The Shift, part two, chapters 3, 4, 5, 6

The Shift, Chapter 3, Not One Way (Part Two)

Your Custom Tool Kit For Emotional Regulation

“The right tools limit mistakes.” Peter Sage

Let’s get to the actual work of building your own custom tool kit for emotional mastery and fitness. It is super important to keep in mind there is not ‘one way’ to do this correctly. It’s also important to keep in mind that these will take practice. There is not ‘one way’, but there are some basic tenants that tend to work for most humans most of the time.

You don’t need to ‘reinvent the wheel’ completely, though you may need to put a bit of your own unique spin on it. Some practices may come easily to you and some may take more time. Some may only be partially effective. Some may not be effective for you at all.

The key to success is to not give up. Pause and adjust when you find yourself feeling overwhelmed. Pause, breathe, and begin again. Find what works for you, and let go of whatever does not.

Also, keep in mind that the subconscious is vast compared to your conscious mind. Remember the ant and the elephant. You can make some progress using your conscious mind, but your progress can be much greater and much faster if you tap into the power of your unconscious, or subconscious mind. This is where art therapy, music, laughter, and things we commonly call metaphysical or supernatural can be highly effective.

Although I have done my best to compile and synthesize the resources and tools that are currently available, I have no doubt there are others I have missed, and there will be new modalities to come up in the future. Also, as I mentioned and want to stress again, there is not one way to mastery. It is up to you to find and use what works best for you.

The following section is an overview of the tools and techniques I have found helpful or interesting or are currently popular. It is important to understand that building your own custom tool kit does not have to look like anyone else’s tool kit. Also, there are many tools that have been shown to work well for most humans.

Not One Way

Pausing, Questioning, Breathing, Moving, Shifting Awareness, and Reframing are the basic elements of The Shift, but there are infinite subtle variations and nuances to how and when to use these tools. You will need to try some of them out and practice them in order to determine what works best for you.

I want to emphasize, if you have a tool that is currently working well for you, I encourage you to keep using it. However, if you realize that you have been using a ‘coping strategy’ where you could be using a ‘growth strategy’, then you can decide to make a change when you are ready.

Ayurvedic medicine teaches that all disease comes from stagnation, accumulation, and then disease. A universal remedy then is to consume less and move more. Get rid of clutter in your external and internal environment. Move, breathe, and shift your perspective. Change your diet, and maybe your hair conditioner. See if you can find sparks of healing in unexpected places. You might be surprised what a profound positive impact a small shift can have on your well-being.

I used to drink alcohol like it was a sport. Smoking a lot of weed, and eating sugary things was a coping strategy I used for decades. It served me relatively well in many ways. Eventually, however, my body started to let me know that the damage was accumulating — not only from overconsuming these and other things, but more acutely, from allowing myself to continue ‘moving forward’ while increasingly out of alignment or congruence with my underlying values and beliefs.

This is a common pattern I see in modern society. This is at the heart of the emerging mental and physical health crisis I see all around me. The ‘fix’ can be a drastic shift in behavior and environment, but it can also be a more subtle shift, or a series of small changes. Usually it’s a little of both. It’s important to recognize this is an individual, ongoing process. Find what works best for you right now. (And for ‘heaven’s sake’ stop blaming everyone else for your own misery!) Remember, your life is your responsibility.

What works best for someone else is not necessarily what will be best for you. Also, what works best for you in one phase of your life is not necessarily going to be what works best in another. It is all a dynamic dance, and a grand experiment for you to explore for and in yourself.

Get to know yourself better

A key to maximizing your effectiveness while you practice this is to understand your own natural cycles and rhythms better. I recommend that you spend some extra time near the start of this part of your journey to get to know yourself better. Make taking time to know yourself a regular habit in your life, if you don’t already. Journaling or keeping a diary is an excellent way to do this.

Treat yourself like someone you are genuinely curious about and take some notes. Chart your successes and your failures. See if you can convince yourself of your own worthiness by learning to love yourself. Do the things that you admire and feel good about doing. Do a quick assessment of your sleep and energy type, and then try making one or a few changes to your routine. Take time to evaluate and adjust your words and actions regularly.

Choosing the tools to keep in your toolkit

As you read through these tools, think about which ones will work best in your life right now. Choose just one or two to begin with. Give yourself time to really see what works for you. Use some method of charting or tracking your progress. This can be as simple as a calendar with emojis or different colored stars on it, or as elaborate as a set of different journals and a ‘cookie jar’ of positive reminders you collect for yourself. The point is to try things and keep the ones that work well for you.

The most effective place to start is often with disruption. Then pause, and question. Anytime you realize you are repeating thoughts, ask yourself:

Is that really true?

How is this feeling trying to help me?

What is the polarized feeling in my subconscious that is an opportunity to be rebalanced and used as fuel rather than draining me?

Start from where you are, and do the best you can with what you have, from where you are. You can always upgrade at any time as you progress. As you decide which ones to try, keep in mind you may need to give a new habit at least three weeks and use some method for tracking your progress.

Some of my personal tools have been useful for decades, and others have served me just for a day. If you are not seeing progress or you are not happy with the results after about three weeks, adjust, modify, or replace that and try something different.

When you find something that seems to unlock a new level of capacity for you, congratulate yourself. Then take some time to really anchor it in. Evaluate what it is about it that works well for you, so you can bring that personal insight to other tools as you build your personal tool kit.

If you try something you like but are not sure it is working, keep doing it and see if you can figure out how it is helping. If any of these tools seem to make things worse, just stop using that tool, at least for now, and try something else. You don’t need to create a story about it, like “I hate yoga” or “I suck at meditation”. Simply say to yourself, “not today” or “not for me right now” and move on.

Remember, “Wisdom is whatever works.” (C.P. Estes)

The Tools — Red, Yellow, Green Light

I like to think of these tools in three main categories, which I label ‘red’, ‘yellow’, and ‘green’ light tools.

Red Light tools

Red light tools are those tools I use in an emergency situation. This could be an actual emergency or a perceived emergency — this is the same to our nervous system. You can use these when your fight or flight system is activated.

When you are overwhelmed and dysregulated, the first order of business, or priority one, after getting to safety (!) is to get back to a coherent state as quickly as possible. Then take some sort of inventory of where you are. This can help you regain more coherence, and anchor to the present moment. This will also give you a benchmark to compare to later so you can notice what is working and what is not.

Over the last decade, I have started to realize and recognize that different types of dysregulation can happen on the other side of the energetic spectrum.

Euphoria, mania, or pursuing something with an extremely narrow and intense focus can also be signs that your nervous system is bypassing your higher thinking arenas, and you are being driven unconsciously. This is great when we are on task, in a flow state, and safe. However, it can be problematic if we are not consciously aware of when we in that state, at least to some degree. We can perceive a potential mate or intimate partner, a prize, or a food source in a way that overwhelms our ability to make clear, calm, conscious choices.

For me, it is more difficult to recognize and acknowledge imbalances of positive states than of negative ones. Perhaps this has to do with my upbringing, and my addictive patterns, or perhaps it is a natural way of keeping life driving towards survival.

If you have an anxious, avoidant, or chaotic attachment style, and a history of neglect and/or abuse, you might be conditioned to interpret your feelings of arousal or hope about love as signals that you are in potential danger. It’s a good idea to pause before making any big decisions if you can, especially when you feel strong emotions about it. Whether they feel extremely negative or positive, try to bring your nervous system back into a more coherent, calm state before making a choice. This is why it can be helpful to ‘sleep’ on a big decision.

Of course, it is also important to recognize that sometimes we are actually in an emergency, or under real threat. In these times we are likely to respond in ways that lead to better outcomes if we practice and use the same tools as we do when we are misinterpreting ‘false’ threats as real ones.

Red Light Tools (In case of emergency, do not break glass!) (smash glass fire emergency graphic)

Emergencies and feeling that sense of extreme urgency will flip most of us almost instantly into a sympathetic state, bypassing our logical, thinking minds and connecting our actions and words directly to our limbic system. This is a healthy and natural survival mechanism. It is very difficult, if not impossible, to think at all, let alone ‘think straight’ when we are in this ‘fight or flight’ state.

This state arises when our system has determined that we need to take fast and extraordinary action. It could be that you really are in danger or in a position to help someone else in immediate danger. It could be that something we desire is in our immediate grasp and a moment of hesitation could cost us what we want. Assessing the situation is something that you can train yourself to get better at. Keep practicing.

After you are out of immediate danger, or if you determine that your system is being activated at times when you are not actually in danger, either because of our modern hyper-stimulating environment, your personal surroundings, or due to a hypervigilant, traumatized, or overactivated system, the next order of business is to regain calm coherence. THEN choose and implement your responses with more of your full faculties at hand. Learn to recognize when you are dysregulated and reset your system. This is the sort of thing that the military and other institutions that know how to get the most out of human performance use. It can be highly effective.

If you are in immediate danger, keeping your nervous system as calm as possible is still usually going to give you the best chance of survival.

Modern life tends to trigger many of us into feeling a sense of dread or existential threat even when we are not in actual immediate danger. Two minutes of listening to advertising or ‘news’ programming on television or radio is enough to activate most of us into a partially threatened state.

Many humans are currently living in a nearly perpetual state of existential threat. Our systems start to become chaotic and start to break down when they are incoherent for too long. Finding ways to reset your nervous system and regain coherence is increasingly challenging and necessary. Also, find ways to disengage or unplug from our modern, overstimulating environment regularly. This is a healthy strategy. Make this a regular practice and you will feel better.

The Red light tools that I currently keep in my tool kit are the Pause, Questions, Breath, Bounce, Sway, Sigh, Sing, Movement in Space, Shake it off, Forward locomotion, Touching Hands, Checking Basic Needs and, The Flip.

Recognizing Dysregulation/Pause-Breath-Question (graphic P)

Learn to recognize when your body is dysregulated or becoming dysregulated. It might be a feeling of being incoherent, or a more subtle feeling of turbulence. If you notice your heart rate has changed, or your breathing is rapid, or your chest or stomach is tight, these are signs that you might need to shift your attention and reset your energetic state. Start with the breath. Often it is helpful to exhale before you try to take a deep breath. Once you can get your breathing under better control, you will find it easier to ask yourself helpful questions and take additional steps to reregulate your body systems.

When my body is dysregulated, often the first thing I notice in my body is that it becomes difficult to breathe properly. Sometimes I start to tear up, or I feel agitated and hot. This is my cue to remember to shift my attention to bringing myself back to a more coherent state.

Yellow Light Tools

When I have made some big decisions I find it helpful to pretend I make a choice, sleep on it, and check in with my nervous system first thing when I wake up. Waking up to a new choice can feel exciting, or it can fill us with dread. It is helpful to give it a trial run if you can before ‘signing on the dotted line’ or committing yourself to something that might not be in alignment with your core values, even if you can’t quite put your finger on exactly why at the time.

This is not to say you will never have to move forward in doubt. Many times we simply can’t know how things will work out. When you look back on your life, most of the decisions you make are probably not going to matter. Keep in mind, that goals are vehicles to help you become more of the person you want to be. The destination itself can be arbitrary.

Of course, the reason our systems do respond with rapid shifting of neurochemistry sometimes is because sometimes we do need to take fast action. Wasting precious time on logic can cost us the prize or even our lives. There are times when pausing and questioning is not an appropriate response.

Luckily, this is our default setting, so unless you have trained for deep diving or other extreme abilities to override your nervous system, you are likely to respond to ‘predators’ and ‘prey’ automatically. Evaluating the difference is one of those things that takes practice, and you will get better at it the more you do it.

In real-time, you are not likely to have time to think through “Is this a red, yellow, or green light situation?” when it is a red-light situation. Learn to recognize the signs of dysregulation in your body. Take immediate action to re-regulate your system to the best of your ability as soon as you do. Your body has this system built in to help keep you alive in dangerous situations and to help you ‘get the prize’ when it is in reach. Mating and finding food are just as important as avoiding predators and taking shelter from storms, when it comes to basic survival.

