Unbroken

Coach and author Sheela Masand received the idea to interview those who had learned directly from Sydney Banks about the three principles that describe how we experience human life. That idea became Inside Out Transformation: A Revolutionary Guide for Coaches, Therapists, and Counsellors, which has been described by reviewers at ‘extraordinary’, ‘powerful, engaging and inspiring’ and ‘brilliantly lucid’. If you’re curious about what the three principles are and how they apply to your life, and to easing your suffering, Sheela’s book is a great place to start. In 2010 Sheela Masand was introduced to a psycho-spiritual understanding called The Three Principles discovered by Sydney Banks, also referred to as the inside-out understanding. She didn’t know it then, but her life was to be infused with its unique and undeniable transformative magic. Her coaching business slowly transformed in the same way – she couldn’t help but share the Principles in all her work. You can find Sheela Masand at SheelaMasand.com. You can listen above, on your favorite podcast app, or watch on YouTube. Notes, links, resources and a full transcript are below. Show Notes Seeing for the first time that life only works one way (i.e., inside-out) Do affirmations help create change? Looking upstream to see that we live in a world of thought What heart-centred business owners commonly struggle with On tackling a big project like writing a book Resources Mentioned in this Episode Jamie Smart We didn’t discuss him but I’m going to mention Tad Hargrave and Marketing for Hippies Jack Pransky George and Linda Pransky Chana Studley The Viva Event Uncovering the Extraordinary Coach Within with Joe Bailey Transcript of Interview with Sheela Masand Alexandra: Sheela Masand, welcome to Unbroken.  Sheela: Thank you. Good to be here. It’s lovely to have you here.  Alexandra: Why don’t you tell us a little bit about your background and how you came to find the three principles?  Sheela: I don’t know how far back in time we need to go. But just to say that I live in Spain. I am British. And I’ve lived in Spain since 1986, which was a long time ago. I was married and had two beautiful daughters. And along the way, I got divorced. That’s one thing. But along the way, I became self-employed. It’s one of those things I always knew. In the back of my mind, my dad was very entrepreneurial.  I always had this sense that I would, one day, have my own business. I didn’t set out career-wise to do that. But it serendipitously and landed in my lap to join up with somebody become in partnership and open a British food and drink import business here in Spain, which I never thought I would do that.  And it was very successful, like, super successful in the sense that we ended up with 20 employees in a warehouse. And, it was very, very, very successful in its day. And then, unfortunately, my business partner died at a very young age. He was only 48, and very unexpectedly left me with this business. A few years have gone by, and I was already exploring other things that I wanted to do, I’d become vegetarian. So importing bacon and sausages and pork pies from the UK wasn’t really sitting very well with me anymore. I was weighing I need to be doing something, and I wanted to do something alternative in the helping field. And come across coaching. And I was exploring different modalities.  We’d already decided I was going to become a silent partner in this business that we had that was flourishing. But then, as I say, he died. And I ended up with this business I didn’t really want because legally, I had to take it up, take it on, while I didn’t have to. But I chose to because there were all these people rely on me, telling me they have mortgages to pay, etc. And then the recession hit, hard times hit, and things didn’t go so well. So I ended up with a lot of debt. And the reason I’m sharing the backstory because this is how I came into the three principles. In my journey of looking for what was my next step in terms of my career or business, I bumped into an NLP coaching course out here in Spain, and I did that I love it. I really enjoyed it. I ended up joining Jaime Smarts’ email list because he was one of the best NLP around at the time. And little did I know at that point in time that he’d started to change paths, change courses, because he had come across the three principles. But I didn’t know that, and neither did anybody else on this email list. So this email drops into my inbox saying – and bear in mind that I was in financial distress at this point in time, lots of lots of debt, and didn’t know how I was going to get out of it. So this email lands in my inbox saying if the secret is so great, show me the money. He’s a very clever man in terms of wording and

