In this session, we focus on the ghosts in our past.
Video Transcript:
Dr. A: All right. Welcome everybody to the Conscious Forum. I’m Dr. A, your facilitator and I hope everybody had a wonderful Labor Day weekend and enjoyed time with their family, had an opportunity to kind of create some space in their lives and hopefully reflect a little bit on how amazing life is and how lucky we are to all be here, because although sometimes we kind of get caught up in reacting to the days of everyday life in the hamster wheel, there’s an important need for us to kind of create some space between us and the reactive, crazy world we live in. It’s chaotic, and through technology we’re adapted to— we’re basically connected to everything that’s going on in the whole world now, which our human brain was never designed to do, and actually, you’ve done a quite a good job of hanging on through that, but we can get better, and that’s what this Conscious Form is about.
I’m just taking up a little time here as we get started and people kind of settle in, but one of the key parts is really understanding our consciousness, our awareness, our presence and how we react to the situations around us, and one of the biggest attributes we can have living in this chaotic world is psychological flexibility. Lots of stuff’s going to happen. Some of it’s good. Some of it’s bad. But how we respond to it determines, literally, the outcome, and the outcome is everything because one of the things that as a physician, I’ve studied for over two decades now, is our Optimal Health and Wellbeing, putting ourselves in position so we can be as healthy as we can be, both physically and mentally, in terms of our overall feeling of wellbeing is so critical to our longevity and the quality of our life.
You know, I wrote in the first Habits of Health, about the areas in the world where people live to be over 100 and in those areas, one of the key parts is they are aware of those things. They are very aware and very present. They’re very connected to their family, they’re very connected to nature, and they use nature as not something outside of them, but something they’re part of. So the Conscious Forum was developed for us to be able to be together. The way I usually conduct this is I’ll do a part, just to get it started, and then we’ll open it up for questions and I find the questions that you guys ask are incredible. I learn from them every time. I’m so grateful for them. I’m so grateful for your participation, and this Conscious Forum is designed for everybody. Not just people that come from our mission, but basically, any of those eight billion people that want to work on themselves and want to be in a great place that’s open, that’s simple to understand, and yet allows us to work in a psychologically safe space and work together.
So with that, basically, consciousness [Dr. A is referring to the slide on screen]. You know, you’ll see me put that lab jacket there [image on the slide], because we need to become real students of our own consciousness and our consciousness refers to our state of awareness. Of our surroundings, our thoughts and our feelings. All three are critical. I think we’re usually fairly aware, if we spend a moment of time and look out and see an object, we’re aware of that surrounding, but most of the time we’re actually not aware in our daily life, because we’re so busy thinking inside.
Our thoughts are going like crazy, and our feelings, and we’ve got this tumultuous interaction between our thoughts and our feelings and we come to think that they’re actually us, and actually they’re not us. We are the awareness of those things. You are not your thoughts. You are not your feelings and we’re going to get into the deep end of the pool today and we’re going to talk about some things that will probably stimulate some interest and hopefully, some of you will get this from the standpoint of, “Wow. I’m starting to understand,” because we’re here on a lifelong journey to create Optimal Health and Wellbeing. So the forum, basically, is a place, meeting, or medium where we can discuss and exchange ideas on particular issues.
So today, basically, what we’re going to be talking about is: who is running your life? And we’re going to focus on the ghosts in our past, which sounds a little early for Halloween, it’s only September, but the ghosts in our past are actually so prevalent in running our everyday life and most of the time, because they’re unconscious, we’re not aware of them by definition. The human psyche is timeless. What I mean by the human psyche is basically, our experiences of life. The thoughts and emotions together form our psyche and what I mean by timeless is you’ll be having a dream sometime, and all of a sudden — I had one this morning where I dreamt of someone that I hadn’t seen in over 30 years — so all that stuff is stored in there, and yet such a small amount is at the conscious level. Most of it is unconscious. It’s basically below the waterline and we’re not even really sure sometimes why we do things, and that’s why becoming conscious, working on our vertical development, working on being awakened to what’s going on, being aware and fully present, will allow us to now be able to put on that lab coat, so to speak, and kind of find out what’s making this tick. And that mental gym is as important, and I believe more important even than the physical gym. Physical gym we want to stay active. Having strong muscles, having great balance is the key to longevity and living a high quality life, but even more than that, the quality of life inside of here, inside that— between that six inches between your ears, that’s the quality that really sets up for every day to be optimal.
So, we’re going to talk about that from the standpoint of a photograph. Think about a photograph you have, maybe flipping through an album, looking at childhood pictures or looking at pictures with your family when you were growing up, or an event, or place you want, and you’ll basically feel really strong emotions or memories or nostalgia and all those things are stored energy. We have energies to store, and they’ll bring up stuff. You’ll look at a photograph of something that reminds you of an incredibly great time, or it might be something that was really traumatic, and you’ll see it, and all of a sudden you feel that well of emotions. All that stuff is stored inside. It’s literally what creates our stories and it’s what we used when we were really young to kind of navigate our way, and at least perception wise, stay safe.
So that’s really important to understand and you know, part are hauntings, you know, our ghosts and our ghosts are pieces of the past that come up and they actually run our daily life, and it’s really important for us to understand that if we want to make progress and not be at the expense of our past, because our past, at the time we were growing up, our parents did the best they could and they also were kids of their parents and so you know, as a whole, we came up in an environment that was nowhere near the same as it is now, but has a lot of the same things. The things that affect us. The things that are important to us. So we’re going to talk today a little bit about our ghosts.