With practice, you can develop your skill of recognizing and more accurately assessing your own emotional state and also start to notice when others are dysregulated. When others are dysregulated is not a good time to try to work things out. It’s usually not a good time to come to an agreement about something, other than perhaps an agreement to breathe or move together to come back into coherence. After regulation is reestablished you will find your efforts lead to much greater progress.

Try not to spend time going around in trauma loops or revving up the dysregulation with negative thoughts. Make an agreement with yourself that you are going to do your best to shift the next time you notice that you are feeling any of the signs or sensations that indicate dysregulation. Don’t beat yourself up when you realize you are not doing as well as you would like. Instead, congratulate yourself for recognizing it, and adjust accordingly.

Remember, the point is not to complicate things or create friction, except to the degree that we need to pattern interrupt sometimes. The point is to develop some system of organizing your tools so that you know what to do, and what tool to use, in any given situation, automatically, without thinking about it.

It merits another reminder here, that resistance is like glue to the things we resist. Rather than pushing against the thing or idea you do not want, put your attention on what you DO want. Let your resistance fade.

In time, you may even come to genuinely appreciate when you recognize resistance in your body or energy. This is a clue that there is growing dissonance or tension between your ant and the elephant, and/or the ‘room’ you are in (too many loops?).

Green Light Tools

Many of us have been trained to override this natural guidance system to such an extent that we do not notice the signs and signals until dysregulation is intense. Many of us have been living in a chronically dysregulated state for so much of our lives we may think this is normal. We may only pay attention to our emotional overwhelm when it reaches a full-blown meltdown and we become unable to function altogether.

Many of us are told we have excess emotions because we are damaged or defective. We may be convinced we should numb ourselves or choose from a menu of questionable drugs. This can create a story of ongoing or permanent disability.

Autism, ADHD, personality disorder, PTSD — all these are valid challenges that can make it difficult to navigate emotions. Whatever the reason is though, see if you can suspend that belief and practice regulation instead of fueling your self-limiting beliefs. Quit telling yourself the same shit-story and try out new strategies until you find something that works. Remember, this is your life, and your life is no one else’s responsibility.

If this is you, then I will remind you to go slow, be patient, and recognize that the people you are keeping in your life are highly likely to be repeating the same patterns and trauma loops. This does not mean they are trying to hurt you or mean you harm. Not at all. But it does mean they might not be helping.

You may need to spend a period of time in some degree of isolation, cocooning yourself to some extent so you can develop new regulation skills. As you practice taking responsibility for your own emotional state, you will be able to interact with specific people or scenarios without being triggered into an emotional reaction. Those areas that cause regular melt-downs or high-energy reactions are the places you are most out of alignment with your values. Pay attention to any areas you notice this is the case.

It can be painful and taxing to do this work. I have a great deal of compassion for those who choose not to, for it is currently easier in many ways to go along with the dysfunctions of society. I have a friend who firmly believes it is not her job to try to do anything to make the future better.

“Don’t carry the weight of the world on your shoulders”, she likes to say.

Maybe she is right. I agree that taking on too much is another way we can keep ourselves looping in a lower energetic state. It is not our job to fix the world or save anyone else. It is our job to take the best care of ourselves that we can and help others when we are able to. We can be more helpful to others when we take care of ourselves first.

It is true that too much of this way of thinking can lead us to be stuck in the ‘savior complex’ or the martyr side of the low-flying disk I mentioned earlier. If you realize you are using caring for others as an excuse to not take good care of yourself, simply pause, exhale, and shift yourself into a higher energetic state.

You don’t have to carry the weight of the world on your shoulders to take responsibility for your own life. There is a lot of room for variability in this. Do what you can. Heal what you can. Improve what you can. Let the rest go.

Human history has ample evidence that individuals do make a significant difference. In any case, I seem to be drawn with very large shoulders and wired with an exceptional drive to do something. I have a strong drive to help, and actively participate in this life. In my younger years, I used this as an excuse to ignore healthy boundaries and wound up damaging myself and my relationships.

“Never believe that a single person can’t change human history. In fact, it is the main thing that has.” (Hormones, relationships, weather, stars, and the moon also play a role.)

Let’s review the tools:

(Graphic P — Pause & Breathe)

The first tool I nearly always use is the Pause, usually followed immediately by bringing my attention to my breath. The physiological sigh, as it has been named, though sometimes it takes a few rounds of slow deep box breathing to gain enough control to then start to add the sigh on the top of the inhale, hold, then exhale through the mouth.

Bringing my attention to my breath also creates that pause that allows me to shift to check in with what the narrator in my head is doing. Often I will find there is some fearful or victim-state, default program running.

Questioning — first round, disruption, going deeper, genuine curiosity, question authority (graphic Q)

Anytime you notice a repetitive or negative thought see if you can interrupt the pattern. Ask yourself one or all of the following questions:

“What is really true?”

Is that really true?

Is that the whole and only truth?

How is it serving me to think about this right now?

Can I do anything about that from here and now?

What can I think about to help bring myself back to a more regulated state?

Sometimes, your internal narrator will answer “Yes” to the “Is it really true?” question and start justifying the thought even more. At this point, ask again, this time with a bit more vim and vigor, such as “Are you sure that’s the complete truth, the only truth, and nothing but the truth?”

Be genuinely curious if you can. This is particularly useful for those dysfunctional patterns that are recurring in your life. By getting curious and inquiring within, you can untangle underlying unconscious or outdated beliefs that are no longer serving you. These are often the things that are creating chronic dysregulation in our lives.

At this point, if you can hold yourself in the potential space created by the pause, you will begin to unravel your brain’s hold on the thought and find you are able to put even more space around it with “Why do I think I think that?”, and “How would I feel if I didn’t think that?”, or “How is it serving me to believe that?”

A crucial component of this exercise is to understand that re-regulation is priority one. If my body is unsafe, or if the dysregulation is due to some physical factor then I need to address that right away. If it is due to my own thinking, then I can shift my thinking with deliberate thoughts. If I can’t seem to do that for myself, then I use default programming that I know can help re-regulate me, such as music, comedy, or one of my favorite podcasters.

Remember, this is purely for you. You do not need to share it with anyone else, and it is not helpful to be dishonest or hide things from yourself in this process. Most people find writing or drawing or interpretive dancing without overthinking is helpful in getting to the subconscious truths of what is really going on. Try not to overanalyze. Remember there is not one way to do this. Find what works for you and simply let go of anything that does not.

Your Basic Needs Are Your Responsibility

Basic Needs? (graphic B) Breathing…

Another helpful line of questions is to check in with your body’s basic needs. What is your body trying to tell you? Remember that emotions are merely data, and feelings are the story you are making up about that data, which is likely to be inaccurate or incomplete.

A good place to start is almost always to check in on your body’s basic needs for food, water, and safety. Check in with your basic needs early and often.

Is your glucose low? How about your electrolytes? Do you need a pinch of mineral-rich salt in your water? Are you thirsty, or do you need to pee? Have you been drinking enough clean water? How is your sleep lately? Where are you in your hormonal cycle? How much have you been exercising lately? When was the last time you danced? When was the last time you sang, hummed, or used your voice to make a beat? How well are you managing your stress levels lately? Is your body dealing with extra stimulation that you have not been mindful of and so not managing well?

By identifying reasons you may be feeling dysregulated, you can create a reinforcing safety loop, letting your body know that caring for your basic needs is something you are always going to do to the best of your ability.

Be sure to take positive action once you have identified something you think might be part of ‘the problem’. I find that I will sometimes spend a lot of time contemplating the problem, come to a potential solution, and then still not take any action. This can propagate that feeling of self-sabotage and lead to more negative spiraling. If you find you are doing this, pause, get up, and take positive action.

Drink some water. Go outside and exhale. Give yourself two minutes to breathe and stretch. Take your vitamins or herbs. Do the thing that you have concluded is likely to help. It probably will, and you will gain positive momentum with more practice. Remember, just start where you are and do the best you can.

Once you do this inventory, TAKE THE NECESSARY STEPS TO REMEDY THE IMMEDIATE CAUSES if possible. If it is not possible to give your body what it needs right away, make a note and assure yourself that you will as soon as you can. Remind your system/self that this situation will change eventually, and resolve to get through it as best as you can.

If it seems unbearable or impossible, or you find yourself repeating the same self-defeating story you might need to do some work. Journal or create some art with a genuine curiosity. See if you can discover something new about yourself.

If you really can’t bring yourself to do the work and feel better because you are feeling overwhelmed, see if you can choose a healthy distraction such as comedy or gazing at clouds in the sky. Compartmentalize whatever it is for the time being if you can, and focus on something that you CAN control.

Patterns, Rhythm, and Disruption

Counting, tapping, drumming, or simply establishing a pattern any way you can can be a helpful way to soothe your nervous system. You can begin to count your steps or count your breathing as a first step to calm down an overstimulated nervous system. You can notice or find your heartbeat or listen for an external sound that has a pattern. The point is to bring yourself in a more coherent state.

Shaking, tapping, patting, rubbing, stroking, or rocking and many other forms of subtle or rigorous movement can help you dissipate the energy built up and find your way back to a more regulated/coherent and calmer state. See if you can practice listening to your own body while you try out a few different things, and find some that feel good to you, or like they might help, at least for the time being.

Humans are some of the most adaptable and resilient creatures we know of. We have a much greater capacity to adjust to harsh conditions and maintain homeostasis than many others. There is a great deal of untapped potential in us yet.

Moving & Posture/Physical Alignment — muscles, joints, fascia, energy —

Movement is something our bodies need to be healthy, which our modern culture seems to be collectively neglecting. The quality of movement matters. Sometimes you might need some intense physical exercise to move certain feelings through your body, and to keep yourself balanced.

You might also be missing gentle, subtle movements. Some of the most subtle and gentle adjustments to the way you move your joints can be the most therapeutic, so don’t think that you need to move in some way that is too difficult for you. The object is to find movement that unlocks that pattern of feeling locked up and disconnected and regain a sense of cooperation and flow.

We tend to curl up, fold, collapse, and shrink when we our energy is in a low frequency, so by straightening your spine, checking your physical alignment, aligning your pelvis and chest, lifting your chin and eyes a bit, pushing your head back over your shoulders, and dropping your shoulders down and back, you can send signals to your nervous system that you are resuming a more regulated state, or coming back on line.

Tapping, Touch, & Rhythm

Touch — Relationship — the Space between us —

Touch is another basic human need which is being collectively neglected in our modern society. It seems that many of us are starved for basic touch to such a degree that it is a major factor in the increasing rates of suicide and mass shootings.

Unfortunately, many of us were not only neglected as children when it comes to healthy loving touch, but many of us also were subjected to harmful, violent or sexual touch in confusing ways which have left us with nervous systems that find touch confusing and not a source of safety. If you have mixed feelings about touch and find it challenging to differentiate loving touch from manipulation and exploitation, be sure to use this tool mindfully so that you help soothe and calm your nervous system, and do not create further trauma in your body or your mind.

I find a nice self-hug, tapping, swaying, or simply grounding, bringing my attention to where the earth is supporting me, to be effective tools. Pressing your body into a corner or wrapping yourself in a soft cozy blanket can be soothing for some of us. Again, find what works for you and don’t worry about what doesn’t, at least for now.

Touch can be a useful tool in many situations. This can involve another person but I recommend you learn to use touch to soothe yourself without relying on anyone else. By bringing your attention to where in your body you are feeling sensations, and naming those sensations or feelings, you will begin to send a signal to your nervous system that things are becoming more organized, in control, and less chaotic.

Touch can also be a great way to change the temperature on your skin and distract the nervous system by sending new information to it. You can try a heat or ice pack. Try light and firm touch. Keep your touch loving, and also don’t be afraid to tap or even slap rigorously if this feels good to you, as long as you can do it in a loving way.

You are of course welcome to add any of your own (and I would love to hear about them), and only use the ones that seem useful to you. You might come back to them at another time and find different tools are more useful to you at different times in your life.

