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hey this is Leo for actualised org and in this episode I'm going to talk about the lower versus the higher self you are like a light switch meaning that you have basically two modes on which you can run on and off or in other words the lower self and the higher self what is the lower self the lower self is who you are when you're fearful when you're mean when you're petty when you're untruthful when you're selfish the higher self is when you're calm when you're kind noble generous truthful and selfless and in the human organism if we think of the human organism as a machine it's like you have this switch and the switch can be flipped at any time and can send you from the regular place that you're at which is usually the higher self it can send you down into the lower self and this is really the difference between the animal inside you and the human inside you the lower self is like the animal the Beast although in a sense it's kind of a slight and a slander on animals to say that because it's interesting you know with the human organism the human is capable of being like hyper human and embodying everything that's the most noble about humanity when you're in your highest self but when you're in your lowest self it's like the flip opposite of that 180 degrees and in fact you're much worse than an animal and the things that a human being does from the lower self are really damaging both to the individual who does it but also to the people around that person and also to society at large right and most of the issues and problems that we have in in society any like really serious problems we have in our own personal lives often come from the fact that this switch gets flipped and we're not conscious to the fact that the switch is getting flipped so I want to talk a little bit about that here right now and I'm going to give you two key insights here in this episode and the first key insight is the following there is a boundary between the lower and the higher self and this boundary is something that you probably have never thought about and you're totally unconscious of but here's the insight this boundary is being threatened when you are threatened you go into your lower self and the crazy thing is that this happens for most people unconsciously they're not aware that this is going on and that creates a lot of problems I want to give a credit to eben pagan for introducing me to this insight here it's a very very powerful and rare insight that most people do not make in their lives and this creates all sorts of problems which is why it's so important so think about this if you're making a decision from your lower self chances are it's going to be a disastrous decision also if you're trying to take some action in your life from the lower self it's probably going to be a disastrous action or behavior and if you're making some sort of plans for your life or setting goals for your life from a position of the lower self and that's going to be a disastrous plan that you're making so why is this issue important well for these reasons because we don't want you making bad decisions bad behaviors and bad plans right and um you know people who really screw their is up um one of the most common ways is this issue right here something happens they get pissed off or they get really afraid they get threatened in some way they get sent down from their usual high self which is you know nice and then they get sent down to this mean petty brutal person and then they do something or say something that they really regret and can never take back and then this destroys their life and really you know that could happen once or twice but it's really bad when it keeps happening repeatedly and you don't understand that it's going on with you and the crazy thing is that you can be a very intelligent person and still not be conscious and aware of the fact that this is happening to you so there's a distinction to be made here between intelligence which is one thing which is not really that important but on the other hand like emotional intelligence and awareness which is completely crucial to the results that you get in your life so when we say that the the threat that you experience sends you from a higher solvent to the lower self what are we talking about well clearly we're obviously talking about physical danger if you get into a situation where you are in physical danger for example maybe you're driving your car and then all of a sudden something happens and you you realize that oh [ __ ] you're you're really in trouble here in the next couple of seconds right you had one of those moments while driving even if something bad happens to you ultimately still you sense that physical danger and all of a sudden it sends you into that flight-or-fight response right it's a physical threat so that's obvious stuff or if you know if there's someone stalking you in a dark parking lot then you're going to sense that you're in physical danger and you're going to get flipped into your lower self but what's interesting is that there's a there's also triggers that are more subtle and these are the ones you really got to watch out for because the physical danger stuff you know most of us aren't really always like in physical danger that's a rare situation that happens to us and actually a lot of times you know we respond fine to that the problem is when you start responding or just reacting from your lower self to some of these other threats so here's some categories for you so for example money a whole category of threats can be subsumed under that so money threats there's triggers there that could trigger you right so what do you do if you're going broke you feel like someone's going to steal some money from you or you feel like you're not going to be able to make more money in the future something like that how about family triggers the family category huge how many of us are triggered by stuff relating to our family that we don't like you know what we're going to see that person we're going to have to talk to this person I'm going to have to negotiate something there and those triggers send us into the lower self also intimate relationships is a huge category career is a huge category reputation is a huge category think about situations where your reputation is on the line and that's a trigger for sending you into your lower self or also think about belief systems think about if you hold a religion or you have religious dogmas or if you have some sort of scientific background or you have scientific dogmas and beliefs and you have to defend all that and whenever those come under threat then you feel like you have to defend and when