Modern Meditation: Discover Your Potential, Power & Purpose

1. Introduction: You know what you need to change your life. You just sometimes need help getting clear on those answers that are already inside of you. Hi, I'm Justin Michael Williams, author, speaker, and musician. This is your 10 day meditation journey that will help you unlock your potential, your power, your purpose, and step into the fullness of who you know yourself to be. Most people look at me and see me as a meditation teacher and think that I was, like, always into this kind of stuff. When I first learned about meditation, I literally said, Meta what? I hated it. I couldn't get my mind to stop thinking, and I thought I was so bad at it. But that all changed when I found the right style of meditation. For me, meditation is what actually helped me believe that I was worthy of accomplishing and living the life that was set out for me to live. I'm so excited to teach this course because I'm taking the best of everything that I've ever taught over the last decade and brought it down to this ten day program to help you take action in your life in a quick, easy, and effective way. You'll be given a daily lesson every day for 10 days, followed by a simple guided audio experience and a journal prompt that helps you integrate everything you've learned into your life. Whether you've never meditated before or you've been meditating for a long time or you find yourself right in the middle where you keep trying it and stopping and trying and stopping again, you should take this program if you are ready to use this practice not just to relax and be chill and be Zen, but to finally transform your life. I'm so glad you're here. Let's get started. 2. Getting Started : Welcome to our journey together and we're really on for a special one because this is not your mama's meditation. This is going to be a whole different type of practice that's not here just to help you relax and reduce stress and be zen and sit and chill. This is a practice that's here to help you become more of who it is that you really are. A practice that's going to help us take action and move forward in our lives to become more productive, more purposeful, and to make the changes that we want in our lives and in the world. I know this story really well because I grew up as a kid, literally in a home with gunshot holes on the outside of my house with a lot of domestic violence and trauma. Look, we all have our stuff that we grew up with and whatever it was, your own version of your conditioning, we all learn to adapt. My adaptation was one that I think a lot of us will relate to. It was becoming what I call a chronic over achiever. Thinking if I do enough, accomplish enough, succeed enough, then I will finally be enough. This ring a bell, anybody? What happens when we get stuck with this chronic over achievement is we get entangled. Our self-worth becomes completely entangled with our validation and our achievements. We don't know who we are or what we're worth outside of what we produce or what we do. I did all the doing. I graduated the top of my class in high school, got a full ride academic scholarship to go to UCLA. I get to LA, I come out of the closet, I'm making money. I start a marketing company when I was in college, started making six figures. By the time I was 23, driving a BMW, living two blocks from the beach in Venice Beach. I don't say this to you to brag. I say this to you because I got to this point, and I looked in the mirror and I said, I have accomplished every thing I've ever set out to do. I've done everything that everyone in my family expected me to do, and I'm still miserable. How is it that I've done everything on the outside and I'm still not happy. That set me on this spiraling journey first downward and inward, but ultimately to find my truth and to find my power and to learn that real happiness in our lives is not just about constantly being busy in what we do, but it's about who we are being inside of that doing. That's where the change happens, that's where the impact happens, and that is what we're going to do together in this program. We're going to go on an incredible journey together, starting with helping you get clear on what it is that you actually even want for your life. Not what people expected of you, not what your family expects of you, not what's more realistic, not what's safe, what do you actually want? Then we're going to dive into self-sabotage because you can get clear on what you want as much as you can, but if you were sitting here pretending like you're thinking positive and meditating and doing all this personal growth and taking courses, but still engaging in self-sabotaging behavior. It's like driving with your foot on the gas and fully on the brake at the same time. So we're going to break through the things that might be stopping you without you even knowing it. Then we're going to dive into breaking through fear and activating your creativity and taking action so that you can see real change in your life, and all this stuff that you're doing will finally have the impact that you wanted to have. That's just the first half of the course. The second half of the course is one of my favorites. This is where I'm going to teach you how to create your own personal meditation ritual that you can do well after this program is over. The reason this is one of my favorite parts is because it wasn't until I was able to create my own meditation practice and I had the blessing of being trained by one of the world's most renowned teachers and leaders apprenticing with him and now teaching to people in over 40 countries around the globe about meditation. I'm here to tell you one thing that when you step into this practice, everything that you're doing becomes better. Everything that you're trying to step into becomes more real. That's the journey that we're on together. If you're in with me to do some meditation, to get some shit done, not just to chill and relax, step into this journey because we're in for a great one. Now let me give you a couple of ground rules before we get started, I have three golden rules that I want to make sure that I mention to you here. These are the three myths about meditation and I get it. Some of us have never tried meditation before, and if that's you, you're actually in the best spot. Because what most of us have done is we've tried meditation, we've tried these different apps, we've tried the guided practices, and we pretend like, "Oh my God, we tell our friends that we love to meditate." But really we're lying, we're just sitting there trying to meditate, trying to get our minds to stop thinking, trying to do this thing that we can never actually accomplish and then beating ourselves up inside because we can't make it happen. I know some people here do enjoy their meditation practices. Whatever part of the journey you're on, whether you've tried meditation, but it never sticks or you've heard about it but never given it a shot. This practice is going to teach you how to create a ritual that will work for you. There are three myths that stop us from being able to meditate. Myth number 1 is that meditation is about getting your mind to stop thinking. Listen, it is not possible to get your mind to stop thinking. That's why meditation feels so hard. My promise to you is throughout this program, I will never ask you to stop thinking. In fact, most of you are really good at meditating because guess what? If you can worry, you can meditate and I'll teach you how in this course. Myth number 2 is that meditation is supposed to be about relaxing or being zen. While meditation can feel relaxing sometimes that's not what meditation is really about. Meditation is about becoming more alive, becoming more connected to your passions, more connected to the things that you care about, the causes you believe in, and how you want to grow and move forward. That's what we're going to be doing in this course. Then myth number 3, and this is a big one, is that people think that in order to meditate, you got to sit cross-legged, all still with your back straight, just bind tight and booty all tight. That you don't have to do that to meditate truly. With meditation and this is one of the most important tenants of meditation, if your body is not comfortable, your brain can't relax. This biological system is smarter than anything you're trying to do in your practice. I will never ask you to sit cross-legged. I will never ask you to be uncomfortable. In fact, I'll never even ask you to be still in this practice. The most important thing as we jump into this journey is that you are comfortable. If you itch or you want to scratch or you whatever is you're practicing, let yourself move. That's a part of the practice. This that we're doing here together is revolutionary. It's revolutionary in so far as who you thought that you could be and also who it is that you're going to become and we're doing a practice together called freedom meditation. Now, let me tell you a little bit of the logistics about how this is all going to work. Every day, for 10 days, you're going to have a guided practice and it's going to be just a short audio video experience. We're going to be able to actually learn some new concepts and then be able to experience these concepts inside of a listening practice. The reason I call them a listening practice is because what meditation is really all about is learning to listen to, and hear the most important voice of all, the voice inside of you. Because if you can't hear that, then we're building our life based on what everyone else says we're supposed to do. The nuts and bolts structure is like this. Every lesson, we'll start with a short talk of me giving you some technique or tool or experience that you need to understand. Then we go into an audio only guided meditation listening experience. For the audio only practices, you'll see that all disappear. We do that on purpose because you don't have to see anything for these meditation practices. You can just plug it in your ears. You don't even have to be looking at the screen and I'll guide you through the whole journey. Then at the end of each practice, I'll come back, tell you what's next, and then you'll want to get into your guided workbook that will help you integrate these practices in your life. Let me tell you, the workbook honestly might be the most important part of this journey, because this is how you take these concepts that we learn and what you hear within and then implement them into your life. I know some of us when we think of things like, "Oh God, there's a workbook. I don't have time to do a workbook." Look, I get it. I'm actually this person too. So we've specifically designed this workbook to be easy, quick, and short, and guided for you. The reason why we did this is to be honest with you, the workbook is actually one of the most important sections of this practice. If you skip the workbook and you don't do that, then all we're doing is sitting here and meditating and thinking and listening, you can just listen to a podcast and do that as much as you want or go on an app. This is an experience, a transformational experience that we want to go through together. The only way that you can bring this transformation out of your head and into your life is by integrating it. That is what I promise you the workbook is all about. Now, I've structured this journey over the course of 10 days for a specific reason. I know some of you over achievers are going to want to power through it and get through it all in a weekend. Don't do that because you need some time to let these practices and experiences integrate into your life. This is not just about learning a skill, this is about learning something that's going to actually help you transform your life. The only way to do that is to learn, go back into your life for a little bit, steel how the practices blossom and unfold in you, and then come back for the next stage of the journey. If you have to skip a day, don't worry, it's okay. Just come back as soon as you can, try not to let too much time elapse. The best way to get the most out of this experience is to do 10 days, one day at a time, and then we'll be on our journey to freedom. Go ahead and download your workbook in the class resources, and then you can meet me right back here in day 1 when you're ready to get started. I'll see you there. 3. Day One: Claim Your Vision : Welcome to day 1 of our journey together. Today, we are going to talk about what's called the six life zones. I want you to listen very closely. Science has proven that if you find fulfillment in the six life zones that I'm about to tell you about, you'll live pretty much as happy of a life as anybody can get, and you're going to want to write these down. Number 1, work and career. Number 2, creativity, passions, and hobbies. Number 3, your physical, emotional, and spiritual well-being. Number 4, authentic relationships. Number 5, financial freedom, and Number 6 service. Now, let me talk to you about these a little bit because I'm going to explain them a little differently than you might expect. Work and career is obvious. It's what do we do for work? What are we stepping into as our career? But I want to talk about this in relationship to your creativity, passions and hobbies, which is life zone number 2. Now, here's a myth that is one of the shadows and the things that's plaguing the personal growth in entrepreneurial world right now. Everyone will tell you that you have to be working in your passion, that you have to be doing a job that you love, and if you're doing a job that you love, that's the one thing that's going to make you really happy in this life. There's no study that proves that anywhere, and they've studied it all over the place. What they have proven, however, is that as long as you have time and space dedicated in your life for your creativity, your passions, and your hobbies, then you could live just as much of a fulfilled life as somebody who is working in their passion. You can work as a teller at a bank or you can work at the grocery store, you can work in an office, or you can work anywhere. But as long as you're working a job that doesn't suck your energy dry out of you, and you're also making dedicated time in your life, not just when you have extra free time, but making dedicated time in your life for your creativity, passions, and hobbies, you will and can live a fulfilled life. I always tell people you don't have to give up your job to go work in a garden for your whole life if you love gardening. Just make sure you're gardening a few times a week. Physical, emotional, spiritual well-being is easy. We got that but you just got to make sure you focus on all three. We're usually good at focusing on either one or the other. Then authentic relationships is overall an easy one to think about. Oftentimes, though, we think about our romantic relationships only but I want you to think about all the other relationships in your life, with your friends, with people you have to care for, with your kids, and most importantly, the relationship with you, with yourself. Now, let's talk about number 5, financial freedom. This is a really important one to talk about, and especially in this community where we're learning and we're growing in skill share and trying to expand our competency and our ability to do many things. We oftentimes look at financial freedom, as $ sign that we're making based upon comparing ourselves to other people and creating this $ sign based on what everyone else thinks we should have. But financial freedom, what it really means is being able to do what you want, when you want, and how you want to do it without worry or concern for money. You have to think about what is the vision that you have for your own life? What is the $ amount, what is the energy investment that it's going to take for you to fund that life? For example, for me, for somebody who has albums and courses, and filming and a team, and I'm doing massive events all over the world, that's going to take a different $ amount than somebody who wants to be a stay at home and chill with their family, and have a small business at home. Both visions are equally as powerful and equally as good, there's no comparison. But there's a different $ amount that relates to your financial freedom to make that happen. I want you to think about what that is for you. Then finally, service. This is one that we often skip. Service doesn't necessarily mean that you start a nonprofit, or you go start some charitable foundation which, of course, you can do those things. But service involves something a little bit deeper. It's about looking at how you are serving others, how you are supporting others, how is it that you're giving back? How is the work that you do in the world, or your hobbies that you're contributing to in the world? How is that impacting other people's lives in a positive way? You can volunteer, you can do something to use your skills and talents to help other people, and really what we have to remember is that we all rise together and when we raise the tide, it lifts all boats. We're focusing on the six life ones first in day 1, because if you don't have a clear vision of where you're trying to go, of what you're trying to change and move and evolve towards in your life, then everything that we try to change, we have to do it by force because we're trying to force ourselves or discipline ourselves, but it doesn't take discipline when you're moving towards something you enjoy. When we're moving toward something that we like, we don't have to try so hard to move away from the things that we're trying to change. In this lesson, we're focusing on the six life zones to help you figure out what the real vision is for your life. Here's one of the things I want you to remember. When we're focusing on the vision for how we want to expand in our lives and how we want to change our lives in some ways, especially as it relates to these six different life zones. What you have to remember is it's not about your vision coming true exactly as you see it. What's important is who you become in pursuit of that vision. Who you become as you're going towards your goals is actually what matters in your life because here's the thing. Your vision probably isn't going to come true exactly as you see it in your head or exactly how you have it on your vision board. But if you're going towards that, who you become will be even better. Let's get into a little practice together today that's going to help you figure out which of the six life zones you're going to focus on most because everyone has one life zone that needs a little extra love, and it might be a little different than you might expect. Usually, when we think about it, we think we know which life zone it is. When we