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hey this is Leo for actualised org and in this episode I'm going to talk about how awareness alone is curative I'm going to show you a secret for how to autocorrect any unwanted behavior more action isn't always the answer despite what you might hear in self-development circles in fact neurosis can be defined as the excessive use of will force and action to try to change your own behaviors and what this leads to is self sabotaging patterns where you try to change something part of you wants to change it and part of you resists changing it and the net result is that you're kind of stuck and you're dead in the water and you're not getting the kind of results that you want in life and then you're feeling guilty and bad about all these behaviors that you have in your life that you don't really want but then secretly you actually do want them which is why they are still there in your life so one way to overcome this is to really experience a reframing about this this idea of how change is created in your life and I want to share a very deep insight with you a very powerful insight that can totally transform your life as simple as it is if you just start to apply it and what this insight is is simply that awareness alone is curative let me repeat that awareness alone is curative what this means is exactly what it sounds like it means that you don't necessarily need to plan and work really hard to let go of unwanted behaviors in fact what it means is that any unhealthy behavior that you have will autocorrect in time merely through the process of observation which is what awareness essentially is it's simply observation so we need to draw a distinction here between you trying to actively change some aspect of your life like maybe you're trying to quit smoking or overeating or you're trying to become more confident or you're trying to be more responsible with your finances something like this right whatever your issue is doesn't matter but usually it's like when you have this problem you're looking for an active solution to it well there's an interesting alternative and the interesting alternative is just to take the light of your awareness and to shine it on the problem trusting that with sufficient awareness the problem will simply dissolve and that's it now what's really cool and powerful about this method is that it doesn't require you to really do anything it's extremely versatile it will apply across the board to many many many many problems you currently have in your life and you will have later on in your life so this is a super versatile technique and I'll show you all the different areas in your life where you can apply it right some really cool areas but first let's talk a little bit about why and how this works and in fact a an additional point I want to make about this this principle right it's really a principle of advanced self development work is that awareness alone is curative I want to like program that into your mind so that when you have a problem this principle comes up it's like oh yeah Leo told me awareness alone is curative maybe I can rely on that principle rather than relying on my old neurotic knee-jerk reaction desire to try to change it through force the additional kind of corollary to this principle is that it's actually not possible to engage in an unhealthy behavior while you're fully conscious this is a mind blowing state and I want to give credit to Bill Harris from Centrepointe who I learned this from I really love this this corollary principle think about this actually if you are trying to engage in unhealthy behavior whatever you deem that to be so smoking drinking partying porn gambling whatever and you can't seem to help yourself you can't seem to stop it right what this principle is saying is that the reason you can't stop it is because you're doing it without awareness if you were to do it with full awareness the behavior could not be continued it would have to stop on its own accord now that's a powerful principle don't just take me on my word for it try it out for yourself this is something you have to really test out now there's a catch of course here and the catch is that for this to work it requires constant awareness right a certain duration of awareness you can't just be aware for a second or a minute you have to be aware throughout the whole thing so what this principle is saying in practice let me give you an example is it saying that if you're smoking and usually you and everyone around you consider smoking to be on healthy activity so you probably are aware that it's unhealthy but when you smoke you're not really fully aware of it so with this principles telling you is that if you were to smoke without trying to change anything about how you're smoking without trying to force yourself to stop if you were just to smoke with full awareness fully consciously over and over and over and over again you would not actually be able to continue to put that cigarette in your mouth at some point it would just hit you like a lightning bolt to the head it's like wait a minute what am I doing here what what am i doing what am i thinking what am i doing and you would just put it down because the awareness would reveal the damage that this is doing to yourself to such an extent that you couldn't really authentically genuinely continue the behavior but for that to happen like I said the catch the catch is that it requires constant awareness it's not enough just to say oh yeah I know smoking is bad for me and then just to continue to smoke unconsciously that's not going to work the other catch here with the the broader