you're doing that defending you're dropping into your lower self so the question is are you aware of what triggers you to cross this boundary the the idea of this entire episode is very simple right it's just that there's this boundary and you're crossing it and this boundary is just a threat but you need to actually get mindfulness and awareness around this in your own life and you need to see what are the individual idiosyncratic triggers that you personally have because each of us has a unique constellation of triggers that send us into this kind of fear mode the question is what is that for you you need to start identifying that and getting more and more clear about it and one of the best ways is just maybe to keep a journal or a diary and any time that you actually do get sent down into your lower self and you later notice it you write down the situation so maybe you come home after work and you're you're in a conversation with your spouse and you you two are talking about something and all of a sudden some issue comes up and it's like that's the issue that triggers you to go from higher self to lower self what of that is maybe it's money maybe it's the in-laws maybe it's you know the discussion about having a children or maybe it's about you know some religious view usually what would happen is that you would just get sucked in to the lower self and not even realize that that's what happened you just how you to just have a big argument and you'd kind of know why it happened but on the other hand you didn't really understand why it happened right and from that lower self maybe you did something nasty or stupid or mean that then ruined your relationship so that's just one example right I'm sure you can fill in the blanks and come up with your own examples of how this works so you need to start to do this work of actually identifying this stuff not just taking it as a theory because as a theory you know this is nice but when you identify it that's when it really hits home to you when you actually see it in action and here's the second key insight that I want to give you here what's the actual mechanism by which this lower self gets activated sure there's this boundary you get threatened but how is it actually happening what happens when you're in your lower self this key insight came from my meditation retreat what I wish I just done came back from and what I noticed there was something very interesting first of all I heard the facilitator talking about the emotional body and he said a very curious thing which really piqued my interest he said that one of the most important ways in which mindfulness can help us as human beings in everyday life is to make us more aware how our emotional body revs up and that may be very curious and in fact he said that the way he designed his whole system and the way that he uses the language to explain mindfulness to make certain distinctions in your mind his whole model for mindfulness was basically kind of you know one facet of it was designed in such a way that it would help you to be able to identify this within yourself while it's happening and I didn't quite you know I kind of intellectually understood what he meant but I didn't get like an experiential sense of what he meant until I was meditating and I was meditating outside for most of the retreat next to this little nice beautiful wooden chapel just like this small little private chapel and there was a bench and I was sitting outside and it was this place kind of near the woods so there's a lot of insects flying around and I was sitting there meditating for the whole week and what I noticed is that there's a man there's a lot of wasps flying around me and at first it just kind of see like I'll just you know random wasps here and there that's normal but then I looked around as I was you know setting up my bench one morning and I discovered that oh [ __ ] there's a there's a wasp nest right behind me as I'm sitting on my bench and it's kind of near the ground and I'm sitting on this balcony and no wonder all these wasps are flying around me when I'm meditating it's because I'm sitting in their flight path it's like they're flying to and from their home and I'm like right in the middle of it sitting there trying to meditate but you know it was a beautiful spot so I wanted to keep the spot didn't want to move and what I did is I just said okay I'm just going to kind of deal with it I'm gonna sit through it but the very interesting thing that happened to me is that see the problem is that the emotional body revs up inside of you probably many times a day in your life but you don't actually notice it you're not mindful enough you don't have enough awareness this is a muscle that needs to be developed so when I was sitting there I got a really interesting kind of science experiment just fall on my lap because I was sitting there and I was meditating and I was good getting into a place record I could really totally calm myself down and if you ever get into that kind of meditative place where you calm yourself completely and you get a real clear sense of what's going on in your body emotionally like you get in touch with all the different sensations in your body what you're going to notice is that there's a very clear and palpable sense like oh I'm relaxed and everything is normal and cool and I can just be calm and you notice that there's like a lack of any kind of churning emotions or any kind of like churning sensations in the stomach or in the chest or any kind of like tingling sensations in in your limbs stuff like that but then when a threat presents itself and this is actually the interesting thing here because usually when you're meditating you don't get threatened very often but this was interesting because the wasp as I meditated with my eyes open the wasp flies by my face and I can't help but go into an emotional reaction even though like I'm not doing it consciously it just happens to me right because in humans were hard-wired to have phobias of spiders and snakes and and various insects so this was very curious because I was sitting there and I was totally peaceful and calm but then this wasp just flies and hovers near me and all of a sudden I can see like holy [ __ ] my emotional body just lit up like a Christmas tree right I could see it it's like it's like it's getting going and getting going and getting going right and it starts as like a sensation in your lower abdomen and then maybe it moves up into your chest and maybe your your hands and feet get involved and your limbs get involved and then your mind gets triggered and your mind starts flashing pictures to you of a wasp like biting you in the eye or you know biting your eyeball