START HERE: Watch the video on how the program works and read the concepts.

Layer Zero will give you four days of concepts and a simple awareness meditation to help you get a feel for (pun intended) what you will be exploring in the program. It will get your mind and body working in a way that will help you absorb the future stuff more easily.

As you feel like you have absorbed the content and metabolized the movements in Layer Zero, move onto Layer One. Every four weeks, you will have access to an additional layer. The program is designed so you can follow along as scheduled or go at your own pace. You may choose to repeat a week to help you integrate the material. Everyone repeats weeks. Before progressing to the next Layer, ask yourself if you have felt the sensations and awarenesses in the movements, understood and absorbed the concepts, and completed the focuses. If not, give yourself permission to continue your exploration. This is a progressive system. Build a strong foundation and don’t allow your need to complete something to push you forward.

Suggestions for Success:

• Watch the video before starting.
• Do the movements.
• Check out the links and resources available on this page.
• Get into the community. Be seen. Ask questions. Engage.
• Reach out if you need help or feel unclear.
• Be kind to yourself. New habits take time but the payoff is huge.
• Show up for the calls to give and receive insight.
• Be curious and playful

Why Movements

The Movements and Meditations are the most valuable part of the system.

The Concepts and Focus will give you new perspectives and increase your mental understanding. The Movements will help your body absorb the ideas, create a new foundation, and help the old you create a new,balanced and optimized, you.

Balance makes it harder to be distracted, to be or allow yourself to be pulled in non-beneficial directions. Balance will give you more patience and tolerance. It will be easier to stay playful, be yourself, and express your ideas in a concise way. Balance will make it much easier to be present, articulate, and kind. Optimal balance creates efficiency and fluidity. When you are optimally balanced everything will feel easier, more fun and fulfilling.

Layer Zero – Ramping Up

Thank you again for joining us in The Change Militia.

Layer Zero will get your mind working in a way that will help you absorb the upcoming concepts more easily. Remember to do the meditation. The meditations and movements are the core of the program.

Day One – Concepts

The program will have a daily focus, daily concepts, and suggested movements and/or meditations. The Current30 is a simple 30-second awareness meditation you can do to get you in the groove.

As an example. What is your body position? Look for simple things: what is the lighting, what is happening in the background, are you allowing yourself to be distracted or multi-tasking? What are you wearing? Are you cold, hot, hungry, full, etc. What sounds abound? What sensations are you aware of? What can you smell? What is just at the edge of your awareness? Search for the subtle. Are you happy, sad, anxious, hungry, etc.

You get the idea, take in as much of your current environment as possible. Look and feel for things you take for granted or overlook. Make it a quick study.

That’s it. Go through your day becoming aware of what you are doing, your surroundings, sensations, and situations.

If it helps, set your phone timer for 37 minutes and every time it goes off, take a Current30.

Don’t judge, label, chastise, or condemn yourself; just observe. Don’t look for good or bad, just notice.

Have fun, be curious, and explore. The purpose is to become more aware of the present moment.

We also encourage you to be a part of our Facebook page, The Change Militia

Day Two – Concepts

Habits, we don’t need no stinking habits!

So, hopefully, you moved through yesterday detailing your environments with a bevy of Current30’s.

What did you discover that you find interesting or unexpected? Let us know in the FB group!

Today, see if you can identify how much of what you observe in your Current30’s is habit.

Every morning when I get up, I make a thermos of tea. I do it without considering whether or not I want tea. While the water comes to a boil, I feed the dog, stretch my hips and low back, warm up my wrists, and then do a handstand against a wall for as long as I can … or until the water begins to boil. That is all habit. I default to it.

See what you can become aware of for yourself. You might think of it in small chunks of time, sequences, or routines. How do you get ready for your day? What is your route and routines for getting to work, diet choices, personal interactions, and the clothes you wear? Examine the choices you make and see if you can begin to get an idea of how much of what you do is done without considering other possibilities.

And like Day One, don’t judge, label, congratulate, or condemn yourself, just observe. Don’t look for good or bad. Don’t try to fix yourself, just observe.

Have fun, be curious, and explore. You are developing a new foundation that we will build upon. Don’t listen to that fiery little voice in your head telling you to stop it, drop it, and roll it up and forget it. Forge on, being truly curious is an exploration beyond your current paradigms, assumptions, familiarities, and comfort zones. The value of simple awareness will become a huge part of your new foundation.

Day 3 – Concepts

Have you identified your habits? We’re assuming you concluded that almost everything you do is habit. We are habitual creatures. We follow patterns. We seek familiarity and comfort.

One of the reasons you follow patterns is because your subconscious mind views them as safe and survivable. Your daily cup of coffee and which hand you use to buckle your seat belt become a confirmation of safety to your subconscious mind. Your habits become a part of your Autonomic Nervous System and a component in Homeostasis. Your habits help your subconscious mind to answer the questions it asks a gazillion times a day “Should I run or rejuvenate? Am I fine and in a familiar zone or should I fight, take flight, or freeze?”

(If you didn’t click through to the links above) Your autonomic nervous system keeps track of the minutia of your existence. Homeostasis is the floor and ceiling your autonomic nervous system sets-up to decide if you should play or panic.

