David Bayer: I think we all go through cycles in our personal growth. There was a period of time where I had literally read all the books I'd gone to, all the events I had done, all the tools. I went down the rabbit trail and I was still feeling stuck in personal growth. It got to a point where I was like, I just suck at my own personal growth and I'm never going to get to the other side of this. I understood the philosophies, but I was experiencing so much stress, so much overwhelm, still comparing myself to other people, feeling not good enough, that I was like, I just think I'm fundamentally broken. But you know, when you stay in the game long enough, you see some things. And I found these three really powerful distinctions, potent tools that literally changed the game for me. They took this complicated industry of self help and literally distilled it down into one thing that I could focus on. And when I got clear on that, that's when everything changed. Welcome to A Changed Mind. A journey into the topics that matter to you most. From the neuroscience and spirituality of mindset and personal growth to groundbreaking strategies for health, wealth and relationship. To open and honest conversations about pressing global issues such as the environment, censorship, corporate capture and democracy. Each and every episode reminds us of the certainty of the goodness of the future and provides the teachings, tools and timeless wisdom inspiring you to create real, lasting change in your life and in the world. If you've been desiring A sanctuary for your spirit. A place to go to tune out the distraction, negativity and doom and gloom so that you can tap into the deep power, the vibrancy, and the potential you have inside. You're in the right place. Welcome to A Changed Mind. Hey guys, welcome back. It's David here with another episode of A Changed Mind. A sanctuary for your spirit. A place where each and every episode I remind you of the certainty of the goodness of the future. Man, I'm so excited for today's conversation. Today I'm going to be sharing with you three really potent tools that transformed my experience of self help and personal growth. They literally helped me close the gap between where I was reading all the books, going to all the events, doing all the work, and where I am today, which is by no means perfect. It doesn't mean that I don't have limiting beliefs or suffering thoughts. But I love my life today. I'm creating powerfully, I'm creating intentionally. And I really feel like I've realized the promise of personal growth. And that promise is that we will experience peace and joy and happiness on a somewhat regular basis and that we can actually materialize into our reality the visions that we have, the dreams that we have. But there was a time where I really, really felt stuck and that I sucked at my own personal growth. And I'm going to tell you a quick When I got into personal growth, it was not something that I had pursued. It was something I was forced into. Because one day, really, one long binge drinking, binge drugging, and binge sexing weekend, I woke up on a Monday and realized that I was an addict and I needed to do something because my life had become unmanageable. And so my foray into self help was actually the rooms of Alcoholics Anonymous. And more specifically, it wasn't aa, it was saa, which is Sex Addicts Anonymous. And sex addiction was really the thing that I struggled with the most. Most pornography was super accessible. When I wanted to stop drinking, I just didn't go to the bars anymore. When I wanted to stop drugging, I just stopped calling my pot dealer. And. But when I wanted to stop sexing, it was very, very difficult. My sponsor had a very graphic way of articulating the difference between sex addiction and all the other addictions. He said, well, sex addiction is like having the pipe between your legs and walking around with it all the time. It's like you're walking around with the drug all the time. And one of the interesting things about sex addiction is that you can just fantasize and continue to support parts of your brain that are driving your addiction through fantasy, because your brain doesn't know the difference between imagination and reality. And so I started going into these rooms and churches and schools that were donated and getting together with 40, 50 other people who were really living in like a secret society of addiction, especially sex addiction. It's a thing that a lot of people don't talk about. There's a lot of taboo around it. But these were all regular people in the sense that they were doctors and moms and lawyers and politicians and entrepreneurs. But they were different in the sense sense that as I started working my program in the 12 Steps of Sex Addicts Anonymous, I started becoming really, really aware of my thinking. Like, it was such a great way for me to get into this conversation around self awareness and transforming my belief systems, because I had to constantly monitor my thinking. Because if I didn't, within a couple of minutes, my mind would suggest this idea that I should open up my computer and look at some naked women and I would do it. And so I became very Very vigilant around my mind. And at about the same time that I got some. So under my belt, one of my employees, I was running a business at that time. I had about 30 employees put a book on my desk for me to read. And it was a book called Kingdom Principles by Miles Monroe. And I read this book cover to cover, and it was really interesting because Miles Monroe was talking about the teachings of Christ. And a lot of the principles were the same as what Bill W. Who was the founder of Alcoholics Anonymous, put into the 12 steps of alcoholics Anonymous. It was really like a way of living and a way of doing a daily inventory and purging yourself of. In Christian doctrine, it would be like evil thoughts or thoughts of the enemy. And in the language if Bill W. And Alcoholics Anonymous, it would be like limiting beliefs and unprocessed trauma. And so I started to become really, really curious. And I was taking a trip. I had to go raise some more money from investors, and I. I went to a bookstore. And I don't know if you've ever gone into a bookstore and, like, a book decides it's going to have a relationship with you. It's like calling to you from the shelf, like, grab me, read me. So there was this book. I wasn't an avid reader at that time, but I grabbed this book off the shelf, and it was a book called Awakening the Buddha within by this guy, Lama Surya Das. And on the back of