Sunday Focus

Layer Nine, Week Two Focus

Try to identify how, where, why, and when your interpretation of energy determines your experience. Which of your bodies primarily determine the value you give?

Spend the day tracking the direction your energy moves. Feel for movement toward, away, or parallel to people, things, and situations. What are you drawn toward? What repulses you? What do you shy away from without thinking?

Sunday’s Concepts

Layer Nine, Week Two Concepts:

Your interpretation of energy moving gives you your experience of life. Everything you label, value, and judge is a projection of that interpretation. Understanding all the aspects of energy will help you reduce the amount of value you give to the things that either don’t exist, are unchangeable, or just don’t matter.

Here is why the following level of detail and complexity matters: The more familiar you get with the ingredients, the better chance you will have of changing the outcome. I want to help you create a relationship with energy, how it moves, and how it communicates.

Mastering energetic movements will improve every aspect of your life because you will understand your motivations, fears, resistances, and habits. When you understand your energy, you will understand other’s energy. Understanding will lead to the ability to transform your world into your vision. You will change the world from the inside out.

Some of the variables that influence those energy shifts include direction, size, density, gravity, resonance, momentum, and time. Proximity and Gravity immensely influence energy reconfigurations.

Direction is obvious … or it might not be. Let’s say you love bread AND you commit to reducing your caloric intake between 10 am and 6 pm. You show up at my house around noon as some freshly baked sourdough is coming out of the oven. You physically want bread (toward) and you mentally want to avoid eating (away). The energy in your emotional body will split with one aspect moving toward something physical you value (bread) and in a different direction, toward something mental you value (diet). Your energy body will split mirroring the movements of your bodies.

Direction is rarely linear or singular. The chances are slight that all your bodies and all your components are moving in the same direction. Directional alignment happens during moments of fluid effortlessness and even then, the direction will be following a non-linear trajectory.

Size is determined by your mental and emotional bodies and your subconscious mind. The more value you give an opportunity or a fear, the larger its energy configuration will be. Size will also vary from body to body and component to component. Each of your bodies will give a different value to every opportunity. Not eating during the bulk of the day will have a much bigger mental component than physical. Fasting is a mental construct, not a physical one.

Time and proximity will influence size, especially emotional size. Your emotional body would have almost no influence if it didn’t make situations more dramatic than they actually are. It will use fasting as an excuse to dramatize hunger (increase its size).

Density is the amount of importance you give your resistance and/or determination. Density is your level of willfulness or stubbornness.

Density can make things feel less manageable or crystal clear. If you are to be married in two weeks and are very determined to lose 17 pounds, the density of your pending nuptials will outweigh your love of food. Food will be less appealing. Food’s density will change from benefit to threat. It will go from something you enjoy to something that is a hazard to your success. Remember, the food didn’t change, the only thing that changed was the mental and emotional value you assigned.

Resonance is a function of timbre (Layer One, Week Three) and attraction. When two drops of water are put next to each other, they are drawn together. When oil connects with water, it keeps itself from merging. If you happen to be at my house before 10:00 or after 6:00, your LOVE of bread will mesh with your intention to restrict your intake because you are out of the fasting window. The two will collaborate and confirm both energy configurations. You will enjoy the bread and pat yourself on the back for not eating it during your zero-calorie window.

Resonance will be very body specific too. Mentally, you might love the idea of fasting (resonate) and your body might completely disagree (dissonance). Your love of fasting might resonate with your mental belief that you are bad, don’t deserve food, and need to punishment. In that case, your desire to fast will be very unbalancing. (unhealthy resonance)

Time is relative. Mental time goes by much faster than physical time. Physical time is relative to your degree of discomfort. Time is also relative to proximity and density. It is easier to tolerate the discomfort of hunger longer … when there isn’t a loaf of fresh bread in front of you.

Emotional time moves in varying patterns. Impatience moves quickly. Grief moves very slowly. Some emotions are fleeting, others sluggish. Your emotional attachment to a failed relationship diminishes over time. Anger is fast, resentment smolders, and irritation builds speed over time. Patience remains at a constant rate … until its time is up.

Proximity is the emotional value you give to the distance you maintain from people and things in your environment. A person pushing up against you on a crowded subway will be less of a threat if they feel harmless. You will emotionally value their proximity positively if they smell good, are attractive, and provide warmth or stability. Their proximity will be a threat if the opposite of the above is true.