The main objective really is to pattern interrupt the nervous system by putting in some new data, preferably something that reinforces calming and coherence, though sometimes a sudden jolt like a slap or an actual electromagnetic shock is the quickest way to get to a reset.

An important component is to have a desired outcome in mind during the reset, even if it is simply to regain a more calm coherent state. Having a single, clear prioritized outcome in mind will help us find that/get to it much more quickly. Then we can practice shifting to a more productive state, or take more productive actions from a more coherent state. The better we get at managing our systemic integrity and clarity the more quickly we will begin to cultivate lives we truly desire.

Sound Healing — Vibration permeates

Sound vibrations permeate our body easily and can be an excellent tool for bringing yourself back into coherence. Of course, sound can also have a jarring or distracting effect. The reason the entertainment and advertising industry always uses sound is that it is one of the most influential and easy-to-disseminate modes/methods of influence.

Blowing a horn or conch shell, using a gong, bell or singing bowl, or using your own voice are all wonderful tools you can add to your personal tool kit if they appeal to you. I find Baoding Balls very relaxing.

Listening to your favorite music is also helpful. I urge you to pay attention to the quality of music and ask yourself if it is a distraction, a coping mechanism, or a healing tool. Is the music you are listening to helping you re-regulate and adding coherence, or is it distracting you from dysregulation? Both can be useful, but if you are using coping and distraction more often than healing and returning to a coherent state, you may be due for an upgrade of your tools and strategies.***

Sensing — Using Your Body and All Its Senses (graphic S?)

Think about all your senses and all the ways your body takes in data, from sight, touch, smell, sound, through proprioception and interoception, balance, temperature, and gravity…any shift you can create in the data being processed can potentially shift you into a more regulated state.

Remember that usually, unless there is actually an immediate danger that you need to respond to, most of the time you will do best to find a soothing, non-destructive, perhaps even healthy shift, rather than merely disrupting. Again, though, sometimes any disruption can create or begin to create a positive shift and open a space to shift into a more coherent state.

When I am playing my guitar and I break a string or it goes drastically out of tune during a song, I adjust immediately by playing that string less, and tuning it in the song if I can. At the soonest opportunity, I stop the regular flow of the show to fix the issue because it is too far out of tune or broken to continue. If need be, I remove the string and then continue to play until the next break, then put on a new string or switch guitars, or whatever is necessary. If the guitar is only slightly out of tune, I will wait until between songs or even wait for a break a few more songs in to tune it up. Then there is regular tuning and practice.

(Summary of Chapter 3)

You can shift your perspective. You can change your breathing. You can almost always shift your posture or your focus, thereby shifting your energetic state. This can make a huge difference. Remember everything is temporary, and ride it out the best you can. Simply adding more order to your situation in any way you can, with a rhythm or a soothing pattern can help bring your parasympathetic nervous system back ‘online’.

When you realize you are feeling dysregulated, try not to spend your energy blaming anyone else or shaming yourself. Pause, question, breathe, and check in with your basic needs. Then use one or two of the tools you have found that work best for you.

Try some music. Take a walk. Do some yoga. Call a friend or go talk to someone at a bus stop. Tune in to nature and listen to the birds and bugs that are busily taking care of themselves. Get inspired and create something.

Once you are feeling more regulated, evaluate the situation and see if there are things that need more adjusting. Maybe you need a new hobby. Maybe you need to clean the kitchen. Maybe you need a new job or to take a vacation. Try not to make any big decisions from a dysregulated state.

Remember that sometimes survival is the highest form of self-care. Check in with your behaviors and the stories you are telling yourself to be sure you are not actually harming yourself and calling it self-care. If you are feeling threatened and like you need to defend yourself with the vim and vigor appropriate for a life-threatening threat/situation, when actually it is merely a ‘leaf in the sky’ or some other misinterpreted data, you may cause yourself or others harm by existing in ‘survival mode’ when you could be healing or developing new skills.

A note about comparisons and judgments…In this journey we call life, you will most certainly encounter people who seem to have things more and less figured out than you do. In any measurable arena, there is a variety of talents and abilities, and that is one of the greatest things about us as a species.

It is absurd and counterproductive to use others as markers to measure your own progress. Instead, I encourage you to keep a journal or calendar or some other way of tracking your own progress. It is very helpful to have a record of successes and struggles to look back over any time you need evidence that you are making progress on your own journey. If you notice a pattern is recurring, you will begin to see it as fuel for your own growth, not as evidence of your failure.

Learning to use these tools regularly will change your life significantly for the better. Start where you are and do the best you can with what you have. Track your progress. Celebrate your successes and make adjustments where you see that you are making mistakes. Learn where you most often get trapped or self-sabotage and examine the underlying root cause. Get to know what your values really are so you can check the coherence of your elephant and your ant, and make sure all your ‘ducks are in a row’.

All my fucks are lining up!*Graphic?

You can’t actually get ducks in a row by waiting. You must waddle forward and then you will find all your ducklings will fall in line naturally.

Any tool you find that works for you is wise to keep in your toolkit. Remember, there is not ‘one way’ to heal, not one way to make a fantastic life. Try out new things until you find something that seems to work and then practice that to see if it improves.

If nothing seems to work, that is usually a sign your basic needs and sense of safety is so threatened that your body does need to stay in the sympathetic system in order to best survive. If you recognize you are not in real danger and your system has established a dysfunctional pattern, take heart, brave one, for this is a good sign that you are making progress in your own healing journey.

The Shift, Clarity in the Mud, chapter 4

States of Consciousness, Chapter 4 (Part Two) Draft, 3 24 24

Bringing Beautiful Things to the surface (graphic of mud and lotus flower) How naming our emotions more specifically can help us process AND communicate them more effectively

Now that we have introduced the tools, let’s start to put together just a few that work best for you. It’s important to keep in mind the desired outcome for this entire process is for you to feel like you are running your own life, confidently and competently. You have permission to pick and choose the tools that make the most sense for you and ignore the others, at least for now. Over time you are likely to find you may start to learn to use more of the tools in this book, or find other tools which I did not include. This is all perfect!

Remember, Feelings Are Not Facts, but they are information that your body wants you to know. By design, you only notice the emotions that rise about the regular ‘hum’. Naturally, these are going to tend to be the ones that ‘set off’ or trigger some ‘alarm system’ that something needs your special attention. Emotions are an integral part of being human. Feelings are stories we tell about our emotions. They can be wonderful guidance to help you become more authentic, coherent, and vibrant.

Many of us are taught early in life that some emotions or feelings are good and some are bad. It is very common for humans to celebrate and ‘drum up’ more ecstasy and joy and suppress anger and sadness. However, any extreme emotion can be a signal that you are veering ‘off course’.

Your system is designed to always aim at homeostasis, so having extreme positives will likely lead to extreme negatives. When we are criticizing someone else, that is a clue there is something in us that we are denying and ashamed of. When we put someone else on a pedestal and think they are better than us, that is a clue that there is something in us we want to cultivate or an invitation to look more closely at our true desires and bring more of that into our conscious lives.

The recent influx of diagnosed ‘disorders’ including neurodivergence, autism, CPTSD, bipolar disorder, personality disorders, depression, anxiety, panic, and ADHD can all be viewed through the simple lens of a build-up and stagnation of unprocessed, or unbalanced emotions. By focusing on rebalancing the polarity, rather than giving more momentum to the direction of the emotion, you can learn to rebalance your own mental and emotional states.

Your system simply wants homeostasis and wants to keep your consciousness and unconsciousness working together, moving in the same direction. The feeling of chaos and turbulence in your psyche is your guidance system trying to guide you back into alignment. If you can shift from a story of ‘defective’ to a story of ‘opportunity’, you will be delighted at the positive changes you will see in your life, sometimes instantly.

I do think that those of us being labeled as having autism, ADHD, CPTSD, severe anxiety, or as neurodivergent rather than neurotypical tend to be extra sensitive to these sensations. These labels are only helpful in certain contexts and sometimes do more harm than good.

We also sometimes have a lack of capacity to process them, which can lead to a nervous system that is frequently or chronically in a dysregulated state. It will probably take some time to develop new strategies and find the most effective tools for you. Be patient and compassionate with yourself as you learn to do this. Be sure to keep a ‘success journal’ or ‘good feeling jar’ that you can draw from when you need a confidence or moral boost.

Do you believe the stories you tell yourself about your emotions?

Do you interpret your emotions as accurate messages that require logical responses, or are they chaotic and messy and hard to understand?

Many of us have had little or no training on how to interpret or handle our emotions. My hope is that this book can serve as a guide to help you bring more sense and order to your emotions. Learn to let the turbulence settle when it is overwhelming. Learn to use it as fuel sometimes for your creativity.

If you come from a family like mine, then you may have been encouraged to express some of your emotions and forbidden to express others. Many of us have been shunned and shamed for having emotions or feelings at all. Negative and high-energy emotions are often discouraged or condemned in families and schools, while still being actively expressed in all sorts of unhealthy ways. Many of us have learned to use anger as fuel, sadness as justification, and joy as a reason to feel shameful.

Those of us who were severely abused or neglected by our primary caregivers or siblings may have learned to unconsciously suppress our natural defenses in order to survive. This often leads to a continuation of the abusive pattern because it is an unconscious coping mechanism. I have watched countless families struggle with the effects of this unconscious playing out of defensiveness in unhealthy ways. If you cannot say “no” or “stop that” without experiencing an escalation, you might have internalized that feeling and it could become self-destructive.

I believe this was a major factor in my own history of autoimmunity. My body started to turn against itself and attack my own tissues when it became highly activated with no healthy ways to process my feelings or no outlet for expressing the deep sense of defensiveness that I felt in response to having my body and safety threatened repeatedly in infancy and early childhood. Of course, there are other lenses to view this through. Hormones and glucose levels play a significant role in the way our bodies feel. So do the stories we listen to. We are highly susceptible to outside influences and internal variations.

Females and males are often raised with very different programming and expectations. In either case, we are often taught that we have specific obligations to others because of our gender. If you have been programmed to believe that your worth is wrapped up in overriding your own needs and desires to care for others then it may take extra work to really get to the root of your core values and navigate life with fewer feelings of resentment or disempowerment. This is the case for a majority of women and men, so remember you are not alone if you feel this way.

Consider the six primary ‘true feelings’ purposed by John Diamendez*? JD. poses that there are 6 primary ‘true’ feelings, and that all else is polarized emotion that holds the opportunity to alchemize them and turn them into fuel for the 6 true emotions, which are

gratitude

love

inspiration

enthusiasm

certainty

presence

(I am not sure if I agree)

***

It is my desire to offer a fresh perspective of the potential value of all of our emotions, while also encouraging us to put them in a different context when it comes to how we think about our emotional responses.

Throughout much of my life, I have been led by my emotions. I have seen them as guidance, as messages from my body, and clues about the intentions of others and what I should do. I have come to understand that my somewhat unique neurology might make me prone to feeling a much higher degree of intense emotions than the majority of other humans. I suspect that we simply have not yet learned to articulate most of these and that people/we all are receiving much more emotional data than we are interpreting. As general language models and other forms of “artifical intelligence” come into being, I think it is important to consider how our emotions are a significant part of what makes us human.*

It is only when something ‘trips a wire’ of being outside our own personal ‘normal’ that we even notice a change in our emotions and call it feeling. This is how divers who train to override the anxiety of carbon dioxide poisoning can end up dying instantaneously. Your body does the best it can to alert you to danger, but if you don’t take the time to get to know yourself in a loving, curious way, or if you train your body that you do not listen to it, it may find new ways of letting you know things are not okay.

“I’m pretty fucking far from okay” quote?

That might sound obvious to you, or you might find you have some resistance to this idea, so let’s break it down a bit more.

Our emotions and the subsequent feelings that arrise from them are indeed messages from our bodies. They are the result of chemical cascades that happen in response to data received and transferred to various parts of body systems or the whole body. I am not saying we should disregard our emotions or feelings or act like they are not happening. I am also not saying we should allow ourselves to be governed by them or leave them unchecked. I am saying that our interpretations of our emotions, what we call our feelings, are often underdeveloped and so misinterpreted, or interpreted in unhelpful, often very unhealthy ways. If you do not take time to understand what your emotions are communicating and respond with what your body needs, you are likely to end up feeling like a slave to your own emotions.