principle that awareness alone is curative is that awareness isn't as easy as you think it is you might think awareness oh that's that's easy I got that handled I can do awareness leo ah no you don't realize yet how little awareness you have and in fact even though the principle is solid and it works it works it's kind of like the law of gravity it always works the problem is is that you just don't have sufficient awareness to be able to actually follow through on it that's the real catch here and also it requires patience so this awareness it doesn't work in five seconds and it probably won't work for you in five minutes it requires a constant application over time which you might not have that sort of patience or that sort of consistency so that's the catch now let me show you how this would work with a real-life example so the example I want to use here is going to be eating junk food but I want you to realize that this is just an example and that we're talking about a much broader principle and that any other example you can think of that's sort of along these lines will work just the same right so take whatever problem you have whatever unwanted behavior you have and just substitute it in your mind with the example that I'm using so eating junk food how does this work usually what would happen if like let's say I have this bad habit of eating junk food and in fact at one point in my life I did have this habit so let's say I have this habit and I really want to stop because I know it's not healthy and I like how fat is making me so normally what would happen normally I would go I maybe watch some videos I'd read a book I take a nutrition class or something and there they would tell me no how bad it is that I'm eating this junk food and so then I would guilt myself into like oh well I shouldn't eat that cheeseburger and I shouldn't eat that chocolate and I shouldn't eat that candy and so forth right and normally what I would say to myself then is I'd say okay I gotta really put the screws to myself I gotta get serious here I gotta take massive action I gotta go on a diet I can't eat this stuff and I can't eat that stuff it's all this is wrong I gotta eat like healthy vegetables I got a really restrain myself I got a like some and massive willpower and I gotta watch myself like a hawk so I don't screw up that's the usual a solution that we try and what happens well it might work for a little while but then what happens is that your willpower eventually erodes and you give in and then the whole thing just gets shot to hell and you're back in your old patterns within a week or a month or something like that now what would happen if you tried this alternative method that I'm suggesting if you realized Oh awareness alone can be curative now let me apply that to this situation and what would that look like what it would look like is something like this you're sitting at a nice restaurant your favorite restaurant with all your friends on a Friday night and you really want to splurge tonight so you ordered the that you know the double extra greasy a one and a half pound cheeseburger with double cheese and double bacon and ranch dressing and barbecue sauce and a big thing of fries and onion rings and you got a thousand calorie milkshake and this is like your favorite meal and you're just you know you're gonna splurge yourself tonight because you worked hard all week so you're sitting and you're you're going to eat this thing so what you do is you let yourself order all this stuff you don't prohibit yourself but you do it consciously so as you're sitting there and you're ordering and you're telling the waitress hey you know I'd like double bacon and double cheese and extra ranch dressing and give me some onion rings and all this stuff as you're ordering that you're just doing it fully consciously with awareness and you're trying to maintain an awareness throughout as you're placing your order knowing full well what its leading to you know what its leading to then when the waitress brings over your your burger you're going to sit there and going to eat it now you're going to do it not like you normally would you're going to do it with full awareness so here what you do is you you look at this burger and just sit there and you look at the grease dripping down from and you just look at it with full awareness now as you're doing this you're not judging yourself nor are you judging the situation so you're not telling yourself this is bad I shouldn't be doing this no just the opposite you let yourself do it no judgments at all but you do it with awareness right you see the grease dripping down the burger and then you take your first bite and you notice that bite going down and you already notice that that bite there's something a little bit dirty about it it doesn't feel quite right but anyways you know it's also enjoyable so you notice that - and then you take the next bite in the next bite and you're just noticing how this thing is making you feel and then you know as you're eating more and more and more and you feel like all of a sudden you're you're full now but still you're you know you're taking more and more bites and so you just sit there and you you mindfully watch that you observe it and then you notice yourself starting to feel nauseous starting to feel sick starting to feel heavy and sleepy and achy and bloated and maybe you're having heartburn or indigestion or whatever and you just watch that you don't judge yourself you don't tell yourself this should be this should have not happened this is wrong that whatever that this is going to make you fat you don't do any of that you just watch in