feel it, sometimes it tells us something a little different. Let's practice. We'll start like we're going to do in every single practice with the freedom trinity. Body eyes, and breath. Go ahead and just get cozy, relax into your body a little bit, and take a deep breath in and a breath out. If you feel comfortable, I invite you to close your eyes. Remember, you can always keep them open if you'd like. Then place your hands over your heart one on top of the other. Now we'll align our breath together with a three count breath. On the count of three, go ahead and exhale everything out of your system through your nose, 1, 2, 3. Exhale everything out and come to completely empty. Now to my count of three, inhale for 1, 2, 3. Hold for 1, 2, 3. Exhale 1, 2, 3. Great. Again, inhale 1, 2, 3. Hold for 1, 2, 3. Exhale 1, 2, 3. Last time, inhale 1, 2, 3. Hold for 1, 2, 3. Exhale 1, 2, 3. Now just breathe normally, and I'd like to invite you to do a short visualization with me. But I want you to know that as we visualize that some people imagine or visualize with their eyes, meaning seeing images in their heads. But some people don't visualize that way at all. Some people visualize with sound, meaning they hear things in their minds or some people visualize with smell or taste or even physical sensation or emotion or a combination of them. If I ask you to see something in this practice and you don't see it in your mind, you're not doing it wrong. If I ask you to hear something you don't hear it, you're not doing it wrong. You're doing it right. Just notice what you do notice instead of focusing on what you don't notice, and most importantly, don't force anything. Just see what arises naturally. There is no way to do this practice wrong. So don't worry, even if it's your first time meditating. Here we go. I'd like you to give yourself permission to imagine a future version of yourself at any point in the future, who is living the life of your dreams. You have the body you've always wanted, you're in the house you've always wanted, your health is the way you've always wanted, your relationships, you're how you've always wanted, you have the money you've always wanted. Everything is exactly as you've always wanted and dreamed of. If that feels impossible, good. Because if we can't think beyond our current circumstances, we'll never be able to live beyond our current circumstances. Just let yourself go there with me. You can rub a magic lamp. Everything is possible. What do you notice? Now, you might have multiple images shuffling in your mind, and that's fine. Don't worry, or it might be fuzzy or blurry or incomplete that's fine too. But see if you can just let one idea bubble up to the surface, and we're going to start to dimensionalize this a little bit more. As you look at this future version of you, who is living the life of your dreams, and you're going to let yourself go there with me right now. I want you to notice in this vision, is the future you indoor or are they outdoor? What are you wearing in the vision? Is there anybody there with you? What kind of environment are you in? What's happening in this vision that indicates to you that you are indeed living the life of your dreams. Take a second now and just scan around this future vision and pick up as many things as you can. Again, don't force it, even if things are fuzzy or blurry or incomplete. That's okay. Just notice if you can pick up any colors or textures or things in the environment. Then notice if you hear anything, are there any sounds associated with this future vision? Again, don't force it, if not, just notice. Do you smell anything or taste anything? Do you feel any physical sensations, maybe a temperature or something touching your skin? Most importantly, how does it feel, what's the emotional quality of this future vision? Take a moment now and just notice as much as you can. Now, looking at this future you, who is living the life of your dreams, I want you to ask your future self this question. Here's your question. Which area of my life do I need to focus on transforming most so that I can become you? I'll ask it again for you. Which area of my life do I need to focus on most so that I can become you? Be specific, and trust whatever arises without second guessing it even if it was something you expected or not. Now keeping this vision in your mind repeat these words with me. You can say them silently in your mind, whisper them out loud, or even speak them with your voice. Here are your words. I am ready. I am worthy. I am powerful. I deserve this life. I am ready. I am worthy. I am powerful. I deserve this life. Last time. I am ready. I am worthy. I am powerful. I deserve this life. You deserve this life. You deserve this life. You deserve this life. Remember, you can come back to this place anytime you need it. But for now, go ahead and take a deep breath in and a deep breath out. When you feel ready, I invite you to open your eyes. Welcome to a new beginning. For some of us when we do this kind of a practice, what comes up for us is exactly what we always expected, and for others of us, something comes up that we didn't quite know was going to be there. Whatever it was, for you, just trust whatever it is that arose. Now what I want you to do is make sure you go straight to day 1 of your guided journal practice. Open up your book, and you'll see some questions there for you that are going to help guide you into learning how to integrate this experience into your actual life. This is important because in our next practice day 2, you're going to learn how to integrate this and start to put this into action. If you're doing incredible work. Thank you so much for practicing with me today, and I'll see you in the next practice. Bye for now. 4. Day Two: Break Self-Sabotage: When people come to me and say, my vision isn't coming true how I saw it. I've been meditating. I've been working. I've been listening to a podcast. I did my vision board, but nothing's happening. I always tell them this. You don't get what you want in your life. You get what you are. We don't get what we want. We get what we are. What does that actually mean? Well, it all has to do with self-sabotage. Look, you can meditate as much as you want. You could take as many courses on Skillshare as you want. But if you are still engaging in a bunch of self-sabotaging behavior, it's just like watering a garden full of weeds and expecting roses to bloom. It's like driving with your foot fully on the gas and on the brake at the same time. That's what so many of us are doing. It's really easy for us to try to think positive and to try to keep our minds right and start to listen to the right things and read the right books. But all of that goes to waste. It gets completely canceled out if we're still engaging in a bunch of self-sabotaging stuff. Here's the thing. In my book, Stay Woke, I cover four different types of self-sabotage; toxic habits, toxic people, toxic thoughts, and toxic beliefs. But here in this course, we're going to focus on the most toxic one of all, toxic habits. Now, I'm going to talk about toxic habits a little bit differently than you might expect because you don't need me or a course to tell you if you're engaged in some insanely toxic stuff. I want to talk about some of the things that slip under the rug a little bit. The things that everyone else is doing, the things that seem like they're not toxic or that have actually even become a part of your identity, but are the things that are stopping you from reaching your goals. Look, I've been on a mission to take meditation out of this spiritual echo chamber, and to bring it to everyday people like you and me. We got to ask some big questions. Like, how does meditation loosen the grip on our toxic habits with things, especially like porn, drugs, alcohol, social media, and meaningless sex? How does it help us stop comparing ourselves to other people? How does it help us actually get **** done and not just sit here relaxed in Zen all the time? How does it help us with the environment, with social justice, with productivity, relationships, money, trauma, healing, entrepreneurship, creativity? How does it help us overcome obstacles and step in to our power? What is a toxic habit exactly? Remember, I'm going to talk about these in a little bit of a hidden way. A toxic habit, this is how I define it, is anything that you're doing regularly that lowers your vibration or keeps you from reaching your goals. In this way, you have to understand that you first have to have the goal, which is why we did the practice we did in Day 1 to help you figure out what you want. What we do is we use that vision that we created for our lives as a filter, and we ask ourselves a simple question, are the habits that I'm engaging in throughout my day taking me closer to that vision or further away? There's no in between. We like to pretend like there's in between and that everything is neutral. No. Everything you do, every habit you have, everything you choose to engage with throughout your day from when you wake up to when you go to sleep, is either taking you towards your vision or further away. When we get really honest about that, we have an amazing filter to look at some of the things that we do that seem seemingly mundane, but are actually holding us back from accomplishing our dreams and goals. Let me give you an example. One of my students, Jaden is an incredible trans activist who's doing powerful work in the world. I was talking to Jaden and Jaden was like in my vision I just keep seeing myself playing guitar. I said, okay, well, why don't you play guitar? They were like, well, I don't have time. Then I let Jaden talk for a little bit longer and longer, and then I asked Jaden a trick question. I said, Jaden, I've been trying to figure out some new Netflix shows to watch. What are you watching on Netflix right now? Then Jaden started listing off every single Netflix show that exists and was telling me how excited they were about all these Netflix shows. I looked at Jaden with my eyebrows up, and right there they knew, oh, oh, I was caught. I asked Jaden, Jaden real quick, be honest with yourself. How many hours per week are you spending on these Netflix shows? Jaden starts counting and goes, oh, oh. I said, that's it. Netflix and watching TV for you is toxic. Now, is watching Netflix or watching TV toxic in general? No, of course not. Most things are not inherently toxic, but it's our relationship to those things that make them toxic or not. Specifically, if you're saying you don't have time and that's what's keeping you from accomplishing your goals and becoming who it is that you want to be, then you have to look at the things that are taking your time that actually don't matter that much. In this case for Jaden, watching TV is toxic. Here are some things that you might not normally think of that can actually become toxic habits. Always saying yes when you really want to say no. Obviously, we talked about watching TV, going to sleep too late, waking up too late, drinking coffee, drinking alcohol. Any of these things, are they inherently toxic? No. But what becomes toxic is our relationship to those things and being real honest with ourselves about whether engaging in these behaviors are taking us closer to our vision and further away. Now, I want you to listen to me very carefully before we get into this practice, because this is important. I'm not demonizing any of these things. All we're doing is asking ourselves, who do we want to become and what's stopping us from getting there. Most commonly, the things that are stopping us from getting where we want to go are not these big dramatic boulders and roadblocks in our lives. They're the little things that we're doing every single day that become habits that block us from our dreams. In this way, something can be toxic for you now, but not toxic for you later, or it can be toxic for your friends, but not toxic for you. You have to get clear on what your vision is and then decide if a habit is toxic for you or not. We're going to figure that out right now in this practice. Like we do each day, we'll start with the freedom trinity; body, eyes, and breath. Go ahead and just soften into your body, get comfortable. Remember, you can relax your shoulders, relax your eyebrows, relax your jaw, the space behind your ears, softening into your body 5% more. Then go ahead and place your hands over your heart. Take a full deep breath in, and a breath out. When you feel ready, I invite you to shut your eyes. Remember, you can always keep your eyes open if you'd like, but just look down a little bit and blur out your vision so you don't get a distracted gaze. Now, we'll align our breath together with the three count breath. On the count of three, go ahead and exhale everything out of your system through your nose. One, two, three, exhale everything out and come to completely empty. Great. Now, to my count of three, inhale for one, two, three. Hold for one, two, three. Exhale one, two, three. Again, inhale one, two, three. Hold for one, two, three. Exhale one, two, three. Last time, inhale one, two, three. Hold for one, two, three. Exhale one, two, three. Great. Now just breathe normally, and like we did in our last practice, I'm going to invite you into a short visualization with me and remember, you can use all of your senses for this practice. I want you to call into your mind right now that future version of you. The future version of you who is living the life of your dreams, and trust anything that arises today, even if it's fuzzy or incomplete. You might have multiple things shuffling in your mind. But just notice in this vision today. What is the future you wearing in the vision? Are they indoor or are they outdoor? What do you look like? What do you see? As we drop back into this future vision, has the narrative expanded at all? Do you notice anything new or anything different? Just scan around yourself in the vision and notice what colors are around you. Is there anybody there with you? What are you doing in this vision? What happened or is happening or is about to happen? And what is happening in this vision that indicates to you that you are indeed living the life of your dreams? Notice, do you hear anything in the vision? Remember, don't force it. Do you smell anything or taste anything in the vision today? Do you notice any physical sensations? Are there any specific emotional qualities? Take a moment right now, and just continue scanning around this future vision where you are living the life of your dreams. If you haven't fully yet let yourself really go there. You can rub a magic lamp. Everything is possible. Scan around. What do you notice? Now, as you look at this future version of you who is living the life of your dreams, ask the future you this question, what specific habit is keeping me out of alignment with becoming you? What specific habit is keeping me out of alignment with becoming you? What specific habit is keeping me out of alignment with becoming you? Just be here for a moment now as you get the messages you need. Now, go ahead and place your hands over your heart and just feel or repeat these words with me. I am allowed to change. Show me the way. I am allowed to change and I know the way. I am allowed to change, and I am ready to take the next step. You're ready. You are ready. Go ahead and just anchor into what you received for a moment, knowing that you are safe to grow, you're safe to change, you're safe to evolve, and you have the power to move forward. Go ahead and take a deep breath in and a deep breath out. When you're ready, I invite you to open your eyes. This is deep work. What I want you to do right now is go straight to Day 2 of your guided journaling exercises. This is how you're going to start to integrate it in your life and I left some big questions for you in there. I want you to explore it really honestly as best as you can. If you had multiple toxic habits come up for you, don't worry, a lot of us do. What I want you to do is pick the one habit that you think would have the biggest impact on your life and explore that in your journal prompt. You can come back to the other ones later, I promise. If you're doing incredible incredible work. This is how we really start to change and in the next practice, I'm going to teach you something called a power action that's going to help you turn these toxic habits into power. I'll see you there. 