The Confusion Experiment: Recent Episodes
theconfusionexperiment
This show is for everyone who doesn't want to go "back to normal" but rather wants to create a new normal, a better way of living. Every week, we'll unpack confusion so we can love what it offers us, dismantle our minds so we can live more from our hearts and practice being comfortable in the discomfort of not knowing. Time to get real.
This week, I'm sharing with you the Winter Solstice Special from my other podcast, The Camille Conte Show. It's a lovely hour of music, poetry and history. May you take a moment today to be still, appreciate the beauty of the seasons, the turning of the wheel as the Pagans say, and perform some personal ritual or ceremony that connects you to your Sacred Self. Peace, CC
We've got a new moon coupled with a full solar eclipse today, yet another celestial event happening in what is being named "A Divine December." But what does it all mean to us as we go about our lives during these times of tremendous Change? I've spent all day steeping myself in the silence so I could feel into what this opportunity is all about. Turns out, it's a gift that we're being given from Life itself. In this episode, I explore the opportunity that is being presented to us this day, this month and how it is that we can receive what we have always been worthy of. I came to the microphone today lit up from deep within so what you're about to hear is a high vibration frequency sure to tune you up and turn you on to all that is being offered to us today. As the great song sings, "People get ready. There's a train comin' and you don't need no ticket. You just get on board!" Next stop: Freedom! Enjoy.
The deconstruction of the old world order. What does that mean for us if we were a part of that order?
How do we handle the complete falling away of the day-to-day structures that governed our sense of self and the life that we live?
How do we handle the assault on our senses as we are bombarded with betrayal, injustice, outrage, death, grief and loss?
When clinging to the old and denial of the new doesn't work, how do we adjust to change we didn't ask for?
How do we deal with our addiction and attachment to order and control when it falls away and we can't put Humpty Dumpty back together again?
How do we surrender to uncertainty?
How do we trust the unknown?
This week's episode touches on many of the uncertainties and questions that are overwhelming us as we continue to grapple with this pandemic. Enjoy
This week's show features the audio from a live stream talk I did Sunday for the Alaska Center for Spiritual Living, my spiritual home in Anchorage. Since we are all going through so much Change right now from significant personal changes as well as societal changes in attitudes, beliefs and values, the topic is ripe for discussion.
I offer some insight about what Change is and how we can look at it from a different perspective and when we do we are able to lighten our emotional relationship to what it is we're going through. Even if it's just for a few minutes, it's ok to step back from the pain, hurt, trauma and drama and get some relief. It's also ok to change our minds. In fact, the ability to change our minds about something is a sign of strength and courage. It shows that we are willing to revisit decisions when either we have changed or new information has arrived that changes our relationship to the situation.
Lastly, there are some tips and strategies that you can apply right now to bring about a peace of mind and heart that is much needed right now, the difference between habits and practices and a reminder that you have everything you need to meet this moment in your life and to deal with Change. A great episode to share with others. Enjoy.
There's much being said about COVID19 and on this week's episode I talk about what it's teaching me, you and us. How is it teaching us these lessons? By taking away from us the things we took for granted, the habits that have kept us numb and unconscious, the way of life that has run its course as the new design for living makes its case. The importance of flexibility, the value of contrast, the practice of detachment are all part of life's lesson plan for us.
COVID came shouting into our lives and screamed, "WAKE UP!" Wake up to your life! Wake up to your habits that kep you dependent on people, systems and structures outside of you and get familiar with the practices that turn you back to your own self, your own power and your own inner Intelligence.
COVID has forced us to feel the feelings we've spent a lot of money and time avoiding. Why? Because we don't know how to feel, we don't have enough practice simply being with our feelings without judgement. Also, we're afraid to feel these feelings because they've been avoided for so long they pack quite the punch and we're afraid we won't ever get out from underneath the mess of it all. And lastly, we don't know what to do when we meet ourselves in that silence when all of life as we know it has been snatched away without warning.
If we choose, though, to wake up and ask ourselves, "What is this teaching me? Why is this important for me to feel this feeling and understand how and when it came to be lodged in my heart? What is the lesson for me to learn? What am I clinging to that's making me suffer?" In this week's episode, we head into the laboratory of life with a willingness to change the way we look at things knowing that when we do, the things we look at will change. Enjoy.
