The salient point of this podcast episode revolves around the transformative journey from victimhood to empowerment through the metaphor of becoming a "bodybuilder of love." We delve into the profound understanding that one’s past experiences, while undoubtedly impactful, do not have to serve as the foundation for one’s future. Instead, we explore how the challenges one faces can be viewed as weights that strengthen the capacity for love and resilience. This discussion unfolds through a rich dialogue that emphasizes the necessity of acknowledging fear as a protective instinct, while simultaneously asserting control over one’s emotional landscape. Ultimately, we illuminate the path toward harnessing personal power, enabling listeners to cultivate a life characterized by intentional choices rather than reactive patterns.

Takeaways:

1. In this episode, we elucidate the profound transition from victimhood to empowerment, demonstrating how individuals can reshape their narratives.
2. Listeners are encouraged to utilize their life's challenges as weights, fostering personal growth and strengthening their capacity for love.
3. The concept of creation is redefined as a biological instruction, emphasizing the importance of understanding one's physiological responses to fear and anxiety.
4. We delve into the necessity of confronting and dismantling the psychological foundations built on fear, advocating for the establishment of a new, empowering framework.
5. The episode highlights the transformative power of choosing love amidst adversity, reinforcing the notion that true peace is cultivated through strength rather than the absence of turmoil.
6. An essential tool presented is the practice of 'soulview', which encourages individuals to shift their perspectives from fear to understanding, thereby fostering compassion for oneself and others.

Links referenced in this episode:

1. why this Keeps happening.com
2. Instagram
3. Facebook
4. TikTok
5. YouTube

Delving into the themes of trauma and personal empowerment, this episode presents a compelling narrative on the transition from feeling powerless to embracing one's capacity to create. The speakers engage in a candid conversation about the biological and emotional realities of anxiety, linking physiological reactions to deeper psychological patterns. Through a series of insightful analogies, they illustrate how past experiences can serve as the foundation for building a more empowered self. The metaphor of becoming a 'bodybuilder of love' encapsulates the essence of the episode, inviting listeners to perceive their challenges as weights that build emotional strength. The discussion emphasizes the necessity of facing fears rather than evading them, positing that true empowerment lies in transforming distress into strength. By equipping listeners with practical tools, such as the concept of 'soulview,' the episode seeks to shift perceptions of fear, urging individuals to honor their emotional responses while taking charge of their narratives. Ultimately, this episode serves as a clarion call to redefine one's relationship with adversity, advocating for a proactive approach to personal growth and emotional resilience.

Welcome to why this Keeps Happening.

From Trauma to Transformation.

The podcast that helps you break free from repeating patterns and create the life you want through our five stage process.

I'm Mark Seitler.

Before we begin, we want you to know that this episode is based on a real coaching session that was over two hours long.

We've condensed it down to the key insights and breakthroughs to protect our clients complete privacy.

The voices you're hearing are AI generated to keep our clients fully anonymous.

This allows us to share real transformational moments from our coaching work.

In today's episode, Becoming a Bodybuilder of Love, you'll discover why your past doesn't have to be your future foundation the secret to shifting from a victim mindset to being a powerful creator.

And how to use your greatest challenges as the weights that make your love muscles stronger.

I mean, right out of the gate, I just have to be totally honest.

I am so exhausted.

And I don't mean just like I need a nap exhausted.

I mean, my soul is tired.

It's this 3am Wake up call almost every single night.

It's like a starting gun goes off in my brain.

Right.

My heart is pounding, my thoughts are just racing and I just have this overwhelming sense that the world is literally on fire.

And I'm just sitting here waiting for the flames to reach my front door.

It's completely paralyzing.

I can hear that heaviness in your voice, I really can.

And I want to pause this right there because what you're describing, that specific 3:00am wake up call, the racing heart, the anticipation of the fire, that is actually a biological event.

We need to decode.

A biological event.

Yeah.