5. Day Three: Commit to Your Action: Welcome to day 3 of our journey together, and this is one of my all time favorite practices because this is how we really move the needle. Today, we're talking about power actions. So so far, what we've done is on day 1, we got clear on our vision, and then on day 2, we figured out what was stopping us from getting there. Now we put the rubber to the road and we actually start to take ourselves forward towards our vision. So I want to teach you a concept that literally, and no joke, has changed the trajectory of my entire life. I've been doing this for over eight years, and I promise you, if you take one thing from me from this entire class, I want you to take this. This is called your daily power action. So so many of us have a to-do list. We wake up. We have this to-do list. We have all these things that we want to get done, I want you to think about your to-do list and think about how many things are on your to-do list that actually have anything to do with you. Are they other people's to dos? Other people's expectations? Are you being used as a tool to help someone else accomplish their dreams? Now, that's real. That's a part of so many of our lives. We have jobs, we have kids, we have to-do lists, we have things to do. But you have to have at least one thing that you're doing every single day that's taking you in the direction of your dreams and your goals. One thing every day. So here's what you're going to do for the rest of this course and hopefully for the rest of your life. Is you're going to pick one thing every single day, and it'll be a new thing every day that you'll commit to doing and you will not go to sleep that night until this one thing is done. I'm not saying pick two things, pick three things. The real trick behind doing this successfully is picking one thing. Because when we pick two things or three or four, it's easy for us to look at our to-do list and say, "These are all things that will take me towards my vision, but I don't really have time to do all those things today." But if you pick one thing and you tell me that you didn't have time to do one thing for yourself today, you lying. Even if you picked one thing and you got in the bed, I've done this many times, I go, "Oh, my God, I haven't done my one thing," then you can get up and just do that one thing. Now, here's a couple of things that you need to know as you're picking your item because you'll be picking a new item every day, and I left a spot in your guided journal for you to write it down, is be realistic with yourself. When you pick your item based upon what the structure of your day looks like, it could be something simple, like, I just need to send an email to this person. Or on a day when you have a little bit more space, if you were writing a book, for example, you could say, "I'll outline the entire chapter of my book today." Make it fit and flex with your life, because the trick to having success here is not thinking about going from A to Z reaching your goals. It's going from A to B, from B to C, from C to D. If you do this every day, one thing a day, you have 365 items every single year that you've taken to move you forward towards your goals. What I want you to know is that there is no power action that is too big or too small, and it's not even all that linear, sometimes. Some days your power action will be, you need to rest today. You need to go to sleep early. And some days your power action will be, you need to bring this thing up in therapy. Sometimes it's an email you need to send or a specific thing that you need to do. But remember, as long as you have a vision of where you want to go, even if that vision is changing, no action is too big or too small. They're all taking you in a winding road to the direction of your dreams. While no power action is too big or too small, you want to make sure that the action that you choose is realistic for you to get done in that day depending on what you have to do. So if you have a super busy day, your power action isn't going to be outline my entire book. The power action might be, I need to send this email, or I need to go to bed a little bit more early. Or if you have a little bit more space in your day, maybe it's on a weekend, and guess what? I do not take weekends off from my power actions. Even if it's on a weekend, you say, "All right, I have a lot of spaciousness today. Today, I'm going to write three songs. Today, I'm going to create this art project. Today, I'm going to outline the whole book." Let your power action flex with your day so that you can have a win and actually get it done. So I want to tell you a little story of how this actually worked for me in my life and when I started doing it. Several years ago, my grandmother who I was very close to, almost a decade ago now. My grandmother who I was very close to got diagnosed with stage 4 cancer, and the doctors told her she only had a couple months to live. When this happened, it was a huge shock to our entire family. She was 67 years old, seemingly healthy. So as soon as I got the news, I jumped on an airplane from LA to San Francisco, where I'm from in the Bay Area, and I walked into her house. When I walked into the house, she asked me a question that literally changed the trajectory of my entire life. She said, "If you were in my shoes, and you knew you were going to die in two months, what would you do?" I looked at her, and I'm like, "What are you even talking about?" And she said, "Listen, I've been wanting to talk to you about this for a long time now. But now that I know I don't have a lot of time, we're going to talk about this now." I closed my eyes, and I felt this well of emotions come running up inside of me and I wanted to cry, but I didn't cry because when I was a kid, they said only ******* cry and then I just blurted out. "I would stop every single thing that I'm doing, and I would record an album, I would do music. I would step on stage, and I would stop hiding the truth of who I am." My grandmother in that moment looked at me and she said, "I know. Baby, I know." The thing is, I had always wanted to do music ever since I was a little boy, but I let all the kids who teased me at school about being gay, about being different, make me think I sucked at everything, and I stopped myself. I let my circumstances of growing up as a little boy in the hood make me think that it wasn't realistic. It wasn't practical, and I gave up on my dream. So in that moment, my grandmother, who in my family, we call Baka. So my Baka, she looked at me and she said, "I don't care when, I don't care how. Promise me you'll do it. Promise me." I looked at her, and I said, "I promise." That week, literally, one of my mentors, I went to them and they taught me about power actions, and said, "One step every single day." Three years later, that little boy who grew up in the hood, who had never written a song, who had never been in a recording studio, put out his first album, Metamorphosis, and my album ended up charting in the top 20 of the iTunes pop charts next to Britney Spears and Taylor Swift. In that moment, I knew that power actions worked. I'm not sharing this with you today to brag at all. I'm telling you this because I know that sometimes the dreams that we have for ourselves seem impossible. They seem insurmountable. They seem so beyond the circumstances we have for ourselves. But these power actions are the key, they are the key to moving you forward to the life that you desire and deserve. Let's practice. We'll start like we do with every practice with the freedom trinity, body, eyes, and breath. So go ahead and get comfortable. Place your hands over your heart. Take a deep breath in. A breath out, and when you're ready, I invite you to shut your eyes if you feel comfortable doing so. Remember, you can always keep them open if you'd like. Just keep a soft gaze so you don't get too distracted. So as we do, each day, we'll begin with the freedom trinity, body, eyes, and breath. Now, we'll align our breath together with the three count breath. On the count of three, go ahead and exhale everything out of your system through your nose. One, two, three, exhale everything out and come to completely empty. Great. Now, to my count of three, inhale for one, two, three, hold for one, two, three, exhale one, two, three. Again, inhale one, two, three, hold for one, two, three, exhale one, two, three. Last time, inhale 1, 2, 3. Hold for 1, 2, 3. Exhale 1, 2, 3. Great. Now just breathe normally. I want you to call into your mind right now that future version of you. The future version of you who is living the life of your dreams, and trust anything that arises today, even if it's fuzzy or incomplete. You might have multiple things shuffling in your mind. But just notice in this vision today, what is the future you wearing in the vision? Are they indoor or are they outdoor? What do you look like? What do you see? Just scan around yourself in the vision and notice what colors are around you. Is there anybody there with you? What are you doing in this vision? What happened or is happening or is about to happen? What is happening in this vision that indicates to you that you are indeed living the life of your dreams? Notice. Do you hear anything in the vision? Remember, don't force it. Do you smell anything or taste anything in the vision today? Do you notice any physical sensations? Are there any specific emotional qualities? Take a moment right now and just continue scanning around this future vision where you are living the life of your dreams, and if you haven't fully yet let yourself really go there. Now, as you look at this future version of yourself who is living the life of your dreams, ask this question. What is one specific step that I can take that will bring me closer to being you? What is one specific step that I could take today to bring me closer to becoming you? What is one specific step that I could take today to bring me closer to becoming you? What is one specific step that I could take today to bring me closer, to becoming you? Just be here for a moment now as you get the message you need for your power action. Then go ahead and place your hands over your heart and just feel these words with me. You can repeat them to yourself or you can say them out loud or just feel them in your heart. I am committed to myself. I am committed to myself. I am committed to myself. You're allowed to commit to yourself. It's not selfish. It's not too much. It's not a waste. This is how you reclaim your power, your creativity, and your purpose. Go ahead and take a deep breath in, and a deep breath out, and when you're ready, I invite you to open your eyes. This is it. This is where the work begins I want to make sure that you know this and that this is super clear. Every single day for the rest of this program, and hopefully for the rest of your life, but definitely for the rest of this program, you're going to pick a new power action every single day to do. Remember, you'll just pick something that's realistic for you to complete in the day that you have in front of you. You'll pick a new item every single day, and step by step, at least by the end of this program, you'll have eight actions that have taken you forward. I think you will be shocked to see what you can do in even just eight actions. You are doing incredible work. I want you right away to go right into your guided journal. I left you some space to explore and to write down your power action. I'll see you in the next practice. 6. Day Four: Face Your Fear: Here we are on day four, and I'm sitting back in my chair today because we got to have a real conversation. We got to talk about fear. I need you to know this and listen to me very carefully. Anytime you're pressing forward towards your dreams or towards your goals or something that requires you to give up the short term benefit for the long term gain. Fear is going to come up. When it comes up, it comes disguised, and we have to expect it. Some of the most successful people in the world know that fear is going to arise anytime we're doing something creative. Right now, you're working on the most important creation of all your life. I want to describe to you today the eight hidden forms of fear and how to spot them and move through them. Because now that you're taking your power actions, they're going to come up and try to knock you off track. But if you know these forms of fear, you can catch them before they knock you over. Listen to me very carefully through this lesson, and you might even want to take a few notes because these forms of fear are super sneaky. The same way we talked about toxic habits that go a little bit under the radar, these forms of fear do the same. The reason why it's so important for us to recognize these forms of fear is not just to notice them. But noticing them helps us to recognize that when these forms of fear come up, they're actually a cue. They're like a flag or a marker in the ground that's trying to get your attention to say, Hey, you're actually moving in the right direction, but you're scared. When you notice these things coming up around a particular topic, you know that you're moving toward something that's here to help you grow. Fear is always going to show up towards something that's helping you grow and evolve. When you notice the fears and you can catch how they come up disguised, it's your cue to not turn away from them, but to keep moving in the direction of your goals. I'll start with Number 1, the first form of fear. This one might sound a little bit obvious, but it's important to name, it's called real fear. The reason I'm naming real fear is because so many personal growth and transformational things try to say like, ignore fear, fear is not real. No, fear is real. Fear is here to keep you safe. For so many of us, we've had situations in our lives where our fear actually protected us. I think about a story when I was actually singing in choir class when I was in the second grade, and I used to get bullied and teased a lot. I went to sing and choir and every time I would sing, the bullies would laugh and they would make a lot of noise, and they would try to beat me up after school and all this stuff. My fear was very real, and my fear kept me from singing, and it actually had a purpose in that time to really keep me safe. I want you to think about the moments in your life, maybe even in your past with things that you've gone through, where a fear actually helped you protect yourself in a real tangible way. The reason why I named this is because it leads into the second form of fear, which I call an echo fear. Now, an echo fear is when a fear from the past is echoing into your life now, even though the situation is not present anymore. For me, this showed up in a lot of ways. I would try to sing and I would get really nervous and I would start shaking, even though I'm an adult. Nobody was trying to beat me up because I was singing. Nobody was trying to tease me because I'm singing, but I created this whole story in my head about how people were going to think I sucked, about what people were going to say. I ended up stopping myself from sharing my voice because of the real fear of the past, creating an echo in the present. We do this in our lives in so many ways. Let's get to the third form of fear. This is a big one. Perfectionism. Yes, I'm talking to you. Perfectionism. We all have it. Perfectionism especially gets creatives and entrepreneurs and artists because we think we just want to get it right. I just want to make sure everything is perfect before I get it done. Perfectionism is a form of fear stopping you from moving forward. All the most successful people in the world, I know, run by this mantra. Done is better than perfect because it takes something being done for you to get feedback and you need feedback to grow. The only way that you can actually start to grow and evolve on your path is by putting things out, getting them complete. I'm not saying that you put out ****** stuff, but you know that you've been struck with the fear of perfectionism when you've started to perfect and perfect and perfect something into this grave of exhaustion to where you're not even finding joy in it anymore. That's when you know fear has taken hold. Number 4, indecisiveness. This is a massive one for so many of us. I'm not sure what I should do. I don't know if I should do this. I should call him, if I should do this thing, which choice to make, then you're pulling out your Taro cards and reading the pattern and reading your astrology and your human design and trying to figure out everything. Meanwhile, you ain't done nothing. You've just sat here and created a whole story in your mind trying to make a choice, and so often that paralyzes us and we make no choice at all. Again, the worst place to be is stuck. Once you make a move, that's when you learn the lessons, and you learn the lessons so that you can grow and start to move forward. Number 5. This is a massive one for so many of us. I know this one gets me distraction. Now, how many times have you had the moment where you were going to finally sit down and do the thing? You were gonna write the book, you were going to do the album, you're going to make the dating profile. You're gonna do the thing. In that moment, you're like, you know what? I focus so much better when my apartment is totally clean. I'm going to clean up everything first, and then I'm going to light all the candles and I'm going to get everything straight. I'm going to vacuum. I'm gonna do everything, and then I'm gonna sit down to work. Yes, we've all done this so you got to try that recipe that you never wanted to try. You wanted to mill prep. Meanwhile, you've been getting everything else done for two weeks with your apartment of mess. Ain't mill prepped in three months, but the moment you're going to sit down to finally do the thing, all these distracting habits that seem really rational come up to try to stop us from moving forward. This is fear coming disguised to stop you from taking the step that you need to take towards your dreams, and this is why the power action is so important. Number 6 is inner critic. The inner critic is the voice inside of your head that tells you that you're not blank enough. I don't know enough, I'm not skinny enough, I'm not this enough, I haven't learned enough, I haven't studied enough, I don't know enough. Some version of I'm not enough. We convince ourselves not to do something because we think that we're not good enough to do it. I know everybody who's here watching this program believes in their growth and believe in their transformation. But we all have those small voices inside of our minds that tell us that that dream, not for me. To big for me, not right for me, not practical, not realistic enough. Really, the inner critic uses one technique, and it's called dissuasion. Dissuasion is the opposite of persuasion. It's the voice in your head that tries to convince you not to do something. This is a form of fear coming up disguised. Number 7, and this is a massive one for me. Avoidance. This is when you have the thing. You know you're supposed to do it. It's been on your to do list. It's been on your power actions. You know it's a simple thing that's going to take you five minutes even sometimes. But you spend more time thinking about doing it, avoiding doing it, putting it off till next time, doing everything else on your to do list first, almost getting started on it, but then changing your mind because you're not in the mood and you're just going to wait till later when you're in a better mood. This is avoidance, and this is a form of fear coming up disguised. Now, let me talk to you about the final form of fear. Really, this is all building up to this form because this might be the sneakiest one of all. This form of fear is called conspiracy. Brene Brown has one of the best definitions of conspiracy I've ever seen. She says that a conspiracy is a story with limited factual data points that we fill in with our own ideas, values, and beliefs. What happens is we have some story, something that happened. We don't have all the details, but we start to make up all these conspiracies and confabulations about what we think might happen, and what happens is conspiracies keep us stuck in what I. When we're stuck in what I, we really avoid asking the right question, which is, why not? I'm going to give you an example here of a conspiracy because this is a lot more practical than you might think. We all do it all the time. How many of us have ever been dating somebody, for example? You're dating this person in the beginning, you're texting each other good morning, and good night, and you've got all the messages going on and on. And then one day, you text good morning and you don't hear anything back, and in that moment, you have maybe like an hour until the conspiracies begin. You start scrolling through your phone, making sure it delivered, yep. Okay, I delivered. Oh, my God. Did I say something last night that made them mad? Maybe this, maybe that. Then we make up all these stories in our heads. Only for a couple of hours later that person to text and say, Hey, oh, my God, so sorry, I left