Everything is upside down these days and very much like the storm that took down the 300 year old trees here in New Jersey, our lives have been uprooted. In this week's episode we talk honestly about the changes we are going through and the chaos that this massive change has brought with it. But in order to deal with the uncertainty of these times, we must begin to examine how our minds work so we know whether or not they're working for us or against us. Questioning what your mind presents to you as true is key if you want to reduce stress.
I also talk about the importance of self-compassion and give you an exercise that you can begin to use to bring some love to yourself as you navigate the new way without a map or instructions. And you can't talk about COVID and not talk about uncertainty. What we realize though is that if we spend too much time fearful and worried, we miss the gifts that uncertainty brings to us. Oftentimes, the answers are seedlings in the fertile soil of not knowing but it takes an understanding of what is really going on to see things differently.
Lastly, we touch on mindful endings and how COVID ripped a way of life right out of our hands. We didn't really have the chance to mindfully acknowledge what has ended. It's not too late to do just that which helps us better accept what is.
Remember to be aware of your breath, stay hydrated, exercise, play your favorite music, turn away from the news and get to know the Intelligence within you that's breathing you! This powerful essence is untouched by all the chaos and confusion and resides in a pure state of ease and grace. The more you tune into it, the more it tunes you! Enjoy.
Do you suffer from "decision paralysis?" I have and it's painful. It's that horrible feeling of being stuck, unable to move, afraid to make a choice. It's taken some practice but I have learned how to make decisions in a way that makes me feel better about myself and the decision itself. In fact, I've done so much work around this area of my life I've actually experienced a decision making me! In this week's episode, I talk about the many spokes in the modern day wheel of decision making. They include intuition, the heart and a willingness to change your mind. (What? I'm allowed to do that?!!)
We all have intution. As the great philosopher, Dr. Ernest Holmes said, "Intuition is not a product of the intellect...it is a thing in itself. Instinct is intuition acting unconsciously; intuition is instinct elevated ot the point of self-awareness. They are identical." But like any muscle, intuition must be strengthened and it can only be strengthened when we acknowledge it, welcome it and consciously cultivate our relationship with it in our everyday living. How do we do that? We talk to it, we invite it into our problems, we ask it to show us the way when a decision has to be made. We ask it to help us when we can't "figure it out." Then we listen and trust that what follows is that inner intelligence that knows communicating directly to us.
In this historic moment when everything that we've built our life upon is crumbling, falling out from underneath us, it is important that we stop asking the past to inform us of the future. We've never been here before and the mind can only use what it knows which produces a very limited landscape. The heart however, along with our intuition are designed for such a moment as this. When you add the language and way of the heart and intuition to your mind as a process of knowing, you have a balanced and inclusive formula for decision making that produces a personal methodology that helps you move forward with greater confidence.
Come join me in the laboratory of life this week and let's take a deep dive into this wonderful topic!
These are uncertain times. But why has uncertainty gotten such a bad reputation? Well, that's because we have placed a high value on knowing. In fact, we have an obsession with knowing and when we don't know the mind tells us that's not a good thing. However, when we examine this more closely, we can clearly see that's not necessarily true. Turns out, uncertainty is a natural and normal experience in life. It's especially normal when we're dealing with a new way.
This week's episode explores uncertainty from two perspectives: the mind and the heart. We also get real with our ignorance to how "the new" really works. For example, a new way arrives without all the facts, figures, information and proven successful formula immediately available. That's the beauty of something being new! It gives us a chance to experience the pureness of something having no past. It gives us the chance to live inside something and allow it to unfold, like a movie, one frame at a time. It's called the journey. The mind wants the destination. It doesn't value the journey; it values the way that gets you there. We need to learn how the new works. By doing so, we can meet this moment, right now, with a greater sense of compassion, flexibility, curiosity and understanding.
Then we can better answer the question, "how do we live in and with uncertainty?" This week's show gets into that, too and offers up some considerations.
- Live in the question. The mind only wants the answer but uncertain times require us to live inside the question, to reframe the question many times over, to contemplate multiple possibilities and to put the question inside our bodies by imagining its many potential answers to see how it feels.
- Educate yourself on why your mind resists uncertainty so you can bring compassion to those moments when you're in resistance to not knowing.
- Be willing to redefine uncertainty as a valuable experience during times of Change.