silence and then when you go home after you've consumed this giant meal you watch yourself on your drive back home you watch yourself how am I feeling with this giant meal in my stomach and you just observe that and then two hours later when you're sitting at home and you're so sleepy you got to take a nap because of this giant meal and you can't do your work or whatever you just notice that - and then when you're going to sleep and you're not feeling very good you have a stomach ache you notice that you don't judge it you just notice it and then when you wake up in the morning and then you have to go to the shower and you undress to go to the shower and you notice that you have a big gut sticking out you notice that and you're just fully aware of it without judging yourself and then if you do that day after day after day after day at some point will happen is that you will become so aware of the absurdity of the situation and how much damage you're causing yourself that you're not going to have to force yourself or guilt yourself into not eating that burger anymore what's going to happen is that your friends one day will invite you hey let's go out Friday night and you know go to our favorite restaurant and order some greasy food and you'll just say oh you know I don't feel like doing that today because your mind would will have by that point become fully aware of how much suffering you're causing yourself so that's an example of how you apply this see one of the really shocking things you'll learn if you start to practice this principle in your life is just how unaware you ordinarily are especially when you're doing these unwanted behaviors really the only way you can engage in unwanted and unhealthy behaviors is by not being aware and usually there's actually mechanisms you have that facilitate this right there's things you do when you're doing something unhealthy to distract your awareness from the fact that you're doing something unhealthy so when you sit down at the television with a gallon bucket of ice cream and your favorite TV show and you're gonna watch six hours of it while eating ice cream well it's like you kind of just get sucked into the TV show you just kind of like totally let go you become totally unconscious you surrender to it and that's the only way you can do that that's the only way you can sit through that highly unhealthy behavior right because if you sat there for six hours fully conscious of how much you're wasting your life how much you're wasting your health all the other things you could have been doing with your time and how higher consciousness you could have been feeling then it would have been too painful for you to continue that behavior you would have just had to push the off button at some point so I want you to start thinking how you could apply this in your life where could you use this let me give you a couple of qualifications and a couple of pointers for how people make mistakes with applying this principle so one big point of confusion that people make here is that they assume that awareness is the same thing as logical knowing it's not so a smoker logically knows that smoking a cigarette is bad for them but that doesn't really do anything that doesn't change their behavior and you might know that eating a greasy cheeseburger that has 3000 calories of bacon in it probably isn't good for your health you know that but that's not awareness awareness is something very very different awareness is a in-the-moment observation of what's happening knowing is something like a memory you can just know a fact and store it in the back your mind and you can then pull it up once in a while that's not awareness awareness is right now are you aware right now as you're engaged in whatever activity whatever the activity is as you're engaged in it are you aware of what you're doing and that is a skill you have what we might call an awareness muscle in your mind and this muscle is flexed every time that you are being consistently aware and then when you stop flexing the muscle your awareness just kind of true goes away dies off and you go unconscious for a few minutes or a few hours or a few days or a few years you go unconscious right and then it comes back again but this is a muscle this the muscle can be trained ended to be developed and it's very different from logical knowing so even if you're a very smart person you know very smart people can still have very bad behaviors because smarts don't count for very much here what really matters is your awareness muscle if you want to eliminate the deep underlying neurotic needs that you have which are the sources of these unwanted behaviors the only way to do that is by shining and penetrating those with the light of your awareness observation awareness here don't take it as some you know fruity new-age woowoo concept it's really not it's just observation it's kind of like you know if you went outside and you wanted to observe the birds and you just wanted to observe the mating pattern of birds in the neighborhood what would you do you have to go outside just like grab a lawn chair sit on the lawn and just watch birds all day it would be kind of boring it would not be very interesting but as you were doing that eventually you would learn you actually learn like oh that bird I've seen that bird before that specific bird you know it has a little feather sticking out of its head in a weird way or it has like a broken foot or something I've seen that bird before that happens just because you're observing a lot after a lot of observation you become familiar with things you start to see the patterns of how things work that's