the book, it had these four statements. It said, look, life is full of suffering. The suffering is going to happen to you. There's a way out of the suffering. And the way out of the suffering is the Eightfold path of virtue. And what I was reading was the four noble truths of Buddhism. And I was like, man, this is really resonant with everything that I read in this book. Kingdom Principles by Myles Monroe. It's very, very similar in concept to what I was learning in the 12 steps. I got on the airplane. I read this book back to back, and I was like, wow, Buddhism is not that much different in philosophy. There's a big difference between a savior and Christianity. But philosophically, a lot of the tenets were the same and very similar to the 12 steps of alcoholics Anonymous. And I dug Buddhism because Buddha broke it down into eight steps. Bill W. Took him 12. So I'm like, bigger, better, faster. And so I think I was officially in personal growth at that time. And so I started reading all the books. Eventually I found this little book called Think and Grow Rich by Napoleon Hill, where Napoleon studied the most successful people in the history of the world and came up with 13 principles that he saw them all implementing to create powerfully in their business, businesses and lives. But the one kind of cohesive conclusion that he came to was that thoughts are things and they create our reality. And so I started reading books around thought, vibration and energy. And then I had an opportunity to go to Tony Robbins, Unleash the Power Within. And then I went to the Landmark Forum and I did the Landmark Advanced series. And then I started studying spirituality. I found this book called the Autobiography of a Yogi. And by the way, if any of these resonate with you or you've been on this journey with me, leave me a comment if you're following on YouTube, watching the episode on YouTube. But Autobiography of a Yogi was a game changing me because it combined Hinduism with Christianity and science and science of mind. So I'm going to the events, I'm reading all these books, and there are these moments where I feel better. I start to become aware of my limiting beliefs and I see for a moment they're not true. Especially when I was at an event like Tony Robbins. It's like he keeps you in state for like four days straight. You're jumping up and down, you're screaming. You know, you don't have time for your limiting beliefs when you're doing that. But then you go home. And my experience was that I had like a personal development hangover. It was like, what the hell just happened? Like, I was so excited. Everything was possible. I'm scre screaming out, I am a gladiator. And then I go home and I feel even worse than I did before I went to the event. I know all this information around self help, but I'm still comparing myself to other people as I'm seeing their pictures on Facebook. I'm still indecisive around the things that I need to make decisions around. I'm still feeling like I'm not as good as I should be. I'm still feeling overwhelmed and stressed and like there's not enough time. Like, what the hell is wrong with me? So I started dating my wife at this time and I dragged her into this journey of personal growth where I started listening to Abraham Hicks. And then I went to an Abraham Hicks event. It's this woman, Esther Hicks, who channels Abraham, which is this infinite intelligence that talks about vibration and the law of attraction. I ended up going to Sedona and meditating on red rocks for weeks on end. I remember when I was in Sedona. I was so desperate because it's like I'm trying to find a way to get out of my personal suffering. And Sedona is a nice place, I guess, but I had this idea. Someone told me, like, find a vortex and it'll like, clean the energy out of you. And someone else told me, like, you maybe there's some, like, evil energy inside of you that's continually caused you to feel depressed and frustrated and hopeless. Go into a crystal. Crystal shop and find a crystal. So I roll into this crystal shop in Sedona and there's a young girl behind the counter and I'm like, hey, do you have like a crystal for somebody who sucks at self help? And she said, are you here this weekend to see the Arawakan and Kogi Indians? And I'm like, what are the Arawakan and Kogi Indians? She said, this was back in 2012, remember the world was going to end. And so she said, oh, they're an ancient indigenous people. It's their first time traveling out of the Amazon and they're going to be sharing with people this weekend, like, what's coming up with this big shift in consciousness and the end of the world. And I'm like, my God, I've lost, like, what am I doing in this deadbeat town dragging my poor girlfriend there, like, in a crystal shop. But I was so desperate. I stared back at the girl and I was like, yes, I'm here for the Indians. Tell me where they are. So literally, I spend the whole weekend in the Sedona High School gymnasium with the Arawakan and Kogi Indians and their translators. Was an interesting conversation, but it definitely wasn't the breakthrough that was bringing me to peace and serenity. And then we went to India. We spent three weeks, like, meditating and doing breath work and learning. And then like a four star ashram in India, we ended up going to Tibet. And I just kept going deeper and deeper and deeper down this rabbit hole, getting into sacred geometry and astrology and astronomy and getting into numerology. And then eventually you start to search for enough of these things on Google and then you get on YouTube and it starts suggesting these videos. And next thing I know, I'm going down like the quantum rabbit trail and trying to understand quantum theory and consciousness theory.