out or landing on the back your neck when you're meditating and and stinging you multiple times in a row or something like that right you start getting these like fantasies of a killer wasp out hunting for you or maybe the whole family of wasp is going to come join this one wasp and they're all going to sting you to death that's literally what your mind starts coming up with once the emotional body revs up more and more and more and what's fascinating is if you ever get the chance to just sit there and watch how your emotional body revs up and then also revs back down and then revs back up and then revs back down then you start to really get this sense like oh man this is a really important skill to develop is this ability to to sense when this emotional body is doing what now I was sitting there this was like a perfect science experiment because I was sitting there and almost like this lab setting where I could isolate the variables the problem is that most people in their lives they don't get this kind of opportunity and in fact just the other day I was sitting and doing some work right and only because I've been meditating a lot over the last couple of weeks after I finished the work and I just took a little break sat down on the couch I realized lies holy [ __ ] I was just working for 50 minutes and my entire emotional body was like lit up like a Christmas tree but I wasn't really aware of it until I just came out of that work session and into my break and now I've my prime sitting here trying to practice a little bit of mindfulness and now I can actually see like oh man there's all this like emotional weird emotional sensation happening in my in my lower abdomen and I can really feel it and it's there and it's not that easy to just let it all go I actually have to sit there and practice meditation for maybe two or three minutes just to start to get it to rev down and rev down and rub down and kind of just put me into a really nice calm even grounded place now that's something that you get when you do meditation practice and mindfulness practice which is what most people are missing out on right they think that meditation is just going to give them you know something or some calming of the mind but they don't understand that they're going to get these critical distinctions that now you can apply to places in your life right and it's like a muscle you have to build up this mindfulness muscle so what I'm talking about here this this inside of the emotional body revving up I don't mean that just as soon as it revs up that instantly you're in your lower self usually what happens that it revs up and you're still cool but then it revs up a little bit more and a little bit more a little bit more and after a certain point you know it revs up enough that it it just kind of like becomes this some this snowball that's rolling down the hill and it's totally lost control it's turn into an avalanche which is now this powerful thing is unstoppable and that's when you're in your lower self when that avalanche you know when that snowball turns into an avalanche and so why mindfulness is so powerful in meditation is such a powerful practice is that you can start to see when the snowball starts rolling when it's still a little baby snowball before it turns into an avalanche and you can prevent it from becoming an avalanche not even by trying to control it necessarily by just simply by observing it it's crazy that just simply observing what's happening in your emotional body is enough to make it dissipate and go away whereas when you're not observing it and you don't even know that this is happening inside you what happens there tends to be this just runaway effect and you just get blindsided by this thing so one thing I recommend is that if you do have a hornet's nest near your house then go try this out this is a really cool experiment go try meditating outside and make sure you're sitting there with your eyes wide open so you can see all the wasps flying around you maybe you want to even put some some food for them that they can come near you right and just see how your emotional body revs up it's a really cool exercise to do but also you know not everyone has a hornet's nest near them so a little hard to engineer that all right so that's the two key insights now you might ask okay I get the theory now what do I do with this Leo well here are some action steps for you number one is make sure that you make a commitment right now and for the rest of your life - never make decisions when you're in your lower self now of course this implies that you have the ability to be aware of when you're actually in your lower self so what that means in practice if you want to actually honor this commitment is that you have to build your awareness muscles so that you can see when that line is actually crossed and when you do step down into your lower self there's a couple of ways you can do this one way is to just let it happen to you and you're only going to be able to tell after the fact right so maybe your spouse says something nasty to you and that sends you into your lower self and you don't realize it for a day and you have this huge blowout argument with your spouse but then you know the next day in the morning you realize like oh [ __ ] I got sent into my lower self and I didn't even realize it but at least I realize it now okay so that's how it happened and you kind of retrace your steps so there's that way that's kind of like the trial and error approach you know not the best way but that one works for four people in a pinch so you can use that you got to remember though to do that right otherwise you're going to forget maybe keep a journal or a log of all these incidents that happen to you of crossing the line so that's one way another way is just practicing more meditation another way might be doing this wasp this wasp experiment that I told you right so there's there's multiple little techniques you can you can employ to do this the other thing you should do as an action step is make a commitment to disengage from people when you're in your lower self we don't want you making decisions when you're in your lower self we also don't want you engaging with people why not because probably you're not going to have something nice to say when you're in your lower self probably going to be a dick probably you're going to be a [ __ ] probably you're going to say something nasty probably you're not going to really be generous or magnanimous or very truthful or very honest right probably gonna be quite selfish so all these things we'd like to avoid in our lives because there's a lot of bad fallout that comes from behaving that way so one simple solution is just