These forums are designed for us to reconnect as humans and talk about the human condition. To learn how to take back control and become the dominant force in your life.
Video Transcript:
Dr. A: All right everybody. Well welcome. It’s Tuesday–the first Tuesday of the month. Happy October! Man, has this year been flying by and you know if you think about it, the year is one circulation around the room. One rotation around the sun. So we’re what? Three-fourths of the way through? Starting to move into fall. Beautiful time of the year. Other than the hurricanes and for anybody that was affected by that, our prayers and best wishes for your quick recovery. It was a pretty awesome storm and it really shows you how powerful nature is, and you know, we’re connected to nature, and as we everybody settles in here, just a couple thoughts on that. One of the things that we found is that we’re becoming an urban species—an indoor species—so to speak. We literally—our kids spend less than eight minutes a day outside in nature and that loss of connection, that human connection to nature, and to each other is so important for our wellbeing.
In fact they find that when you’re lonely, it increases your risk of stroke. Obviously, mental health issues, and it’s one of the reasons why I do this Conscious Forum, and that is to help us really make a difference in our lives and in the ability to communicate. So invite everybody that you know to these. They’re designed for us to reconnect as humans and kind of talk about the human condition. You know, we’re set up a certain way and we were designed that way to protect us against danger, but in the modern world we live in, we’re not doing too well with it. So that’s what we’re about and so the forum really is literally a place, meeting, or medium, where ideas and views on a particular issue can be exchanged.
And so what I like to do in these forums is I’ll pick a topic, I’ll go through that and then we’ll open it up for discussion and we can share things that are going on in our lives or observations we have, or questions we have, because the more we interact— I like to think of it as in the ancient days, if you’ve ever been to Greece and you’ve gone to the Acropolis and you sit up there, you could just imagine you’re Socrates and Plato. Not to say I’m them, one of them! [Dr. A laughs], but I am somebody that likes to gather like-minded people that want to work on their health and their wellbeing and that’s kind of my focus, my desire. That’s what drives me every day is to help people really have the opportunity to change their health and their life.
So let’s get going today. We’re going to talk on something that is so critical and so misunderstood and we’re going to give you some insights into that and hopefully it’ll open up a little bit our understanding. So basically your ego runs a show. Showing your ego who is the boss, that’s where true freedom begins. It’s when we think we’re free, and we think about the things we see on TV, where you’re driving a nice car or living on the ocean and we say, “Wow. That’s what I want. That’ll make me free. But that’s really not what makes you free. What allows you to be become free is when you can remove yourself and not have your ego be in charge because it is in charge. It is literally— it drives all the cogs [Dr. A is referring to an image on screen], and we’re going to talk about your thoughts and your feelings. We’re going to talk about how the ego works, and it’s so tricky in how it works, but it’s running the show, and it is literally there, right in the middle, and it’s telling you what to do all the time.
So the question is, “Oh no. I don’t have an ego. I’m shy,” or “I’m an introvert.” That’s not what we’re talking about. Your ego is your personal mind. It is the thing that you hear all the time. So if we define what the ego is, literally, it is the automatic thoughts. The thoughts that you have. You know, a good time to really start analyzing this, I like to do it myself is, where am I in relationship to my personal mind? Am I awaken? Am I conscious? Am I filtering everything? Good time to start is right in the morning. You take your shower, if you take a shower in the morning, you get in the shower, the ego has one job while it’s in the shower and that is to regulate the water temperature. That’s the purpose of the personal mind, of those automatic thoughts. Like, “Oh, it’s too hot. It’s too cold,” and to adjust that temperature so it’s just right. Right? So it’s at a temperature that’s not going to burn you and not going to make you shiver. Although some people like cold plunges and want to shiver— that’s not really my cup of tea. But that’s not the subject of today. But that’s what your ego is doing.
Your personal mind is adjusting the outside environment and that should be about as far as it goes is trying to adjust the outside environment. Obviously, we want to make sure we’re aware of our surroundings and put ourselves in surroundings that are conducive to our health and wellbeing. But bottom line, we have so little control over what’s right in front of us. What’s in front of us? Right over here something else is happening. So the automatic thoughts that come up, those are the things that are going on. That voice in your head so to speak, basically that’s your ego. That’s your ego talking to you and it’s running the show, every single day. And it makes up stories. It perceives something happening. You know, you’re at work or you’re at a party, or you say, “Hi,” to somebody and they don’t say anything back. Your ego immediately goes to work. It makes up, “Wow. Why is Sue upset with me?” You know, and you might even build the story so quickly and be so aggressive that the ego says, “No. We’re going to go tell her off.” And then you run up to Sue and say, “Sue, why did you ignore me?” And Sue looks back and says, “I’m sorry. I don’t know what you’re talking about,” because Sue didn’t hear you and then now you got Sue’s stuff going, and then her ego’s going, and then you’re in the what? The Drama Triangle.
It’s that prevalent. Every single moment of our day, and most of the stories it tells you just are not true, and they’re your self-concept. So your psyche, your thoughts, your feelings, those are what make up our experiences of life and we’ve taken those experiences and categorized them. It’s what causes prejudice. It causes all kinds of things that do not serve us well in the moment based on our past. You know, the issues. The stored, negative energy from the past or the anxiety about the future. Alls you really ever have—and we’ve heard it a million times, but your ego has taken that and says, “Yeah. Okay. I need to be in the present,” and all of a sudden you’ll go, “Oh yeah. Look. I see what’s around me.” That’s not what I’m talking about. I’m talking about there is that voice in your head that’s running the show. It’s telling you everything.
So let’s look through the process. Something happens, an event, people, just like we talked about, Sue doesn’t answer you. Goes in, hits your ego. It doesn’t just go in and observe, like right now I can look at—I’ve got a glass here of electrolytes and I’m looking at it, and for a moment I’m looking at it and I see it as it is, and I’m not making any notion about it. It’s kind of like when you’re driving down the road and the stripes on the road, you know, you don’t pay attention to those but if it’s something that triggers something inside your ego, from your subconscious, something, stored energy sometimes that you didn’t like and you pushed it down, like coiled springs, and it’s down in there and it touches that. It immediately becomes a big deal. It comes to the surface and now you are running with that, right? You are running with that idea and it’s called a cognitive emotive loop.
