Biology of Perception

Trailer

Biology of Perception

Hi, I'm Sharon Colker and I'm here in San Diego at the pulse drop a lady's conference. As a Peloton instructor or as a polite participant, you often want to be the master of your own body and we spend so much time working on that. But what about the inside? What about how we're thinking, how we're feeling and how is that impacting how as physical structure is working where either victim or we're a creator. Has anyone ever seen the elephant tied up at the circus where they just put like a rope or a small chain and they tie it to what you know, a big tree? No, a little stick. Little stake in the ground. And I used to sit there thinking that staying the Moscow to really, really take pride. And I asked the elephant trainer, how'd he, how'd he get that to happen? He's always really easy. What we do is when we tie up the mother, we tie up the baby as soon as they're pretty much born, but we tie the baby with a thicker rope and we tie them to a tree or we tie them to a truck. And the baby for a couple of weeks, pulls in Yanks and, and draws and yells and rolls over and does all sorts of things to try and get away. But after a few weeks it begins to understand that when that is there, it can't get away. And it develops a really deep belief.

So when that elephant grows up to two and three and 20 and 30, you have a 50 year old elephant standing there, tied up, not even seeing its own power. All have a little bit of elephant in us. There's things that we don't see that are stored deeply in our beliefs in our subconscious. We have to understand that you and I today, this is the first day of the rest of my life and how I choose to perceive my world and how I choose to correct what's been implanted in me is my life. So, um, I want to begin this morning by, um,

Chapter 1

Introduction: What Your Mind Perceives Your Body Believes

bringing to awareness that we all have something common in this room. Um, and it might not be something that you think about on every given day, but it's something that we think a lot about when we, when we work with health and wellness in people and that is that you and I are a human species. We are a species. We are a very successful species on this planet.

Some would say we are very destructive species on this planet, but we've been around for about two and a half million years. I'm sure we've all seen something similar to this. I refuse to believe that the person on the right hand side is our greatest potential. But sadly this is where the western is heading. And I, and I have to say as an Australian, we are now officially the fat is nation on earth. Percentage wise we beat the United States.

So 60% of our people of our population are obese. And to me this is kind of disconnection. It's a form of as a symptom of disconnection from self disconnection from what's happening and, and the busy-ness of life takes over the second person, the one on the left, um, that person there. That is how, if you are a scientist, this is how they believe we have looked for the last 20 to 50,000 years. In fact, what they're saying is if that we were to bring a child from that time and grow them up in our family today, that we probably wouldn't know the difference physically, physically in the last 20 to 50,000 years.

Science tells us that we have changed less than 1% now, obviously intellectually light years. But physically we have this ancient body. And what this body was designed to do and how it was designed to live and how it was designed to respond was to live in a very different world, into a very different place than the world that you and I know today. So there's a big difference between what is natural for the human body and what has become normal for us in society. But the challenge that we have is that our body living in a normal society that has technology there has Starbucks, there has lots of distractions that has busy-ness, this has traffic, this body is responding in an ancient way. So I guess we have this kind of stress response that you know, we're supposed to be saber tooth tigers and it was supposed to be famine, but today time is our saber tooth tiger.

If we miss a deadline or we don't get things done on time or we feel that urgency or we forget to pick the kids up from school, you know, that's when we start producing adrenaline. What's become our famine is our mind. When we start to think and we start to worry, we start to get concerned and we run things over and over and over in our mind. And when that happens, we start to produce another hormone called Cortisol. And those two hormones are our main stress hormones.

So even though our physical body is not in danger in everyday life, in our normal life, our body is producing these stress hormones. And what we're beginning to understand is how we think and feel on any given day has as much impact on our cells as what we eat and how we move. So who's heard of the concept of epigenetics? Anyone in the room? Couple of people. Fantastic. What we have known for quite some time is that our genes, who's heard that our genes, you know, rule everything. That's it. Now James, you know if you've got it in your genes, you're going to get it.

What the new science of epigenetics is saying is that there is something above the genes called the Epi genome that has the capacity to switch genes on or switch genes off. What that means is it gives us enormous power if we use it effectively. So what switches the genes on and switches the genes off is the EPI genome. What affects the Epi genome is the environment that we give our epigenomes. What's the environment? Our bloodstream, our bloodstream goes out to every cell.

So what do we put in that bloodstream? How we nourish that, how we move it, how, what hormones and things go in when we move our body. That how we think and feel also goes into our bloodstream. And that bloodstream is the river of life and it affects our epigenome, which affects our genes and turns things on and off. So when you look at these things, you know, nutritional choices, activity level, environmental factors, and a positive or an emotional positive emotional diet, if you want to know more about epigenetics, it's a fantastic science. It's really growing exponentially and we are going to learn more and more and more about this as life. Progressors go to youtube.

There's lots of different videos there. There's a fantastic book by Dr. Bruce Lipton called the biology of belief. He also has another book called spontaneous evolution and he's just released another book called the honeymoon effect. All three of those books are fantastic. He's a cellular biologist, um, and he's probably the one that's really out there telling us most about epigenetics. But when we look at this, this is what I want to talk about today, this emotional diet, how we think and feel each day and how it impacts us. And can we control it? Can we influence it?

I like you to just take a moment to find a really good posture in the seat that you're in right now. And whilst you're doing that, put your feet flat on the floor and find your sitting bones and you know you're all [inaudible] people so you know what to do. You know, straighten yourself out and uh, just find a space where you can be here. I'd like you to just really breathe deeply down into your belly and just your eyes for a moment and just really feel your feet on the floor. Feel your feet, your sitting bones on the seat, and very deeply into the belly and bring yourself into this moment and be the master of your attention right now. I'm going to take you on a very quick 32nd visualization. I want you to imagine with the greatest of intensity, with your mind standing in your kitchen and in front of you as a kitchen bench on the bench there is a cutting board. There's a sharp knife and there's a bowl of lemons and you to reach out with your mind's eye and imagine yourself picking up a lemon, placing it on the cutting board. And then with the other hand, reaching out and picking up the really sharp knife and slicing the lemon into two halves.

And as you do so the smell of lemon comes up and assaults your nostrils and all the lemon juice pulls onto the cutting board. And it's a really, really, really juicy lemon. But pick up one quarter half of the lemon and slice it into two quarters. And as you slice it into two quarters, more juice runs out onto the cutting board. But you reach forward and you pick up one quarter of the lemon and you bring it up to your mouth. And as you open your mouth and bite into the flesh of that lemon, the juice runs into your mouth that runs down your chin.

It squirts into the back of your throat. And as you swallow that lemon juice, it's very sour. It's very bitter. It's very, very accurate. Okay, relax. Open your eyes. Thank you. Now even with these bright lights, I could still see some people going, mm, who found themselves pulling a face. Okay, but what I'm really interested in is how many of you salivated.

Yeah. Okay. Now look around the room. No Lemons in this room. No smell of lemon in this room. Know Word Lemon. So the power of suggestion, the power of your mind created a physiological response. And this is the most important thing that you and I, because we all on this journey together, every time I stand and I t I work and I and I share this information, I remind myself of the power of our mind and how it affects our body. So whatever our mind perceives, our body believes.

