Speaker 0 00:00:03 Welcome to the doctor's week show where I show you how bad States of mind, difficult life issues, aren't pathological, but rather signs of personal growth trying to happen. All right, let's get into it. Hey, traveling folk, how you be today? I hope you're doing well. And feeling wise, most of us like dumb ass is off the time because life happens so fast and it can be so tricky and challenging to deal with. Well, today I'm going to talk to you about how to be a wiser instead of a dumb ass. Okay. That's Tom, I'm going to expand on the inner wisdom work we did in the previous episode in episode 14, how to access your inner wisdom and use it to change a problem. We tapped into a new way of perceiving what's bothering you so you can transform it. We often get so entangled in our issues.
Speaker 0 00:01:18 It's hard to find the right perspective and direction. We need to move in just when we need it. Wisdom seems to be nowhere in sight, but it's always right there just below the surface. All you need is a method for accessing it. And that's what the exercise was for. Wisdom is a fascinating thing. It's the great healer, the transformer, the language of the gods, but what exactly is it? And how does one develop it? We all probably agree. It has something to do with the ability to think, feel, and act using knowledge, experience, insight, understanding, and common sense. And most of us associate wisdom with some form of unbiased, judgment, compassion, experiential, self knowledge, self-transcendence, non-attachment ethics, benevolence, and all these kinds of good things. But these are definitions looking from the outside in what's the actual experience of being wise. And how can you connect with it?
Speaker 0 00:02:42 First of all, it's not a state of consciousness. Like some spiritual teachings make it sound wisdom is an attribute of enlightenment and neither enlightenment nor wisdom happened through some sort of balanced, unchanging, static state mind. They happen through your process. A process consists of changing and evolving States of mind, not just one way of being it's a growth trajectory, not a fixed condition. One of the ways this has represented in Eastern spiritual traditions is in the yin yang symbol of Chinese. Now Islam people misinterpret this symbol to mean that wisdom equals balance and that we should aim at achieving a balance of our opposites, male, female, active, passive, and so on. But if you look closely at the symbol, each side has a tiny representation of its opposite within it. What does this mean? It means that each side contains the seed of its opposite.
Speaker 0 00:03:53 And so the two sides, aren't static, ways of being that are in balance with each other. They're just momentary images of a fluid process in which the two sides share and exchange their information, morph into each other and evolve as an integrated whole. If you really want to heal, grow and develop wisdom, don't try to achieve some sort of permanent. Supposedly Y state of mind, this approach is a misguided Western interpretation of Eastern philosophy. You're in process always. That's your true nature. Everything happening in your process is meaningful. Information meant to awaken you to something new and the process never stops. Each problem you encounter is a new riddle, a challenge designed to spur you on to the next level of consciousness. What messes up your life is the seed of your wisdom. You have to use your problems as your guide, study yourself. When you feel messed up, especially the inner stories you spin and process them.
Speaker 0 00:05:06 Don't just believe them. Don't just automatically fall under their spell. And definitely don't just repress or even try to meditate them away. I say meditate them away because I've had clients who practice meditation to try to detach from their problems. But really what they're doing is splitting themselves from their own process. The Eastern notion of wisdom as non-attachment can be confusing, and some folks misconstrue it to mean you should dissociate from your problems. You see this in folks who just want to bliss out and not deal with the mess in their lives. Relationship problems, health issues, self hatred, and so on. Mindfulness should be used to go into experiences, not just observe and detach from them or bliss out or whatever. Now, when I say wisdom is a process, it means it evolves. Ancient wisdom is awesome, but it's also static. And therefore limited just like the wisdom of any era will be because individual and collective consciousness, knowledge, understanding and feeling are always evolving in traditional cultures.
Speaker 0 00:06:31 For example, indigenous cultures, this is less true because wisdom is carried by the elders who have the most experience with the beliefs and practices of their society. And they usually don't promote change, but in non traditional cultures or what I call creative cultures because they constantly recreate themselves. Wisdom is forever changing. What's considered wise today may be considered passe in the future. Awareness and knowledge are always in expansion mode and therefore wisdom. Isn't just something you learn once. And for all, you have to continually discover and rediscover it in ever-changing ways. It's a developing story. So where does wisdom come from? It comes from the deep levels of the subconscious to acquire it. You have to learn to access all your different ways of being aware, both conscious and unconscious thinking, feeling, visualizing, hearing, moving, relating, remembering intuiting, and so on and process what you experience in these various channels of perception.