And for you, listening to this right now, if you've ever jolted awake in a panic, you need to understand the mechanics of this.

We were talking a little bit before we started about the concept of creation, and I think given what you just said, this is the perfect place to really unpack that.

But maybe not in the way you're

expecting creation, because, I mean, it feels like the exact opposite of that.

How so?

It feels like destruction, like entropy.

My life isn't being created.

It feels like it's being eroded by everything happening out there in the world.

I certainly am not sitting up at 3am Trying to.

Trying to create anxiety.

I'm the victim of it.

I know it feels that way.

And logically, looking at your conscious to do list, nobody writes have a panic attack.

Right between buy groceries and call mom.

Right?

Exactly.

In this deep dive, we define creation a bit differently.

It isn't a wish list.

It's not a vision board where you cut out pictures of a nice car creation.

At its absolute core is a set of biological instructions you are sending to your central nervous system.

Instructions?

But I'm not instructing my heart to pound.

I don't want it to do that.

You aren't doing it consciously?

No.

But let's look at the actual mechanism.

When you're lying in bed, terrified of a fire that hasn't happened or a financial collapse that hasn't occurred, or some political outcome that's months away, what is your body actually doing in that exact moment?

It's reacting.

My chest gets super tight.

I'm sweating.

My stomach is just in knots.

Exactly.

Your hypothalamus is triggering your pituitary gland, which is signaling your adrenals.

You are flooding your entire system with cortisol and adrenaline.

Fight or flight?

Yes.

You are physiologically preparing to fight a tiger or run from a literal wildfire.

Now, here is the crucial question.

I want you to really think about this, and I want everyone listening to think about this, too.

Does your body, your heart, your lungs, your blood vessels, know that there is no actual fire in your bedroom?

I mean, no, I guess not.

Not in that moment.

It feels completely real.

Precisely to the primitive parts of the brain.

The amygdala, the limbic system.

A vividly imagined threat and a real threat are totally identical.

The neurochemistry is exactly the same.

Wow.

This brings us to the rain dance concept we touched on earlier.

But I want to go way deeper than just the folklore of it.

Okay.

When indigenous tribes danced for rain, they weren't looking up at a blue, empty sky and begging, please, please, let it rain.

They weren't?

No.

Because begging implies lack.

It implies the rain isn't here, which confirms the state of drought.

So what were they doing then?

They were dancing in the mud.

In their minds.

They were feeling the humidity on their skin.

They were splashing in the puddles.

They were.

They were smelling that ozone smell right before a storm hits.

They were feeling it as if it was already happening.

Exactly.

They were generating the state of rain within their own bodies before a single cloud appeared in the sky.

So they were basically hallucinating?

In a neurological sense, yes, absolutely.

They were simulating the reality so perfectly that their internal state shifted to match the outcome they wanted.

And this is the hard truth here, and I say this with total respect for the pain you're in.

Okay, Lay it on me.

You are a master creator.

You are right now the Michelangelo of anxiety.

Oh, wow.

You are simulating the jail cell of fear so perfectly, with such high fidelity that your biology has actually moved into the cell.

You have created a reality of imprisonment without anyone ever locking a door.

That makes me feel sort of sick, actually.

Sit with that for a second.

You're saying I'm doing this to myself because I look at the news and the world is actually dangerous?

It's not a hallucination.

There are wars, there's violence.

The economy is incredibly shaky.

I'm not making that stuff up.

No, you're not.

If I just stopped worrying.

I feel like I'm just being naive, like I'm sticking my head in the sand.

This is the most common resistance to this work.

And for anyone listening who feels that exact same defensive spike, know that it's a completely valid point.

The mind acts like a defense attorney.

The defense attorney.

Yeah, gathers evidence to support the feeling you're addicted to.

We have a system in our brain called the Reticular Activating System, or ras.

Its entire job is to filter out the millions of bits of data we see every single day and only let in what is deemed important.

And you know what it decides is important?

Danger.

The bad stuff.

