We have a very strong personal mind that has carried us since we were kids, and it helped us a lot. Now it can keep us stuck in the past, but we can free ourselves from it and create a healthier life with less struggling for ourselves and for the people around us. Learn more with this month’s session.
Video Transcript:
Dr. A: Well welcome everybody, to the Conscious Forum. I’m Dr. A, and we’re going to have a really good time today. We’re going to explore some things that are really important for our understanding. As we kind of put on our lab coat and our goggles, and kind of look into our minds and into the way we think, the way we feel, and the way we react and behave. This is going to be an interesting forum. I put together some visuals, I think, that will help explain it. Hopefully, as we go through this, you’ll get some “aha” moments and then we’ll discuss them, but as everybody’s kind of filing in, I just wanted to kind of go over what the Conscious Forum is all about, if this is your first time.
So you think and break the words down. First, conscious or consciousness is the state that refers to being aware of our surroundings, our thoughts, and our feelings. So that awareness. Being fully present in the moment, which is something, by the way, we do very little of in the crazy world we live in. We’re so used to using these things [Dr. A holds up a cell phone] and we’re kind of glued to it. It just amazes me more and more. I’ll be going through airports, or at restaurants, or just in daily activities including driving and people are just mesmerized and connected and they’re missing everything that’s around them.
So we’re going to talk about consciousness in a very specific way today through what I call a forum. The forum is a place, meeting, or a medium where ideas and views on a particular issue can be exchanged and I love—it’s one of my favorite things doing this once a month—to just really have an opportunity as I’m doing the research and growing and learning more and more and synthesizing better and better ways to help people, literally build the psychological flexibility to be able to move from struggling in their lives to actually thriving in their lives. The feedback I get from you guys is so so important because it allows me to know whether things are clicking, whether they’re not clicking, and creates a feedback loop that is really important. So I learn just as much from this as you do.
So as you’re going through, I usually start off by doing a section on the front end that covers one of the thought processes, one of the awareness processes, one of the conscious processes that’s involved in how our human mind works and during that time, if something pops up, something you could identify with, certainly we want you to share that and this is an opportunity to really give feedback and helping you. This is not about theory. This is about helping you learn and grow. You know, I go to the mental gym every day. I spend some time learning, growing. I want to be open, curious and learn more because as I do that I’m able to adapt and be more flexible and have more emotional agility to the world we live in.
So let’s get started. Today we’re going to talk about why do we have so much trouble accepting ourselves? And that’s a big one. Maybe just think about that for a second. Why do I have so much trouble accepting myself? Let’s think about that. So let’s start off with the role that our mind plays. You know, we have a body. We have a mind. Our mind and our thoughts are not us. They are something that’s created within the human brain, that we synthesize and we come up with, and there’s different kinds of thought, but our mind is in control of our lives and our mind, is it good or bad? Well, it depends on what you do with it. It’s kind of like driving a car. You can use a car to drive and pick up the kids, go do your chores, go on trips to marvelous places, and explore the world or it could be used as it has been, as a weapon of destruction and plow it into a crowd. So a car can be good or bad.
The same thing with our mind. I mean the war is going on. The bad things that happen, and good things that happen. I think we see at the Olympics some of the amazing things the human mind can be used to practice, and take the mind and the body, and we can create incredible things with that or we can create things that aren’t so good. Basically, your mind is a complex computer. It’s kind of like your phone in a way. Look at all the things we can do with our phones. It makes the world so accessible to us and so important, but it also can be used to do things that aren’t so good, and it’s extremely complex. I mean we can do things as complicated as figuring out how to go to the moon, right? Or how to— astrophysics, to do all kinds of things, and I’m going to show you some examples here in a little bit.
Or we can use it really for diabolical things. We could, some of the things that people have done to hurt others, to hurt people, to hurt countries. I mean, the mind can be used in both ways and it has the ability to do that. So it’s important for us to really kind of understand that. So I put this slide together because if you think about it, the mind is this huge multifaceted computer as I talked about. The impersonal mind is most of our mind, In fact, impersonal mind means it’s not about us. It’s about what our mind can do. It’s the abstract. It’s what Einstein— Einstein used a big portion of that green area because that’s what our mind is designed for. It’s designed to serve us. To help us negotiate through life. To be able to move. To be able to take the five senses and look at everything around us and then interpret it through that lens and do great stuff with it.
So if we look, something happens, current reality comes in, and basically, we use that data. So if you read a book or a book on consciousness, is what we’re doing, then you can take that information and then collate it in the impersonal mind, and say, “Okay. How do I use this to move me forward?” Right? And it’s beautiful. It’s our intelligence, or we can turn it and make it all about us and that’s the personal mind, and if you look, I’ve specifically made the impersonal mind, the abstract mind large because we are brilliant. We are all brilliant. I mean look at us compared to, I don’t know, raccoons. I mean our brains, the things we can do, things we can think about, our ability to sense ourselves and awareness, they’re incredible. Our personal mind though, is all about us and it’s a small part, but unfortunately for most of us it dominates. It’s all about us and that’s why it’s called the personal mind.
So let’s explore that a little bit. The impersonal mind. I mean it’s about abstract thinking. If you think about it, 10,000 years ago we lived in caves and now, with Elon Musk and some of the forward thinking astrophysicists and stuff, we’re planning on habitating Mars. We couldn’t do that. It didn’t just get made up. That is our evolution and our ability to use this incredible mind and when it’s not used for us personally, in other words, it’s not used to take care of some issues we have, but it’s actually used for the amazing things we create. It’s pretty exciting.