Speaker 0 00:07:51 This leads to wholeness and wholeness means having access to all the parts of your unfolding story. As soon as you don't have access to your whole process, you get signs and symptoms that something feels off. And since you're always in process, there is no permanent state of mind where you won't sometimes feel off it's the human condition. So being wise means frequently being a fool at every turn of the road. You're like, what the hell is going on? Now you have to process the signs and symptoms as they arise, evolve and inform your life. Wisdom is seeing feeling and knowing your whole process as it happens in real time. It integrates many levels of your experience thought and reality at once. It's, multi-dimensional simply being smart or having a lot of experience with something doesn't necessarily make you wise. There are plenty of people in the world who are brilliant, experienced, and possess a lot of the attributes we associate to wisdom, but still aren't wise because they don't have access to all their inner parts.
Speaker 0 00:09:11 Each part of you shows you another piece of the puzzle without all the pieces, your perceptions and interpretations are partial, incomplete and subjective. It's like only being able to see part of a painting. You can't really grok it without seeing the whole thing. The objective truth reveals itself through your wholeness, not just through one part of you, the more you're able to experience all your parts, the wiser you become. And of course, that's why we get into relationships with people that both provide and provoke, unprocessed, and unknown parts of ourselves. Now you might experience your inner wisdom from, or a day or more you're in or walls break down. And suddenly you can see and feel into the whole mystery of what's going on. And you know exactly what's required of you. This can happen when you get into a special state of consciousness, purely by accident or through studying something or a relationship experience, exercise, meditation, drugs, religious rituals, childbirth, a near death experience and so on.
Speaker 0 00:10:36 But this kind of breakthrough is often fleeting to actually become wise. You have to practice it as a way of living your process. Over a long time, you have to build your capacity to access your inner parts. As they arise and follow the process, they move you in. They show you the way they give you wisdom. Your wise self is always there with them. It's in all of us it's wise, but we're dumb. Children can be incredibly wise because they're born with it. The problem is that most of us never develop it. We learn things and fossilize our learning into a set of so-called facts that we rely on. We don't go the next step and learn how to tap into our processes. As they unfold and inform, change, and develop this knowledge. We look outside ourselves and allow society and other people to dictate to us what wisdom is.
Speaker 0 00:11:41 And we let this slowly chip away at our own deep inner knowing without realizing it. We adapt to the demands of the world, including the ones deny who we really are. This happens through the two basic ways we perceive and process life, experiential and analytical. When we're younger, we tend to just experience things. We dive in and see what happens. Then as we accumulate experience, we concretize it into mental programs. We assume represent wisdom. Each experience adds to this sort of personal philosophy of life. As this happens, we slowly withdraw from diving full on, into experience. And we live more from our ideas about life. This is why as people get older, they often look back at the younger cells and think man, life felt magical in some way polite. When people say back in the day, they're referring to what it felt like to just live, be in the stream of happenings, total immersion and experience, which is what you have to do to connect with the subconscious you can't connect with. What's under the surface in your psyche, by just thinking and talking about it, or by relying on stale old experiences. I mean, you might have some insights, but to really get into it, you have to experience it directly. This is one of the reasons I developed an experiential process approach to working on problems. When I was in talk therapy, I often felt like it's just too much talking, huh? Maybe I'm talking too much right now. Uh, I got to go play guitar riff. I'll be back in a second.
Speaker 1 00:13:50 <inaudible>
Speaker 0 00:14:32 All right. I'm back. That felt wise. Wisdom happens from the intermingling of real time experience and analysis. You have to be able to jump into the experience, whether it's crazy or mundane, ecstatic, painful Fon, or scary knowing or unpredictable, and also be able to stand on the shore and look objectively at what's happening. This is wholeness. Most of the, of us either never jump into the water or just stick our toes in or some folks live in the water. Like they experienced everything, but have zero insight to be whole. You have to be able to jump in and then analyze your experience or do these two things simultaneously. This is one of the drawbacks of mindfulness and insight meditation, as well as talk therapy. They emphasize self observation, but don't show you how to get into the stream of your process. They're static process presents itself as signs, simple thoughts, feelings, conflicts, and so on.
