Episode Transcript
The masks we wear. Do you ever get the feeling that you are leaning in to a version of yourself that doesn't quite fit? It's almost like you're in this bubble and you're leaning into different kind of aspects of that bubble and you can feel it. You can almost feel the pressure of it on your face as you lean into this kind of way of being or way of doing things that you've just gotten so used to you think it's normal. So these are the kinds of things that I tend to ponder and tend to play around with.
And I kind of learnt very early on that you can almost, when it comes to awareness, you can play pretend. You can, I have a grown up version of that now, I call simulating. And so you can simulate different ways of being. You can simulate different ways of responding.
Now I first started playing around with this while I was teaching my form of mindfulness in a local primary school. And it would normally come about as a response to a question that one of the children had. And so I was like, well, there's no point just talking about these things. Like talking just is just moving ideas around in your head. Like I have to be able to, I have to be able to feel it and experience it. Like if they're going to get a different perspective, that perspective has to incorporate mind and body.
And so I used to first identify the question and then try and sort of build the structure of the question. And I would find that that structure had a certain shape to it and a certain kind of, the technical word is a vector, but it's like a, you know, a vector is kind of like a way, a direction that the energy is going in, but it's not necessarily in a straight line. And so once I identified, you know, the shape and the pattern and the, you know, its direction, the way the energy was moving, I could look for different ways for that energy to move and different vectors, different patterns even. And so I would present these shifts in the structure and the space that was the structure held and simulate these different ways of being. So it wasn't giving an answer. It wasn't telling them what to think. It was showing them how to explore alternatives.
So one of the things that I found recently is that I was getting pulled into directions and I felt like I was having to wear, having to wear a mask for one of those directions. Now it wasn't being forced on me. It just, there was something not quite sitting right. And so I came back away from that mask, from that way of being, following what I called the return path.
What I found was is that you can use your awareness to shift the state you're in. You can use your awareness to change the way you deal with the conditions in your life. And one of the things that I found, and I go over this quite extensively at nonordinaryliving.com is this idea of the return path. Because often we don't just arrive where we're at, like spontaneously. It's, there's been steps that have brought us there. Okay. So there's a path that has brought you to where you are, you know, based on your past experiences and your, you know, all your beliefs and your thoughts and everything. The whole package has brought you to where you are, which means that there's a return path.
And one of the, probably one of the biggest breakthroughs I had with awareness was this realization that, that most of our daily existence and most of our moment to moment experiences were directional. We tend to sort of lean, and it's in our language, you know, we kind of lean into things and you know, we've got to put on a brave face and you'll find with a little bit of just bringing awareness to every day, you'll, you'll notice that there's this kind of sense of being pushed into things.
And one of the simplest exercises that you can do, one of the simplest practices you can do that takes absolutely no effort whatsoever is just lean back a little and just feel what that feels like. Just get this sense of coming back away from the mask that you're in. And there's this instant sense of release and relief. You just get a little bit of breathing room.
Now it's not going to fix everything, but it's a good place to start because if you are pushed into the mask and you're trying to change the way that you're operating, it's never going to work because you've already got this filter in place. You've already got this way of being that you have leaned into and filled out that's going to express and it's going to express the energies of that mask, of that way of being. And that mask is also going to filter what comes in.
So when we, if we want to drop that mask, we can't just drop it. That doesn't work because you don't know what you're dropping. This isn't about fake it till you make it. This is literally energetics. It's the way energy and a way awareness operates. It doesn't just appear. There's a path. There's a structure. And when we can understand the path and when we can understand the structure, then we can start to follow the return path and we can start to destructure these modes of being and modes of living that have become habitual to us.
The feeling that you get when you just pull back just for a moment is this sense of, like I said, this sense of breathing space, but also there's this sense of clarity and we almost get this sense of, Oh my God, I've like, I've, I can, I feel myself.
And I know for me when, when I realized, you know, that I was sort of going down the wrong path, so to speak, and when I started to pull back into what I call the neutral state, and again, this is covered extensively on my site and it's, you know, it's all for free. I have these protocols called minutes to mastery that anyone can access. They're all on YouTube. And so that's, you know, dealing with the main kind of the big six, I call them. So stress, anxiety, depression, focus, mood, and motivation.
It's once you come back into this neutral space, it allows you to reconnect. Now these aren't just words, there are feelings associated with these states. And that's what we're, that's the, that's the key is to not just become aware of the structure, but become aware of the shift in the felt state that you're experiencing in the value of the space that you have been in, come back from, and now are able to create from.
Quite often we just want to jump straight into the next thing. But we've got to be careful there that we don't just build another mask. So oftentimes it pays to just sit in that neutral state and just reorient. So just to get a feel of what it feels like to be you again, without any habitual ways of doing things. And you'll start to get this sense of yourself that you quite possibly have forgotten or that you quite possibly have thought had left you.
And what I mean by that is I found when I started to play around with this, you know, this return path and coming in to what I call the neutral state. So it's basically the neutral state is just getting rid of all the charge. As soon as you start to engage in any kind of activity, whether that's physical, mental, emotional, whatever, there's a certain amount of charge attached to it. There has to be in order for us to move. But oftentimes we don't, that charge builds up and we don't discharge it. And so we're carrying that charge into everything that we do. And that charge can build up to the point where it doesn't take much to trigger an explosion because there's too much charge there. It's got to go somewhere. So it just either explodes or we shut down.
So the idea around working at the awareness level is to identify these pathways that we're stuck in, these states that we are bound to and we want to unwind. We want to follow, bring the, take the return path back. We want to unbind from those states, from those tones or ways of being. And we want to reconnect with our own source and then create or allow the emergence of our true self to come out. Now there's a lot packed into that sentence, which I'm not going to go into now.
