Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 11:47 — 21.6MB)
Subscribe: Apple Podcasts | Google Podcasts | Spotify | Amazon Music | Android | Stitcher | RSS
What is the Inside-Out Understanding? When it comes to letting go of unwanted habits, how is it different than all the other techniques and strategies that we’ve tried?
Answers are here in today’s Q&A episode of Unbroken.
You can listen above or on your favorite podcast app or read the notes and links below. Here are the highlights and the full transcript is below.
Resources mentions in this episode
- Submit your question for a future Q&A episode here.
- Free video series: Finding Freedom From Overeating and Other Habits
- Mavis Karn’s website
Transcript of episode
Hello, explorers, and welcome to the very first Q&A episode of Unbroken podcast.
This Monday edition of the podcast, going forward, is going to be me answering your questions about getting rid of unwanted habits, about letting go of an over eating habit, or any kind of other habit. And since this is the very first episode, though, there’s nobody listening yet.
So I thought that what I would do is think back to the questions that I had at the very beginning of exploring this understanding, and then answer those questions.
Moving forward, you can submit your questions, and I’ll be happy to answer them on a future podcast. There’s a little form at that link that you can fill out. And I’ll respond and maybe answer your question here on a future show.
For today, I’m going to go back in my memory and think about one of the most pressing questions I had at the beginning of this exploration which was:
How is exploring this understanding, the Inside Out understanding, different than any other method or approach that I’ve tried?
Over the last however many years for me, it was about 30 years, of trying and failing to fix an overeating habit, until I came across this understanding. So the way that I’m going toexplain how this is different is a metaphor. And it’s one that I use in the free video series that’s available at my website called Freedom From Overeating and Other Habits. If you go to alexandraamor.com/start, you can have access to that.
If what I say today piques your interest, or leaves you wanting to understand more, that might be a good place to start, because we dive in a little bit deeper.
This metaphor has to do with a beach ball. Very often as children, we have those big inflatable beach balls, they’re bigger than a basketball, and the ones we had as a kid were rainbow colored. And something that was fun for us to do, we would throw them around and stuff at the lake as a child. But something else that was fun to do was sort of tried to submerge them under the water, when we were at the lake. You’d sit on it, and it would pop back up.
It was pretty tricky to try to get it to stay submerged under the water. It took a lot of energy, it took a lot of balancing, it took a lot of just thinking about my center of gravity and how my weight was distributed those kinds of things.
The the other methodologies that we try when we’re trying to get rid of an unwanted habit, the other strategies, the other approach are things like willpower or maybe rewarding ourselves when we get through a day without eating a favorite food, or restricting favorite foods, foods that we feel are problematic. or following a diet for example, or depriving ourselves of the thing that we feel comforts ourselves or gives us that good soothing feeling that we’re searching for, whether it’s cigarettes, or soda pop, or what a gambling, whatever it is, that’s giving us that feeling we try to cut ourselves off from that deprive ourselves from that. What that ends up being like, is just like me trying to balance that beach or submerge that beach ball into the lake when I was a kid.
It is possible for a short period of time and some people manage it for longer than that even. The thing is, though, that the beach ball is designed to not be submerged. It’s not like a piece of concrete. It’s filled with air. And so just the basic laws of physics have it wanting to pop back up to the surface of the water.
If this is a habit that we’re trying to distance ourselves from, an unwanted habit, in order to keep it to keep that ball submerged, it takes a lot of energy. Like I explained at the beginning, it takes a lot of balance, it takes a lot of concentration, like you can’t really be doing anything else, when you’re pushing that beach ball under the water. That has to be your entire focus. You couldn’t say, for example, go for a swim at the same time, as you’re trying to submerge that ball. My brother and I used to chase each other in the water all the time, when we were kids but you couldn’t do that at the same time as you’re trying to submerge that beach ball under the water.
So yeah, those are the main points that it takes a lot of energy, it takes a lot of focus and concentration. And your your concentration has to be solely on that.
When we come to this understanding, when we come to exploring unwanted habits from the perspective of the inside-out understanding, what we’re instead doing is we don’t have to put that energy and attention on all those managing strategies about the beach ball, or the unwanted habit.
This approach isn’t just another management technique, like the ones we’ve used in the past.
That’s how it’s very different. It instead asks us to look in the direction of our innate well being, our innate wholeness or innate resilience. And it asks us to see the unwanted habit not as a problem, but as part of the way that we are made as a part of our divine engineering, which is what Mavis Karn calls us. She’s a practitioner in this understanding, amazing lady, look her up if you have a chance.
So the way that we are designed as human beings is that these cravings that we experience, and the cravings that then become unwanted habits that we have, are actually a call from our innate well being, from our innate health, trying to remind us about our true nature, which is one of wellness and wholeness and well being. It is one that will return to equilibrium on its own.
Very often what we’re trying to do with an unwanted habit – one of mine was sugar, I really loved sugar – what I was trying to do was a couple of things:
- I was trying soothe myself, comfort myself, because I felt some sort of disturbance within myself.
- And then also without realizing it, I was trying to return myself to a state of equilibrium.
When we look in the direction in this direction, and the direction of the inside-out understanding, what we’re looking toward is how all of those management strategies, all of that using an outside substance to or an unwanted habit to return ourselves to equilibrium are actually unnecessary.
All that activity with the beach ball, trying to keep it submerged, trying to keep that habit under control, is entirely unnecessary. And that’s the difference between what I would call sort of the old paradigm of psychology approaches to this kind of habit, versus the approach that we’re looking at here.
Unfortunately, 99% of our world is structured around management strategies, especially when it comes to unwanted habits. So exploring this understanding, can feel a little bit unfamiliar. And I wanted to highlight the difference.
If you’re brand new to this understanding this may not quite land with you yet. But once you start to maybe listen to other podcasts, read other books and that kind of thing it will start to set to land, you’ll start to see the difference that I’m pointing to.
So that’s what I wanted to share today because that was a big question that I had when I first started to explore this understanding. So I’ll leave you there for now.
These Q&A episodes are going to be shorter than the main episodes on Thursdays. But I hope that you found that helpful. And you can find lots more information at my website, alexandramor.com. A more is spelled a m o r, there’s no E. It’s the Latin spelling, not the Italian.
I’ll be back every Monday to answer your questions, like I said, and for the next few Monday’s I’ll be answering my own questions from a little while ago, but I hope that they will be just as helpful as if you had asked them.
Thanks for tuning in. Take care. I’m sending you lots of love and I’ll talk to you soon. Bye.
Transcribed by https://otter.ai
Photo by Raphaël Biscaldi on Unsplash
Leave a Comment