Our ghosts are unconscious, autonomous, complexes, and you think, ”Wow. What does that all mean? That’s a bunch of big words.” Well, it basically means that first of all, they’re unconscious. Second of all, they’re coming up automatically. You do not have control when they come up, and they’re complexes, and we’re going to spend some time talking about complexes. Complexes are things that were put together that we end up creating that are at an unconscious level. Very important. So we’re not aware, and those, they’re projected onto us, onto our daily life. So they’re parts of our past, some experiences, that now get put—they kind of take over something in our daily life and we’re on automatic and so they’re actually operating us, and they’re separate from our ego. Our ego is our personal mind, but part of that is that we’re aware of it. So our ego functions, you know, I like to use the example: get up in the morning and you go into the shower. Your ego is there. Its perception is that it’s going to protect you and it tries to go way beyond its actual role, but in the case of the shower, you go into the shower, if it’s too cold, you turn it up a little bit. If it’s too hot, you turn it down. So your ego is functioning properly there. Being conscious and actually focusing on keeping you safe. But these processes are things that are buried.
They’re parts of our past. They’re just like that photo that reminds you of something. They are actually stored energy inside of us. Some of them are helpful, and some of them aren’t helpful, and we’re going to talk about that, because remember I talked about last month, about we’re a complex computer, and I’m going to use a couple of slides from last month just to put this in perspective on how these complexes actually affect our everyday life. So we should understand that when an event happens, it comes in, if we look at that event specifically, just how it’s happening in its purest form from our own personal mind, which is not about us, it’s just about what we’re observing. Basically it comes in, it’s just like a photograph or a videography that you do, and it’s pretty much reality, but as you can see, in the lower part [Dr. A is referring to the lower part of an image on screen], our personal mind takes over, interprets it, and then compares it to our experiences.
The reason why we do it, our brain consumes a lot of oxygen, a lot of fuel, and so we do what we call comparative reality. We, in everything we do, we stereotype things. That’s what causes prejudice. We do all these things because we want, over time, to say, “Oh, okay,” in this case, “No. I know what that is. I don’t need to think about it,” but the reality is, there’s assumptions that something we see is the same it was, and that’s reality, gets interpreted and blurred in our mind. So that’s really important to understand because the impersonal mind basically is a conscious computer like functioning. It functions, it’s the abstract thinking. We’ve gone from 10,000 years ago, living in caves to now with people like Elon Musk, putting us on the verge of being able to go and live on Mars. That’s the abstract. That’s the brilliant mind. That’s the part that functions up here. That’s the part that allows you to do well on tests. That’s the part that really allows us to build all the incredible things that separate us from basically every other species on the planet.
[00:10:37] We’re able to sense self and separate that into abstract thinking so very, very critical and so this is what happens, right? Your conscious of our inner world, basically your impersonal mind does your homework, creates ideas, builds rockets, allows you to help drive your car. Now the unconscious of our inner world is our past patterns and how they interact, and as I said, everything that you’ve ever experienced is stored somewhere in there. It may be at the deep recesses, way down in there, but that deep psychological thinking, and we’re going to talk about how we can manage it, is really important. So those past patterns can work like, you know, healthy complexes keep us safe. So for instance, when you were little your parents may have said, ”Hey, don’t touch the stove,” or “The pot on the stove, because it’s hot,” and in the beginning you may or may not really listen to them, but once you did touch it, and we all end up doing that at least once, we end up touching something just because we’re not fully conscious, we touch it and we get burnt. Then it creates a complex. That complex is the projection.
When you see a pot on the stove you know it’s hot and you don’t touch it and those protect us, or when you go across the street you look left, you look right, before you cross the street, and actually it’s funny because I was in Gainesville for the Gator football team over the weekend and everybody’s excited. They’ve got their Gator gear and they’re walking— and there’s actually kids in college excited. All fired up with their friends and I was watching them literally avoid that, where they actually were walking you know out into the traffic without looking, because we get distracted and so these complexes are important, and they serve us well. Unfortunately, we have unhealthy complexes. All the stuff that happened to us where we created, “this is the way to negotiate when my parents aren’t nice to me.” “This is the way to negotiate it when someone doesn’t include me in a party.” “This is what happens when I ask someone on a date and they say, ‘no.”” So we build all of these complexes which create a whole bunch of anxiety, guilt, fear, and insecurity, and so our personal mind, it’s all about us.
It’s about your ego and then the things your ego doesn’t even see, which are our ghosts, which are these conceptual things that are below, and even our personal mind isn’t even aware of them because they’re down so far. They are our ghosts. So let’s talk about that. We become possessed at times by them. The impersonal mind kind of gets left. These unhealthy complexes come up and we end up doing things we regret and don’t serve us well. We all know that happens. We think, “Why yesterday? Why did I get so upset about that?” And that’s basically the first step in learning how to move beyond those ghosts and actually create an environment where you can be healthy and safe. So complexes, we use our old patterns from the past as the basis of living our current and our future life. All of us do this. They are unconscious and occur because we have history.
You went through a whole bunch of stuff. All the way since you were born to today, and we continue to have stuff, and those complexes are these ghosts that are inside of there that we’re not aware of that cause us to do stuff. Projection is a really good example of uncovering those complexes. You know, you’ll be saying, “Well, they’re never very nice,” and we’ll project onto them. We’re projecting something about ourselves. Something in our own complex. So if you’re projecting, and basically saying things about other people, it’s a good idea if you want to start working and putting your lab coat on that you actually say, “What does this say about me?” And then create that space, and then investigate that, because you can learn so much. Remember, going to the mental gym every day is so important. Our old patterns, basically, are going to come up and they become present in these complexes and when that happens, we are taken over. We are haunted by them, and the ghost comes up and takes over, goes into our presence and has us do something where we don’t even realize we do it sometimes, and so that’s why it’s important to really understand that.