Gravity is the will to live. Gravity is the life or death factor. It is the pull toward or away from one or the other. If something has no connection to any possible death scenarios your mind wants to concoct, it will have no gravity. Your environment strongly influences Gravity. A bus coming at you has much more gravity than a bicycle coming at you.

Monday’s Focus

Layer Nine, Week Three Focus

Feel for instances where you maintain a static distance as you interact. Where do you keep people, opportunities, or potentials at a safe and measured distance? An example might be how friendly you are with your barista. How do you limit your affection and your intimacy?

Can you feel a STOP energy? When do you shut things, people, conversations, interactions down? When do you feel the stop current from others? What does a stop energy feel like in your body when it is internally generated? Externally generated?

Monday’s Concepts

Layer Nine, Week Three Concepts

Energetic currents are why the above factors are changing. Currents direct and influence outcomes. Intentions, plans, goals, purposes, drives, and unconscious habits direct energy into these currents of energy.

If I want to give Kelly a hug, I reconfigure my bodies to meet that intention. Physically, I move in her direction, alter my posture, and change my facial expressions. Emotionally, I soften and expand my feelings of love and affection. Mentally, I quiet my thoughts and give hugging my full attention.

I change my energy to one that I hope will resonate with her current configuration. I energetically offer the hug with my energy configured to acceptance and affection. I invite and encourage her energy configurations to be the same. I seek resonance.

My energy body communicates the benefits to her energy body and subconscious mind. It starts a conversation. It offers safety (gravity) through a shared and cooperative existence. It says, “We are safer together.”  It signals that I want the hug now (time), and am moving toward her. (proximity and momentum).

So, what if I am unsure about some of the aspects. What if I my intention is to hug someone who is grieving and I am not sure if they are open to a hug?

Physically, I might hesitate. My movements wouldn’t be fluid. Emotionally, I only partially radiate the amount of sympathy I feel. I hold back. I don’t completely soften. Mentally, I am unable to give the hug all my focus because I might worry about a list of things from offering unwanted solace to rejection to coming across as overbearing or insensitive.

My hesitation stops my momentum and makes the timing of my hug vague. My proximity fluctuates because part of me wants to move forward and part of me doesn’t.

Energetically, I am sending a bunch of mixed signals that might come across as forced, unsure, or inauthentic. At the least, my desire to offer condolences is stilted, wooden, and unnatural. Mixed signals guarantee a lack of fluidity and authenticity.

Let’s look at the energy reaction from the grieving party (GP) to my indecisive hug.

GP sees me and reads my physical and energetic clues. GP will interpret those clues based upon his or her history, habits, predispositions, and our existing relationship.

If GP knows me, he or she knows I am a hugger and might read my indecision and bail me out by creating a clear intention of his or her own.

If GP’s grief is bringing up a lot of indecision, my indecision might elevate the indecision brought on by his or her grief. GP might read my indecision as judgment, lack of worth, or loss of intimacy/relationship. My indecision might trigger a fear response (fight, flight, or freeze).

A solution would be to communicate my hesitation in a very direct and transparent way. “GP, I want to offer my condolences and give you a hug. Would that be alright?” Sharing my intention and my uncertainty creates alignment in my bodies. I connect directly with GP. I soothe any fear triggers by making it clear what I am offering and letting GP know that it is an offer and not a demand. Lastly, I don’t hesitate.

Intimacy and authenticity are fluid because there is a clear intention, energies are expanding, and there is no hesitation. Authenticity comes from the ability to be present and to communicate transparently the nature of your presence.

Authenticity adds gravity by resonating a shared experience. Authentic expressions connect at a subconscious level where deeply held fears resonate without a threat of death. Authentic communication connects shared emotional triggers. People can feel and relate to your nervousness without getting nervous themselves. They can feel it without fearing it. Tear-jerkers and scary movies work on this principle.

To be empathetic, you must be internally authentic. When you connect to your fears without trying to mitigate them, your ability to communicate empathically will skyrocket. If you are present and connected to your fear of death, you will be able to feel and relate to it in others.

Tuesday’s Focus

Layer Nine, Week Four Focus:

Attracting energies generate vacuum fields. When you find yourself attracted to something, feel for the vacuum. Find things that attract you and try to identify specific things and the space that draws you.