to disengage from people and actually you can tell them Hey I'm in my lower self right now so I don't want to engage you so maybe you know your spouse is talking to you you guys are in the middle of a conversation and you're sensing that it's getting heated and you sense that oh I just crossed the line and if you have enough of awareness of that then you can just tell your spouse hey you know let's just cut this conversation off right now um I'm going to go you know watch some TV for an hour because I sense that I just got triggered into my lower self and I don't want to say or do something that I'm going to regret and just actually say that to your spouse and just see what happens you'll probably get a much better reaction than you normally would right or if you're engaging with your boss at work with your employees same kind of deal right as soon as you sense yourself getting triggered into your lower self find a way just to distract yourself to not have to deal with that situation right there so that you can just take a little bit of time off your emotional body can rev down and then you can come back clear-headed and deal with the situation in a more empowering way so make that commitment to also practice mindfulness of the emotional body revving up this is a more subtle thing than actually crossing the line and this is something you can do on a daily basis just after you know go go work for a couple of hours and then get off of work and then just come come sit on your couch or sit in a chair at your office and just meditate for five minutes and just see calm yourself down and just see where were you ad before and where are you at now what you're probably going to notice that you're so stressed during the day and you don't even notice that you're stressed because it just becomes like you know like you're a fish and water you don't notice the water it's only when you calm yourself down and actually put yourself into a meditative state you can actually finally realize by way of contrast like oh damn I was stressed for two hours and only now I can realize why I was stressing the fact that it's happening somewhere in my body and you're going to get more and more experience with that and then you're going to get better and better mindful this muscles so that's a that's a good way to to practice that another thing you should do is change the structure of your life if you need to to remove the triggers that send you into a threat mode so if you're living in a part of town where there's gangs and violence then you probably not don't understand it there and get accustomed to that you probably actually want to go and change your neighborhood or you know if you're living in some third-world country where there is some some safety issues and you feel like you're in physical harm you probably want to change your location or maybe change where your house is positioned something like that maybe get some stronger locks on your door I mean it's okay to actually go out and take some action to fix this stuff right it's not just all mental but also you know beyond the physical danger stuff you need to get more awareness around the triggers that you have so money family relationships you know all that stuff we talked about career your reputation and once you know those triggers then you got to actually change the structure of your life to remove the worst triggers because if you're living your life in this way where you're constantly triggered by these things all the time and that's just a function of the environment that you've created for yourself then you know what you know all the personal development in the world is not going to really help you because you do need to work on these triggers so maybe you have a boss that's always yelling at you and berating you at work and maybe that's always sending you into your lower self because you always feel threatened when he's yelling at you okay well you probably want to consider changing jobs or moving to another department at work right that's what I would call a structural change to your life but before you can do that first you need to recognize what are the triggers so the last action that I want you to take is go get some coaching or some therapy or if you can't afford that then sit down and really do some serious journaling yourself and ask yourself this question what are the most common triggers for me that send me into my lower self that's the key question for you and this might be something you can sit down and think about right now and come up with some examples but also it might be something you gotta actually do over the weeks and months because you're probably not going to be aware of these triggers until they actually start happening to you and now you know these ideas that I've talked to you about right now you have these distinctions which you didn't have before so sit down and slowly progressively make this list of triggers so you know what they are and you know you can get coaching on those and get therapy on those you can go buy some self-help books that will help you to deal with those you basically have to unwire them which you're going to discover that a lot of those triggers they probably go back far into your past the roots of that trigger stem all the way back you know to your childhood somewhere maybe to your earliest memories or maybe to the dysfunctional relationship you had with your mother or with your father or with your sister or your brother or something like that that's usually what it is and you know those can involve some work to unwire that's why therapy is so popular because therapy does that that's why coaching is popular because coaching helps you to do that and it can be difficult to unwire or trigger like that all by yourself because usually what happens is that you're so sucked into the trigger that again you're like a fish and water you don't notice that this trigger is actually not a part of you is kind of like an artificial dysfunctional part of you so a lot of times it helps a third person to look at your situation to kind of give you some guidance which is why therapy or coaching can be so effective but you can do it yourself if you're very determined all right so that's it those are action steps go ahead and do this and I will see you soon this is Leo I'm signing off post me your comments down below click the like button please share this video with a friend and come sign up to my newsletter at actualized org beyond the newsletter which is free which updates you with all the free videos that I release every single week I also have a lot of resources there some core and stuff you can take my life purpose 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