So how do we take back control of our lives? I think this is the question that we all want to know and basically, we got to observe our patterns. They tell us our hauntings are things that happen to us that basically are underneath the waterline that are so important. So it’s great. These are questions you probably want to take a picture, a snapshot of this [Dr. A is referring to a number of questions on a slide]. So these are great questions To ask yourself. If you say, “Why did I get—” something happened relatively small yesterday or earlier today, ”Why did I get so upset about it?” And write down what was going on, and then you can kind of start to investigate it, because it’s a ghost that came up. It actually possessed you. “Why did I feel so inadequate in this situation?” “Why did I surrender to those feelings of inadequacy and why am I being self-defeating every day?I have such good intentions when I get up and the next thing you know I’m self-defeating myself. I’m self-sabotaging. Why? Why is that happening?” And it’s your ghost.
It’s this stuff from the past that you put down inside of there years ago, which may have been productive at one time, but doesn’t really help you, and of course: why did I comply and give away my integrity one more time? All great questions, and questions you can ask yourself. That’s so why it’s so important when something really gets you, and by the way, these projections, these ghosts, they will stimulate you. You will feel the “icky sauce” of them. Tightness in your jaw. In your throat. Feeling in your gut, and when you feel it, stop, and you know the drill; challenge why you’re feeling that way, and choose the outcome to get you through that process, and then put the lab coat and say, “Okay. So why did that happen?“ You know, what from my past, what pattern is coming up, and bubbling up? And especially the ones that, you know, when you’re journaling that come up more than once. Those are telling you that you have concepts, complexes from the past that are still directing, that are coming up and interfering with your ability to actually move forward and create the things you want in your life.
Why do we get stuck? Because of our complexes. Things inside that keep us from moving forward. That create guilt. That create animosity. All these things are there and they’re below the surface, and most of them are made up stuff that really aren’t of any real value to us. So you were basically psychologically possessed. Think of it as that haunting, right? You were possessed one minute by something, a concept, complex from your past, that doesn’t serve you well. So all our stuff is part of our personal mind. Anything that you ever stored in your mind because you resisted or clung onto it is trying to release. So this stuff will come up, it’ll be triggered by something in your day, or something emotionally inside will trigger, and it will come up and it will take over and possess you. So I just wanted to kind of finish this part. We’re not going to get into the details of this and certainly, as I always say, you know this is a forum to help you start. To get on your lab coat and kind of work on yourself and work on yourself in the standpoint, how do I free myself from these things that are having an effect? That basically, in the drag of the past, and not allowing me to really focus on the future I want to create.
So we have unfinished business of the parent. You know, was your parent omnipresent? A lot of parents are there all the time. In fact, we have the thing we call helicopter parents. Those are parents that are hovering over their kids all the time, not letting them do anything on their own, but could fully direct them, and being their friend, or your parents are absent and you had to do it on your own. You had make your own world. Those are questions, was the world safe? Could I believe in what they were saying and if I did what they said, would it work? Did I have their approval or did I have to meet certain conditions? Did I have to act a certain way? And certainly we all have to be socialized into the value where it’s a good idea that you stop at a red light, right? It’s good for you, good for society. It wouldn’t be good if you just randomly did whatever you want, but was our relationship with our parents where we had to meet their approval and conditions? And now your parents are— you haven’t been in their control in 20, 30, 40, 50 years, but maybe, mentally they’re still there. They may actually be deceased and they still have control over you, and basically it’s learning that you do not need their permission.
That all these things are these complexes that affect us and they’re good things to start investigating. You know, a relationship ghost. You know, am I loved? Is there guilt in my relationship? Can I believe in my partner? Will they betray me? I mean, the classic one is that a mom left when a young man was 10 years old. A mom suddenly drove off with someone else and they didn’t see her again and wonder why he now has three failed marriages, and it’s because he constantly has this complex that he’s going to be left alone, he’s going to be betrayed, going to be abandoned, and so basically starts feeling that, and senses that, and it starts taking over. These ghosts take over his behavior and now he’s doing stuff. Bottom line, checking on him, having an investigator follow them and of course, if you’re in a relationship and you’re the receiver of that, you’re going to start thinking your husband is not right, and he’s going to get the result he wants. You’re going to end up leaving him. So I’m just using that as an example. These things happen at every level in our life and there things that we’re not trying to fix, we’re just trying to become aware of the things that trigger us, and those ghosts. So we can then move beyond and now focus. I like to talk about problem solving versus creating what you want. You’ve got to understand that if things are in the way they’re acting on you and they’re preventing you from being able to fully free yourself, conceptually move on to what you really want.
[00:20:55] And of course, the haunting of unlived life. I think now more than ever, you’ve heard me talk about this, but 40% of people in major cities are lonely to the point where they don’t feel relevant. They feel disconnected because of this onslaught of technology and even though we can actually connect to anywhere in the world, we feel lonely and it’s really hurting us. Materialism: I mean, it’s never been more prevalent and “get the latest,” I know people are waiting on the latest iPhone, I mean gosh, the ones that we have work so well, I mean, do you need the latest? “Yes. I need it because that’ll make me feel like I’m whole. I’ve got it together,” and yet all that is not going to help us in any way. It’s just Band-Aids put on. DistractIon. We are distracted beyond measure. Where we get caught up in that keeps us from doing any of the things that are really important to us. It keeps us stuck. It keeps us procrastinating and not allowing us. Those are all complexes that we have.
Legacy: we want a matter for something. Early on the first Habits of Health I basically went to a guy named [unintelligible 00:22:06] that evaluated people in their 80’s and 90’s that were on their last days of their life and asked them, what would they have done differently? And one of those things, they would have forgotten those arguments with family. They would have smelled the roses, so to speak, and been more aware, and the third, they would have left the legacy. Whether it’s helping their son—I have a friend that yesterday afternoon, I saw him with his young son at the pool, and he made some errors earlier on in his life and because he was working so hard that he didn’t have time for his person. So now he’s spending the time and teaching him how to—18 months old, and the kid is swimming! Knows how to roll over. I mean it’s amazing, and so he’s compensating for something he didn’t do before and that’s what we need to do. We need to know what are the important things in our life, and the last is summoned to what? Inside of you, we all have greatness, and we have things that we want to do. Are we actually listening to that summons? There’s something summoning us to be more, to do more, and bottom line, to follow that or are we ignoring and pushing that down because of our concepts, our complexes that say, “I’m not worthy.” Something that happened to you 25, 35, 40, 50, 60 years ago, or, “Am I allowing those ghosts to still manage my life?”
