Episode Transcript
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 persons with eyes and ears and hearts and maybe wings happy new year. How are you? I hope you're feeling well,
Speaker 1 00:00:38 But if not, let's get you free. I spent the morning watching the birds flip back and forth between the trees outside my kitchen window. And I'm ready to talk to you about flying free. Actually first let's talk about birds. They're fricking awesome. In case you haven't noticed the ones I was watching were speeding from tree to tree, then cruising down to the ground and walking through the grass. Then taking off, up to the sky free. And here I am. This pump on a log human who can only walk and run and swim, but the real freedom, the air is off limits to me. I mean, I can get in a plane. I could jump out of a plane, but it would be pretty pale in comparison to what I was witnessing there. I can totally understand why birds have captured our imagination since the Dawn of time.
Speaker 1 00:01:51 They're the archetypal symbol of freedom, transcendence, symbols of the soul and the pursuit of higher knowledge, the link between earth and the heavens. And they were once thought to be forecasters of future events, but why all these fantastical projections onto birds? I mean, other animals do things that we can't do, but we don't have quite the same reverence for them. It's because flying is one of human's oldest inner psychological processes. We all seek to fly free from our finite and restricted States of mind, the confines of living in a physical body, the pressure of existing within a community of rules, everyone craves some sort of personal liberation. This is why altering one state of mind is one of humanity's oldest practices. When you alter your state, you have the potential to see and feel in a way cut through your illusion. He'll grow break. The chain means of your inner oppression.
Speaker 1 00:03:07 In fact, fact, true healing chain and growth require an alteration of consciousness. You won't get very far by just thinking or talking about your problems or having an expert, tell you what to do. You have to connect with a different way of experiencing life, a new way of perceiving things. Hmm. Before I go further, since I mentioned breaking free of your inner oppression, I should make it abundantly clear that working on your inner life at all is a privilege of living in a free society. No, wait, the way things are, that's really only. If you're part of the majority, if you're in a minority group, the quest for freedom sometimes has to be focused on social issues. Whoa, correction, really? No one's free until everyone's free. We all have to work on freedom for everyone on all levels, but a sense individual and community change are reciprocal.
Speaker 1 00:04:22 It's important to focus on both of them. I just want to say that this episode addresses those of us living within a context that allows inner freedom. I remember my Russian and Polish friends telling me that during communism folks were afraid to even have their own thoughts. That's how oppressive it was horrible. If you live in an oppressive environment, inner freedom is a more complex issue. And it's usually not a priority that said regardless of one's environment, we do all share the same urge to alter our States of mind because we all have the inner drive for psychological and spiritual freedom. And we use all sorts of ways to do it. Drugs, alcohol, sex, exercise, work, slay love, Hey, eating, sleeping, dreaming, meditation, meditation, incantation, ritual, prayer, and music. Of course you can do all these things, hopefully not all in the same day without ever waking up and becoming consciously free in yourself to do that.
Speaker 1 00:05:54 You have to process your States of mind and not only the ones you intentionally alter, but also the ones that accidentally happened to you through having problems. You see a problem is actually an unconscious meaning unintentional altered state of mind. Everyone has what they consider their normal state of mind, either the way they usually are or the way they strive to be by definition, a problem throws you off from this. It tosses you out of this known preferred state of mind. In other words, a problem is a disturbance to your consciousness. An unintended alteration of how you feel within this experience is meaningful information that wants to be translated into a conscious state of mind. Now, these aren't new ideas. In fact, there is old as humanity over 40,000 years ago, the earliest medicine, men and women called shamans used ritual and hallucinogenic plants to induce altered States of mind in folks suffering mental and physical problems to help them heal.
Speaker 1 00:07:20 Shamanism is the precursor to psychology. They talked of spirits, omens and animal powers. We talk of psychological complexes, defense mechanisms and repression, but it's all the same thing. Invisible intangible States of mind and mood. We try to understand and change. One of the images of the shaman is a bird taking a man into the air. So he becomes a winged human. The meaning is that in order to heal, change, grow and transform your life. You have to fly free of your usual way of perceiving to do this. You have to process your altered States of mind, the ones you intentionally induce and the ones that manifest as problems. This is how to connect with the awareness you need to transform your life. The way to begin is to simply start taking your imagination. Seriously. It's the bridge between your conscious and your subconscious mind. It's always at work and contains all the information and facts about your process.