Whatever you focus on.

If you buy a red car, suddenly you see red cars everywhere on the highway.

Yeah, that happens all the time.

So if you deeply believe the world is a hostile, terrifying place, your RAs will literally filter out acts of kindness.

It will filter out beauty, it will filter out safety, and it will highlight every headline, every frown, every threat that confirms your bias.

It's just proving me right.

Exactly.

So, yes, the evidence you're seeing is real, but your selection of the evidence is completely biased by the state you are creating.

You're building a rock solid legal case for your own imprisonment.

Okay, I see that.

I really do.

I do.

Doom scroll.

I look for the bad news because I feel like it prepares me somehow.

Right.

But how do I stop?

It's not like I can just flip a switch and say, oh, everything is fine.

Now that feels incredibly fake.

And it would be fake.

We aren't looking for fake positivity here.

We're looking for structural integrity.

I want to shift metaphors for a second because I think we need to look at the foundation this house of fear is actually built on.

You've done a lot of work on yourself, right?

You mentioned reading a ton of books, trying different things.

Oh, I have a whole bookshelf full of them.

I've done talk therap.

I've done the morning affirmations.

I've tried Every meditation app on the market.

And how does that usually go?

Honestly, I feel better for maybe about a week.

It's like I hang some really nice new curtains in my mind, so to speak.

That's a great way to put it.

But then one thing happens.

My dad calls or I see a really bad news story, and the floor just falls out.

I am instantly right back at square one.

The floor falls out.

That phrase right there is the clue.

Back in my real estate days, we used to fix up investment properties.

Most of them were just cosmetic flips.

You know, new paint, modern fixtures, maybe throw down some landscaping.

Easy stuff.

But I remember this one specific property.

It looked okay from the street, but when we walked in the front door, the smell hit you like a physical wall.

Oh, gross.

Like mold.

Way worse than mold.

It was this toxic cocktail of rot, Old animal waste ground deep into the carpets, and a pool in the back that had turned into a literal biological swamp green, Thick, festering.

Ugh.

I can almost smell it.

The house was rotting from the studs out.

The concrete foundation itself was cracked and leaking moisture.

Now, imagine if I had turned to my crew and said, hey, guys, let's just hang some really extensive velvet curtains and put a nice coat of beige paint over that black mold.

It would bleed through in a week.

The smell wouldn't go away at all.

Exactly.

And even if it didn't bleed through visually right away, would you be able to sleep soundly in that house, knowing what was breathing behind the drywall?

No way.

It's totally toxic.

You'd get sick just breathing the air.

This is exactly what I see happening with you.

And frankly, with so many people listening to this deep dive right now.

You are highly intelligent, you are motivated, and you are trying to hang beautiful curtains.

Your meditation practice, your career success, your intellectual understanding of your trauma.

You're hanging all of that on a structure that is fundamentally compromised.

The foundation, yes, the foundation of your psychological house was poured by your parents.

And we have to be honest, brutally honest, about what they actually put into that concrete mix.

Fear.

Pure, unadulterated fear.

Fear, yes.

But also very specific beliefs.

Beliefs like safety is impossible or joy is suspicious and you are ultimately helpless.

Yeah, that's exactly it.

That is the concrete slab you are standing on every single day.

As long as that foundation remains, any structure of happiness you try to build on top of it is going to be incredibly unstable.

It's not that you aren't trying hard enough.

It feels like I'm failing all the time.

You aren't failing.

You are trying to build a beautiful skyscraper on quicksand.

We don't need a renovation here.

We need a demolition.

Demolition sounds violent, and honestly, impossible.

That's my history.

That's who I am.

You can't just jackhammer out your own childhood.

I can't change what happened to me back then.

You cannot change the history.

That's true.

The events happened.

But the foundation, the beliefs, and the neural pathways derived from those events, that is absolutely removable.

It isn't who you are, it's what happened to you.

There's a massive difference there.

It feels like the same thing most days.

