Each button above will take you to the appropriate section. Remember, this is a movement based program and clicking on a link doesn’t qualify as doing the movement. 😉 Do the movements. Have fun, be curious and feel for the unexpected. Changing your world requires that something changes; make it you, make it now!
Layer Two, Week One – Sunday
- Morning – Watch Video and Read Instructions Sit and Unwind, Level Three
- Midday – Watch Video and Read Instructions Standing Meditation, Identifying Center
- Evening – Read Week One Concepts
- Evening – Practice Sit and Unwind, Level Three or Standing Meditation, Identifying Center
Sunday’s Focus:
The word for today is distraction. Increase your awareness around the typical ways you allow yourself to be distracted. Is it mental? Do your emotions pull you away from your intentions? Does your physical body grab your attention? Does your energy get frenetic? What are the habitual ways you lower your efficiency, productivity, and success?
Sunday’s Concepts
We have talked about resistance and compensation. Compensation is what you do when you feel resistance. Compensation and resistance are the coping mechanisms your subconscious mind uses to reassure itself that you are not going to get too. Compensation and resistance keep you enveloped in your subconscious limited reality.
Compensation and resistance are what you use to stifle growth, moderate happiness, and constrain success. Your subconscious mind worships average; compensation and resistance are its two most loyal apostles.
There are several levels of compensation in everything we do. We are never 100% involved, committed, or invested. Compensation and resistance are how we limit our presence, connection, and engagement.
If I resist exercising, I resist it physically by not moving and resist it emotionally by bringing about feelings of lethargy, inadequacy, or hopelessness. Mentally, I give value to stories about how it is better to not exercise, how I might get injured, or won’t have the energy left over to do what I need to do later. I convince myself it is too hard or pointless, that there are more important things to do. Energetically, I create an atmosphere of sticky immobility or isometric uncertainty.
Layer Two, Week One – Monday
- Morning – Read Monday Concepts
- Morning – Practice Sit and Unwind, Level Three
- Evening – Practice Standing Meditation, Identifying Center
Monday’s Focus:
The next time you find yourself with tension, stress, or overwhelm, ask how it is benefiting you. Is it necessary or required for success or achievement? Will any of the existing components be harder if you choose not to be tense, stressed, or overwhelmed? Stress works like pushing the brake pedal while you jam your foot down on the accelerator.
Monday
Compensation is the wicked bedfellow to resistance. Compensation is the negotiation and accommodation our subconscious mind makes when it feels threatened. It finds the easy way; unfortunately, it is not usually the most beneficial way. Physical compensations are how we settle on the easiest way instead of the best way. Poor posture is a great example of physical compensation.
Every movement, action, and decision has some form of resistance and compensation. When you can highlight them, you give yourself the opportunity to begin to alter, mitigate, or change them.
Begin to question, be curious and explore your movements, actions, and decisions. Look for the compensations and resistances you use and when you find them, challenge yourself to be a little more engaged, involved, and connected. Be persistent. Your subconscious mind is going to fight you; it wants you to be average. It strives to constantly moderate your decisions toward mediocrity.
You can kick its ass or be half-ass, the choice is yours.
Layer Two, Week One – Tuesday
- Morning – Read Tuesday Concepts
- Morning – Practice Sit and Unwind, Level Three
- Evening – Practice Standing Meditation, Identifying Center
Tuesday’s Focus
Hopefully, you are identifying and backtracking your distractions as suggested in the last two day’s Focus. Continue doing those two things and see if you can become aware of what triggered your left turn. Identify the distraction, backtrack to your left turn (when the distraction started) and then see if you can figure out what triggered the distraction.
Tuesday’s Concepts
The sides of the breath in the Square Breath movement are symbolic of the seasons and the stages of your life, loves, careers, relationships, addictions, habits, movements, reactions, and actions. Everything in your life is in one of the four seasons or stages of the breath.
