Unveiling the Power Within: Personal Stories, Biofields, and the Journey to a Fulfilling Life- Ep. 255

Speaker 1: 1:25

Welcome to the show everybody. This is Dr Jay Titta. I am the host of the Next Level Human podcast. Today, we are going to be talking about change. We do that a lot on this show. It is perhaps the most important thing that we humans do. This podcast really is a personal development podcast, and I do think personal development is the most important job that we have as humans. And, of course, within personal development, there is really four jobs that each of us must manage. We talk about this in the beginning of every single show. You hear it in the beginning of every single show the four jobs of every human. We must manage, save, earn money. We must attain and maintain health and fitness. We must find, give, receive, collaborate, communicate, love our fellow humans. We got to manage those personal relationships and, of course, the most important one, the personal development one, in my opinion, which has a lot to do with purpose and meaning. But why are we not able to achieve these things? It is very difficult, obviously, for people to make the changes that they want to make. Why?

Speaker 1: 2:46

One of the things that we have been talking about repeatedly in the last several episodes is this idea that we think it is all about behaviors and habits. In other words, we think it is about I got to exercise a particular way, I got to have budgeting strategies, I got to eat a particular diet, that there are certain tools and techniques that I need to change in relation to my parents or my significant other. This is how we tend to think about things. Right, that there is something out there that I must do these to-dos. If I do these things, I will be better. To do these things, I have to change my habits and behaviors. One of the things we have to realize is that our habits and behaviors are peripheral. They are on the outer layer of us. There is something much deeper in us that habits and behaviors flow out of. What are these things? They are our identity, which is informed by our beliefs, which is informed by our stories. It is stories which transfer into beliefs, which construct our identities, which then impact our thinking and our feeling and, ultimately, our behaviors and our habits. If we want to change, we need to be aware of the fact that habits and behaviors are peripheral. They are downstream from identity, beliefs and, perhaps most importantly, story Our stories, the stories we tell. We are going to spend a little time with this.

Speaker 1: 4:33

I just released a brand new book. It is called you Grow Me with my co-author, emily Goff. It is a book about romance. However, it is a book about personal development and the stories we tell. If you are interested in this particular podcast, that book, even if you are not interested in romantic issues, it is a personal development book that unpacks stories specifically in the realm of romance and helps you understand how to deconstruct those stories, to live a better story, to get better results in personal relationships, in particular romance. If you like this discussion, I would encourage you to get that book because it really is, first and foremost, a personal development book that just talks about these concepts that we are going to cover in this issue, or in this issue of the podcast, this episode of the podcast, rather in a way that is oriented around romance.

Speaker 1: 5:42

So let's start with where these stories come from. These stories that we live by come from. They began to be formed as early as our lives began, right, so literally from the age of zero, when we're born, all the way till our present time. But there are particular developmental stages that these stories become more important and become more influencing. The developmental stage of childhood, zero to ten years old, the developmental stage of adolescence, ten to twenty years old. And then our young adulthood, our twenties, our early thirties. In the early developmental years, these are the programs that come around safety and security. In the adolescent years, these are the programs and stories that we tell ourselves around acceptance and belonging. And in our early adulthood these are the programs and stories we tell ourselves around autonomy, freedom, these kinds of things, authenticity, etc. It's really who we, when we really discover who we are Now, of course I have made the case over and over again in the next level human philosophy that we get stuck and so that zero to ten year old phase is the base level human phase.

Speaker 1: 7:08

Now, a lot of people get this wrong because they like to think about hierarchies, base level being worse than culture, level being worse than next level. It's really about a developmental process. The base level process, the child process, is really about we must be self-centered, we must be self-contained, we must be self-ish to survive. Little kids of course they aren't able to be aware and conscious in the same way an adult would be, and so of course they see their parents or their caretakers as just extensions of themselves. It's a very selfish. You know time frame, and it needs to be, because a child can't take care of themselves. So don't get confused here with this idea of a child being selfish. They must be a normal part of their development, of course.

