Awareness and Consciousness Podcast

In the book, The Four Agreements, Miguel Ruiz outlines a code of conduct for creating love and happiness in your life. One of his Four Agreements is “Don’t Take Anything Personally". In this episode I describe some of the hidden assumptions that cause us to take things personally.

Understanding the ego mind and consciousness means becoming aware of the way our mind dreams. The ego mind has more than just thoughts and beliefs; it has emotions, memories, visual images and a life of its own. When we believe what our imagination dreams we can get lost in a world of illusions.

I often get asked if people can really change their life. They want to known if they can overcome fears, stop the judgments, and quiet the voice in their head. The answer is yes. However, when people ask, they usually ask with such fear and doubt that almost no amount of words will suffice. Perhaps this interview will help overcome some of those doubts.

It might be hard to believe that we fear love and happiness, but it is a real dynamic that happens in the mind. It is easier to understand if we consider the mind to be a living being with many different aspects. We are essentially killing off false self images of our personality.

Fear is that emotional force that drives us in a direction away from joy, happiness, and love. Fear can paralyze us to the point that we feel helpless and suffocated. Often fear appears irrational, but it only looks this way at the surface.

What are core beliefs and how do you identify them? That’s what many people are realizing they need to do to change their emotional reactions. The problem is where do you look to find core beliefs?

Our body has physical desires, our emotions have a desire to express love and our mind has a desire to have its beliefs and expectations met. This can create some internal conflict that gets more complicated when we add another person's desires to the mix.

Desires for a relationship come from deep within us. They aren’t desires for a specific person so much as a need for expression and experience of connection and feeling that we can have with another person. Those desires include the emotion of love, physical affection and sexual satisfaction.

Experts will advise you that in order to be happy you first have to make yourself happy. What they usually can’t explain is how to make your self happy. What I try to uncover in my work and in this audio is some of the mystery that surrounds an individual’s happiness. 

When it comes to stopping or changing emotional reactions people often approach the problem like they are fixing a car. The assumption seems to be that if we change one thing the whole problem will go away.

In this episode I cover some places that assumptions hide. I do a little poking around to show you what they look like. I also show how they lead us down dark alleys chasing illusions in our mind. Becoming aware of those dark alleys of mental illusions will make it easier to get out.

A big component of feeling insecure is the image of perfection that we create in our mind. When the voice in our head compares us to that image of perfection it concludes that we are not good enough. Buying into this comparison with an imagined self is what creates the feeling of not being good enough.