I know it does.

But chopping out the foundation means looking at that concrete slab of fear and saying, this is not mine.

This was forced upon me, and I am no longer willing to build my life on it.

It means we have to pour a completely new foundation based on who you choose to be, not who they needed you to be to survive their household.

I really have tried to get away from them.

I moved three states away.

I've gone.

No contact for months at a time.

And did it work?

No.

The rage is still there.

I look at my dad and I just see a bully.

And I look at my mom and I see a coward who just let him be a bully.

And honestly, I've just given up.

I don't expect them to change anymore.

I just want to be left alone.

I want to gently challenge you on that specific phrase.

I've given up.

Why?

It's the truth.

Because in my experience and in the work we do, there's a massive canyon between resignation and release.

And right now, just listening to the tension in your voice, I think you are camped out in resignation.

What's the difference?

The result is the exact same change.

The result for them is the same.

The result for you is completely different.

Resignation is passive.

It sounds like.

I know they won't change, but it sucks.

I'm sitting here in the wreckage of this house, really angry that the contractors aren't coming back to fix it.

Yeah, that's fair.

Resignation is heavy.

It's a victim state, because you are still waiting.

You've just decided that the wait is going to be forever.

You're still hooked into them, just through the back door of resentment.

Okay, that hits pretty close to home.

So what is release, then?

Release is active.

It is a surgical cutting of the energetic cord.

It's looking at your parents and fully realizing you are incapable of giving me what I need.

And then, and this is the absolute hardest part, you stop going to the hardware store for milk.

The Hardware store for milk.

Then think about it.

You keep going to your parents, emotionally, mentally, looking for nourishment, looking for safety, waiting for an apology, wanting them to finally just see you.

Yeah, I guess I do still want that.

But they are a hardware store.

They sell hammers and nails and saw blades.

They do not stock milk.

They never have and they never will.

Release is grieving that fact.

Grieving?

Yes, it's crying for the little girl who didn't get the milk she desperately needed.

But once you grieve it, you stop banging on the front door of the hardware store, screaming, where is my milk?

That makes me feel incredibly sad.

Like there's this deep ache in my chest right now just hearing you say that.

Good.

Let that ache be there for anyone listening who feels that exact same ache about a parent or an ex.

That sadness is the doorway out.

Anger is just a shield.

Grief is the actual wound.

If you can grieve it, you can heal it.

As long as you stay angry, you are actually making them the gods of your universe.

I definitely do not think of them as gods.

I think of them as damaged, dangerous people.

Intellectually, yes, you do.

But emotionally, if your internal peace depends on their behavior or on them apologizing or on you proving them wrong in your own head, you have granted them omnipotence.

I see what you mean.

You're essentially saying my happiness is conditional on these two people.

You have handed them the remote control to your central nervous system.

Release is taking that remote back and saying you are just people.

Flawed, broken products of your own broken parents.

That generational thing.

I know, it's true.

My grandfather beat my dad.

My dad learned that rage was just how you survive.

He didn't invent the rage, he just inherited it.

Right.

It's a machine.

A generational trauma machine.

Your dad was fed into it.

Your mom was fed into it.

Think about your mother for a second.

She taught you fear, not because she hated you, but because she loved you.

In the absolute, only twisted dialect she could speak.

How is fear love?

She thought if I make her terrified of the world, she'll never let her guard down and she won't get hurt.

She was trying to armor you with anxiety because that was the only version of safety she ever knew.

That is.

Wow.

That's actually really true.

If I was happy, she would completely panic.

She acted like my happiness was a blindfold.

Like if I was smiling, I wasn't watching the perimeter for an attack.

Exactly.

So in her mind, crushing your joy was a protective act.

Now we can acknowledge that Is a sick, totally broken system without excusing the abuse.

But understanding the mechanics of that machine helps us take it apart.

You don't have to stay in the machine.

I want to get out.

I really do.

But I feel like I just don't know how to create anything else.