the power of observation right that's very very different than just reading in a book something about a bird very different another qualification here is that being aware is not the same thing as moralizing not at all so remember that in this example that I gave you with the eating junk food you're not sitting there I'm not telling you to sit there and say oh I shouldn't eat bad and this thing is super bad for me no this bacon you know I've read in a book that bacon is is terrible for my heart and you know this is gonna make me so fat and I don't want to be fat all of that stuff that's not awareness that's actually unawareness moralizing is actually one of the major unwanted behaviors that you should be concerned about with unwire and one of the ways that you can unwire moralizing is simply through awareness you don't on wire moralizing through more moralizing you just observe yourself moralizing until after a while after enough days of moralizing and moralizing and moralizing you see wait a minute this moralizing it's actually hurting me oh it's hurting me oh maybe I should stop doing it and your mind will release it will release the release will be beyond you it will transcend you see the power of awareness is that awareness comes from someplace deeper than just you you as an ego sitting there as an ego you want all these things in your life you're trying to set up the perfect life for yourself you're trying to be happy and you're trying to avoid misery and suffering you're trying to do all this stuff but paradoxically what's happening is that because you're trying to micromanage everything with your ego the ego gets in its own way it's kind of like a micromanaging boss that doesn't let a good employee do his job right right a good boss has to actually let go of control and just kind of sit back and watch and once in a while he steps in and gives a little bit of advice here and there and basically he trusts the employee to do the work that he's supposed to do but see you're not doing that you're micromanaging as the ego that you are because it gives you a sense of power in your life it's just sense of control and you thrive on that the ego thrives on that what has to happen here is you have to let go of that and just be aware and that's a foreign notion too many people also another qualification is that awareness is not suppression so I'm not telling you to suppress anything here I'm not telling you to suppress your desires even the bad quote-unquote bad or evil or shady desires that you have I'm not telling you to suppress those so what I'm telling you is actually quite the opposite if you have a real desire to have sex or to watch some porn or watch I know a six hour marathon of your favorite show while eating a bucket of ice cream do that do it don't hold yourself back as you're doing it be aware though you see don't try to stop yourself the mistake the very a big mistake that people make when they're trying to be aware is that as they're being aware they're also at the same time manipulating their behavior to try to come uh to the best outcome possible so it's like if you sat down you know Kayleigh oh I'm gonna do what you said so I'm sitting here with my gallon of ice cream and uh I'm eating it a little bit and I'm washing my TV and now Leo told me that you know aware and slowed is cured so I'm going to be aware of this but as I'm aware you know wouldn't it also be nice if I just actually like resisted it leo should I just resist it and like tell myself to put it away and what I'm telling yours no don't do that do what you naturally want to do so if you naturally want to eat the whole bucket eat the whole bucket but be aware while you're eating the whole bucket notice that awareness here is very hands-off activity it's like it's very passive it's very passive it's almost scientific like I said if a scientist was observing Birds outside and trying to describe accurately their mating behaviors the scientists wouldn't go and run up to the birds and try to interfere and force them to mate by hand right that would beYOU that would be totally against the scientific method because it's just it's so artificial no the scientists would sit back he would hide himself and he would try to make himself totally transparent and invisible to the birds so that the birds could do their thing and he could just bored these the actual situation you just records it that's what I want you to do I want you just to record in your own mind exactly what's happening and that would be you following this principle and then all you got to do is you just gotta keep doing it consistently and just trust the process trust that this principle works and over time what you'll do is you'll prove it to yourself now let's talk about how this can be used in your life different areas of application basically it works for any unwanted behavior or bad habit that you have so of course over eating drugs drinking smoking porn television internet Facebook social media this kind of stuff video games procrastination shyness guilt perfectionism workaholism depression anger anxiety fear OCD see it works for all this stuff and more this is just a small list let me pick out a couple of these and talk about them in a little bit more detail so let's say for example you have a shyness problem and maybe you were bullied in school so you're kind of shy now ah and you say you say Leo how do I solve my shyness problem well rather than going out there and forcefully trying to solve it in a desperate neurotic manner how about we apply this principle so the principle is awareness alone is curative so when you're being shy the next time it happens to