So with that we need to understand, we are psychologically possessed in those periods of time and basically, by bringing that to presence and understanding, spending the time, you can now start addressing those, and either whatever is necessary, and so what I like to say is become a ghost-buster. Let’s become ghost-busters. The past is not the past. It’s still operative in all our lives to some degree, in some much more than others, and we kind of think, “Well, that’s who I am.” It’s not who you are. You are the awareness of everything that’s in front of you and the things that are in there, those thoughts, those feelings, those things that create, those complexes, those ghosts, are all from the past. None of them really have a role in your future, other than if you’ve learned from them, and that’s why we like to talk about the obstacles in the way. It teaches us to move beyond the things that affect us, but that your father or mother did something to you 50 years ago and you’re still letting it affect you and not giving yourself permission to move on is holding you back.
So how’s that operative? Write these two questions down because I think when something happens if you just ask these two questions you can really start to understand. It’s going to take a while. Bottom line is your ego is running the personal mind, it’s all about you. It’s trying to keep you safe. So you got a lot of things working against you, but the thing you have working for you is you are in control. You can become the Dominant Force in your life and you can Stop. Challenge. Choose. when something’s happening, especially when you see a pattern. Those are our hints. Those are the breadcrumbs that are leading that, “Hey, something, some ghost is operating. I’m being haunted by something from the past.”
So what does it make me do? What does it keep me from doing? Those two questions can change everything. So with that, accept. Be grateful. Break the spell, right? I should really have saved this for Halloween, but break the spell. The spell it has over here is unconscious. It’s an unconscious, autonomous concept or complex that’s acting there and you can, over time, by becoming aware, accept those things and not beat yourself up! Don’t say, “Oh, I wish I had better parents.” No. You have what you have. We all have different things that have happened in our lives. It’s what you do with them. When you become fully responsible you take radical responsibility. You can change everything and you can break the spell.
So with that, I love to show this because this is from the Cassini project or probe, that went to Saturn many years ago. We had over a decade of getting to watch it and this is looking back in the middle with all the middle of our galaxy looking back at that little bright dot there. That little bright dot is a reflection of the sun on the earth, shining off this incredible blue ball with all the green that is the only place we found so far that is inhabited or allows us to have anywhere near life, and I think it’s great when we the contingency to live on the moon or Mars, but I don’t want to live there. I want to live right here and we’re only here for a short period of time. Hopefully, if you learn the Habits of Health, and you’re taking control, and becoming the dominant force in your life, you can build the psychological flexibility to thrive. There’s never been a better time to be alive. If you’re willing to become responsible and the Dominant Force and be flexible enough to understand that there’s more available to us, in all areas of our life.
If we’re willing to put those complexes, those ghosts, and bust those ghosts, or at least put them to the side and now focus on what we can do to help create optimal health and wellbeing. So, with that Rach. Let’s open this up. What questions do we have?
Rachel: All right. First up we have Karen. Karen, can you come on camera?
Karen: I’m here.
Dr. A: Hi, Karen!
Karen: Hi! It’s so good to see you again and I have to say, I’ve met you in person many times and I’ve never been as nervous as I am right now. I feel like my heart is in my throat, but—
Dr. A: Before you ask the question, let’s ask, why?
Karen: I don’t—I’d hate to say I don’t know because I feel like that’s a cop out. Um. I guess because I’m just so overwhelmed with gratitude to you, and what you have done personally in my own life. I feel like to say, “Thank you,” is pretty shallow and so one, I want to just express to you how grateful I am for what you have done personally in my life, and I think maybe you have answered one of my questions, but, what is the difference between unhealed stored trauma and ghosts? I think what you mentioned is that the ghosts is the awareness of the stored trauma? Okay, and then the second thing is, doing the head work and moving past things that may have happened as a child with a parent. What should be or what should I hope to be my response when that happens with someone that I’m in a committed relationship with, with betrayal?
Dr. A: Yeah. No, those are great questions and by the way, thank you so much, and I’m honored to answer your question. We are more the same than we are different, and we basically, in our life, like, you’re a mom, right? [Karen nods]. Yeah. I’ve never been a mom, and I have to tell you I don’t know of one more difficult— I can tell you, I watched my wife raise my girls from the standpoint of all the work involved. I mean, I got to do the fun things to help teach them and talk to them, but I watched, especially when they were little, little babies, how hard it is. So I’m in awe of you, okay? Because bottom line is, we all are unique, special, and we’re all different, and we all fulfill different roles, and it brings me great pleasure to talk about this stuff because we didn’t we didn’t pick our parents. And then, whether you had amazing parents or bad parents, it doesn’t really matter, because they did the best they could do with what they had, right? So bottom line— but here’s the difference. The difference is, during that period, during those, especially those really young years, you needed them because they provided survival for you, right? And so you’re here. So just thank them for that and whether they affected you in a way—you got to remember they were also kids of their parents, right?
[00:30:12] So a lot of this stuff is generational. It’s ancestral complexes that are part of our lives and all I’m saying—and you’re not trying to fix them, I want to be really clear. We’re not trying to fix anything here. We just want to become aware, because their hauntings are affecting us. You know, you go to a spooky movie or watch a spooky movie—I remember as a kid, I insisted on going to see Dracula with my parents because I was so ”grown up” and I remember sitting there looking, I don’t know, I was like, maybe seven years old. My parents should have never taken me, but I insisted because I was so, you know, I was so cool and I remember sitting there, Dracula had the cross on and was turned into mush and I remember my father looking over me, there’s no way I’m not looking, right? And bottom line is, scared the hell out of me. I had to keep the light on for the next six months, the light in my room. So just listen, we’re impressionable when we’re little, right? And these things affect us, and we think they’re permanent, and they’re not, and that’s the whole point here, and by the way, whether you’re talking about stored trauma, it’s all energy.