So anything you think and feel has an impact on what happens inside your body. Now, what I really want to touch on today and I won't spend too much time on it, is the part of our that is associated with stress. And there's two parts of our brain, and I'm going to talk a little bit about today, and if you are scientifically bent or if you are in urologist, you will know that the pictures I'm showing are not a direct representation of the parts of the brain. I'm going to talk about that. These are the best pictures that I could get that looked pretty okay, but just just for our section that we're going to do today. But what we used to know about the brain, and by the way, I work with a neurologist and he said to me, you know, Sharon, if we were smart enough to know how to understand the brain, we'd be smart enough to know. We'll probably never understand the brain. It's such a complex thing, but you know, there's some basic things we're beginning to really understand.

What we do understand, which is new information in the last, say 10 to 15 years, is that our brain is changeable. There's something called neuroplasticity. Who's heard of that? Yeah, fantastic. And if you had an a really good book to read would be the brain that changes yourself by Norman Dorje because there's some wonderful stories in that and some incredible concepts that we haven't even began to conceive. But what it means is the brain is like a muscle. The more you use certain parts of your brain, it's like a muscle.

The more you use a muscle, the more neurotic new neural activity you have, the stronger the nervous system has their connection, the more there is an end gram effect and the more that muscle responds and gets strong. So exactly the same with the brain, which parts of the brain we use the most. That's where we have the most neural activity. The parts of the brain that we develop are the parts of the brain that we're putting the most use into. And what I want to hopefully inspire you to think about today is as a one part of our brain that we want to have a lot of neural activity and a lot of blood flow in, in terms of helping us manage stress, uncertainty, and self doubt in our life.

Chapter 2

The Human Brain

So let's talk about a little bit more about the brain. This part of the brain, and it's, as I said before, it's a pretty picture, but inside that part of the brain, just above the brain stem, there's a part of our brain called the limbic system.

And this part of our brain is totally and utterly associated with saving our life and, and, and deciding whether things are safe or unsafe. For us it's called the limbic system. And in the limbic system there's two parts that we need to understand the reptilian brain. And that's the part of our brain in the limbic system that moves us away from danger. So that's when you're walking down the street and someone almost, you know, comes and cuts you off in front of you. Like I was walking around along the street the other day and this person was walking with their dog just down here in San Diego and their dog as it walked past, just like turned and went back at. And I just went and like, I didn't think like I didn't go Sharon move to the left away from the dog.

It was like my body moved me. Do you understand what I mean? So it's like your body moves away from danger. It's what saves your life. If you are tragically stuck in a tsunami or anything like that, people, you know, holding onto trees and not knowing how they could possibly do that set reptilian brain that just kicks in and it saves our life magically. The other part of the brain is called the Amygdala or the Amygdala depending on where you're from in the world. I hear it spoken and said differently. I call it the Miglia. Um, and the Amygdala is like an emotional sensor.

So what it does is it pattern matches what's happening now in this moment to what has happened previously that is stored in my subconscious and deep down in my subconscious here, I have a whole lot of stored, habitual responses to situations. And the most important thing to understand, I guess, is that the eyes don't see the eyes of the Lens, but it's the brain that sees because it's the brain that decides what's happening around us. The eyes are just like the lens that put the information into the brain. And in fact, one of the concepts in the brain that changes itself, the book is someone who was blind, was taught to see by using their tongue that their tongue could connect to the brain and teach them to see extraordinary, extraordinary. So when we think about this, we have to imagine that say, um, I feel really threatened by a conversation that I'm having, that the Amygdala goes in and it pattern matters and it goes, is there anything stored in here that's happened before?

And if it is anything like that, is this safe or is it unsafe? And if it's unsafe, it moves me away and how it moves me away is usually I will argue or I will put it down or I will say, you know what? I'm over this and I will run away because it's about fight or run. Yeah, that's our thing. Flight or fight. We are the fight it. We are the put it down, we control it or we run away from it. Dr. Daniel Friedland, he lives here in San Diego and he's an extraordinary man in terms of his knowledge of this, and I'm going to talk a little bit about him later and I love his terminology when he talks about the Amygdala, when he said it is absolute velcro to bad experiences and yet it is Teflon.

Two good experiences. All right? What that means is whatever is happening around us emotionally, we're going to grab on to what's more dangerous, what's more upsetting, what is really unsafe and uncertain and we're going to react to that. Does that make sense when we're working from that part of our brain, because this part of our brain is literally trying to keep us safe. So this is a very reactive part of our brain. It has no social consequence whatsoever.

Has anyone ever had this situation happen? You're having a discussion and you're talking to someone about a concept that you are really passionate about and this person becomes quite opposing in your point of view and the opposing point of view. You find yourself defending more and more and really standing on your, your principles of that. You are right. Okay. And then it starts to get a little bit heated. Yeah. And you can feel the heat start to rise through your body can feel heart rate go up a little bit. And some ways, some things says don't go there.

But then you react and you're into it. And let me tell you this and let me tell you that I, and this is another thing, and that's another thing, and you don't have it right. And Jada Avara and off you go and you go into full defense. You go into full attack. This is, I am right. I am right. I am right. I am right.

And you walk away and you feel amazing. Yeah. And the first thing you do, the first person you bump into is, can you believe what just happened over there? Like that person over there, they said this and I said that, and Dah, Dah, Dah, Dah, Dah. And what am I looking for? Consolidation year. Why? Think about it from a human species perspective, why do I want someone to join my team?

Bigger army Seyfried's safety in numbers, right? She's on my side. He's on my side. So see, I have more people on my side than your side. So my argument is right. Yeah. And so you feel fantastic. God help that person if they don't agree with you. So, so you, you, you carry on and, and you know, you know, about an hour later you kinda calm down and you reflect, oh mm, oh, maybe I shouldn't quite have been. So, you know, oh, has anyone ever had that experience? Okay. All right.

That's the limbic system. No social consequence. None whatsoever. It doesn't understand the consequences of the heat of the moment. This is what happens when people get violent, when they absolutely snap and they hurt somebody. I don't know whether you, um, we have problems in Australia with alcohol and young people and there's a lot of violence on the streets at certain times in certain areas.

And people talk about the one hit punch that just put people down. And these are usually educated people who've gone for a night out, who have got very alcoholically, um, shutdown. And what we know about alcoholism at chuck shuts down the executive function of the prefrontal lobe. So it really opens up the idea of having the limbic system rule. And this is where someone looks at somebody and they misinterpret that look and they feel that that person is attacking them and they just hit them.

This is road rage when someone gets out of a car at a traffic light and gets a cricket bat and smashes the windscreen, no social consequence at its worst. This is where murder happens. This is from this system here. It just doesn't have an understanding of any emotion. The only emotion that understands is anger, frustration, safety, uncertainty, be safe.

So when this part of our brain is switched on where I can be very violent people verbally and also physically, the number one part of this brain, the number one priority is to save our life. That's what it's about. Safety saved our life. So in this part of our brain, we rarely really reacting. We are not really thinking logically about things. So when you get in the heat of the moment and you find yourself kind of losing it, it's when you're kind of working a little bit from your limbic system. We have a saying in our office, only one person can go limbic at anyone.

Okay? It's really important and we use it. This has veneer color, we use this as been [inaudible]. And I had a guest who came back after a year and she said to me, Sharon, I took it into my house. I taught my children what going limbic was like, right? And I say to them, don't go limbic on me. Right? And she said, and then I learnt her, there was something even better. And that is, you don't want me to go limbic. Okay.