Explore what nervous feels like. What does the transition to nervous feel like in your body? How does your emotional posture change? What happens to your mental components? Where is your center point when nervous?

Tuesday’s Concepts

Layer Nine, Week Four Concepts

Let’s discuss some of the ways energy moves. What I want you to get out of this, more than anything, is that energy is not two-dimensional (good/bad).

Energy moves in endless ways including spherically, pushing, pulling, swirling, curving, repelling, attracting, stifling, compressing (linear, spherical, acute), opposing, resistant, fragmenting, lopsided, dispersed, vaporizing, welcoming, inspiring, and filtering.

That is a lot and the list really is endless, but this week’s examples will give you a good foundation. The key is not to be able to label the energy movement but to identify movement as it is happening and understand how energetic communication is a big part of every interaction.

Let’s start and use water as an example. On the gross level, water can transition from vapor to liquid to ice. You know water transitions to vapor when you see steam. The water turns to steam and then the steam becomes part of the air. Steam transitions from visible water vapor to invisible water vapor (humidity). The water vaporizes into steam and then the steam disperses into the air. Dispersion is passive, the steam absorbs and peacefully integrates into the air around it.

So, you are familiar with the types of water movement. Here is how movements apply to energy.

Spherical energy movement radiates out in every direction. When you feel genuinely happy, you radiate joy in every direction. When you are happy about something or with someone, your happiness will radiate toward the object of your happiness.

Expansion isn’t always beneficial and is rarely perfectly symmetrical. You will usually assign a label to every expansion that distorts the symmetry of the expansion.

Pushing and pulling energy is very directional. Demands and expectations will always have a pulling or pushing quality. Always. If you can feel a pull or a push, you will know there is an expectation present. I want is a pulling energy. I don’t want is a pushing energy. Revulsion is a powerful, directed pushing energy.

Curiosity, fascination, and wonder are great examples of swirling energy. Picture yourself opening presents as a child. Your energy and attention flows around all the wrapped boxes. When you start to open one, your energy flows around it, swirling and contorting as you rip the wrap.

Curving energy flows can happen when intentions and attentions wane. Distractions curve energy. Curving energy happens to me often in Home Depot. I go in with a clear intention and find myself pulled toward the gas-powered snow blowers on my way to pick up a HVAC filter. I will fulfill my intention but it won’t be in a straight line.

Attracting energies create a vacuum, a space less dense than the surrounding space. Attracting energies give some place for resonate energies to land, find safe harbor, and expand without fear.

Let’s create a hypothetical situation where you might get nervous.

You are about to give a speech to the Greater Jerkmanistan Chamber of Commerce about the need for all sentient beings to live harmoniously. At some point, you transition from not nervous to nervous. It might be the instant you agree to speak, on the way to the venue, or just as the Grand Poohbah is introducing you.

The transition to nervous takes time even when it may seem instantaneous. It takes time because the energies must redistribute between the bodies and the components. They change location, orientation, and trajectory. They transform from one way of being to another and that movement takes some measure of time.

Using the list of movements, spherical, pushing, pulling, swirling, curving, repelling, attracting, stifling, compressing, opposing, resistant, fragmenting, lopsided, dispersed, vaporizing, welcoming, inspiring, or filtering, what happens when you shift to nervous?

First, you know that nervous is a defensive posture. Your systems are preparing for an attack. You are nervous because of what you think/predict/project might happen. When you are defensive, one of the things you will do is attempt to generate some defensible space around you, you repel.

Second, you direct (push) your attention (energy) toward the threat. Your subconscious mind convinces you that you are not safe in your own body. So, you project your energy into the threat space, you act as if you are giving the talk before you are actually giving the talk. You shift your center completely out of your body and then try to re-center to this fictitious future place. Nervous isn’t about right now, it is about some other time.

Third, you compress your energy internally (that creates the nervous feeling). Butterflies in your stomach is the feeling of energy compressing and swirling in your solar plexus. Fourth, you generate an energy field to oppose the threat. Fifth, your energy might disperse into a hundred different scenarios.

Wednesday’s Focus

Layer Ten, Week One Focus:

Track your reactiveness. Look back on each interaction and find the places where you reacted without consideration. Reflect on what the reaction felt like in your body and where you felt it.

Reflect on when you feign your reactions. What face do you put on for others? Where are you insincere or inauthentic? What purpose is it fulfilling?