We’ve talked about that before. Where you’re thinking something, and then you feel something, and then you feel something, then you think and pretty soon you’ve got that cycle going, and if you go to bed at night and you haven’t properly used the Habits of Healthy Sleeping to set up your room and basically quieted yourself and turned off all incoming stimuli and something triggers before you go to sleep. Man that cognitive emotive loop hits you, and that’s why 80 million Americans—in America alone—do not sleep well, and that becomes a real issue. So when it hits the ego, the bottom line is, it creates these automatic thoughts. Automatic thoughts create emotions and feelings and it’s a cyclical pattern of a cognitive emotive loop, and what ends up happening is, depending on whether you actually fully feel it or not, basically you start projecting. So if we conceal, we withhold, we withdraw, then we project. So if you’re projecting or saying something, gossiping, or thinking something to someone else, actually that’s something going on in you and you’re projecting it because it’s something inside of you that you’re struggling with, which is a very good thing.
So because what I always hope you do when we do these sessions together is when you get done is, hopefully you’re taking notes and you are basically putting on your lab jacket and your goggles, and you’re going to work on this, you know that you need to exercise. That fitness is important. That muscles are important for longevity and for us to be healthy. Your mental health is the same expression. You need to go to the mental gym. The more you spend time working on and journaling on this, the more you become aware in the moment of what you’re doing and you literally, we’re going to talk about in a little bit here, about how we basically fire our ego. How do we do that? It comes from being aware and the other thing that happens with our emotions and things is we resist, we actually resist the emotion, and when we resist something, by the way, it gets captured inside of us and now it becomes a trigger for us, or we cling if it’s something we really love. We cling to it. We all have great memories. Could be childhood memories, it could be a vacation you went on, a situation on a special date night, doesn’t really matter what it is, but something we obsess about we cling and we try to recreate it. You cannot recreate it.
If you went to somewhere in the tropics and had a wonderful time three years ago. If you go back to the same place hoping to recreate that, it won’t be the same, because your ego, your personal mind has changed. The conditions will be different. The weather may not be as nice. You have a different relationship with your significant other. There’s something going on outside at work. Doesn’t matter what it is, but bottom line is, whether we resist or cling, these are things that don’t service us. We want to fill—just like you watch the stripes on the road, the dashes on the road, and then you forget about them. That’s how anything that comes in should be. You can address something, if it needs to be addressed, but you fully express it inside and then you let it go. So critical. And then we suppress things. So we have all the stuff inside of us.
[00:10:27] So, how do you deal with it? How do you deal with your ego? Well, think about it as, it’s your stored trauma. It is literally the things that have happened throughout your life. Your personal mind, your psyche, is just the collective experience of everything that you’ve experienced throughout your life and most things—some things you have memories of and there’s no emotions attached to them, but there’s things that were somewhat traumatic, and especially when we’re really little we’re not able to process. The prefrontal cortex, till about five, is not developed, so when something happens emotionally it gets stored in there and we adapt to it the best we can at that young age. It could be something—a relationship with your siblings or your parents or school. I mean, I remember in the first grade—I hadn’t thought about this until just now—I forgot to get the memo that you’re supposed to learn your ABCs and I got called on in class and I remember I didn’t know my ABCs, and so I remember that moment being embarrassed in front of the class, and now—I processed it a long time ago—but at that time it kind of drove me. It drove me to go home and make sure first of all, I learned the ABCs and I learned the song, “ABCD” and then I resolved it naturally and then it’s kind of gone away, but it’s probably somewhere in there. There’s probably some things that touch me even as an adult and so we need to be aware of those things. And there’s our dislikes in our likes and those are the things to create the preferences that the ego deals with and it basically runs the show. It tells you what you shouldn’t or what you should do all the time.
So we’re not looking at the world objectively, our personal mind, our self-concepts decide on whether we love something or we hate it, and it’s really that voice in your head. So that voice in your head is not you. I’ve said this a million times, but I can tell your ego has created a story for you saying, “Yeah. That doctor’s crazy. He doesn’t know what he’s talking about. We’re one. We’re in charge.” So let’s talk about that. That’s really what I wanted to focus on today. So our ego filters everything. What happened and what I’m making it mean [unintelligible 00:12:43], makes you more comfortable with the world around you. So your ego takes everything that comes in, especially our human relational health, and it basically distorts it to make it work for us. So that’s going back to Sue. Sue wasn’t even involved. Sue didn’t even hear you, but Sue inside said, “Wait a minute. That’s making me look bad so I need to go confront that and make that right.” So your ego basically filters that reality and it’s going to go make it right.
So, let’s talk about that. So even when you want to work on removing that filter—I mean I know you guys all think like, we want to do that. Your ego owns you. Your ego owns you. Fully owns you, and it’s constantly making demands on you. You know,
“Like this person.” “Don’t say that.” “Don’t wear that.” It tells you— makes a thousand decisions. It is on you all day long and here’s the deal, do you know why you let it get away with that? Because you think it is you. You think that’s you. You think your ego is you. Your thoughts, your mind, your feelings, your heart, everything’s coming from your heart. You think they’re you and it’s got you hoodwinked. Because it’s there 24/7. See, it’s been there so long, if you look in the mirror at what you look like when you were five, or ten, or fifteen, or twenty and you look at the mirror today, who’s looking at you? Your morphology. Your morphology changes. As we age, we change and all you have to do is look at old photos and all of a sudden, “Wow.” But the ego has been there from the very beginning.