So being limbic is where we're kind of stressed, where we're, we're not really thinking clearly and, and we're not being our best. We're not, we're not operating from our best of intentions and we're certainly not working from the higher levels of emotion that we are quite capable of being. Okay. So the other thing that we should know about this part of our brain is that this is where our amygdala goes to. So our conscious mind is the mind that fits, um, that, that we're consciously aware of. It's our wishes, our respirations, our desires.

It's our positive thinking. It can go future, it can go past. But just like this iceberg represents, and this is always represented by psychologist below the surface is something called our subconscious or unconscious mind. And that's where all this information is kind of stored. So when the Amiga lab is fired and it goes into the subconscious and it attaches to a belief or um, you know, some sort of thought process down there, then it can send us into our limbic system. All right? And we'll talk more about this a little bit later.

Okay. From the limbic system, there is a direct main line to our adrenal glands and our adrenal glands. Every day should be building and supporting. Our immune system should be creating our baseline hormones should be producing DTA, our adrenal glands, and one of the most important tiny glands in our body that keeps our harmony and keeps our balance, particularly for our immunity and our ability to fight disease. But what happens is from the adrenal glands, there is a priority pathway that the limbic system can say to the adrenal glands, I don't care what you're doing right now.

I have an emergency situation where we are in danger and saving our life is our number one priority. So we need to produce adrenaline and cortisol now. And when that happens, our immune system becomes depleted. Our baseline hormones become interrupted and our longevity in life gets affected. So when we are constantly driving from the limbic system through and producing adrenaline and cortisol, we're actually depleting our IRA train of glands.

And what we see in retreats so much is adrenal fatigue and adrenal exhaustion. People are so tired. Take away the caffeine, take away the sugar, take away the technology, take away the responsibilities, take away the stimulus. You sit people down for the first two days, guess what they do okay. They cannot, cannot stay awake. They have no energy.

It's like the adrenal system is overloaded because they're just go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go all the time. And this has huge implications for that epigenetic perspective that I was talking about because if our bloodstream is pumping out adrenaline and cortisol, then that has a very, um, destructive effect on ourselves as opposed to the happy hormone, Serotonin, dopamine, those things, which has a very positive and supportive effect on ourselves. So this is quite serious. It's really quite serious. So when you get, um, when you're talking about adrenaline, it's our flight and fight hormone. It's about increasing blood pressure. It's about increasing heart rate. It's about increasing respiration. You know, the blood goes out to the extremities. It's a very black, white perspective.

Limbic is very black, white. You don't get ideas because it's just now we need a solution. And when you'll know that you make a decision from the limbic system, when you look back in reflection and you go after the crisis is over and you go, oh, that was, why didn't I think of that? It was so simple. Anyone ever had that where you realize that you didn't, you fixed it, you made it happen and it was fine, but you realize there was a more simple solution that would have been better that you didn't see in that moment. Okay. So, um, the other one is cortisol hormone of longterm stress and that decreases our muscle mass. It decreases our metabolism. It releases blood sugar from the liver into the bloodstream.

Um, it makes us crave carbohydrates and it is a stach. It is a fat storage hormone, uh, and it creates insomnia. You'll know that you've got a lot of cortisol in your body when you get stressed. If you wake up at two o'clock in the morning and you crawl all over your bed until four or five o'clock in the morning, not being able to sleep. Okay. That's when cortisol is out of balance.

Anyone sort of getting a bit of that going on. Okay. All right. And what happens when you don't sleep? Do you deal with stress better when you tired? No. So it's up perpetuating nasty cycle. Uh Huh. So then we get anxiety and we get worry with cortisol.

We get very um, panic attacks with adrenaline, but we get very anxiety and worried and we go over it and over and over and over and over and over. It's like a, it's like a broken record. Anyone sort of ever had that in their mind. Okay. So that kind of gives you a bit of a picture and I really am giving you concepts. This is very basic. I'm not going into a great deal of detail here, but just to give you an idea of what it kind of feels like, all some of the things that you could be looking at. Let's talk a little bit more positively. This part of our brain is fantastic. All right, and when we talk about human evolution, that part of that 1% has really happened in this part of our brain.

Now it's not that whole section there, it's just if you were to take the front section here, it's called the prefrontal lobe. So it's just the front here and what we want is a huge prefrontal lobe because this is our executive. This is our executive function. So remember before when I was talking about the limbic system in some way, something goes, don't go there that this guy going stop. You're about to go in dangerous territory. And in this, this part of our brain is associated with the parasympathetic nervous system. You guys would know what that means, right?

So it turns on our relaxation response. It also gives us high mental functioning. So Brent said something this morning and it reminded me, and it happens to me all the time. Have you ever had a day where you've had to come up with a solution for something and you just can't come up with a solution? You've got your team together, you've coming up with ideas, but you know it's not the one and you've got all these things happening and you're exhausted and you're tired and you've got, but there's a deadline, there's a deadline. We've got to have it done by tomorrow. You go home, you stand in the shower, the hot water hits you, and for a moment you go, ah, you come into your prefrontal lobe and all of a sudden bang.

There's the idea. Yeah, okay, so this is when you are in the prefrontal lobe. This has social consequence. It understands. It allows us to play chess with life, if you understand what I mean. When you play chess, you're always thinking three or four moves ahead and those people that are the chess masters are not only thinking probably six or seven moves ahead. They're also thinking what the potential moves of their opponent is going to be six or seven moves ahead, right? So this is what our, this, when we develop this part of our brain and really work with it, it allows us to truly understand big picture and small detail at the same time.

And it understands future consequences. So when you're in an argument, you can step back and go, oh no, that's probably the not right the right thing to think because say because that person might think that and then that might be a consequence and then there might be a problem with that later on. It allows us to override and sus press unacceptable social responses. So it stops us from putting our feet in our mouth or both feet in our mouth. It has the receptor sites, dopamine, Serotonin Vasopressin, and it's really associated with response. So to activate these part of our brain is where we deal with challenges better and we don't do it in a victim way.

We don't do it in a way where we feel threatened or we feel uncertain. We're actually able to see clearly what's going on. And to be able to evaluate the best course of action. So this is number one option to me. This is number two option. To me, this is number three option to me, these are the consequences to this, Huh? That's the least amount of consequences I can deal with. That's the best one.

That's my decision. And you live with that decision and you're clear with that decision. When you try to make a decision out of the limbic system, you go around around a circle, should I do this? Maybe I should do that then maybe I should do. What do you think I should do? Well, she said that I should do that and I'm not sure what I should do.

I still know anyone done that. Okay, so the prefrontal lobe, when you come into this part here, it's executive function. Think about it as being the CEO. It's the best place to come and make our decisions from. So the question is, which part of your brain do you want to be your default program? Which one do you want to have the greatest amount of blood flow to?

Which one do you want to have the strongest neuroplastic changes to? Which one did you want to develop the most? The Olympic system or the prefrontal lobe? It's a no brainer, really, isn't it? Okay, so someone said to me a couple of weeks ago, can I get my limbic system removed by surgery? No, you can never over it.

You can never truly override completely the Olympic system. Remember our number one effect as a human species is survival. But what we need to learn to do is really develop a strong prefrontal load that we can say, ah, that's actually not unsafe. That is safe. Okay, so the juicy bits are,

Chapter 3

Limiting Beliefs in the Subconscious: Nature or Nurture?

how does that stuff get into the subconscious? How does it get there? How nature or nurture is it, you know, birthed into you?