Is happiness something we need to create in our lives? Or does it occur naturally? And does searching for it actually get it the way of experiencing it? You can listen above, on your favorite podcast app, or watch on YouTube. Notes, links, resources and a full transcript are below.  Show Notes A status update on my low mood (‘depression light’) Experiencing the inside-out nature of life due to a challenging situation Letting wisdom lead the way out of difficulty How our feelings, even scary ones, pass through us and move on Why happiness is not something we need to chase or create Transcript of episode Hello explorers and welcome to Q&A Episode number 14 of Unbroken podcast. I’m your host Alexandra Amor. I’m here today to talk about happiness. The first thing I want to do actually is do a couple of follow ups quickly on a couple of previous episodes. A couple of q&a episodes ago, I talked about the low mood that I was in. And the experiences that I’ve had in the past with low moods being a precursor to some sort of shift or insight or transformation, that kind of thing. My low mood is still around, I can definitely feel it. I’ve been a little bit distracted by some life things that have been going on. But today, I’m very settled, and I can definitely tell it’s still there. In fact, I’m recording this episode on the day that it’s supposed to go out on, the Monday. And that’s really unlike me. I tend to do things in advance, but it was a bit of…I don’t want to say a chore. But it was a bit of an effort to get myself into the chair today and record this episode. To me, that’s an indicator that my mood is low. I’ve been describing it to myself as ‘depression light’. On the scale of depression with 10 being the worst, it’s really definitely very low on that scale, like a one or a two. But I do notice it. So like I said in the previous episode, I’ll just carry on and take everything as it comes. As ever, with these situations, it changes. I was planting flowers on the weekend, it’s spring here now. And I went to the garden center, got some flowers came home, put them all on their little pots, so that I could put them out on my balcony. And, for example, during that experience, I was really content and really happy and distracted, I think, from my low mood. So I just wanted to point that out as well. We’re having a very changeable experience, which is something I’m going to talk about in just a second as well related to happiness. Then the second thing I wanted to follow up on was I mentioned that there’s this uncertainty going on with my living situation. And what’s been really interesting to note is that though it can be really scary I can really see my experience coming from the inside out. Sometimes I’m worried about what might happen in the future. Sometimes it’s not on my mind at all, and I’m very content or peaceful or just not thinking about it. And to me, that just points to the nature of our experience and how we think that our circumstances is our what create our experience of life. When we take a moment to just observe our own lives, and what’s going on with ourselves – and I encourage you to do this for yourself, just test it, try it out, see what you notice – that I really noticed that, that this, what would I say difficult maybe or challenging situation with housing is, like I say, it’s not on my mind all the time. If my experience was outside in, then I would be bothered by that all the time, because it’s still unresolved. It’s been over a month this has been going on. And there still aren’t any clear answers, and I don’t know what the future holds. And yet, at some moments, I’m just perfectly at peace with the whole thing. I will say to that I was writing in my journal on the weekend and one of the things I said that I would like to do is to really ask that my mind takes a step back from this situation. What I mean by that, is that my normal modus operandi would be to really use my brain and figure out solutions and really get in there start calling people start making plans. And not that there’s anything wrong with that at any given time. But where I felt my wisdom in this moment was guiding me for lack of a better word was to really take a step back and just see what the universe comes up with. The universe is a lot smarter than me. That goes without saying. And so I’m almost posing it like a challenge to myself, how peaceful and calm and quiet can I be? And how little can I interfere with whatever wants to unfold? How much can I listen to my wisdom? And go where it shows me might be the next best step to take. Following that, rather than following my mind, which tends to be quite fearful and nervous and wants everything to be squared away, and

Joe Bailey knows that life can be difficult. In addition to life’s ‘regular’ challenges, he’s had personal experiences with illness, including Lyme disease (more than once), and the effects of mould. He also knows that all human beings are in possession of an innate and trustworthy ‘compass of wisdom’. Our thoughts can be noisy but our innate wisdom and resilience is the eye at the centre of life’s hurricane that can guide us and smooth out the bumps on the sometimes rough road of life. Joseph Bailey, M.A., L.P. is a licensed psychologist, an author, seminar leader, consultant to organizations, public speaker, and psychotherapist. His work has included co-founding The Minneapolis Institute of Mental Health, developing programs for health care provider wellness at the University of Minnesota Inner Life of Healers Program and numerous hospitals including North Memorial Hospital, Minneapolis, East Lansing Health System and Mayo Clinic Arizona (The Resilient Physician Program). He has also worked extensively in treatment centers for addictions—Gulf Breeze Recovery, Meridian Systems and Farnum Center, and numerous social service agencies. Joseph is the author of six books with over a half million copies in print including the best seller, Slowing Down to the Speed of Life with Dr. Richard Carlson and The Serenity Principle. Learn more about Joe at JoeBaileyAndAssociates.com. You can listen above, on your favorite podcast app, or watch on YouTube. Notes, links, resources and a full transcript are below. Show Notes Learning from Sydney Banks and his very different approach to human psychology On the paradigm shift of the three principles Working with everyone from climate scientists to clinicians at the Mayo clinic to those struggling with addiction The priceless value of relying on a calm mind Finding our own compass of truth Resources Mentioned in this Episode Joe’s book: Thriving in the Eye of the Hurricane Interview with Mahima Shrestha about her work in Nepal Joe’s book: Fearproof Your Life Transcript of Interview with Joseph Bailey Alexandra: Joe Bailey, welcome to Unbroken.  