The personal mind. It’s all about you. It’s all about our concepts, our views, our preferences, and what we do is we take current reality, as we showed it, and I’m going to show you some visuals of this, then we take the stored trauma, which is basically the stored patterns from our past. Really I wouldn’t call it trauma because it can also be positive things that we cling on to, or things that we’re obsessed with that happened in our past that we use, and then we interpret everything that comes in through that lens and then it becomes our personal thoughts.
An example of that would be something like, you know, we want the world to be a certain way. So over the weekend, I had a day where I wanted to go boating, but it rained and we had a hurricane, well it was a tropical storm when it came around the west side of us, but not a good day to go boating. I could have gotten upset about that in my personal mind, because it’s all about me or I say, “You know what? Let me do some other things,” and I got a whole bunch of work done. I actually did part of preparation for this talk, and so I turned it into something and didn’t get disappointed about it, because bottom line is, we have so little control over current reality in the real world, but we do have full control of how we respond to that on the inside.
So if we look at this and what happens, normally, current reality happens, our impersonal mind takes it over and we do what we do with it. We do our homework, and we sit down and do the arithmetic. We don’t take that personally. We create ideas. As I mentioned, we build rockets and we drive our car. These are all things that we do that it’s not about us, and that’s why science, I think it’s one of the reasons I was really attracted to become a physician because by becoming a scientist you’re working with the impersonal mind. You’re not working— it’s not about you. If someone’s sick, it’s not about you. It’s about you helping make them better. It’s about you knowing what the diagnosis is. It’s about taking this brilliant abstract mind and collating it and doing what works for you, and it was always my attraction. Science is current reality. Science is what defines the world in a way that’s repetitive. If it’s not science and it’s just the story, that’s made up, and it’s made up by individuals, and it’s not accurate.
So the personal mind is so important. It is so huge and we use so little of it. Unfortunately, basically what we do is we take our past patterns. We compare everything to life’s experiences, and so how we frame things determines what we do and how we feel about it. As you can see, past patterns, when something happens— someone walks by you and doesn’t respond to you, you immediately are upset about it, and you get your personal mind going and then you start diabolically thinking how you can use your abstract mind to help make it right. You know, I’m going to go talk to them. I’m going to go give them an articulate discussion. I’m going to write a letter and say why this doesn’t work and why it isn’t good for us, and so we’re trying to rationalize something that happened because our past patterns were triggered by something from the past. Really doesn’t make much sense, and then what happens is, as I show here, we take those past patterns, so we’re not okay with it, and then so we figure, okay, what can make us okay? And then we use the abstract part to change the world. To make it what we want, and if we can’t do that, because we have very little control over the outside world, then we suffer, and as I’ve said many times before, basically pain in life— things are going to happen. Events are going to happen, but suffering is optional. You have the total ability to move forward, solve what needs to be done, and then move forward and move on. It’s really important.
[00:10:42] So let me review that. Your personal mind. We use our brilliant abstract mind rather than for all the things— Einstein used, to sit for days and just basically, abstractly, without his personal mind, not about how smart or stupid he was but would actually use this abstract mind to create amazing stuff on relativity and make stuff that Newton had done centuries before, basically obsolete, and we can we have that same capability, but instead what we do is we use our abstract mind to conceptualize an outside world that won’t bother us and make us feel good. We try to modify the outside world multiple different ways and so we use our old patterns from the past as a basis for living our current and our future life. It’s nuts.
So what do we do with our personal mind? We first figure out what it is we need to be okay. So it could be well, I’m going to go buy a new dress, or I’m going to buy a new car, or I’m going to go treat myself to dinner, or it could be something as small as I’m going to get up and go to the refrigerator, and because right now I’m stressed out, I basically need to do something to give myself pleasure, and then the tactic may be that you go to the refrigerator and and grab a container of ice cream and eat the ice cream, and basically that means make you okay for five minutes, while you’re pleasuring yourself with the ice cream, but as soon as it’s gone now you have something else. Now you’re upset because now you did something that basically was not healthy for you and now you’re even less okay.
Really important to understand what our personal mind does. We’re basically at war with the world trying to make it right according to ourselves and I will tell you, there are two conceptual things here. One is our personal mind, what we like and what we don’t like, and when we get what we like then we’re okay. When we don’t get what we like we’re not okay. When we get away from something we don’t like then we’re okay. If it affects us then we’re not okay. If you think about it, it’s pretty crazy. You’re going to lose that war because the world is not on your schedule. We’re eight-plus billion people. Everybody’s schedule and everybody’s experience is a little different.
So with that, either you don’t want it, you know I didn’t want it to rain, but it rained and so I made the adaptation to say, let me let me do something else. Actually, because of where I live in South Florida, usually the weather’s pretty good and we’re outside a lot of the year, so it’s a good time to take an opportunity, let me work on some stuff inside because it’s not worth going out. It’s rainy, and it’s cloudy and windy. Or something you do want, if this happens, then I’m okay. Well basically, if it doesn’t happen then you’re not okay. So understand that our preferences, our concepts, and what we want in the world being about us is why we’re not okay. So if we think about all our stored stuff, our personal mind, anything that ever got stored any time before right now basically causes you to resist or cling onto something that you had before. Or what we want to do is make the decision that we can actually change that, and how we do that is we accept and be grateful, and how we do that will be another talk that’ll do in the near future.
I want to get your feedback, obviously now, and you can also send it in the chat, but what I like to do, one thing we should accept, to be grateful for, I want to show you this because we hit the lottery. This is a picture of the Earth taken from the Cassini probes that landed on Saturn. Earth was 2 million miles away here and if you look, here we are. This amazing— and the pictures that come from the astronauts and from the different space launches that show the Earth, this brilliant blue ball that just glistens and has the green, and it’s just gorgeous, that we’re on, if you look, we’re in the middle of nowhere and there’s no other life planet like that, that we know of yet, and we’re sending the James Webb Telescopes out into the far reaches and we know that 130, I think, 130 million earths would fit inside the sun. The sun’s part of one of the billions of stars in our galaxy and there’s two trillion galaxies according to the James Webb. So basically, we hit the lottery.