And so I spent like 10 years going down this rabbit trail. And it's not that there weren't incremental improvements in my mind there were, but there was still a lot of, like, unprocessed belief systems and programs that I didn't know how to get rid of. And I think that personal growth. And again, you tell me if you relate to this experience or not. But personal growth is, like, so vast and so expansive. Like, you can get into things like muscle testing and somatic release and how the body keeps score and epigenetic expression and processing trauma. And it's like there's so many directions that you can go in, and there's so many teachers out there that that can become a new addiction. And so for me, personal growth was becoming an addiction. And I had to step back and be like, okay, hold on a minute, Dave, you're not broken. There's something that you want. You want more peace. You want more clarity, you want greater understanding, and most importantly, you want more integration. I wanted to be able to embody what I was learning. I didn't want to just understand how to achieve peace. I wanted to experience peace. It was a big difference. I didn't want to just understand that I could attract more money and prosperity and abundance into my life. I wanted more money and prosperity and abundance in my life. So the three distinctions that I'm going to share with you are going to start to structure out this conversation in a way that I believe is going to give you more access to your next level of growth. Wherever you are right now, you might be at the David awakening, the Buddha within stage, where you're just starting to read the books. You might be at the David Abraham Hicks stage, where you're going to the events and you're getting into vibration and law of Attraction. You might be studying consciousness theory. You might be, you know, somebody who's even a teacher of somatic work or trauma healing. But, you know, there's a gap right now between everything that you know and everything that you're experiencing. And so I'm going to share these three really potent distinctions with you. And the first one is really understanding what personal growth is and defining it in a way that makes it accessible for us. I look at personal growth today, and it's changed over time. I look at personal growth or mindset at its core as downregulating the nervous system. So it's really about learning how to more consistently operate from the parasympathetic expression of your nervous system, which is rest and relaxation, instead of the sympathetic expression of our nervous system, which is the fight, flight, or freeze. And as human beings, as a species, our tendency is to operate from sympathetic from fight, flight, or freeze. And it's super functional. It's allowed us to survive and we're constantly thinking about survival. We're having fear based thoughts, we're very vigilant, we're watching for any threats. But those threats don't exist anymore like they used to. Those threats existed at a very fundamental level, like at a basic needs level. Like you might be eaten by an animal or attacked or killed by another tribe at any moment. We were just living in survival all the time, just like the animals out there in the natural. But that's not our reality anymore.

So I remember distinctly when Carol and I, I don't know why I have this memory, but my wife and I, she was my girlfriend at the time, were at a restaurant and I didn't have that much money in my bank account. And I'm looking at the prices of the entrees on the menu and I'm just praying that she doesn't order something expensive or God forbid, also want like a glass of wine. And so here I am staring at a menu in a restaurant in downtown Orlando, moving into fight or flight. Like that's not how the system is meant to function. But what's happening is we've advanced so much in civilization over the last few thousand years, but the nervous system is the same. And so this work that we're doing in personal growth is about downregulating the nervous system. And so why is that important to understand? Because if you understand that, that's one of just a couple of root causes of what we're focused around now. You can engage in practices that downregulate the nervous system. So you can engage in meditation, you can engage in things like cold plunging or hot saunas or yoga pract. It's like, okay, I know that one of the things I'm focusing on right now is downregulating my nervous system. You could look at what upregulates your nervous system, like toxification or foods, or you could change your diet, you could detoxify your cells, you could go through an intracellular detoxification program because that's upregulating your nervous system. And so it's important to know what game we're playing. And in our work, we break down these two states of being, the parasympathetic and sympathetic expression of the nervous system into what we call powerful states and primal states. And the, the ability to notice what state of being you're in. And what's really nice about this classification system is it's binary. It's just two states of being. It gives you an indicator as to what you need to do. Next, if you're in a powerful state and you feel good, by all means, continue on with your life. The thoughts that you're having in that moment are creating a future that you desire. You're in alignment, you're vibrational, you're resonant, you're coherent. We want to operate from a powerful state. When you're in a primal state, when you're in a state like stress, anxiety, overwhelm, jealousy, anger, boredom, the behaviors that are associated that are things like indecision, self sabotage, procrastination, worry, depression, hopelessness, anxiety. When you're in a primal state, it's important that you stop whatever you're doing. And to the best of your ability, use tools that you have access to to get back into a powerful state of being. Because everything that you want to create is going to come from a powerful state. See, when you're in a powerful state of being, you're in a state that has the capacity to access intelligence beyond yourself. Intuition, inspiration. That's where you have hunches. That's the state of being where you're present. You're able to show up powerfully in your relationships or your business or your career. That's the state of being where healing exists. When you're in a powerful state or the parasympathetic expression of your nervous system, your body immediately engages in reestablishing homeostasis. No matter what you're experiencing. Chronic health problem, autoimmune inflammation. The reason why we see such an explosion of these disease states is because we spend so much time in a primal state. So when we're in a primal state, we want to notice it, we want to acknowledge it. And it's really easy. Do I feel good or do I feel bad? If I feel bad, I'm in a primal state. That means my nervous system is upregulated and I want to do something right now or within the next couple of hours or sometime today to support my down regulation. That becomes your practice. That practice is as important as any other practice you could have, if not more so. It's more important than going to the gym. It's more important than, frankly, what you put in your body and what you eat. This is a really important practice that you just start to notice. Am I in a powerful state or a primal state? Because every time you notice that