Joe: Thank you. What a great title.  Alexandra: Oh, thank you., I was so pleased when I thought of that. So it’s so great to have you here today, Joe. Why don’t you tell us a little bit about your background and how you got involved with the three principles.  Joe: Sure. And thanks for having me. So a little bit of background, I guess, to go way back, I discovered when I was 16 that when I was an exchange student in Guatemala, I had an opportunity. My aunt was a Catholic nun working in Central America with the poor and involved in lots of social justice issues.  I lived there for a summer, and it opened me up to my vocation really, to want to help people, alleviate suffering in the world and being raised Catholic, after high school that I went into seminary, thinking I’d be a priest. I had some amazing experiences for that one year I was in the seminary, got to work with Martin Luther King’s organization, and my prefect, the counselor that for our unit, was one of Martin Luther King’s best friends. So we got to learn a lot about all of that. And with that was a big influence on my life. But it led to me leaving the seminary after a year and deciding to continue my vocation by helping people. So I became a clinical psychologist and went to grad school and all that. And the more I got into psychology, the more I thought, is this the right fit for me because there is no spirituality in psychology was very agnostic. I did yoga and meditated and all did all these other things, because I always felt that was part of the whole person was to help people not just with their mind, but their whole essence or spiritual nature. And that wasn’t really to be found in psychology until I met Sydney Banks. About 10 years later, from the beginning of grad school till I was about 32. I met Syd at the recommendation of Keith Blevins, Dr. Keith Blevins, who was my best friend at grad school. And actually, he urged me to listen to Syd’s tapes over the years. But I was cynical at that point.  There was so many trips going on in psychology that I thought it was just another fad. And I was tired of that. So I just was not very open. Until one day, Syd was going to speak in Miami, at the University of Miami medical school. And Keith invited me, and his wife Elda also said, By the way, my best friend, Michael, she is coming too, and we’d love for you to meet, and I was available.  And so I thought, Okay, well, that’ll be fun. I went to Miami, and that first day I met my wife, Michael. She’s a woman, but she has a man’s name. Because she was born on the feast of St. Michael the archangel, and she was going to be a boy. I fell in love with her first sight. And four hours later, I met Sydney Banks. Alexan

When we have problems and challenges in life, where can we turn for guidance? What if there was a source of pure, clear wisdom that was 100% reliable and could guide you under any circumstances? The good news is this source of answers is available and it’s within you. You can listen above, on your favorite podcast app, or watch on YouTube. Notes, links, resources and a full transcript are below.  Show Notes How our minds innocently get involved in problem-solving What to do when we feel a lot of fearful thining What does wisdom feel like? When does wisdom show up? Resources Mentioned in this Episode Tania Elfersy, author of The Wisdom of Menopause and Perimenopause Episode 4 of Unbroken with Tania Elfersy Transcript of episode Hello, explorers, and welcome back to another Q&A episode of Unbroken. I’m your host, Alexandra Amor. Today the question is: Where can I go for guidance? I love this question so much. And I’m going to use a personal story that’s going on for me this week to illustrate what I mean by this. And then I’m going to move into a brilliant thing that I heard from my friend Tania Elfersy the other day that really ties in well.  