Learning to listen to the feelings we have can be an excellent way to learn how to give ourselves what we need, and get to the root of our true desires. We can get to know ourselves and come to a better understanding of our interpretations of the chemical responses that are created in response to what is going on around and inside us. It’s important to realize, however, that the stories we tell ourselves about the emotional responses we have are often rooted in misinterpretations, false programs, unresolved conflicts, and traumas.

Currently, I see many people who either suppress and ignore most of their emotions, distract ourselves from them, or dive deeply into them without reservation. If we react as if our interpretations of our own emotions, or our feelings, are facts, rather than clues, or data to be put into a larger equation/picture then we can feel overwhelmed by them. This often leads to a desire to suppress them.

Why simply shutting down or turning off your emotions is not an effective long-term strategy for success. (little boy lost on the moon graphic/art)

If you simply learn to ignore or shut down in response to having emotions, as many seemingly successful people do, you could end up being one of the beings who is hurting everyone around you without understanding why. You might also develop disease in your own body. Your feelings are messages you can use, and simply ignoring them or shutting them down will not make the messages irrelevant, it will simply make you unaware of them. If you have a reoccurring pattern of people around you accusing you of being insensitive, there is probably some truth in that which could be useful to examine.

Imagine there is a car alarm going off outside. It only makes sense to ignore the alarm or turn it off AFTER you have evaluated the situation to see what set the alarm off. If you have an alarm that starts going off all the time when it shouldn’t, then it needs repairing or replacing. Your emotional system is similar. It is there to help you, and if it seems like ‘a bother’ then take a little time to figure out why. Also, if other people’s emotions are upsetting to you, and you find yourself shutting down, blocking them out, or humiliating them for being emotional, consider that you could be part of their problem. Even if you think you have your emotions ‘under control’, they are still driving you and influencing the other humans around you. It is worth examining them even if you believe it isn’t. It always ‘takes two to tango’, and your conflicts are never ‘just the other person’. If they were, you wouldn’t be aware of them.

Women, especially, are equipped with intuitive senses that many men are less in touch with. The current paradigm often shuns women as ‘too emotional’. This is hurting us all. Hysteria was a documentable disorder in the great made-up* manual of disorders up until 1980, and our current society still treats women with incredible disrespect and disregard for our health and safety. If you have a woman in your life, especially if that woman is you, please keep this in mind. Hold a safe space for her and learn what intuition can do.***

Rather than shutting down, narrowing your perspective on emotions and labeling them are simply ‘good’ or ‘bad’, try shifting your perspective to be more broad. Get curious and ask yourself ‘What is my body trying to communicate to me, really?’

It is natural and normal for this to take a good deal of practice. A good place to start is to notice where you feel it in your body, and what it feels like. Give it a name. Get curious and specific. Try not to be judgemental or dismissive.

What research and science has found so far: (emotions wheel graphic)

One thing that has been studied regarding emotions and feelings, is what we call them (Brene Brown and colleagues?). Research has shown that most of us have only a few words to describe the complex myriad of emotions our bodies are capable of. “Glad”, “sad”, and “mad” are the most common states which people in my culture can identify. Many of us use only a few words to describe our emotions. Research shows that as we begin to expand our vocabulary about them, we also expand our ability to handle them in healthy ways.

There is also good research to show that the more specific we can get about describing our emotions to ourselves, the more useful they can become. For example, rather than just thinking “I am mad”, if we can get curious, add a pause, and dive a bit deeper, we will often discover an unarticulated desire or boundary under our emotions. If we can get to the boundaries and desires that our emotions are responding to, then our emotions and feelings become helpful messengers. They are clues, and helpful guides, rather than hindrances and disruptions to be quelled and calmed.

Keep in mind that the point is not to label them and make them part of our identity or impose them on others as their identity. The objective of naming them is to help you rebalance them, compartmentalize them to an extent, and recognize the fueling potential they hold.

Much like labeling boxes in a garage or closet, it can be helpful to label our emotions accurately and to explore and document/inventory of them somewhat regularly so that we can make sure we are keeping our beliefs in line with our values and to check out behaviors and habits with those values. Nearly all diseases can be viewed through this lens of alignment and coherence. Incongruence and incoherence interfere with the body’s natural ability to heal. By getting more curious about our emotions and learning to label them more specifically, we can create more congruence and coherence in our bodies.

When we have very high-energy emotions, they often do ‘stir up’ lots of sentiments and sediment which can literally cloud our judgment. There are several studies that indicate that negative emotions like anger may rev themselves up when we express them, rather than dissipate. They can also become toxic if stuffed down into the body and not processed.

It is important to learn to ‘take your foot off the gas’ when emotions are high. Learn to pause, and take some time to untangle them and let the intensity settle before making choices and taking action to remedy them. The long-standing “count to ten” advice when we are angry or upset is a good place to start as it can help create the necessary pause to then make a different choice. I know this is easier said than done when we are in the throws of an emotional surge.

Making a regular practice of meditation is a great way to improve your ability to calm yourself in those heated moments. Just like working out regularly can build strength in the body, practicing calming techniques regularly can improve your ability to find calm when you feel ‘revved up’. Remember this is an ongoing practice, not a destination you can get to.

Learning to pause and breathe rather than reacting instantly is a great strategy when dealing with our modern-day tendencies to be overstimulated and over-reactionary. Obviously, in real emergencies, when we need to fight or flee or freeze (or fawn/fuck), this tendency to switch into the sympathetic nervous system serves us well. When this happens our emotions override our prefrontal cortex/or higher reasoning system and we literally no longer have access to most of our own intelligence. We act quickly and without thinking.

When our system is activated and we are not in a real emergency, this is when we can damage our relationships and our own bodies if we do not take some time to get back to a regulated state. Learn to ‘tune up’ so that it functions to actually help us navigate these situations in the best ways possible. Left undisciplined and unexamined, this system can be destructive. If examined and disciplined, it can become a great asset in your life.

(Include emotions wheel?/chart/graphic)

What is normal? When feelings are not ‘normal’ — What happens to you has an effect — the myth of normal (Gabor Mate)

If this system becomes over-activated it can begin to malfunction frequently, and then we call that PTSD or an anxiety or panic disorder, or some other psychological malfunction. The mental aspect of this, the story we tell ourselves about what is happening, is secondary to the chemical reactions in the body. Our emotional responses are often misaligned with what is actually going on and with the responses we actually want to have. This is a major factor that has led to our current state of rising suicide rates and increasing psychological dysfunction.

While I agree that this state is not a highly functional or desirable state, I don’t think it is helpful to view it as abnormal or a disease or “syndrome”. The work of Gabor Mate, Zack Bush, Joe Dispenza, Michael Pollan, and many others in the last decade helps to bring a much different perspective into focus. The idea that there is some ‘normal’ that we should be aiming for is absurd and falls apart when you really get into real-life situations. I find the idea of coherence, and settling, much more useful.

Mention Oprahs book, What Happened To You?*Body Keeps the Score?

When we define ourselves as defective or disordered and start to identify as that, as if everything is not temporary, we often hold ourselves in that state longer than we would if we simply examined our state and then started to take necessary actions to bring ourselves back to that more calm center lane before we make choices or take actions.

A useful technique when struggling with limiting beliefs or self-defeating thoughts on repeat is to add the words “right now” or “yet” to the end of a limiting statement. These are magic words which open up spaces of possibility for change. I encourage you to use them often.

Many of my personal and professional relationships have been damaged by my lack of understanding of this. I see people around me every day who are wounding one another, often the people they love the most, because of what seems to be a lack of understanding of this basic idea. When we label each other or ourselves as damaged or defective without adding a sense that it is a temporary state that we can remedy, we are creating more incoherence and incongruence in our lives and that permeates society.

As I mentioned, there are times in life when we do want this system to be in the driver’s seat. We are capable of incredible feats, such as lifting a car off a child, running incredibly far or fast, or enduring unimaginable pain in order to survive or help someone we care about survive. This system is a beautiful mechanism that serves us well in some situations.

However, in our modern society, we are often bombarded with activating and triggering sights, sounds, smells, and ideas. If we do not consciously take steps to manage this in healthy ways, we are likely to get bounced and dragged around by this overstimulating, stirring up. This is why finding a regular practice of remaining or returning to a more calm and coherent state. Self-regulating is crucial to building a fulfilling and vibrant life.

“Peace is the result of retraining your mind to process life as it is, rather than how you think it should be.” Wayne Dyer

Are you settling or simmering? Learning to Let Emotions Settle, Stirring Things Up For better results — just the right amount — dynamic balance — Icarus tale? highs and lows, no guidance, falling to perilous end (second graphic of pond and lotus blossom/fish?)

Do you want your life to be an example for others, or a warning? In the grand scheme of things, both are valuable and regardless of what you choose, you are worthy of living the life you create. However, as I know you have seen, there is a whole lot of variation in the amount of enjoyment, fulfillment, wellness, and wealth that humans embody in this life.

Developing a practice of ‘settling the sentiment’, or letting the mud settle before re-engaging in the pursuit of your goals is going to be a necessary ongoing habit. I find that approaching this with the same idea of red, yellow, and green light tools is a helpful way to organize my mental tool kit.

A daily meditation practice is the most proven, easiest method for this, and is available to everyone. Even if you never have time to stop moving because you are a slave in a mine, you can learn to create a safe haven in your mind, and cultivate coherence in your body. *Consider Nelson Mandala’s experience?*

Letting your emotions settle is sometimes going to be a matter of emotional regulation, or resetting the nervous system. However, it is also a matter of cultivating resilience and strength so you maintain this calmness more of the time. Much like you want to address an acute injury differently than you address your desires to build more strength and resilience and flexibility overall.

Many of the tools and techniques are actually the same or similar for red, yellow, and green light situations, however, the intention, speed, focus, and duration tend to vary. I feel inclined to pause here to remind you, there is ‘not one way’ to do this. Find what works best for you where you are now. Use the skills you have and build on those over time.

“Wisdom is whatever works.” Clarissa Pinkola Estes, PhD

Let’s go back to the example of containers with labels on them. When we become aware of an emotional response there is something our body has determined needs our attention. We have emotions all the time. They only get our attention or come into our conscious awareness when the body system perceives some threat or something out of the ordinary that needs our attention. It could be something dangerous or it could be that we are moving closer or farther from a desire or goal, and so our alert system has been activated with a ‘warmer’ or ‘getting cold’ signal.

While it may be useful to use broad categories initially, like good-bad, or mad-sad-happy, we would be wise to get curious about them and be more specific. See what boundary is being crossed or what desire is a stake. Start to utilize the information our bodies are gathering and trying to communicate to us, and also to help us really have a better idea of what our feelings really are getting at/telling us, try to add another layer or two of descriptors.

For example, underneath anger is very often fear. When I feel frustrated that I can’t figure something out, or fearful that I might be lost, my initial feeling is often one I might describe as anger, and someone on the outside would probably describe as ‘negative’. A bird in the windowsill might describe it as ‘agitated’. When I get curious and go a bit deeper into it, depending on the specific context or situation, I usually find something more distinct, and more useful. More often than not, I find I am not upholding my boundaries or I am acting out of accordance with my own values. Recognizing this can help me dissipate the anger and do something constructive with it rather than lashing out.

Try to develop this skill anytime you feel an emotion, or become aware of an emotional feeling in your body. See if you can find another, more descriptive word for what it is. Remember there is no right or wrong answer in this, you are merely trying to create space and some order so that things can settle. Try checking to see where you feel it in your body, and what kind of sensations you are having. Is it tightness in your chest? Is it a burning in your stomach? Is it a leaning back or a contraction?