my phone at home and went on a hike or something. Sometimes the answer is actually a lot worse than that. But overall, what happens is we have a limited factual data point. The only fact in this story is you sent a text, and they haven't responded yet. Everything else is a story that we've made up in our head. We do this in our lives, with our co workers, about our dreams, about our goals, with our families. We have to watch all the conspiracies we make up because those conspiracies are usually here to try to stop you from going after what it is you really desire. Now, why is this important and why are we even talking about this before we practice together? Well, Because as you're going after your dreams and goals, fear is not going to come up to you and say, like, Hey, you're afraid, this is fear, I'm just trying to stop you now. It's going to come up as distraction. It's going to come up as the indecisiveness. It's going to come up as these different forms. It just seem like normal things. But if you can catch them and spot them, you can pause and ask yourself the most important question. You can put your hand over your heart and just say, What am I really afraid of? Sometimes, it's our own greatness. Let's go ahead and dive right into our practice together. Go ahead and just get relaxed. We'll start with the freedom, trinity, like we always do. Body eyes and breath and just soften into your body first. Today, because I know we talked about fear, just soften it even a little bit more than usual. Drop your shoulders, relax your jaw, relax the space between your eyebrows and then go ahead and place your hands over your heart. Take a full deep breath in, a deep breath out, and when you're ready, I invite you to shut your eyes if you feel comfortable doing so today. Remember, you can always keep them open. As we do, each day, we'll begin with the freedom of trinity, body, eyes, and breath. Now, we'll align our breath together with the three count breath. On the count of three, go ahead and exhale everything out of your system through your nose. One, two, three, exhale everything out and come to completely empty. Great. Now, to my count of three, inhale for 1, 2, 3. Hold for 1, 2, 3. Exhale 1, 2, 3. Again, inhale 1, 2, 3. Hold for 1, 2, 3. Exhale 1, 2, 3. Last time, inhale 1, 2, 3. Hold for 1, 2, 3. Exhale 1, 2, 3. Great. Now just breathe normally. I want you to call into your mind right now that future version of you. The future version of you who is living the life of your dreams, and trust anything that arises today, even if it's fuzzy or incomplete. You might have multiple things shuffling in your mind, but just notice in this vision today. What is the future you wearing in the vision? Are they indoor or are they outdoor? What do you look like? What do you see? Just scan around yourself in the vision and notice what colors are around you. Is there anybody there with you? What are you doing in this vision? What happened or is happening or is about to happen? What is happening in this vision that indicates to you that you are indeed living the life of your dreams? Notice, do you hear anything in the vision? Remember, don't force it. Do you smell anything or taste anything in the vision today? Do you notice any physical sensations? Are there any specific emotional qualities? Take a moment right now and just continue scanning around this future vision where you are living the life of your dreams. If you haven't fully yet, let yourself really go there. Now, as you look at this future version of you who is living the life of your dreams, ask this question. What am I really afraid of? Now, what am I really afraid of? Be here for a moment now being totally honest with yourself, but radically compassionate with yourself as you get the message that you need. Go ahead and place your hands over your heart and just feel these words with me and you can either whisper them to yourself or say them out loud or just repeat them and feel them in your heart. I may be scared, but I'm doing it anyways. I may be scared, but I'm doing it anyways. I may be scared, but I'm doing it anyways. When you're ready, go ahead and take a deep breath in and a deep breath out. We'll transition just slightly now to take a moment for you to think about what your daily power action might be today. What is the one thing that you're going to do today that will take you in the direction of your vision, and your dream, and your goals? Specifically in the life zone that you're focusing on for this program. When you're ready, I invite you to open your eyes. Fear. This is how we break through our fears. That mantra, that affirmation. I may be scared, but I'm doing it anyways is one to live by, and that's what we tell our fears. Look, I know you're scared, but we're going this way because we know that this direction is the direction of your freedom. I want to leave you with one really important teaching, and this is one of my favorite teachings. Listen closely. It's about fear and faith. I'm not talking about religious faith. I'm talking about the bigger definition of faith. That means a complete belief and confidence in something or someone. That can include religion, but you can also have faith in your friends or faith in your family, so fear and faith. What I need you to know is that both fear and faith are the exact same thing. They're the same thing. But I know that sounds like a cool Instagram quote or something like that. But listen to what this really means. The tenet that underlines and underscores both fear and faith is one thing. Both fear and faith require you to believe in something that you can't see and that hasn't happened yet. That's it. That's what fear and faith is all about, believing in something that you can't see, and that hasn't happened yet. We're going to believe something either way. What are you choosing to believe? Believing in fear is choosing to believe in futures where our circumstances limit our possibilities. Believing in faith is choosing to believe in something more, for our world, for yourself, knowing that more is possible, and that's what we're waking up in this program and putting it into action. Go ahead and go straight to your journal. This is where we start to put it into action and I will see you in the next lesson, Day 5. Bye for now. 7. Day Five: Wake Up Your Creativity: Welcome to day 5. This is our day on creativity and it's perfect because we're right here at the halfway point of our journey together. One of the most important things about this program is recognizing that as we take action, as we move forward past our fears, that creativity and fear come hand in hand. You don't get one without the other, especially when you're doing something that is new to you or that is pressing you a little bit outside of your comfort zone. There's really two ways to explore going out of your comfort zone. One way is, let's say on a scale of one to 10, your comfort zone is a five, one way is to try to do a 10 or a 12. Oftentimes for so many of us, that scares us and pushes us out of the water, we end up failing. It recycles us into this cycle of shame over and over and over. But another way to approach this, is if your comfort zone is a five, is to just try a six, and then to try a seven, and then maybe try a six again, and then to try an eight. Taking these little bites helps us move past our fear in a really powerful way. Now, today we're talking about creativity. I love this quote from my colleague, Jennifer Bloom. She says, "I don't equate creative to artistic. We are creating the most important thing of all, our life". That's what you're doing here. Whether you consider yourself an artist or an entrepreneur, or a mum, or whatever you consider yourself being, this idea of creation is something we're actively doing every single day. We want to break down the word creativity. What I actually like to say honestly is about decolonizing creativity. Colonized creativity focuses on perfected output. It says that your creations don't matter unless they have a purpose or unless they're worth something. Decolonized creativity says that our creativity matters just because we have the power to create, just because we have the power to be. It's about the process more than it's about the product. That's what we want to focus on today in this lesson. Now let me tell you something you might not know about the word creativity. The origins of this word creativity obviously go back to the word create, which comes from creatus in Latin, which actually means to bring into being. Back in ancient times, they actually didn't believe that humans could create anything at all. They thought that the only way that creation of any kind and any kind of creativity happened, was you connecting in to some higher self, to the divine or from all the different religions and traditions passed back. But now in modern days, we know that we do create. But what you have to remember, is that when we're tapping into that space of creativity, it's not our job to judge it. So when we tap into the space, we're connecting with our highest self. We're tapping into a creative space that's greater than us, and because you don't know how just being in your creative process. Again, this is even just about creating your life, how that can impact somebody else. Little by little, ripple by ripple, we change the world by stepping into our own power in truth. Let's dive into our practice of creativity. Go ahead and we'll start with the freedom trinity, like we always do, body, eyes and breath. Get comfortable. Relax a little bit. Then go ahead and place your hands over your heart and take a deep full breath in and a breath out. When and if you feel ready, you're invited to shut your eyes. Remember, you can always keep them open if you'd like. As we do each day, we'll begin with the freedom trinity, body, eyes, and breathe. Now, we'll align our breath together with the three count breath. On the count of three, go ahead and exhale everything out of your system through your nose. 1, 2, 3 exhale everything out and come to completely empty. Great. Now to my count of three inhale for 1, 2, 3, hold for 1, 2, 3, exhale 1, 2, 3. Again, inhale 1, 2, 3, hold for 1, 2, 3, exhale 1, 2, 3. Last time, inhale 1, 2, 3, hold for 1, 2, 3, exhale 1, 2, 3. Great. Now just breathe normally. I want you to call into your mind right now that future version of you. The future version of you who is living the life of your dreams and trust anything that arises today, even if it's fuzzy or incomplete. You might have multiple things shuffling in your mind. But just notice in this vision today, what is the future you wearing in the vision. Are they indoor or are they outdoor? What do you look like? What do you see? Just scan around yourself in the vision, and notice what colors are around you. Is there anybody there with you? What are you doing in this vision? What happened or is happening or is about to happen? What is happening in this vision that indicates to you that you are indeed living the life of your dreams? Notice, do you hear anything in the vision? Remember, don't force it. Do you smell anything or taste anything in the vision today? Do you notice any physical sensations? Are there any specific emotional qualities? Take a moment right now and just continue scanning around this future vision where you are living the life of your dreams. If you haven't fully yet, let yourself really go there. Now, as you look at this future version of you, who is a living the life of your dreams, ask yourself this question that gets right to the heart of the spirit of creativity; what am I ready to bring into being? What am I ready to bring into being? What am I ready to bring into being? Just be here for a moment now as you get the messages that you need. Go ahead and place your hands over your heart and just feel or repeat these words with me; I am ready, I am powerful, I am creative. I am ready, I am powerful, I am creative. Last time. I am ready, I am powerful, I am creative. You are creative. You are bringing into being the most important creation of all. When you're ready, I invite you to take a deep breath in and a deep breath out. Before we transition, this is your moment to select your daily power action. The one thing that you're going to do today to help you take you towards your vision, your dreams and your goals. As soon as you're ready, I invite you to open your eyes. You are creative. You are a creative being. When you tap into this creativity that is inside of you, you tap into a source of power that's connected to your highest self. This moment is a great opportunity to just step right into your guided journal practices to start to see how you're going to wake up creativity in your life and write down your daily power action. We're halfway through the program now, I'll see you in the next practice. Bye for now. 8. Day Six: Your Energy Signature: Welcome to Day 6 of our journey together, we have crossed the halfway point. Now we're going to switch gears a little bit and do one of my all time favorite practices. We're going to begin like we've been doing for the last five days by dropping into your vision, but this practice is going to end a little bit differently. I'll explain it all a little bit later, but let's go ahead and dive right in. We'll start like we've done every other day with the freedom trinity, body, eyes, and breath. Just go ahead and relax, get still, and then when you're ready, put your hands over your heart, take a full deep breath in and a breath out, and I invite you to shut your eyes if and when you feel comfortable doing so. As we do, each day, we'll begin with the freedom trinity, body, eyes, and breath. Now, we'll align our breath together with the three count breath. On the count of three, go ahead and exhale everything out of your system through your nose. 1, 2, 3, exhale everything out and come to completely empty. Great. Now to my count of three, inhale for 1, 2, 3, hold for 1, 2, 3, exhale 1, 2, 3. Again, inhale 1, 2, 3, hold for 1, 2, 3, exhale 1, 2, 3. Last time. Inhale 1, 2, 3, hold for 1, 2, 3, exhale 1, 2, 3. Great. Now just breathe normally. I want you to call into your mind right now that future version of you. The future version of you who is living the life of your dreams, and trust anything that arises today even if it's fuzzy or incomplete. You might have multiple things shuffling in your mind, but just notice in this vision today. What is the future you're wearing in the vision? Are they indoor or are they outdoor? What do you look like? What do you see? Just scan around yourself in the vision and notice what colors are around you. Is there anybody there with you? What are you doing in this vision? What happened or is happening or is about to happen? What is happening in this vision that indicates to you that you are indeed living the life of your dreams? Notice, do you hear anything in the vision? Remember, don't force it. Do you smell anything or taste anything in the vision today? Do you notice any physical sensations? Are there any specific emotional qualities? Take a moment right now and just continue scanning around this future vision where you are living the life of your dreams, if you haven't fully yet let yourself really go there. I want you to answer this question with the first 1, 2, or 3 words that come to your mind, trusting the very first thing that comes to you. Here's your question. As you look at this future version of you, who is living the life of your dreams. What energy do you need to cultivate more of in your life now today to become that person that you're seeing in your vision? I'll ask it again. Trust the first 1, 2, or 3 words that arise. It can be any number of words, Here's the question again. What energy do you need to cultivate more of in your life now to become that person that you see in your vision? 1, 2, or 3 words, trust what comes up. Now, whatever word or words you chose, I want you to repeat those words out loud five times right now so you remember them. Go ahead, five times repeat them. This is so you remember. Then place your hands over your heart again if you've moved them, and for the next few breaths, I want you to imagine on your inhales that you're literally breathing in the energy of your word or words. These words can even turn into a color or a light or a texture. Imagine on each breath in that the words are bathing you and soothing you and healing you like you're taking a shower in it, healing you inside out. Go ahead and deepen your breath and keep going. Just imagining on each breath in that you're filling yourself up with the energy of your words. Breathe deeply. Keep going. Now I want to add on the final piece. On your exhales now, when you breathe out, imagine you're sending that energy out, those words are that word out to everyone you love. As you inhale, you call it in and bring it into you, and as you exhale, you radiate it out, inhaling as you heal yourself, and exhaling as you offer it out to the world. Go ahead and do a couple more rounds on your own now. Great. Finally, take one more deep cleansing breath in and a breath out. Before we transition as we do at the end of each practice, I want you to think about what your daily power action might be. What are you going to do today that will take you in the direction of your vision and goals? Then whenever you're ready, I invite you to open your eyes. I want you to recognize how powerful what we just did was. Because what you just created is something that's called your unique energy signature. The one word or two words or three words, and again, it doesn't matter how many words, but those words that you created or what we're going to call your unique energy signature. I want you to write them down right away so you don't forget. Here's why this is so powerful and important. For the last five days of this practice, the whole first half of this program together, we've been grounding in to the vision of who it is that you want to become. Right here on this side, we have who you want to be, and then here we have who you are now, and notice that there's a gap. I want you to recognize that I didn't ask you, what do you need to do to fill this gap. I said, who do you need to be. Look, we're all so busy doing things in our lives. But that doing, all the busyness never has the actual impact we want it to have in our lives if we haven't changed at our level of being. Who are we being inside of all that doing? Again, this is one of those things that sounds really philosophical, but it's very simple. We've all had this experience. How many people have been to a doctor, for example, somebody who's doing the thing of being a doctor, but the doctor is a total jerk and who they're being as a doctor makes you feel worse than you felt when you went in. On the other hand, there are doctors who are being kind and compassionate and patient and loving, and the impact they have on you is totally different because of who they are being inside of the doing. This matters tremendously, and this is going to help you transform your life. Go ahead, grab your journal, and start writing right away because this is how we're going to integrate all of this to create the best meditation ritual that you can possibly create for our sometimes messy but modern and very real lives. I'll see you in the next practice. 