Speaker 0 00:15:55 And all these things are happening in real time. In that very moment, you have to dive into the process and follow it. If you say you spend your whole time observing, just looking at what's happening or thinking about it or trying to figure it out, you don't access. What's really trying to come forth or what's trying to happen. What's trying to unfold because you don't unfold. Anything. You have to occupy the experience and unfold the process, just observing yourself or just analyzing yourself. Doesn't do this. And as I said, if you just swim in the waters of your process without any self analysis, you're inviting trouble. I see this all the time with musicians. I know who are alcoholic. They just flow. And I'm like, what are you doing? Use your freaking brain dude. As I said, as people get older, their capacity for jumping totally into their experiences tends to wane and they start to live one step removed from the core of life.
Speaker 0 00:17:13 By following an established set of unchanging ideas. Instead of living the experience of their process, one place I've noticed, this is in some singer songwriters, as they age, sometimes their voices improved, but oftentimes their lyrics don't come from their subconscious anymore. Like they've lost the capacity to enter into the stream of their deeper experiences. The lyrics don't sound or feel like dreams anymore. They sound like someone about something in a more literal way. What was once an excursion into the shadows of life? The exposing of hidden truths shifts to the already known conscious plane of awareness. The words sound like someone just having normal thoughts and making them rhyme. Whereas they used to create transformative dreamscapes with poetic power, the essence of youth, the spirit in us that makes us try new things because that's how to experience. Life is something we should aim to never lose.
Speaker 0 00:18:27 If we lose it, we lose vital contact with the real fuel and fire of our lives. Our bodies get older, but I don't think this is why older folks get ill. It's because they've lost contact with their dreaming, their subconscious and their capacity to make these experiences conscious. The body demands consciousness. It's not just a physical machine. It's a somatic manifestation of your life story in every moment. You're the metabolic expression of everything you experience. This is why it's so important to begin working on yourself as young as possible because later on your unprocessed experiences will catch up with you guaranteed. I mean, you can always start, but I'm saying start now. I use the example of songwriting because a lot of my life's learning has come from music. If I have any wisdom at all, and I'm not sure I do. I'd have to attribute it to two things, processing and rock and roll.
Speaker 0 00:19:45 And as strange as it sounds, they're really the same thing. They're just two different ways to bring out the deeper truths, hiding in the shadows of our psyches and the dark alleys of the world. After a while of processing a problem, it's no longer what it was when I started. Once I dive in and follow the new perceptions that emerge from my various inner parts, my problem changes as I change. It's not the problem that needs to change. It's me. That needs to change a problem. Isn't a thing that has nothing to do with me. Like I'm just an unlucky, passive participant. It's a dynamic process of information. That's being communicated to me to wake me up about something. The way I respond, which starts with how I define my problem is often one part of the problem. The other part is that I'm unaware of my relationship to something going on in me or in my life.
Speaker 0 00:20:55 And that relationship might be no relationship. Like I'm totally asleep about some issue to process it. I have to access the wisdom, the transformative element behind whatever's bothering me. Well, that's what happens when I write a song or play my guitar, or just listen to a great song, which for me is often old blues and rock and roll these tunes. Weren't just entertainment. Like a lot of music is today. They were sermons over the years. They've given me an experience of another world. I hadn't known. They took the ground out from under me and took me on a journey into everything that's unsaid, unknown. Unfelt disavowed. They scrambled my brain with surrealism and sound. They spoke truth with power of spirit. And when I write a tune, I also journey past my know and self into the unknown. I never know what's going to happen or what I'm going to uncover.
Speaker 0 00:22:04 Sometimes I hit a dead end. Other times, I touch on a piece of wisdom that helps me in my life. So for me, a problem is music. I know it sounds totally weird, especially since problems, sock and music doesn't, but they both aim at the same thing to bring out what's under the surface, the hidden directions in your life, the healing wisdoms you need. Speaking of accessing your inner wisdom. I wrote a song called before the Dawn, which talks about the hidden intelligence in your problems, the unseen, unknown transformation and weighting, the sun that shines in the dark before the Dawn, I'm going to release the single and the video. The first week in January, 2021, you can watch the video on my YouTube page and stream the song on Spotify or wherever you listen to music. Here's a sneak preview.
Speaker 1 00:23:09 <inaudible>
Speaker 0 00:24:08 See you next time. Stay aware
Speaker 1 00:24:11 <inaudible>
Speaker 0 00:24:14 And follow me on social media at doctors awake, and you can sign up on the mailing
[email protected], where you'll receive discounts on private coaching events and merchandise starting in 2021 weekly personal growth tips, and lots more
Speaker 1 00:24:30 Be well.