We should be so grateful, so lucky that we get to be on this Earth. I get to see rain come down that allows our plants to grow, and that’s the adaptation that I’ve taken. I’ve always kind of felt that way and it’s really facilitated my life, but over the last 5-10 years, working on this, the amount of gratitude we should have every day for being alive on this planet, because if you look at there, there’s not much else around, and we’re fortunate enough to be part of this experience, and yeah, is the human mind something that’s a sticky wicket that we have to negotiate? Yes. But we can work on it, just like we can work, and we know that muscle strength is important for staying healthy, and for longevity. Exercising our mind and learning to be conscious, being able to Stop. Challenge. Choose., and start learning these skills is the key way to suffer less, be more joyful and more appreciative of the amazing lottery we call life. Hopefully, that was helpful and Rach, let’s open it up for questions.
Rachel: All right. First up we have Karen. Karen, can you come on camera?
Karen: Yeah. I’m trying. There we go. Hi, Dr. A. Thanks, Rachel. How are you doing today?
Dr. A: I am fantastic.
Karen: Good. Me too. Gosh, so my question was because I’m going through some stuff. Sorry.
Dr. A: That’s okay. Go ahead.
Karen: When I started my journey 10 years ago I was healthy. I was fine. I just wanted to lose weight. I did fantastic and then in my past, when I was 14, I started dating way too young and I dated a person who beat me up mentally and physically most of my childhood life, until we divorced. We did get married right after I turned 18 and then we divorced, right as I was getting to be about my second child, and about 21 and a half years old, and that has been a part of my self-esteem. How I felt about myself and the man I’m married to now is fantastic. Treats me like a princess for 36 years, but that stored trauma, I always kept it pushed down, and then in about 2016, I have four children, six grandkids, in 2016 my kids, one of my children and his children, he kept my grandkids from me for a season, and that’s when I started noticing I was getting sick.
Now my trauma, which at this point I didn’t realize it was man manifesting emotion— physically, so I’ve been battling health issues now for a few years. I’ve been to eight different doctors and then this year that child again pulled his kids away from me, and I haven’t seen him in over three months. I was tending my little grandson for two days a week since he was born and he’s three and it’s just rocked my world. I try really hard to battle the health issues that the trauma is causing, but this up here, as much as I try, you know people tell me, well you’ve just been a doormat. You’ve always been there for your kids. You’re so nice. You’re this and that, but how do you not— how do you compartmentalize your relationship with a child and your grandchildren? It’s not like a stranger that you can just take out of your world. I’m struggling and I just didn’t know if you would have some good tips.
Dr. A: No, I hear you, and the biggest tip I can give you is to get some help. You need to get— I’m not a psychotherapist. That’s really not the intention, and you have real, real-life events that are compounded by your past and you’re identifying it beautifully. I mean the work, excuse me, the work that I do is making you aware and you’re fully aware. You just articulated the issues going on, but you need professional help. Just like when something’s wrong physically with you, you go to a doctor for that. You need to go to someone and get professional help and helping sort this out and to work through this because you have significant life events that are occurring now over trauma, like you said, or stored energy from the past, and they’re conflicting with each other and they’re coming out.
So I would say this to you, the beauty of it is this is a great time to address things that you’ve ignored for a long time and work with someone and because of the work that we’ve done you’re aware of the language. You understand it. You just articulated it beautifully, and now you need to get someone to help you with that. I mean, and it’s not really my bailiwick and not really the— but you’re now conscious, so now you’re ready to go to work and you’re going to, like I said, put on your lab coat, get some goggles and go out because these are real things you can’t compartmentalize in and basically just stop thinking about someone, that’s very important to you and you shouldn’t. The answer isn’t to hide in the sand. The answer isn’t to just ignore it. The answer is to use this beautiful time and the work done so far, you really understand what’s going on and that’s the first part. Now you need someone to help you.
[00:20:35] Just like, you know, I use the analogy; if you know that your muscles aren’t where they need to be and you’re not sure how to lift weights properly so you don’t get hurt and so you develop the muscles. You go to a trainer and you have someone that’s professional to help you. Go see somebody and that because, as you said, most of your physical issues are secondary to here, and it’s real. It’s not like you’re making them up. It’s not like a ruse, they’re actually occurring because you were having a conflicting world between your— again, your mind and your personal mind and that interaction with your outside world. They’re all lining up and it’s triggering you and your family is the most important thing to you, and for anybody to criticize that you always care about them that’s not right, and not that it’s right or wrong, but it’s just that, don’t listen to anybody else. This is the time for you to truly wake up and help heal yourself through professional help. Does that make sense?
Karen: Yeah. It does.
Dr. A: So please, please do that, and let me know how you’re doing, okay? Because you have a beautiful heart. I can sense and feel that, and you need someone to help you because the outside world now is really hitting on that stuff and it’s bubbling up. The reason why you’re feeling it, and it’s bubbling up, is now the time to address it, and basically there’s two things going on, one is obviously the situation in your life, right? Which you need to get help to help with that. The other part is your own inner world. You need help with those two things and it’s really important for you. I wish you the best and keep us informed on how you’re doing, okay?
Karen: Thank you. I appreciate that, and I have to say these forums have really helped me, the LifeBook, everything we do with Optavia, has helped keep me here because there have been moments that I haven’t wanted to be here and so I appreciate the love that we have as a community and that you’ve brought us all together in this community because it really has saved my life. Thank you.
