Awareness and Consciousness Podcast

Your attention is not just your focus, but a force with which to steer your life, thoughts, emotions, and personal change.

I got listened to and understood in a way that I felt important and valued. What I didn't know was that this wasn't an accident. The person listening to me was doing some very conscious and skillful things in their listening to help me have that experience.

we have these strategies of giving a good impression and hiding the stuff we fear they will judge us for. And so our relationship is made "comfortable" in that space of keeping up a false impression and hiding our negative feelings and thoughts. However, it's not comfortable long-term living in these masks and false versions of our self. Certainly not with our intimate partner. We can't keep the facade on all the time. It's exhausting. It's going to break down.

I gathered all sorts of habits and false beliefs in my childhood that later led to disconnection, disappointment, frustration, and heartbreak in a relationship.  One example was from the fairy tales and movies growing up. They painted a picture of "happily ever after" into my brain. Once you meet the right person, it goes seamlessly to "happily" ever after." But, unfortunately, those stories planted a false paradigm that set me up for disappointment later.  I got into this "inner work" because I was struggling and unhappy in my relationships. I think a lot of people do. Even if their relationships are "good," they may not feel good in them. Sometimes a "great relationship" brings up our inner fears, insecurities, jealousy, and other sabotaging emotions and behaviors.

Daniel's journey from misery to happiness took a lot of work. There were many ingredients essential to making his transformation happen and he shares it here in this interview with him. 

The narrative story in our mind is what produces those negative thoughts, self-judgments, and emotions. It arises from the core beliefs we acquired earlier in life, and that can be re-programmed with awareness.  The post Why am I Unhappy appeared first on Pathway to Happiness.

The mind is dreaming all the time. It is dreaming when you are awake, and when you are asleep. The consciousness process involves waking up from these dreams that run through your head. Most often they appear as narrative stories. What will change your life is when you take charge of the dreams in your mind during the day instead of allowing them to dream you. The post #72 Conscious Dreaming appeared first on Pathway to Happiness.

I've been doing a digital detox. I gave up news and social media for lent. I wanted to pull my attention out of the habitual cycle of opinions, fears, needing to be informed, emotions, and addictive social media scrolls. I wanted to clean up and clear space in my mind.  In the process, I had this dream last week. It represents part of the Deam of Maya, or illusions we live in. If you want to be happy and fulfilled, you will need to move your attention out of such stories. The post #71 The Dream of Maya appeared first on Pathway to Happiness.

Pauline Victoria was born without arms or legs, Despite this physical challenge, she has done what many would think impossible. I wanted to know how she did things like drive, swim, and scuba dive. She said it was how she played the mental game to overcome her physical challenges. In this interview, I got to explore how Pauline masters her mental game. The mental game includes desire, faith, presence, surrender, and calming your nervous system with control over your attention. The post Mastering the Mental Game appeared first on Pathway to Happiness.

Figuring out the truth isn't straightforward.  Consider this; the mind is the mechanism that we use to discern the truth. However, this is the same mind that generates stories, false narratives, daydreams, and fictional realities in our heads.  These two uses of the mind are contradictory. It's no wonder people are having difficulty seeing the difference between truth and a made-up story.  The post #69 Self Awareness – Why do people believe crazy lies, conspiracy theories, and illusions? appeared first on Pathway to Happiness.

The voices in your head are normal. They are the patterns of thoughts arising from unconscious beliefs. They can be funny, frightening, random or chaotic, and possibly cause deep suffering. The post #68 Voices in your Head appeared first on Pathway to Happiness.

Eva Beronius and Gary van Warmerdam explore moving from identifying with the mind to realizing our Self as Consciousness.

Trauma is often the cause of anxiety, depression, ADHD, anger, harsh self judgment, suicidal thoughts, and other mood disorders. It is much more common than you think. You don't just get PTSD from wartime combat. Your brain and nervous system can be altered from sexual assault, abuse, bullying, emotionally abusive parents, even if they never hit you, surgery, or a car accident.

To change a belief sometimes it helps to understand where and how it came to be. When you understand why and how you started to believe your thoughts about being wrong, bad, unlovable, or broken, you have new perspective on those ideas. You can understand their time and place from who you are today, instead of who you were when those beliefs may have helped. You can also see why it is not true today, or not true before that moment you began believing in your false ego identity as who you were.

My interview with Anna and her journey out of trauma reactions using the skills and perspectives she learned in the Self Mastery practices. Combining them with EMDR treatments and other modalities to go from anxiety, depression, anger and suicidal thoughts, to Living Happy.

Where do you start making changes when you are overwhelmed with emotions? Understanding the deep sources of emotions help us move into compassion, and decrease the impact of the Inner Judge. Beginning steps include acknowledging where you are, accepting it, and then finding one small change to get you started.

There is a fear virus going through people's minds and emotions at the same time there is a biological Corona virus infecting people's physical bodies. The spread of fear is a lot faster and more widespread. There are things you can do to protect yourself, and improve your emotional state.

Emotional wounds show up as our "baggage" in relationships. They are our unhealed emotions and beliefs from past experiences and affect our current relationships. Physical wounds can be seen but emotional wounds are invisible. They are experienced as emotional reactions, negative thoughts, and sabotaging behaviors. Understand them and you will be more compassionate to yourself and others.

Interview with Eva, a Self Mastery Course subscriber who worked her way out of panic attacks, anxiety, depression, and career burnout to build a completely different life. Letting go of fears and eventually feeling joy and love was a surprise change, until it became the new normal.

This podcast will guide you through a breathing practice using specific techniques to relax your nervous system and brain. There are reasons that breathing techniques can help you relax. Breathing. When done properly it bypasses your intellect and directs your nervous system to switch off the tension and hyper-vigilance. This is something that you can’t do by thinking better thoughts or trying to be positive.