Speaker 1 00:08:40 In episode 20, exercise seven, how to access your inner freedom and use it to process a difficult issue. I shared a really simple application of this. You use your to access the freedom that already exists within you, and then use this liberated state of mind to change a problem. It's sort of a backwards way of working. It starts with the end, your inner freedom and works back to the start. Your problem. I designed it that way because it's an exercise and it's a beginner exercise in future episodes, where I show you how to process a problem from scratch. You'll organically discover the inner freedom that exists in you in the present moment. And it will automatically help you transform your problem. The exercise is for learning tools for processing your imagination. Now no one is completely free within themselves. At all times, someone who presents himself like this is either doing it to appear a certain way or just isn't conscious of the way in which he isn't free being free.
Speaker 1 00:09:55 All the time would mean that you achieve one static state of mind that never evolves is never challenged, never thrown a curve ball never knocked off center, but the reality of our processes makes this an impossibility. And why would anyone want this? Anyway? It would mean you don't grow. You just repressed the movements and changes, trying to happen in your life, which of course would give you problems that would make sure you're not free. Your problems are really just expressions of your process. And if you use them in an intentional proactive way, they become guides to your freedom.
Speaker 1 00:10:40 Now the one thing you'll never get free of is your process. I mean, I guess when you're dead, you do this a great in the 5,000 year old Chinese Oracle called the I Ching it says online, unlimited possibilities are not suited to man. I'll include women here. If they existed, his life would only dissolve in the boundless to become strong. A man's life needs the limitations or deigned by duty and voluntarily accepted the individual attained significance as a free spirit only by surrounding himself with these limitations. And by determining for himself what his duty is by limitations, the quotas are referring to the specific parameters of your process, the way it needs you in each moment to be this way or that way, do this or that change this or that grow like this or that you can participate in and co-create process. Or you can repress it, deny it, try to manipulate it or avoid it, but you can't get free of it and make it go away.
Speaker 1 00:12:04 It's the cards you're dealt with to cultivate your inner freedom. You have to become aware of acknowledge, accept, and follow your process as it unfolds so far. So good. You're stuck with your process. So how do you experience inner freedom within this constraint? As I touched on earlier, there are two main ways to cultivate it. One is by processing the altered States of mind, you intentionally induce because your urge is drive you there. It's common for people to feel temporarily free while doing a certain activity, creating, reading, skiing, making love, meditating, cooking, or whatever they don't experience this sense of freedom. Otherwise, or someone has an incredible talent. Like they're a musician who feels ecstatic while he plays his instrument, but in his everyday life, he's more on the board or boring side. We seek activities or are given gifts that connect us with something, breathing, ecstatic, fun, transformative, uplifting, meaningful, and empowering as a way to access our inner freedom.
Speaker 1 00:13:41 Some people call this a flow state because you jump in and just flow for a while without all your usual baggage. If you use the methods I teach to study and process these experiences, you can begin to integrate them into your personality, your everyday way of being, instead of them just being these isolated activities you do, you can take doing and converted to a way of being the star strongest example of being unconsciously driven to have a freedom experience is addiction. Addiction, research and therapy are totally one sided. And this is why so many folks relapse. The focus is almost exclusively on addictions as behaviors that enable the person to get away from something mostly inner pain missed the whole other side of the equation, which is that addictions are unconscious attempts to go towards something namely to experience an otherwise inaccessible state of freeze need them, whether it's mast beer, pot, heroin, gambling, sex, food, plastic surgery, or working out the aim is to experience a high that makes you feel free of your normal state of mind, which doesn't feel free in some way.
Speaker 1 00:15:23 There's something in the person's psychology that specifically blocks or forbids this kind of inner freedom. And the addiction is an unconscious way to bypass the block. In most cases, folks don't have any awareness of the block at all. They just feel driven to get high. Now it obviously doesn't make the person free. It's more like a simulation of a state of awareness. They need addictions therapy often fails because it only focuses on not doing the harmful behavior and it overlooks what's driving it. If you're strongly driven toward your own inner freedom willpower, and sometimes even your belief in God, aren't enough to stop you from relapsing. The solution is to explore and process the state of mind that your addiction induces so that you don't have to unconsciously produce it in a harmful way. This almost always involves identifying what stops you from consciously having this high experience, for example, an unseen inner critic, abuser, or other oppressive figure.