Dr. A: Thanks, Karen. Good luck. Okay.
Rachel: All right. Next up we have Ray. Oh, Ray! You are on.
Dr. A: Ray’s there. Hey, Ray.
Ray: Hey, Dr. A. How you doing?
Dr. A: I’m good.
Ray: I had the privilege of being at convention this year and just learned so much from you and so many other people. I really appreciate it. This program has definitely changed and saved my life. This gift of a program as we call it. My question for you goes back to last month. We were talking about habits a lot and how to stop those habits and one of the things I was wondering is like, is repetition of better habits the best way to stop those reactions that are embedded in our minds? Like when we do stuff without thinking, how do we stop those types of habits that are so deep?
Dr. A: Yeah. That’s a great question and it’s really quite simple, but it’s hard to do because, you know, our whole personal mind, which we’ve been talking about today, is based on our experiences. Everything we do is based on our experiences. One experience over the other and so if you think about it, we all have a unique set of experiences, right? Everybody’s a little different. No one has the same set, and so if you think about it, and think around you, and all the things happen around you, you know someone right next to you at a concert is having a very different experience, right? Whether they’re at a meeting or not they have a different experience. So we’re all totally different, but what I find is the most helpful, to answer the question in two parts. The first is to basically become fully aware. Getting that personal mind to the side so that in every environment, if I start to go down that track, going to a repeated pattern, then I stop, as you’ve heard me say a million times. Stop. Really ground myself and not react because habits, especially triggers, you know, we have our triggers or cues. Our trigger or cue is the start that initiates the habit.
If you, as soon as you start feeling that cue, your body almost always will sense something’s off instead of following through with it. Like going to the kitchen. You basically stop. Sense it, why am I feeling this way? Challenge that, and then choose an outcome that’s different. So in that case, if something upsets you, you stop, you challenge and say, “Okay. That’s upsetting me. Why is that upsetting me??” And then it usually goes back to something that’s stored energy inside of you, and then choose something else. So rather than going to the freezer and grabbing some ice cream, instead you go get a big— what I do during these calls, I drink a lot of water and during meetings. I always have a bottle of water and I use that to break that reflex. We’re all human. We all go below the line. Nobody is perfect. That’s not the idea, the idea is to recognize when you’re going into one of those old patterns and stop it so it doesn’t go into the response, right? You stop, basically stop the, wherever the cue is, you stop that and make it more difficult to go to the response.
One of the things that in interviewing James Clear last week, we talked about something which is really important— make it more difficult to initiate that. So a good example of that, if you’re, and I’d pick on different nutritional pollution, but Ruffles. Ruffles is a good example, right? They’ve got that dialed in the right amount of crunch. You just bite it and the salt, the sugar, everything is just perfect and so once you’ve done it, once you’ve had one, then the addiction centers, because you get the response. You get the reward you want. Then you repeat it. You have more and more, so in that case, basically, don’t buy those. You know your willpower comes at the grocery store, so don’t bring those things in your house. If you have to go drive to get them, you’re probably not going to do it, and that accounts for everything. So kind of a great thing to do is get a journal. Get it out and start logging your day and then when you see, okay, listen in the afternoon I went back to that old preference, that old habit, basically I’m not going to do that anymore, and then replace it with something that’s equivalent, that moves you towards where you want.
So water is always an easy choice for us all the time. The other thing is if you’re used to, you know, before you went to burger places for lunch, basically don’t drive that way. Don’t drive by them. Prepare your lunch at home the night before. Something healthy, and by the way, you’re probably going to like the taste better. You’re going to save some money, it’s more convenient, and then you use the rest of your time to go for a walk. So we can implement different strategies to help us with that, and then the last thing, which was the first thing you asked, yes, setting up a new habit is about making it repetitive. It needs to be repetitive and in the Habits of Health System, I show microHabits. MicroHabits in essence are what James Clear in essence does with his— what he calls Atomic Habits, same thing. Listen, none of us are brilliant. We’re taking the things that work and trying them so that people can use them and so I appreciate coming up from different points of view because some things catch for us more than others.
So the same thing here. During this, you’re helping by asking those questions. There’s people that are probably right now thinking, “Oh, yeah. That makes sense. I’m going to use that,” because remember, every one of our experiences is different. So try different things. If one thing’s not working then try something else. I know that during ski season, especially as it gets towards the spring and I go heli skiing, I know that I need to go down and get on my Peloton, and I need to do squats, and I need to do lunges. If I don’t, when I’m up there and they drop me out of the helicopter, I’m in big trouble. It’s too late then. So I put my tennis shoes right by my bed and that’s the first thing I do is I go down to the first floor, two levels down, don’t stop, go, and I get on that bike, and then I’m in the routine. Just like last week we heard about the guy that just drove to the gym, right? Didn’t even go in. He did something to start the new habit and so over time repetition makes the difference. Is that helpful?
Ray: Yeah. Absolutely. Thanks a lot.
Dr. A: You’re welcome. Cool. Awesome. All right. Rach, who we got next?
Rachel: All right. Next up we have Cinda. Cinda, can you come on camera?
Cinda: There we go.
Rachel: There you are.
Cinda: Good morning, Dr. A.
Dr. A: Hey, Cinda. How are you? Sporting yourself a new hat there? I like that.
Cinda: Yeah. That’s because I was out mowing the lawn earlier and it controls the sweat from running down in my eyes.
Dr. A: Right. You probably use an old-fashion push mower, as tough as you are!
Cinda: I do! I walked over 5,000 steps during half of my backyard this morning.
Dr. A: I love it and that’s why you’re looking so good and you’re making such great progress. Congratulations.