you in the moment actually just watch yourself being shy notice the thoughts coming up in your mind notice what those thoughts are doing to you to your behavior notice the emotions that come up notice your sweaty palms notice what's happening notice the people how they're reacting to you notice what happens after the shyness disappears so try to be fully aware through that shyness process and what I would suggest is going to happen what I would predict is that if you do that day after day after day after day eventually you will reach the pole where you will no longer be shy that's pretty powerful pretty powerful but you have to be consistent with it you have to actually practice awareness and you have to not fall into all those traps that I talked about what about depression Leo how do I cure my depression what do I do what kind of forceful neurotic action should I take well how about you apply this principle and the next time you're depressed you just sit there and you'll be fully aware of your depression without trying to change it without trying to run away from it without without trying to become happy somehow through some kind of chemical and mechanical stimulation just be aware of your depression be aware the thoughts that come up while they're coming up notice all that it's not easy to do you got to actually do it you got to apply awareness to it that's challenging because if you're depressed your awareness muscles are very weak but what I'll guarantee you is the following if you do do it and you become or stay aware longer and longer and longer throughout every depressive episode that you have in your life after a certain point the depression will become impossible it will simply become impossible because what'll happen is you'll become aware of how you are creating the depression as crazy as that might sound to you but you are creating it and you can become aware of it but it will take patience and consistency on your part you have to actually have a little faith in this process and so on with things like fear if you have fear about something like let's say you have a fear of your kids doing drugs what do I do about that Leo how do I stop my kids from doing drugs well instead of getting them to stop doing drugs what I would suggest is that you actually work on your fear of them doing drugs and the way that you do that is just to be fully aware of the fear as it comes up so the next time you have this fear just be aware what's happening what thoughts are you thinking what images are going through your mind be fully aware of that and over time this problem will autocorrect and you won't need to force things to happen so I hope you can see the power of this right extremely versatile technique very foundational principle let me wrap up a little bit by just kind of going deeper into what's really happening in your mind with awareness you got to realize that your mind is like a thinking machine it's a complex very vast network of thoughts thoughts and beliefs I've talked about this in other episodes where I talked about the knowledge graph or another phrase that I like for is this web of beliefs that you have in your mind you have hundreds and thousands of different beliefs in your mind thoughts these thoughts are being triggered every single moment throughout your life you can't really control it and this is one giant very complex system this entire system is what creates your personality and is what fuels many of the actions and behaviors you take in your life so basically if you want to start to create changes in this web of beliefs what starts to happen is you have to notice you have to start to become aware of how the system works notice that that is different from trying to change the system the system is so huge and so vast that it's beyond your capacity to change this system tries to maintain homeostasis it tries to maintain kind of a status quo and it doesn't like when you go in there and try to change stuff in fact what's happening is that there is not a you who's sitting outside the system who's trying to change the system what is really the case is that you are the system so how do you change yourself well that's really tricky if what you try to do is the most kind of like nine an intuitive thing is that you're going to try to act from within this web of beliefs to change the web of beliefs and if you try to do that you're very likely to fail because thoughts will not deeply change other thoughts if you want a real deep change in this whole system what's required is awareness the raising of awareness as awareness is raised this web of beliefs starts to restructure itself naturally because actually the reality of it is and now we're getting into some very deep stuff but the reality of it is is that this web of beliefs is sort of floating in a giant sea of awareness the awareness is the only thing that's outside you might say the web of beliefs there's nothing else outside of it so the deepest thing you can appeal to and the most fundamental thing you can ground yourself in is awareness but notice that that's not thinking that's not knowledge that's not belief that's not moralization that's not ideology that's not dogma it's awareness and to confuse awareness with any of these other things is to get stuck in this network of beliefs that you have and this network of thoughts and then it's really difficult to create change in your life because the function of this network is to maintain homeostasis and homeostasis is not change change really truly comes from awareness and we have a tendency naively to want to force a change and we think that if we just apply enough force in one part