I've only ever known the machine.

My brain is hardwired for this.

I don't believe that's true.

And I think you are vastly underestimating yourself.

I want to do a little excavation here.

Okay.

I want you to close your eyes for a second.

Take a deep breath.

I want you to go back.

Dig deep into your memory.

Tell me about a time, maybe when you were younger, where you just decided to be happy despite everything going on around you.

A time you created a new reality just because you wanted to.

Um.

Let me think.

There was a time.

It's kind of faint, but.

Ninth grade.

Tell me about ninth grade.

Paint the picture for me.

I was the total outcast.

I was weird.

I was depressed.

Always just hiding out of my room to avoid my dad's temper.

I wore all black.

I constantly looked at the ground.

And one day I just woke up and decided I'm going to be happy today.

Just like that?

Yeah.

I don't really know where it came from.

Maybe I was just exhausted from being miserable all the time, But I decided I was going to walk into school, Smile at people, and actually try to enjoy being alive.

What did that actually look like?

Give me the sensory details.

How did you do the rain dance that morning?

I remember walking outside to catch the school bus.

I smelled the air.

It was spring, so it smelled kind of crisp and fresh.

I looked at the flowers in the neighbor's yard.

Super cheesy.

But I was literally just appreciating the sunshine on my face.

Not cheesy at all.

That's visceral.

What happened at school?

I walked into the hallways and I said hi to people I usually completely avoided.

I smiled at them.

And the crazy thing was, people actually started smiling back at me.

The ice just started to melt.

I felt so light for six hours.

I was a completely different person.

Look at what you did right there.

You created that state out of absolute nothing.

You were living in a literal war zone at home.

And yet you generated sunshine and connection from thin air.

Yeah, I guess I did.

You didn't wait for your dad to magically be nice.

You didn't wait for school to somehow be easy.

You projected a reality, and the world reflected it right back to you.

That is the definition of a master creator.

But.

And I can hear a but coming.

What happened when you went home?

It didn't last.

I came home and I was buzzing with this new feeling.

I was practically floating through the front door.

And my mom took one look at me and just completely lost it.

What did she do?

She grabbed me by the shoulders and started shaking me.

She screamed in my face, why are you so happy?

Are you on drugs?

Are you having sex?

Wow.

She immediately pathologized your joy.

She literally thought the only possible reason I could be happy was if I was intoxicated or doing something sinful.

She tore the whole thing down in seconds.

She basically told me that looking at the world through rose colored glasses was going to get me killed or pregnant or addicted to drugs.

And what did you do in that moment?

I just collapsed.

I went right back to being the depressed, safe little girl in her room.

I realized that I'm just not allowed to be happy.

Happiness is dangerous.

You realize that?

In her house, happiness was a threat.

It triggered your mother's deep fear, which then triggered her attack on you.

So your developing brain learned a very clear lesson.

Joy equals attack.

Depression equals safety.

Yeah, that's exactly the wiring.

That is the wiring we're dealing with.

But look at what you actually achieved before you walked through that front door.

You proved that you have the internal capacity to generate a completely different reality entirely independent of your external circumstances.

You did it once, you can absolutely do it again.

But this time, you don't live in her house.

You are the adult now.

You set the rules.

It just feels so much harder now.

The world feels way scarier than high school.

Did the stakes seem so much higher?

The weights are definitely heavier.

Yes.

But that brings me to something else.

I know about your background.

You were just a survivor growing up.

You were an athlete, right?

You were heavily into bodybuilding.

Yeah.

In college, I was completely obsessed with Rachel McLach.

I had her book and everything.

Tell me about that transformation.

Well, my mom was overweight, ate terrible food.

Lots of donuts, fried stuff.

And she complained about her body constantly, but never did anything about it.

I decided I wasn't going to end up like that.

I completely changed my diet.

I hit the gym every day.

I transformed my body.

I got really, really strong.

Okay, let's look at that for you.