Wednesday’s Concepts

Layer Ten, Week One Concepts

Fear is always reactive. To conquer fear, be responsive. If you are always responsive, you will never be reactive. If you are never reactive, you will never be fearful.

A simple analogy. Change is a ball and you can choose to be a wall or a mitt. If you are a wall, the ball will impact you and bounce off in a very fearful, reactive way. You will react without deliberation or consideration of consequences and potential benefit. Reactivity is rarely efficient, seldom beneficial, and is almost never fun and fulfilling.

If you are a mitt, you will catch the ball and then decide what to do with it. You can keep it, throw it back the way it came, or toss it in any other direction. You will deliberate and consider which response has the most beneficial consequence. You will be in control.

Knowing how you are moving and the percentage of the energy you allocate to each (reaction and response) will help you move toward being more responsive, with less fear, and greater efficiency, benefit, and fulfillment.

Let’s look at how each of the energy movements, components, and bodies can be reactive and responsive. Most of your movements will be a combination, you will react and respond.

Physical – On its own, your body reacts subconsciously to internal and environmental stimuli. That is homeostasis. It gets hot and you sweat. You run up a flight of stairs and your heart speeds up. Your body responds to stimuli as well, you allow yourself to relax when someone rubs your shoulders.

Mental – This one is a bit easier to digest. Your conscious mind is your responsive mind and your subconscious mind is reactive. And they are constantly brawling with each other for supremacy.

Thoughts can be reactive or responsive. Yesterday, I ran 18 miles. Throughout the run, whenever I felt like I was about to hit a wall, I started thinking about how proud I was of myself and allowed those thoughts to infuse my physical, energetic, and emotional bodies. I chose to counter my reactive mind by responsively affirming that the discomfort I was experiencing was a sign of success.

Emotional – Emotions are a reactive response. Your emotional body interprets the sensations present and then reactively assigns a label. The exception is when you consciously infuse your system with a certain configuration.

Anger is normally reactive but you can also decide to get mad. Most responsive anger is feigned. You might pretend anger to shift your guilt. You might choose to get angry so that you don’t allow intimacy or grief. If you respond, pretend, and feign, often enough, it becomes habit (reactive). I’m sure you know people who are habitually angry, cynical, depressed, nervous, etc. They convince themselves that they are angry and forget that it is artificial, manufactured, and disingenuous.

Let’s look at the energy movements we have been exploring the last couple of weeks.

Using the list of movements, spherical, pushing, pulling, swirling, curving, repelling, attracting, stifling, compressing, opposing, resistant, fragmenting, lopsided, dispersed, vaporizing, welcoming, inspiring, or filtering, which do you think are inherently reactive or responsive?

Spherical is reactive when you transition into threat assessment. It is responsive when you transition into opportunity assessment.

Pushing and pulling are both usually reactive. They might seem responsive, like when you are consciously pushing someone to make a particular decision, but the push (demand) has an underlying fear. If you are completely responsive, you will rarely, if ever, generate a push or pull movement.

Swirling energies are a response. They born from curiosity, fascination, and wonder. They are born and arise from a place of non-reaction. Curving energies are a combination. You have an intention (response) and you are allowing a distraction (reaction). Repelling is reactive. It is brought on by some fear trigger (the ball bouncing off the wall).

Knowing how your energies are moving and the percentage of the energy you allocate to reaction and response will help you move toward being more responsive, with less fear, and greater efficiency, benefit, and fulfillment.

Reactivity is born from the subconscious desire to limit change, growth, and expansion.

Thursday’s Focus

Layer Ten, Week Two Focus

Make a list of your beliefs, truths, and givens. What do you think is right, good, enough, true, possible, and their opposites? Find habits and reactions in your daily routine.

Connect your beliefs, truths, habits, and assumptions to the underlying fears. Revisit the list from Sunday and explore a few of the things. Try to determine what your subconscious mind is afraid of.

Thursday’s Concepts

Layer Ten, Week Two Concepts

To be less reactive, you must decide to release the value you place on your fears. To do that, you will examine every given, truth, or belief you hold dear. Hiding in the closet of every given/truth/belief is some fear monster. How full of fear they are determines the subconscious value placed on them.

Truths include all your right/wrong, good/bad, always/never, black/white, should/shouldn’t, can/can’t, will/won’t, do/don’t, true/false, possible/impossible, and all/none.