of the web of beliefs that that will somehow make a dent but with what we don't realize is that this web of beliefs is actually the place from which the force is coming so the force isn't coming from some outside magical location the force when you're trying to apply force it's actually coming from a part of the web of beliefs so what happens is that it's like this self referential like twisted phenomenon right this is where self-sabotage comes from it's like one part of the Weber believed tries to turn against the other part and then this part reaction turns against that part and so you just have this like swirling vortex of homeostasis in the end what happens is that the this this web is so complex that every part adjusts itself to maintain a certain balance and status quo which is why the harder you try sometimes the less you succeed the counterintuitive thing is to let go of that whole enterprise and to just work on raising awareness and to have faith that the change that you seek will come as a natural byproduct of the raising of awareness and not through some force applied within the system the system is really helpless to change itself without awareness but this requires a radical new way of thinking your web of beliefs has to actually conceptually first grasp oh yeah I'm not the only thing at work here there's something beyond me here at work let me surrender to the thing beyond see that has to enter into your network of thinking which is why an episode like this can be valuable to you because even though as I'm speaking to you I'm giving you concepts and thoughts and beliefs and you might say well Leo this is just more adding more stuff to my network and it's not giving me more awareness yes that's technically true but we have to start somewhere right we have to get a little bit of leverage somehow so ah the way we do that is by feeding a little bit of the right kind of beliefs and thoughts into your network and then hoping that that will be enough for you to then trigger that awareness and maybe aha right you have an aha moment so a thought can lead to in a-ha moment it can lead to an insight and those aha moments are those insights that's what creates change those insights do not come from thoughts those insights come from awareness that's some deep [ __ ] I don't want to go into too much detail on that I'll talk about that later in other episodes because we get a little deep here but I did want to give you this kind of like deeper understanding of what's really going on here when you're trying to change some of these unwanted behaviors and why it's so difficult for you and why you keep backsliding and while you keep sabotaging and why it seems hopeless and it's like Oh Leo I can't you know I can't cure my depression I I just can't seem to lose weight and I can't seem to get my finances in order and I I just keep procrastinating over and over again and it seems like nothing will help well if you've been stuck in that cycle try the alternative try adopting the principle that awareness alone is curative and just have faith in that process believe that the deepest change will come from awareness of the damage that you caused yourself and from a natural desire for reality and truth all real change comes from alignment with reality and truth at the most fundamental level that's what's going on when you're growing when you're developing when your self actualizing but for that to happen you need to develop some awareness so you might say well Leo how do I have developed this magical thing called awareness well there's really no shortcut for it it's simply by sitting there and be by being aware but there are a couple of very simple things you can do probably the most powerful is to set up a meditation habit daily meditation habit I have many episodes to talk about how to do that so you might want to check those out and start experimenting with that but all so a lot of my other videos you know they talk about what awareness is in more depth what truth and reality is how the mind plays tricks on you the illusions created by thoughts so as you watch all this stuff what's going to happen is that you will get the right concepts into your web of beliefs that will allow you to create a little bit of clearing for the awareness to start to arise and really take effect and then over time you know over months and years as you train that up and you flex your awareness muscle it will become so strong that a lot of the problems that you've had in your life they'll just simply melt away and dissipate so doesn't that sound like a better alternative to the stuff you've been trying that's been failing give it a shot let me know how it works all right I'm signing off please click the like button for me post your comments down below I do like to read them sometimes share this episode's friend and lastly come check out Ashley eyes that are right here there's my website and my newsletter sign up to the newsletter because it'll keep you on track with this journey of learning about how your mind works how your mind deceives you and how to raise awareness I'm going to have a lot more content coming out in the future that has to do with in-depth topics about how thoughts work how consciousness works what awareness is what being is what reality is what truth is how to get in touch with all this stuff and man if you do that for just a couple of years the whole experience that you have of life is going to transform and I'm really excited to have you to start to taste that in your life that's what excites me about this work so I'll be sharing more of that coming up sign up stay tuned and I'll see you soon with more you