The square breath practice connects the seasons into a loop. Once your subconscious mind relaxes into the loop, it begins to feel safe, loosens control, and then things start to move onto the next season in the sequence. If you are stuck, you stop the process just before the season that holds the most fear for your subconscious mind.
You are stuck in your stuck places because your subconscious mind fears what it projects will happen in the next season or stage. It is afraid of change and the possibility of the pain it perceives might accompany that change.
The next time you do something you love or at least enjoy, feel how easy it is. Feel how you effortlessly move from not doing, to starting, to doing, to finishing. There is a sequence and if you allow it, all the transitions are fluid, smooth, and free of stress. Imagine if every single thing in your life was that easy?
Layer Two, Week One – Wednesday
- Morning – Read Week One Wednesday Concepts
- Morning – Practice Sit and Unwind, Level Three
- Evening – Practice Standing Meditation, Identifying Center
Wednesday’s Focus
So far this week, you have identified, backtracked, and found the triggers of your distractions. Right?! If not, keep practicing. It will be a revelation. Next, see if you can figure out what you were feeling before the trigger. Let’s call it your pre-trigger state. Something alerted your subconscious mind to a perceived danger. Feel for it. The sequence is pre-trigger, compensation, trigger, distraction. The pre-trigger is the critical component to understand and identify.
Wednesday’s Concepts
Let’s explore each of the seasons in turn. The inhale is Spring, full of birth, growth and potential, a blossoming adolescence. The inhale holds the fear of your enoughness, and the possibility of a new life. Your inhale is the season of opportunity and expansive transformation. It is Eros, the God of Love. It is the season of the illicit, the prognosticator of the previously inconceivable. Your inhale is the rule breaker and the taker of chances.
Your inhale initiates movement and accepts a challenge. The inhale is the season of intuition and knowing. It is confidence and certainty. Breathe in, feel every possibility and the promise of fulfillment.
Find something fun to challenge yourself. Set a goal just outside of your normal reach. Take a dozen deep breaths and with every inhale allow the confidence of your success to magically increase. Feel the emotional quality of your certainty begin to radiate and pulse. And then sally forth into the challenge.
Layer Two, Week One – Thursday
- Morning – Read Week One Thursday Concepts
- Morning – Practice Sit and Unwind, Level Three
- Evening – Practice Standing Meditation, Identifying Center
Thursday’s Focus
How did you do feeling the qualities of your pre-trigger configurations? Put simply, you start to feel a certain way and your system gets worried. It fears getting too something and it starts looking for ways to limit your movement. You go about your day, getting stuff done. You are productive, you mentally, emotionally, and/or energetically expand until your subconscious mind starts to worry that you will grow past what it finds tolerable … and it starts to bring sparkling trinkets into your awareness to limit your growth by distracting you. Feel for the fullness before the distraction.
Thursday’s Concepts
Summer is the top hold, the confirmation of your enoughness in a wave of abundance. The full lungs of the top hold give you all the tools you will ever need. The top hold nullifies the excuse of insufficiency. It offers the opportunity to exist without limits.
The top hold is the placeholder for the fear of success and your fear of fearlessness. The top hold is also the birthplace of conformity. It is the way you constrain fulfillment, happiness, and playfulness.
The top hold is the placeholder for the fear of success and your fear of fearlessness. It is the place where you hold on to your possessions, whether they still serve you … or not. If you hold on to your breath, or anything else, too long it becomes toxic.
To laugh, you must exhale; holding your breath keeps that from happening.
Layer Two, Week One – Friday
- Morning – Read Friday Concepts
- Morning – Practice Sit and Unwind, Level Three
- Evening – Practice Standing Meditation, Identifying Center
Friday’s Focus
The last suggestion on yesterday’s focus was to feel for the fullness before the distraction. Keep doing that today. That full quality is the key to adaptation, growth, and success. As you reach that fullness; if you don’t allow yourself to get distracted, your system will begin to adapt. Full will become normal and your subconscious mind won’t start looking for ways to diffuse your energy. Feel for the full, tolerate the healthy discomfort if offers, adapt, and grow your capacity to be focused, productive, and successful.
