The Confusion Experiment

Inter-generational Racial Healing with Kokayi Nosakhere - Episode 21

Five weeks in to the new show and I sit down with Kokayi Nosakhere who is dedicated to educating us on inter-generational racial trauma that resides in our nervous system. What's fascinating about this theory is that it exists in both the victim and the perpetrator and the steps necessary for this healing to take place. It's a truly engaging and interesting conversation that leaves us all with three steps that we can take right now to begin to not just dismantle the inequality inherent in our society but to rebuild from an agreed upon value: community. 

Have We Lost Our Minds? - Episode 20

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This is the first full length podcast after launching the new show with a three part mini-series called "The Findings," which featured the eighteen nuggets of insight that the experiment revealed. Those episodes are all under 10 minutes so definitely give them a listen.

In today's show, we talk about why losing our minds might actually be a good thing, especially when you open up to the idea that there's a Mind behind your mind and how sitting still with yourself helps you feel into that space. Plus, no doubt about it, COVID made us lose our minds as massive change was imposed upon us and life as we know it came to a complete STOP. Our mind has been in a tailspin all this time as it tries to convince us that the old way is better than Change because at least we're familiar with it. Meanwhile, Change shows up with no past and asks us to be willing to step towards it. Enjoy. 

Here's the information about the upcoming "Ready for Change" course. 

The Findings - #18 Life can be easy.

Life does not have to be hard. That’s the old way of living. The old way is, you have to be exhausted by the end of your day to know you put in a good day.  Why would we want to exhaust ourselves as a measurement that it was a good, productive, successful day? It’s killing us! Have you noticed? Our tanks are empty.

With this new way emerging through us and as us, we can find ourselves standing on a solid foundation as Change brings the walls tumbling down. That’s the conscious evolutionary moment before us: to realize that the only real world is the one within, and it wants out. This world can never be touched, affected, changed, or diminished by the external world of effects. Meditation takes you to that place and helps you realize through personal experience that 99.9 percent of what is real is unseen, including ourselves.

From the book, "The Confusion Experiment."

The Findings - #17 The New Design for Living.

The world as we know is collapsing.  It’s part of our natural evolution and necessary for what is coming. However, for many it’s terrifying. We’re here inside this time of massive change and people are freaking out. We’re turning around and saying to each other, “Who’s got the instructions? I’m getting fired, this is ending, this is happening; how do I do this? Somebody give me the instructions!”

The problem with the old way is that it doesn’t give you the instructions for the new way because the old way doesn’t even know it’s dying. Besides, it couldn’t give you the right instructions for the new way even if it wanted to because it doesn’t have them. The new infrastructure is being built from the inside out. The new design for living is within us. We have everything we need.

From the book, "The Confusion Experiment."

The Findings - #16 There's a new measurement of success.

Another construct I had to let go of was how I measured success. In radio, success is measured by the size of the audience. It is so important that the hour is divided into quarter hour measurements. The radio station with the biggest audience won and the DJ with the most listeners won and that made the sales people win because then they could raise their prices and make more money. It was the quintessential ripple effect so the pressure to be #1 was pretty intense.

I didn’t realize how influential this deeply seeded training was in my current life until I had a realization in the summer of 2017, after I had officially finished my 100 days of meditation (though I continued the practice after I was “done”). In August of that year, I created an event where I talked about "The Confusion Experiment" at the Alaska Center for Spiritual Living in Anchorage. The day before the event I was terribly anxious. I’ve learned that when I ask my inner Wise One a question it answers me, so I asked, “What is going on here? Why am I freaking out?” I realized that my mind was taking that audience-size measurement of success from so long ago and laying it over this new experience. It was doing exactly what it was supposed to do and that’s exactly when I realized that measurement was no longer valid. I understood where it was coming from and why it was active; however, I also realized that I wasn’t there to measure the success of my talk based on how many people were in the seats. Was I affirming a full house? Of course, but my awareness of what was causing my anxiety allowed me to unwrap myself from  it. I was then able to redefine my success as something internal - the expansion of my consciousness and the opening of my heart.

I also decided to redefine what success meant and declared I was already successful simply because I was doing it! It was the first Facebook Live event I’d ever done, and I was ecstatic that I was willing to be so out of my comfort zone.  It was a huge learning curve for me and just having that work was such a success. I had over 124 views while live and to this day over 500 people have watched that 52 minute video. As soon as I released the audience, it showed up!

From the book, "The Confusion Experiment." 

The Findings - #15 Be willing to change.

One of the things that happened along the way was that I had to say goodbye to me.  As I have been moving through this time of reorganization, I never did so without bringing my radio personality into the mix. I can see now that this was another time in which I spoke about myself in the third person. Meditation revealed to me I had been fighting for “her” place in my new life. It wasn’t until I came back to Anchorage in the summer of 2017 that I understood what was happening.

I was doing some fill-in work at KNBA radio. It was the first time back at my old stomping grounds since 2016 when I also did some part-time work while in town. With the headphones on, a song playing in my ears, I heard a voice say: “This is too limiting. You love music, but it’s too limiting.” I immediately thought, You can’t take this from me. But then I realized that nobody was taking anything from me. It was all going with me, but it was going to convert its form and its shape into something new. Wasn’t this what I asked for? To let the new emerge?