Do you arrive in form with this or is it something that we learned through our environment and what his thought is that it's a bit of both. And one of the most important bits of work that epigenetics is looking at is that while we are in Utero, that the mums don't go into guilt here. All right. This is not about guilt. Whilst we are in Utero and we were inside our mother, we obviously sharing everything that is happening with mom and as a human species, it's important that we are preparing cellular and also brain-wise to come out into the world prepared. So if mom is happy and relaxed and feeling safe, then Bubba is going to share all those beautiful by a chemicals.

If mom is stressed and feels uncertainty and self doubt and doesn't feel loved, and Baba is going to be sharing those as well. So the huge implications that they're talking about today in epigenetics is, and there's a beautiful youtube video, it's called begin before birth, epigenetics to understand that we as a species need to truly understand that the mum needs to feel protected and every man in the room goes, oh, thank God that isn't my responsibility. Yes, it is. As the father, you're supposed to make the mother feel safe, okay. And loved and cared for. And that's, that's your role. That's your role. Um, but moms need to feel, you know, the beauty of this incredible experience. The wonder of being able to give birth is extraordinary. So in that time there's a little bit of stuff forming and then when you come out into the world that they say between about one age one and six we, we live in this incredible brainwave that sort of fluctuates, but mainly in Dita and in theater it's like a direct download into the subconscious.

It's like we can draw information from around us almost by Osmosis. We're not actually paying attention, but we're picking up signals and information energetically as well as cognitively. What that means is at age four, I could be sitting here playing a game and over here the television sets on and I'm subliminally getting information about what's correct to eat, what's cool, what's happening, what should be happening in terms of relationship, what I need to tell my parents to buy me for Christmas. Yeah. All that sort of stuff. My siblings are playing over here and one of them hits the other one over the head with a teddy bear and successfully wins whatever is happening. And I learned from that that I need to be, you know, controlling in life.

I actually need to be suppressing someone to get what I want. Over here. My parents are having a dialogue and whether it be positive or negative, that's what I'm learning relationship should look like because I'm a baby human and I'm learning just like a, a pup learns socialization from its mother, dog or any animal. We are learning. Children learn what they live. We are picking that up. So my mother was born in 1918 and my father was born in 1909 and they lived in a world where though I have British heritage, my parents were English, I was born in Wales and they lived through two world wars. So their perception of the world and how they basically raised me in the first, you know, 15 years of my life was very different to how people would be raising children.

Now does that make sense? So they prepared me really for a world that doesn't exist anymore. Now, this isn't about beating up on the parents because we have to understand that you and I today, this is the first day of the rest of my life and how I choose to perceive my world and how I choose to correct what's been implanted in me is my life. That is my life. And it's your life too. We can spend our lives blaming what's happened. I always say to my daughter, I did the best they could. I'm really sorry, but you know, you're gonna have to change your own brain. So, and that, that's, that's life. And it's true. I did the best I could. My parents did the best they could.

And I understand that some parents are really dysfunctional and they offer a very dysfunctional childhood. And so we learn different things. But a lot of that stuff is, is, is in their beliefs, get programmed in really deeply how powerful our beliefs. Really powerful. I'm a horse rider and my mother said from the time that I was six months old, he used to point to the donkey on the beach in Wales. And I would go over and patted and she would put me on the donkey. She said, by the time you were three Sharon, I would put you on the donkey.

I give the six his, I'm telling you my age now, the six bounces to the donkey man. And I would leave you there for an hour and a half. I would go shopping and the donkey man would just walk me up and down the beach and I was just happy at three happy, happy, happy by six I had my own little pony Dolly and we lived in this little Welsh village and Dolly was like this big and she was round and she was old and she was stubborn. And so I learned very early on that if Dolly wanted to go over and eat that belated glass grass over there, that I had to really get, you know, negotiation happening otherwise cause she was much stronger than me. Right. So she would just pull me around so I could never understand when I went to the circus, how they tied up the elephants just didn't figure to me.

Has anyone ever seen the elephants tied up at the circus where they just put like a rope or a small chain and has anyone ever seen this? Yeah, you might see it in Thailand. If you go and travel now or India and they just put a little small chain or a small rope and they tie it to what, you know, a big tree. No, a little stick, little stake in the ground. And I used to sit there thinking that state must go to really, really deep, right. This is my little, you know, seven, eight year old mind going, I can't figure this cause sensor, big elephant. That's a little stake. You know, Dolly, if I did that to just go and walk off, right. So I couldn't understand why the elephants did that and I didn't get my answer until I went to Thailand a number of years ago and I asked the elephant trainer, how do you, how do you get that to happen? He's always really easy.

What we do is when we tie up the mother, we tie up the baby as soon as they're pretty much born. But we tie the baby with a thicker rope and we tie them to a tree or we tie them to a truck and the baby for a couple of weeks pulls and Yanks and and draws in and yells and rolls over and does all sorts of things to try and get away. But after a few weeks it begins to understand that when that is there, it can't get away. And it develops a really deep belief. So when that elephant grows up to two and three and 20 and 30 and you have a 50 year old elephant standing there tied up, not even seeing its own power, we all have a little bit of elephant in us. There's things that we don't see that are stored deeply in our beliefs in our subconscious. And I, I've always told that story and then I went and listened to Bruce Lipton.

He told the same story about the elephant. Then I believe that Deepak Chopra's uses the same thing about the elephants. So I don't know. It's obvious, isn't it amazing have consciousness. Two people are talking about similar concepts around the place, but it was always a big thing for me. So Po beliefs are incredibly powerful, incredibly powerful. And so I guess what we have to understand is that we might have beliefs stored in that deep seated subconscious that are really limiting us or disempowering us. And the most important thing to understand is that those things have been programmed into us. And some of them may not be true.

For example, when we talk about love and being loved, some people in this room might believe the only way they can be loved is if they look a certain way. Other people will believe the only way they can be loved is if they act a certain way. Other people will believe the only way they can be loved, as if they have enough power or they have enough money or they feel secure enough. Or when I reached this, then people will love me or my size of my body. This is, this is when people will love me. So these deep seated beliefs rule our life. It's extraordinary. And, and they get into our inner dialogue. And that's, that's what we start telling ourselves.

And we don't even know that we're telling ourselves that because we're so telling ourselves that so often we're not even listening to ourselves anymore. Has anyone ever had that experience where you drive your car home and you park your car in your garage and you think, I don't remember driving. How did I get there? Or you driving down the freeway and you're supposed to take this exit and you're thinking, thinking, thinking, are you, oh, there goes the exit. Yeah. Okay. So that's when we are working sort of in our conscious mind, but it's our subconscious mind that's driving us there. Does that make sense?

The subconscious mind is the one that's got you home safely and your garage. All right? Because the subconscious mind is, is ruling. So when we're busy in our mind and when we're busy doing things, our subconscious programming is evaluating and trying to keep us safe. And some of that programming may not be true. So sometimes we react when we don't need to react because the Amygdala is picking up something that we're not mindfully looking at and going, actually that's not true. Does that make sense? Yeah. So, um, I guess investigating beliefs and modifying our perception and our behavior is one way that we can really get into that stuff that's stored and figure out how we can do things a little bit differently.

