record of what happened so that there's wisdom there. And we can with that wisdom, engage with the body's information stream without getting caught into a reaction inside of that stream. So as we finish up today, our little story about you as a tadpole people, I'm going to call you Tad from now on unless you're a girl and I don't have a girl name for Tad TAs. TAs, the Theodora.
(40:22): The point is, look, it is uncharted territory for most people to actually engage with learning to lead and think and respond to life from the heart as an organ that's picking up its own sense data and not in some really emotional way. There's a lot of people that lead with their emotions, and that is leading with the mind When you say these people are emotional, they're just leading with the mind in a particular way, in a juicier way than somebody who's leading with a mind in a more rational way. But all of that reason is built on something deeper. It is not trained. But if you really want to taste some of the glorious things that happen in life and feel more safe and secure in your circumstances, worry will only tie you up in knots. Perception is the thing that will protect you. I could worry about a train coming all day long, or I could set up a radar or some kind of detection system that allows me to see if a train's coming, and then I don't have to worry about it.
(41:21): I just got to pay attention to the signal and so I can enjoy my game. And then if the alarm goes off, I move. Same with a smoke alarm and a fire alarm. That's why they have them in houses. And that way if it goes off, you don't have to be the one that's trying to figure out if the fire is the house is on fire all the time. You can get out of there quickly. And this is why those alarms then go to the fire department. They go to other places. And so that the city gets alerted, and they don't necessarily have to just wait for somebody to come sprinting all the way down the road, across the highway, into the front door going like, Hey, there's a house three miles back that happens to be on fire. I don't know if you'll get there in time.
(41:57): No, no. We want early alert systems. And that isn't a paranoia thing. Your body's designed to teach you about life. It's designed to show you where life will be the happiest, where you will find the easiest flow that comes from the heart, not the head. So challenge your head this week, guys. Challenge your thoughts, challenge your worries, challenge your stresses. Challenge your anxieties. Ask yourself, what is my heart telling me? But then let your mind task itself with the job of making the heart honest. Is that really what's going on? When the mind is allowed to be, the questioner is allowed to be that type of role instead of the one that just has to see without eyes and hear without ears, and sense without fingers, and smell without a nose, and taste without a tongue. When the mind is allowed to be the one that questions the information and makes action that way, instead of the one that's supposed to provide the information, life turns around in some really, really beautiful ways. And it starts with engaging the heart and then watching it change as you continue to question it.
And it's a beautiful, beautiful, beautiful process. And that's it for today's Alive and Free podcast. If you enjoyed this show and want some more freedom bombs landing in your earbuds, subscribe right now at wherever you get your podcast from. And while you're at it, give us a rating and a review. It'll help us keep delivering great stuff to you. Plus it's just nice to be nice.
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