This openness to change was a huge turning point for me. I had been trying all this time to force who I’d been in radio, this great rock n roll dj, into a new idea that was not yet fully formed. I can see why I was so attached to this identity; it’s who I’ve known myself to be for a long time, so the idea of letting that go was terrifying. Who would I be if I wasn’t that?  In that instant, the butterfly began to flap her wings.

Who we believe ourselves to be, how we see ourselves, the identities we have, the roles we play….when you deepen your awareness of the Self, when you consciously and actively co-create your own evolution, shift happens! Things fall away, you outgrow relationships and jobs, sometimes you even outgrow you. The more I changed internally the more my outer world fell away. The old skin cannot hold the new wine.

From the book, "The Confusion Experiment."

The Findings - #14 We've got to do the turnaround.

We have to turn away from the world of effects, the headlines, what doesn’t feed us and what makes us heavy, and turn towards what makes us feel better. Here’s what I’ve learned – life is mostly a vibrational thing and it’s pretty awesome. We’re here to feel good. When I look at the headlines, I don’t feel good. So what am I going to do? Am I going to take my precious, creative, never-been-here-before moment and react to something that’s already done? How does my emotional reaction change a headline? Better to ask, “What’s mine to do?” and put your creative energy towards being a solution versus a reaction.

One of the things I learned in meditation is that I want to be right on the edge of the problem. If I’m in the problem, I can’t be a place for the solution to come through me. I can’t be the solution if I’m in the problem. So I want to be right on the edge so that I can still see the problem but I’m not necessarily absorbed by it or taken down by it. This is the new place for us to be: outside of the problem just enough to understand it,  to ride the edge of what’s happening so as to be a vessel through which a solution can come.

Yes, these things that are happening in our world hurt. It’s crazy the depth of poverty, oppression and violence that fills our lives. But crazy is not going to fix crazy. Love will fix it. The heart will fix it. Peace will fix it. Harmony will fix it. You’re not going to get your answers from “out there.”  You’ll get it from inside you, from your heart, from the One that knows.

From the book, "The Confusion Experiment." 

The Findings - #13 We're afraid to feel.

We’re so afraid to feel that we’d rather blame others for our feelings. We’ve been told to numb them, avoid them, project them, to do all kinds of things instead of feel them. But let me tell you, what’s real is that we feel. Clearing stuck energy by giving ourselves permission to feel all the hurt, the anger, the disappointment and everything else that has become, as Eckhart Tolle calls it, a “pain body” is critical to being able to live from our hearts. If your heart is clogged up with unforgiveness, how can your best self emerge? If you’re riddled with shame and blame, how can you trust yourself to leap? My mind was always showing me how someone else was to blame. Meditation showed me what was mine. Another game changer.

It’s time we mature and own our feelings. How do you do that? By learning how to sit with your feelings and feel them, by allowing yourself to become comfortable with your own discomfort.  That’s the skill to develop and meditation is one way to do it.

 

From the book, "The Confusion Experiment."

The Findings - #12 We’ve trained to look outside of ourselves.

We actually believe that people and things are our source. We’ve come to believe that it’s someone else’s job to satisfy our needs and that always leads to disappointment because it’s built on a false premise that your source is external. For too long we’ve believed that the outer world creates the inner world so we need people to be a certain way and say certain things to make us feel certain ways.

I have actually believed that people make me feel different emotions, and if only they would say something else or if only they had done something else, then I would feel differently. That has failed pretty consistently throughout the majority of my adult life. It’s called control; it’s called manipulation; it’s called insanity. But this is what we do! We believe people are causing our inner world, our emotions, how we feel. We believe that they need to change before we do. I’ve finally realized – nope – I’m responsible. It’s going on inside me, it’s mine to own and work with. As the great Reverend Rainbow Johnson said  a long time ago, “I may have pressed my buttons, but you didn’t install them.”  I’ve never forgotten that saying. It’s a good one to remember.

 

From the book, "The Confusion Experiment."

The Findings - #11 The mind has taken us collectively as far as we can go.

Do you know what I’m saying? We’re seeing it in our everyday living.  The mind has run its course as the tool for our evolution. It’s not the mind that’s going to take us to the next place. It’s the heart. That’s why I’m so excited that you’re here and you’re reading this. This is about you making the choice to open your heart a little bit more today, tonight and tomorrow. It’s about listening to your heart, getting familiar with its language and trusting its guidance. 

Here’s why that’s important. We’ve effectively cut the heart out of the equation as well as the value that instinct and intuition bring in balancing how we know. Instead, our model of success is what you know and who you know. Knowing, that’s success, and knowing leads to clarity, another seemingly important piece to happiness. You already know how I feel about clarity! No wonder I felt like I was a failure in these last three years.  I can see this so clearly now. I thought I didn’t know but really, I didn’t know that I knew! Now, I know that I know. That doesn’t mean that I’m not going to take a course and learn something from someone else however my new method is to first turn within and ask. That process acknowledges that there is something beyond my own thinking mind that knows and I can communicate with It, and It with me. We are the guru we’ve been looking for.

 

From the book, "The Confusion Experiment."