What constitutes your image of perfection? Take the judgmental thoughts you have and look at the criteria of expectation that is behind the judgment. In other words, what criteria do you have to attain in order for the Inner Judge to finally say, “Congratulations, you made it.” These hidden beliefs result in thoughts of being a failure and create emotions of unworthiness. By having an... Read More

Changing Core Beliefs Changing a core belief doesn’t happen in a day. It may not happen in a week, month, or year! Everyone goes through the steps of changing core beliefs at a different pace. However, they almost always follow the same process to achieving the end result — changing their core belief. This is no simple task. If changing your core belief is part... Read More

The Mind Creates Illusions About Money that we React to with Fear People will often refer to their emotions or fears as irrational. But if we learn how emotions are created, we can see that they are not irrational. They are actually the practical result of what the mind and imagination are doing. It is what the mind and imagination are doing that are completely... Read More

Want to know where your low self esteem and insecurities come from? It’s based on emotion, not self-image. To build self confidence and overcome low self esteem is to change how we feel emotionally about ourselves. To change our emotion requires changing two different core beliefs about self image: The first core belief is obvious. It is the belief that we are not good enough.... Read More

The critical voice in your head telling you whether you are succeeding or failing at things is actually pretty stupid. It sounds smart, acts confident, and pretends to be an expert. However, it hasn't actually done any of the things it is criticizing you about.

A man shares what he discovers as the source of his social anxiety that began when he was in 3rd grade. In this podcast I describe a process to dig into the layers of your unconscious beliefs, and release the emotional beliefs trapped there.

What are the false beliefs that form our Ego?  Where do our false beliefs come from?  When did we begin to get these false beliefs o our identity and lose touch with our authentic self?

From a consciousness perspective, even statements that are factual are still not the Truth. Words are what we use to describe a thing, or facts. But words are not the thing itself.

Lying to your self can cause a response in the reasoning part of your brain that makes you feel good. Sometimes people confuse this good feeling with being right, or feeling that they have just agreed with an explanation that is truthful.

Self loathing is a strong hatred towards oneself.  You will also find with it a lot of internal thoughts of criticism and self judgment. Underneath that there will be a layer of beliefs relating to worthlessness.

Unconscious beliefs are agreements we have in our mind that we have no awareness we are holding. In spite of not having any intellectual knowledge of our own beliefs, they can still cause us to have emotional reactions and sabotaging behaviors.

When you take responsibility for your life, you also accept a power over it. Taking responsibility for the good stuff is easy, it is the not so good stuff that feels uncomfortable. But this is what you want the power to change.

Attempts to overcoming or at least reduce anxiety tend to fail. Perhaps our efforts fail because we are applying the wrong understanding, and therefore the wrong model for changing it.

When we act in the way of a neutral observer we notice different things. We notice when thoughts are arising from parts of our ego and the emotions they produce. We can also notice the idealized version in the background of our mind being used as comparison.

Once you realize that the mind that is distorting things is at the beginning of our perception and interpretation of events, you become aware that perceiving reality is much more difficult.

Sometimes people get poor results with affirmations. When they say positive things about themselves the dialogue of thoughts in their head pushes back with harsh negative comments.

The hero's journey is the classic tale often told through movies and stories going back to The Odyssey by Homer and many modern versions. It's appeal is that it represents our journey to create peace and happiness within our self and our own mind.

What does resistance look like and how do you navigate around it to make changes in your self? Jamie is one of the most persistent people at doing personal change work that I know. She also resists change, happiness and unconditional love more than just about anyone I know.

Attempts to develop confidence often fail because they revolve around projecting a positive self image or achieving success. Unfortunately these two things don't eliminate other beliefs causing feelings of insecurity.

To effectively change the thoughts and beliefs we beat our self up with it is important to look at the problem differently. That's what I do in this episode on what specifically happens when you are "beating yourself up".

This simple meditation lets anyone begin to enter into a state of mindfulness using a very common sense practical approach. What our mind construes as a deeply mystical thing like meditation doesn't have to be so esoteric.

Understanding how your mind creates emotional reactions is key to making personal change. This understanding of the mind is done through mindfulness, also know as Self Awareness.

A belief begins as a conceptual idea in our mind. Then our imagination turns it into something like a dream, or virtual reality. A belief, particularly a false belief, has the capacity to create an illusion in our imagination that seems like reality.

David served in the Army and National Guard. After responding to the World Trade Center and Afghanistan he came home and discovered that his emotional reactions were out of control and inappropriate. In this interview he shares how the Self Mastery course has helped him.

Even the basic building blocks of language such as words can be distorted and made confusing by how the mind alters their meaning when we are not aware.

I don't think we should just manage our anger. I believe in eliminating anger. Trying to control triggers, circumstances, and other people so we don't become angry is too much work.

At the core of sexual performance anxiety are fear of failure, rejection from our partner and self rejection. These expressions take place in our mind and affect our emotions.

Carolyn comes to a seven day intensive and discovers what it is like to shed fear based self judgments from her childhood and embrace the experience of unconditional love. It's no longer an intellectual idea that she reads about in books. It is a tangible way of living life that is now a very real possibility for her life.

Careful observation reveals that  ideas, thoughts, and beliefs behave as if they are alive in the mind. When ideas grow and link together with other ideas they become big stories and can have multiple points of view and tangents.

Sometimes it helps to take a step back and have a sense of humor about the process of overcoming fears, identifying and changing core beliefs.

An interview with Miguel Ruiz about his book that is written with his son Jose Ruiz. We also talk about how the belief system creates a virtual reality, how we distort love, how to use doubt to question your beliefs and other things.