When I was talking about photos, you’ll have a photo, and maybe you have siblings or something and you look back and it’s a photo of you and your parents or something you were doing in your childhood, and one sibling may have amazing, great feelings come out. The other may have terrible things happen, right? That’s all stored energy inside of us and that’s the stuff that wells-up and we don’t want to deal with it. We basically put it away. We got it out of there, that stored energy, and the stored energy can be good. I mean, it could be as simple as like two years ago, let’s say you went to Ksamil or to somewhere beautiful and you were with your significant another, and there was a beautiful sunset, and you had a great time and you end up kissing, you had a great time, and then two years later something else—I’m not talking about you specifically, I’m just talking in general—two years later you’re dealing with difficulty in your marriage and you go, “Let’s go back to Ksamil because now we can be good again.” It doesn’t work that way. It just doesn’t work that way.
So it’s important to know that there was something there that either created the right environment and removed something you ghost-busted or it just wasn’t operating there, but it’s still there. So that’s why it’s important to recognize that stuff, so when you’re working on it and you sense it, know that betrayal can be real. I mean, it’s something that can happen and certainly, the example I used about a young boy seeing his mom drive away with a stranger, I mean that’s pretty traumatic, and it led because they repressed it. It led to three failed marriages because what it did was the gentleman, when he grew up, he would project that. That complex would come, bubble up, and he would get paranoid because of that and say, “Well, wait a minute. You’re not to be trusted,” and then he’s actually doing stuff which is projecting onto the other something that the other is totally innocent of.
So what we’re looking to do is, what’s operating in our daily lives? Right? And when you feel those feelings, that means that there’s something one of those ghosts, one of those hauntings, and I’m just using different words to make it so it becomes familiar, because stored trauma? What does stored trauma mean? Right? I mean, it’s obvious if you lose a loved one or something, but there’s a lot of subtleties in that and it’s all there and it’s whether it’s operating and by ghost-busting, we simply want to start to recognize: I have a pattern that I’m not conscious of these autonomous, unconscious complexes that are operating, and what we want to do is recognize them and either just basically say, “Ah, that’s what’s going on,” and then let it go. Just kind of reject it or basically just go forward in what we’re doing.
So for instance, if you have something that bothers you— if you drive down a road, the white lines in the road, you know, let’s just say you drove today and you looked, you don’t remember anything about those white lines. You saw them. If you were getting ready to pass you look down and say, “Oh, it’s a double line. I can’t pass here,” or “it’s a passing lane so I can pass.” But other than that it goes in, you observe it, and boom, it’s gone. You don’t recollect that. Right? But if you have something inside that you repress, or you didn’t address, or is just there and you’re not conscious of, something you may not even recognize and it gets triggered. Man, you say, “Oh, I don’t want to deal with that,” and you are actually grabbing hold of it and pushing it down like a coil spring. You’re pushing it down rather than just accepting it, relaxing and letting it go. Does that make sense?
Karen: It does. It does, and I have to— I just want to share, I did a live on our client page about this. I have three congenital heart defects and my first, I had open heart surgery as a child, and so whenever something comes up, you know, even though I’m fifty-eight years old, I go back to that little girl, and I cry and I get scared, and a couple weeks ago I’m laying in the hospital waiting for my procedure and I just started focusing on my breathing and all the things that you have taught me, and I trusted my cardiologist, and for the first time in I don’t know how long, my heart rate was fifty-eight and my husband took a picture of it. He’s like, “We’ve been married for thirty-six years. Your heart rate has never been fifty-eight!” But I’m using things that you have taught about making me the dominant force in my life and I have a three- week old grandbaby now, and I’m ready to embrace that next chapter. So again, from the bottom of my heart, you have changed my life in so many different ways and I’m so grateful to have an opportunity to thank you.
Dr. A: Awesome. I love that. Thank you. And that’s why this is a forum, because that just brings me full of joy because the bottom line is, we are more similar than different and it’s our concepts, it’s our complexes that get in the way and say, “Oh they have that. They have this.“ No. We all have the same things. It’s how we use our tools and you’re using your tools in a way— yeah, and by the way, when you’re a little kid and you’ve gone through that and you’re in the hospital, those things are real trauma. Those are—you have stored trauma, and it just shows, even in the complexity of that now, as an adult, and by the way, paranoia is taking a real event and now applying it to non-real situations. Right? Same thing with neurosis, and their psychological terms, but what they actually mean is we’re now taking something that happened that might have been real at one distant point and we’re now applying it to— we’re modifying reality and now injecting those thoughts and those feelings and allowing us not to function at our optimum because of something from the past.
That’s a great example of that. And what you do is you’ve learned, even under something as traumatic as having to deal with open heart surgery, all that stuff you had to have, you have now taken control and become the Dominant Force, and you’re able to thrive. You have a new grandkid, and I can just see the smile and the joy on your face. You’re not suffering. If you basically said, “Oh woes me.” Right? Been the victim. “I had these things happen to me and they scarred me for life.” No. They haven’t. They haven’t scarred you for life. They are there. They are energy and each time, when you have those, you allow that to release and come up. It loses its effect on you. So in the sense of when something comes up, that feels that way rather than denying it, suppressing it, repressing it. Just accept it and relax and it will be gone in 90 seconds, and you just showed, and I love it, because as a doctor, you were saying, “I felt calm,” and your heart rate amongst getting ready to have a significant— something happen to you, you were able to remain calm.
