Episode Transcript
Speaker 1 00:00:03 Welcome to the doctors, which 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.
Speaker 1 00:00:27 Hey, people welcome. How are you doing today? I hope you're up and running like a smooth operator cruising down the highway towards your destination. I'm hunkered down in my music studio, surrounded by many amp and guitar friends who are built between the 1950s and 1970s. The golden years of music, equipment production before everything became mass produced cheapo plastic, and I'm ready to confront the obstacle. We call obstacles. There's so much info on the airwaves these days saying never give up power through the obstacle believe and achieve. When the going gets tough, the tough get going and all that's good. But that approach is only a subset of a more important and effective way to deal with the things that block you in your life to truly understand and transform an obstacle. You have to unpack the information in it and let it guide you. It might want you to power through.
Speaker 1 00:01:43 For example, if the purpose of the obstacle is to push you to connect with your power, but oftentimes an obstacle is there for a completely different reason. It's there to redirect you to wake you up to something you haven't been aware of. It might even want you to change your entire goal. If you just always try to power through you, miss this essential information, you might even succeed at your goal, but it's at a cost because when you repress or ignore information in your life, it has an insidious way of showing up again at a different time as a different problem down the road. So let's get into this. In episode 50, I showed you how to identify your authentic goals and process the obstacles that get in your way. Every goal has a story behind it. And if you're not conscious of how it drives you to pursue your goal, you're not going to be aware of what you're really doing or what your deeper motivations are.
Speaker 1 00:02:53 This is going to set you up to experience obstacles that upend your life in ways you couldn't have predicted. You might very well succeed at your goal, but at an expense you may not have banked on. The reason this happens is that the obstacles you encounter are unconscious parts of your story, and they have to express themselves. They're meaningful parts of it they're meant to happen in order to wake you up to certain changes you need to make on your journey towards your goal. The classic example is the common story of someone who spends years pursuing a goal and either fails at it and feels depressed or succeeds and feels like is that it is, is this all there is to life and then they get depressed too, or wait, there's a third option. You can just not pursue any goals at all. And then feel depressed that your life is boring.
Speaker 1 00:03:55 All of these examples are results of either avoiding or just powering through obstacles, but never processing them as meaningful information. I remember a deep and complex process. One of my clients went through, it shows the uncanny power of an obstacle and how it carries meaning and serves a purpose. I had a client who wanted to have a child, but she wasn't aware that it was mostly in order to not feel like there was something wrong with her. She felt like the odd one out, since all her friends had already had kids, she felt pressured to be quote normal, whatever that is. She tried for years, but couldn't conceive. Finally, after many in vitro procedures, she gave birth to a beautiful, but severely disabled child. He couldn't speak, socialize or relate in any sort of quote, normal way and tragically at age eight, he died of an illness.
Speaker 1 00:05:05 Doctors didn't understand. Now, of course you can say all of this was just chance or from the in vitro treatments or a result of some kind of unknown hereditary factor and had nothing to do with her or her process. But when I had her explore the part of herself that her child represented, she got in touch with a deep desire to not adapt to society's conventions. She had a powerful cathartic experience of realizing how her whole life had been an attempt to be like, she thought the world wanted her to be so that she'd feel accepted and loved. And of course this included having a child, her child's inability to adapt to social conventions and relate to people in the so-called normal way was a mirror expression of her own need to accept and love herself for who she truly is not for being able to adhere to society's demands.
Speaker 1 00:06:15 He was her angel on many levels. Now, am I saying she made a mistake? Absolutely not. She had an awesome child and a deeply transformative life experience. This is how we learn and grow. My point is simply that knowing the story that drives your goals will help you on your path. It will give you more choice, more awareness, and it'll help you navigate your process. So when you have a goal, the most important question you can ask yourself is why get in touch with your deeper motivations? So you can pursue your goals in a conscious way. If my client had done this, she might have still gone ahead and had the same beautiful child, but she would have gone into the process with eyes open it's when we pursue our goals with our eyes have closed that we encounter the most difficulties. The obstacles we meet, speak directly to this unexplored.