you're in a primal state, and sometimes just noticing it begins to downregulate. Oh, I'm stressed. Okay, let me take a couple of breaths. Let me calm down. Let me begin to Downregulate. Every time you do that, you increase the capacity of the nervous system to downregulate. You start to retrain your nervous system into a downregulated or parasympathetic state. And I haven't heard anybody else talk about this in this way, but I believe that that practice is actually the evolution of our species. So I think we're going through a speciation event right now. Now, where there are two types of nervous systems that are becoming more predominant. There are some people in the world that are activating even more and more and more their sympathetic nervous system. They're in more fear and more flight and more fright than ever before. And there are systems that emerge that actually perpetuate that fear, whether it's media systems or financial systems or totalitarian systems or corporate capture, or make no mistake, like, fear is intentionally being used to keep us in a fearful state, because that's the way that the people who have controlled power and money and resources around the world maintain that control. So you have to realize that you can be part of the increasing fear. Or there's another group of people right now that are having. In New Age, it's referred to as like, a spiritual awakening. And so those are people who, regardless of their external circumstances and situations, are learning how to downregulate their nervous system. They're spending more time in a parasympathetic practice. And so normally when there's a speciation event, we can see, like, there's a bird, and it diverges into the bird with the longer beak and the bird with the shorter beak, and we can see it. What's really interesting here is that this isn't a visible evolution or speciation event, but it's actually taking place. And so a really powerful spiritual being is evolving. Some people refer to this as, like a return of Christ consciousness or a great awakening that's taking place. Some people move into conspiracy theories, or maybe they're not conspiracy theories, but just what may seem like wild theories of, like, this is the first emergence of the extraterrestrial right is the spiritual being. Because when you're operating from a powerful state, you start to gain access to supernatural capabilities. And it goes back to a lot of these books that really impacted me, from Autobiography of a Yogi with Paramahansa Yogananda to Napoleon Hill's Think and Grow Rich to even really reading the Autobiography of Gandhi. You look at people who have achieved greatness and perform supernatural deeds. And certainly this is what the Bible is about and other scriptures are about. But predominantly the Bible, it's about witnessing supernatural capabilities by people who are able to align themselves in this way. And this is an alignment of the nervous system. It's a downregulation of our nervous system. So in this sense, personal development is a neurological game. It's a neurological practice of learning how to let go when your system gets upregulated. And so what are you letting go of? Well, the upregulation is normally a result of a program that becomes activated. It's a habit in the nervous system. It's a habit in the brain that is expressing a program. What people would call a limiting belief or an unprocessed or unmetabolized trauma. The program becomes active, and the program is actually what's moving you into a powerful or a primal state. See, you're always in one state of being or the other. You're either in a powerful state or a primal state. You can check in with yourself right now, like, how do you feel? Good or bad, Powerful state or a primal state. And you're never in two states of being at the same time. You're not like in fight orf flight and in rest and relaxation at the same time. And what's really important to understand is not only are you only in one state of being at a time, and you're always in one state of being or the other. But what determines the state of being that you're in are the thoughts that you're having. So it's not the experience, it's not that you got fired from your job that's causing you to move into a primal state. It's the meaning or the thinking that you. You have about losing your job. Oh, I'm never going to find another job. I'm not going to be able to pay my bills. What am I going to do? I'm going to end up living under a bridge. They shouldn't have fired me. It's all those thoughts that are determining what state of your nervous system is active. And so if you can change your thoughts, you can change what state of being you're in. So it's very important for us to approach this change from a psychological perspective. And that is really the first of the three kind of potent pillars that I'm going to share with you, is that you can play the game of personal growth, which is a downregulation of your nervous system, by playing the psychological game, by starting to become aware that the only thing that's moving you into a primal state, which is really the only problem is your own thinking and that what's triggering it is some form of limiting belief or a story or a trauma. And we've got tons and tons. I've recorded tons of episodes on this channel with all kinds of tools to work with the information that's coming up to work with the psychological phenomenon that is occurring in the moment. The program I'm not good enough. It's never going to work out for me. They shouldn't have said that to me. Money's hard to make any of the limiting beliefs or programs that we learned when we were children. But this upregulation is occurring at a psychological level. Now this can also happen at an emotional level because just like you've got these programs or habits of thought because the thought then transmits its energy through the nervous system, because that's what happens. There's an electrical activation in your brain which represents the activation of this program in response to what's happening. Oh, I hope Carol doesn't order something in the menu. I don't have enough money in my bank account. What's wrong with me? How come other people have more money than I do? I'm never going to get out of financial insecurity. That's a psychological phenomenon. It's an electrical activation in the brain. But the way the human being operating system works is that electricity is then transmitted and translated through the nervous system. And you experience that thought as an emotion. And so when you're thinking the same thoughts over time, you