For simplicity, let’s use the term belief but remember, the assumptions you have about others, how things will proceed, expectations, and all your givens and truths are not real. Beliefs are your conscious mind colluding with the falsehoods created by your subconscious mind to stifle growth, expansion, and change.

Your beliefs predispose you to reaction. When you react, you shift the energy of your momentum and expansion toward the assumed threat (what you are reacting to). Every time you react, you change your trajectory away from your intention, away from growth, and away from optimal benefit.

Beliefs limit you and limit your ability to be responsive. Your beliefs trigger reactions because your subconscious mind doesn’t allow for any middle ground. Every belief you have will arouse, promote, or instigate a reaction because your subconscious mind registers every belief as life or death and then reacts as if.

Your personality is the composite of your habitual reactions to everyday events. If your beliefs determine your reactions and your personality derives from those reactions, your beliefs must determine your personality.

And follow this thread … If your conscious and unconscious fears give birth to your beliefs … and your beliefs create your personality … in reality, your fears determine your personality.

Who you are being and who you believe you are is, in large part, dictated by what you are afraid of. That’s a pretty bleak picture but let it sink in. You have lived your entire life with fear driving the bus most of the time (and so has everyone you know, love, or are Facebook friends with).

The world runs on false beliefs, habits based on fear, and the reaction cycle. If most of what you do is a reaction and most of what others do is a reaction, then most of what we do together is a reaction. If I react to your reaction and then you react to my reaction, we create a cycle … that repeated often enough develops into a habit that dictates the nature of our relationship.

If you do that with everyone you meet, all your relationships are reactionary. Your environmental body is primarily reactionary until you decide to make it something else.

Let’s look at a four-step path out of reactionism.

Step Zero would be to make the time and configure yourself to be curious. Be curious to the “what ifs.” What if everything you believe is fundamentally flawed, incomplete, or serves to limit you?”

First, allow, acknowledge, and accept that you are a reactive being. Second, decide that you want to be a responsive being. Third, make conscious decisions to overrule your reactive tendencies with responses that maximize opportunities. Fourth, tolerate the expansive and healthy discomfort that your responses generate.

Let’s detail those four steps and highlight why they are vital.

Number One: Allow, acknowledge, and accept that you are a reactive being. To fix a problem, first, you must admit you have a problem. Before you can admit you have a problem, you must allow for the possibility that the problem exists. You have to believe that it could be true.

Number Two: Decide you want to be responsive. This needs to be five-body resolution. Just thinking you want to be responsive isn’t enough. You need to connect to your decision with all your bodies. You think it while you are feeling it, energizing it, relating to it, and doing it. Successful outcomes maintain optimal balance, focus, and strength in all your bodies.

Number Three: Make conscious decisions to overrule your reactive tendencies with responses that maximize opportunities. Your default is to be reactive. Changing your default takes not only a strong commitment but practice, lots of practice. Your goal is to spend more of your energy looking for opportunities and less looking for confirmation of your limiting beliefs.

Number Four: Tolerate the expansive and healthy discomfort that your responses generate. The expansion that being responsive creates gets uncomfortable quickly. Reactions bleed energy. When you are constantly reacting, you are constantly diffusing your vitality. It is like trying to fill a bath with the drain open.

When you feel or realize that you are reacting, it is a sign that you are fearful, that a belief has been triggered, and that your subconscious mind is trying to drive the bus. Feeling and realizing you are triggered as you are being triggered is a learned skill.

Respond to your reaction before the reaction has completed its cycle. An effective thing to do when triggered is to stop and do a Current150. After you establish the general state of each body, find the one that is the most reactive, out of balance, and rebalance it. If you are reactive, you are out of balance, guaranteed.

Friday’s Focus

Layer Ten, Week Three Focus

List your greatest fears. Prioritize your list and identify the top three. Identify which body is the most reactive and gives the most value for each of your top three fears.

Ascertain which component (focus, strength, stability, flexibility, endurance, speed, rejuvenation) is the most influenced and unbalanced by each of your top three fears. What is your standard energy movement when you are approaching and around probably fear generating areas?

Friday’s Concepts

Layer Ten, Week Three Concepts

Let’s explore the energetics of external triggers and how the value you place on fear leads to reaction and imbalance.

Do you remember when we talked about threat assessment? (L9W2) – Your environmental body is in near constant threat assessment. It tries to pull energy from your mental and emotional bodies by prioritizing external stimuli over internal sensations.