Again, as you notice what is going on in your body, try not to use that as fuel to feel more incoherence, but rather use your increased awareness to shift your perspective and create more organization in your overall systems. The more you can develop a more nuanced vocabulary for these sensations, the more you will able to harness the incredible capacity of untapped potential that your body holds.

When we can label them more precisely, you will find that they become easier to ‘put into place’. You can determine what needs to be handled in the immediate situation at hand, and what is simply information to take inventory of later, at a more practical time.

Sometimes positive feelings are also a sign of dysregulation

Up until fairly recently, I only considered negative feelings to be a sign of dysregulation. It took some major melting down to reveal a significant truth about ‘getting high’ to me. I have been accustomed to fairly extreme highs and lows in my life. I think it is fair to say my tolerance for pain, chaos, discomfort, and ‘riding the waves’ is substantially higher than the average human.

The tale of Icarus comes to mind as a fine example of this.

In the story of Icarus, his father and he are banished to a tower for some crime, and his father builds them fantastic wings to escape by. Icarus’ father is not portrayed as a very moral character. He tells his son to be careful not to dip too close to the waves because if his feathers get wet, it will be much harder to fly. Then his father flies off, leaving him behind.

Icarus is literally having the time of his life, flying about the ocean, and begins to play. He swoops down very close to the water, and a wave sneaks up and gets the tips of his wings wet. Icarus is so distracted by his enjoyment of flying that he forgets his father’s additional warning, not to fly too high and risk the heat of the sun melting the wax that is holding the feathers on his wings. Icarus foolishly flies up very high, feeling fine, and the wax does melt, and he falls, down, down, down, smiling all the way in ecstasy until he dies.

This story is often told as a cautionary tale to warn against ‘flying too high’, but I think I had previously missed the bigger point. I had related the idea of ‘too high’ to having aspirations above your ability. However, now I see it had more to do with his state of mind being so elevated that he was not thinking properly. It was Icarus’ foolishness, combined with his lack of guidance, that left him ill-equipped to handle his first flight by himself. The excitement of flying was too much for him, and he forgot to be mindful of the highs and lows. He went too low and then too high and then fell out of the sky completely.

(Why he couldn’t swim, we will never know.)

Extreme emotions on either side of coherence, are a reason to pause and bring yourself back into balance. Until recently I was always trying to maximize good feelings, with little regard for how dysregulated I was in an elevated state. It might feel better to be in a state of ecstasy, but a dysregulated state is still not a good place to take decisive action or orchestrate your life from.

I realized I was often setting my goals from an elevated state, and that was setting me up to feel disappointed in myself. It’s important to note, this does not mean you or I or any of us can’t achieve truly remarkable things. It does mean that it is important to pay attention to your own state and adjust accordingly to keep yourself in balance. With consistent practice, you can learn to fly very high indeed. Just be sure you are in a calm and coherent frame of mind when you set your goals and when you evaluate your progress, otherwise you could end up ‘overcorrecting’ and plummetting farther down than you imagined was possible while you were flying high.

(graphic of Icarus?)

A few years ago I was experiencing a profound increase in negative emotions and feeling overwhelmed a lot of the time. Once I was able to acknowledge to myself that my nervous system was frequently incoherent and that was having negative effects in my life, I started to try to ‘fix’ the problem. At first, I tried focusing on the positives and not allowing myself to ‘wallow’ in negative feelings. In fact, I would ‘drown out’ any negative feelings with loud music, marijuana, alcohol, programming, and sugary ‘treats’.

This seemed like a sound strategy, and I am certainly not the first to have tried it. However, after a few years of things getting worse rather than better, I had some major epiphanies about how I had been suppressing many of my negative emotions rather than accepting they were healthy messages that deserved my attention. Resisting negative emotions is like a sticky glue that gives them more staying power in the long run. Rather than resisting negative emotions, learn to develop a healthy appreciation for them. (The flip)

Simply noticing and acknowledging when you are feeling overwhelmed and depressed or manic is a good first step. The next step is to accept that this is a normal, natural reaction to your circumstances and treat yourself with compassion and patience rather than using the recognition as fuel to add more negative energy to the situation. As you practice loving yourself unconditionally, becoming the parent that your wounded inner child needs, you will find it gets easier to decide to get curious and find out why.

Remember, learning to take responsibility for changing the course of your life, does not always come easily, as a single shift, but rather, as yet another series of shifts. Without the correct tools, sometimes diving deeper into your emotions simply leads to more and more dysregulation. Make a regular habit of pausing and shifting so you can bring subtle and significant changes that will permeate every aspect of your life. Again and again, keep refining your perspective, uncovering things the things you do not want to look at, and deal with things you have been putting off by avoiding those negative feelings. Take a good, hard, honest look at yourself, but gently now, with compassion and patience.

This is such an important key to all of this. To remember that this is part of the process, and to embrace it as cheerfully as possible. Cheerfully embrace your misery, and be a little more cautious when you are feeling euphoric, that is what I am saying. Seriously, if you make the accurate labeling of your emotions or feelings one of your goals, you will become a person who handles your emotions more gracefully/skillfully. This is the physics of progress in action.

Energetic States and Levels of Consciousness

Graphic and description of scale, and then into to Peter Sage/?? Original Work of? Egyptians???

Think about a time in your life when you responded poorly, and things got worse. Now consider a time when things seemed like they were going badly, but somehow you managed to turn things around, and make them better. The key difference is your energetic state. You can learn to cultivate a higher energetic state with practice. That is really what this book is about.

If you can, check in with yourself and your self-talk regularly and see if your self-talk is coming from a lower or a higher energetic state. If you find yourself thinking things are happening “to you”, that is a low energetic state. If you are thinking that things are being done “by you”, that is a bit higher energetic state. See if you can bring yourself into an even higher energetic state (while remaining regulated) and realize that things are happening “through you” or even “as you”.

I find the lens of consciousness as having many layers to be helpful in some contexts, though really it is not a fully accurate way of looking at it. To simplify the idea, and make it more practical, we can check the nature of our internal dialogue and find out what energetic state we are in. Pay attention to the words you think and speak.

When things are happening “to me” I am in the victim state, and when they are happening “by me”, then I am in what I call the business or doing state. Above that is the sense that things are happening “through me”, which is the state I most often feel I am embodying when I am working as a healer or facilitator of healing in others.

“As me” is that state of consciousness when we recognize we are one with everything, everything is always exactly as it should be, and we are a part of this infinite co-creative capacity we call Consciousness The Universe, Life, or God. Personally, I prefer to call it The Great Mysterious Grand Poo Paw, for numerous reasons. I don’t believe it matters much what we call ‘that which is beyond our ability to fully comprehend’, so long as we recognize there is a lot that we are not solely responsible for. This is a collaborative existance. Being in coherence means working well with the entirety of existance. Remember, it is a practice, a process, not a destination.*

Summary of Chapter 4

*Break the Wheel (Crappy Childhood Fairy),

If all this is adding confusion or stirring up more mud and lack of clarity, take a deep breath, exhale, exhale a little more…When you are feeling overwhelmed, start by clearning the clutter, and letting things settle.*

Don’t despair, brave heart. It will settle of its own accord in time, and meanwhile, if you can, celebrate that you have come this far, that you have set your intentions to make positive shifts in your life, and know that repetition works, and with practice and positive reinforcement, all this will get easier. Choose just one tool to practice at first if that feels like all you can do. It is enough to practice the pause, putting more space around your feelings, start by breaking the pattern, and disrupting the pattern.

Break the churning negative emotion thought cycle that stirs up negative emotions in your body, recognize this is a positive feedback loop, reinforcing itself chemically.***Recognize that ‘the wheel’, or the ‘shit storyteller’ or ‘the shit storm’ that is this recurring drama tic self-defeating pattern in your life is an illusion, and so arguing with it, overanalyzing it, trying to figure it out or “fix it” just adds fuel to it and keeps you spinning in it.

The Crappy Childhood Fairy (Anne Runkle) uses the analogy of ‘breaking the wheel’ to point out that the only way to break this cycle is the disrupt this pattern. It may be scary at first, or seem like a violent thing to disrupt your life like this, and it can be. However, you will discover that much, like a rodent running on a wheel in a field, there is a whole world waiting to be explored outside the confines of the spinning wheel you keep being drawn to.

If you can only remember one thing at this point, try to remember that the stories are made up, and if you are telling a shitty story about your shitty life, just stop. Shift. Sh Ffff Tt

Tell a better story. Begin now. Begin again.

“Doc it hurts when I do this.” — “Quit doing that.” cartoon

(Disrupt you — Jay Samit*)

The Shift, Goal Stacks, Choose Your Friends and Enemies Wisely, Chapter 5 (Part two)

Choose Your Friends and ‘Enemies’ Wisely, Goal Stacking, Comparison as a Source of Joy, Draft 2 26 24

“If it’s your job to eat a frog it’s best to do it first thing in the morning. And if it’s your job to eat two frogs, it’s best to eat the biggest one first.” Mark Twain

If you live in a chronically dysregulated state, you are likely to be distracted from really getting to know yourself and setting good goals. It might seem pointless or impossible from where you are now. Take a few minutes and imagine what goals you might set if you DID have time to dream and make them come true.

The truth is, many of those dreams are very unlikely to come true if you are not working on them regularly. They are 100% guaranteed not to come true if you never set them. This is really the main reason that learning to regulate your emotions and raise your emotional state is so important to living a life you love. This is why I started with the decision to take responsibility for your own life.

“If you don’t write down your goals, you’ll probably end up working for someone who has.” ~Peter Sage

We’ve all heard that it’s important to set goals. You may not be aware that only a few people in an average cross-section actually write down and review their goals. Those people who do write down their goals are overwhelmingly more successful at achieving them than those who simply state them or perhaps merely keep some vague idea like “a good life” or “a happy family”.

Without clear, specific outcomes, milestones, checkpoints, strategies and steps, your goals are likely to remain vague dreams in the distant future. Your goals could end up always moving just out of your reach. For many, especially as aging takes its toll, goals feel like they are pulling farther and farther away. If you don’t make time to write them down and regularly visit them, they might just feel more and more distant, until eventually you find yourself giving up on them, one by one or in big swaths.

“Being fit? That was a silly dream.”

“Financial security? What a fool I’ve been to believe I could have what everyone wants just by doing the same things that most everyone does, which is not much in the way of taking specific action to achieve my dreams.”

The point of setting goals, however, is not merely to achieve the goals, but rather, to help you become who you want to be. The point of having goals is to keep your ant and your elephant moving in the same general direction, working together, rather than spinning your wheels in self-sabotage and internal conflict. This might seem a bit tricky to navigate, so let’s dive a bit deeper into how and why to create clear goals and make revisiting them part of your regular routine.

Good goals should feel just slightly out of reach, at least at first. If you can easily see how to reach your goals when you set them, then they are not goals that will lead you to develop yourself. You need to have at least some big goals that are outside your comfort zone, and at least a little bit beyond your current reach. Of course, you do want to achieve your goals too. Just be mindful that you will need to set new goals along the way, to keep yourself evolving, consciously.*

Remember, the object of these big goals is to motivate your own progress and self-development. At the end of the day, and at the end of your lifetime, it is how you feel about yourself when you are by yourself that matters most, not which goals you achieved and which you didn’t. That does not mean you should set your sights on things you don’t believe are possible. It does mean that you don’t need to be able to see all the steps to take the first one. It means you don’t need to set goals that have a clear path to success, but rather, set goals that lead you to become the person you want to be.

I think it is worth considering that our sense of self-worth seems to be greatly enhanced by attempting and at least occasionally achieving success when doing ‘hard things’. (sweet spots)

Consider a goal like ‘climbing a high mountain’ or ‘making it off the highest lift and down the mountain without falling down’. You might be pursuing a goal like getting a degree, raising healthy happy children, publishing a best selling book, or recording and producing an LP of original music. Having goals is important and can help drive improvements, however, once one is accomplished, you will need a new goal. Goals are important and also somewhat arbitrary. It isn’t actually a specific goal that makes attaining it worthwhile. It is the feeling of being the type of person who achieves their goals. It is knowing you did it, not the actuality of having done it. Does this make sense?