start to experience the same emotions over time. And over time, the nervous system actually becomes pre programmed. It's like having a preset button on your radio. And so there's probably five to seven core emotions that you experience on a regular basis that you don't desire. Anxiety, overwhelm, feeling less than. And these are preset buttons. And so, so this can happen at an emotional level as well too. And so what do we do in order to short circuit or habit change when this phenomenon is occurring, you're just going through your day and then all of a sudden you have a thought or you have an experience and it moves you into a primal state. And so now you're thinking these thoughts that don't feel good and you're feeling these emotions that don't feel good. And so now you're not in a resourceful place to be able to create or materialize or manifest the vision you have for your life. One of the distinctions that I realized this actually came as I was building, building my coaching business and starting to have coaching conversations. We got to a point between me and my coaches where we had had over 10,000 coaching conversations. That's a lot of data. And what we started seeing was the same pattern showing up every time. We would work with people on their limiting beliefs, and when they were entangled with a limiting belief, they'd be in a primal state. And then using the tools that we teach, in particular, a phenomenal tool that I've talked about on other episodes called the Decision Matrix. And if you want, you can jump on over to my website and get my free ebook where I walk you through the Decision Matrix. But we were working the matrix with all of our clients. And what we found is that as we work the Decision Matrix, they'd transform their limiting belief. And they would say, oh, wow, I can see that the limiting belief was never true, and they would shift into a powerful state. And so when we saw this enough times, literally thousands of times, a new distinction emerged, which was that anytime you're entangled with a thought or a limiting belief, that doesn't feel good, meaning it moves you into a primal state. What we found 100% of the time was that thought wasn't true. This is really interesting. Like, anytime you move into a primal state, it's caused by one thing and one thing only, which is your own thinking. And what I'm suggesting is the quality of that thinking is that 100% of the time, it's not true. And so when we realized this, this changed the game for us, because what we found was the fastest way to blow out a limiting belief was to see that the limiting belief was untrue. And so now we sort of had this North Star. It was like, well, what tools can we develop to help people see their limiting belief is untrue? Because when we can do that, it's like, boom. The thing just dissolves. And they move from a primal state back into a powerful. So what I want to share with you today is we're kind of piecing together this tapestry for you to excel to your next level of personal growth, is that you have to understand that all thoughts that don't feel good are untrue. And what's actually happening is there's a fundamental vibration in the universe of truth. Some cultures, they describe the sound of it as Om. Like monks would chant Om. What are they doing? They're chanting the cosmic vibration. Vibration. That cosmic vibration is the baseline truth. What that vibration also is is love. It's at a frequency of love. So there is this. And some people might describe this. Again, I Don't consider myself to be an expert in Christianity, but some people might consider this to be like the Holy Spirit. In the late 1800s, there were a group of kind of spiritual scientists out of the uk. They described it as the ether or the fabric, or it's described as the field. The Hindus described it as the Akasha. Also Plato and Aristotle referred to it as the fifth ele or the ether. And so it's this kind of invisible fabric or 360 degree field that surrounds us and that the material world actually operates on top of or emerges out of. And that field is highly intelligent and it's loving in its intention and focus and action. And so because we have free will and because all possibilities exist in our universe, we can actually imagine things or think things that aren't in alignment with this fundamental truth. Like things aren't going to work out for me or I'm not good enough, or there's not enough time. And they may seem true, but they aren't in alignment with a reality that is always operating for your greatest growth, your greatest prosperity and your greatest evolution. So life itself is always lifing to support you. In other words, God is always working to support you, even through the challenges. But when you have a thought about your life that's not in alignment with myth, well, life is always working for me, and I live in a universe or with a God of possibility. You're entangling and activating energy in your brain that is not in alignment with the field or the fundamental vibration of loving intelligence. So it's dissonant, it's not in harmony. And so this disharmony becomes transmitted from your brain into your nervous system and you feel that disharmony, you feel that dissonance in your body. And that's actually what a primal state is. So stress, anxiety, overwhelm, jealousy, anger.

These are all indications of untrue thoughts, misinterpretations of the present moment. It's pretty powerful, right? Anytime you're thinking something that doesn't feel good, it's not true. And so if you know that now, you can start to explore the thinking and go like, okay, well let me explore like how might this not be true? Or what is the opposite of this? Because if this isn't true, then the opposite of this must be true. And how is the opposite of this idea or thought that I'm having actually true? And you can start to this is our process. This is actually the decision matrix. So spoiler alert. But you can still go check it out and download the whole thing on my website@davidbear.com or go even deeper on my book if you want to pick it up off of Amazon. But this is the process of seeing your unintelligent thinking is unintelligent. And this is what we found to be the fastest way to actually transform your belief systems. And so you might say, but Dave, it's true that I lost my job. So how can you say that me saying to myself I lost my job and moving to a primal state is not true? And what I'm suggesting is it's not the thought that you lost your job that's moving you into a primal normal state. That's a fact. You lost your job. It's