When you are in threat assessment, you are preparing yourself to react. When you are looking for opportunities, you are preparing yourself to respond. To find opportunity, you must be looking for it.

Every external trigger is born from an internal fear.

The birth of the internal fear creates an entity. Fear takes on a life of its own. The size of the entity is determined by the value (amount of energy) you feed it and the size of the room you give it in your house (energy body).

Triggers are the doorbell to the room your fears live in. When something or someone (including yourself) rings the bell, the door opens, the entity escapes and starts looking for ways to get attention.

So, if your fears and their triggers are entities waiting for someone or something to ring their bell, how do you keep them contained, devalue the entities, shrink the room, and remove the doorbell?

The end goal is to remove the value of the entity. You will never be able to remove all your fears and reactions. Some are hard-wired and part of your foundational operating system and are beneficial. Your reflex response (which, in our terminology, is a reaction because it is not conscious) is what jerks your hand away from something too hot to safely touch.

Your subconscious mind places the values on your fears. The larger the value, the more sensitive the trigger (louder the doorbell).

As you read on, take note of all the ways fear unbalances you or leads to imbalance. The degree to which fears unbalance you is determined by how much you value them. If your fear is high, your resulting imbalance is probably extreme. If you only find your fear vaguely disquieting, the resulting imbalance will be minimal.

Each body and every component places a different value on every fear you have. Some things will have a high mental body fear value and a low emotional body fear value. Your physical body might have a deep fear that has little influence on your environmental body.

Your most valued fears (biggest triggers) will probably exist in all your bodies, but probably not to the same degree. Understanding how fear unbalances each of your bodies, components, and movements will make their unbalancing influences easier to identify. Knowing that your reaction level is determined by how unbalanced you are will make lowering your reactivity easier.

Being predisposed to fear triggers requires that your energy be presumptively configured to react. The energy you use to presumptively configure is not available for anything else.

Responses are initiated from balanced energy configurations. You respond by reconfiguring your current energy to maximize the opportunity. Your configuration will go from one optimal and balanced response to another balanced and optimal energy response.

If you are trying to overcome a fear of spiders, balance your fear of spiders with the actual threat spiders pose and then address your fears in each of your bodies.

Mentally explore the rationale behind the fear. Is it rational? Yes, spiders bite, but according to the linked article, most self-diagnosed spider bites, 83.6%, are something else. Get rational, allow your conscious mind to accept that your fear is unfounded and then act accordingly.

Emotionally and energetically connect to what the fear feels like. As you connect to it, encourage it to move and flow. Connect to the emotion of self-sufficiency, empowerment, and safety. Let the emotional energy of fear transition to something beneficial. Do this every time you feel the fear.

Disconnect your environment from your fear. Break your associations. If you feel your spider fears in elevators, ride an elevator and do something fun, fulfilling, or outrageous. Find a busy elevator, dress up like a mermaid clown, talking toaster, blue frosting cupcake, or a tiny horse with lipstick and then sing a show tune. I can guarantee you, you will never think of elevator spiders again.

As you begin to devalue your fears and break their associations with your environment, they will create less imbalance. If you stay balanced, you will be less reactive and more responsive.

Saturday’s Focus

Layer Ten, Week Four – Focus

Spend the week feeling the actions and reactions (energy movement) in others and in your environment. When possible, balance yourself and then wait. Empathy is the ability to feel existing energy and its transitions.

How does your ability to feel energy movements change as you approach a new area or scenario? Can you feel your ability to feel energy movements meet your resistance to feeling the approaching changes? Where does your presumption of tension inhibit your ability to feel the energy flows of empathy?

Saturday’s Concepts

Layer Ten, Week Four Concepts

We are going to talk about communication and influence, how energy movements affect change. Empathy is the ability to feel and interpret changes in energy.

With others, spoken language and physical gestures are a small part of your interaction, you primarily communicate with their subconscious minds and held fears. Navigating that mine field is an art that requires presence and empathy. Start with this presumption, people are and will always be reactive first and responsive third. A few weeks ago, we talked about the cycle: threat, familiarity, opportunity.

(L9W1) Value is assigned hierarchically in three tiers. The first tier is threat, second is familiarity, and the third is benefit. Your mind, especially your subconscious mind, values what is beneficial last. Everyone you meet is doing the same thing as you. First, they look at you and determine your threat level. Second, they look to see if you fit comfortably into their familiar configurations. Lastly, they look for any opportunities that might be present.