Goal Stacks

One of my favorite concepts to use in my goal setting is goal stacking. This is different from multi-tasking, which has been shown to not really be possible for humans. When we attempt to do more than one thing at once that is not integrated, then they may compete for our time and energy. When we can link them, or stack them, they become part of the same task, just with many layers of satisfaction. Goal stacking is doing one thing that satisfies more than one goal or desire at the same time, like doing exercises with your kids, or doing your doctoral thesis on the slang used among snowboarders so you can improve your snowboarding while also getting your degree.

When I was raising my son I got particularly good at this. As a single parent, I found myself with chronically limited time and energy and always a potentially overwhelming list of things that needed to be done. I wanted to include fitness and outdoor play in my routines, but how to manage that and also get in enough family time, work time, and all the rest?

The answer came in goal stacking. I got good at using time management tools and scheduling tasks and events into set blocks of time, and I tried to make sure that everything in my schedule filled more than one goal. So time outside was also time with friends or family, and was also fitness time. Time researching was also work time and sometimes also family time. This is goal stacking.

The Utility of Comparisons (graphic/art of comparison)

“Comparison is the thief of joy” is a popular saying, and many people take it as truth. I think it is misleading and much more important is how we use comparison. Comparison can also be a source of joy and motivation.

We cannot help but compare, it is a thing we naturally do. We can be more mindful about HOW we compare, and what we compare, and what to. The intention behind our comparisons is what matters, not the mere fact we are comparing things, which again, we really cannot help but do by our very natures.

Rather than try to ‘not compare’, I would like to suggest we can use comparison more intentionally to help us become more of the people we want to be. Choose your friends, mentors, and enemies wisely.

The Myth of Normalcy

A prevalent distortion I currently perceive in society is that we use an idea of ‘normalcy’ to compare our imperfections to, and then conclude we are broken or flawed or disordered. Our current paradigm is heavily dominated by what I call ‘the industrial disease complex’. It profits from making and keeping us chronically ill. Ideally, we are just functional enough to continue to slave away mindlessly working on the goals of those few among us who have been brave enough to take the reigns of their own lives, set goals, document them, and do the work of achieving them.

It is increasingly popular to define ourselves as traumatized and overcome with some ‘disorder’ which is presented as if it was our identity, so much so that many people currently say “I am ADHD” for example, rather than, I sometimes struggle with many of the traits which can be best understood under the broad/general heading of having ADHD. The current system presents these as if they are irreverable aspects of our beings, rather than temporary and narrowly viewed aspects of a greater whole which we all are. It can be disparaging. So one tool I urge you to use is to put a pause and a space around any label that you take to be your identity.

I am…

That is the totality of your true identity. Every label you put over that is a cloak, a hat, a story, a label that points to an idea that is capable of evolving. In fact, the evolution of our individual and collective identities depends on our willingness to step bravely into that unknown, rather than shrinking back into the empty shells of our former selves and the labels we came up with to organize them.

Just like the pieces of tape or black marker words printed on boxes of things in your closet are not the actual things inside them, so too, your labels, your titles, and your names do not define you. You are much much more than any single label can even point to. Break free of the ridiculous idea that any single aspect of your identity, or any single label or word defines you over all others. Use what serves you now, and in any given situation, and let go of the rest.

Of course, sometimes a label or a name or a title is very useful. In that case, embrace it wholeheartedly and step into it confidently, knowing it is yours to claim. Just know that, like a hat or coat or boots, or an entire wardrobe style, or accent/language, you can change if you choose to. All this is temporary.

You are more of a shapeshifter than you know. In fact, you are always changing, always shifting, always unfolding. The question is, are you doing it consciously and with your own intentions, or are you doing it aimlessly or by default? Are you allowing your creative energy to be harnessed for fufilling the desires of others? If you are, are their values aligned with your own, or are you harming yourself by not taking more responsibility for yourself, and in that way, actually harming all of society?

Are you stepping into the fullest potential that only you can bring into this existence, or are you squandering it with distraction and complaints?

Learning to recognize complaints and comparisons as unarticulated or poorly articulated desires is another key to creating goals that really ‘light your fire’, spark your inner fire/awaken your own creative genius. (creative genius, Elizabeth Gilbert***housing your own genie or muse while not owning it — allowing it to be free and sharing the responsibility — surrendering to the mystery — not taking all the credit or the blame)***

You are enough to be worthy and deserving of your own unconditional love, exactly as you are. You are also capable of much more than you are currently doing, almost certainly.

Choosing Your Enemies Wisely and Well/The Fight and Futility, (Are you addicted to being angry?) (polarity graphic?, yin and yang)

A friend of mine posted this on social media: “It’s very strange to realize that you choose chaos over peace because it’s the only thing you’ve ever known.” and I found myself feeling a sense of gratitude to myself for doing the work over the last decade or so to get to a place where this is no longer strange, and no longer entirely true for me. It took a long time for many reasons, not the least of which was my thoughts and beliefs, and also the circle of people I surrounded myself with.

It is commonly understood that we become like the people we spend the most time with, or spend time listening to. If your friends are wealthy, you are much more likely to become more wealthy too. If your friends are wallowing in a victim mindset, complaining and telling stories about who did what to whom, you are likely to adopt a victim mindset too.

One reason for this is that we find a sense of security in the familiar, and so we often mindlessly repeat things once we develop a habit. This is why it is important to examine your goals, get to know yourself, and disrupt your patterns regularly. Get out of that rut!

Something that is not talked about as often, but which I recently heard some great conversations about from Patrick Bet-David, is that it is equally important to choose your enemies wisely. Let’s unpack this idea a bit more.

What makes a good enemy? A useful enemy is something or someone that motivates you. An enemy can be a great catalyst for getting you out of a rut. It is something you push back against or someone you compete with.

Ideally, your enemy is not a person or group of people (which is fraught with dismal outcomes including war and prison systems) , but instead, your enemy can be an idea or construct. It is a motivating force that drives us to become better, to not be defeated, and reminds us of our underlying deep ‘why’. (Simon Seneck?). Your enemy motivates you to do better. It can be the thing or person you push back against. Your enemy can be someone or something you want to be more like, or it can be the person or thing that helps you remember who you don’t want to be.

Masculine and Feminine Energy/Yin Yang, The Power in Giving and Receiving/Polarity

We live in a reality that is defined largely by dualities. Good and bad. Feminine and masculine. Right and wrong. Day and night… Everything in this reality also comes in cycles, oscillating from one side to the other. You can’t have giving without receiving. You can’t have dominance without submission. You can’t have improvement without failure. This is built in to our nature and everything around us.*

We can use this to help evaluate and recognize where we are in any cycle. Look at your various relationships and environments through this lens and you might see them in a different light.

The Physics of Progress (it’s about the process , not a destination, enjoy the ride and also, check your course/map/internal compass)

One of my favorite online teachers and coaches, Tom Bilyeu, often talks about using the scientific method to move forward in business and in personal relationships. An important idea in this framework is that failure is guaranteed, but success is not.

Learn to embrace failure as feedback. Try not to see it as an ‘endpoint’ but rather, as a necessary step along the path of progress. Similar to the way you might develop a theory and then develop an experiment to test that theory or see how it holds up against scrutiny. It is important to keep this ‘growth mindset’ approach when learning to listen to your own emotions/feelings while still maintaining functional coherence to manage your life.

It’s crucial that you keep humility about you. Keep in mind, you are going to be wrong more often than you are going to be ‘right’. Really, ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ are not helpful ways of assessing as perhaps would be “slow progress” and “faster progress”. When you understand that ‘failure’ is just feedback, you will understand it is necessary to try things that do not work and learn from your mistakes. Do not let any one misstep or faltering cause you to turn back or give up altogether. It is all progress. In fact, we often learn much more from our failures than we do from our successes.

The famous inventor is quoted as saying “I have not failed. I have merely found ten thousand ways that do not work.”

One of my favorite stories, told by my favorite storyteller, Clarissa Pinkola Estes, is of the congregation of birds and a golden feather. She tells the story juxtaposed to a story of a shadowy/otherwordly ‘boogie man’ of sorts which takes the life-essence of a child when his father has lost touch with his own ability to see what is in other dimensions around us. The two stories are presented to illuminate the way that we humans might become so convinced by our own misperceptions that there is ‘no magic’ or nothing beyond our perceptions, that we miss that crucial moment when we must forge forward rather than turn back.

In turning back we miss that precious golden opportunity that only our own, unique progress can add to the collective. Do not lament or grieve this loss for long, brave heart, for there will always be more potential than we can fully step into. This is what creates the tension necessary to propel this entire existence forward. It cannot be any other way.

These are the moments our emotions and subsequent feelings can help us tap into, or tune to, if we choose to learn to listen to them. The deepest, most fulfilling, most delightful aspects of life are on the other side of doing the hard things, and one of those is learning to face and navigate our various emotional states in more nuanced ways, rather than shunning all intense emotions as “too much” or disruptive.

In my experience, I have seen many people ‘veer off course’ when they think we ‘finally have the answer’ and ‘go all in’ on some ‘truth’ that turns out to be more of an entertaining theory. Many relationship constructs and religions operate on this structure, and from my perspective, this holding on to false truths is the cause of a great deal of human suffering and stagnation.

*Myers Briggs and others, self-reflection, self-narration, evaluation discussion?

Another of my favorite online coaches, mentors, and teachers is Peter Sage. He has a great way of explaining how it is important not to make goals for the sake of achieving the goals, rather the point of making goals is to see who we can become in our journey to trying to achieve them. When we set goals with this ‘growth mindset’, we will triumph even when we do not succeed. As long as we are progressing, even if it is by way of the ‘cha cha cha’ sometimes, we will be able to look back at the course of our lives and feel satisfaction and a sense of pride over our accomplishments.

*If you want to stop living in hindsight, you need to live with foresight.

You see more of what you are looking for, so setting clear goals and intentions will help keep your brain focused. Similar to going shopping without a list or a budget in mind, if we go through life without a clear agenda and priorities, and check that they are in alignment/congruent with our core values and true/special genius, then we are likely to get distracted and end up with a whole lot of what we don’t actually need or even want.

By planning ahead before I go grocery shopping, for example, I can set the intention for a reasonable allotment of healthy treats, whatever that means to me. Then I can feel good about my choices rather than coming home with things I know are not congruent with my goals to be healthier, somehow thinking I won’t overconsume them, as if there was any amount of them that was good, and then overconsuming them AND feeling bad about it, adding momentum to a negative spiral.

This is a crucial key for me. Setting stricter goals and scheduling does not have to mean beating myself up when I don’t get it right. It does increase the odds I will get much closer to reaching them than if I do not set them at all, however. It is important to recognize that the behaviors themselves are usually not the things that register as ‘good’ or ‘bad’, rather it is our conscious intention, and the timing of specific actions, that total up to us feeling positive or negative about ourselves.

Eating when we are hungry rather than by a schedule, waking when we are rested rather than to an industrial timeclock, and expressing our desires and preferences from a regulated, calm, and secure state allows us to engage with life in ways that cultivate more delight and lightheartedness in our relationships and in our bodies*with ourselves and each other.

Again, by not having a plan and a conscious idea of priorities, we become slaves to the external world.

Summary of Chapter 5

Remember, success or failure is not what dictates an endeavor’s usefulness. Think of your life as a scientific experiment of a sort, in which you keep a theory of the most incredible life you can imagine creating, and then try out different experiments, various tests and trials and trainings, in order to see how far you can progress. Remember that living a good life and being a good person is not a destination, it is a process.

Those who fail to plan, plan to fail.

If reaching the goal was actually the main objective, then when you reached the top of that mountain or learned to hold yourself upright, or remembered your A, B, C’s, you might have been satisfied enough to live out the rest of your days having achieved that one thing. Realize that your goals are merely lures to entice you to keep moving forward. Be sure to examine them regularly, evaluate them to see if they are serving you well, and adjust accordingly.

