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Everyone, welcome back to the show. This is Brett. And I wanted to record this episode as I guess a message of hope, maybe perspective. Maybe just looking at things a little bit differently, and sharing my thoughts with really the unprecedented situation we find ourselves in right now.
Depending on where you are in the world, perhaps you have already hit the peak of this pandemic, perhaps you already in the thick of it. My heart goes out to you. I can only imagine what you’re going through right now. And for those of us who are here in North America, and I think the writing’s on the wall and there’s a very high likelihood that this is heading our way. All of the data shows that. And I think collectively as a society, we are facing something that we have never ever faced before. And this is also a, it’s a crisis or threat. That is also very, very unusual compared to pretty well, every other type of threat out there.
And what I mean by this is, you know, we, as human beings, we always go through life struggles, we always go through challenges. We always bounce back for the most part. But these are usually short term challenges. These are usually things that we’re presented with as individuals, where we’re presented with something, we’re then asked to go out and counter that so that we can essentially come up with a solution. This is extremely To be different, because this is something that is really affecting every single one of us. And at this point of time, it’s affecting every single person around the world. And I’m not talking about the virus itself. I’m not talking about getting sick with cobit 19. I’m not talking about any of that. I’m talking about the disruption of day to day life. I’m talking about the fear, the panic, the worry, the uncertainty that we are all currently experiencing. And again, this is going to differ from region to region. I think that people in the southern hemisphere, you know, unfortunately, flu season is not there yet. So I know that there’s not as much panic down south yet and I know because I have a lot of friends and family down there. Be here in North America and in the Northern Hemisphere. We are really hitting the hockey stick curve and we are being asked to,
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instead of go out there and do something we’re actually being asked to do nothing at all. Right, we’re actually being asked to stay home. We’re being asked to sit on our butts and do nothing at all that is the best possible thing that we can do right now. And it makes it very interesting because again, we’ve any crisis or any situation like that is normally met with a counter response. And in this case, the counter response is to sit and to do nothing. So there’s a lot of noise going on around out there, especially social media is really amplifying the fear factor. There are dozens of theories that are going on with the conspiracy theories, whether they be scientific theories, whether it’s the origins, the actual impact of the virus, and really what this is doing is creating a lot of confusion. Alright, it’s creating a lot of confusion. It’s creating a lot of panic. It’s creating a lot of stress. And I feel that as we move forward because I cannot see this being a short term problem here, I cannot there’s just there is no way. The data just does not show that this is going to be a two week quarantine or three week quarantine. And then we’re all just going to get back on with our lives. All right, it’s just not looking like that. So, the reason why I say all of this is, when you boil it all down, we are being asked at this moment in time to sit and do nothing. Which means that we’re asked to sit with ourselves, right? So we’re assuming sit with ourselves. And sitting with ourselves really means sitting with our mind. It means sitting with our emotions. And we are now essentially locking ourselves down or self isolating, which I think is a very, very important and good thing to do right now. But with self isolation comes things like Cabin Fever, right? There’s the sense of agitation, there’s a sense of background or ambient fear that’s going on. And you know, for those of you with small children or children living in a house, you know, children are very, very perceptive to that on on, perhaps even a subconscious level. And so as we move through all of this, I think the biggest challenge that we’re going to be faced with here, aside from the economic challenges, the logistical and pragmatic stuff, the day to day disruption, is we are going to be challenged with our own mind. For people who are already practicing things like mindfulness, meditation, perhaps you’ve gone on retreats, perhaps you have a spiritual discipline, whatever that is, perhaps you’re a little bit more tuned in with your mind. But if you’re listening to this, and you’ve never tried meditation, you’ve never tried any type of breathing techniques or stress reduction techniques or anything like that. You might want to consider starting to look into something like that. Okay? Because at the end of the day, all that you are left with is yourself and your own mind. For a lot of people listening to this, you might not want to hear that word spiritual. You might not want to hear that right now, because what we’re dealing with is a very real, tangible, physical problem. But here’s what I want to share with you. The sages and mystics for thousands of years have said that everything comes from consciousness. All right, and I’ve learned this in energy medicine. We are now starting to see this in the scientific literature, especially in the realm of quantum physics and so forth. Consciousness flows into thought. Thought flows into emotion, and emotion flows into the physical. So any physical thing that’s happening on the surface, any physical thing that’s happening in your life can be traced back to your emotional response to things thought patterns, and ultimately to consciousness or your own spirit. And the kicker here is that you cannot separate any of them. Right? This is something that I’ve taught in my classes. This is something that I’ve helped many, many of my clients in the clinic with over almost 20 years now is to understand that all of these things are intertwined. And by just looking at the physical side of things, you’re really selling yourself short. All right, we can distract ourselves all day long, right? So we can put on TV shows, we can watch movies, we can eat food, we can exercise, we can go for a walk, we can do all of these things. But none of those things really taps into the quality of your mind. Right the quality of your mind. And, again, why I say this is we are being called right now, in this unprecedented situation, to not just pull together collectively as a society, but we’re also being Forced to look at ourselves to really question the nature of our own reality. Right?