Listening.

Pay close attention to this shift.

Yeah.

You looked at your genetic inheritance, your mom's physical body, her habits, and you said, no, I am building something else.

And you actually did it.

You understand the mechanics of building muscle better than most people.

So tell me physiologically speaking, how do you build muscle?

You have to lift heavy, you have to create resistance.

You literally tear the muscle fibers.

They're called micro tears.

So that when they repair themselves, they grow back thicker and stronger.

It's essentially trauma to the muscle.

But it's controlled trauma.

Exactly.

You absolutely need resistance.

If you go into the gym and lift a pencil or just wave your arms around in the air, nothing is going to happen.

You need the heavy iron, you need the struggle.

You need to hit that failure point where you physically cannot lift it one more time.

Right.

I want to propose a totally new identity for you.

I want you to stop seeing yourself as the victim of your past.

And I want you to start seeing yourself as the bodybuilder of love.

The bodybuilder of love?

That sounds, I don't know, a little abstract.

How does that actually apply to my panic attacks at 3 in the morning?

Think about the things you fear the absolute most right now.

The angry people in the world, the politicians you hate, your parents, the terrifying state of the economy right now.

You look at all of them and you just wish they didn't exist.

You wish the gym was totally empty of weight so you could just walk around easily without any strain.

Exactly.

I just want it all to be easy.

But what if those difficult people, those terrifying situations out in the world, what if they are your free weights?

My free weights.

So my dad is a dumbbell?

Well, in more ways than one, maybe.

But metaphorically, yes.

He is a 200 pound barbell.

Every single time you interact with him, or honestly, even just think about him, you have a distinct choice.

You can let the weight crush you, which is the victim mindset, the why is this so heavy?

Why is this happening to me mindset.

Or you can use that interaction to exercise your capacity for boundaries, for compassion, and for maintaining your own internal state of love despite the immense pressure.

So when I see something horrible on the news, that makes my chest tighten and makes me panic.

That's a rep. That is a rep. That is a heavy set of squats.

You look at and say, okay, here is hatred, here is fear.

Can I hold my center right now?

Can I stay in a place of love and safety even while this terrifying thing exists?

That is the workout.

Wow.

If the world was totally perfect, if everyone was kind and loving and enlightened, you wouldn't need to build any muscles at all.

You'd be emotionally flabby.

But you, you have been given a world class gem to train in because you have had so much resistance your entire life.

I Never ever thought about it that way.

I always just wanted the resistance to stop.

I really thought peace just meant the absence of trouble.

Peace is not the absence of trouble.

It is the presence of strength.

The burn hurts.

But you know from your bodybuilding days that the burn is exactly where the change happens.

You are uniquely qualified to be a teacher of love, specifically because of what you endured.

Think about it.

If someone from a perfect, happy family with a white picket fence comes up to you and tells you, just choose love.

The world's beautiful, do you actually listen to them?

No.

I think they're completely naive.

I think they have no idea what real life is actually like.

I just roll my eyes at people like that.

Exactly.

You dismiss them instantly.

But what if someone stands in front of you?

Someone who has been beaten down, someone who has lived through psychological torture, someone who has every valid reason to be bitter and hateful, and that person looks you dead in the eye and says, I choose love.

That.

That commands respect.

That's incredibly powerful because they actually know the cost of it.

That is undeniable.

That is what you are building.

You could look at someone who is trapped in their own anger and say, I know the exact hell you are in.

I live there.

And I walked out.

That makes you a guide.

It makes you incredibly powerful.

But how do I actually do it?

In the moment when the fear is gripping my throat at 3am, I get the concept intellectually, but the fear feeling is just so overwhelming, my amygdala is just screaming at me to run.

I'll give you a very specific tool for this.

We call it soulview.

It's about shifting your perspective from the ground level where the hand to hand combat is happening to a much higher view.

Let me give you an example that happened to me.

Okay?

A while back, I was staying at a campground and I went down to the hot tub.