Speaker 1: 7:54

However, if we get stuck in base level, if we get stuck in that base level state, if we for some reason have struggles or traumas or trials or tribulations or things like that, where we get stuck in that base level state, then we can be in a position where we are constantly challenged in safety and security needs and this can bring out all kinds of dysfunction. People who have it at the extreme turn into narcissists, extreme selfishness, they have Machiavellian type behaviors, extreme manipulativeness, and they can even border on psychopathy or sociopathy, where they lack empathy or the ability to connect with others because they are so stuck in their base level state. By the way, in psychology research, this is the dark triad. It is narcissism, machiavellianism and psychopathy, narcissism being extreme sort of selfishness or self-centeredness, machiavellianism being more manipulative tendencies and psychopathy being lack of compassion for others and only care for ourselves. So when we get stuck in our base level state, we write stories about safety and security. Now, if we write stories about safety and security and we don't feel safe and secure as little kids. How's that going to manifest as adults? Well, we're going to have stories about control and power, because if we lack safety and security, we are going to want to control our environment and have power over it. This explains a lot about certain people that we see, especially certain politicians. It seems like the whole political realm seems to be filled with people who lean narcissistic, machiavellian and or psychopathy, and a lot of us love meant that fact, and there's actually research suggesting that in times of distress, in times of cultural unrest, national upheaval, narcissistic, machiavellian, psychopathic type of people because they're so self-centered and think so highly of themselves and think they're the smartest person in the room, they tend to seek power. And because when these things are happening, we humans also tend to default back to our base level selves a little bit, because we're a little bit fearful and feeling our safety and security being challenged. We also tend to many people tend to want to vote for these people. So we have to check ourselves. These stories have real implications for the world, not just ourselves. But these are deep stories.

Speaker 1: 13:05

Now, in the culture level way of looking at things, you go into your adolescent self. It's all about acceptance and belonging. And if we get our Development arrested there which I would argue, the vast majority of people live and die, never escaping their Adolescent selves, always being too wrapped up in acceptance and belonging and never getting to their next level, human selves. When we get too wrapped up in acceptance and belonging, what do we do? Well, we start to posture, we peacock. We want popularity, popularity is what we go for, and we forget ourselves. We forget our authenticity. And so we write stories about who we're supposed to be in the eyes of culture, what we're supposed to do in the eyes of culture, the job we're supposed to have, the timetable were supposed to be on. Everything begins to look like quote, keeping up with the Joneses, and that is a whole series of stories Also that we write.

Speaker 1: 14:00

Now, keep in mind the base level stories we write and those culture level stories we write. We're not always aware of them. They live in our subconscious minds, and we're gonna talk about that here in just a minute. And, of course, if we escape this Level of development and by escape is probably not the best word evolve past these levels of base level development and culture level development, we move into our next level human state and the next level human state is concerned mainly with growth and Contribution. It's all about I want to do something to grow myself and I want to do something to matter and make a difference for the world. And in order to do that we move into Freedom and autonomy but, most importantly, our own authenticity. We begin to see that Culture level ways of doing thing make me mean that I will leave myself behind. I start to own myself as a next level human. I start to own my uniqueness, appreciate my uniqueness, love myself for my uniqueness and start finding ways to grow myself in rich others and Contribute to the world. And these stories begin to define Everything that we do. And so in the book you grow me and in much of my teachings I talk about how these stories form.

Speaker 1: 15:18

So imagine you have a long piece of string. When I was in elementary school actually I'll never forget I don't know why, but there were always strings on the floor or yarn, pieces of yarn on the floor, and I picked that up when I was bored in class. And if you have a long string and you're bored, what are you gonna do? Well, you only thing you can do really with it is, tie a knot. So I tie a knot with it and then I tie another knot on top of that, and another, another not on top of that, and another Not, before I had this big ball of yarn and then I would try to find another straight piece of string and start tying knots in that. Well, this is a lot like what happens in our subconscious mind, in our base level times, development zero to ten, in our adolescent time.

Speaker 1: 15:57

We write stories and when we write these stories, what happens is something happens a struggle, a trial, a tribulation, a difficulty. By the way, it doesn't have to be a trauma, it can just be a difficulty. For me, I had a volatile mom. It wasn't traumatic, I'd never beat by her, I was. I was never abused by her, I was loved by her. But she was emotionally volatile and that was not a trauma per se, but it was a struggle or difficult for me. So I wrote a story about not trusting female emotions because I never knew what I would get with my mom. Also, my brother teased me a lot when I was young, wasn't traumatic, I wasn't abused. He didn't like beat on me it and assault me, you know that kind of thing, but he really teased me and it had an impact on me. And so the story I wrote there was I needed to get big and strong and defend myself, and even my current body type at 50 Years old this, you know, beefy sort of muscular body is a story, is an outcropping or in a Consequence of that story of safety and security becoming a strong guy.