Good ways to do this holistic counseling. It's like, um, we were talking about it at the lunch yesterday. You know, when you have a client come in and you say, you know, what do you feel is wrong with you go, oh, I've got this problem with the shoulder. And then you look at them and you go, oh, there's so many other things going on there. Yeah. But they can't see it. It takes someone from the outside to see it. Does that make sense? So when you work with like a holistic counselor or you're doing some NLP or you're doing like journey work or you're doing like a stall work or you're doing some kind of belief change work, what it means is someone is going to ask you the right questions when you can sit still and be quiet and listen to the feeling and listened to what arises. So you can begin to think, Huh, that's amazing.

Let me tell you a personal story. Um, as I said, you know, my mother and I love my mother and she's now passed into the other realm. Um, and you know, she did the best that she could, but at age four, something happened. And in one of my investigations I realized that that set up a really huge belief that I wasn't even aware of. So at age four, um, we lived in, um, my parents had a hotel and I had two 22 bedrooms and my mother was really, really busy and I had really fine long hair and my mother would wake, get me up in the morning. And you know, this is, we're talking early sixties here and uh, she would, um, she would wash my hair and we had no conditioner and then she would comb my hair and of course my hair was really fine, so I would scream and she would get frustrated because she was busy and all the guests in the hotel will be going, what on earth is happening to that child up there? So my mother decides at age four that we're going to fix this. So she takes me for a haircut. Well, I didn't know I was having the haircut until I'm in the chair. Right. And, um, I, I loved, okay, I love my hair and when I was four and um, so when the haircut started, it didn't start sort of here as a trim. It kind of started here.

Right. I'm, because in the, in the early sixties, what was really cool was razor cutting this long. So mum goes ahead and cuts my, well, I start to demonstrate, and I grew up in a family where my mother could look at me and I knew that I was in serious problems. Anyone sort of had that. Yeah. Um, and, and my mother was giving me the look and I was like, I don't care. You know, like this is really distressing to me. So I s I screamed and I, I was really naughty as my mother said, I was really naughty. And so I've gone into a lot of trouble. Haircuts still happened, but what that did to me when I went back and I, and I looked at that event when I was really still, and someone was asking me the right questions. How did you feel when that happened, Sharon? And of course at four, I didn't have the words to explain, but she said to me, I'm going to give you a balloon of communication. If I give you that balloon, a communication, can that four year old say now what she was feeling and what she was feeling that four year old was disempowerment was feeling. I felt violated. I felt like I didn't matter.

I felt that, um, you know, there was no consent and I felt that I was really humiliated because all my friends had ponytails and pink tiles and ribbons. And I didn't. So I felt really, it really affected my self esteem. Big Time is a haircut, right? But it affected myself. Take a stay in big time and to add to injury, to insult to injury [inaudible] and let me grow my hair till I was 11 so for these years I had this really short hair and I really felt uncomfortable. I felt like I didn't feel a part of the tribe, the little girl tribe.

Does that make sense? Yeah. So what that instilled in me, the belief that got instilled in me is the person that loved me the most, or the person that was supposed to love me the most could hurt me the most. You try have a relationship with that as a deep seated belief. Cause Amy time, someone go really close to me, my Amygdala went, hang on a minute. None Union. You don't start pushing away. Does that make sense? So there's stuff and you know that there's only one little thing, you know there's still others in there that I'm still sorting through.

My goodness, there's a lifetime journey for us to kind of sort through these things where we can begin to understand ourselves so much better. Because when you understand yourself, you see the world differently. When you understand what triggers you, you see the world differently. So it's like we have all these buttons all over us and someone can come along and go and our role in life is to desensitize that button to take it away so no one can push that button anymore. Does that make sense? So really I'm creating prefrontal lobe development really helps us as well because you have to Brea in your prefrontal lobe to be able to understand the concepts of what is actually happening in belief. George Lucas said, we are all living in Klages with the doors wide open. It's a great statement.

Has anyone ever seen that loony cartoon? And I've tried to find it, um, but I saw it years ago and it was a picture of a man and he's got jail bars in front of him from like a jail window and he's holding them and there's no walls, there's no ceilings, there's no door. But he's holding these bars and he's like this and he's walking around in life and all he's got to do is actually just go put the bars down and he's free. So limiting beliefs and those things that really called us back or learned behaviors that hold us back. They're really things that just hold us when if we go and investigate them and put them down, we can really empower ourselves.

Chapter 4

Be the Master of Your Thoughts

I think this man here is an extraordinary person. Nelson Mandela just celebrated his 95th birthday.

He's been very unwell, but I believe he's doing better at the moment in hospital. But this man here came onto my radar many, many years ago and I read an article about him and what he, what he said was the, the, the journalist asked him question. The journalists said, how did you possibly endure 28 years of incarceration in Robin Island? And he apparently he sat up in his chair and he pointed his finger and he looked at the journalist straight in the eye. He said, let's get one thing straight. I was not enduring. I was preparing, I was not enduring. I was preparing that jumped off the page at me.

I thought that has to be singularly the most optimistic statement that I've ever heard. Two things sprang to my mind. A, does he think like that all the time or was that just lip service? B, if he does think like that, how, how does one person think that optimistically, how does one person take two thirds of their life in imprisonment and say that he was preparing? That is an extraordinary perception in life. So he became a bit of a hero for me and I began to read a lot about him. And what surprised me the most was that he wasn't always the shiny penny that you and I see him as today. In fact, if we go back into his younger years, we would probably use the term terrorist because he and his party were very suppressed and they were acting very limbically in how to, how to, how to stop the suppression. So when the South African government put him in jail, they wanted him to die.

They didn't want him to live. And he talked about how hard it was physically, how incredibly hard they decided whether he ate, whether he drank, they decided whether he was washed or whether he was dedicated on. They decided whether he was in solitude or whether he was socialized, they decided whether he was interrogated or whether he was left alone. They would wake them up in the middle of the night, take them into the exercise yard, get them to move a ton of bricks just to break the sleep cycle, just to break the spirit. And he realized at one point that he had absolutely no control over his physical self. None whatsoever. They owned it completely.

But in that moment he had an Aha and that our how was, he did have control of something and that was, that was his mind, his thoughts. And he thought either they control that or I control that. And so he decided to reappraise something we call in psychotherapy with start therapy. Reappraise the situation. So he talked later on about becoming the master of his thoughts. And I think that's, if you and I can become the master of our thoughts, if we can be mindful, you realize there's more than one person in here, right?

Does anyone have a notice that? Okay, so when you become the master of your thoughts, you begin to understand what true control is. And so he started to call Robin Island his home rather than prison because that's what it was. He started to call the jailers and the gods, friends and associates, he began to thank them. So when they put him in a solitude, he said, thank you for giving me the opportunity to be by myself, to process, to think, to plan, cause I've got a lot to do when I get out of here. When they took him to the exercise yard and they made him move a ton of bricks in the middle of the night, he said, thank you for giving me the opportunity to keep my body strong, to move, to be fit because I need to have a fit body when I leave here, when they chatty min and and did things, everything, they starved him.

And this was the one that broke my heart. When they starved him. He said, thank you for giving me the opportunity to understand what true hunger is, because I now have empathy for people who have famine in their life. And I never understood empathy before. I never understood what empathy was. And so what I think happened, I certainly don't have any research on this, but I think what happened to him over the years is that with this, uh, master of thoughts and reappraising a situation or event, he began to really develop some neuroplastic changes in his prefrontal lobe.