- Embrace a daily practice like mindful breathing, yoga, meditation, chanting, walking, anything that connects you to your breath and puts you in your body.
- Don't deny or judge moments of uncertainty or force yourself to be certain of something that has not yet ripened.
Please share this episode, rate and review it too as that helps a new podcast grow! Enjoy.
Did you know that confusion is intentionally used as a strategy in marketing? It's also used in the work we do as a way to keep our competitors on the defensive, it's used in interpersonal relationships and it's used in politics as a way to keep the masses controlled and in fear. The confusion we experience as a result of a well thought out plan remains as something we personally experience only when it's not challenged. This is where critical thinking comes into play.
In this week's episode, we get real with our own use of confusion as a personal strategy, oftentimes when we are not even conscious of it, and what are the gifts it yields. We also use the laboratory of life to get into some important questions: How, then, does critical thinking help? What are the skills that a critical thinker use? Can we strengthen our ability to apply critical thinking more often in our everyday living?
This week we answer those questions and give ourselves a much needed test to see where we land on the scale of between being an active participant in thinking on our own and a passive recipient of information. (Think social media!) Give it a listen and share it with someone so that the two of you can do a follow-up discussion and further explore this important topic.
Here's the website I used when describing what critical thinking is and the questions you can ask yourself to experience what it's like to critically think your way through something.
Confusion often gets a bad reputation for being a negative experience and is seen as a sign that you're lost or worse, don't know what you're doing or where you're going. But The Confusion Experiment reveals to us that chaos and confusion are actually high states of consciousness when you understand what is actually going on during these times of upheaval.
In this episode we explore the messy, sacredness of confusion as a time of tremendous potency and possibility and why we don't want to rush through such a moment as this though the mind can't wait to get out of it! That's because confusion is the antithesis to what keeps the mind calm which is knowing and knowing is not one of the qualities of confusion. That doesn't make it less valuable it just makes it different. Once we align ourselves with what is really going on during times of confusion and chaos, we can slow down a bit and look around so as to gather up the fertile seeds that are scattered about.
We also talk about the pushback that we experience outside and inside of ourselves when we're in times of Change, why that's so and what we can do with all these "little deaths" we're experiencing. The take away from this week's time in the laboratory of life is to:
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Meet your confusion with compassion. It's your mind that's having a hard time.
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Redefine your own confusion and see it as a high state of consciousness and of tremendous value.
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Remind yourself that chaos and confusion hold the seeds of the new. You just have to look for them.
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Lean into those activities or practices that keep you centered and feeling light.
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Remember to practice flexibility.
Enjoy this week's show!
Five weeks in to the new show and I sit down with Kokayi Nosakhere who is dedicated to educating us on inter-generational racial trauma that resides in our nervous system. What's fascinating about this theory is that it exists in both the victim and the perpetrator and the steps necessary for this healing to take place. It's a truly engaging and interesting conversation that leaves us all with three steps that we can take right now to begin to not just dismantle the inequality inherent in our society but to rebuild from an agreed upon value: community.
Listening on Apple Podcasts? Please rate, review and subscribe and help get the new podcast on Apple's "New & Noteworthy." Thanks so much!
This is the first full length podcast after launching the new show with a three part mini-series called "The Findings," which featured the eighteen nuggets of insight that the experiment revealed. Those episodes are all under 10 minutes so definitely give them a listen.
In today's show, we talk about why losing our minds might actually be a good thing, especially when you open up to the idea that there's a Mind behind your mind and how sitting still with yourself helps you feel into that space. Plus, no doubt about it, COVID made us lose our minds as massive change was imposed upon us and life as we know it came to a complete STOP. Our mind has been in a tailspin all this time as it tries to convince us that the old way is better than Change because at least we're familiar with it. Meanwhile, Change shows up with no past and asks us to be willing to step towards it. Enjoy.
Here's the information about the upcoming "Ready for Change" course.
Life does not have to be hard. That’s the old way of living. The old way is, you have to be exhausted by the end of your day to know you put in a good day. Why would we want to exhaust ourselves as a measurement that it was a good, productive, successful day? It’s killing us! Have you noticed? Our tanks are empty.