Speaker 1: 17:01

And so this is what happens to us. We humans are meaning making machines. We forget that we tie these knots in our Psychological ball of yarn and these original knots we tie from these original stories they become what I call seed stories. Seed stories in that if you take a seed and you plant it in the soil and it grows, those roots Go pretty deep and those roots and that seed determine everything that happens after that. So all these branches and leaves on this tree right stem from the root belief systems and the root core of that tree. And so that is the problem, because these knots that we tie in our psyche have one knot tied on top of another, knot on top of another knot. These are all stories, and these stories begin to silently guide our lives. This is where you get quotes from people like Carl Jung that say, if you don't make the conscious conscious, or the unconscious conscious rather, it will follow you around and you will call it fate. If you don't make the unconscious conscious, it will follow you around and you will call it fate. And so how do you know if you have these deep seeded and seed stories in you, these knots that go deep into your psyche that you're not aware about, that are silently causing you not to be able to change, silently influencing your habits and behaviors and making it so?

Speaker 1: 18:29

Every time you try to try to change your habits and behaviors, you slip back. You know, whenever you have repeated patterns, recurrent obstacles and stuck emotions, you know what this is like. You get a new job, you make more money, but for some reason you still have the same amount of money in your bank account. You get a new romantic partner, but it feels like the same old relationships and the same patterns. You try a new workout, you try a new diet, but you end up losing some weight and then ending right back up where you were with the same old habits and behaviors. This is how you know you have some deep seeded stories. So if you're one of these people who hops around from diet program to exercise program, again and again, get a short little bit of change and then revert back to your old ways. This means it wasn't your habits and behaviors, and you're never going to be able to make a dent in this until you start dealing with your identity and your beliefs, which flow out of those deep seeded seed stories. So what I'm trying to get you to understand is that we humans need to begin to look at these stories, and nowhere in health and fitness, nowhere in financial training or I shouldn't say nowhere, but in very few places, even in the romantic coaching world.

Speaker 1: 19:47

If you hire a financial coach, if you hire a diet and exercise coach, if you hire a relationship coach, what are they going to focus on? They're going to focus on your habits and behaviors, right? They're going to tell you, hey, if it's a financial thing, or to say you need to learn how to budget, you need to learn how to invest that kind of thing. If it's a diet and exercise coach, they're going to say, hey, you need to learn how to cut out carbs or do this particular workout or adopt this particular diet, and if it's in the relationship world, it's going to be like you need to learn how to communicate this way or that way. What they never do is they never go.

Speaker 1: 20:20

Honestly, we need to go down into the stories you're telling. What are the stories that you are telling about money, right? As an example? I grew up in a family who saw it was a lower middle class family. There was a lot of lack, a lot of talk about how there was not enough money and, more importantly, a lot of talk about how rich people were taking advantage and were greedy and a lot of that. So I grew up with a money story of I always had to be in lack, took a lot of hard work to make money and, by the way, don't make too much, because if I'm a rich kid, right, then I'm not a good person and that story goes deep into our psyche. So if I'm someone who hates money, who believes rich people are out to get us, who believes that they're all bad, then why would I allow myself to have money? And I had to unpack that In the health and fitness world.

Speaker 1: 21:14

I also grew up in a family that was food, was love. Italian Americans you know pasta and those things. Food is love. You finish everything on your plate and I also then had early introductions into, and adolescence into, bodybuilding, where you eat and you eat and you eat so you can grow muscle. So now, as a consequence of that, I have a very difficult time and have struggled with, with stopping eating when I'm full, realizing I don't need to eat all of the time and realizing food should not be a stress to make me a stress reliever, because that's what it was. So you can. You see, those stories around finance and food influence my habits and behaviors, and same thing about relationships, and so what I want you to begin to look at is I want you to begin to look at what are these deep stories that you are telling? Now I want to take another little bit of time here and then we're going to end this podcast to begin to help you understand how to begin to unpack this, and in the few episodes to come, we'll go into this in a little more detail.