And his executive function started to take over. So when he came out of Robin Island, he didn't come out the victim. Oh good. They need to me was terrible. They did this, they did that. He did it. He came out and he said, okay, we need to unite the nation and how are we going to unite the nation? We've got the blacks and we've got the whites and they're not together sport.

We're gonna win the World Cup. This team had no way of winning the World Cup. You know what? He inspired the teams so much. They won the World Cup and the nation became more United. They still have problems.

But Nelson Mandela was an extraordinary person who really changed a humanitarian and extraordinary person who went through extreme adversity in life. So I know in this room people would have gone through adversity. And I encourage you to look at that adversity and say, it's not defining who I am. Now I am something different and I have potential to be something different as a result of that, it's made me stronger or it's made me and find the positives and move on. So I want you to think about this.

Imagine if you had two speakers on your shoulders and they were wired into your brain, and that wiring into your brain meant that everything you think and thought gets out of those speakers and everybody around you can hear it all the time. [inaudible] how would that be? That'd be okay. So what would you do? You can't switch the speakers off. You can't put cushions in front of them. You can't drown them. What would you do?

Yeah, meditate is a good thing, but can you meditate 24 hours a day? What would you do? Change your thoughts, change your thoughts. So here's the biggest question. If you don't want anybody else to hear those thoughts, why on earth are you happy to say them to yourself? And what are you saying to yourself? I you listening to yourself, maybe not our mind.

Our mind has enormous potential. I love this saying, beautiful servant, dangerous master or show is a guru in India. I had the pleasure. I'm going to say the pleasure of learning how to do this. And let me tell you, when you do this, this spinning from the Sioux fees, if your mind doesn't switch off, you fall over, you get dizzy. So it is one of the most powerful meditations I've ever done because the mind as you're spinning, the mind's going, you're getting dizzy, you're going to fall over, and you've got to literally go, no, stop. I'm not. I'm breathing. I'm doing this, I'm doing this, I'm doing this.

So you're correcting and catching up. So if you get the opportunity to ever do that, it's beautiful. Gandy said, I will not let anyone walk through my mind with their dirty feet. Our mind can take us to a very dark place. I'd like to add that we should not walk through our own mind with dirty feet because it can take us to a very dark place. Yeah.

Anyone ever had that experience? Yeah. Or it can take us to our happy place. And who's in control of that, by the way? Who's in control? Can you just do this? Yeah. Okay. So we're in control of it. So we choose every day. I love this. Marion. We'll meet Williams said, you must learn a new way to think before you can master a new way to be.

And on the one on the other side, be careful how you are talking to yourself because you are listening. Not only are you listening, your body is listening and it's producing biochemicals that are either supporting yourselves or being destructive to yourselves. So positive thinking now and I guess all this, uh, you know, um, affirmations has been around for quite some time, but it used to be thought to be really airy fairy. Now it's really grounded solidly in science that what you think has an impact on yourselves and your emotional. Um, and, and thoughts are really, really important. A system of thinking came my way from a wonderful man by the name of Colin James, and he introduced me to this many, many years ago.

And it's become a bit of a mantra for me and I want to share it with you because when you start thinking about mind and you start thinking about, you know, how can I think differently? But where do I start? It's all to march. And you know, and by the way, you know, can you change your thoughts? Can you change your mind? Can you change your mind? Yeah. Okay. So if you can change your mind, who were you? If you can change your mind, who are you and not your mind?

So when you realize that you are not your mind, you can begin to audit your thoughts. So the lowest and the, and, and, and there's four levels of thought and the lowest thought that we can think is called destructive thought and destructive thought are thoughts of, I'm hopeless. I'm no good. I'll never be good at that. I'll never be as fit as that. My core is never going to be as strong as that person over there. I could never do that over there. I'm not successful enough. I'm hopeless. You idiot. Um, would you mind standing up if you have ever in your life, ever had a destructive thought place?

Okay. I'm guessing the people sitting are just too lazy to stand now. They quickly stand up. So I'm look around. Did you think you would be the only one? No. So it's, it's part of human nature. So have a seat. Thank you very much for sharing. So destructive thought. Let's have a think about it. All right. Um, and do they help us? No. Do they make us feel good? Do they give us joy? Love, happiness? No.

Do they make us successful? No. So why do we think them programming and not paying attention programming and not paying attention, not being mindful. Nonproductive thought is the next level of thought. And this is where we talk about things that have happened in the past that are completely unable to be changed. And yet we regret if only could or should have water, all that sort of stuff. Yeah. And this is the land of victim. Now, let me begin by just saying in this room, statistically we would have people who have been physically, emotionally, sexually abused, would have experienced abandonment, rejection, deep uncertainty.

Each of us in this room would have some emotional scars inside us. Bad things happen to good people all the time. Bad things happen to good people all the time. Some people able to just dust it off and say, you know what, that has made me stronger and more able to do this. And they become better in their life as a result of it. Others go, you know what? My life is ruined and it's, I can never get past this. I can never get over this. This is my life.

This is my lot in life. And they stay stuck. They stay stuck as anyone. Um, tried to help someone who's in victim mode. Okay? Have you ever experienced it? Where you like, come on, let's go do this and we'll go and do that. And I hope you do this. And I'll help you do that. And they're like, oh, well, you know, did I tell you my story? My story is this and this is what happened to me and this is what happened to me. And you know, I'd love to do that, but I can't, I'm not ready right now.

Or Oh, that's really sweet of you. Okay, I'll do it. But you know, in my life is tested and you keep trying and you keep trying and you keep trying and you keep trying. And after a while you get it. By the way, the victims give us energy. No, they're like energy suckers. Right? Um, so you keep trying, you keep trying, you keep trying and you can't, and specific preservation in the end because you're exhausted, you have to go and walk away. And the, and the, and the people who were really stuck in victim will then go, see, I knew you weren't in this. I knew you weren't here to support me. And all of a sudden now you're the perpetrator. Yeah. Has anyone ever happened, had happened to, and then they suck the next rescuer in and the first place they start is you and then they go to their life and this person helps them and tries to help them, tries to help them and then it gets, does that make sense? Who's the only person who can rescue a victim?

Kind of like this? Yeah. I am the only person that can rescue myself. Byron Katie wrote an amazing book called who would you be without your story? She grew up in a very violent household, very, very violent and as a result of this violent household because she became uh, a rampant alcoholic and have a necklace. It was, I've never known love. I don't understand it. You've got no idea what my life is.

And somehow somewhere along the line she rescued herself. Now she is traveling the planet, teaching people how to rescue themselves. She's an extraordinary woman. Loving what is and also who would you be without your story or two great books that you could read about that. So non productive thought hoses in our past.

It holds us in the bad thing. If my mother hadn't cut my hair when I was four year old, I'd act be actually be able to let Levine. Okay. Um, if, uh, you know, my sister hadn't have done this, if that corporation would have looked after me after all the years of service, I would be more successful. Now, if I hadn't invested that $20,000 and lost it, I would still be able to have a retirement fund now. Nothing you can do. It's gone. Yeah. Uh, if that, if I'd have bought their block of land in 1982, I'd be a millionaire now. All right. All that stuff is that nonproductive thought. It doesn't move us forward. Does it make us feel good about ourselves?