the meaning you're giving the experience of the job loss. I'm not going to be able to pay my bills. Well, in a universe of possibility with a loving infinite intelligence that's always working for you as long as you allow it, other ways and resources will show up for you to pay your bills. But if you're chanting or incanting or affirming this belief which isn't in alignment with the loving resourcefulness of the field itself or of God, then you're going to be entangling with a dissonant vibration and feeling that is a negative emotion in your body. So this is the process again, just taking us back through it. Number one, this is a game of a downregulation of the nervous system. Number two, what is up regulating it? It's our thoughts. What type of thoughts are up regulating our nervous system? Untrue thoughts. What's the fastest way to transform an untrue thought? Well, see, that untrue thought is untrue. How do you do that? Well, you have to know that anytime that you're thinking something that doesn't feel good, it's not true. And now you can start to explain, explore the thing. So second thing, and I mentioned this before, the habit of thought becomes a habit of emotion. And so now we have to work with the body. And so you have to have a practice for getting into your body and calming the body. And this is a recent practice for me because a lot of my work has been at a psychological or intellectual level. Like, I don't know about you, but for me, sometimes I feel like I'm living in the space above my head. It's like I'm walking on the street and a lot of times I'm not even paying attention to what I'm seeing or I'm walking through my house and I'M not even present to the experience of like me going through my home. I'm up in this like mental space. And if you live in that mental space, it's a real disconnection from the body. And we can't work with the body to retrain the body's habit of emotion if we're not connected to it. Many, many, many, many people, especially in western society, are completely disconnected from their body. And again, I think that's another reason why the body is energy deficient, why we experience inflammation and autoimmune and chronic health chall because the body is not being experienced with the soul. The soul is living up in this mental plane. And so the body begins to deteriorate and respond accordingly with dis ease or disease. And at the same time, because of stressful thoughts or unintelligent thinking that move us into a primal state, we're conditioning the body for operating from fight or flight. And it's not designed to do that. I read some statistic, I don't remember what it is. I mean, you can go find out from some expert on Diary of a CEO, But I, I heard some experts say something like, your body's not meant to be fight or flight for like more than 14 seconds at a time. But most of us are living in fight or flight like all day long. In fact, if you think about it like, just come up with a number for yourself right now. If you were to add up all the time that you are feeling stress or anxious or worried, or comparing yourself to other people or feeling like you're not as far along as you should be, you could type this in the comment box. If you're joining on YouTube, just come up with this number. If you're listening on the audio platforms for yourself, comparing yourself to other people in indecision, procrastination, beating yourself up, judging yourself, judging other people, thinking that someone else shouldn't have done something or they should have done something, or at any time entangled with that negative inner critic in your head. How many hours a day on average do you think you spend in a primal state? Like, if it's true that we're only Just think about that number, what's the number? You got it. It's a number. For me, it was like all my waking hours before I got into recovery. And when I got stuck in personal growth, it was still something like half my time, like eight hours a day. That's not good for the body. It's not good for anything that you're wanting to create. So this is really cool though, because now we can look at as root cause. You're wanting to make more money, you're wanting to have better relationship, you're wanting to have more peace. You want to be more spiritual, connected, you want to grow your business. Really at the root cause level, it's this amount of time that we spend in a primal state. And what we're saying is you can get out of a primal state by looking at your thinking and seeing your unintelligent thinking is unintelligent. That's a practice. And then number two, we need to start working with the body. Because what we've been entertaining in the mind is inhabiting in the body. And so I've developed a practice recently of just slowing things down. Because the problem is not anything that's showing up in my life. The problem is not that a marketing campaign doesn't go well. The problem is not that I have an argument with Carol. The problem is not that I don't have time to get all the things that I planned on getting done because I now have a two year old who I adore and I allocate some of my daily time to him. You know, the problem is not some of the health challenges that I've been having. Those things aren't the problem. The problem is the speed of the mind. It's the speed that those things trigger. Do you get me? Like, just check in with yourself for a minute. Like, for most of us, we become so overdeveloped mentally. And the mind is speed. The heart and the body are slow. The mind is actually a tool for working with information that already exists. The heart and the body are the tool for accessing information that is new. And so we want to use both. But the mind has become so overdeveloped and we're living in this speed. And then of course, life doesn't support the downregulation of our nervous system or the slowing or the descending back down into the body because everything's so fast. Like a lot of these podcasts, people listen to it like 1.5 times speed or 2 times speed, and that's fine, but it's speed. I communicate with my team through a walkie talkie WhatsApp tool called Voxer. And I listen to it on two times or three times speed. Everything is fast. Like, think about just as you're flipping through Instagram and you're looking at shorts, things are fast. And so there's the speed that's taking place and there's an opportunity to get into a practice to support your psychological practice of a body practice. And so my practice is I notice the speed and it's cool because. Because I can. It's so simple for me now I either notice