9. Day Seven: Practice Silence: Welcome to Day 7 of our practice together, and here we are with only four more practices left. I'm honestly a little bit sad, but you're well on your way to learning how to meditate on your own. Today, before we get into the practice, I want to teach you something really important because a lot of us think that meditation is about getting our minds to stop thinking. How many of us have heard that before? Listen to me. The idea that you can get your mind to stop thinking is totally crazy. It would be like me saying, everybody , we're going to meditate. Everybody get your hearts to stop beating. 1, 2, 3. You would be looking at me like, I can't do that. That's why so many of us feel like we suck at meditating or we can't do it because we're trying to do something that is literally impossible. I know that somebody out there, you've heard somebody say that they've gotten their mind to stop thinking. They're lying because guess what? Just the idea that you got your mind to stop thinking is what? A thought. You cannot get your mind to stop thinking, nor should we even try to. I think this is the propaganda of meditation. What we really want, I believe, is not to get our minds to stop thinking, but is to get our thoughts to work for us instead of against us. Our thoughts work in service of what we're trying to create and do in our lives, instead of having our thoughts break us down. The style of meditation that I've been teaching you and that you're going to learn is called freedom meditation. Freedom meditation is a technique and a style that is all about welcoming your thoughts, welcoming your emotions, welcoming the truth of who you are. There are so many styles of meditations and techniques that ask us to push things down. But we don't need more practice pushing things down. We all know what happens when we push things down for too long. It ends up seeping up and bursting out in our lives in some place where it doesn't belong. This practice is not about pushing things down. In fact, this practice is not even about relaxing. This practice is about becoming more alive. I need you to hear me clearly when I say that. Meditation is not just about relaxing. Meditation is about becoming more alive, becoming more connected to your passions, more connected to your emotions, more connected to the causes you care about, the things you believe in, and what you're pressing forward into in your life. As we use this practice, some days you're going to feel relaxed and peaceful in all love and light, and some days you won't feel that at all. Some days when you sit down and you get quiet, you feel anxious, or you feel stressed, or you'll feel sad. This is all a part of being alive. Don't push anything down. You might think about a whole bunch of things. You might think about your to do list, sex, creative ideas, random song lyrics, comparing yourself to other people, unfinished business, things that you have to do, things you were supposed to do yesterday. All things are going to come up in your mind and you're not going to push them down. But what I will teach you to do, so you're not just sitting there thinking like crazy, is how to anchor your thoughts with your unique energy signature. What this practice teaches us to do more than anything is to let the storms roll through. Instead of yelling at the clouds, asking the storm to go away, we just sit back, maybe grab an umbrella and wait for the storm to pass without cursing it or making it wrong or bad. We all have these moments in our lives. In this practice, I'm going to guide you through several silent techniques that you'll be able to use to explore your unique energy signature. Now that you have all of that, let's jump into our practice. We're going to start this practice a little bit differently. We're going to start with the freedom of trinity, like we always do, body, eyes, and breaths, go ahead and get comfortable. You can place your hands over your heart. But we're going to start this practice today with your eyes open. To begin, I want you to first just take a deep full breath in and a deep breath out. Don't look at me. I want you to actually find a spot in the space that you're in, and it doesn't even have to be a special spot. It could be a spot on the wall. I want you to look straight at this one spot without moving your eyes. Then we're going to transition into a brand new way of starting your practice with your eyes open. You have your spot. Remember, you picked a spot in the space that you're in. I want you to look directly at this one spot without moving your eyes. Just look straight at it with a soft but steady gaze, looking at anything that's in your environment, just pick one spot and look at it. Now as you look at this one spot, begin to let your peripheral vision expand. That means that you'll notice how without even moving your eyes from the spot that you can see a little bit to the left of you without moving your eyes. Then I want you to notice how far to the right of you you can see without moving your eyes. Then notice how much of your space you can take in above and below you all without moving your eyes. For the next couple of breaths, let your vision expand and expand in all directions. You're keeping a soft gaze on that focal point, but then taking in as much light and color and detail from the space around you as you can. You're doing great. Notice how without moving your eyes very much at all from this one point, you can begin to take in the diversity of colors and textures and light patterns that surround you in your environment. As you keep expanding, I want you to notice that what you're doing with your eyes right now is the same thing that you're invited to do with your mind when you meditate. We focus on a point, a gentle internal gaze, and in this case, it's your unique energy signature. But at the same time, we welcome in the diversity of our internal environment. Our thoughts, our emotions, our feelings, our sensations. We don't have to push them down just like you don't have to push away anything you're seeing to focus on this point in front of you at the same time. With that in mind, let's take this internal and take a deep breath in and a breath out. I invite you to close your eyes. Now we'll align our breath together with the three count breath. On the count of three, go ahead and exhale everything out of your system through your nose. 1, 2, 3, exhale everything out and come to completely empty. Now, we'll align our breath together with the three count breath. On the count of three, go ahead and exhale everything out of your system through your nose. 1, 2, 3, exhale everything out and come to completely empty. Now, to my count of three, inhale for 1, 2, 3, hold for 1, 2, 3, exhale 1, 2, 3. Again, inhale 1, 2, 3, hold for 1, 2, 3, exhale 1, 2, 3. Last time. Inhale 1, 2, 3, hold for 1, 2, 3, exhale 1, 2, 3. Great. Now just breathe normally. I'm going to walk you through four different silent ways to work with your mantra, your unique energy signature, and I'll guide you through each step. Again, this is going to be a little different than any other practice we did. What's going to happen is I'll take you through each of the four techniques, and you'll have a moment to practice each one individually on your own. For all of these four techniques that I'm going to teach you, all I want you to do is repeat your mantra, your unique energy signature, silently in your mind with no audible sound. You're just repeating the words in your mind again and again. The first of the silent techniques I'm going to teach you, is to repeat your mantra very slowly, as slowly as you possibly can. For example, if your mantra was focus, what I'd want you to do is dissect each letter and syllable so it might sound like this in your mind silently, of course. Focus. It's a really stretching out the words and feeling each syllable as you repeat it silently in your mind. Now, I know this might sound a little bit silly, but you'll do it in your mind, and trust me, you'll feel how this changes as we go through each and every one. Just explore creatively and see what comes up. In a moment, you'll hear a soft chime sound, and then I'll give you a few moments to practice this technique on your own, and then we'll move on to the next one. Ready? Go ahead and introduce your unique energy signature now, your mantra, and then repeat them silently in your mind as slowly as you possibly can. Begin. Go ahead and just stay in this space, and we're going to move right on to the next technique, which is still silent, but now repeating the mantra more quickly in a more rhythmic pace. If your mantra was focus, for example, you might repeat it like this. Focus, focus, focus, focus, focus, focus but of course, silently in your own mind. You'll notice this will feel completely different than the last one. Go ahead and call in your mantra now. Begin repeating it fast. Great. Now for the third technique, three and four, which is repeating your mantra silently, still, but in rhythm with your breath. You'll inhale and imagine that energy infusing your body as you say the words in the rhythm of your breath, and then exhale and imagine sending the energy out to the world. You inhale the words and exhale the words silently in your mind. Go ahead and call your mantra forward now. Perfect. Now for the final of our four techniques, let go of the words of your mantra completely. I don't even want you to say the words. I want you to allow the words to transform into a color or a texture or a light pattern. Imagine this color or energy or light pattern is a ball of energy that's right in front of you. It can be any size, any shape, any texture. This ball is a representation of your mantra, of your unique energy signature. Without even needing to use the words, you can experience it. As you inhale, you'll breathe in the energy of this mantra ball infusing your entire body with what you need. Then when you exhale, you'll imagine sending those colors and radiating that energy out to everyone you love. Go ahead and call in your mantra ball use your imagination and creativity and breathe with its energy now. Amazing. Before we finish, I want you to just take a second and notice which of these four techniques did you like the best. Repeating it slowly, fast, in rhythm with your breath or with your mantra ball. You're allowed to pick more than one and some of them you won't like at all. You'll feel like that was weird. I didn't like it. I didn't connect with it. This is normal. We're doing this like a buffet. You'll take a little bit of what you like, leave what you don't so that you can create your own perfect meditation recipe. When you're ready, go ahead and take a deep breath in and a deep breath out. Finally, as we do in every practice, think about what that daily power action is going to be for your day to day. What will you do now in this day that will take you in the direction of your vision and goals? When you're ready, I invite you to open your eyes. That's it. This is how we start to learn to build our meditation recipe. You have four techniques, and I have many more that I'm going to show you over the next several days together. Remember what I said. I know I said it a couple of times already, but we often think we're so used to thinking that we do meditation wrong if we don't like something. If you didn't like any of these techniques today, even, I have some more for you in the next practice. But what you're going to do is you're going to pick what you like, leave what you don't. By the end of this journey, you're going to be able to meditate on your own without me and without any guidance at all. You're doing incredible work. Go ahead and get write into your journal so you can start to explore how this will unfold in your life. I'll see you in the next practice. 10. Day Eight: Practice Aloud : Welcome to Day 8 of our journey together. Can you believe it? We're already this far through the program. Today, we're going to continue on our journey of learning some more tools that you can use to integrate into your meditation ritual. What's really exciting about this is by the end of this, you're going to have eight different tools that you can pick and choose from to use in your own practice for the rest of your life, and you'll be able to switch between them or take them in and out whenever you want to. But before we get into this, I want to make sure that I explain something to you so you understand what the heck is even happening in your mind when you meditate, because sometimes we sit down to meditate, and we feel like we're just sitting there and we're thinking about a bunch of random thoughts. What is the difference between sitting in daydreaming and thinking and meditation? Well, the difference is the introduction of your mantra, your unique energy signature. When you introduce these words or this word that you have chosen into your mind and you set a timer, and you sit and commit to your practice, this is what shifts daydreaming or just sitting in random thinking into a focused meditation practice. Remember in our last practice where I had you look straight at a point in front of you and start to expand your vision, and without moving your eyes from the focal point, you still welcomed in everything that was in your environment, that's what we do with meditation with our minds. We focus on the mantra, your unique energy signature with a soft gaze, and guess what? Sometimes your mind's going to wander a little bit, but whenever it wanders, you just gently welcome yourself back to the mantra, just as easily as you drifted away from it. We do have the ability to focus gently on the mantra and welcome in our thoughts and welcome in our sensations and welcome in our emotions. I want to explain a concept to you that's studied really well around meditation and the neuroscience and what's happening in the brain. This is a concept, to keep it simple, called restfulness to restlessness. Now, what most of us think is that the point of meditation is to get you from a restless state where your mind's going crazy into a restful state. That's not true at all. The point of meditation is not to make you feel restful. The point of meditation, in fact, is not even to make you feel good. The point of meditation is to give you the capacity to feel. Period. It's not about feeling good. It's about feeling the full range and spectrum of what it is that we normally push down. What happens in any meditation practice is you might feel restful for 20 seconds, and then you'll feel completely restless for 50 seconds. Then you'll feel restful again, and then you'll feel restless, and all of that is a part of your practice. If you make it a goal to be restful and relaxed and peaceful the whole time, you'll feel like you're doing it wrong. Here's what most people feel like in meditation. You sit and you're like, okay, I'm supposed to relax now. Then you're like, okay, I'm relaxing. I'm relaxing. Keep it right here. Oh, no, no, no, shoot, and then you spin back up to the restless state. If you let all of that go and just know the whole cycle, whether you're switching between restful and restless every 10 seconds, is a part of your practice. Now, here's one more really important point that I don't want you to forget, and this might be the most important thing that I tell you in this video about your meditation practice. Most of us are conditioned to automatically assume that we're doing our meditation practices wrong, that it's some really hard thing that we have to work super hard at, and eventually we're finally going to get there. No. You know how to meditate. It's natural for us. It's easy for us. It's actually not as complicated as you think. All it's about is sitting purposefully welcoming in a thought, a feeling, a sensation, and emotion to focus on, and just focusing gently on that point while you welcome in the diversity of your experiences, and your mind will wander. It's totally normal. All you do when it wanders is you welcome yourself back to the mantra, just as easily as you drifted away from it. With that much kindness, gentle, like oops, I was supposed to be meditating, back to the words. Now, one last thing, the word that you chose or the words that you chose for your unique energy signature are really special, because they are the words that are going to help take you from where you are now to who you want to become. But they also have another magic power. I say magic not to make it all kind of whoo, but because it actually is something really special that happens. The word that you chose, let's say, for example, it was confidence. What most of us think when we meditate is that, my mantra is confidence. So I'm going to sit here and I'm going to fill myself up with confidence, and I'm just going to feel so confident and so powerful. While that's the case, sometimes, what also happens is this. The word that you chose will lure all the thoughts and memories and feelings and sensations that actually need to be healed and released and let go of. So if your mantra, your unique energy signature was confidence using the example that I mentioned, yes, what might come up are all the ways that you want to feel more confident, but what's also going to get lured in is all the ways that you're not being confident in your life. All the memories and the trauma that has made you into a person who doesn't feel confident, all the places in your life where you're holding back your power and your confidence, and they're not coming up to drag you down. They're coming up to just be felt, bathed, and soothed in the energy of your mantra and sometimes just released. Other times, if you feel a thought or a memory coming again and again and again, every time you sit down, that's a clue. It's a cue to say, hey, you need to take this lesson, this message that you're getting from this meditation practice and do something about it in your life, which might mean therapy or taking another program or a class or reading a book to help you with this in your actual life. Meditation is getting the whispers so that you can learn the lessons that you need to learn in your life. You could be feeling excited or over it. You could be feeling love and light all the time or a total hot mess and still be meditating the entire time. This is normal, even for people who've been