With this new way emerging through us and as us, we can find ourselves standing on a solid foundation as Change brings the walls tumbling down. That’s the conscious evolutionary moment before us: to realize that the only real world is the one within, and it wants out. This world can never be touched, affected, changed, or diminished by the external world of effects. Meditation takes you to that place and helps you realize through personal experience that 99.9 percent of what is real is unseen, including ourselves.
From the book, "The Confusion Experiment."
The world as we know is collapsing. It’s part of our natural evolution and necessary for what is coming. However, for many it’s terrifying. We’re here inside this time of massive change and people are freaking out. We’re turning around and saying to each other, “Who’s got the instructions? I’m getting fired, this is ending, this is happening; how do I do this? Somebody give me the instructions!”
The problem with the old way is that it doesn’t give you the instructions for the new way because the old way doesn’t even know it’s dying. Besides, it couldn’t give you the right instructions for the new way even if it wanted to because it doesn’t have them. The new infrastructure is being built from the inside out. The new design for living is within us. We have everything we need.
From the book, "The Confusion Experiment."
Another construct I had to let go of was how I measured success. In radio, success is measured by the size of the audience. It is so important that the hour is divided into quarter hour measurements. The radio station with the biggest audience won and the DJ with the most listeners won and that made the sales people win because then they could raise their prices and make more money. It was the quintessential ripple effect so the pressure to be #1 was pretty intense.
I didn’t realize how influential this deeply seeded training was in my current life until I had a realization in the summer of 2017, after I had officially finished my 100 days of meditation (though I continued the practice after I was “done”). In August of that year, I created an event where I talked about "The Confusion Experiment" at the Alaska Center for Spiritual Living in Anchorage. The day before the event I was terribly anxious. I’ve learned that when I ask my inner Wise One a question it answers me, so I asked, “What is going on here? Why am I freaking out?” I realized that my mind was taking that audience-size measurement of success from so long ago and laying it over this new experience. It was doing exactly what it was supposed to do and that’s exactly when I realized that measurement was no longer valid. I understood where it was coming from and why it was active; however, I also realized that I wasn’t there to measure the success of my talk based on how many people were in the seats. Was I affirming a full house? Of course, but my awareness of what was causing my anxiety allowed me to unwrap myself from it. I was then able to redefine my success as something internal - the expansion of my consciousness and the opening of my heart.
I also decided to redefine what success meant and declared I was already successful simply because I was doing it! It was the first Facebook Live event I’d ever done, and I was ecstatic that I was willing to be so out of my comfort zone. It was a huge learning curve for me and just having that work was such a success. I had over 124 views while live and to this day over 500 people have watched that 52 minute video. As soon as I released the audience, it showed up!
From the book, "The Confusion Experiment."
One of the things that happened along the way was that I had to say goodbye to me. As I have been moving through this time of reorganization, I never did so without bringing my radio personality into the mix. I can see now that this was another time in which I spoke about myself in the third person. Meditation revealed to me I had been fighting for “her” place in my new life. It wasn’t until I came back to Anchorage in the summer of 2017 that I understood what was happening.
I was doing some fill-in work at KNBA radio. It was the first time back at my old stomping grounds since 2016 when I also did some part-time work while in town. With the headphones on, a song playing in my ears, I heard a voice say: “This is too limiting. You love music, but it’s too limiting.” I immediately thought, You can’t take this from me. But then I realized that nobody was taking anything from me. It was all going with me, but it was going to convert its form and its shape into something new. Wasn’t this what I asked for? To let the new emerge?
This openness to change was a huge turning point for me. I had been trying all this time to force who I’d been in radio, this great rock n roll dj, into a new idea that was not yet fully formed. I can see why I was so attached to this identity; it’s who I’ve known myself to be for a long time, so the idea of letting that go was terrifying. Who would I be if I wasn’t that? In that instant, the butterfly began to flap her wings.
Who we believe ourselves to be, how we see ourselves, the identities we have, the roles we play….when you deepen your awareness of the Self, when you consciously and actively co-create your own evolution, shift happens! Things fall away, you outgrow relationships and jobs, sometimes you even outgrow you. The more I changed internally the more my outer world fell away. The old skin cannot hold the new wine.
From the book, "The Confusion Experiment."