that I moved into a primal state, meaning I don't feel good, or I noticed the speed and it's really one and the same thing because the speed doesn't feel good either. And so I stop whatever I'm doing and I put my hand on my chest over my heart. This is really important because what we're trying to do is bring our presence back down into the body out of the mental space. We're trying to downregulate the nervous system. We're also trying to activate the energetic centers of our body, in the middle of which is the heart center or the heart chakra. And this is where intuition comes through. This is where inspiration comes through. This is where you actually decide to do things that seem completely unrelated to the outcomes that you're trying to produce, but they lead you to coincidences and synchronicities that end up producing the outcome. Like you look backwards and you're like, that's the craziest shit. Because I was able to produce this result, but not through my plan, but through this like God's plan or divine plan or universe plan that has unfolded that's coming through this energetic center of your heart. That's where the information's coming through. So I put my hand on my heart and I'm able to close my eyes and actually feel the energy there. And it's a warmth. And you can do this after the episode. You can do it with me now. But it only takes a second to put your hand over your heart. Withdraw your senses from the external world by closing your eyes. Bring your awareness and your attention to your heart center and feel that energy. And notice that that energy is just a subtle warmth because again, the heart and the body are warm, the mind is cold, the mind is like a machine. And so this is a great practice to engage in to support this root cause practice of downregulating your nervous system. Yes, we're doing the psychological work and we're seeing our unintelligent thinking is unintelligent. But we're also doing the body work. And what's great about this practice, even if you think that the heart chakra is a bunch of woo woo, and this idea that I'm sharing with you, that information and intuition come through the body and the heart, not the mind at the mind uses the information that comes through and processes it so that it can be practically applied in our third dimensional manifested reality. You're like, okay, that's all a bunch of bs. Okay, fine. But just fundamentally, by engaging in this practice for a minute or two, you're doing a nervous system habit break. Because if you don't do this, you're going to keep doing what you've normally done, which is the speed. If you don't do this, you're going to continue to engage in the upregulated nervous system and it'll maintain its upregulation until some other point in time, probably when you just get burned out and you go to sleep. But this is a habit break. And so as you break the habit of the upregulated nervous system you have, it inclines your nervous system to downregulate more frequently and more easily because that's what this in practice is around personal growth. So just at a fundamental level, it's basic physiology tells us that this is an effective practice for working with the body. And then the third practice that I would piece together into this lens through which you're going to access your next level of personal growth and really integrate every. Everything that you've been learning is a spiritual practice. So we've got a psychological practice, we've got a in the mind, we've got an emotional practice, in the body, and we've got a spiritual practice. And the spiritual practice is actually, I would almost look at it as not mind or body, but kind of everywhere, external and internal. It's like more of a practice of essence. And this is a practice and why I talked about in other episodes where a personal relationship with your higher power is so important because in order to relax the system, whether you're taking the psychological or emotional approach, I think it's fundamental to believe that there is a power greater than you that is working on an ongoing basis that has infinite resources and infinite possibilities supporting you towards your greatest growth, your greatest prosperity and your greatest evolution. Like if you don't believe that, if you don't believe that there's a loving intelligence supporting you personally and paying attention to you, I think it's very difficult to let go psychologically or emotionally. It wouldn't make sense. But that's the difference between the primal nervous system, an ancient man, and a powerful state of being and an evolved human being. An evolved human being is a spiritual human being because it's allowed spirit to take hold in every aspect of that organism's life. And so what does that mean? Well, in my 12 step recovery, we had A serenity prayer that we would say at the end of almost every meeting, which was, God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the, the difference. So this is the idea of surrender or letting go and letting God. Well, you can't let go and let God if there is no God. And I believe a personal relationship with God is important. I also believe that a personal relationship with Christ is important. That's something I've been exploring in my own life. But at least start off with a relationship with a higher power, whatever that is for you. That's what allows pretty much anybody who gets into 12 step recovery to start building a relationship with the God of their own understanding is because there doesn't have to be any initially, any requirements, requirements on it could be nature, could be the universe, whatever it is for you, could be the field, could be love, could be intelligence, could be God, Jesus, Allah. Again, I think the further you go into this more religious conversation, there are advantages to the Christ path and loving path of devotion, of right Christianity. I think it gives you access to even more tools in the Savior of Christ. But I don't feel like I'm an expert to talk on that yet because that's part of my own personal journey. I do have a couple of other episodes where I talk about why a personal relationship, relationship with a higher power is important and what I think the role of Jesus is, at least in my life at this point. But this third pillar of a spiritual approach to downregulating the nervous system requires that you believe that you're taken care of, requires that you believe that even though you can't see it, help is on the way, solutions are on the way. That allows you to believe that when you're fighting a battle that you have not