Your goals should help you to keep unfolding and blooming into your fullest potential. You should revisit and revise your goals regulary. The more ‘far out’ your goals are, so long as you believe in your ability to achieve them or at least, move closer to achieving them; the faster and farther you are likely to expand your own capacity to set even greater goals.

It’s also important to be mindful of who you choose as friends, and who and what you choose as enemies. Recognize that both of these can be great assets on your journey, and they can also both become liabilities. It is easy to fall into old patterns around old friends, and important to check yourself and disrupt the patterns that are no longer serving you in your quest to live a life you love.

It is up to you to evaluate your circles of friends and what concepts and people you choose to push back against or compete with, and make sure they are helping you move towards your goals and become the person you want to be. If you realize a friend or an enemy is not serving you towards that end, simply shift your focus to what does. You don’t have to make it into a ‘big huge hairy deal’. Just shift.

It’s important to keep in mind, dear brave heart, that the truth lies somewhere in the dance between extremes, not in the pinned down, ‘dead butterflies’ of your crusty conclusions and underdeveloped theories. Keep going, dear one, life is longer and shorter than you might think.

The Shift, Going The Distance, Zoom-Zoom & Flow, chapter 6

Atomic Habits and Quantum Shifts, Change Your Shit Story, Turbo-Charge Your Life With Flow State Cycles, Chapter 6 (Part Two), Edited Draft 2 27 24

[Chapter 6, Going the Distance — the Infinite Game? — atomic habits and Quantum Fields — physical and metaphysical

[When to hold and when to fold, circles of influence***, what the greats have in common (Dolly, Keanu, Nick Cave?, Beck, Bowie, Prince, Shapelle, Oprah, Terarei, Yeonmi, Musk /Greatness (Lewis Howes), Human history*, doing things your way, going alone sometimes, finding the right help/from the right state, atomic habits, quantum fields, neuroscience, reinforcing loops and breaking patterns, disruption, getting physical with metaphysics?***deeper than Chapter 4 intro, Improbability (Hitchhikers Guide), Moonshots, Xprize]how you do one thing*Atomic Habits, your shit-story, hung up on truth*don’t let the truth get in the way of a good story and don’t let your story get in the way of building a new truth — the truth of the future is fluid — Shaheen? Anderson Paak?]

[Going the Distance — when to hold and when to fold (Dolly Parton, Nick Cave, Keano Reeves, Frank Zappa, Beck, David Bowie, Prince, …so many greats!]

“If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go in good company.”

So many of our favorite, most influential artist are those who have refused to live their lives by the dictated programming of others.

Most of us have a special admiration for those among us who have dared to forge lives for themselves. Those who step outside the box, and push into new boundaries of what it means to be a human. Our favorite entertainers, athletes, inventors, and scientists are those who held themselves up against the ‘grain’ of mainstream society, embraced their individual stories, and turned what seemed like tragic details or detriments into their unfair advantages or marketable brand. I am here to tell you, you can turn your own tragic details into unfair advantages too.

To my perception, this life is not about doing one or the other, but rather, about balancing the two. The key is in choosing the right tools, doing things in the right order, and learning to be more fully present and consciously engaged in whatever you choose to do.

Elon Musk is a prime example of this. He has not been afraid to do things on his own, in his own way. He demonstrates little to zero need for anyone else’s approval, so he is able to make decisions and move incredibly fast. At the same time, he has built extensive teams of humans and rapidly increasing fleets of robots to help him achieve his dreams. He is actually putting the idea of human beings becoming a multi-planetary species by colonizing the moon and then Mars in our perceivable reach for the first time in human history. Talk about far-reaching!

Really there are countless fantastic lives that you or I will never know of, and many ways to create a life that feels rich with purpose and meaning. The object of this game is to build a life that is satisfying to you, regardless of how significant your story is to anyone else. It’s usually best to keep in mind that what other people think of you is really none of your business. What you think of you should be your main concern. The most important thing is how you feel about yourself when you are by yourself.

If you are like many humans, this can vary widely from day to day, week to week, year to year. This is where relationships with others and external details can help reinforce or help change how you feel. So developing circles of interaction that reinforce the positive aspects of who and how you want to be is crucial.

Saying goodbye or distancing yourself when you recognize that a group of friends or a set of circumstances in your life is reinforcing aspects that are not helping is important too. This is often very difficult. Most of us prefer what is familiar because it feels safe compared to the great, vast unknown. We prefer a beautiful lie to the ugly truth. The sooner you learn to embrace the unknown and stop looking at your own life through distorted glasses, even if they are rose-colored, the sooner you can develop your more authentic, more vibrant life.

Most or all humans develop our patterns of how we relate to others in the first 7 years or so of our lives. The deepest patterns are established before we are four years old, and are often engrained and trained into our very being. It can feel impossible to break these patterns later in life, even when we realize they are holding us back or not serving us well. This is where doing the work of self-examination and self-mastery is most valuable.

We can transcend our early patterns once we get honest with ourselves and actually see them for what they are. They are just stories we tell ourselves to explain how we are feeling. We can change our perspective and build our old stories and patterns into more useful ways of being. We can create new and better patterns in our own lives and in humanity at large.

Sometimes the feeling that something is impossible is a clue to reexamine your goals. Other times that feeling is an invitation to leap into the unknown. I like to think of making big changes in terms of atomic habits and quantum leaps.

Metaphsics-Quantum Fields/Quantum Shift***Mojo — particles and waves, collapsing the wave function to become matter and move forward…

Quantum Leaps & Shifts

A quantum leap is defined in the Merriam-Webster dictionary as:

an abrupt change, sudden increase, or dramatic advance.

NOTE: Quantum leap {or shift} is rarely used in scientific contexts, but it originated as a synonym of quantum jump, which describes an abrupt transition (as of an electron, an atom, or a molecule) from one discrete energy state to another.

I find this helpful to think about when thinking about how to make significant changes in my own life. A quantum leap or shift is an abrupt change or a dramatic advance. It sometimes defies the ‘logic’ of everyday life, where we generally follow similar patterns and take small steps. Atomic habits and quantum leaps are interrelated, and they are both happening all the time.

Learning to harness the capacity of both these natural phenomena is part of what I am calling The Shift. Add a dash of ‘improbability drive’ from “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy”, and now you have a method for dramatically up-leveling your life. You can change things quickly, and you can also make incremental, steady changes. It is not an ‘either-or’ situation. Rather, it is a ‘both-and’ aspect of this life.

By combining the practice of making consistent, small changes in your life, with the practice of making abrupt changes, and dramatic ‘leaps’ in your energetic state, you can create a life that is barely recognizable to your former self. It does require a combination of embracing the unknown — the Great Mystery of life, while also building trust with yourself with consistent positive action. It also requires letting go of your limiting beliefs and shitty stories about yourself and creating a new sense of identity.

Sometimes a quantum shift might look like a dramatic change in location or physical circumstances, but always it is a dramatic internal shift. I encourage you to consider that you can make meditation or focusing on shifting your energetic state a regular practice. In fact, if you prioritize this habit consistently, you can make much greater strides in creating a life that brings you more joy and satisfaction, more fulfillment, more love, more creativity — more of whatever you decide is most important for you, in your life. However, if you don’t drop the old shit-story you keep telling about yourself, you are going to keep finding yourself back in the same old patterns of self-defeat.

This probably sounds easier said than done. It is actually as easy to do it as to say it. Just do it. Doing will create the changes you desire. Saying you want to do it can sometimes create the opposite result. Ruminating on how you want things to be different can decrease your energetic state, and spiral you into ‘the pit of despair’, or a low energetic state where you embody the victim-perpetrator-martyr mentality loop. Around and around you will go. Feeling like you are stuck in Groundhog Day.

If you take your consistent actions from a low energetic state, you may cultivate a life that ‘fits in’ better with mainstream humanity, but it will remain unsatisfying and full of struggle. If you can learn to raise your vibrational frequency first, get in touch with who you REALLY are, get into a higher energetic state, and THEN take consistent and inspired action, you might be amazed at the life you can create.

(Picture of trees in a circle — name?, reference)Nelder Plots*forestry plantings showing how closer together creates smaller trees — mycelium/network components — tensions between resources, allies, competition — see-saws — next chapter Riding the Upswings of ebbs and flows

I saw this aerial photograph of a grove of trees called Nelder Plots, which demonstrates how trees grow larger when they are planted farther apart, and smaller when they are planted close together. I think this is important to keep in mind when growing ourselves as well. There are times when staying closer to the mainstream and perhaps growing slower or smaller might seem preferable. Other times you might feel inclined to get a little farther away from the center and take up more space on your own. Of course, people aren’t trees. We have the added luxury of moving from one extreme to the other and also exploring so many degrees in between. How tall and far-reaching can you grow on your own? This is what you are here to find out.

It is worth noting that there are times when you will be best off on your own if you want to accomplish specific changes in your life quickly, and other times when paying attention to building a close network of people around you is going to be what you need. Just recognize there is again, not one way to be in this regard. The default mode of most humans is to crowd closely together. Often we keep ourselves packed so closely that we are unable to imagine how tall we really can be, and we do not grow to full capacity.

It is those who dare to venture to the farther edges and lead or simply not follow who ultimately pull humanity forward the most significantly. When I reflect on the humans I admire most, I notice they are consistently balancing both of these aspects. They are comfortable being themselves in and out of the crowd. They generally have healthy support systems and they also do not need any particular outside influence to be who they really are. They are able to grow fully into their own unique aspects because they do not tell shitty, self-limiting stories about themselves. They take consistent actions toward their goals.

The aspect of following the crowd comes naturally to most of us. Developing a habit of going on your own, and expanding beyond your inner circle takes doing the inner work to transcend your own limitations. It starts with changing your own internal dialogue. Stop telling yourself shitty stories about yourself. It can be scary and difficult, and also exciting. Combine quantum shifts or leaps and consistent little steps. Find your own balance. Learn to operate from your own golden center.

Atomic Habits — taking the next small bite of the elephant — finding the golden center* (& Quantum Fields**collapsing the waves?)

James Clear recently popularized the idea of thinking about the smallest possible steps, the tiniest aspects of our actions and how all of these ultimately add up to the direction we go. I think it is important though, to regularly examine the alignment between our conscious ‘ant’ and our subconscious ‘elephant’, to be sure we are taking small bites of the right thing, and moving in the direction we want to be.

As we have covered, a feeling of incoherence, confusion, or chaos can be a sign that things are out of alignment. This is a good time to take conscious action and participate in your own future destiny. Check yourself and see if you are telling yourself a shitty story. If you are, shift. Just stop telling that story and start telling a better one that is aligned with your true, authentic, unique self. If you do not, you are likely to be thrust into another trauma loop or cycle that plays out some unconscious pattern. Over and over and over again. When you have finally had enough, and are ready to take the quantum leap, just do it. You don’t need anyone’s permission. If it seems like too much, remember; quantum science is a science of very, very small things that affect the totality of every larger thing.

Perspective shift/relativity/Zoom-Zoom

The size of things is not what they seem. A papercut often hurts much more than a systemic malfunction, but is not so serious. Cancer can grow silently sometimes for decades unnoticed. A drowning man makes no sound. A screaming child is usually fine. The size that things seem to be is deceptive.

Our perceptions of what is most significant is often skewed and obscured by cultural norms and our own ingrained beliefs. Consider that the majority of mainstream society lives in the lower energetic states most of the time. If you live your life trying to ‘fit in’ with mainstream society, you will automatically find yourself in the lower energetic states.

You belong in this life. You can be sure of that because you are here. You do not need to compromise your sense of belonging to fit in. When you step into being your more authentic, fantastic self, you will realize you truly belong wherever you are.

To build a fantastic life, The Shift requires that you decide to take control of your own life, decide to brave the unknown, and decide to stop telling yourself shitty stories about yourself. Stop using the majority as a guide, other than as a reminder of what masses in a lower state can look like.