Does it give us joy? Love, happiness? No. Now for those of you that are skeptical, there is something called critical thinking and we'll go to the next level because when we talk about productive thought, we talk about things that we, so from this perspective, this building, amazing building this life Sunday, beautiful. There had to be an idea in someone's mind, but it took a lot of productive thought to make them stay there, to make this building stand up. The trick is not to pepper the productive thought with the destructive and the nonproductive thought. So to try to stay in that productive thought. So you've got the obstacles that come your way and rather going, oh, there's the obstacle. Let's eat those all done. You know, draw a new unit. Woe is me, and life is terrible and this is just my lot in life.

I always fail that the obstacle comes and we go, okay, how can we get around this? What can we, how can I sidestep? How can I do this? So you're always thinking productively. We call it white hatting. Yeah. Rather than than black hatting. So productive thought. Do they make us successful that they make us feel good? Yeah. Okay. And then the highest level of thought is pure thought.

And it's thoughts of love, joy, happiness, empathy, gratitude, compassion too. They make us feel good. Yeah. So when this came my way, I got to thinking, oh good, I'm, it's good. When you're looking you think, have I got, yes, it's all good. So I got to thinking that, you know, all right Sharon, 24 hours in the day, I sleep for eight of them. You should do 16 hours. Where do I spend most of my time? Above or below the line? Yeah.

If you observed your own thoughts, where would you spend most of your time? Above and below the line and have to be honest with you, when it came to work, it was above the line because I love what I do and I've created what I do. It's become a joy in life for me. So I found it really easy to be there. But when it came to thinking about myself, a lot of it was below the line. When it came to thinking about my interactions with my family, a lot of it was below the line. Why? Because I didn't feel loved. No, because my beliefs had been implanted at a young age. As I said, my parents were quite old when they had me.

They all had a family and then they had me. So the difference between, I've got two brothers and two sisters, the difference between them and me is 15 years, 15 years. So I grew up like a soul child and only child and, and you know, back in the 60s they all got married by the time I was five. And they all lived in the, yeah, in the village. In the street. Right. And so they would come to the house and I felt very, very judged by them because they would come in and go, look, she's so spoiled. She has that. She gets this. We never had that. And so I grew up thinking that I was spoiled. I grew up thinking and I had deep seated beliefs that I really didn't deserve, that I shouldn't have because I shouldn't be spoiled. Does that make sense?

So if I bought a new car, I didn't tell them cause I thought, oh no, they're going to think I'm spoiled. But when I went back in and I reappraise the situation at an event, what I realized was they grew up through the second world war. It was them that didn't have what they should have had. I was normal. So actually the problem with it is not mine, but it changed my relationship with my brothers and sisters. They're now in their six, late sixties and seventies. And they're hysterical.

I love them, absolutely adore them because I see them from a different perspective. I don't see them from that little girl place anymore. I see them from a place of understanding. Wow. How their childhood must have been really hard. And my childhood was really blessed apart from the haircut.

So, um, you know, so there was that idea of, you know, understanding so and so. Now I, it took some time to get, and I'm still working on it, you know, every day when I, every time when I do a presentation like this, I'm reminding myself, as I said, we're all on this journey together. Guys. I often say to our guests, just because your work in a health retreat doesn't make you immune to the challenges of life, or that somehow you're blessed with health, you know, you get these challenges the same way. We're all humans. We're all doing the best we can. By the way, do you know that we're all just making it up as we go along, so don't get too caught up in it. Um, so, you know, look at this. Where do you spend most of your time now having, looking at this, where do you think, where do you think your limbic system is? A bubble below the line and where do you think your prefrontal lobe is? Where's the Olympic? Yeah.

So you're more likely to be limbically thinking when you're below the line in those thoughts. So paying attention and auditing your thoughts is really important. I did a couple of weeks ago, I was driving along and I left the retreat and I had an appointment and there's a lot going on. And I was thinking, and I was in my conscious mind and of course my unconscious mind, my subconscious mind was driving and I missed the exit. Right? And the first thing, this is the, and you eat idiot. Yeah. I caught it and I went, no, not idiot.

Not Paying attention. Pay Attention. Cheron and it was just a correction. We correct emails, we correct any dialogue, you know, that we had any written things that we have, we need to start to correct our thoughts. And when we start to correct our thoughts, when we start to stand outside of and Luke into ourselves, we become conscious, we become aware, we become the observer of our thoughts. We become the master of our thoughts. And when we are doing that, we're in the prefrontal lobe. When we're not doing that, when we're in the middle of throwing a temper Tantrum, cause that's what it is. We're in the limbic system.

And so you ever seen someone in the limbic system and you're trying to calm them down. You're like, okay. So just like just breathe, just breathe deeply and calm down and they're like, I am breathing and I am calm. They're not in their prefrontal lobe. And you know, it takes a little while. They are the only person that can get them back into that. And it's important that we all take responsibility for this because we have impact on how we transmit our energy. And I'll talk about this in a moment. So William James said,

Chapter 5

Be the Positive Change

our greatest weapon against stress is our ability to choose one thought over another. And that's really the crux of it.

When we think about the type of stress that you and I experienced today, I mean, yes, there's extremes. Death is something that is really hard to deal with and we do need to go through the grieving process, but when someone cuts you off in traffic or you miss a deadline or something's happened, we have to understand is we have to correct our own thoughts because how we correct our own thought will depend on whether we're in our prefrontal, whether we're going into our limbic system. So stress doesn't happen outside of us. It actually happens inside of us. It's our ability to process and manage our thoughts and emotions, how they come through us. Does that make sense? By the way, when you're doing mindful activities like [inaudible] understand that you're in your prefrontal lobe because you're focusing on your breathing, you're focusing on those things. But when you're working with your clients, when you're working with your customers, correcting them in their dialogue I think is an extra service that you can be offering. Oh God, my cost is terrible.

It's getting better every day you're improving. You need to tell yourself that you're improving here because even that will have a cognitive effect and an energetic effect. So everything we do is supporting ourselves, becoming our own best friend, and also supporting each other. It's a really important thing in life and I think it's becoming more and more things. You know, things happen that are bad. And my daughter just recently went through a really challenging situation and then a couple of weeks later I saw this on her Facebook and I thought, that's so cool. Remember when something goes wrong in your life, just yell, plot, twist, and move on. That's that. You know, that pretty much does it. You know, like, you know, we're, we're in, we're playing a game in this life in some ways and we really not here to work.

I don't know whether you understand that, but we're really here to have an extraordinary experience. So when something goes wrong, just understand that it's part of, it's, you know, in a, in a movie it's like plot twist, but it's going to be all right in the end. And as they say in the famous Marigold Marigold Hotel, that movie, I love that movie. Everything will be alright in the end. And if it's not all right, it's not the end. I love it.

And this idea of supporting ourselves, you know, gone. God grant me the serenity to except the people I cannot change. We can't change people around us. We can only change how we accept or how we hear or how we perceive the situation, the courage to change, the one I can and the wisdom to know that it's me. It's a really powerful statement as well.

And I think focusing on the solution for all of us is about love. That first slide, what is our greatest potential as a human species to become obese? Our greatest potential is love. It is so extraordinary when I think of the really adverse effects that have happened in the world, like the, the horror of the World Trade Center. What sticks in my mind though, and not seeing the people falling out of the buildings or the buildings falling down or the planes going in.

