Liberate Your Story Podcast

So I’m going to warn you about this episode. I will take us to deeper awareness of how our curious minds work. I find it fascinating and I think you will too…so hang with me because it has very real-world applications.

Earlier this week, I jumped into a pool of conversation, yes…on facebook. I usually know better than this as I see it as futile and adrenaline-inducing. It’s not normally good for my nervous system. But once in a while, there is one that is so much of a justice issue for me, that I find myself smack dab in the middle of it.

This particular conversation was actually pretty intriguing to me because of the nature of how easily it pointed to our programming.

The post was a meme that said “ My teenage nephew told me he asked a girl out and she turned him down. I said “You know what to do next, right?” He said “I know. I know. Keep trying.” I said “NO. LEAVE HER ALONE! She gave you an answer.” He was shocked. No one had told him that before. Teach. Your. boys.”

I think the reason this caught my eye was that someone I knew had made a comment on the post. So…of course I started reading the comments.

I wasn’t surprised and yet I was. It’s 2022 and I was saddened that we are still having a conversation about consent and the word NO.

I decide to reply. Just a simple statement based on a few absurd comments that were made.

“because no means no. It’s not a fucking game and it’s not a negotiation. And we aren’t beehives. The culture that says women can and should be pushed so you can win is the culture that has to change. Time to grow up and see that women are not to be conquered.”

Ok…so it was pretty to the point and strongly said. My Fierce Lioness came out to chat it up for a bit.

And then the comments to my comment began. What surprised me, I suppose, was that these were women defending the “game”.
One man called me out saying “ other women are letting you know that you don't speak for them. So what now? How are you going to blame guys for that?”

I made some comments back to the replies to me around personal responsibilities, sexual abuse culture, consent, etc. I could share it all with you, but honestly, if you’re a listener of my podcast, it will likely just anger you too.

It’s also not actually my point today.

I speak to our programming alot in my writing, work and podcasts. I do this because I deeply believe that how we have been programmed to see the world is how we will continue to make sense of the world.

If we have a belief around something, we will do whatever we need to in order to continue confirming that belief.
I’ve said before that we can change what we believe at any point in time. But the curious part to me, is how we got to the belief in the first place.
It’s curious to me, because I don’t want to just land on a belief, absorb it and operate from it without my intention to.
It’s almost like personal consent of our beliefs.

So how do we get to these deeply programmed beliefs?
They don’t just belong to us as an individual…I mean, look at any contraversial post and comments. You will see a collective of beliefs.
It’s communal and when we need to, we find our agree-ers and camp with them.
We build momentum with each other over these beliefs…only instilling the belief even deeper because we have support or a cheering section telling us its the right way to believe.

And without a village… it's a lonely world, right.

This is another reason I find it so important that we take inventory of our beliefs regularly and evaluate on their ecology.
Is it good for me? Is it good for you? Is it good for the planet?
If you are answering no to even one of these, then it's time to reevaluate.
Your values and your vantage point have likely shifted.

We are amazing beings. We have the most effective operating system in existence. We have a very specific way in which we create our lived reality.

You have your very own set of experiences that have guided you to see the world the exact way that you do.
This is what I think makes us as humans so incredibly fascinating!
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It's also what can make life with each other so complicated.

So what influences our understanding and experience of the world around us? We have three areas of our being that create or influence our reality.

The first is neurology or neuro.
Neuro is more than simply our mind or our thinking.
Our thinking is essentially the result of what makes up our whole nervous system.
You may know this as your five senses: Visual (sight), Auditory (sound), Kinesthetic (touch), Olfactory (smell), and Gustatory (taste).
These all bring us much-needed information about our reality.

Think of neuro as the Collection Space. It's where it all comes in…and then we get to do things with that information.
Amazing things if we pay attention to this incredible process.

The second is Linguistic. This is where we become aware of how we communicate within ourselves and others. It’s the language of your mind. This is a beautiful and confusing space. We have developed our language of our mind and our communication system based on what we have taken in.
It forms how we continue to experience reality. It’s ongoing.

The third is programming. I think of this as that OS, the operating system. This is where we form our strategies, habits, and beliefs.
Based on all that info we take in, learned or experienced, we build a way of living.

I mentioned that we take in information through our 5 senses.
These are powerful receptors for us. And we each have a “sense” that we are more highly in tune with or influenced by.