So the personal story is that I live in a condo, apartment, and I’m renting it. And additionally, I live in a town where it’s really hard to find housing. Now I lucked out when I moved here, five and a half years ago, in that this was the first apartment I looked at, it was perfect. For me, it was the perfect price, perfect size, the building is nicely maintained, all that stuff. So I was thrilled, beyond thrilled and snatched it up right away. Housing in this town where I live is really, really an issue to the point that the vacancy rate is well below zero, I would say. People live in camper vans, in the summer there’s lots of tourists around, and many of them live on the back roads, in vans, but in addition to that, there’s people who actually live here and work here and have jobs who do the same thing, because there just aren’t a lot of places to rent. There’s a variety of reasons for that and I won’t get into it all, because that’s not the point of this podcast. So you’ll just have to believe me, it’s tough to find a place to rent, when you live in the little town where I live. It came about recently that my landlord was thinking of selling the condo that I’m renting. She had a buyer lined up. In the last week or so I guess I would say there’s been a lot of upheaval around here with inspectors coming and going and that kind of thing. When I first heard the news that the place might be sold, I was really really quite stirred up and anxious. And not the least of which, because we’re coming into the high season. I’m recording this in early May. And between May and October if it’s hard to find housing in the winter, then it’s basically impossible in the summer. This is not the ideal time for me to be having to look for a new place to live. So when I got that news, my stomach was really churned up. I could feel my thinking go into overdrive, and just having lots and lots of busy thoughts about what I should do. My mind was trying to solve the problem, which is what minds do. They’re always trying to protect us and help us and keep us safe. And that’s their job. And they take it very seriously. So definitely my mind got to work trying to fix this problem. And make it go away, essentially. What I knew, thankfully, when all this was happening was that all that busy thinking and all that all those butterflies in my stomach, those weren’t the places to look for guidance about this issue about what I should do, if anything, who I should talk to, any actions that I should take, any investigation that I should make all that stuff. Thankfully, because of the three principles, understanding, I knew enough to just let that happen. The busy mind and the butterflies in my stomach, knowing that it would settle down after a period of time, I didn’t know how long that would be. And also knowing that that as I said, that was not the place to go to look for answers. And so that’s what I’ve been doing. I’ve really just been sitting with my feelings just letting them happen. At some moments, I feel really churned up and anxious. And other moments I don’t. I’m very much at peace and just going about my day and reminding myself that in the grand scheme of things having to move is a pretty small problem. But that logic, that’s a logical thought. And our emotions don’t always respond to those kinds of things. What I’ve been doing is waiting for wisdom and insight when they’re ready to speak about any action that I need to be taking. And I should say, too, that things are still a bit up in the air. If the people who are interested in buying this apartment do that, th

Our brains are designed to think and to solve problems. However, we ignore other innate tools available to us at our peril; things like our access to wisdom and peace of mind. Poet and coach Anne Gleeson went through an exceptionally difficult time in 2020, which included a cancer diagnosis. A lifelong explorer, she happened upon the Three Principles at that time and found that an understanding of how our thinking works helped her navigate these turbulent waters. Now she assists others who want to do the same. Anne Gleeson is a poet, a certified Change coach, and is deeply interested in helping each of us create an experience of life that is joy-filled and open to possibility. She has worked as a teacher and leader in schools and universities, Adult Learning Centres, and in Tonga, as an Australian Volunteer Abroad. She began her professional speaking career when she returned from teaching in the Pacific and started working with Freedom from Hunger. For the past 15 years, she has worked in the Funeral Industry providing grief support as a Celebrant and Funeral Director. Learn more about Anne Gleeson’s coaching at StormToSky.com and her poetry at eagleeson.com.au You can listen above, on your favorite podcast app, or watch on YouTube. Notes, links, resources and a full transcript are below.  Show Notes Exploring grief and end-of-life with an open heart Experiencing a cancer diagnosis, a marriage breakdown, the loss of a business, and the pandemic – all at once Practicing not resisting experiences, even if they involve cancer Finding peace of mind in unexpected places Resources mentioned in this episode The Little School of Big Change Barbara Patterson’s podcast, Real Business Real Lives Changeable podcast episode with Malene Colotla Transcript of the episode Alexandra: Anne Gleeson, welcome to Unbroken. Anne: Thanks, Alexandra. Lovely to talk to you from the other side of the world. Alexandra: I think you’re my first Australian guest. This is very exciting. Anne: I feel honored. Alexandra: Why don’t you tell us a little bit about your background and how you got interested in the principles? Anne: I grew up in a very traditional farming family in some ways; it was all about the way that the world worked. And then, in 2017, my mother was dying, and I was caring for her. And then there was a creative workshop in the town I lived.  And that was so surprising to me because I didn’t think of things like that, like, generally it was agricultural meetings, and that thing. But anyway, I couldn’t do it then because of the circumstances. But a year later, I joined that group. And it was run by somebody called Robin Emerson, who was a really beautiful creator.  