Cinda: Well, thanks. Thanks. Well, I think that— I went on an incredible walk in the month of May and walked 424 miles across Spain. Most of the Camino de Santiago, Frances route. The first four days people kept telling me that I was an inspiration. I was a legend. I had gone viral and it was so hard to accept that because that wasn’t my intention when I set out to walk. It was to celebrate that I had survived my brain surgery and that I was about to be 75 years old and I walked with a special all-terrain walker. Once I finally accepted that, I began to realize that I was making a difference in many people’s lives. People that I never met, and I never will meet, because my my face and my images were scattered all over the world by that time.
[00:31:00] I walked 424 miles without pain from my crushed vertebrae and when I was resting at the beach at the end of my trip my vertebrae acted up so severely that I cried with every movement and I came home in severe pain that lasted for almost two months and during that time I allowed my mind to take control because of the pain that it was in, and I did not eat healthy. I gained back some of the weight I lost. I felt defeated and as you can see in my new background picture, I have a new goal. It’s to fit into that uniform and I have a ways to go to do it, but how can— I’m struggling to get back in my five-in-one and one a regular basis. I do it okay for a couple of days and then I go off of it. How do I take control of my mind in a positive way again?
Dr. A: Wow. First of all, that’s one heck of a story, Cinda. One heck of a story, and by the way, I want to start with the first part because you did that basically for yourself, to celebrate how much health you’ve gotten and you did this long track, which is incredible. I can’t even imagine doing that myself, and during that, you got a lot of positive feedback and you kind of had struggled with that because that’s not why you were doing it. So you know what that is, is your personal mind not feeling you’re worthy and the reality is you’re more than worthy, and to your point current reality, remember, we just showed current reality versus our abstract mind versus our personal mind.
So in the beginning your personal mind was kind of coming up, bubbling up, saying, “Oh, I’m not worthy of this. I shouldn’t be getting this attention,” and the reality is that’s a sign that your personal mind still has some ownership over you, right? And to switch that to gratitude and to just take that in because I have people all the time telling me I help them with their life and done those things and there was a time early on when people would say that, or I saved their life in the ICU. I mean, it’s been my whole life, doing things and always being in service because I love to help people and I wasn’t really good— I wasn’t good at getting Christmas presents. I wasn’t good at any of that because my personal mind, my personal mind says, “Oh, no. I don’t need that. I can take care of myself. I don’t need that,” and the reality is, we need that more than anything. We need to be together. We need love. Love is the highest form— fun and love is the highest form of motivation.
If you look at it, fear is the lowest. Extrinsic motivation, money, and wealth and fame, those are also not that great. Intrinsic motivation, where we’re doing something because we care and we’re passionate about it is good. Having fun with it is even better and the best for really motivating us is love. That we love, and to feel all that love come in. I’ve been doing this for a long time, helping people, and I’m more on top of it, more desire to do it than ever before because that’s what feels you.
So that’s the first thing is you should go back and all the notice you got, all those things, you should use that to fuel you, right? To help you when you’re starting to feel pain because what you put in, it’s garbage in, garbage out, and you have real, somatic pain because of your physiology and your thing, but you can gate that pain through love. Through actually being grateful and grateful for being able to do that, and probably next time you do it, don’t go quite so far, right? [Cinda laughs], because you are a human being and we are all going through birth to death, and we all get older, and that probably was a little too much for you, but the first point is take that first step, right? Without pain, and what I mean by that is start filling yourself with the love from all the people.
I mean, just hearing your story, you are very, very admirable and you’re a hope for many others, and you can switch that in your brain. Just like that. You can switch and when you start feeling that— because this area, you know, I mean you’ve seen this before, people walking across coals or in China, having open heart surgery with just acupuncture, right? So that is a very powerful mind. Allowing— I’m not— those are extremes. I’m not saying anybody should do those things, but the point is, the work you’ve done and what you know is when you’re focusing on that work it helps support you through these times and then make sure you’re recovering in a sensible way, either going to a physical therapist or having someone help you with recovery and stretching.
So you want to not ignore the body but you want to put it in great function. Even at the point, for a short period of time, whether you need to use some type of anti-inflammatory, right? But It’s a combination of things, but the central focus for you, you’ve already shown, if you can go over 400 miles you’re already, in your age, you’re already incredible and with the underlying physical limitations that you had. So you already have the power to do it and take that one step at a time. Pick something that makes you really feel passionate and do that first and then, through the halo effect, as you do that daily and you get back into that routine, then you can add something else.
When I wrote the Habits of Health Transformational System it was about looking at all the MacroHabits, all the key areas, and one of the big ones, as you know, is your healthy mind and you have a strong mind. So take the gratitude. Use that to fuel you. Switch it around. Start getting more active along with what you know every— your healthcare professionals say you can and can’t do, maybe find someone to help you with flexibility and start coming back in a way so you’re working on your body, but use the strength of that mind that helped you walk over 400 miles to get yourself back in momentum. Does that make sense?
Cinda: Thank you. And last night, on the community call I heard someone share, “Never forget the miracle that got you to where you are.”
Dr. A: Yeah.
Cinda: And I’m a 9% survivor of brain surgery that was a miracle, you know, and it’s allowed me to have the courage to do what I did.
Dr. A: It’s amazing.
Cinda: And I want to not forget that on a daily basis so that I can overcome the obstacle.