But I did want to share this story with you because it's happening in real time and the benefits of spending just even just a few minutes identifying this sense of pressure wherever it is and wherever it's leading you to and just to come back from that and just to sit in that neutral state for a few moments. The benefits far outweigh any inconvenience those few moments might seem and I'll say seem because if you can't take a few moments out to change the way you are, then you're going to keep going the way you're going. And if you don't like the way you're going now, that's not going to just miraculously change.
Okay, we've all seen and know probably know people who have gone their whole lives without trying to change and they're stuck and they just go through, it's like Groundhog Day, they go through the same thing over and over again. They have habitual ways of speaking, have habitual ways of acting and more than likely have habitual ways of reacting. So they are stuck down a path bound to a particular state and they don't know how to get back.
So if you are tired of hauling around or walking around with the mask that you've got on and if it doesn't fit, maybe it's time to step back from that mask. Because once you remove the charge from these stuck states, you realize that those stuck states and those highly charged pathways that you've been going down aren't you. They've got nothing to do with you.
The real you is not that person that's tired all the time, that's frustrated, that's angry, that snaps at people for no reason, that wakes up just like already weary. That's not you. Okay, that's the pathway that you've found yourself down and the state that you are stuck in. It is not you. It is just the state of awareness that you find yourself in. It's the mask that you have on that's holding all this charge, it's holding all these habitual ways of interacting with the world. It's holding itself up as a filter to what can reach you.
Once you take that mask away, once you take and release yourself from that energetic state, you regain capacity, the capacity to be you. Because while you are wearing that mask, your system is trying to compensate, it's actually trying to bring you back, whether you know it or not. And it's that energy that your system is using to try and bring you back that's the part of the problem. In fact, it's probably the basis of the problem.
The reason I can say this is because once you get the hang of coming back into the neutral state, it happens in the click of your fingers. It happens in an instant. There's no effort involved. In fact, it's a letting go of effort.
And I'll put it to you here without going into it. But if you can operate from your potential state, so you can't sit in neutral forever, you do have to move through life and get things done, but you don't have to go into a particular mask. And if you do go in a particular direction, think in terms of a figure eight. So you're not bound to it, you're just moving in, around and back. And that, that dynamic way of being, being in a dynamic state of awareness is highly energizing. I'm not talking about over the top, pump your fists in the air excitement. Okay. That's, that's for some reason, society has equated success and doing well with making huge claims to a crowd of a hundred people that are cheering your name. But that's not true success.
Success literally means to keep going. It's the taking the next step and the next step and the next step. And if you can make sure each one of those steps is in either a neutral state or in your own potential state, which is kind of like a state of animation, controlled animation that fits the moment. You don't want to go beyond the moment, but if you can allow, it's almost like the mask never forms. And so you're moving into and out of and through within each moment without having to wear a mask, but you've got all the ingredients of that mask at your disposal. So that that mask doesn't become a mask anymore. It's just the changing face of who you are and who you need to be to interact with each moment and to realize the fullest extent of your potential.
But none of that can happen without that first step. And that first step is a backwards one. This is the missing ingredient in all of the, or most of all that I've seen, self-help material that's out there. The first step is a backwards one. And it's not a backwards one in that you are having to go backwards. It's not a negative. It's a recharging. By first, discharging.
Okay. But once you come back into this neutral state, reconnect with who you are, the next step presents itself, which it does. Okay. This is getting a little bit deeper into the energetics, into mind-body energetics now, into how energy behaves. But the very next step presents itself and you actually feel good in that moment. By feeling good, I just mean a simple binary. Do you feel good or bad? I feel good. That's it. You don't have to explain it anymore. It's like, yep, I'm good. I can keep going.
And you'll start to get these kind of little flashes of who you are. That's the magic. You'll remember who you are. You'll recognize who you are. These memories of the past will pop up when you, and if you recognize these moments, you'll go, "Oh yeah, I felt really good then. I felt like I was me in those moments." And it's that energetic sense of when you were feeling good and when you're feeling the most yourself. That's that energetic sense that we want to get back to.
So the masks we wear are very real indeed, from an energetic perspective. But we can step back from them and we can release the charge that wearing those masks brings with it, brings with them. We can access and inhabit the neutral state. We can reconnect with a truer sense of who we are, what I call your energetic signature, the thing that makes you you, the energy source that makes you you, your signal. We can start to remove the noise and with a little bit of practice, we can pretty much do this in an instant. In a moment we can return to neutral.
If you want to learn how to do this, if you want to access the minutes mastery, if you want to learn more about the neutral state, please go to www.nonordinaryliving.com and check it out for yourself. Like I said, it's all free. I will eventually be moving into teaching higher states of awareness, but none of that's necessary. What we need right now is release and relief.
As a, as human beings, as individuals, as families and groups and communities and society in general, I think we need to just take a step back and to neutralize. Forget about trying to make all these huge changes. There's no point if we're carrying the same energy into these new perspectives. We're wearing the same masks and hoping to see things differently and hoping to act differently. It's not going to happen. We're already in these pre-charged states.
So the best thing we can do for ourselves and for society in general is to take a backward step. And that's not a sign of weakness. That's not being a victim. That's not being weak at all. It is a different form of strength rather than that, you know, push, push, push and claiming in that alpha kind of mentality. This is empowerment. There is power and there is empowerment. And that empowerment comes when you reconnect with your source.
So give it a go. Check out non-ordinary living and start to develop what I call a living practice. When necessary, in each and every moment until your life becomes a grounded, animated, enlightened existence.
Over to you.