Resourceful people have a high fear threshold and a wide zone of familiarity. They find opportunities because they spend less time and energy focused on their first two tiers, fear and comfort.

People with low fear thresholds and narrow bands of acceptability create a cycle that conceals opportunity. They prioritize threat assessment and then maintain the familiar. They go through life finding possible threats and then contorting themselves or the threat so that the threat is somehow familiar. As soon as or before they deal with one possible threat and achieve familiarity, they start looking for the next.

If your desire is to communicate effectively, your challenge will be to maintain energy configurations that encourage safety, familiarity, and opens the door for opportunity.

You create the opportunity for success by altering your configurations to ones that will entrain with your audience. You don’t change who you are, you change how you are so that it resonates sequentially with their threat detector, then their familiar sensor (comfort zone), and then their opportunity gauge.

The first step will be to balance your bodies. It doesn’t matter where you start (physical, mental, emotional, energetic, or environmental) and work through the rest. Once you are generally balanced, you assess the balance of the components in each of your bodies. Do what it takes to maximize the efficiency of each component in each body. Get specific. Get subtle. Find optimal. Remember Balancing Your Bodies from Layer Nine, Week One?

The next stage will be to feel your energy flows (this week’s movement). After you feel yours, read the energy flows of your environment and then the energy of whomever you are communicating with. Once you are present and aware, you are in a position to respond. You will respond by determining which of your available opportunities is the most in-line with your intentions. After you select the most appropriate opportunity, you will alter your energy to maximize the chances of success.

The quickest way to balance your bodies is by rebalancing more often. The closer you are to balanced, the quicker and easier it is to get your balance back. Do your Current30’s or Current150’s until they are second nature. The more often you do them, the more often you will feel the transitions. As it becomes second nature (habit) to be aware of the energy flows in each of your bodies, you will feel the transitions as they happen.

Maintaining your balance is a matter of releasing your presumptions, preconceptions, and predispositions. When released, your energy levels will skyrocket. Presumptions, preconceptions, and predispositions burn a ton of energy. When you stop draining your energy with assumptions, judgments, and defensive posturing, you will find your enlivened neutral.

Playfulness and wonder constantly try to glance around the curtain of impossible and find ways to make things possible. Playfulness is incredibly opportunistic and undefended. It allows, accepts, and acknowledges the inconceivable. If you can learn to be in that space (configuration), you will be unstoppable. Playful is fearless, unlimited, and without demand or judgment.

Happy, content, playful, efficient, and fulfilled can be your default. It can be where you live most of your life, it can be how most of your actions and interactions unfold, and it can be the foundation for all your relationships.

Practice maintaining optimal balance if you want to change your defaults. Commit and be persistent. The happy, content, playful, efficient, and fulfilled default will be uncomfortable, maybe really uncomfortable in the short term. It will be uncomfortable because optimal is not familiar.

Your comfort zone is familiar and suboptimal. Optimal balance will always have a feeling of discomfort, it will feel challenging, it will be a stretch because you are stretching your capability and capacity beyond the norm. Growth is rarely comfortable. Success and mastery require foregoing your comfort to achieve evolution.

After you have gained some mastery in identifying and maintaining a place of optimal balance, you can begin to play with doing the same thing for your relationships, environment, and the people in it.

It will be much easier to determine how, when, and why things and people in your environment change when you are in a balanced place. You will begin by feeling the energies present and then learning how to navigate and devalue other people’s fears, fear triggers, and the resulting reactions. The reactions (results of triggered fear) will be the easiest to feel and identify.

Initially, the biggest fear may be feeling adrift, alone, or separate. When you disconnect from your reactionary patterns and the reactions of others, you may feel a disconnect because it feels so different. When you react, you are making a direct connection with the cause of your reaction. When you respond, you absorb the energy of the cause, digest it, and then decide how you want to proceed. It may or may not directly connect with the cause.

The feelings of separation will subside as you adapt from threat assessment to gauging opportunity. When you are consistently gauging opportunities as your default, you stay connected to everyone and everything.

Continue to explore how to quickly presence yourself, read energy, and respond in the most beneficial and successful ways. To do this, you will find resonance, entrain with your environment, and then raise the vibrations until they meet your intention or trajectory. You will change your world from the inside out.