It starts early. It has a protective role. Especially when we’re young. It’s what keeps you from, you know, when you first recognize that the stove is hot. You probably touched it or got near it and your ego registered that as a defensive mechanism and that’s the good part. That’s the same thing as reducing or increasing the temperature of your shower in the morning. That’s a role that it plays, but it’s running everything 24/7. Any chance of seeing beyond its control—it’s not possible if you think it’s you. So if it was not there all the time, right? If it was only there partially, then all of a sudden you go, you change your perspective like that. You’d fire it immediately, right? Just think about it. That voice in your head. That inner voice. That roommate that’s in there, the stuff it says to you. If you had a friend that said stuff like that to you, you would kick them out. If they were your roommate, you’d kick them out. Today.
So understand that, and it’s not kind to us. That judgment of ourselves, self worth, worthiness—all these—shame, guilt. Those are all ego driven things to put us in our place and so we think that’s us. None of that is us. So how do you fire it? Well, I’ve been going over this for over three years, we’ve been doing the Conscious Forum. I’m going to use the same photo because it’s literally getting out and observing. It’s actually removing yourself and asking the questions, who am I? What’s going—it’s the childhood curiosity, rather than the need to be right. We’re defensive. We decide that we’ve got to be right—and that’s our ego talking. It puts us in that because that way it thinks it’s doing its job and what we want to do is get out and be curious, have that childhood curiosity. On everything. What if the opposite was true? What if what I’m thinking, the exact opposite is true? And that suddenly, all of a sudden, you get away. The ego doesn’t want to hear that. It’s not going to say, “What do you mean the exact opposite is true? We’ve seen this happen five times. This is exactly what’s going on and it’s happening again.” No. It may not be. It totally may not be and so that’s why we project. We make assumptions. We basically take it personally. We take everything personally because our ego wants to be the boss.
So the first step is getting out and observing. When you observe what your mind says to you and what your heart feels, it is not you doing it. That’s that opening. That’s the thing that really makes the difference. Someone is watching the mind—if you say right now inside, “Help.” Say it inside. “Help.” Okay. So your thoughts created a communication inside. You heard it say ‘help’ correct? Who is that that heard it say help? That’s not you. That is simply a thought that’s being generated, and understand that most of the thoughts—the thoughts at the subconscious level, are from things from the past. They’re your ego dialing everything up and creating its preferences. So that basically throughout the day what happens is what you want to happen. I can tell you that is a recipe for struggling. Struggling continually. As I mentioned, life is intrinsically unstable. We’re going to have stuff happen to us, but what happens to us, how we interpret, how we respond to it, will determine the outcome. That’s psychological flexibility. That’s what this work is about because once we become awakened and we’re able to basically see that that’s not us, that the ego is there, and by the way, the ego is not going to go quiet into the night. So when you ask, who am I? Who knows this, of who I am? That is your consciousness.
That is the essence of you. That is you as a true human being, without the contrived manipulative ego trying to create a personal world that works for you all the time, because if you rely on it, your life’s going to be miserable. As soon as you get a clue of this awakening, it’s over. So it’s just that glimpse. That glimpse of awakening that who you are has nothing to do with your identity, with your ego, with your job, with the car you drive, and you are sitting there and once you start to feel that, man, this great awareness comes in. You’ll feel a rush of energy and all of a sudden your perspective will change because you don’t get depressed. Your ego gets depressed. Your thoughts create that. You are the pure energy that’s there, that are now manipulating the world to create a situation that then causes you to feel that certain way, but once you have it, it’s over.
I like to call it the realization, and the first thing you’re going to do, just like, I think it was on The Apprentice. I never watched it but, “You’re fired!” Right? You are fired. You’re going to fire that ego. I don’t have to put up with this… Any of this anymore. I don’t have to put up with all your nonsense, with all that continual gibberish, and it becomes a moment of enlightening. And then the rest of it is: commit yourself to getting out for good. I don’t have to put up with this anymore. Now we’re not going to talk about that part today. I will just kind of set you up for it because I want to open it up for questions because the first thing is—listen, it’s not going away. It’s not like they brought in the exterminator and killed all the cockroaches and then they’re out of your house. They come back. I live in Florida. I have to do that every single month. They use a non-toxic one for pets and stuff, but they do it, and I actually, literally, the other day—I very seldom see them because they do such a good job—there was a cockroach down in my lower level when I went to work out. He was dead as a doornail, was right out in the middle, so obviously what they’re using is working, but they come back—and your ego has been with you your whole life so it’s not going to go. It’s not like, “Oh. Okay. I recognize what Dr. A is saying today and yeah, I’m not going to pay attention to any.” It’s not that easy.
[00:20:33] It’s going to require a lot of work and we’re going to spend time next month going over it but bottom line is, for now, what I would love you to do is just start noticing. Noticing when your preferences come up and ask yourself, “Why do I have that preference? Is that me? Is that really what I want or is that something that my ego set up telling me what to do here? Because I mean—I’ll give you an experience, I was out with some friends last month in Vail, and bottom line is, they’re out in the middle of a beautiful creek. We were bike riding, it was a creek, and there was a rock and so they were sitting on the rock and all of a sudden a little black water snake came by and man, they just freaked out. They just freaked out. I jumped out and we were on top of the rock and I said, “Just relax. It’s gone now,” and so it took about ten minutes. I mean it’s okay to say, “Oh, there’s a snake. I don’t know if that snake’s dangerous.” So for the first ninety seconds to be scared is a good thing. Getting up on the rock, let’s say—I mean, there’s no water moccasins in Colorado, but bottom line, it’s not a bad thing that you responded that way and got up. And then that fear, in about ninety seconds should have gone away, but no, for the rest of the week this person didn’t want to get near the water. Okay, that’s a neurosis. That’s beyond. That’s where your ego now is over-reactive.