Speaker 1 00:16:45 And you don't need to have experienced outer abuse to have such an inner figure. The other way is to process your problems directly within the painful, messed up fucked up parts of your life is a meaningful message. That's trying to guide you to your freedom, your enlightenment. In fact, that's what problems are for. They're not mistakes meant to mess you up. They're meaningful and purposeful processes of personal growth trying to happen. They contain information that needs to be made conscious an inner critic, a bad mood, a relationship conflict, a career problem, a health issue, a world issue or whatever is a message to your current mindset. It doesn't matter how awesome you think your current state of being is. Your subconscious wants you to keep growing. So it keeps sending you negative altered States of mind to upset your status quo and get you into the flow towards your next more aware state of being life is process relate to it as a river of changes, not as a static condition.
Speaker 1 00:18:10 If you process your problems over time, your chronic issues will start to loosen their grip on you. And even your perception of them will change. They'll slowly shift from feeling like painful burdens to simply being signs of how you need to adjust your direction. It's like at first you venture out in your boat and struggle with the wind current sun crashing waves continually tossing you to and fro, but eventually you become an expert sailor able to ride through the nasty weather and then magic happens. You discover that the rain wind, currents and waves are actually you, and you can transform them into friendly weather, true freedom. Doesn't come from ignoring or repressing the storm, or just toughing through it, or even staying on the shore and just observing it, which is what mindfulness meditation aims at. In other words, it doesn't happen by changing your state of mind.
Speaker 1 00:19:24 So you don't notice your problems or by just trying to power through them, or by simply observing them in meditation. All of these approaches have value, but none of them will consciously transform. What's bothering you into a new uplifting way of being hidden within your worst problems is your greatest superpower. True inner freedom comes from going into the storm, processing it and thereby transforming it. Freedom comes from making the subconscious conscious. Now what we're all taught is to get rid of what bothers us, but this is pretty ineffective. A lot of the time, the way to not only get rid of it, but change your life in the process is to integrate the message and align yourself with the changes that demands today's hurricane becomes tomorrow, sunny day, if you process it, that's freedom. The exercise shows you a simple method for accessing and getting a taste of this.
Speaker 1 00:20:44 It's a simple imagination method that connects you with the part of you. That's already free, but hasn't been accessible to you. It's a weird, but true fact that when you feel totally unfree blocked, oppressed, messed up confused entangled in moods and messes. There's another part of you right there under your nose that's wise and free. It knows exactly what you need to do. The crux is having the tools to access it. There are lots of different ways to do this. And the exercise is just a beginner's way to get a sense of it. Personally, I use whatever method is called for in a given moment. And I apply it either to a problem or to a positive experience. I have doing something I like. For example, I grew up on rock and roll, which is the quintessential expression freedom. It grew out of the blues, which began with the mournful field hollers of African slaves in the American South.
Speaker 1 00:21:55 It was their instinctual call for freedom through chanting. This evolved into freedom seeking songs that were played on the acoustic guitar and sung when slavery ended and lots of folks move North to Chicago, the music got electrified by the time white folks picked up on it. In the 1950s, it was already morphing into rock and roll where the message wasn't only about suffering, but also the unbelievable liberation that grows out of simply acknowledging your pain. You can't connect with what's beyond your problems without first being truthful with yourself about all their details. There's a crazy paradox in all this. Listen to BB King sing every day. I have the blues sounds bad, right? No, it's an ecstatic song. Why? Because when you allow yourself to be vulnerable enough to fully acknowledge what's going on, stop playing mind games with yourself, get down to the nitty gritty.
Speaker 1 00:23:11 The shitty, the shams in your life, go into what's happening. Instead of trying to get out of it. You begin to set yourself free by virtue of discovering your true feelings and process strange as it sounds and acknowledging, embracing, and accepting the truth of where you're at in this very moment actually begins to transform. What's bothering you. You may not feel it yet, but you're already on the road to change and growth. The further into processing your problems. You go, the more they morph into something else, a new consciousness, the blues is just the facts, the real deal. And this is what processing is. Rock and roll is the celebration of this authentic spirit in ourselves. Sometimes I feel like rock and roll is my own personal super highway to freedom. And the guitar is my vehicle. See you next time. Stay aware.
Speaker 0 00:24:24 You can follow me on social media at doctors awake, and you can sign up on the mailing list at doctor's wake.com, where you'll receive discounts on private coaching events and merchandise starting in 2021 weekly personal growth tips and lots more be well.