Habits reaffirm the familiar. Familiarity sends a safe signal to your subconscious mind and which lets your ANS know it can relax.

The problem with your subconscious mind’s definition of safety is that it doesn’t distinguish between unhealthy and healthy. You default into your patterns because your subconscious mind knows that those actions are survivable. Habits don’t put you into immediate harm. Even things like smoking or snarfing a whole bag of Oreos don’t create immediate life-threatening conditions. Doing them repeatedly, for an extended period of time, does.

If your actions are something you do regularly and survive, your subconscious mind begins to associate them as safe. It relaxes into them. Habits like bad relationships, angry outbursts, fast food lunches, chronic pain, stress, and over-doing can all trigger the subconscious mind into believing you are safe.

The subconscious mind is much like a two-year-old child. It is reactive. It wants what it wants, when it wants it, and will panic if it doesn’t get it immediately. It likes habits and since 95-99% of your mind is subconscious, it controls much of what you think, feel, and do.

Your subconscious mind wants to be in charge. It is a bully. It wants to remove the freedom of choice. Your subconscious mind wants to enslave you to what is familiar, regardless of its value, benefit, or long-term consequences.

Here is the secret. Your conscious mind is stronger. It wields the sword of change. Your conscious mind can cut through any habit instantly by simply making a different choice.

Try it. When you find yourself about to make a habitual decision, choose differently. Start with some simple things. Put on the other shoe first. Pick up your drink with the other hand. Stop eating Oreos before the bag is empty. Have something different for breakfast. See what happens or doesn’t happen. Use your conscious mind to confirm that simple changes of habit are not life-threatening. Making different choices will be uncomfortable. Confirm for yourself that uncomfortable isn’t necessarily unsafe.

Have fun, be curious, and explore. Be aware of what you are not willing to alter and where you falter and fall into the familiar. Don’t judge, label, congratulate, or condemn yourself, just observe. Don’t look for good or bad. Don’t try to fix yourself, just observe.

Day Four – Concepts

Resistance is futile … or does it create futility?

In Day Three, we suggested challenging a few of your habits. How did it go?

What did you do differently and what did you choose to not do differently? Please consider posting your results in the FB group, thanks!

Making another choice isn’t always easy, it requires determination. Determination is a focusing of energy in a specific direction for a specific and sufficient length of time to bring about the adaptation to change.

Sometimes it feels like you need to focus your energy on being determined before you can actually be determined. Don’t be fooled. You don’t have to convince yourself that something can change before you change it. Jumping off a high dive for the first time doesn’t require you to “work up the courage” before you jump. If you focus your energy on climbing the ladder and walking one step beyond the end of the diving board, you will succeed.

The mad hatter of mental chatter you encounter as you climb the ladder brings about resistance to change. Your subconscious mind doesn’t have a history of survivability to relate new experiences to. The subconscious mind wants to be in control of the moment and to control the future. It wants to walk ahead of you and ensure the path is free of potholes that might swallow you up. Your subconscious mind is fear-focused and always looking for potential problems.

When you feel the resistance to change, especially beneficial change, it is your subconscious mind trying to convince you to stay firmly rooted in the familiar, in what it can control and predict. It wants you to only do things you have done before.

All change requires movement. Beneficial change requires sufficient movement to stimulate an adaptation response. You adapt and grow when you move past the familiar into the unfamiliar, when you move from comfortable to uncomfortable.

Growth requires discomfort. Beneficial growth is healthy discomfort.

Healthy discomfort will always have long-term benefits. One of the things we intend with this program is for you to embrace and celebrate healthy discomfort like a neon billboard flashing the word SUCCESS!

Over the next couple of days, see if you can begin to identify what feels hard? What feels impossible? What or who brings on discomfort? What do you resist?

And remember, don’t judge, label, chastise or condemn yourself, just observe.

On Sunday, start the Layer One, Week One content. Read the concepts, do the daily focus, the movements, and meditations. Make it a habit. Start changing your world from the inside out! 

When you feel resistance to reading the content or doing the movements and meditations, use your determination to make a choice for change. If your time is limited, always do the movements first.

Current30

Step 1 – Take 30 seconds and make an inventory of your internal and external environment. What do you see, feel, hear, smell and taste? What are you aware of mentally and emotionally? What are the qualities of your “right now”?

Step 2 – Do this often.

Step 3 – Every time you do it, try to feel something new, something additional, and something unexpected.

Step 4 – Your intention should be to experience your world more fully, to feel more deeply. Feel for the subtle and the unexpected. Notice something new.

Step 5 – Strive to add depth and breadth to the experiencing of sensations and awareness.

Why it Matters – This is the single most powerful tool you will ever have to find your center and verify what is actually present. It is a doorway that will make the subconscious conscious.

Everyday Usability – This exercise will show you that you are never angry, afraid, sad, or any other label. You are a set of sensations and projections. How you value those sensations and devalue the projections is a choice you will learn how to make.

Progression – The progression here is endless. The more you do this and the more your focus and subtle awareness grows, the more you will feel, sense, and understand. You will get deeper, more present, and empathetic.