meditating for many years. This is really what the practice is all about. Learning to welcome the truth of who we are while we sit in compassion with ourselves during our practice. Now let's get into some more tools. We'll start, as we always do with the freedom trinity. Let's practice. Go ahead and just rest into your body. Just relax your shoulders, relax the space between your eyebrows, relax your jaw. Then place your hands over your heart if you feel comfortable doing so. Take a full deep breath in and a breath out. When and if you feel comfortable doing so, I invite you to shut your eyes. As we do each day, let's begin with the freedom trinity. Body, eyes, and breath. Go ahead and get extra comfortable today. Now we'll align our breath together with the three count breath. On the count of three, go ahead and exhale everything out of your system through your nose. 1, 2, 3, exhale everything out and come to completely empty. Great. Now, to my account of three, inhale for 1, 2, 3, hold for 1, 2, 3, exhale 1, 2, 3. Again, inhale 1, 2, 3, hold for 1, 2, 3, exhale 1, 2, 3. Last time, inhale 1, 2, 3, hold for 1, 2, 3, exhale 1, 2, 3. Great. Now just breathe normally. Great. Similar to the previous practice, I'm going to walk you through a handful of different techniques today. But today, you're going to work with your mantra in a little bit of a different way. In the last practice, we did silent techniques, meaning you just repeated everything in your mind. Today, we're going to activate your voice. We're going to actually use your voice to say your mantra aloud. Don't worry. I'll guide you through each step and you'll have a few moments to practice on your own. For all of these four techniques that we're going to do together, again, you'll repeat the mantra out loud. I know some people can feel shy or embarrassed here, and that's fine. We all do sometimes. This is actually helping you gain awareness to the part of you who is sometimes afraid to express themselves. Just feel what comes up for you, and today, we're going to unblock it. Welcome whatever feelings arise to your practice because this is probably an example of what you feel when you go to express your authentic voice or speak your truth to the world. Some of these practices will feel really silly and weird. If that's the case, you'd never have to do them again. But I do want you to have the experience of each of them so you can learn what you want to use in your personal toolbox and what you want to take away. Let's get started. The first technique is actually really easy. You're going to whisper your mantra slowly to yourself, using a whisper voice, and when we do it slowly, we're going to do it similarly to the way we did it in the last practice by breaking down each syllable, each letter one by one. But instead of doing it in your mind, you'll just whisper it super tenderly to yourself. For example, if your mantra was the word focus, it might sound like this, focus. Literally dissecting each letter each syllable and tenderly repeating the mantra to yourself. Go ahead and start whispering your mantra slowly now. Perfect. Now we're going to move on to the next technique, which is still whispering, but this time, instead of repeating your mantra slow, you're going to do it more quickly and in a little bit of a rhythmic fashion. Using the same example, if your mantra was focus, you might repeat it like this, Focus. Or you can do it even a little more slowly like focus, all still with a whisper. You'll notice this feels completely different than anything you've done before. Go ahead and call in your mantra now and begin whispering it a little more quickly. Begin. Great. Now for our third of four techniques. This time, we're going to increase the volume a bit here. What I want you to do is repeat your mantra slowly again but this time out loud using the sound of your voice. If your mantra was focused like we've been using, it might sound like focus like you're just enchanting yourself with your own voice. You'll notice that when you do it with your voice instead of whispering, you can actually hang out on each of the letters a little longer than we were able to do in the previous practices, and you might even start to feel depending on your words, the actual vibration of your voice inside of your body. You can maybe even feel it vibrating on your face in your lips as you start to repeat the words. As slowly as you can and as feels comfortable, go ahead and start repeating your mantra out loud. Now. Great. We have one more technique now. Again, we'll be repeating the mantra out loud, but as you probably expected, this time, it's more quickly. Again, if your mantra was focus, it might sound like this, focus, using the sound of your voice. Go ahead and call forth your mantra now and repeat it using the sound of your voice in rhythm and a little more quickly. Begin. Amazing. Notice, there are so many gateways into this practice. But before you open your eyes, I want you to just notice that, of course, some of them you liked more than others, some of them, your mind wandered a little bit more. They activated a different feeling or energy in you. So I want you to just take a second and recognize which of those four techniques that we tried did you like best, and were there any that you didn't like? That's all fine too. Once you've clocked in your mind which ones you enjoyed the most today, go ahead and take a deep breath in, and breath out. As we do with each practice, think about what your daily power action will be for today. When you're ready, I invite you to open your eyes. There we go. You have eight different techniques now from the last two practices that we've done together. You have all the techniques, and I actually wrote them for you inside of your journal. So I want you to go straight to your guided journal and start to notice which of the techniques you liked best from today's practice. You can add them to your toolbox so that you can use them as you start to build your own daily meditation ritual, and you're almost there. You're doing amazing work, and I'll see you in Day 9 in our next practice. Bye for now. 11. Day Nine: Get Moving : Welcome to day nine of our journey together. And so far we've done some incredible work in this program. I'm so proud of all the work that you've done if you've made it this far. What we've done is we started by creating your vision and then going into understanding what might be stopping you from stepping into that vision. Then we learned how to take power actions every single day, and you've been taking actions or trying to take actions at least every day as we move through creativity in action, and learning now how to start building your own personal meditation ritual. In today's practice, I'm going to actually allow you to choose your own adventure. You have all the tools today, all the techniques. You're going to choose your favorite tool and dive into your practice. But before we get there, I want to teach you one more thing that I think you're finally ready to learn. It's about movement. Because let me tell you a little secret. The idea that in order to meditate, that you have to sit totally still and totally stiff, and cross leg it and not move at all is Bullshit. Literally, this is, like, not a part of meditation. In fact, stillness, this concept of stillness is totally overrated and completely as ridiculous as the idea that we can get our minds to stop thinking. Stillness. Nothing in the universe is still. We're literally like flying through the cosmos right now at bajillions of miles an hour. Nothing is still. Your body is never actually still. When you sit, even if you think you're being still, what's actually happening is your body's expanding and contracting with the rhythm of your breath. There's all these micro-movements happening all the time. In your meditation, when you think you have to sit totally still, it actually creates rigidity in our practice, and that's the opposite of what we want. We want to be flowing in the rhythm and the natural rhythm of our bodies, our minds, and our emotions. Here's what I'm going to invite you to do in this practice today is to invite a little bit of movement to your practice. Now, I'm not asking you to get up and do a whole TikTok dance routine. What I'm asking you to do, however, is just if you're sitting and meditating, move your neck a little bit from side to side. Or if it feels natural to you to actually expand and contract your hands or your arms as you repeat your mantra in rhythm with your breath. Or if it even feels normal for you to pulse a little bit from side to side or forward and backward as you breathe just subtly. Then maybe even for a moment you come back to stillness. Then you start moving again. This is all part of the practice. One of the most important things to remember is that if your body is not comfortable, your brain can't relax. If you move during your practice, it's not messing up anything. In this practice, I want you purposefully. Even though you're going to choose your adventure and try your own techniques, I want you to give yourself permission to move your body and move around. Of course, if you want to sit completely still, you have permission to do that, as well. I just want you to know that you have options, and stillness is not a virtue in meditation. It's not something that you're trying to get to. But if it feels natural to you, go there. Let's dive into our practice together. Like we do in every single practice, we'll start with the freedom trinity. Body, eyes, and breath. Go ahead and get comfortable, relax your shoulders, relax your jaw, the space between your eyebrows and behind your ears. You might even start pulsing with your breath now. You might even move your neck a little bit and place your hands over your heart when you're ready and take a deep breath in. Noticing the natural movement here and a breath out. When and if you feel ready, I invite you to shut your eyes. As we do each day, let's begin with the freedom trinity, body, eyes, and breath. Now we'll align our breath together with the three count breath. On the count of three, go ahead and exhale everything out of your system through your nose. One, two, three. Exhale everything out and come to completely empty. Great. Now to my count of three, inhale for one, two, three, hold for one, two, three, exhale one, two, three. Again, inhale one, two, three. Hold for one, two, three. Exhale, two, three. Last time, inhale one, two, three, hold for one, two, three. Exhale one, two, three. Great. Now just breathe normally. Now we're at the point in our practice where I'm going to ask you to choose your own adventure by welcoming your mantra to your practice using any of the different techniques or even a combination of them that we've learned together. Just to give you a reminder. Here they are. You can choose to welcome your mantra silently out loud with a whisper, slow, fast in the rhythm of your breath, remember you could even use your mantra bar and turn it into a color or a texture. Anything goes. You're allowed to switch between them if you start and you feel like one of them is not sticking for you today. Your life changes every day. Your practice will too. Welcome it. Today, you'll notice that I'm going to give you a lot more free time and space in your practice than I usually do so that you can start to prepare for practicing on your own without me. Remember, please give yourself permission to move your body today. In a moment, you'll hear a soft chime sound to mark the very beginning and the end of your open practice time today. I'll check in with you right around the middle to see how you're doing. Go ahead and welcome your Montreal now using any of the techniques and allow your body to pulse, sway or move as feels comfortable to you. Begin. You're at the halfway point now. If your mind has wandered, it's okay. Just welcome yourself back. Come back to your mantra just as easily as you drifted away from it. Remember, it's okay to let yourself sway in pulse or to try to be still whatever feels good to you. Go ahead and get back to your practice now. Amazing. When you're ready, go ahead and take a deep full breath in. And a deep breath out. Finally, think about what your daily power action will be for this day. What are you going to do today to take you in the direction of your dreams and goals? When you're ready, I invite you to open your eyes. You're doing it. How did that feel for you? What's really important to remember is that when we do these practices, our minds are going to wander. They're going to move around. They're gonna come back. But what you're really learning to do now is when the mind goes somewhere is to just let the thought pass, just let it go, and gently welcome yourself back to your mantra, to your unique energy signature, just as easily as you drifted away from it. And this is such an important tool because so much is going to happen in our lives. But if we can bring ourselves back to what we want to believe in, to what we want to become, that's how we start to claim our power back, and you're doing it right now with meditation. Go ahead and get straight into your journal. Today's exercises are going to help you integrate this as we prepare to go into our final day together. Can you believe it? Day 10, which is going to be all about building your personal meditation ritual. I'll see you there. 12. Day Ten: Build Your Own Ritual: Here we are. Day 10 of our journey together. Today, you are joining the ranks of thousands and thousands of other freedom meditators all over the world. This is a really big deal. Of course, it feels like a big deal, probably for your personal life for committing to a meditation practice for this long and taking all of these actions. But in the bigger picture for so many of us, we're the first people in our family or the first people in our lineage to ever take the time and the chance to break some of these cycles. I'm here honoring you fully to know that this work that you're doing goes well beyond just yourself. It has ripples out into the world to everyone that you touch. In today's lesson, I'm going to warn you right here at the top that this is going to be a little bit longer at the beginning than you're used to with me. The reason for that is because after this, you're going to be meditating on your own. I want to make sure you have every single tool that you need to do that effectively. The final pieces of your meditation recipe have to do with three elements of building your practice. Time, place, and what I call sugar. I'll explain them to you right now. Time is how long you meditate and how long you sit for your practice, and I'll dive into details on each of them in a moment. Then place is obviously where you do your meditation practice. I have some tips for you there. Then sugar is that little something special that you can add to your practice to make it a little bit more sweet. Let's go through each of them one by one to make sure you understand each of these elements, because although they're simple, they are the most important building blocks of doing your practice on your own. Let's start with time. How long should you meditate? Well, studies have actually shown short practices consistently have more long term benefits than long practices every once in a while. It's better for you to practice six minutes every day than 30 minutes twice a week. Just keep that in mind as you're building your own practice ritual, try to get it in as much as you possibly can. I find that the sweet spot for most people is somewhere between 12 minutes and 17 minutes. What you always want to do every single time you practice, I still do this over a decade later, is to set a timer. If you don't set a timer for your practice, then what you end up doing is you sit and practice, and you have to keep opening your eyes and glancing at the clock every two seconds. That's annoying for everybody. Just set your timer, sit it down, and when it rings, if you decide you want to keep going, keep going. I'll warn you that even when you set the timer, there are going to be moments when you probably think, did I set the timer, and you want to look at it and make sure that you set it in the first place because it seems like your practice is going really long. If that happens to you, it's okay. Just look at the timer. You can open your eyes, look really quick, and come back to your practice just as easily as you drifted away from it. It's not going to ruin anything. Let's go in to place, the second building block to building your personal meditation ritual. You probably already have some place that you've been sitting and doing your practice. But I just want to point out here that while it's important to have one consistent spot in your home where you're really comfortable to do your practice, that you don't have to always practice there. You can practice in your car, on the subway, in the train, on your bed, on the floor. Literally anywhere goes. Just get it in, even if it's on your lunch break or in your car in the parking lot sometime before you go into work. Just get it in, even if it's just for a few minutes. This will make a dramatic difference in the trajectory of your day, and it's totally worth your time. Number 3, my favorite, sugar. I call this one sugar because my Baka, my grandmother who I told you about, I would always learn to cook with her. One of my favorite things that she would do when she was working on one of her mouthwatering recipes that we would make together, is she would always add a little pinch of sugar to make everything taste a little bit more special. That's what you want to do in your meditation practice. Think about some of the little things that you can add to your practice to make it personal and special to you, like incense or candles or a spiritual book or religious text or sage or Palo Santo, remember, you got to get them sustainable if you do that, or anything else that you want to welcome into your practice. It could even be photos of people you love or your kids or just something that you want to add to make your practice feel more special to you. Remember, sugar is always optional. All you need is you for your practice, and keep it simple. You don't want to sit here and have to make some [inaudible] ritual to make sure you can meditate every time. You just keep it really simple and add a little something whenever you want to to make it nice. I always have a little crystal next to me, a little one in my pocket. Actually, I have one here right now. Every once in a while, I light a little bit of Palo Santo, and that's the way that I roll. You'll decide what's good for you. Now you have all the building blocks and all the techniques. Now it's time for you to make a commitment. You can even look at your guided journal right now because I left some space in there for you to write down, time, place, and sugar, how long are you going to meditate, where you're going to meditate, and what is the sugar you're going to add, if any. I want to give you one more little note that will help make this easier for you. One of my favorite studies on habit formation shows us that it's easier to build a new habit when you attach it to another habit that you're already doing regularly. This is a hack to help us build habits more effectively. If you want to consistently continue meditating, think, I'm going to meditate and attach it to brushing my teeth or making my coffee. I'll meditate right after I make my coffee every day or I'll meditate right after I brush my teeth when I go to bed. Things that you do regularly. I hope you're brushing your teeth every day. But anyways, these are things that will help us build a consistent ritual, and it doesn't feel like you have to add this whole thing to your life. You're just attaching a few minutes onto something that you're already doing. You got everything now. Let's dive in to our final practice together. Starting with the freedom trinity, as we always do, body, eyes, and breath. Go ahead and get comfortable. Place your hands over your heart as we jump into this final practice together. It's bitter sweet. Take a deep breath in, and a breath out. When you're ready. I invite you to shut your eyes if you feel comfortable doing so. We're going to start our practice today as we usually do with a three count breath. Then I have something a little special for you before you jump into your mantra practice. Let's begin. We'll start by aligning our breath together. On the count of three, I want you to exhale everything out of your system and come to completely empty. 