So I’m going to use that as an example because there are so many things we might want to do, because it was hot. It was really hot in Colorado, in the summertime like that, and I was in the creek—going down and getting in the creek, which felt so good after a long bike, right? And they wouldn’t get in the creek and so that’s your ego telling you, “No. You’re not going to do something.” So that’s a good example. We all have those things in our life and so that’s a good way to start. I just love for you, you know, over the next three or four weeks is to spend time really sensing when your ego’s done something and it’s really over-reacting because that is not, those are thoughts you’re having. Those are feelings you’re having, and they’re not serving you, and it happens day to day, hour to hour, minute to minute. It affects your relationships. It affects your ability to do your job. It affects your health dramatically. If just for that reason, because I’m all about having us live ultra health and live a longer, healthier life. Emotional mismanagement. Allowing that to get out of line is the leading cause of death in the world and I don’t know anybody else that says that, but I am convinced. I’m absolutely convinced.
In fact, if you look at our life expectancy—I’ll take one last example just to show you, because this is one that will maybe drive home to you. So you know, most of the time when you want to eat, are you really hungry? Is your body really signaling you’re hungry? Well sometimes it is and we know that if we drink lots of water, that helps because a lot of times, about 30% of the time or so when we think we’re hungry, we’re actually thirsty. So we’re missing the sensation. But most of the time when you want to eat it’s not that you’re hungry. It’s that your ego, your personal mind, has said—it has no discipline by the way. That’ll be the part we’ll talk about next month, is really separating and having yourself, things that you want and your internal, your intrinsic, your deep valued self, do things and not letting your ego intervene because you know what? When you get up in the morning you may not want to get up, but basically, and if it’s on the weekend, you were going to work out, but you sit home—so getting back to the eating: so most of the time your ego just decides, your mind decides, or your feeling is, “I need something to eat,” and this happens with emotional eating, which we all know about and think about it.
Your ego, your mind—your mind doesn’t have a mouth. It doesn’t have an alimentary canal. It doesn’t have a stomach, duodenum, small intestine, large intestine. It doesn’t have a colon. It doesn’t have any of those things, but it’s telling you what to do. So think about that. It is fully, completely in charge. To the point, it’s ensconced in you, and you think it’s you, and so these little clues, and that’s the tidbit. That’s your work for this month, is to literally sense when it’s telling you what to do and just say, “Time out buddy. Time out, you. Time out her.” It’s a her or he or it might be something else, I don’t know, but whatever it is tell it “time out.” In this case, I’m going to remove the filter, and that’s kind of how we’ll end it, and we’ll just work on this.
There is no one giant step but lots of little ones and your ego is the toughest critter, because you think it’s you, and until you create that separation—that’s what awareness is. That’s what conscious witness means. It means that you step away and you see this mind, this ego, this psyche, these thoughts, these feelings that are basically running the show and you just decide time out. I’m not gonna let you do it. So that’s what moves from this filtered, where— you know, it’s been called many things. It’s this, the cogs going on. I think some people call it ‘monkey mind.’ Doesn’t matter, but it’s all this going on inside versus the pureness, being unfiltered. Where you can enjoy a beautiful sunset, full in its presence, without linking it, clinging to something, “Oh, I remember when that happened four years ago when I was with my honey,” or “My best friend,” or instead you just fully be aware in the moment and associate it with warmth and great feelings.
There’s nothing wrong with that, but understanding the difference between being fully run by your ego and now being run by you, your consciousness. So again, going back, I like to end with this, what we’re talking about is building internal stability. So you can handle anything, and that’s kind of how I look at it when I’m working with people or talking to people with my kids, with my mom, my family. Can you handle it? And the reality is, you can handle anything. I mean, even, you know, I like to use Victor Franklin. He lived in a concentration camp and he could handle it. He handled it and he had the worst external outside world. His family was killed. He was in a concentration camp, they took away his manuscript, he was skin and bones, but he could handle it because he built in that resolve and he focused on what was most important. The essence of who he was. That inner, real voice. Not this ‘Chatty Cathy’ but basically this inner, deep sense, instinctual sense of who I am, and what my journey is, and where I want to go in my life, and what that does is that allows external equilibrium. You then become able to help all the people around you. Your loved ones, your friends, your community, the people you work with, and you allow to build in that external stability so that you have the balance between when that happens.
The word equiniti has been used, in essence, what that means is you can handle it. I have the psychological flexibility and I am able to take whatever happens, deal with it, not that we don’t have emotions. Hey, I love going to Universal. I love riding the roller coaster because I like to get scared for a few moments, but the ride’s over in a couple minutes you get off and you go, “Wow, I felt alive. That really felt good.” Boom, and then it’s gone, and I don’t have any residual, like, “Oh. I was so scared. I’m not going to get on the roller coaster again.” So hopefully that makes sense. Some good food for thought. Let’s go ahead now and open it up for questions. So let me stop sharing. All right, Rachel, do we have some questions?
Rachel: Yes we do. First up we have Phyllis. Phyllis, can you come on camera?
Phyllis: Can you hear me?
Dr. A: Yeah.
Rachel: We can.
Phyllis: Thank you, Dr. A, for this wonderful information. My question is, do you have a specific process that you’d recommend for eliminating sabotaging beliefs?
Dr. A: Well. We’re going to talk about that. The answer is, well, you know, what we just talked about. Just know that you’re sabotaging beliefs are self-concepts. They are your ego. They are things inside of you and there are multiple different reasons for them. It could be—one of the things we see with people that are pretty overweight is that that’s shielded them from having to deal with relationships and so you know, that conceptually could be one of them. There’s a million of them and what they are is a part where you’ve created a scenario where you want to stay in your comfort zone because it’s understood. See, that’s an amazing question, Phyllis, because—yeah. I can’t see you, just so you know, by the way, but that’s okay if you don’t want to show, but I just want to make sure you knew that [Dr. A is referring to Phylli’s camera being off]. So bottom line is, your ego has set up these scenarios—there you are [Phyllis turned her camera on]. So, your ego has set up these scenarios where it wants to keep things the same.