Speaker 1 00:07:20 Y of course, you're going to encounter problems either way, but to differences that there'll be way less troublesome and dramatic. You'll be able to use them to propel you further on your journey instead of getting completely derailed. So what exactly is an obstacle? I mean, what's its inner nature and purpose simply put an obstacle is information. It's trying to direct your process. It looks like it's trying to stop your process, but that's only because you've committed to one track and aren't aware of the other tracks you need to follow. When an obstacle presents itself, it's painful and we get upset and curse it because it goes against our most basic paradigm of life where we seek what feels good and reject what feels bad. This is especially true when something gets in the way of our intentions or goals, frustration city. But the fact is when it comes to obstacles, goals and your process, there's really no good or bad information.
Speaker 1 00:08:33 There's only information good and bad are value judgements made from one particular part of your psyche. Even your worst problems and obstacles contain meaningful information. Everything you experience is meaningful. There are no meaningless useless experiences. It's up to you. How you use them. For example, if you experience anxiety or depression, you receiving meaningful information, that's trying to wake you up to something. We tend to use the disease model of mental health, which aims to get rid of any information that doesn't feel good or causes pain, but this completely misses the mark. It misses the entire purpose of problems and their role in driving the evolution of your consciousness. Your problem is your process. It's your growth trying to happen. So when you're cruising toward your goal and suddenly a big Boulder appears in front of you, this is part of your path. It's not an extra, random, wrong unrelated aspect of what you're doing.
Speaker 1 00:09:41 It is the way you just have to unfold. Its meaning and purpose obstacles are friends of your process, not enemies of your process. Everything you experience from the heavens to the Hells is an important part of the puzzle. Trying to simply eliminate what's in your way or feels bad or makes you uncomfortable is killing a part of your process. That hasn't yet had a chance to come to consciousness and be actualized. The result is you move further from your true goals and you diminish your potential by cutting out information, that's meant to inform your awareness and catalyze your growth. Now, there are two kinds of information in your process, conscious and unconscious, and they're equally important. Conscious information consists of everything, you know, identify with and intend. It's usually the parts of yourself that you're in control of unconscious information manifests as everything you don't intend.
Speaker 1 00:10:50 And aren't in control of obstacles, accidents, problems, symptoms, bad states of mind and so on. If you want to truly understand yourself and really transform your obstacles and problems, you have to resist your immediate automatic reaction to just get rid of them, rationalize them repress or avoid them stop and say to yourself, hello information. You're causing me pain. So you must have a message for me. I'm going to take you seriously and help you reveal what you're trying to communicate. This is what the exercise showed you, how to do to process the information in the obstacle instead of just trying to overcome or avoid it. It's there to direct you to adjust your path change and grow. The whole reason you encounter obstacles and have negative experiences is to push you in your growth by deciphering the information contained in the experiences that cause you pain, you get onto an authentic path that feels whole and right, what begins as something that totally blocks and frustrates.
Speaker 1 00:12:09 You unfolds into a message that becomes a liberating power. Your obstacles are processes to work on not evil enemies to vanquish. The psyche is an information process that continually uploads data to guide you in your personal evolution. We usually try to cut out all this valuable content because it's painful, but pain is creation. Change evolution, birth birthing hurts. We need to wrap our brains around this fact repressing masking, medicating, ignoring, or even trying to bliss out information that doesn't feel good. Not only has limited healing effects. It robs us of our growth. Most of us have been conditioned to use this good versus bad comfort versus discomfort adversarial model. And there are various levels of it at one extreme is psychiatry, which just drugs you up. So you aren't even able to focus on the information, trying to come to your awareness, less extreme, but still based on the same idea, our traditional psychology therapy and personal growth methods whose primary aim is to simply get rid of your symptoms and pain.