1, 2, 3, go ahead and exhale everything out and come to complete emptiness. Great. Now to my count of three, inhale for 1, 2, 3, hold for 1, 2, 3, exhale 1, 2, 3. Again, inhale 1, 2, 3, hold for 1, 2, 3, exhale 1, 2, 3. Last time, inhale deeply 1, 2, 3, hold for 1, 2, 3, exhale 1, 2, 3. Now just breathe normally. I want to start today by taking us back to the beginning of our journey together. I'm going to invite you into a short visualization with me, where you welcome in that future self. The future you who is living the life of your dreams. Remember, as we do this practice that you can use all of your senses, so if it's fuzzy or blurry or incomplete or if it's changed at all, all of it is allowed. For our final practice, I want you to call into your mind that future version of you. A future version of you who is living the life of your dreams, let yourself go there. You've already gotten closer. Just trust anything that bubbles up today, even if it's fuzzy or blurry or incomplete. Notice in this vision today, what are you wearing? What do you look like? What do you see? Are you indoors or are you outdoors in the vision? Has the narrative of this future you expanded or changed in any way? Is there anybody there with you? What are you doing in this vision that indicates to you that you are indeed living the life of your dreams? Go ahead and just scan around this future you and your vision and notice, do you hear anything or are there any sounds associated with the vision? Don't force it at all. Do you smell anything or taste anything? Do you notice any physical sensations? Do you notice any specific emotional qualities that are arising in your practice today? You're getting more advanced. You got this. Just take a moment now and scan around your vision and just let it expand. Noticing what you can. Now we're going to do something a little bit different. I want you to welcome your mantra, your unique energy signature to your practice. Remember, you can speak it or whisper it or say it silently or out loud or use colors or the mantra ball textures, whatever you prefer. A combination. Welcome your mantra to this vision, now as our closing practice of integration. I want you to imagine that you're sitting directly across from this future, on every breath in, the future is sending you the energy that you need. On every breath in the future is infusing you with the energy of your mantra. So breathe a little bit more deeply. As you imagine this future, you helping you become the fullest version of yourself. Now as you exhale, offering it like a thank you. I want you to offer and send that same energy back to your future self. Inhale, the energy comes to you. Exhale, you offer it back up. This is the cycle of your own becoming. Continue in this space for the next few moments. As you let yourself practice and engage and enjoy the presence of this future vision for the becoming of your life. If you're having any trouble visualizing any of this, don't worry. Just welcome in the energy of your mantra. Feel the energy of your own becoming and notice and welcome whatever arises. Amazing. Now, when you're ready, go ahead and take a deep breath in and a deep breath out. Finally, as we've done each day of our practice together, think about what your daily power action could be. What are you going to do today that will take you forward toward this vision? When you're ready, I invite you to open your eyes. That's it. You did it. You've done it Day 10. Here we are together, and I hope you can really feel me congratulating you here because what you've done is a big deal, a lot of people do not take the time to commit this level of care to themselves. And I hope you can feel the power of this journey that we've been on together. You've started by creating an incredible vision for your life, learning how you might be stopping yourself and then choosing to take action anyways, to move beyond your fear, to activate your creativity, and now to create a ritual that you can use for the rest of your life. You have a couple of things that you can do now. The first is I know some people who want to do this. You're like, I don't want it to end, as you can actually, we've structured this so you can go through the whole 10-day journey again, but focusing on one of the different life zones. You focused on maybe one or a couple of the six during this journey, and now you can start over using a different life zone and seeing how that impacts your life in a new way. Or you have all the tools that you need now. You can start just meditating on your own. We actually have a special toolbox for you of additional tools and resources that you can use to help you advance your practice as you get on your way. Most importantly, I just want to thank you for showing up for yourself. This work that we do on ourselves truly does have a ripple effect out into the world because when we change who we are being, the outcome of what we do changes. This is our responsibility in the world. To make sure we're making the change for ourselves, for our families, for our communities, for this planet, and for one another. Because what doesn't heal repeats, and it stops with us. May you be happy. May you be free? May you always find peace and anytime you get off track, may you remember that this freedom meditation practice will always guide you home. Thank you so much for practicing with me. It's been a true honor. I'll meet you right here in the special place the next time we practice together. Bye for now. 13. Final Thoughts : Congrats, you made it to the end of the class. I wanted to record this quick video just to tell you some next steps that might help you on your journey forward. First of all, I want to make sure that you know that you have a toolbox that we've created for you with a bunch of additional practices that can help you on your journey forward. We have little energy tune ups, all different lengths that will help you as you continue on your meditation practice, and you can use them anytime you need them. We also, because of popular request, put in some music for you, so you have the tracks that we've been using to practice with together, that now have no guidance on them, but you can just turn them on, come back in here, and meditate on your own with the music in the background. Then finally, there's a bunch of different links and resources that you might want to use to help you on your journey. Last but not least, and this might be the most important, I want you to post your unique energy signature, your special words in the project gallery. We'll be checking it out so we can see the whole community there rising together. Thank you so much for practicing with me, and I'll see you somewhere else along the path. Bye for now. 14. Bonus: 5 Minute Energy Reset: Welcome to your practice. So often, there are things going on in our lives that we can't control. But what we can control in every circumstance and in every situation is what we are choosing to bring. What energy are we choosing to bring to the circumstance? In this quick five minute energy reset, we're going to help you reconnect into your power, into your purpose, and help you remember who you really are. I want you to go ahead and get comfortable as we do with all of our practices and just relax your body for a moment. Then take a deep full breath in and a breath out. If you feel comfortable, I invite you to close your eyes. Remember, you can always keep them open if you'd like. Then to align our breaths on the count of three, I want you to exhale everything out of your system through your nose. We're going to do a practice called the four count breath. 1, 2, 3, exhale everything out and come to completely empty. Now, to my count of four, inhale for 1, 2, 3, 4, hold for 1, 2, 3, 4 exhale, 1, 2, 3, 4. Great. Let's do that again. Inhale 1, 2, 3, 4, hold for 1, 2, 3, 4, exhale 1, 2, 3, 4. Last time, inhale 1, 2, 3, 4, hold for 1, 2, 3, 4, exhale, 1, 2, 3, 4, And now just breathe normally, and just soften into your body a little bit more. Now just relax. If you're having trouble relaxing, that's okay. But just try softening into your body like 5% more. Let your shoulders drop 5% more. Let your jaw relax 5% more. Even try relaxing the space between your eyebrows. Just softening a little bit. As you soften 5% more into your body, I want you to think about one or two words that describe an energy that you want to cultivate into your life today. One or two words that just describe the energy that you want to bring into this day as you reset right now in this practice. If you can't think of a word, don't worry, maybe it's peace or confidence or focus or just permission to feel whatever you're feeling. Just trust what arises in you. Once you have that word or those words, I want you to start inhaling a little bit more deeply. Just taking deeper breaths in whatever way feels comfortable to you. As you inhale, I want you to imagine that the energy that you're cultivating is literally covering every crevice of your inner and outer body. It's bathing you. It's soothing you. Go ahead and start to deepen your breath. Inhale as deeply as you can. What I want you to do is imagine on each breath in, that you are literally showering yourself, bathing yourself, calling in the energy that you want to cultivate. Imagine you're plugging yourself into it, recharging yourself with it. That this energy is overcoming you as you call it in to your inner and outer body. This is how you reset your energy. Great. Now, the second part. Letting go. As you exhale now, I want you to imagine shedding all the things that you don't need. Remember, think of a specific word or energy that you're letting go and just let it go and imagine on each out breath that this energy is literally dissolving outside of you. On the inhales, you're calling in what you need, healing yourself inside out. On the exhales, you're letting go of everything that doesn't belong to you. Do three more rounds on your own, just like that. Now, as we close our practice, I invite you to just place your hands over your heart one over the other, and just repeat these words in your mind with me and you can either repeat them silently in your mind or you can whisper it or you can say them out loud. I am ready. I got this. I am ready. I got this. I am ready. I got this. Go ahead and take a deep breath in. And in breath out. When you're ready, I invite you to open your eyes and welcome back to your day. It's all it takes sometimes five minutes to reset our energy, claim the energy that we want to embody and cultivate and let go of anything that's not serving our truth. This is Justin Michael Williams, signing out, and I'll meet you right here in this special place the next time we practice by for now. 15. Bonus: 10 Minute Tune-Up : Hey, and welcome to your 10-minute tune up. In this practice, we are going to tune up your energy to get you strong, creative, confident, powerful, no matter what you've been dealing with in your day, so that you can step back into your day with more purpose and power. The way that we're going to do this practice is a little different than you might expect. We're actually going to focus on the seven different energy centers of the body. There are seven points in your body, that are really important for us to go through, and we're going to go from the bottom to the top as we tune up. I'll show you the energy centers and tell you what they are really quick and what they're for, and then we'll go into a short breathing practice together, right into our tune up. The first energy center is right here, and you'll place your hands, face down, palms down on your knees. This is the energy center that's all about your groundedness, about your physical body. If you're feeling spacey or cold or shaky or anything like that, this energy center helps you ground back in to your home, which is this body. The second energy center is you'll place your hands just right below your navel. This is your energy center for your creativity. For all the creativity and your creative juices and keeping them flowing, is right here just below your navel. Then we move up to just above the navel, the lower part of your rib cage. This is the energy center of power. This is your confidence center. This is just below the rib cage, just above the navel, and you'll put your hands here when it's time to do that in the practice. Then we move up to the fourth energy center. The heart. We all know this. The heart is the place of love, tenderness, self care, compassion, being kind to ourselves, first and foremost, no matter what's going on in our lives right now. Then we move up to the throat, the fifth energy center. You want to like choke yourself. You just want to lightly place your hands on your throat. We're going to activate our fearless expression of our authentic voice of setting boundaries and sharing our truth with the world. Then the sixth center, second to last, is right here in your mind. You'll place your hands just lightly, right between your eyebrows and on your forehead. This helps activate your thinking, your intuition, your mind, your idea generation. This will tune up this part of the energy. Then finally, we end here. Like a big crown. Palms open. You notice we started with the palms down, right on the knees, and as we tune up, you turn your palms up towards the sky, right here like a crown. This is really anchoring into, remembering that you can surrender, and release and trust in the guidance that's coming to you. I love looking at this kind of like a crown. You're claiming your throne, you're claiming the power of who you are. We had hands down, under the navel, above the navel, right at the heart, the throat, the forehead, and then you put on your crown, and you're all tuned up. Shall we begin? I'll guide you through the whole thing, so don't worry. There's one thing that I want you to remember before we go into this practice. Is, when we do this tune up, a lot of people expect it to feel really relaxing, love, and light, whatever. Sometimes it'll feel like that. But usually, for a lot of us, when we're doing this tune up, I like to think of it a dishwashing cycle. You're rinsing off and scrubbing off all the grime and the gunk that's inside your body, mind, and spirit, and your energy. The reason why I say this is as you go through this practice, you might feel a little uneasy. When we get into the different centers, I want you to notice what kind of thoughts come up. Because usually the thoughts that come up will change at each center, and those are the specific thoughts that are pointing towards, what it is that you need to release. Just notice, if you feel anxious, if you feel sad, if you feel stressed, welcome all of it, and you can welcome the love and light too. Let's begin. Start by just getting super comfortable, as comfortable as you can. We're going to start by aligning our breath, with a breathing technique called the four by four. What you're going to do is you're going to inhale for four, hold for four, exhale for four, and then hold the breath out for four. That's the different part. You're going to hold it out for four. I'll guide you through every step of the way. If you have trouble breathing through your nose, remember, you can always breathe through your mouth, but just purse your lips, like you're blowing through a straw, if you're going to breathe through your mouth so that you can restrict the air flow a little bit. You'll have a little bit more control that way. Through your nose or through your mouth, exhale everything out of your system now. Come to completely empty. Great. Now, to my count of four, inhale for 1, 2, 3, 4, hold for 1, 2, 3, 4, exhale 1, 2, 3, 4, hold it out for 1, 2, 3, 4, inhale 1, you got it, 2, 3, 4. Hold for 1, 2, 3, 4. Exhale 1, 2, 3, 4, hold it out for 1, 2, 3, 4. Inhale one, last time, 2, 3, 4. Hold for 1, 2, 3, 4. Exhale 1, 2, 3, 4, hold it out for 1, 2, 3, and 4. Great. Now just breathe normally. We're going to start tuning each of those seven energy centers. To start, just place your hands, palms, face down, on your knees, or on your thighs. And all we're going to do at each of these energy centers is take three cleansing breaths at each center. Remember, your mind might wander and lots of thoughts and feelings and things will come up, that's great. That's the grime and the gunk that we're clearing. You'll notice it change a little bit at each center. Let's go ahead, hands, palms down on the thighs or the knees, and take one breath in and one breath out. Breath 2 in, breath 2 out. Breath 3 in, and breath 3 out. Then bring your hands and touch just below your navel. We're clearing out your center of creativity. Breath 1 in, breath 1 out. Breathe deeply. Breath 2 in, breath 2 out. Last one. Breath 3 in, and clearing what you don't need, breath 3 out. Stay with it. You're doing great. Bring the hands now, right above the navel to your center of your confidence in power. Breath 1 in, breath 1 out. Great. Breath 2 in, breath 2 out. Breath 3 in, breath 3 out. Switch. Right to the heart, hands right over the center of the chest. Breath 1 