[00:29:55] See, your comfort zone is your ego saying, “Oh. Today I don’t need to work very hard.” Right? “I don’t need to work that hard today because everything is the same. I figured all these out. I have a scenario, I know if I eat at the same restaurant, I know what I like.” Right? “I know if I stay in this area and don’t move out of it…” So they’re excuses. Those sabotage—you’re sabotaging yourself because it’s an excuse so that you don’t have to grow, because—and here’s the bottom line, this is one of the things that I become so aware of and working with some of the psychologists and reading some of Carl Jung’s work, we have a tendency to create preferences and to do that on purpose because we want to stay the same, right? We don’t want to have to change and so we have identity we created of who we are. We then say this is my environment and this is the environment I want to be in, and then so anytime we get out of it, basically, we struggle and so we sabotage. We self-sabotage ourselves so we don’t have to address it because the key thing is courage.
Being able to grow and move takes courage, and it’s putting your ego and saying, “Wait a minute.” Ego is saying to you, “Hey, no. We don’t want to do this. We don’t want to do this because it’s kind of scary.” Right? “I don’t want to grow,” and by the way, what they found, if you look at people as they age, and on their journey, especially in the second half of their journey, there’s a bifurcation of people that age and become old, and people that age and become young or stay young or even get younger. And by the way, I’m one of those, and the reason why is, every day, just like doing this, I learn so much from doing this every day, I want to be curious and I want to grow. I want to become more. I want to continue to learn, and when you’re curious and you want to learn–boom! You just dial right into nature, to whatever spirituality is for you, whether it’s your faith or if you’re a spiritual person, you’re connected to this amazing thing called life and who we are. When you’re that, you’re on that track, it does stay scary, but it gets—because it’s not about you. It’s about what you’re learning, and growing, and becoming, and creating. It becomes just this amazing journey and when you’re curious like that it really helps. So we kind of hinted on some of the things we can do to get out of that ego, psyche, that personal mind that keeps us stuck, keeps us sabotaging ourselves, and the most important part is find things you’re passionate about.
I’m all about intrinsic motivation. Intrinsic motivation is simply—find something you’re passionate about, something you want to learn and something that you want to share with others and that’s exactly what I’m doing here. Twenty years, or twenty-five years ago, as a critical care physician, I didn’t know any of this. I mean, I was really good at what I did and I trained with the best in the world. I trained with the best facility at Jackson Memorial. I got lots of experience learning how to take care of sick people, I learned the best technology, but man, I was a bear to work with because I was—that ego drove my learning and my growth, and that’s okay in that role. It’s kind of like in the military. It’s not that time to be touchy-feeling. You better know your job or people die or if you’re a pilot you better know your job when you’re in bad weather.
So there are things to be said for that, but the reality is the work that I’ve done has changed everything in my life. Changed my relationship with my children, the way, you know, I lost my wife and how I’ve been able to not cope, but actually grow from that, and have a beautiful relationship with her, although she’s not here. Not feel grief or a victim. It’s all about understanding that, finding out what’s most important to you and then going after it. Go after it. Does that make sense?
Phyllis: Absolutely. Thank you.
Dr. A: You got this. You got this. You do have it, and remember, when you have that self-doubt, or that sabotage coming in go, “Time out, buddy.” Or her, whoever, what you want to call your ego. ”Hey, I’m not having anything to do with you today. I’m going after what I want.”
Phyllis: Absolutely. Thank you.
Dr. A: Awesome. Great.
Rachel: All right. Next up we have, Cinda. Cinda, are you there? I knew she was having connection issues so we might need to move on to the next one. Let’s go ahead and…are you there?
Cinda: I’m here!
Rachel: Okay.
Dr. A: Hey, Cinda. How are you?
Cinda: I’m doing great Dr. A. I had to—I got disconnected on my laptop so I had to connect on my phone.
Dr. A: Well, that’s what being flexible—that’s adaptability. That’s a good thing and that’s why, by the way, you’re one of those people as we chronologically get older is getting younger! And I love that about you.
Cinda: Woohoo! Well, I want to get even younger because I turned seventy-five in July and as Dave Blanchard says, he’s working on getting his age younger than he physically is and I’m doing the same.
Dr. A: Right. I love that. I love that and by the way, it’s here. It’s all here and you’re a beautiful example of it. So what can I help you with today?
Cinda: Well, I want to retrain my brain to connect memories of negative experiences from my childhood and my adult life. There were both physical and verbal abuses that I experienced from my family that sneak into my brain and eventually take control, and when they take control I lose the ability to live healthily.
Dr. A: Okay.
Cinda: And I want to find a way to convert those negatives into a positive and use them for power.
Dr. A: Okay. So I hear what you’re saying. I’ve got a much simpler way. First of all— stop trying to have a better past. Second of all, when you have one of those feelings come up, experience the feeling. Let it come up right then and relax, instead of trying to grab it, and harness it, and turn to something else. It’s in the past. You said you’re turning seventy-five?
Cinda: I am seventy-five. I turned seventy-five in July.
Dr. A: Okay. All right. So you’re seventy-five. So these are things that happened in your past. Maybe all way back to like, let’s say you were five years old. Right? Somewhere around there, or ten, somewhere. Anyway, it was like over sixty years ago, right? Correct? She froze on me [Cinda’s connection froze].
Cinda: Darn.
Dr. A: You’re back. You’re back.
Cinda: Okay.
Dr. A: So that happened over 60 years ago, right?
Cinda: Yes. Well, I was called Jim until I was thirteen.
Dr. A: Okay.
Cinda: And I was beaten repeatedly.
Dr. A: Right. Okay. Right. Sixty years ago something happened. You are nowhere near the same person. You’ve gone through sixty-plus years of evolution. You basically are curious, you want to grow, you want to learn. Don’t try to fix yourself. There’s no need to fix yourself. Those are simply things from the past and now you understand the mechanism. Remember, I want to go back to this, what we talked about today because this will really help you. Your psyche, your ego, is there and when it gets triggered by something it comes up, and what’s happening to you is, Cinda, you’re finding that you’re getting more and more free of your past and you’re much more enjoying life and you’re putting your ego on the sideline sometimes. Okay?