Dr. A: So put that picture, whatever picture inspires you, see that picture from the Cassini inspires me because if you look at it, we’re sitting, floating out in the middle of nowhere, and bottom line is, just our ability to be on this planet should be gratitude and enough for us, right? I mean, we started as this small, little creature, right? By design that just we’ve grown and got the experience, and you’ve been here, 70 plus years to see all these things. If that’s what drives you, and that love of life, then have it drive you. Be passionate about it and use that to keep you so you don’t forget and you realize that you’re not just a survivor, but you’re a creator. You just created a beautiful voyage or journey that inspired people all over the world. I mean you should be really, really grateful for yourself and the service you are to others, and if you hadn’t fought the way you did, you wouldn’t be here and none of that would’ve happened. So, I use that, you already know what you need to do. Go do it, Cinda.
Cinda: Thank you. Thank you.
Dr.A: Alright? You’re welcome. Bye bye. Wow. Wow. Okay, who’s next?
Rachel: All right, next up we have Denise. Hi, Denise.
Dr. A: Hi, Denise.
Denise: Hi. I hadn’t planned on doing this at all.
Dr. A: But here you are here you are!
Denise: Here I am! Yeah. I grew up as a big kid. I was always the big kid and I guess because I was a big kid, I always felt like I had to please people to make them like me and two years ago I took off weight and I feel wonderful and it’s a very natural thing at this point, I go out in a bathing suit, which I’ve never done in my life, but because I’ve always pleased people, I’m unaware of what would make me happy, and right now I’m trying to figure out what would make me happy so that I can stay in relationship to people without pissing them off. So I need some help, and I do see a therapist at this point, but I need some help in trying to figure out how I can forget about the people pleasing and trying to please myself.
Dr. A: Okay. That’s a great one. First of all, dump the word try. Try is, yeah, and the reason why it’s important, you forgot it, but why I want to bring it to your attention is because you’re immediately putting a buffer in like, “Oh, I’m going to try.” You know, Yoda did it better than anybody. Little guy, this green guy, lifted the spacecraft and Luke couldn’t do it, right? Because he was trying. He honestly wasn’t doing it. He was trying. He wasn’t being, like you said, you’ve been able to reach a healthy weight and you’re now, it’s not an issue for it, because now you’ve become a healthy person. Same thing with your mind. Bottom line is, conceptualize, you created a concept as a kid to create—because you were big—you created a concept if I please people I’ll be approved, and if you think about it, the things that are most important to us basically are, and what we struggle with, is when we feel a lack of something, and usually it’s a lack of security, a lack of approval, a lack of control, or a lack of wholeness, the reason why that works it served us when we were a little kid growing up because we wanted to have approval because if we didn’t have approval we weren’t going to have security, right?
[00:41:58] We needed to be part— just like 10,000 years ago in our tribe, if we were excommunicated from the tribe, bottom line, you died. So it’s a very primordial survival part of us. Really instinctual. So, we want approval and so that helps with that, which allows us to be accepted, and we’re accepted, and if we can’t get accepted then we want control. So in this basically, what switched, so you don’t piss people off, you went from, in the first part, you don’t need approval for your weight, but you still need approval from people. So now you’re trying to control them and that’s why they get pissed off, does that make sense?
Denise: I don’t want to admit it, but yeah.
Dr. A: Yeah. It’s a big “aha” moment, right?
Denise: Yeah.
Dr. A: Okay. You don’t have control over anybody. In fact, the only person you have control over is you. You don’t have control over your kids. You might have some parental control, but you don’t have absolute control. Their mind is going to do what their mind wants to do. So understand, the only thing you need to work on is to understand that. You don’t have a lack of anything. You don’t have a lack of approval, you don’t have a lack of security, and you don’t have a lack of control. All those things, you have what you need to be whole, to be successful. That’s the first thing, and that recognition of that is so critical and so what that does is then go from being outspoken and trying to get people to do things to now just receiving. Receiving from them. Just like Cinda is saying, she didn’t like it, she really was uncomfortable when people were telling her how amazing and inspiring, because her ego, her personal mind, didn’t want the burden of someone else and then she started realizing, “My goodness. The gratitude of that. That I’m actually helping a fellow human is great,” and that’s where you are, very similar but in a different way, but basically, you can’t get anybody to love you.
You can’t get anybody to approve of you. That comes by you being completely okay with yourself. That’s the work. The work is always inside, and if you’re pissing people off, you’re projecting your own frustrations onto them. So you want to, instead of conceal and withdraw, withhold, and withdraw from them, you want to reveal, right? Own it and then move forward and build relationships through observation and through listening. Does that make sense?
Denise: Yeah. I wish it was easier said than done.
Dr. A: I’m not saying it’s easy. It’s a repetitive— well, first of all, you broke the initial pattern, right? You’ve taken personal responsibility so in that area you’ve done a really good job. You’ve taken control over your physical health, you just haven’t taken control over your mental health. That personal mind. Putting your personal mind to the side, just like we talked about, and we’ll continue to talk about it by accepting, being grateful when something comes up. Stop. Challenge. Don’t respond. You don’t need to be right. We think because we’ve created this construct of the way the world should be that we think when it’s not that way we should be right. That’s why there are multiple wars right now. That’s why we have prejudice because basically, we only need a couple examples from our own experience and then we think we understand everything because the human brain doesn’t like to think a lot because it burns more oxygen and more fuel, so we basically take a couple examples, our examples by the way, or something we read, and then we think, “Oh, I’ve experienced that before.” You experienced it as one experience, or maybe two experiences, or maybe 10 experiences. There are an infinite amount of experiences in each one of those situations and what we do is we— it’s amazing, we get such— Mark Twain said this, you know, Samuel Clemens said this for science, it says, we get such a “wholesale conjecture based on such a trifling investment of facts,” and that’s how we are in our world.
We created our own world and then we live in it and that if that world’s like we want it to be— but you’re going to lose. If you go to war with the world you’re going to lose. We all lose when we do that. When we start working on ourselves and realizing to have more tolerance we don’t have— we don’t have to have something a certain way, we just simply have to observe and basically see why we’re like that and over time you’ll get better and better. Make sense?