in, clearing your space of love, breath 1 out. Breath 2 in, breath 2 out. Calling in what you need. Breath 3 in, breath 3 out. Three more centers. Hands now right on the throat. We're clearing the energy center so you can activate your voice, set boundaries, say no, say yes, when you need to, and speak your truth. Breath 1 in, breath 1 out. Breath 2 in, breath 2 out. Breath 3 in, breath 3. Now up to the space of your intuition and ideas. Hands touching right between the eyebrows, right on the forehead, just touch with your fingertips lightly. Let's begin. Breath 1 in, waking up the ideas, breath 1 out. Clearing what you don't need. Breath 2 in, breath 2 out. Breath 3 in, and breath 3 out. Finally, the crown. Palms open and up. If this is uncomfortable to you for any reason, you can drop your hands down. It's okay. But right now, we're just remembering to trust and surrender into the wisdom and the intelligence, and the flow that comes to us and through us. Breath 1, in breath 1 out, breath 2 in, breath 2 out. Finally, breath 3 in, and breath 3 out. Just relax your hands down, palms face up now on your legs. Just notice how you feel. As we reclaim the energy centers of our bodies, we're able to tune ourselves back to what's important to us. We tune ourselves into our bodies, into our creativity, into our power, into the root of love, into the authentic expression of our voice, into our intuition, and into the never ending flow of wisdom and surrender. Go ahead and take one more deep breath in, and a deep breath out. You're doing amazing work. This is so important. The fact that you actually took the time out of your day, to come and spend a few minutes to tune yourself up, is literally going to help your day blossom in ways you never could have expected. Amazing job today. Now get back into your day. Bye for now. 16. Bonus: 15 Minutes of Gratitude: Welcome to your practice on gratitude. Listen up, gratitude is one of these words that we throw around all the time, like grass fed, vegan, community, love and light, all this stuff. We gratitude, gratitude. But I feel like so often we say gratitude without actually understanding what it really means and how it can impact our lives. In this session, I'm going to teach you a few things you might not know about gratitude, and then we're going to get into a practice about the four types of gratitude that you can use to shift your mood anytime you need to. Let's start by talking about what gratitude is not because there's a lot of confusion about gratitude, and sometimes we even hold back on being grateful because we think it's something that it's not. First of all, gratitude is not condoning, gratitude is not forgetting, gratitude is not excusing, gratitude is not minimizing your hurt, it's not forgiveness. It does not mean you should always be happy, it does not mean stuffing down the problems in your life, it does not mean ignoring the things we need to change, it does not mean spiritually bypassing all the difficult emotions or situations that happen to you, and finally, gratitude is not to be used as a weapon. What I mean by this is so often we have difficult things happen in our lives and people just say, oh, well, you should just be grateful, you should just focus on the positive things that happen, and that feels like it's weaponizing gratitude against us to make us feel like we shouldn't be sad or we shouldn't be upset at what's happening in the world or what's happening in our lives. No. Gratitude is actually something different. You're allowed to feel the full range of emotions of what's going on and difficult stuff does happen in our lives. It happens to all of us. But the truth and the science behind gratitude, and they've studied this at universities from UC Berkeley to Harvard, Yale, and beyond, is that what gratitude gives us the power to do is to take our power back and maximize our potential in whatever circumstance or situation you're in. The way that this looks is like this, when you are actually grateful, you choose to show up and say, yeah, I might be in a bad mood, I might be hurting, I might have wished this didn't happen. But right now, I'm going to choose to be grateful for the things that I can in my life. Because what that does scientifically, is it puts your brain in a different state so that you can learn the lessons. One of my favorite quotes is from a friend and colleague of mine named Kasey Crown. She says, "You trauma doesn't define you." What you've been through doesn't define you, your story doesn't define you. But how you create meaning from those things does define you. That's the truth, and it's scientific, psychological, everything. How you create meaning from what happens in your life is what defines who we become. When we turn to gratitude, we're not spiritually bypassing, we turn to gratitude to say, let me open my mind to find what my Angloso beautifully calls, the rainbow that's inside of every single cloud. What we're going to do now is we're going to go through what I call the four different types of gratitude, and they're really easy to remember. It's gratitude in, gratitude out, gratitude up, and letting go. You can say it like a song gratitude in, gratitude out, gratitude up, and letting go. Super easy. Gratitude in is expressing something you have to be grateful for about yourself. It's so easy to start by saying, I'm grateful for this thing that I have or this person who did something for me or whatever. But what about you right here in this body? How have you shown up for yourself? How have you maybe set boundaries or did something that you said you were going to do? It doesn't even have to be a big thing. It was like, oh, I did not eat that piece of chocolate cake last night even though I really wanted to. I only ate half the pint of ice cream. Great. A win. I'm just kidding. But some of this practices that we do, it's really important that we express gratitude in for our bodies, our health, our well being, who we're being as people, and how we're showing up in the world. Then the second thing is gratitude out. This is the one we're really used to, expressing gratitude for your house or your friends or someone in your family or something that happened to you or a physical object that you have that you might just be grateful for. Then gratitude up. This is one of my favorites, and you don't have to be spiritual or religious or anything to do this one. This is about really recognizing that so much of what happens in our lives doesn't have anything to do with us at all. So many of the beautiful things that happen in our lives are a matter of synchronicity or being in the right place in the right time, or just hearing overhearing a conversation that leads you to somewhere else that leads you to somewhere else. For those of you who do have some spiritual or religious practice, you can send that gratitude up to whatever you call that higher power. Then finally, and this one's my favorite, is the energy of letting go. What are you holding onto that's keeping you from feeling grateful in the first place? What do you need to release? What do you need to release that grip of so that you can stop feeling so tense and open up to the space of gratitude inside of you? What we're going to do in this practice is a little bit different than you might expect. I want you to grab something to write with. It can be a pen and a paper, you can even use the notes on your phone or something like that. But if you do, turn it on, do not disturb so that you don't get disrupted in your practice, but you need something to write with for this one. You're going to write down as many things as you possibly can for each type of gratitude within that silent space. Now, here's the golden rule, and listen to me very carefully, the reason why so many of us have tried gratitude practices or we have a gratitude journal, and it gets boring after a while, or you start and you do it for four days, and then you'll never do it again, so many of us, I know I've had a gratitude journal that was sitting in my closet for a year, is because we're not specific enough. What the science and the research shows is that people who can keep regular gratitude practices actually feel more happy, more fulfilled, and they have more purpose in their life. This is science. But the way that you have to do it is by being super specific. You can't just say, I'm grateful for my house, I'm grateful for my life, I'm grateful for my kids. Although you're grateful for those things, they're going to get boring after a while day after day. What you want to do is be super specific to what are you grateful for that day. Something that is like a micro piece of gratitude, and this is what keeps your gratitude moving. The reason this is so important, and I love this about the studies is what they found is that when we express gratitude by, let's say writing something down or even sharing it with a friend of something that we're grateful for, the byproduct of gratitude is happiness and it reverberates through our systems and through our lives. Let's see how you feel at the end of this practice and how it works for you. We'll start by just taking a super quick breath practice to align us and pull us back to center. We'll start by just getting comfortable in your body, relaxing your shoulders, relaxing your jaw, take a full breath in, and a breath out and if you feel comfortable, I invite you to shut your eyes. Remember, you always have permission to keep your eyes open if you need to. But if you do, just look down and keep your vision a little bit blurred out. On the count of three, I want you to exhale everything out of your system through your nose. 1, 2, 3, exhale everything out and come to completely empty. Now, to my count of three, inhale for 1, 2, 3, hold for 1, 2, 3, exhale 1, 2, 3. That's right. Again, inhale one, easy breadth, 2, 3, hold for 1, 2, 3, exhale 1, 2, 3. This is called the three count breath. Last time, inhale 1, 2, 3, hold for 1, 2, 3, exhale 1, 2, 3. Last time, inhale 1, 2, 3, hold for 1, 2, 3, exhale 1, 2, 3. Great. Now just breathe normally, soften into your body a little bit more. In a moment, you're going to hear a soft chime sound, which I'll use to mark the very beginning and the very end of each section. As soon as you hear the chime, I want you to open your eyes, start writing as many things as you can, and then when the second chime sound rings, you'll close your eyes, maybe even place your hands over your heart, and come back into your practice and we'll go in and out a few times for each type of gratitude starting with gratitude in, expressing gratitude for everything you can think of that you have to be grateful for about yourself. Don't feel bad if you can't think of that many things, just get as much as you can and be as specific as possible. Ready? Open your eyes and let's go. Great. Go ahead and place your hands over your heart, close your eyes, come back to yourself. We're going to transition now into gratitude out. This is all the gratitude you have to express to people, places, things, all the nouns in our lives. You'll think of as many things as you possibly can and be as specific as possible. 1, 2, 3, let's go. Great. Again, hands over the heart. Come right back into yourself, and just check in and notice how you feel right now, even just right here halfway through our four types. Take a breath in and a breath out. Now we transition to gratitude up. Gratitude for all the serendipity that's happened in your life. If you have a spiritual or religious practice, you can turn the gratitude that way as well. Gratitude up. Let's begin. Great. Last one, hands over the heart, eyes closed. Now we move to letting go. What is it that you are ready to release? What is it that you are ready to surrender and let go of so that you can step into the flow of your life more fully. Start writing out everything you need to let go now. Great. Go ahead one more time, hands over the heart. Eyes closed if you feel comfortable. Whatever you're feeling right now, see if you can even have gratitude for that. If you can remember that whatever you're feeling right now is simply the feeling of being alive. Especially if we don't judge it as good or bad. Go ahead and take a deep breath in, a deep breath out. Feeling what you feel. Then open your eyes. That's it. You're doing amazing work. When we turn to gratitude, when we choose gratitude, it reminds me so much of the amazing quote by Maya Angelo where she says there is a rainbow in every cloud. Even when the storms come and you can't see it from the vantage point that you're in right now, when we turn to gratitude, we're claiming our power back. We're remembering what's important to ourselves. Most importantly, we're giving ourselves the opportunity to even learn the lesson that is trying to get shown to us through every single thing that happens in our lives. You're doing amazing amazing work. Remember, you can do this practice in 15 minutes like we did today, or you can even just pull out your phone anytime that you're going through something and turn to a gratitude practice for two minutes, three minutes, five minutes. It is always there to serve you. Thank you so much for practicing with me today. You're doing amazing work. I will meet you right here in this special place the next time you practice. Bye for now. 17. Bonus: I Am Enough: Welcome to your practice. This practice has an incredibly important title and an incredibly important purpose. It's called, I Am Enough. The reason why we're using this practice in our toolkit is because so many times, no matter how much we meditate, no matter how much we read or how many podcasts we listen to, or how many courses we take, or how evolved we think we become, there's always going to be stuff that happens in our lives. There's always going to be difficulties. We're always going to feel like sometimes we've gotten off track or that we're not showing up for ourselves in the way that we thought we should or we're not living up to our own high expectations that we set for ourselves. It's normal. It happens to every single one of us, including me. But what we have to remember is that every time we feel like we fall off track or we get off-center, what's happening in those moments is a lesson. Sometimes it's the most important lesson because it's the lesson about what takes us off track and then how to find our way back home. Getting lost is okay because next time you get lost, you find your way back home a little bit faster each time. One of the things that feels really important to me always as we do these personal growth practices is that we remember that we are enough, that our value is not based upon what we produce and what we do, or how much we achieve, but it's really based upon who it is that we're being and how we're showing up in the world. Look, I get it. I feel probably most like anybody listening to this right now, one of the things that I've always called myself as a kid is a chronic overachiever. Thinking it that if I just do enough, accomplish enough, succeed enough, that maybe I'll finally be enough. Then we overwork ourselves and end up pushing ourselves to limits and falling off track even in the overworking. For this practice, we're going to do something a little bit different. I think you'll have fun with this one. I'm going to play you a song. When I play this song, I want you to listen to it, not like you normally listen to your song like a performance or whatever. I want you to listen to it like a meditation because this song, when I first wrote it, the song is called I Am Enough, I wrote it to the childhood version of me who just wanted to know that no matter what he was going through, no matter what he looked like or how much he was getting teased or how much he accomplished, that he was enough no matter what. For each of us, no matter how much we do, that child is inside of you. Today, we're going to make sure they know and you know, that you are enough. Let's start, like we do in all of our practices, by just softening into our bodies. I'll play the song for you in a minute, don't worry. Take a deep breath in and a breath out. If you feel comfortable doing so, I invite you to close your eyes and remember you can always keep your eyes open in these practices. Particularly, for today's practice, when the music starts playing, if you feel called to sway or move or pulse or dance in any way, or even just to sit still, welcome that, invite that forward. This is the creativity part of the practice. Let's start by aligning our breaths with a three-count breath. On the count of three, I want you to exhale everything out of your system through your nose. 1, 2, 3, exhale everything out and come to completely empty. Great. Now, to my count of three, inhale for 1, 2, 3, hold for 1, 2, 3, exhale 1, 2, 3. Great. Inhale 1, 2, 3, hold for 1, 2, 3, exhale 1, 2, 3. Last time. Inhale 1, 2, 3, hold for 1, 2, 3, exhale 1, 2, 3. Great. Now just breathe normally. I want you for a moment right now to imagine a childhood version of yourself, at any age. As you imagine this childhood version of you, see if you can notice what age you landed at, even if you have to approximate a little bit. Notice as you look at this childhood version of yourself, what are you wearing? Are you indoor or are you outdoor? Most importantly, what did that childhood you need to hear most at that time? We use this song, I Am Enough, as a prayer and an intention for the child inside of each of us. Listen closely. I am enough. You are enough. We are enough. No matter what you're going through in your life right now, no matter how you're showing up in your life right now, you are enough. You are worthy. Just take a moment right now to take a deep breath in and ground into your energy, just feeling and noticing whatever it is that you feel. Feeling the energy of music, how it wakes us up in a special way that even goes beyond the words. Music has always been one of those things that we've used throughout millennia, throughout history to transform incredible pain and suffering into beauty and light. This is the way that we express. Today, as you anchor into your enoughness, the enoughness that is your birthright, I want you to just place your hands over your heart and just repeat these words with me. I am enough as I am. I am enough as I am. I am enough as I am. You are enough. You are enough. You are enough. Go ahead and take one final deep breath in and a breath out. When you're ready, open your eyes. Amazing work. This is a really important tenet for us to keep in mind, that we're going to go through stuff. We're going to go through stuff in our lives. We're going to fall off track sometimes, but no matter what, we are enough. Thank you so much for practicing with me today. I'll see you right here in this special place the next time we practice. Bye for now.