We have to turn away from the world of effects, the headlines, what doesn’t feed us and what makes us heavy, and turn towards what makes us feel better. Here’s what I’ve learned – life is mostly a vibrational thing and it’s pretty awesome. We’re here to feel good. When I look at the headlines, I don’t feel good. So what am I going to do? Am I going to take my precious, creative, never-been-here-before moment and react to something that’s already done? How does my emotional reaction change a headline? Better to ask, “What’s mine to do?” and put your creative energy towards being a solution versus a reaction.
One of the things I learned in meditation is that I want to be right on the edge of the problem. If I’m in the problem, I can’t be a place for the solution to come through me. I can’t be the solution if I’m in the problem. So I want to be right on the edge so that I can still see the problem but I’m not necessarily absorbed by it or taken down by it. This is the new place for us to be: outside of the problem just enough to understand it, to ride the edge of what’s happening so as to be a vessel through which a solution can come.
Yes, these things that are happening in our world hurt. It’s crazy the depth of poverty, oppression and violence that fills our lives. But crazy is not going to fix crazy. Love will fix it. The heart will fix it. Peace will fix it. Harmony will fix it. You’re not going to get your answers from “out there.” You’ll get it from inside you, from your heart, from the One that knows.
From the book, "The Confusion Experiment."
We’re so afraid to feel that we’d rather blame others for our feelings. We’ve been told to numb them, avoid them, project them, to do all kinds of things instead of feel them. But let me tell you, what’s real is that we feel. Clearing stuck energy by giving ourselves permission to feel all the hurt, the anger, the disappointment and everything else that has become, as Eckhart Tolle calls it, a “pain body” is critical to being able to live from our hearts. If your heart is clogged up with unforgiveness, how can your best self emerge? If you’re riddled with shame and blame, how can you trust yourself to leap? My mind was always showing me how someone else was to blame. Meditation showed me what was mine. Another game changer.
It’s time we mature and own our feelings. How do you do that? By learning how to sit with your feelings and feel them, by allowing yourself to become comfortable with your own discomfort. That’s the skill to develop and meditation is one way to do it.
From the book, "The Confusion Experiment."
We actually believe that people and things are our source. We’ve come to believe that it’s someone else’s job to satisfy our needs and that always leads to disappointment because it’s built on a false premise that your source is external. For too long we’ve believed that the outer world creates the inner world so we need people to be a certain way and say certain things to make us feel certain ways.
I have actually believed that people make me feel different emotions, and if only they would say something else or if only they had done something else, then I would feel differently. That has failed pretty consistently throughout the majority of my adult life. It’s called control; it’s called manipulation; it’s called insanity. But this is what we do! We believe people are causing our inner world, our emotions, how we feel. We believe that they need to change before we do. I’ve finally realized – nope – I’m responsible. It’s going on inside me, it’s mine to own and work with. As the great Reverend Rainbow Johnson said a long time ago, “I may have pressed my buttons, but you didn’t install them.” I’ve never forgotten that saying. It’s a good one to remember.
From the book, "The Confusion Experiment."
Do you know what I’m saying? We’re seeing it in our everyday living. The mind has run its course as the tool for our evolution. It’s not the mind that’s going to take us to the next place. It’s the heart. That’s why I’m so excited that you’re here and you’re reading this. This is about you making the choice to open your heart a little bit more today, tonight and tomorrow. It’s about listening to your heart, getting familiar with its language and trusting its guidance.
Here’s why that’s important. We’ve effectively cut the heart out of the equation as well as the value that instinct and intuition bring in balancing how we know. Instead, our model of success is what you know and who you know. Knowing, that’s success, and knowing leads to clarity, another seemingly important piece to happiness. You already know how I feel about clarity! No wonder I felt like I was a failure in these last three years. I can see this so clearly now. I thought I didn’t know but really, I didn’t know that I knew! Now, I know that I know. That doesn’t mean that I’m not going to take a course and learn something from someone else however my new method is to first turn within and ask. That process acknowledges that there is something beyond my own thinking mind that knows and I can communicate with It, and It with me. We are the guru we’ve been looking for.
From the book, "The Confusion Experiment."
I’ll give you an example. I have really strong instincts; I’m sure you do, too. Throughout my spiritual journey, using my practices and tools, my intuition has gotten sharper. So when I left Alaska in 2013 and left my home, my career and my life behind, I knew I was ready for something else, something more, something that would take all the different aspects of who I was and bring them together, unified. I didn’t know what it was I was ready for, but I had a feeling it would find me and I would recognize it. I trusted my instinct enough to take the leap of faith.