So that is excellent. You are becoming. You’ve put your lab coat on. You become a practitioner and you’re now changing your life, and what that allows you to do in every aspect of your life, be a better mom, be a better spouse, be a better coach, be a better teacher, be a better leader. All those things come from within. They’re not things outside of us. You can read 20 books on leadership, until you become the Dominant Force in your life and you can sit next to someone else and help show them how to build the same, that’s when you become a great leader. When you’re able to give, because that brings you great joy. So again, Karen. Thank you so much. That was awesome.
Karen: Appreciate you.
Dr. A: Yeah. Cool. Who’s next?
Rachel: All right. Next up we have Wanda. Wanda, can you come on camera? There you are.
Dr. A: Hi, Wanda.
Wanda: Can you hear me okay? I’m in the gym, so.
Dr. A: I can see that. Awesome. Good job. You’re out doing what healthy people do.
Wanda: Yes, I am. So I have a question specifically about binge eating, but to broaden that out a little bit because it can be any behavior, whether it’s shopping, or any kind of impulsive behavior. On my own journey of almost three years, I’ve lost a significant amount of weight, but last year after some traumatic events having to do with our children, and then having to have a second shoulder surgery, all these things came into play and as a result of that I began to binge eat, and it turned into every two to three days, like six to eight-hundred calories in one sitting, and it was almost, it felt like that became my liferaft, was grabbing the food. And so of course, the weight loss paused and I was yo-yoing back and forth. Really just trying to survive. I did lean into a therapist and also this summer, leaned into a health coach that focuses on binge eating and so it’s better. I’m back. I’ve been binge free, except for once, the whole month of August, but I think it’s all associated with stored trauma, triggers, and my question for you is, and I have clients that deal with binge eating as well, how do you contend for your health in your weight loss journey, if you’re on one, or just maintaining, when you start having these behaviors that are associated to the triggers and the stored trauma? Because it takes years to process all that, but in the meantime I want to contend for my health and continue to make progress, and get to my goal, and go on to optimal health. So how do you balance all of that?
Dr. A: Yeah. No, that’s a great question, and remember, Wanda, like you said, you use the word years. You have a past where basically those complexes that we just talked about affect you. They affect your ghosts, right? That’s your hauntings and so they’re there, and how long ago did you start? What you just talked to me about, about these complexes, these concepts, this stored energy, that’s negative, how long have you been aware of that?
Wanda: Well, it’s been my whole life.
Dr. A: No no no, not subjected to it. How long— when did you start understanding what we’re talking about today? How long ago?
Wanda: Oh. Probably…I started my health journey on our program almost three years ago, but it was probably about a year and a half ago that I really started doing getting into the LifeBook. Laying in with my coach and understanding the mindset stuff.
Dr. A: Okay. So I want you to— because one of the things that you said, which I don’t necessarily agree with, that it’s going to take years to get rid of all this stuff. It’s not going to take years. It actually can take just a moment, but you have to set yourself up for that moment, and then repeat that moment. So you just started. I’m not going to ask you— I never ask a woman how old she is, but I would say that in percent that really you might have started looking to get healthier for years and maybe start eating healthier, but the reality is it’s been less than a year that you’re actually now starting to put on your lab jacket and work on these things, right? So you think about, and I’m just going to guess, let’s just say you have 40 years of being unconscious of it, right?—I like to see you smile—and now less than a year of starting to become conscious of it. That’s not very much time. Your ego, your complexes, your past, all those things have been there for a long, long time. You’re just now learning the skill set. It’s kind of like going into the gym. Just like right now, you’re on a treadmill, or on some kind of active machine, and you’re working on both calorie consumption, you’re working on cardiovascular health, and you’re working on muscle tone. Okay?
[00:43:52] Now that you’re doing that you’re starting to become healthier in your muscles over time. It doesn’t happen overnight, but what does happen when you start daily Stop. Challenge. Choose. you start becoming curious, open, and you put your ego to the side, and you actually say, ”This pattern does not serve me.” Remember when I said, how is this not letting me do what I want to do? Or how is this preventing me from doing what I want to do? Or how the lack of this would keep me from becoming everything I want to become. You’re now aware of that and so the more you’re aware, and it’ll come, start with the little stuff, right? Start with the little things. Start with— I like to use the example of traffic. You’re behind somebody that’s going 25 in a 35. Start with those little things and basically now become awakened, say, “I’m going bust this ghost and I am going to sit here and choose and substitute something positive right now, rather than getting irritated,” because if you get irritated about the traffic, by the time— you might even on the way be so irritated by it that you stop at an In-N-Out Burger, or whatever you have, what local poison you have, and grab that, because in the past the only way you could actually make yourself feel better was by substituting, by pleasuring, by having something to eat, and that’s what binge eating is.
It is that you’re not able to cope and you’re not able to have the psychological flexibility and so you respond to something to make you temporarily feel better. It’s like you said, it could be anything. It can be eating. It can be the internet. It can be a distraction, gambling. It doesn’t matter what it is, but there’s something, intense feeling going on, and because you don’t know how to deal with it you go and do something that in just for a very short period of time, and like you said, you’ll do 800 calories because the only time you feel good is when you’re actually eating it. That’s why Ruffles, they have ridges—I’ve been picking on them because my girls still bring them in the house and I literally, when they leave, I throw them away because I know if I’m in that craving, and you know and I choose to eat healthy. I go to the grocery store. My surroundings. I buy my will at the grocery store and I don’t bring that stuff, but my girls have their friends, and they still come in, and they’re twenty plus years old and I’ll throw those things away because I know that the sensation, that crunch that’s been designed, and that salt, and that sugar has been designed to satisfy a need, and being able to get beyond that by being able to pause, become aware that this is something I have to be careful with.
So I love the smile on your face. I just see as we’re talking, I watch you kind of have a consternation about this thing with binge eating and all those things and that is something you’ve identified yourself with. That, “This is what I do and this is who I am,” and actually none of that is true. What is true is your standards to this point have been where you’ve let those things take over. Those ghosts are haunting you and you’re letting that haunting continue to control your life and what you’re doing now is, you’re realizing that at the very beginning, remember when you’re in those tumultuous rapids. You can’t change it then. You have to get out of the rapids, get onto the shore and observe, what are those rocks in there? What is that stored trauma? What are those ghosts? What are those complexes? They’re all the same thing. They’re all part of our experiences.