Speaker 1 00:13:34 I'm always shocked when a so-called expert talks about anxiety or depression and the entire focus is how to relieve the symptoms. They offer zero tools for processing these experiences, no methodology, no map, no vision of unfolding and transforming the process. It's like, they're talking about a virus or a bacteria to simply kill, but this is like throwing away a bar of gold. It impoverishes you and stifles your growth. It relieves your discomfort for the moment, but completely misses the underlying process. Even softer methods like meditation and various spiritual practices, still aim and getting rid of the bad feelings and provide no way of tapping into exposing and unfolding the process that's trying to awaken and heal you. Life is an information and communication process, not a static condition where you have to continually shore up your status quo by disavowing everything, attempting to enter your awareness just because it makes you uncomfortable.
Speaker 1 00:14:49 Speaking of goals, I have lots of them, but one place I don't have any is in songwriting. It's strange. I want to write songs. I like, but beyond that, I don't have any specific ideas. I've never thought to myself, I want to write this kind of song today, or I'm going to record an album. I know these seem like normal thoughts for a musician, but I just don't have them. That's just not how it works for me. In fact, I see goals and intentions as contrary to what making music is all about. I mean, you can certainly be goal oriented with music. You could say, I'm going to write a song about love, craft, some music and words and Presto. You've got a tune or you might've had a certain experience, say a breakup or an attraction to someone. And you think I'm going to write a song about this.
Speaker 1 00:15:45 It just doesn't work that way. For me, it's too obvious, too intentional. And I think art should come from that place beyond you and your intentions. For example, it's popular today to craft, pop hooks, that appeal to both children and adults, but that just doesn't interest me. It reminds me too much of TV, commercial jingles. They're called hooks for a reason because they're designed to hook your attention, but that's not art. It's closer to commerce than creation, but each to his own songwriting for me is more of a processing experience than a crafting experience. I use craft in the final editing process to pull everything together. But otherwise it's pretty much like working on my own process. I let go and allow my subconscious, the unknown unseen, unheard unfathomable, unfamiliar in myself. Speak to me. It's an altered state. That's sort of like going into a trance while I'm there.
Speaker 1 00:16:56 I use my senses and awareness to pick up signals sounds, melodies, rhythms, words, visions, colors, textures, feelings. And I amplify them. It's the same as allowing the information in an obstacle or a problem to talk to me in both instances, it's a process of uncovering something that's already there and just needs to be expressed. Yup. I think songs are already there in the subconscious or in the air who knows, and musicians just put up their antennas and pick up the signals. It's the opposite of intention. It's exploring the anti intentions that are always operating within you. The only intentional element is the pursuit of unfolding. Following where these anti intentions are trying to go. That's why even in this exercise about goals, we explored, amplified and processed the anti intentions, meaning the obstacles to your intentions. We didn't just say, okay, there's my goal. There's my obstacle.
Speaker 1 00:18:09 Screw the obstacle. I'm going to power through. Sure. As I said before, sometimes this works and it may be your process to do this. But the problem with always just going on mental toughness is you drown out important information, not only about your goal, but about your whole life too obstacles, don't only speak to a specific goal or intention. That's just how they get your attention. Their purpose is to provide meaningful guidance for the big picture of your life. So when I work on a problem or make music, I'm working with my subconscious, I'll be making breakfast and I'll start feeling a bit weird. And I don't know what it is. It's just a strange sense of something. Then I have a totally random image floats through my mind. I'm trying to eat my oatmeal, but these weird signals keep coming in. Maybe I'll process it. Or I might go downstairs to my music studio and find that words are pouring out. When it's all said and done, I usually go, oh, that's what that feeling and vision were trying to tell me. And that's why I felt blocked in this area of my life. A disturbing thought or feeling an obstacle, an accident, a failure or an error all contained far more than just pain, inducing negativity. They carry the keys to your life. See you next time. Stay aware.
Speaker 1 00:19:50 You can follow me on social media at doctors wig, and you can sign up on the mailing list at doctors, wake.com, where you'll receive discounts on private coaching events and merchandise, weekly personal growth tips, and lots more be well.