So as I traveled into new territory, I can see now that when my instinct kicked in, my mind jumped in right after it and shouted, “Wait! You can’t do that. That can’t be right. We’ve never done this before. I can’t look to the past and see how this has happened or worked out. We don’t have a reference point. You can’t possibly know! We should find someone who does.” That well presented, unexamined argument created doubt, that doubt caused me to not trust my instinct and that caused separation to my own knowing self as I believed the outer world knew more than my inner world.
So I went outside of myself for the tiniest things like picking a logo for my website. My first choice was a blue lotus but what do I know about a good logo for a website? I better find the people who do know. So I asked all my friends and business colleagues for their feedback. Of course,, everyone had a different opinion! Now I have way too much information. I’m overwhelmed, confused, and paralyzed. I don’t know which way to go. Meanwhile, weeks have gone by until finally I say to myself, “Pick the blue one!” In the end, I came back to the first logo that I loved because of how it made me feel, but the distance that was driven between me and my knowing self was miles wide and the time spent second guessing myself caused incredible stress. So did my need for perfectionism.
The moral of this story is I knew what was right for me from the beginning because of how I felt when I saw it: my heart loved that blue logo. The mind can only work with what it knows. The heart works with what it feels.
From the book, 'The Confusion Experiment."
A GPS doesn’t give you every direction all at once before you leave the driveway; you’d never get anywhere. Once you identify where it is you want to go, the GPS figures out the “how” and tells you one direction at a time and you trust it to get you where you’ve told it you want to go.
That’s exactly how the heart works. The instructions from the heart come after you leap through instinct and intuition, the GPS of the heart. If your heart is telling you to do something, believe that it’s important and knows the way!
From the book, "The Confusion Experiment."
We have an obsession with knowing. Vision boards, goals, five year plans, day planners, time management, to-do lists, all so that you know what you’re doing, where you’re going, and how you’ll get there. This obsession with knowing places a high value on the mind, so much so that I can now see that sometimes when I thought I was using my mind, my mind was really using me!
In addition, the mind doesn’t like the way the heart works. The mind wants to determine a new moment based on what’s already familiar, using the past as its reference point to how it ought to be... except a new moment has no past. The heart replaces facts and evidence with feelings and uses its own set of qualifiers called intuition and instinct. These two inherent qualities have very little value in our society's formula for success and that is particularly true when you experience change. So when you take a leap of faith, you don’t necessarily have all the information. That’s intentional. Life loves to play!
But because the mind needs to know everything before it leaps - past attempts, failures and risks, likelihood of success - it rarely gives the green light. This is why we often feel so stuck and unable to move forward or make a decision. Meanwhile, the heart uses feelings as a preview. Now I can appreciate the importance of the question, “How do you feel?” This is the tug of war between the heart and the mind that was so keenly represented in the “left side/right side of the page” exercise discussed in the book.
In addition, because the mind works with what it knows, it has specific filters about how things should look and, if it doesn’t look like that, then it must mean “nothing is happening.” I suffered from this time and time again and was able to see that it was a cause of not just stress but depression as I got stuck in the belief that nothing was happening while so much was happening. Another major breakthrough.
The mind can take neutral data and create a conclusion that isn’t true. This is why it’s critical to challenge what your mind presents to you. In doing that myself, I realized I was trying to build my future from the past.
From the book, "The Confusion Experiment."
For many weeks in the beginning of this experiment, I was tumbling and twisting and rolling inside a tornado of my thoughts. “I am confused. I am sad. I am unhappy.” I believed I was those thoughts. I identified myself with them, as them.
After several weeks of meditation, I felt like I was sucked out of that whirlwind and put right on the edge of it. I still felt the pull into this crazy vortex of thoughts, but I started to question – "Wait a minute. AM I confused? AM I confusion?"
Then after a while, I moved far enough away from the chaos that I was able to observe my thoughts. It was similar to sitting in a movie theater. What a shit show! No wonder I’ve been confused and depressed. Look at this thing! It’s crazy, it’s insanity….and I love it....because it’s mine. That’s when I realized that I am not my thoughts, I am something else. Over time, I found myself sitting with the Me behind me. the Divine One, seeing things from Its perspective. That’s when I realized this is the Intelligence that breathes me, that beats my heart and it has nothing to do with the mind that wants to see how many people liked my post on Facebook!