And I’m not saying that to be lofty or some pie in the sky spiritual idea. If you take a look around you what’s going on right now, We are all stuck in isolation. And we are very, very social creatures, right? So we love being around people, we always want to, you know, we want to hang out with people. Some of us even though we might we say we might be antisocial are still social creatures. That’s how we’re designed. And what’s happening now is all of these material day to day “distractions” And what I mean by that is the getting in the car, you know, having a cup of coffee on the way to work, chatting with the boss sitting in the office, coming back, making dinner, all of these day to day sort of automated more mechanistic type things. A lot of these things have now disappeared. Really, when you remove a lot of these things, you will notice all of a sudden that you have a lot more time on your hands. Because for many of us right now we are stuck at home, we have a lot more time on our hands. And as they say idle hands are the devil’s playground.
And what I mean by that is that when you sit by yourself, you’re going to find that there are thoughts that your mind wanders, that there’s this again ambient level of fear and panic going on in the background. And, you know, fear itself and stress is not necessarily a bad thing at all. In fact, it’s a very good thing is actually contributed to the
09:42
evolution of society and human beings. It’s kept us safe from danger, right? But there’s a big difference between immediate fear and stress and long term stress in long term fear because usually a stressful situation presents itself, we have a response to that. And we either resolve it, or we just change tack and avoided,
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right. But here,
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we’re in for the long haul. Because life as we know it is going to change. And whether you want to believe that it’s going to change forever, no one really knows that, whether you believe that it’s going to change for two or three weeks, and then we’re all going to go back to the way that we were living. No one really knows that either. But what the data is showing is that we are in for, I would say, at least three to six months. And beyond that, if we’re talking about looking for a cure, whether that is medication, whether that is a vaccine, whatever that cure is for you or for us as a collective that is looking to at least 12 to 18 months away from now. So my point is this. And the point is that to pull this all together, what we’re expecting And right now is not going to be going away anytime soon. And so we’re now presented with a unique opportunity where we’re going to have to face some very, very hard decisions. For all of us, myself included, we’re all going to have very challenging times hard decisions to make. But ultimately, at the end of it all, it’s going to bring into question what is really important in life.
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Right, and I say this,
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perhaps as a little bit more of a not necessarily romanticized or perhaps a little bit more of an esoteric or philosophical point of view here. But as I say, I believe that this is a revolution in consciousness in many ways. And the systems that we’ve put in place and the systems that we’ve built around us, many of us listening to this podcast, know that they’re not sustainable, whether you want to talk about things like income inequality, environmental degradation, loss, and by diversity in our environment, pollution, right? And the fact that capitalism is just driving things, and I’m not necessarily anti capitalist by any, by any stretch of the imagination, it’s more that we’re just sucking up resources and we’re sucking this planet dry without putting anything back. And I think that what this experience is going to do aside from the sciency, pragmatic, you know, head on dealing with a virus, it’s also pulling into question, and it’s going to make us focus a little bit more on what systems are we going to be able to put in place that are more sustainable, right, and what you’re starting to see
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is, right now
12:45
anyway, you can see with financial stimulus packages, you can see with, you know, freezing of mortgages, we’re talking about that we’re talking about freezing up rent. Right now the default position, or where everyone is headed is hockey. we mitigate some of the economic damage that we’re all facing. And I suspect this is just my own thought. I suspect that as we move through this, these are not just going to become temporary solutions. These might in fact become permanent solutions. As we birth a new culture, a new society, a new way of thinking about how we interact and treat our environment. And so I truly believe that this is going to be a process of re-calibration, right of reevaluation of re-calibration, of really thinking long and hard about where we’re headed with all of this and what the final outcomes are going to be on the other end of it all. But through this time, I think, you know, I’ve come to this myself personally, is I think it’s very, very important to stay grounded to stay centered. Do this for yourself, do this to children, for your families, particularly for your children. All right. And as I said, they’re very, very sensitive to your energy. Okay? If you have young children, my son doesn’t know what’s going on right now doesn’t understand why he’s home from school. And as much as you try and tell them, they’re not going to know. But they’re sensitive to your fear. They’re sensitive to your anxiety, and to this panic. So, my parting words here are I would encourage you, while you have the time right now, to look into some type of mindfulness practice, to look into being still whether that’s guided meditation, whether that’s listening to some white noise in the headphones and just sitting on a cushion. Whether that is breathing exercises, okay, whatever that is. Just granting yourself centering yourself. And staying calm throughout this process. And I just want to be clear that I’m not trying to dismiss any of the real and present dangers or threats that we’re all facing. This is more trying to move us out of a state of panic and fear into a state of perhaps being a little bit more aware of solutions, a little bit more aware of how we feel, and how we present ourselves and carry ourselves through this time. So I’ll be back in the coming days with some more announcements. I’ll be announcing the opening of a private Facebook group. For us, it’s community Facebook group, and there’ll be a lot of activity going on in there that are more solution oriented. Okay. If you haven’t checked out my blog, just as a final word, I crafted a fairly long blog article with some very practical tips with regards to supplementation that you can do So I’m going to throw a link down in the show notes for this one as well. But yeah, I think that’s it for my site today and just wish you nothing but strength, love and hope, as we all move through this uncertain time.