So this is an opportunity for your psyche to come back. It wants to take control. It’s excitement. You don’t want anything to do—what happened sixty years ago doesn’t matter. It has no relevance today at all. Zero relevance. Not a thing, and so what you’re doing now is you’re experiencing moving forward. All the beauty of life and what? At the time, your parents were doing the best they could do with what they had. And leave it at that. There’s no need to fix ourselves and your only role is to allow that stuff that’s in there to come up and come out, because what those are is stored energy that blocks your energy flow. You have—we all have energy. We have this amazing flow of energy. You know when you feel it. Some of the cool things you’ve been doing and all of a sudden you feel this exude—This just feeling of, ‘God. I’m so glad I’m alive. I’ve lived seventy-five years and I want to live to be a hundred because I love life.’ Versus a lot of people your age in nursing homes and they dread every day. They get up and they’re depressed and they’re on all kinds of antipsychotics, and antidepressants, and medications and they can’t get out of bed, and you are wildly alive.
[00:39:37] So when one of those things—the ego’s just sitting there thinking. “Ah, Cinda’s a little tired today. Maybe she didn’t sleep as good last night. I have an opportunity here,” and something happens in your environment that triggers one of those ancient stored energy patterns. Instead of resisting it, instead of pushing it back down, fully embrace it. Let it come up and whether it was fear, sadness, you know, the five feelings you can have, let it come up and then accept it. Accept it and have gratitude that your parents were doing the best they could do and let it go because it has no power over you. As long as you take radical responsibility and you’re fully in charge, it has zero power over you. Does that make sense?
Cinda: Yes. Absolutely.
Dr. A: You don’t need to convert it into energy. You need to release it and then this amazing energy that is you, Cinda, will just come up and you will be able to fully be in the flow of that and you’ll just be amazing. It’s all in there. All that energy is in there. You’re not trying to convert negative into positive. You are literally when it gets—the triggers are still there. You don’t want to cope with it. That’s what people, “Oh, I’m coping with…” No. You want to hit it straight on. Relax. Even in your position. Your mental position. Accept it. Relax, accept, and let it flow out of you, and each time you do that its power over you becomes less and less, and the pure joy that is you comes out. Does that make sense?
Cinda: Oh cool. Yeah. Absolutely. So that means I’ll be going on the Camino again next year [Cinda and Dr. A laugh].
Dr. A: I love that. I love that.
Cinda: Thank you so much.
Dr. A: Thank you, Cinda. All right. Cool. All right. Who else we got?
Rachel: All right. Next up we have Jill. Hi, Jill.
Dr. A: Hi Jill.
Jill: Hello! Good afternoon Dr. A, and thank you for taking my question. My question for you is, how do I continually “shush” the noise in my head and remain above the line while dealing in real life, real time, with the cut-off culture? And by that I mean, my oldest daughter has cut me out of her life. Not allowing me to see my grandchildren, which the oldest at seventeen, I raised her from birth because mom didn’t really want to be a mom. So I stepped up and we have a relationship, my granddaughter and I have a relationship that’s beautiful. She’s connected to me and now she’s no longer able to see me. I found myself, about a year ago, in a deep, dark hole, and I was starting to put up the pictures, bring in furniture, and I was comfortable in that hole until one day I couldn’t even do a common, everyday task on the computer. It took me six tries and I had a ‘Come to Jesus moment’ in my living room, where I sort of stomped my feet and said, “Okay. I am done. I cannot continue this.” And so I had a little meeting with the Lord, I’m a believer, and I told him I didn’t like his plan. “I don’t understand your plan, but I’m going to trust it, because I believe your ways are greater than mine.” So yes, I can tell myself that at the time, but every once in a while that stinking Lois in my head, she tells me I wasn’t a good mom, I don’t deserve to be a grandmother, and I found that it’s seeped over into my health because it’s affected my self-worth and so I have sabotaged my health at times only rising to the level of my self-worth and I’m doing much better and my circle of friends would say that, but I was wondering if you could add to that and give me some advice that perhaps I’m not doing right now.
Dr. A: Well thanks, Jill. Thanks for sharing that, and again, I’m not a psychotherapist. If you feel the need, and if it gets to the point where, like you said, you’re paralyzed in and what you can do and can’t do, certainly a psychotherapist can be of great value. These meetings are really for us to just kind of work on ourselves and understand—you know, knowledge is power and also giving you some techniques to work on. It sounds like you had your own realization and so let’s talk about that for a minute in relationship to what I talked about earlier, because everything you said is dead on. First of all, you can’t get anybody to do anything, okay? So you can’t get your daughter to do anything. She’s projecting on you her stuff. Okay. And even though this is hard, don’t take it personally. It’s not about you. That’s the first thing. Second thing is, you have a great relationship with your granddaughter. Your granddaughter is seventeen, so just physically, and not trying to solve the problem, because that’s not my role, but in a year, she’s going to be free, either going to college or going—and she’ll be able to see you on her own.
So that part, don’t worry. That’s going to resolve itself. But the one thing is—so that’s your external world right now. This is a really good example of things that are happening in your external world, which basically really bother you, and that is the relationship within your family, and so before, you weren’t able to cope with it and so it turned you in, and your ego, your personal mind, your psyche, started feeling these mental feelings—I’m sorry, these mental thoughts and these feelings and it put you to the point where you were so tied up in that cognitive emotive loop. The reason why you couldn’t do things on your computer, and if you’ve ever looked at any of my work, your basic limbic system, your amygdala, which is the area that basically perceives threats and protects you, which is in the middle part of your brain had hijacked you. The neural trip wires of that hijacked you and you couldn’t even use your prefrontal cortex.