I ended up sitting in this tub with about 12 people who held political views that were the absolute, complete opposite of mine.

I mean, the kind of views that would normally make my blood boil, make me want to get out immediately or just start a huge fight.

A hot tub full of them.

The enemy.

Exactly.

A hot tub full of the bad guys.

And they started talking.

Now, my ego desperately wanted to engage on the level of facts.

I wanted to bring my stack of evidence to fight their stack of evidence.

We could have just splashed water at each other and screamed for an hour, but I decided to shift to soulview.

I stopped listening to their specific political talking points and I started listening for the energy underneath their words.

I really looked at their faces.

And what did you see when you did that?

I saw terror.

Pure terror.

They were talking about homeschooling and guns and government control.

But the subtext underneath all of it was, I am terrified.

The world is changing, and I won't be safe.

I'm scared my kids won't have a future.

I feel like I'm completely losing control.

And in that moment, I realized that is the exact same fear I have.

It's the exact same fear you have.

We're scared of them, and they're scared of us.

It's a mirror.

We are mirrors of each other.

Both sides are entirely convinced the other is the monster.

And both sides are driven by a desperate, primal need for safety.

When I truly saw their fear, I couldn't hate them anymore.

I didn't agree with them.

My core values didn't change one bit, but I didn't hate them.

I could actually have compassion for their fear.

That is the soul view.

It completely de.

Escalated my own nervous system.

So when I feel that panic rising

in me, when the fear comes up, do not fight it.

Don't try to shove it down or ignore it.

That's just adding more resistance.

Instead, I want you to say, namaste to your fear.

Namaste to the fear.

That sounds really counterintuitive.

Well, namaste means the divine in me honors the divine in you.

So in this context, it means the.

The conscious adult in me honors the protective mechanism in you.

You literally say to yourself, thank you, fear.

I know you are trying to protect me.

I know you're trying to keep me safe, just like my mom tried to keep me safe.

I see you.

I appreciate your effort, but I am the adult now, and I've got this.

So I treat it like.

Almost like an overprotective guard dog.

Exactly like that.

It's barking aggressively at the mailman because it loves you and wants to protect the house.

You don't kick the dog.

You don't scream at the dog to shut up.

You pet the dog and you say, it's okay, boy.

It's just the mailman.

You can lie down now.

I'm in charge.

You validate the feeling completely without letting it drive the car.

I really like that.

It feels way less like a war inside my own head.

It's not a war.

It's a transformation of energy.

You have inside you a literal volcano of rage.

Right?

You felt it?

Oh, yeah.

It's explosive.

I feel like it could burn down entire cities.

That rage is just energy.

It is high octane fuel.

Right now, it's being used to fuel the doom spiral and the panic.

But the energy itself is neutral.

You can take that exact same intensity, that same volcanic power, and redirect it into a volcano of love.

It takes the exact same amount of effort to build a prison as it does to build a beautiful cathedral.

You just have to change the blueprints.

I guess I've just been so busy trying to keep the prison walls from falling and crushing me, I never even looked at the blueprints.

I never realized I was the one holding the pen this whole time.

And for you listening, I want you to ask yourself that same question.

What are your free weights?

Who is the difficult person?

Or the terrifying situation you've been letting crush you instead of using them to get stronger?

How are you letting the hardware store dictate your happiness?

Because that ends today.

You are the architect.

You are the bodybuilder.

And every time a challenge comes up this week, a scary headline, a memory of your dad, a moment of panic.

At 3:00am I want you to smile, feel the weight in your hands, and say, ah, here are my weights.

Time to get strong.

Okay.

Time to do some reps. Time to

do some reps. You've got this.

Today we explored shifting from victimhood to conscious creation and discovered that our greatest challenges are actually the weights that help us build our capacity for love.

If you want similar support for yourself, visit why this Keeps happening.

Com.

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Until next time.

Remember, your patterns don't define you.

Your choices do.