Speaker 1: 22:23

Now here's some of the things we know that are kind of new in science. We are starting to understand that the way we habitually think and the way we habitually feel remember I talked about stuck emotions, recurrent patterns, repeated obstacles these things point to issues that we might have in our deep-seated unconscious stories that we're telling about the world, but not only that. What we also now know, and that science is hinting at, is that there is a biofield, an energetic body that sits below our physical body and informs to some degree our biochemistry, our physiology and our anatomy. And this biofield is an energetic thing, and so there's feelings associated with it. One of the things we need to understand about the unconscious body and this biofield is that it is not logical and linear in the way that we think. It doesn't speak in the language of logic and linearity and predictability and one, two, three, abc. Instead, it speaks in the language of emotion. It speaks in the language of metaphor, it speaks in the language of symbol, speaks in the language of feeling, and so now we can begin to see that it's not just about finding these stories in our thinking, because oftentimes that thinking is so habitual and so knotted and so tangled we couldn't unpack our habitual thinking. If we wanted to, however, we can begin to look at this biofield science and some of the information around the chakras.

Speaker 1: 24:01

Remember the old, new, the woo, woo, new-age chakras? Well, now there is actually new research showing that these chakras do indeed exist, that there are indeed energy of. You know centers in our body that are giving off electromagnetic fields. The biggest ones are the heart area and the brain. Of course these are associated with chakras, and then there's smaller ones going down the body that correlate with the seven chakras or the eight chakras. Actually, they've even found ten of them now.

Speaker 1: 24:35

Why is this important? Because these energy centers also feed into anatomical places in our body. So, for example, let's say chakra one or energy center one, or bio field you know our, you know biofield frequency number one down near the perineum, the, the core chakra. If that energy center has feelings there, and everyone knows what this feels like. By the way, if you ever get up into a high place especially people who are really afraid of heights you feel that weird feeling down near your genitals. Right, that weird feeling down near your perineum. That is the energetics of chakra one and it also feeds into the lower extremities. It feeds into some of the genitalia, it feeds into some of the areas around where it resides. Chakra to the sacred chakra also feeds into some of these areas. So you can imagine if you're feeling difficulty, let's say in the genitals, or you're feeling difficulty in the lower extremities, or you're having low back pain or you're having ovarian pain or you're having these kinds of things, and they also come along with a feeling. This could be another way, besides repeated patterns and recurrent obstacles, to understand where some of these stories lie and where some of this development was arrested.

Speaker 1: 25:55

Now how can we deal with this? Well, we can simply go in to these areas in a meditative way and let's say you're having I don't know some digestive pain around the lower right quadrant in the area of the appendix. You can go down there and look at that pain and, instead of seeing it as pain and purely physiological and anatomical, you can actually go down into that pain and ask it what is this emotion? Is there an emotion here? And you can begin to give it some metaphorical symbolism. In other words, you can say well, what color is it, what temperature is it, what texture is it, what personality is it? You can even say what is it trying to Tell me? And you can begin to, in a very unconscious way, begin to unravel these Stories and begin to understand some of the deep-seated developmental stuck stories we might have now.

Speaker 1: 26:50

Imagine you also then did this in a meditative state, where you used breath work to put you in a meditative state, or you even use psychedelics to do this, and you begin to unpack Some of this, what we might think of as purely physiological, purely anatomical. You begin to unpack it in a different way that is now more energetic, more feeling, more emotional based and, more importantly, more story based. And if you can begin to spot those stories and their Associations, in particular, energy centers in the body and the feelings that they elicit, you can now begin to work on this in a very Different way. Now, I'm not saying that this is the only way to do it, but what I'm saying is this is a missing way. This is a way that people are not using and they are simply coming at this from behaviors and Habits. However, what we want to do, if we really want to change and we're finding we're constantly stuck is we want to get down Into the habits or go past the habits, go deeper. We want to go down into the identity, the beliefs and these initial seed Stories, and this is the thing that I want to begin pushing you towards and understanding as you begin to get deeper in your journey in next level, human.

Speaker 1: 28:11

So this is just more of an introduction, adding on a piece. A lot of this for some of you in the beginning of this podcast was sort Of review, but I added on this other piece here about tying in the biofields, tying in the chakras and tying in how our stories, how our beliefs, how our identity are Perhaps related to our physiology and our anatomy and even our biochemistry, and I want to keep Unpacking this story for you. So I'm gonna stop right there, but if you're someone who's listening to this and you're going, wow, this is really, really interesting, I want you to stick around and make sure you check out the next couple episodes. Also, go and get my new book you grow me. It is a book on romance, but it unpacks a lot of what I just talked about in this podcast through the lens of romance. I Hope you enjoyed this podcast. I hope it gave you some things to think about. I appreciate you all, as always, and I will see you at the next show.