Friday’s Concepts
The exhalation is Fall, a falling off of current potential and a letting go of everything that no longer serves you.
Your exhale challenges your perceptions of attachment, ownership, demand, entitlement, and expectation. Exhales are the season of indecision, the bi-polar season of self-doubt and determination. Leaves are lost but seeds are born in every exhale.
Every exhale is the acceptance of effort, determination, and hard work but also feeds the feelings of failure, incompleteness, and lost opportunities. Your grief lives in your exhale but so does your laughter.
Exhales are the current failures that make room for future successes. When you exhale, you are taking a chance. You are trusting that the next inhale is going to come. You are believing in yourself and your ability to manifest.
Exhales are full of incredulity and raucous laughter. The exhale is the season of fulfillment, appreciation, and gratitude.
Your exhale is the distinctly uncomfortable opportunity to let go, an opportunity you have 20,000 times a day.
Layer Two, Week One – Saturday
- Read Week One Saturday Concepts
- Morning – Practice Sit and Unwind, Level Three
- Evening – Practice Standing Meditation, Identifying Center
Saturday’s Focus
Here is a recap for the week. Distraction is one of the ways your subconscious mind uses to keep you in a familiar place (read limited, unproductive, stagnant, growth-free, unsuccessful, unchanging). It does this to ensure your survival (or so it believes). Change is an unknown, familiar is a known. Familiar is known to be survivable. The more familiar, the more survivable … and that is why habits are so attractive to your subconscious mind. Your opportunity is to challenge your habits, every habit. Make constant change a habit; your system will adapt. In the beginning, it won’t be happy about it but it will adapt. Adaptation is a biological imperative. It is hard-wired into your reptilian brain. Use the awareness of your subconscious mind to challenge the limitations of your subconscious. Get big, stay big, play big.
Saturday’s Concepts
Winter, the bottom of the breath, slowly builds a vacuum where all potential is conceived.
The bottom of the breath is silence, the silence where your Gods speak to you. It is the time where prayers settle, it is the life everlasting of deep space.
The bottom of the breath is the beating heart of contemplation and reflection.
The bottom of the breath is the season of decay, deconstruction, poverty, and exhaustion. It is the black and white of heaven and hell. It is the worthlessness of intolerance, judgment, and hate.
The bottom of the breath wears your impermanence like a suit. It is the time to remain empty, surviving harmoniously in quiet lack until a death occurs. Winter reveals the meaningless nature of all things, every action, hope, and dream. It is completion.
The bottom of the breath is where grief is digested, metabolized, and turned into fuel. The bottom of the breath is where acceptance warms itself by the fire. It is the season of resolution and an end to reactionism.
The bottom of the breath is sitting quietly in a museum looking at fine art with wonder. It is the purveyor of memory and the unassailable power of nothingness.
Ecstasy lives in the bottom of the breath.
Momentum hibernates in winter, waiting as patiently as it is able.
Take these concepts and translate them into your daily life. Feel for the transitions, feel for the loop created as winter turns to spring. The loop is there in everything you do. Find the season where you usually get stuck and then challenge yourself to accelerate your transitions.
Be determined, be persistent, and then celebrate every success. Create a new habit.
Sit and Unwind, Level Three
Step 1 – Sit comfortably (Chair, floor, or sofa, but be comfortable. If you are in a chair, don’t rest your elbows on anything, let them hang. Posture is important but secondary to being relaxed.)
Step 2 – Take a Current30 (Spend 30 seconds being aware of your current situation, environment, disposition)
Step 3 – Begin Exhaust/Purge Breathing (Inhale deeply and exhale with mild force. As you inhale encourage yourself to relax. As you exhale, feel yourself venting tension) Continue for 30 seconds focusing on relaxing your face, neck and shoulders with each compelled exhale.