We negotiated life when we were little and they’re there, and they still are haunting us. They don’t have to. Just like I don’t watch—honestly, some people love to watch haunted movies. They like to watch this. I don’t like them. I have to tell you that when I even see the commercials for them on TV, I just go, “Not interested.” I wouldn’t— why would I go do something that probably inside, may make me think of Dracula? Just not interested, and even though I’m an adult, I know what triggers me and I stay away from it. Chocolate chip cookies. In high school, as a football player, my girlfriend was a cheerleader and she would make me warm chocolate chip cookies. My girls knew when they were growing up, if they wanted some all they had to do was—just the smell of them. So I do not create that surrounding. So start looking at how you can change your surroundings because our surroundings determine our behavior. The work is very established on that. Put yourself with like-minded people. They’re all working on getting you [unintelligible 00:48:41] look at any of the Blue Zone. You know the work I did in the Habits of Health on centenarians, you look at what they do. They are in community with health. There’s a community in— surrounded by Del Taco, and all these bad things, but because they’re in community, and they eat healthy, and they work together, and exercise, and they think exercise is part of their philosophy. They get around people that want to be healthy and they become, over time the effects of those things—you do ghostbusting, basically. Does that make sense?
Wanda: Yes, it does make sense.
Dr. A: Every day you do it. Every day you do it, it becomes a little stronger and every time you do a healthy behavior it’s a vote that you’re becoming a healthy person, and it’s losing its spell over you. Cool?
Wanda: Yes. Yes. Thank you for that and I will braggingly say I’m fifty-three, and the healthiest version of myself in fifty-three years.
Dr. A: Awesome! Congratulations. That’s awesome. I love— and by the way, you look back now and you can see that you need a telescope to see who you were before, because before, you were the victim. “These things happened to me. I can’t deal with it. This is who I am,” and actually all that is made up. You are none of those things. Those are simply ghosts from the past that still come up and haunt, and it’s our job in the present to determine where we want to go in our future, and start ghostbusting.
Wanda: I love it. Thank you.
Dr. A: Okay. What do we got, Rach?
Rachel: All right. Next up we have T.J.
Dr. A: T.J! Hi!
T.J.: Good morning. So, I just want to thank you so much for your deep lessons that are put in just layman’s terms so that we can understand them. That’s so huge. It just creates such awareness and such mindfulness and I appreciate that. Wow. That’s going to make me emotional. So my question is, through the years I truly believe I’ve changed my identity from working with you, and many other personal development avenues, to a healthy person. But as a healthy person, several years ago, I refined and got to the place that I really, really wanted to be and then I allowed life to come in and kind of sidetrack me. You know we moved from a place of thirty years, dug out the barn, got rid of—it was just a lot of chaos, and I never went back to who I was before I got healthy and started working on my mindset. But it’s really hard. Three years, no, I think of it is hard, I’m just not sure why it seems hard to get back to that place where I was refined and I really, I’ve got the exercise, I’ve got the water, but I really liked, like you said, staying away from the Ruffles chips, or the chips, the crunchy chips, and those things, and it just feels hard to get back to that place where I was three years ago. I’m just wondering if that’s maybe those ghosts, and maybe it was just ghosts from four years ago, which I think of ghosts is when I was a little kid, but is it the memory of how simple it was and now it just feels muddled and harder in my brain?
Dr. A: Well, you know, there’s a— okay. Remember this, we have this huge unconscious part of our minds. It’s huge. I mean, it’s big. Remember, it stores— when I say, “Your psyche is timeless.” I really mean that. All that data is in there. Remember, first of all, the Habits of Health, raising your standards to increase your identity. In other words, becoming a healthy person, right? All of that is a lifelong process. It’s not something you do and then pat yourself on the back, because remember, being the Dominant Force in your life requires you to be conscious. It requires you to now build the patterns. So you build habits that over time become unconscious, that support you, but you’ve got a lifetime, and remember, we all have— you know, in psychology, they talk, the hungi, and psychologists, talk about shadow. We all have these very nature— the seven deadly sins, right? There’s different areas. We have a part of us that’s fragmented. It’s not about being perfect. I want to be really clear on that. We have our natural tendencies and before we lived in society, 10,000 years ago, you basically were in a survival mode, right?
[00:53:33] You didn’t have a lot of time to be jealous over someone else’s stuff. You basically were working together collectively in your tribe, which was your community. To stay alive, right? And in its simplicity, because we weren’t exposed to what’s going on, in Europe or in the Middle East, we were exposed to what was going on right in front of us. So our behaviors that allowed us to survive were mostly healthy behaviors, because there are things that we had to do, and we were out walking. One of the areas in Europe that’s one of the the “blue zones” so to speak, the people live on a really steep mountain town. Their whole life, up to the time they died, to be able to do anything, they’re walking up and down hills. They’re basically doing the Habits of Healthy Motion, and then suddenly you go into a condo that’s thirty stories high and you’re using Uber Eats, and you’re basically not even going out shopping and you’re living like that. All these things that are natural, that we needed to do, are gone.
So in this, you have to understand that your standards every day, every week, you set your standards a little higher in all the key areas. We have all the key areas of our life, the six MacroHabit areas. All six of those areas, whether it’s managing our weight, simple thing— get a pair of tight fitting jeans. Try them on once a week. I used to— when I was in practice, I was in scrubs all day. So in scrubs, the drawstring, you could just adjust, and you didn’t know any better, and then I started realizing that over time, after fifteen years, jeans that I love, that I had got out in San Francisco years before, I couldn’t get in, and all of a sudden it’s like, “Whoa.” That’s when I started having these awarenesses. So weight management. Second: Habits of Healthy eating. When you’re eating healthy, when you’re not, are you bringing stuff in your— are those chips getting back in? “Ah. You know what? I’m okay with these.” Are they getting back in?
