Want transformation? Stop focusing on the wrong things —
Here’s what to focus on, instead. Because it works.
Here are the notes, if you prefer to read…
One of the things that the women I work with are most surprised about is that they're focusing on the wrong thing when it comes to their personal evolution. Our culture has, intergenerationally and for eons, taught us to value the intellect over the internal cues of the body. To value what we think over what we experience. So, what’s it like to focus on the wrong things and what happens in the moment when we let go and redirect our attention to focusing on the right things? And what are those things that we want to focus on if we want autonomy, sovereignty, and an intentional life?
The wrong things that we're taught to focus on are: 1. the intellect and 2. external ‘reality’.
If you're reading this, I ask you, how many times has a discovery of labeling a thing, what it is, actually created lasting impact for you? I'll give you an example — when I was about 20 years old, I was in an abusive relationship that lasted seven years. Back then I believed there's something wrong with me.
I believed that because I'm completely batshit crazy. Yelling, screaming, running down the street naked. Just like, completely not crazy — to the point where I checked into a psychiatric hospital more than once. I was seeking to find what's wrong with me.
So I went to the conventional places that one does when they awaken to this reality. I pursued all kinds of therapies and had all kinds of labels placed on me. One of those was borderline personality disorder. I thought — hmm, wow, that makes a lot of sense. Like, no wonder I'm crazy. It's because I've got this thing called a personality disorder! But… knowing that, of course, didn't make anything better. Actually it made everything worse because now in my abusive relationship I was to blame, right? So, naturally, I took responsibility (aka blamed myself) for everything that was happening and tried desperately to fix it.
Then I got diagnosed with bipolar personality disorder type 2. Apparently, everybody had an opinion about what's wrong with me in terms of the symptoms that I was displaying. And everybody tried to help through talk therapy. Now, when you know how the structure of your mind works, you really get that there's no salvation in talk therapy.
Why? Because in order to change your behaviors, you have to change your strategies. To change your strategies, you have to come to terms with the cultural conditioning of who you think you are. The stories that you tell yourself about who you are — I'm a good person and good people fill-in-the-blank. What are the nominalizations that are attached to being a good person? And so we will do anything to protect that version of ourselves, right? So like, what do good girls do? Pat me in the head and I'll be okay, right? Like tell me I'm a good girl and I'll be okay.
In order for that “good girl” programming to shift, I must change my choices and I must discover I must viscerally discover the potentiality of who I'm capable of becoming. So who's the real me? Like who really am I? Beyond the stories, beyond the habits, beyond the behaviors that lead to diagnoses like bipolar and borderline?
The truth is: no external force can ever validate your internal state. So you have to become your best validator.
An external source of authority can never fix one — because we are not broken. We are not the greater sum of all our problems! We are so much more …
When we don’t know that but believe we are crazy and broken, well, drugs become a viable alternative to numb the pain. Numb the intensity. Numb the “too much-ness”. When numbing becomes the only fasable alternative, it’s because you cannot figure out your pain, nor understand it, nor categorize it. You can only digest and metabolize it through the body.
I'm not saying that talk therapy is not effective. I'm not saying that it doesn't work for some people given where they're at and their level of curiosity and management, right? It helps manage. But there are people out there, like me, that management was not enough. I was seeking to live a magical life.
Now, would I have put it in those words back then? Of course not. I would have just wanted to feel peace. I would have just wanted to have meaning, to find an ounce of meaning in this profoundly destructive world (and all I knew how to do was pay attention to the destructive parts of it, because there's so much of it everywhere).
That's the external reality — it pulls you into the bottomless pit of bullshit to pay attention to. And when your attention is on the external, it isn’t on what matters — YOURSELF. Your intention. Your life. Your creations.
Distractions function to remove you from yourself and to keep you in the game of someone else's creation so you don't notice what matters.
So, if the intellect and the external are the wrong things to focus on, well what are the right things to focus on?
It's your body.
It is your body and everything that it takes for your body to be healthy and in flow. The six fundamentals of transformation in my free eight day course starts with breathing. Without breath, your body can only do what it habitually does. Why? Because your breath sustains the state of your body to what it is. So you have to decide, is the internal state in your body and how you feel in it, how you want to feel?
No matter where you are in your journey, always start by paying attention to your breathing. Focusing the full measure of your attention inside your body at the base of your spine, breathing intentionally a water breath. That's a very simple breath of inhaling and holding and exhaling. A nice long exhale and then inhaling. No holding anywhere…
When we breathe that water breath, it’s like the waves of the ocean and flow. When we engage that breath intentionally, the body does what the body is designed to do — process all the information that's moving through it, judgement free.
When we defer to the intellect, it likes to label and judge — whether that's emotions, or whether that's good or bad, or right or wrong, whether that's stories, etc. But the body has no judgments around what it feels. So if you're feeling pleasure in places where you're not supposed to, your body does not have a judgment around that. Your cultural conditioned mind, does.
So, your body matters — it’s the only thing that every single human on this planet has in common. We all have a body, and how it functions and what it does is predictable in the way of the process, but not the outcome. In other words, the process to engage is the same, but the outcome will depend what the processing means for you uniquely.
Before you try to understand and figure out, I invite you to come back to the body and pay attention to your internal state. Become intentional with your breathing and notice your thoughts, notice your body, notice your environment, notice it all as you intentionally engage Quantum TLC™ (attention at the base of your spine, deeply rooted in your body, trusting what's there). Then, refer to The CODE Model™ as the framework for self-discovery! That is what will help you raise your thinking UP logical levels so you heal!
This is how you transform.
This is how you become more by intentionally choosing to trust the only place of power: your body. Your body is so much more than you’ve been conditioned to believe. I know — it’s quite likely that you don’t even like your body. You feel betrayed by your body. When the truth of it is — your body is seeking to communicate with you. That’s what pain is. Are you willing to find a way to explore how else to listen? Because, at the end of the day, your body can never ever lie. Because it's not designed to lie. It's designed to empower. It's designed to process. It’s designed to integrate.
When the body is done processing, then the intellect, your conscious mind, can make a choice.
For now, I invite you to pay…attention. Consider noticing what you’re paying attention to. Is is focused externally, so on what your husband is doing, what's going on in the world, politics, destruction, World War III? If so, intentionally push the pause button. Then, intentionally bring your awareness deep in your body (beware, this is going to cause some movement in your body), and engage a water breath — inhaling and exhaling with no pause. Then notice what happens in your body, your thoughts, your internal state… after just 30 seconds. That’s all it takes to transform your life…will you choose it?