been able to win, that you can stand down because it's the Lord's battle to fight. And if you're willing to engage in that which is called faith, then miracles begin to occur in your life. And so this is important. Einstein said the most important decision you make is whether you live in a friendly or hostile universe. So he's having the same conversation that we're having without putting a label on it, like God or Spirit or Jesus. But it's very important to have this third pillar, the spiritual pillar, and this practice of faith. And so this practice of faith, I think reaches people in a lot of different ways. I think it's a byproduct of the psychological and emotional practices that we're speaking about. Because what I found was that as I started to clean up my mind and as I started to operate more within my body and have a living presence from my body, what I naturally found in this new space that was created was the beginnings of a spiritual relationship and a relationship with the God of my own understanding. And so, again, you can achieve this through meditation. I have an episode on what I call communion journaling where I wake up in the morning and I write to my divine Father and I express my gratitudes and I share my desires and I pray for other people. And I think fellowship is a really important part of this because spirituality is a thing that you can do on your own. Personal growth is a thing that you can do on your own. But my experience is it's not a do it yourself project. There's anything that I've ever wanted to get good at, I had to hang out and be around other people who are focused on getting good at it at the same time. So I think that's another thing that can be very, very helpful is that we tend to do personal growth on our own. But that's one of the reasons why I created this community. It's one of the reasons why we do our annual event, which, by the way, is coming up in March here, if you want to check it out. Powerfullivingexperience.com Would love to have you in the community with a thousand other people. But the communal practices are very, very important. And so if you don't have a spiritual practice, but you want a spiritual practice, the beautiful thing is that you can actually ask spirit to guide you in your practice. Because there's this adage in scripture which is ask and we shall receive. And so if you have clarity based on this conversation that you want to have a more spiritual based life and be in spiritual community and be in spiritual practice, just ask. That's actually how my writing practice came to me. I just decided that I wanted to have a deeper personal relationship with the God of my own understanding. And through a series of meditation and breath practices, I got really clear that if I wake up in the morning and I start journaling, that that relationship will be there waiting for me. And sure enough, it was. Again, you can check out my episode on my communal journaling practice if that's something you're interested in hearing more about. But this is the lens through which I'm operating my personal development program. For me right now, it's next level from where I was in the books and the events and feeling like I was broken. I don't feel like I'm broken anymore. That doesn't mean that I'm not challenged. But I understand the game. I know the rules of the game. I know how to get on the court. And that the game that I'm playing is a downregulation of my nervous system. It's an evolution of who I that there are three areas that I can play this game. I can play the game in my mind and play the psychological, take the psychological approach. I can play the game in my body and take the emotional approach. And I can play the game everywhere and take the spiritual approach. And to me, just being aware of this and practicing it as much as I can and as best as I can, being willing to do it imperfectly and forgetting and getting stuck and getting unstuck, that's part of the practice. Like every time you forget and then you remember, you're strengthening your remember remembering muscle. Every time you get stuck and you get unstuck, you're getting better at getting unstuck. And so I don't think the objective is to like never be in a primal state again or never suffer again. It's just to be in the practice as best as we can. And to me, this is a living meditation. So I have a meditation practice where I close my eyes and I do a variety of different meditations, but this is a living meditation. This is like taking my spiritual practice on the road with me every single day in my business, in my relationship, in my health, in my finances. That's the beautiful thing about life is it just it presents so much contrast and contracted experiences that we don't expect. But that affords us an opportunity to really develop mastery around what matters most, which is who we're becoming. So I hope you love this episode as much as I love sharing it with you and you've got some takeaways. This might be a go. Listen to it again because there are some writer downers in there. But it was a lot of information. And as I mentioned before, we've got our live event coming up. You can check that out. There's a link in the show notes. You can jump on over to davidbear.com grab my free ebook, get on our newsletter. You can hover over to Amazon, grab my book, go Deeper with me through a changed mind. And if you're listening on the audio platforms, do me a favor. If you love this episode, number one, share it with someone. Number two, subscribe. And number three, leave me a rating and review and Same Thing on YouTube. Leave me a comment, Leave me a question. Share with me a little bit about your journey. I want to know this is a thing that we're doing together and subscribe if you haven't yet. And I love you very much. Thank you for the opportunity. It's an honor and a blessing to have spent these 50 minutes with you here today and I will see you in the next episode. Hey, it's David. One more thing. If you want to go even deeper on everything we've talked about on today's episode, don't forget to jump over to www.DavidBear.com. you can find the link in the show notes and subscribe to our newsletter. A couple of times a week. I'm going to be sending you the latest episodes that we've released, along with additional free trainings. You'll get immediate access to my free Mind Hack ebook and go even deeper into all the tools, the technology, the frameworks that have helped tens of thousands of people establish a changed mind. Don't forget to jump on over to the site and I will see you in the next episode.