Denise: Thank you.
Dr. A: You’re welcome. And start with one little thing. Start writing down, during the day when you piss somebody off and then assess it, realize it, go back to it. Why did it happen? And then basically, what? Apologize. Apologize. People want to forgive. They just aren’t going to do it if you keep doing the same thing over and over again. So that’s fully in your— you don’t need approval. So you don’t need approval for them to be your friend. What you need is the opportunity to be responsible for yourself and for your actions, and know that you see the world different than someone else and respect their point of view. You don’t have to agree with their point of view. I mean, I listen to people all the time that go on tyrants and I don’t in any way agree with their point of view but I allow them to be heard and that’s the first step. If they feel heard then potentially they become open. If they’re not heard and you’re playing mental pingpong with somebody and going back and forth, that’s the Drama Triangle.
What I’m about is the empowerment triangle, and in the empowerment triangle, you basically turn the victim into what? Into the coach. You become a coach, a coach for yourself, coach to help others, and coaching is supporting. It’s not “heroing.” So you go from the hero to a support mechanism, right? And from the villain you go to a challenger for people that you know and you have the right rapport. Read that in the Habits of Health and in the Healthy Mind section. I mean it’s so important for us, and to practice it, and practice it every day. Cool?
Denise: Thank you very much.
Dr. A: You’re welcome. You’re welcome.
Rachel: All right next up we have Cliff. Cliff, can you come on camera?
Cliff: I think I’m here. Yes, I am.
Dr. A: Hey, Cliff.
Cliff: Dr. A, good to see you.
Dr. A: Hey. Good to see you, buddy.
Cliff: So my question today, and for you, is you know, I mean, you know me pretty well instinctively. I try to live in gratitude as much as I can and that’s kind…
Dr. A: Try! Try to?
Cliff: Thank you [laughing].
Dr. A: No. I want to stop just for a minute because you’re highly intellectual, you’re professional, you’re wise, but we don’t realize that’s your personal mind doing that. Our prefrontal cortex is where we incorporate language. It’s where our language centers are. Our limbic system in our brain don’t have language and so when we sense [unintelligible 00:49:09], so something in you chose that word because there’s something in your personal— and by the way, our personal mind, our unconscious state, you know, hangi and the hangi and psychology talks about the shadow. We all have a part of us inside, right? That is basically primordial. It’s based on instincts and things that are there and it’s unconscious. We project it out, but if we question and ask ourselves why, then you become this— and as a professional, you were a great student, become the student of what you say and that’s why both my language, and also my journal, my journal makes you aware, gives you a 360 on things. So anyway, didn’t interrupt you, but I want to make sure because I know you get that.
Cliff: No, totally. Words really matter. So you know me pretty well and I live in gratitude as much as I can. I make that my default, but when life throws stuff at us, what can we do? What can I do to make that transition as quickly as I can? Because you said it before to Cinda, I think her name was, you said like, “You can make that switch in a moment,” and for myself, when I can be living in gratitude, when life does throw the stuff at me, when I make that switch, it makes all the difference. So my question is, how can I make that happen as quickly as possible? For myself to make the switch?
Dr. A: Yeah. No. That’s a great question and the three mechanisms that I found effective, the first one is if something happens I— and sometimes it’s almost bizarre, but I will turn it into something that’s positive. I like to say, “Okay. What happened in here?” It’s kind of like the obstacles way, but even more profound than that, in the moment. In the moment, this just happened, just like for the very first lady, in the very beginning, because she’s been around this and because she’s aware of it, she can now get counsel and she’ll be very effective at it. She’ll learn very quickly because she’s already spent the time learning the language, learning the terminology, understanding it. She’s done the investigation, and the same thing here.
[00:51:55] So the more you can be aware and once something’s happened and you shift, and then you start drifting, and then you go down into the Drama Triangle it’s very difficult. That’s why I like to use the analogy of being in the rapids, right? When you’re in the rapids, you’re just trying to survive. You’re just trying to get through the eddies and the currents. That’s not the time to find out how, “I don’t have this happen again.” So that’s where I said, get out and sit on the bank and observe those rapids, the rocks, the things that— you know, a river that doesn’t have anything in it will be smooth. You can take— some of the great conscious leaders of the world have talked over centuries that you can have a crystal clear lake and you drop just the pea in it and it causes ripples, right? So that’s why— we just had the— because I live here on the ocean— we just had the effects of a hurricane that’s 500 miles away from here, but it still has its effects on it, right? So if you can shift back to being fully aware versus allowing that trigger to move you into a reactive state where you do go into the Drama Triangle, that’s awesome.
The other piece, and what you can do if you can stop, then you can take that and turn it into something positive. So the easy examples, we all get caught in traffic. I’m caught behind somebody driving slow, so rather than getting upset about it, how can I use this time and do something creative with it? How can I use something positive? Right? So, in the morning, if something comes up, I get a call or a text or something, and I’m just getting up, I’ll make my bed. I’ll actually make my bed and say, “Okay. This is a time for me to make my bed to start the day off properly,” and then I can address what’s going on. So I don’t allow it to take control of me. Once it gets— it hooks into you, then you’re done that time and you can’t really work on it then. What you can do though, is take notes and say, “Okay. This is what triggered me.” Now, what you can do when you start feeling yourself triggered is use a mantra. When there’s so many thoughts up there you can— a mantra is simply like singing a song to yourself or thinking of something that you like. Like, “I’m okay,” or “I’m great,” or “God,” or whatever works for you. Everybody’s a little different, and what happens is, in your mind, you start saying that, not out loud, but in your mind, and what happens is then you’re focused. it’s like a flashlight, rather than being all these flashlights going on, all the flashlights go into that one thing and allows you to settle down.