It’s important to learn how to look at things, because the mind loves to present life to us through its own filters and those filters are usually distorted. Meditation allowed me to distance myself far enough away from my thinking that I finally understood that there may be confusion but I am not confused. Truly a transformational moment.
From the book, "The Confusion Experiment."
Some amazing things happened while I meditated - the lava lamp stuff I talk about in the book, the tingling sensation in my head, feeling like I was snatched out of time and space - but so much more happened afterwards. My morning hour of meditation gave me realizations throughout the rest of the day, no matter what I was doing. Answers came quickly. Lost items were found easily. Things flowed without my effort and the insights I had around personal growth issues that had been plaguing me for years popped up in my conscious mind as nuggets of perspective and insight that caused one healing after another.
From the book, "The Confusion Experiment."
Whatever the word is for you, Universe, God, Allah, Higher Power, The Thing Itself, there's a You behind you. there's a Mind behind your mind and thank goodness for that! This is the Mind that knows all because It is All. I like to call it "the Intelligence that holds all the planets in place." This is the Mind that communicates via our intuition. It knows stuff and wants to share! Meditation connects you with this Mind and the beneftis are life changing. Get to know this Mind as quickly as possible because it's awesome.
From the book, "The Confusion Experiment."
Not to say that there aren't different teachings that are valid and worthwhile because I too teach different "types" of meditation. However, I now believe that there is no necessary method. If you think there's a method that delays the experience. "I have to go find the method because I don't know what is it. Somebody has to teach me." No. The method of meditation is get a chair. Sit down. Set the timer on your phone for 60 minutes or six. Close your eyes. Get the popcorn and watch the show. That's it. And the next day, do it again. Then, when you find yourself attached to your thoughts and suddenly you're shopping in Costco or having an imaginary conversation with someone in your head, come back to the breath. Always come back to the breath.
Did you know that the breath is the only thing that can interrupt the autonomic nervous sytem? Do you know that we're wired for "fight or flight" and the breath is the only thing that tells the brain it's not in crisis? Do you know that when you take a deep breath you just communicated to your mind that everything is OK?
For example, when you get a message from your boss or your friend that says, “We need to talk,” your brain goes into its ‘fight or flight’ response. If you take a conscious breath, you’re telling your mind, “There’s no charging elephant!” This is so important because the breath halts the secretion of adrenaline and cortisol hormones that were never meant to run non-stop in your body. They were designed to serve your system in short term doses in that small window of “fight or flight." Now however, we’re so overstimulated that everything is perceived as a threat and the constant secretion of these hormones is depleting our immune system. This is why they say, “Stress kills.” So breathe.
The mind’s job is to think. It’s like a manufacturing warehouse, churning out thoughts all day and all night. When we go to sleep, the mind is still creating thoughts - your thoughts, my thoughts, everybody’s thoughts. I believe they swirl around at night while we’re asleep, waiting. Then when you wake up – sometimes before you even open your eyes – they come rushing in! Thoughts, thoughts and more thoughts! So meditation is NOT about stopping thoughts. They’re here to stay. Also, meditation is very quick with the impact it has on the body. Though I left Kyle Cease's retreat and returned to Anchorage feeling very depressed, by Day 8 of my experiment I was feeling better. My mind was still blown to pieces, but I noted in that video that I felt better.
From the book, "The Confusion Experiment."
For those who think meditation is about stopping your thoughts, I would say that the majority of my time meditating is filled with thoughts. What changed is my relationship to them.
From the book, "The Confusion Experiment."
Meditation is about the practice of sitting with yourself, which is actually very difficult for most people to do because we’re not comfortable being with ourselves. We’re also very addicted to stimulation and the idea of having none for an hour - let alone 15 minutes - is terrifying for most people. We’ve also convinced ourselves that we don’t have the time. That’s why meditation is a practice. By doing it everyday, you strengthen your meditation muscle and become more comfortable simply being with yourself.
From the book, "The Confusion Experiment."
Welcome to The Confusion Experiment podcast! This short introduction tells you everything you need to know about the show and the special three part mini-series, "The Findings" that kicks things off. Thanks for listening. Enjoy.