What sticks in my mind is people helping people covered in dust, helping each other. It didn't matter whether you were from uptown downtime, didn't matter whether you were a Jewish, whether you were Catholic or whether you are Islam. It didn't matter whether you were black, white, Asian, didn't matter. It was like, we are humans. We need to get outta here. Let's help each other. And that is our greatest potential. That is our greatest potential. I often think what would happen if, you know, a spaceship was going past earth and it thought, oh, that looks like a great place to invade. You know, all of a sudden all these spaceships came, you know, whether you know, China and America and, um, you know, the Gaza Strip and everyone, would they still be fighting each other? No.

I think we'd all come together and go, okay, there's a bigger threat out there. We're humans. Let's gather together and let's fight. But why does it take that? Why can't we realize our full potential? And you think, well, you know, it's a really big, it's a really big dream, Sharon. It is. But it starts with the ripple. As Marie and Brent talk about impulse star Pele's here, it's the ripple effect. It starts with us, the Dalai Lama. So beautifully said, one day, if we want to disarm the world, we have to disarm ourselves first.

So we have to work on ourself. And it's the greatest gift that you can give to your family that you can give to your community, that you can give to your country and that you can give to the world is you work on yourself, you, you become the best that you can be. Full of love, joy, happiness. That's the greatest gift that we can give. More than anything. There are so many people that have so much money and yet they have nothing because they don't have that. So it's important for us to do it. This connection to self. Yeah, we have relationships with people everywhere, clients, suppliers, family, friends.

But the most important relationship that we're in in this life is the one we have with ourselves, and that's the one we need to focus on. More internal investigation, less external control. The more you internally understand what is happening with you, the more you give and the more people want, the more people are inspired and it's a journey in life. As I tell my daughter, she's 29 you don't have to have life figured out by the time you're 30 you know, it's, this is our life journey, this unraveling, this and this learning this, this presentation I'm giving today. Next year I might understand concepts that I don't understand today that I'll be talking about, that. That's life. That's the journey.

Once you see, this is beautiful. I love this by Ramdass. Once you see and get to your own soul, then every person you look at is a soul. You don't judge the behavior anymore. You look at the behavior and go, what is happening to the soul? Let the symptom is the behavior and you can actually reach past the behavior and get to how can I support you here? What's really going on here? How can we get to support you?

How can I support you to get into our prefrontal lobe, diaphragmatic breathing, connection to the earth. We asked, oh, connected to mother earth and that is our true nature. Not to be walking around on concrete. We need to put our feet in the soil. We need to put our bodies in the ocean. We need to watch the clouds, we need to breathe the air and we need to bring it deeply into our body and we need to be mindful that that is who we are. We have so much more than what we believe we are.

Our greatest potential hasn't even been realized yet because we have like this maze that we keep running around. That's called our mind and our mind is a connected to our beliefs. So open the maize and begin to understand and realize our fullest potential. This amazing intelligence that we tap into that flows through us. Doesn't matter what you call it, it's an incredible intelligence that we are all connected to the connects, each of us. It's indescribable, but when you tap into that, you tap into the earth.

Life becomes amazing. Meditate. People who meditate have folds in their prefrontal lobe, so we want that. Lots of neuroplastic changes, lots of development as it can be good to work, wouldn't probably look good aesthetically. We want them to stay in the bones right and fold over yet, but who knows in the future it might be fashionable. Be the master of your attention. This is a statement that I learned from Dr. Daniel Friedland. As I said earlier, he lives here in San Diego, his new extraordinary man, and he runs a online program that'll give you some information about later.

And this online program is about getting you from your limbic system into your prefrontal lobe in eight weeks. Because scientifically it takes eight weeks to develop in euro plastic change. So doing a program that you do for a regular time where you're following a protocol and you're beholden to that protocol is a good thing to do to actually make some changes. So there's a big difference, excuse me, between being busy and being productive and being stressed. You can be busy, you can be productive and not be stressed. And there's this fantastic place that's not so far away from here called heartmath, which is a research facility who's heard of it.

Her heart methods of great thing go, you go Google it. And what they looked at is that, you know the brain activity and the heart. And one of the things that they came up with is that the heart actually beats in the fetus before the brain is formed. The heartbeats in the fetus before the brain is formed. And so they looked at the connection between the heart and the brain and they came up with a concept that they call coherence.

And what that means is when our heart beats, it goes boom. And then there's a flat line, it goes boom. And then there's a flatline. And what they said is, Huh, there's a lot of information in this flat line here. Let's hone in on that and go deeper. And what they realized is when we were in coherence, when we were kind of sitting in our prefrontal lobe with our heart connected, we had like this in that line, when we were stressed, when we were in uncertainty and self doubt, it was Jaggert and we were out of coherence.

And that has a massive implication to all of us. But particularly you guys because you're practitioners. So what they found out is that the heartbeats, and it creates a pressure wave as it beats. And that creates an electromagnetic field that goes around our body, which is exactly the same as the electromagnetic field that goes around the earth. And as Brent so wisely said the other day, that you know, when our cells are vibrating at the same vibration as the earth, they're healthy. So this electromagnetic field that is around us, we are constantly merging.

It actually extends almost to the edge of the stage for me. So you guys are all melding your electromagnetic fields right now. You may not be touching, but you're touching on an energetic level. And what that means is that when you feel something, you imprint that electromagnetic field and you transmit information in that electromagnetic field. Now if you transmit stress, because we're a human species, what that means is someone picks it up next to you and goes, where's the danger? Yeah, because we're, we, we are supposed to be tribal and so we're transmitting information to each other through this field so people can, limbic is catching is what I'm trying to get at.

So have you ever walked into a meeting and you walk in and you're calm and you're relaxed and you get in there and people are jittery and it's like, Oh God, it's just on a time under and all this sort of stuff. And then all of a sudden you think, well maybe I should be stressed. You know, has anyone ever had that children are masters at it pulling you into your limbic system? What I'm trying to say is when you're working with clients, you have a responsibility to make sure that your thoughts and your emotions are coming from your prefrontal lobe. Because what you're transmitting is that energy that all of the instructors in your studio have that so that when people walk in, they find a tranquil places. Anyone ever noticed energy in different places? Yeah, so we imprint what's going on around us through this way. So we transmit and we receive, and so that has a massive implication.

Now sometimes you get everything, you do, everything you can, right? Do you love him? He's got his yoga mat, he's got his bottle of water, right? He's doing his yoga. Kay. And he still wants to smack someone. This is called a sense of humor. Sometimes things are gonna happen and go wrong, but you've got to have a sense of humor. Whether we have this on our fridge in our office, it's great.

I love this by Deepak Chopra. There are many aspects to success. Material. Wealth is only one component. Success also includes good health, energy and enthusiasm for life, fulfilling relationships, creative freedom, emotional and psychological stability, a sense of wellbeing and peace of mind. This is my goal in life. What's yours? What do you choose? Because literally we choose every single day. Daniel Freeland is this amazing person who I would really strongly recommend, and there's information in your handouts as to how to go do that.

If you mentioned my name, he'll give you the corporate rate that we get at Gwen Ghana. So I'm happy to extend that to you. Ladies and gentlemen, I want to thank you for your interaction. You've been so incredibly kind fine today. You been so welcoming. Oh my goodness. Okay. Thank you. I want to wish you love joy, happiness, peace, compassion, gratitude in your life every single day. Now Ms. Day.