So that’s a great way to start quieting the mind and along the same lines being able to meditate. Meditation is good because what you’re doing is, once you get good at it— people say, “Well, I can’t meditate because my mind’s going.” Well, that’s the first step. Once you’re aware that you got all this talk going on, that’s the first step, and then over time you can use the mantra, you can use something positive to change that, and then the really big one, this is the one where the deep work goes, and you want to start with little things first, Cliff, you want to basically figure out what it is that’s stored inside, energy that’s stored inside you that repetitively causes it, because what we have a tendency to do— which was what my talk was today— we have a tendency when something triggers us, we have a tendency to ignore it. We resist it or we suppress it and we don’t address it, and when we do that then we ignore it. We distract ourselves by thinking of something else. Right? And then we go out and go shopping, or eat a big meal, or drink alcohol, or do drugs, or get on the internet, or watch pornography. It doesn’t matter what it is, we do something to distract us. So we’re not thinking about that.
The reality is, when you start doing the deep work, which is called, “becoming the conscious witness,” of it, you’re standing back from it. When I show form, feelings and thoughts, right? We’re basically really close to our thoughts because our thoughts are there, which serve us when we’re doing something good with it, remembering where our keys are. We’re not doing something good when we’re thinking about how that person talked to us, or I don’t really like what happened there, and then we dwell on it versus feel that, and what we want to do instead is move back from it. Observe it. Put on that lap coat and those goggles and say, “Okay, yeah. This is something here and let it come up. The reason why we resist it and suppress it, not let it come up, is because it’s painful. We didn’t address it the first time because it went down with pain, especially things that happened when we were young.
You know, our parents divorced 40 years ago and we’re still pissed off about it and we’re still using it as an excuse, bottom line, those things are long gone. You have the ability to change you. Our brain is neuroplastic. We have the ability to learn these things. To use the techniques I’m talking about and overnight change those things, if we’re willing to face it now. You don’t start with— our first speaker, you don’t start with something that was that traumatic. You know, when she was growing up. You start with something smaller. Right? Just like you don’t start playing Beethoven. You start with learning the scales. The same thing accounts here. So take something small, use it as an example. Remember, repetition gives you perspective. That’s why— I have certain books that I read and I have those underlined and re-underlined and underlined again, and because I know that the experience— just like today. I learned a lot today. I learned from every one of you today, and then I use that, and then read some of the classic things that are there and now interpret it in a way that helps me more effectively than even those masters were at helping people move forward.
I’m not in this to spout wisdom. I’m here to help people become the Dominant Force and have the ability to organize your life around what matters most. That’s what matters most to me. That’s where I’m spending the rest of my days because it brings me great joy and it makes me feel, and I’m very grateful for the ability to do that. When I hear the things, it’s not my personal mind saying, “Yeah. Dr. A, you’re good,” it’s actually my abstract mind, my impersonal mind, saying, “Yes. This work is effective and it’s helping people and we’re gathering evidence.” It’s kind of like James Clear saying, “If you write a 100 words a day, that’s a vote that I’m becoming a writer.” You’re not a writer in the beginning, but over time— the same thing with your health, with your mental health, I’m becoming mentally healthy, building psychological flexibility because I’m willing to work on it every day, and the work requires daily work, and the patterns—remember—are for your whole life. To expect you can do it once, or listen to one of these things, or read it once and have a meaningful change, it ain’t happening. It ain’t happening.
Cliff: For Sure. So I guess the question I still have is, what can I do to recognize and make that shift as quickly as I can?
Dr. A? Do the three three things. Actually go listen to this about 10 times, because I told you what you need to do. See. Okay. This is a—if you don’t mind— this is a beautiful example, on an intellectual level, you’re a healthcare provider, you’re now retired. You’re a great musician. You know about the creative process. You have lots of extreme talents, but your personal mind got in there. Your ego got in there and buffered what I said and you’re looking for the magic ampullate that— the thing that I go like this and Cliff, and say, ”Now you’re cured.” Ain’t such a thing! The three things that I said, if you work daily on those things come back in one month, three months, whatever works for you, and let me know because you will be dramatically different. Your psychological flexibility will be improved, but it’s about practice.
Remember, the goal is a one or two minute thing. What you want to do is you want to be more— what you’re saying is, “I want to be more psychologically flexible. Be able to handle the events of life at a more effective, quick effective way.” That’s what you asked me, correct?
Cliff: Yeah.
Dr. A: Do the things that I talked about in the last 10 minutes. Listen to it about 20 times. Get your personal mind out of the way, start doing those daily. Come back to me in a month to three months and let’s talk.
Cliff: Thank you, Dr. A.
Dr. A: Awesome. Cool. Awesome. Rach, we’re almost at— do we have a short one, because it’s one o’clock.
Rachel: No. We actually don’t. So that’s perfect.
Dr. A: Save that for next time. This was great. Hopefully, this was helpful for everybody. I appreciate you guys and remember spend, you know, I use Cliff because he’s a tough guy, but really, we have a very strong personal mind that carried us. When we were little kids it helped us a lot. Now it keeps us stuck in the past and it keeps us still doing the same things. What we can do is free ourselves from it. Organize your life. Figure out what you want for your future, allow that to inform your day, and one of those areas to work on is that psychological flexibility. Becoming emotionally agile. Building emotional literacy. Being able to handle our feelings. Starting to identify that stuff that’s been stored there forever. Let it come up. Work with someone if you need that and let’s go create a healthier life with less struggling for ourselves and for the people around us. God bless you guys. Bye.