Think of the people you admire most in life. Think about the people that human society holds up as heroes. Think about great artists, athletes, creators and entertainers. What makes them special? It is that they hold themselves to a higher standard? Is it that they do not mold themselves to fit in to the mainstream? Is it that they have a healthy sense of identity that does not include so much self-sabotage or shit-story telling? Is it that they understand they belong in this world AND that they are also creators in it? You ‘belong’ in this life too, without having to ‘fit in’ to any old outdated, self-defeating story.

***To fit in is to conform yourself to others. To belong is to be yourself and know you are an integral part of this Great Mystery.***Brene Brown?

So how do we put all this into practice? It starts with the decision that you will, and then it requires consistent action and some big leaps. You will need to make minding your energetic state a priority. You will need to cultivate a ‘no shit story zone’ in your own mind. You will need to take consistent action.

Meditation is a popular tool and there are many variations of meditation. However, none of them will help very much if you are still allowing the same shitty, self-defeating stories to rule your subconscious beliefs, or your conscious thoughts. It is important to first work on shifting your subconscious beliefs. Then find what habits work for you, and cultivate those.

Leave whatever does not work for you behind and focus on what does. Don’t tell yourself any stories about how things MUST be. Remember everything in this life is transitory, and you are always changing. By deciding to play a more active and conscious role in managing your own beliefs, you will make your life better, regardless of what circumstances life brings you or what habits you cultivate.

Think of your self — your body mind and spirit — as an atom of sorts, with electrons surrounding a nucleus with protons. If you can imagine that these aspects of yourself are always relating and reacting to one another, you will realize that a change in any of them can affect all the others. The most efficient way to catalyze significant change is to raise the frequency of the nucleus. Let’s imagine this is the energy that courses through your body. This can increase the energy and raise the vibration of your heart and resonate through your body’s energetic field, which will in turn create a cascade of energetic shifts in the magnetic and repulsive aspects of your external reality.

The first and most important step in this is to stop believing you are the lower version of yourself. Stop telling shit-stories about yourself, to yourself and to everyone else. Just stop. Shift your stories to those of potentials and possibilities. Realize you are a unique, tiny shiny speck of an incredible universe. You are the only you there is. All those shitty stories have been told enough times already. You can do better.

Just as personal hygiene, fitness, and home maintenance are not a one-time thing, minding your energetic frequency and practicing better self-talk must be a regular habit. Anything you want to improve will require that you develop a regular practice for it. Give it time and if you ‘fall off the wagon’, get back up and start again. You don’t have to start back at the beginning every time. Start from wherever you are. You will make progress in time.

Life is known to throw us curve balls. Significant challenges such as death, disease, politics, and the weather can all impact your ability to maintain your healthy habits. Rather than lamenting or resenting this, you can learn to embrace the challenges of this, and celebrate your ability to rise from your own ashes when you crash and burn.

(graphic of phoenix — Still I Rise poem?)

Binary thinking — Fuck Yes, or no thanks, not today/hard pass

The more you can check that internal alignment and feel for that potential for flow state, which to me feels like a “fuck yes” in my body, the more you can choose things that will add momentum to your blooming fully into your authentic potential, and avoid getting drug down into the muck. When I was younger I would say it needed to be a “fuck yes” or it was a “fuck no”. These days I tend to prefer a bit softer pass with a “no thanks, not today”. However you do it, get better at saying “no” to the things that are not fully aligned with the path you are choosing. They will only slow you down and drain your energy and sometimes derail you completely.

Neuroscience — dopamine and other neurotransmitters to help us…

By understanding more about the way our neurochemical systems work, flow-state scientists have been able to show that there are some simple things we can do to decrease the levels of stimulation coming into our systems and increase our sensitivity to positive reward systems. The trick, to me, is to not also increase our sensitivity to negative threats, or perceived threats.***Keeping up a tolerance? (footnote?) If you have developed a self-defeating story of yourself, then you are derailing yourself. You are making things harder than they have to be. The good news is, you can stop. Shift your mindset, tell a better story, and raise your energy.

Zoom out and Zoom in

If you zoom your perspective out to beyond you in the room you are sitting in, above the city you are in, out over the continent you are on, out into space to look down on earth, out far enough in space to see our sun as a star and only imagine where we are on this dust speck, out into the milky way, into the trillions of galaxies, through darkness, and beyond, and back again

You will notice you are very very very small. Tiny. Insignificant really.

However, if you zoom in on your muscle fibers, the nerves and chemicals and electromagnetic impulses that comprise your body and mind; recognize your own consciousness contemplating consciousness; and zoom into the atomic structures and vibrating strings and coils and mysterious dark regions of nothing that seem to exist more than the things that do exist; you start to realize how much potential there still is in every atom of you. Your body is an incredible thing. So is your mind. You are full of electricity. You are gelled starlight, essentially, cocreating on levels none of us can fully comprehend.

There is much much more going on that we still have not discovered, that is influencing and interacting with our experiences. Do not believe for a moment, anyone who tells you they have everything all figured out and that whatever limitations you feel bound by now are going to be with you for any amount of time. It simply is not the whole truth. It’s just a shitty story that does not serve you in your quest to bloom into your fullest, truest you.

Introducing, Flow State (your turbocharger) (graphic of stages, graphic of supercharged elephant and ant?) Flow state is a scientific term that refers to an altered state of consciousness in which we perform at our best and feel our best.*(Kotler)*7 core components of flow state* This is where the tools of heart-mind coherence (Joe Dispenza) and Flow State come in to play…

Let’s talk about flow state. Flow state is an elevated state, but it is different from a dysregulated state. Rather than being disconnected from your system and your full capacity, it is as if you drop in to your full capacity more completely. Time often falls away, and many humans are able to achieve much more productivity while in a flow state.

Extreme athletes and top performers in every field have learned to tap into a flow state, even if they don’t call it that. In the zone, in the pocket, super focused, and on it are all terms we use to describe this elevated but regulated state. This is the sweet spot. It’s the golden center. It is where all of you makes a quantum leap and works from an elevated energetic state in full synchronicty.

You can accomplish ten or a thousand times more when you are in a flow state. It is worth learning how to get yourself into this state regularly. Take time to learn how and also take time to get there before you push yourself to take significant actions towards your goals, and you will accomplish much more.*

One of the main reasons we end up self-sabotaging our relationships, diets, and careers is that we crave comfort, and most change is uncomfortable because it requires extra energy. Our bodies are always looking to maintain homeostasis and conserve energy by automating as much as possible. Our unconsciousness is running multitudes of ‘programming’ all the time to keep us alive.

This is why sometimes we must get pretty super uncomfortable, to a place we can no longer bear the way things are before we will finally make a change. Even then, some people find it too hard to change. The longer you ingrain a habit or belief into your life, the harder it usually is to untangle or change, but it can be done. You can imagine, if it took 20 or 30 or 60 years to ingrain a habit or belief, it might take more time than you have left to reverse it. This could be true if you go at ‘regular speed’. Lucky for us, scientists have been working hard to figure out the best ways to make big changes, more more rapidly, that stick to a much higher degree.

I think of Flow State as a ‘turbo charger’ to every other tool in the tool kit. Research shows that we can achieve much higher levels of success and productivity as measured on multiple scales by learning to put ourselves into flow state regularly, and paying attention to the order of things. Doing things in the right order is a big key to getting the best results, so I want to introduce this concept early and then circle around to it again.

Research on flow state, in particular neuroscience (study of the chemical physiology of the brain and nervous system) has brought us to a richer and more clarified understanding of how our body systems operate. We sometimes develop patterns of habit that create positive feedback loops that have negative consequences in our lives. If you realize you are looping around the same negative pathways, just stop. Recalibrate. Try some new tools. You can learn to reprogram yourself and create more positive circumstances in your own life. You can tell yourself better stories about yourself. It all starts and ends with you.

The Flow Cycle is an important key to understanding how to make your overwhelm your bitch. Many of us spend most of our lives in avoidance because we don’t understand that ‘the struggle’ the part that feels like ‘pushing a boulder up a hill’, is a necessary part of the cycle that gets us into flow. The more you learn to not merely endure, but begin to embrace the struggle (and you will also begin how the struggle is not real, it is made up, by you, so you can do the hard thing, and then get to the top of the mountain, and experience flow).

[A great lens for understanding this is the four cycles of flow…I pose there is a fifth stage of the cycle, which is the spark or the start, which must be strong enough to overcome the avoidance or numbing…it does seem as though many of our species, including myself at times, is walking around in a daze of sorts, stunned, not fully alive or awake or aware…I digressed…]

Start. (overcome inertia, hesitation, fear of unknown and leap!) Decide to let a spark take hold of you, and implement it into your future. This is sometimes the hardest step. This is what I hope this book can help with. Shift your mindset and decide to leap into the unknown.

Struggle. (things will not go as you planned, you will be required to do hard things — the more you embrace this and learn to “see a hill, start to sprint”, the more hard things you will get to do, and the bigger the rewarding flow states you will get to. Consider also that those who ‘do the hardest things first’ set a new bar for those who follow behind them, or come after them, and this is how we move forward.

Release. If you don’t give up when things get hard, and you push your boulder all the way to the top of the mountain, you can pause there, looking down at the marvelous view and enjoying that sense of relief, or release. You can let out a great sigh of relief.

Flow. Now is the part of the cycle you have been working towards — it is the ride down the mountain on your snowboard, or the performance of a lifetime as you dance or sing or make people learn or laugh with impeccable timing. Time disappears, and your body becomes an organized, fluidly functioning, magnificent organized expression of waves rather than particles of light.

Recovery. Here is a part of the cycle that is crucial to being able to start the cycle again. Without good recovery practices, we are likely to end up with accumulating unhealed damage to our systems. If you try to short-change any of these parts, your ability to get into flow and utilize it well will diminish. Understanding and utilizing this is what allows some humans to accomplish so much more than others in the same amount of time, sometimes seemingly with less suffering.

It’s important to note that recovery time is not quite the same as relaxation of any kind. It has to do with nourishing the nervous system and replenishing sensitivity to dopamine and other neurotransmitters. Ice baths, saunas, massage, gentle yoga, rejuvenating sleep, and other things that can be considered rewards for your nervous system and replenishing count as recovery activities. Scrolling on social media, watching tv or Netflix or youtube videos, eating pizza and drinking beer are not, though they do arguably have their own value, under the heading of ‘down time/relaxation/resetting. *Laughter is an important tool to keep in mind as well…and laughing has a special ability to put us into a flow state of sorts sometimes, which we might talk about more later?**

I invite you to learn more about flow state and join the growing number, yet still relatively few humans who are tapping into the fuller potential by cultivating a practice that takes advantage of this cycle. I can’t think of a single successful person (I consider successful) who is not demonstrating this practice in some way. Find a way to make it a part of your life today! *

If you feel an impulse to push beyond the ‘known limits’ of something, please, do not ignore that feeling. Our evolution might depend on you. Consider Liard Hamilton surfing a 70′ wave, Sean White’s 1280?**, or Tony Hawk, smashing open the skating industry and creating an empire for himself by age 20.

Summary of Chapter 6

In order to grow into your fullest capacity as a conscious human being, you must be willing to take consistent actions, and also make giant leaps. You need to cultivate both, the habits of small consistent actions, and the habit elevating your energetic state and leaping into the great unknown. It is this combination that leads to a life of greatness.

Find the practices that work best for you and practice them. Remember that the object is progress, not perfection. Do not waste any more of your time telling shitty stories about yourself — to yourself or anyone else. If you fall down or fail, get back up and do better next time. Remember that change is inevitable, and although you certainly can’t control everything — or even most things — you can learn to control the stories you tell yourself about yourself, and that can make all the difference. You can improve your own perspective of your own life.

Use perspective shifts to orient yourself in space-time. Use your consciousness to zoom in and zoom out and then let go of what you think and allow yourself to be. Practice putting yourself into an elevated, or flow state before you push forward and try to make progress. If you learn to do this well, you will find yourself able to do things that others only dream of passively.

No one gets out of this life alive, and also, not everyone steps fully into living while they are alive. You can look to other humans you admire for inspiration and motivation, and also, develop your own ability to leap into the great mystery of life on your own.