So that’s kind of like when I show someone in the rapids. If you have beautiful, moving water that’s calm, which is your steady state when you’re not letting your ego create these cognitive emotive loops, and then you have the rocks. The rocks are those concepts. Those self-concepts, those are like you said, your worth. All those are conceptual, and when you’re in the rapids and you’re basically paddling like crazy, you can’t deal with that. And you saw that. To the point where you couldn’t even work on a computer. So just like that little boy I show sitting there during those periods, just actually stop. You heard me say it a million times, challenge why you’re feeling that way, and then decide not to choose the outcome that you want, right? And that outcome is: I’m going to let this pass. Let it go through its cycle, and whether it’s—frustration is basically fear, anxiety is fear, figure out. Try to label which emotion it is and then in that moment, in that moment, feel it through. Feel it. Always. Don’t try to push it away. don’t say, “Oh, I am worthy.” Don’t rationalize with your ego because your ego doesn’t want anything to do with it, and your ego is not you. Okay. So just in it, realize, “Oh. That’s my ego. Those are my thoughts, that’s my feelings once again, coming up and trying to take over the shell,” because it likes that. It wants to push you back.
See, when it’s got you depressed, sitting in your home not going out, it’s in charge. It says, “Whoa. This is easy. I don’t have to go out and even meet the world now. I don’t have to deal with these things. I can sit here in my own self-loathing and feel sorry for myself,” and be all the way down in the Drama Triangle, and by the way, the idea—I want to be really clear because people, I think, sometimes misinterpret—the idea is not to go below the line. We all go below the line, and if your daughter says you can’t see your granddaughter, who is the love of your life, you’re going to be upset about it, and there’s nothing wrong. You are going to go below the line, but it’s to realize that, “I’m unhappy. I’m sad,” which is the pure feeling. I’m sad for ninety seconds and then I let that go and then I say, “Okay. Now I’m going to go on with my day,” because if you start building that loop, where you’re thinking, and feeling, and it starts growing inside of you it leads to what happened? You got depressed, and that is not you.
I want to be so clear. I mean, there is clinical depression, because you know, we have chemicals that are wrong and those are the people that truly have, that need psychotherapy, but for most of us, really, they’re just our thoughts and our feelings taking over, and our ego trying to put us back in our place. It wants you to be in charge. It wants you to be tended on and it wants you thinking that it is the show. So just that brief, like you said, you’re getting better at it, so getting better at it means there are times when you’re telling your ego, “No. No, I’m sitting here. This is good.” Like just feel as we talk, how you feel. You feel better because what we’re doing is, for a moment there, we’re kind of, because you’re talking directly to me, your ego is kind of over to the side here and rather than listen to your ego, which I hate to say—well, not ‘hate’ to say because the more we notice, is mostly wrong!
Jill: Yeah.
Dr. A: Is was wrong about Sue not being mean to you. It’s wrong about your granddaughter not liking you or now that you’re not worthy or it’s wrong about that you’re a bad mom. If you have a great relationship—and by the way, when you had your daughter, you weren’t where you are now. You were doing the best you could do with what you had, and listen, we’re all in that place. We’re all humans and we are in the human condition and the human condition is one—why do we have the seven deadly sins? Because they’re the shadow part of us. The dark side of us that we all have. Right? They’re why people do the ridiculously bad things they do. They’re always there and what socialization is about, and what understanding is about, so that if you think about it, it’s as simple as, “Hey, we need to pay attention to red lights.” Right? Because if we didn’t pay attention to red lights— think about every intersection. It’d be non-stop chaos. We need to also pay attention that a lot of that stuff that your ego has up there it’s trying to stay in charge and it’s saying, “Oh, you weren’t a good mom, that’s why your daughter’s like that.” Your daughter is not the way you want her to be because your daughter’s not the way you want her to be. It has nothing to do with you and you were doing the best you could when you raised her. Would you do it differently now? Maybe. But again, stop trying to have a better past. You have no control over the past.
[00:50:47] You can take the things of the past and you can now reconfigure them to serve—kind of like what Cinda was talking about—so that they work for your future. I know that my relationship when I was a kid, my relationship with my mom now she’s ninety-two is the best it’s ever been. Why? She hasn’t changed, but we used to go like this on certain things and now I went down here and now this, and now we’re [Dr. A is gesturing with his hands] and I have an incredible relationship with her. I love being with her. That wasn’t always—so because I did the work. So that same thing with your daughter, with your granddaughter, you’re doing the work which will help those relationships become better because you’re not putting up with the nonsense. So what you don’t want to do—it’s okay that you go below the line for a moment, as long as you catch yourself and then say, “I’m up for the challenge. I’m not going to be the villain. I’m going to challenge some of those things. I’m going to now grow and learn and become more.” Versus becoming empowered, versus enabling that. “I’m not going to be the hero. I’m not going to try to save my granddaughter. I’m simply going to be the complete grandmother that I’ve always been, and share the love.” And over time, believe me, things will improve because you’re no longer letting the events of your life control the outcome of how you behave, and you have full control over that. Cool?
Jill: Cool. Thank you so much.
Dr. A: You’re so welcome. Awesome. All right. Who’s next, Rach?
Rachel: All right next up we have Sarah.
Sarah: Hello?
Dr. A: Hi, Sarah. How are you?
Sarah: Hey, Dr. A. I’m good. This talk has been so good today. …
Dr. A: You’ve muted yourself.
Sarah: Hello?
Dr. A: Now I can hear you.
Sarah: Oh, sorry. Yeah, it’s been such a good talk today. I feel like it’s been such a good reminder of really just viewing how much I’ve been allowing my ego to run the show and so thank you. Thank you for showing up, as always. I just had a quick question. So…
Dr. A: Yeah. By the way, before you give your question, I just want to say something about what you just said. We all have our ego running the show! Let’s be really clear, so don’t say, “Oh—” And don’t shame or blame. I just want to make sure. Don’t shame or blame yourself because that’s your ego talking. Those are the thoughts of your ego. You know, it’s, “Oh,” and then what it’s doing is that’s having you be the villain because your ego wants you—see, as soon as it gets you down in the Drama Triangle, as soon as it gets these thoughts and these emotions going, boom. It’s back in charge. It’s so happy. It’s, “Yeah. I got her. I got her. I tricked her,” and it’s going to trick. It’s a trickster. It’s going to try to do that all the time. So when you said that’s what Stop. Challenge. Choose in its very essence is. It’s that when you start feeling that “icky sauce,” something has been triggered mostly from your psyche. Mostly at a subconscious level. Something from your past that you dealt with and it’s trying to come up and your ego is trying to use it to basically say, “Oh, I’ll make you feel better. We’ll feel sorry, let’s go have a bowl of ice cream. Let’s go…” and it’s all BS. It’s not even real. So as soon as you—every day. So anyway, I didn’t mean to interrupt your question. I just want to make sure that you totally understand we all have that and I catch myself all the time. This is, hey listen, it’s been there since you can remember. Your psyche, your personal mind, your self-concepts they were developed very early on. Very early on, and as a result of that it’s hard to separate yourself, and we’re going to spend the next time really talking about that. So I hope you’ll get it, everybody will get it, because it’s a lesson for us all. It’s a thing I do all the time now and I’ve reinforced it. So what’s your question?