Think about smell for example.
If you’re like me, you can sniff out the expired vegetable in the upstairs fridge from your basement…when everyone else needs to pull the veggie drawer out before they can smell it.
You might be more highly in tune to smell and this will influence how you experience the same set of circumstances as your spouse or friend and yet have a very different view of that circumstance.

Your neuro system is evaluating this experience in a heightened response to Olfactory.
So your experience, or reality, of smelly vegetables has an urgency to it that your spouse’s does not.
You will want to clean out those veggies asap but your spouse won’t know to until the next time the fridge is opened.

Now, this seems to be a very neutral, seemingly inconsequential example. But…its not. It’s kind of the whole point.
Are you ready…here we go.

If our senses took in ALL the information coming at us, we’d overload. Every second our senses are hit with two million bits of information.
It’s too much.
So at the back of your brain you have the reticular activating system, the RAS.
The RAS is responsible for filtering and sorting through those 2 million bits of information.
It rapidly decides which bits of information are allowed into the conscience mind and which bits are stored in the unconscious mind.

You see, we all integrate our experiences into either conscious or subconscious spaces of our mind through deletion (toss it out), distortion (adjust to fit our beliefs) and generalization (assigning past experience outcomes to future experiences).

We use filters for this sorting process.

These internal filters sitting at the unconscious level are attitudes, values, beliefs, memories, decisions, language, meta-programs, and time/space/matter/energy.
And they are deciding what your RAS will sort for.
This is a powerful space!

All the information, all of the experiences, all of the memories are there…they just aren’t all being accessed by your conscious mind.
Most of it was filtered to the unconscious mind.

Wonder where that still small voice comes from?
Yep…your stored information at the subconscious level.
Fun little bit of info here…the information stored at the subconscious level doesn’t necessarily have meaning assigned to it yet.
We might “feel” something, but we don’t have words because we don’t have meaning for it.
This is why we have trouble trusting our intuition or others have trouble giving credence to our intuition. And we may override our intuition with something that already does have meaning (like your belief system).

In order to give all this information meaning, we create an internal representation (or IR) of the event through the experiences of our senses.
The IR is made up of all those smells, pictures, feelings, sensations, and the internal language you have with yourself.

Ok…are your ready for this?
THIS becomes your internal experience of an external reality!

This is your worldview, your map of life.
And this map is where we interpret it and give it meaning.

So the meaning we give all of this information is the last point in the process…but to our conscious mind, it feels like the beginning.
It feels like the plumbline for which we have an understanding of all of life.

I hope I didn’t lose you. I actually find this process so clarifying to how my being creates my reality.
AND …why I can have what seems to be, such a different reality than say, you do.

I don’t have the same experiences and events or memories that I have created my worldview from.
I can find similarities to others if we were raised in a similar culture, belief system, or value system.
This is actually what is part of our community experience from a very young age.
When we connect on the way we view the world it creates a feeling of belonging. It’s a powerful feeling.

So this facebook feed I was commenting on.. I had one person reply to me “women have also been taught over the years to play hard to get, though.”

When this information went through the neurological process I just explained, it was filtered by the belief that “relationships are a game” and “playing hard to get is a proving place for building or acquiring relationships”.
If this is a programmed belief at the unconscious level, then our IR continues to filter for support to this belief.
And filters OUT anything that doesn’t support the previous experience (or programming) we have on the issue.

When a belief is supported for a long period of time, it's the only way we know how to view an issue.
We are wired to support the belief….unless… we take a more conscious awareness of our beliefs and test its ecology.

Is your mind blown yet?
Mine was when I learned this.
It helped me understand a few things about myself.

I understood why I could began to feel more and more on the outside of my community. Kinda like you’re going crazy in your mind…like Am I the only one who sees this or believes this?
I have control of what I believe. Just because I was raised in a certain era, state, religion, or within certain social influences doesn’t mean I can’t change my worldview (and self-view) at any point in time. I am not a captive to this previous context my neurology was living by.

Ok..I’m going to add a third insight here that I think is really important to how we live with each other on the same diverse planet.

I can now see other humans from this same lens of information.
They aren’t just stupid people who can’t see the writing on the wall. (I mean, sometimes that's what we are saying in our heads, right?)

We are all taking in information and sorting it all out.
We are in the learning space together.

Now…it would be a lovelier world to exist within if we were all self-aware enough to know that we can evolve and liberate ourselves from previous ways of thinking.
Debating won’t work, but learning will. And that’s what I’m passionate about…for me, and for you, Curious Unlearner.

Liberate our minds and we liberate our story.