We have a tendency to go back because the shadow side of this, is that it goes back through our tendencies from 10,000 years ago where everything was energy spars and nutrient dense, right? You ate mostly vegetables. If you’re lucky enough to bag a wooly mammoth with your fellow tribesmen, tribe women. The bottom line is, then you ate, and you evolved forty billion fat cells in order to store, so we could successfully survive. So these things theologically and oncologically were designed to allow us to live a longer life. Now, we died when we were forty because we got stuck, or we couldn’t keep up, or we had tooth decay, or something happened and we couldn’t eat anymore, right? I see these incredible pelicans out and you know how pelicans mostly end up dying? Because of that impact of them hitting the water. They detach their retinas and they can’t see, and as soon as they can’t see, they can’t eat, and if they can’t eat, they’re gone.
Well, we’ve taken all these natural tendencies through our technology and we put ourselves in this protective womb and we’ll have a tendency to go back to our old ways unless we are disciplined. So all that is, T.J., is you basically, in some of those areas, not becoming as conscious, aware, present as you need to be. If you were doing a journal and you journaled when you were at your best and you journal where you are now, and there’s a discrepancy, it’s not a contest to win. You didn’t win Optimal Health and Wellbeing. You simply accomplished and became it. You became a healthy person, but there’s always the other part of you, the unconscious stuff, that’s always looking. It’s always like— that’s why, by the way, you have to become a healthy person that chooses Not to, because if you’re using willpower, which is very fatigable, you basically will be sitting there and say, “Well, I’m not going to eat any sugar any sweets,” and you’re doing it with willpower, well, six, seven weeks later, you’ll be somewhere and all of a sudden you’ll be at a dinner and there’ll be someone’s dessert and you’ll eat their damn dessert, and you didn’t even know it because you’re subconscious. You’re inside. Your internal, intrinsic shadows want to do that stuff.
T.J.: I love that, and the awareness you just brought to me is the fact that that year was 2020. I was at home. I was in an environment. So it’s my Healthy Surroundings, that has changed, because that move was a place where we started traveling. We started spending time with others. We started— and you know, even when we go to our kids, the environment is not what it is when we are home. We were only home for sixty days last year. That’s the type of nomadic life that we live. When I met— my dad’s, the environment is not. So I really thank you for that. That’s a huge awareness that I just hadn’t processed. So thank you so much.
Dr. A: That’s why there’s six MacroHabits. That’s why all six matter. Nobody’s addressing—just to kind of finish up here with the new weight loss drugs, hey, technologically there are an anti-processed food tool.
T.J.: Yep.
Dr. A: And for people that are highly susceptible, if you go into Element 16, in the LifeBook there’s a test you take, and if you highly susceptible, just like an alcohol, it’s no different than an alcoholic. When they take that food, and they take those grains, and they turn it into a white flour and it becomes processed— it’s just like taking a cocoa bean that the natives of South America eat as a stimulate, just like coffee, that has no, very little addictive effects, and they turn it into cocaine that’s highly addictive. We need to know our tendencies. We need to be aware of them and it’s in all areas. So, great, yeah, it’s great having those medications, but those medications can help fight the food industry. They can’t fight your internal design. Your internal design requires you to become aware, and to now create habits that support what actually serves you, and one of those is again your Healthy Surroundings. I know that if you put, if you bake right now, hot chocolate chip cookies in my kitchen and ask me, I mean, I might be able to do it right now, but if they’re left there, there’ll be a time through the next 24-48 hours where something will happen that I have to deal with, and I’ll think, “You know what? One won’t hurt.” We’re all humans. We’re humans. We need to know and it’s not, by the way, when you start looking at the benefits of choosing Optimal Health and Wellbeing versus choosing to succumb to gluttony and all the other cardinal sins, you realize how you’re vibrantly thriving in your life. You’re in control of your life. You’re not letting the ghost come in and haunt you.
You are basically choosing to do the things every day so you feel optimal. You are optimal, and that’s what the transformational cycle is that I talk about. Whether you have a salad for lunch today or have a cheeseburger, it doesn’t make that much difference in your overall health today, but over time it makes all the difference. That’s why I developed the transformational cycle where, hey, take your journal out and write how you felt after you went back to work, after having a salad with lean chicken, or fish, or something on it, versus having the cheeseburger and fries, and you’ll know immediately in your afternoon that you were feeling better, had more energy, were more productive, were clear, and were able to make better choices. When you made the choice that inside, “Damn that cheeseburger looks good,” and what the bottom line is, when I go out to the West Coast, I will have an In-N-Out Burger. You know why? They don’t have them here. So I can have one occasionally, and it’s okay. So, hopefully that was helpful.
T.J.: Awesome. Thank you so much.
Dr. A: You’re welcome. Well guys, we’re out of time. Rachel, is there any short question I could do real quickly or do we want to save that for next time?
Rachel: We’ll probably save it for next time.
Dr. A: Sounds great. Well, listen guys. Let’s do some ghostbusting. You are the Dominant Force in your life. You just have to realize that, and how that happens is to be awakened. To be present. To stop when something’s happening. Your body, those energetic levels in your body, you know when something— when you have a beautiful sunset and you feel that glowing come up. You also know when you have something come up that gives that ”icky sauce” and that “icky sauce” is one of those ghosts. One of those hauntings. One of those complexes. One of those stored energies that was not positive that you’ve been resisting. Allow those things, be aware, allow them to come up. Don’t resist it. Accept it. Let it come up and in ninety seconds, it’ll be gone, and then focus again on leading from the future that you want for yourselves in terms of your health and your wellbeing, and the things that really matter to you. God bless. See you guys. Bye.