Sarah: Yeah. Thank you. That was honestly so intuitive of you to pick up on that shame and guilt from me. Just by saying a sentence, because it’s true. I have been in that place, that “icky-sticky” whatever place. But my question was, I have a mentor who often says this quote, he says, “my ego is my amigo,” and I just wanted to hear what your opinion was and if you agree with that in any way because I think a lot of times people view the ego as like a monster almost.
Dr. A: Yeah.
Sarah: I just wanted to get your thoughts.
Dr. A: Yeah. No, I think that’s great. It’s the same thing with the shadow. You know, the people talk about the shadow and it’s always—it’s some of our tendencies that are not necessarily positive, but it’s just like the “ego is your amigo,” if you’re using your ego appropriately. So let me put that in perspective. When you’re young, your ego is in service of you, right? It helps protect you. It helps, you know, correct the temperature. In things that you don’t understand, it self soothes you. It creates security for you, like for myself, early on I had a pretty strong intensity about myself and wanted to be the best physician I could be. I wasn’t really interested in—I graduated first of my class—I wasn’t really interested in that. I just, when I finally got into what I loved—and that’s what I always say to people when they’re struggling a little bit or stuck—find something you’re in love with—and I was in love with medicine. I remember when I went to medical school I studied all the time and it’s really cool because my daughter, Erica, is becoming a vet. She just started vet school and she’s studying, actually last weekend she had her white coat and she said, “Dad, don’t come because I’m going to be studying all weekend,” so she found what she’s in love with and I have no doubt and she’s making great grades and better grades than she did in college because she’s in love with it. It’s connected to her soul. Okay? So when you’re young, your ego is is your amigo, from the standpoint, as it helps you stay focused on the things that are important, helps build self-efficacy.
All those things are good, right? Help positive self talk when you’re—but as you become older and you now go into the second part of your life, your ego is in service of your soul, and so your ego is always your companion. Its role dramatically changes. So my ego now is things that were important to me, you know, talking in front of twenty-30,000 people, physician being honored. Things those aren’t very important to me. I really don’t spend much time even thinking about those. I really, now my ego is in service of my soul, which is to do this work. When I get off this call today, I feel absolutely full, and my ego, by spending the work preparing last night, preparing for this, putting together those slides, spending the time in preparation, is something that brings me great joy. I’m in love with that. So my ego’s involved in that. It’s basically supporting that, but it’s supporting the bigger mission. Right? The mission of me being connected and our transformation is moving from our self-interest to our common interest, which is our relational health and our ability to help make it meaning. One of the key things is being connected to everything. Right?
Knowing that we’re part of something bigger and that we’re going to leave a legacy and that we’re doing something that we’re involved in. So yeah. No, I totally agree with him. It’s, but the perspective, the paradigm evolves. See, your ego was important when you were five, you know, you cried when you were—I’ll take you all the way back just to show you how absurd it is. When you were a year old and you had poopy panties, you cried, right? Or six months old. I don’t know how old, but anyway, you would cry, and your mom or your dad or someone, your grandmother, would come clean your panties. So you found out that your ego, by being whining and complaining, was in charge. Well obviously, some people when they’re sixties, seventies, and eighties are still like that because they haven’t evolved their ego. Does that make sense? So yeah. What I’m saying is, and when I talk about ego, I’m talking in relationship, it does things for you.
[00:59:37] Your personal mind having concepts, knowing the stove’s hot, knowing that the ego needs to make an adjustment on the shower. Those are parts of your personal mind, memories, things that you do automatically. They’re helpful. Knowing to put your keys—come in and think, “Put my keys right by where I go out to my car.” Those are all things that your ego does and then as you evolve and you realize what we teach kids—because if you think about it, their ego is fully about them. So when kids are in kindergarten, just to tell you how all this goes, when you’re in kindergarten, remember the golden rule? Doing to others as you would do to yourself. Remember? That’s the first rule because until that point your ego is just saying, “No. I’m fully in charge. I only care about me. I don’t care about anybody else.” Right? So we learn. We start learning and evolving to the point where now our ego in service of our soul, which is really the true legacy. The things that bring us joy. It’s again, what we saw that Cinda’s doing, basically she’s enjoying life. She’s curious and she’s doing something that she loves to do. So hopefully that makes sense.
All right, we really are out of time. If someone has a short question, if not we can make sure, Rachel, that we keep them. Yeah, I love that. Someone just said, “Kids are non-age specific. That’s absolutely—and actually, I wouldn’t burden kids by saying kids are a bad thing, because kids are, in their true nature, they’re enjoying, they’re curious, they’re in childlike wonder. I mean, just watch them. I watch them at the pool and they go non-stop, and then all of a sudden, boom, they’re out and they’re asleep. So being a child at eighty is good. Having an ego-driven, narcissistic, “It’s all about me.” The, “I’m in charge of the world,” that’s not a good thing. Right?
The thing is to be fully cognizant and awaken so that you’re able to experience life without having to connect it and filter to something from your past or anxiety about the future because we have no control over those. So anyway, love you guys and I’ll see you next time. Bye.