Step 4 – Sequential Relaxation Level 2 – (Normal but deep breathing) Consciously relax your body as you breathe. Feel your whole body. Feel your emotional body. See if you can feel the weight of your emotions. Continue to breathe, continue to relax your physical body and connect to your emotions as a presence.
Step 5 – Search your emotional body for the quality of joy, playfulness, fun and contentment. Allow it to percolate, upwell, and gain momentum. Disregard other emotional qualities; pursue and cultivate the feeling you get just before you laugh raucously.
Step 6 – Soften your shoulders, gently contract the sides of your mouth upward, and let your eyes get soft and watery.
Step 7 – Feel for the turbulence of anticipation in your upper belly and a pulsing density in your chest and throat.
Step 8 – Swim and luxuriate in the feeling, allow it to saturate and pervade all that you are and all that you do.
Step 9 – As you make your way through the day, regularly upwell this feeling into your body and continually radiate the feeling into your environment. Let it pervade and infuse everything you do. As you do, it will induce and awaken the same feeling in everyone you meet. This is what we mean by Change the World from the Inside Out!
Why it Matters – This is directed energy movement. This is an example of how you can direct your configurations. It may not work the first time, or the first few times but it will work. Think of all of the times you allowed yourself to get worked up about something. That was directed as well but with less than beneficial consequences. We will build on this. This is a start; eventually you will be upwelling beneficial feelings and energies to groups of people.
Everyday Usability – With this movement, you are seated and focusing on doing this movement. It is in the foreground of your consciousness. Soon, you will be able to do this in the background. It also works on every other emotional and mental configuration. Need to be more efficient? Upwell the mental and emotional components of directed thinking and determination. Need more physical energy? Upwell the qualities of rejuvenation, endurance, and effortlessness. This isn’t the power of positive thinking; it is harnessing the unlimited power of potential. It is fomenting feeling, feeling is sensation, sensation is energy moving, moving energy is potential. Potential is infinite. Tap in.
Progression – The fourth level of this movement will find you creating conceivability and upwelling possibility. The next level will help you to lighten your load and remove obstacles from the road ahead.
Standing Meditation – Identifying Center
Step 1 – Start with bare feet shoulder width apart.
Step 2 – Do a Current30 focusing on physical sensation.
Step 3 – Feel your weight in your feet and how that weight translates up through your body.
Step 4 – Identify places of tension, pain or sensations.
Step 5 – Begin to subtly shift your weight from side to side.
Step 6 – Slowly reduce the amount of shift to hone in on the place where your weight is equal in each foot/leg.
Step 7 – Subtly shift your weight from front to back.
Step 8 – Slowly reduce the amount of shift to hone in on the place where your weight is balanced in the middle.
Step 9 – Continue to search for your center, the place of most balance.
Step 10 – Consciously guide and direct your body to maintain center. Increase your awareness of how you move or drift off of center.
Step 11 – Begin to notice how you compensate when you lose focus.
Why it Matters – This simple practice is easy to disregard. Do yourself a favor and be curious. Learning how, where, and when you physically compensate will give you valuable insight to how you compensate mentally, emotionally, and energetically. Learning your tendencies is the easiest way to recognize them in all of your movements including exercise, relationship, self-criticism, and reaction. Your compensations trigger your non-beneficial habits and limiting beliefs.
Everyday Usability – Be determined, do this practice everyday this week. Look for more and more subtle ways you subconsciously compensate. And then translate that to the rest of your actions and reactions during the day. How do you compensate before you allow yourself to be distracted? Find the ways you compensate when you approach a mental or emotional edge. Compensations are the switch you flip to quell your passion, slow your momentum, and stifle your expansion. Get to know them, befriend them, and then behead them.
Progression – Next week you will be taking these ideas and concepts and integrating them into movement. You will find your walking center in a fun and challenging way.