She also was so interested in these ways of operating in the world. And she loaned me lots of books. And I just ran with it, and then enrolled in the next time that the Little School of Big Change course, came up with Amy Johnson.  And it was very liberating for me. I think I realized how caught up in my thinking I was and how much of my own annoyance or sadness or whatever was to do with the way I was creating an experience. So that was how I got involved in the beginning. I joined and made connections with people. And that was really lovely. Alexandra: Were the Three Principles involved in the books Robin loaned you? Anne: Yes, they were. Amy Johnson’s books. But also other books like Michael Singer, and the person I cottoned on to it wasn’t actually a book, it was Barb Patterson’s podcast. Because I was in business, it was very interesting to me looking at it from that point of view. So it was a whole range of things. And I was hungry. So I gobbled up a whole lot of things. Alexandra: Were you always interested in this exploration? Anne: I think, like, a lot; I’ve had this experience a few times thinking, yup. And I already knew that when I was 15, or whatever, knowing and but, this, I suppose, was giving me a bit of a language. And that’s not to say that I went with that in any way; I didn’t. But even at uni, I went from this country kid going off to Monash uni and Melbourne.  And that was so exciting for me, and I’d race around and go to all different courses and talks at anything that was my mind, was just being expanded in so many ways or my heart or whatever. So, yes, I think I was a seeker always. Alexandra: Okay. Interesting. And so then one of the things that mention on your website is that you’re a funeral celebrant, as well as part of your work. Do you think that work has been influenced at all by the principles? Anne: Has the funeral work been influenced? Yes, every single part of my life has. And I’ve worked in the area of bereavement care and, more, the whole funeral industry for probably 15 years or so. Now, I’m not formally part of the funeral industry, but I work still as a celebrant making

My mood sucks today. It took everything I had to get to my desk and record this episode. But I hope that by sharing what I see about low moods, it will help you when you encounter one. You can listen above, on your favorite podcast app, or watch on YouTube. Notes, links, resources and a full transcript are below. Show Notes How we’re not responsible for our low moods How resisting what’s happening (like a low mood) seems to make it sticky Are low moods a precursor to insight or a new creative idea? Resources mentioned in this episode Q&A Episode 9: What is depression? Unbroken Ep 11: Sensitivity to Our Thinking with Jonelle Simms Transcript of episode Hello, Explorers, and welcome to Q&A Episode number 12 of Unbroken podcast. I’m your host, Alexandra Amor. And I’m really happy to have you here with me today. Today the question we’re going to explore is what does my low mood mean? I’m doing this one specifically today, because my mood is really low today. And I thought what better way to expand on this topic, explore it a little bit. And then I was originally going to post a different q&a episode next week, number 13. But I think what I’m going to do is a follow up episode to this one. In a few days, I’ll record that and just let you know how things are going. For me right now, my mood is is really low today, like really low. All I want to do is just lie on the couch and stare at the ceiling. And it’s kind of been going downhill for a couple of days, I’ve noticed that. What I wanted to talk about was a few different things. The first thing I want to say is, it’s so easy for us to take these things personally. Until I learned about this understanding, that’s exactly what I did. And before I started exploring this understanding, I would have heaped blame on myself for this low mood. And that would have looked like a lot of chatter in my head about how can I get out of this mood? How can I change it? What’s wrong with me? What have I done to create this? How can I fix it. A lot of taking responsibility for it innocently. And maybe talking to myself about being lazy or unmaotivated, anything in that kind of realm. And, again, yeah, that was an innocent reaction to what was happening. I see this kind of situation, this kind of low mood very differently now. One of the things I wanted to say is that when we have a lot of that chatter about our responsibility for our moods, and blaming ourselves and shaming ourselves for that, that is resistance. So any kind of any kind of chatter like that is really us resisting what is happening. And again, we do this innocently. I certainly did it for years and decades. The way that I see it so differently now is that instead of it’s instead of thinking that it’s me, somehow magically creating this mood, and I’m somehow responsible for what’s happening. What I see now is that this is universal life energy moving through me, and this is just what’s happening today. And when I see this low mood from that perspective, what that means is that I don’t take it personally at all. There’s a little bit of background chatter, I guess, about how I don’t like what’s going on. But what’s really nice is that I’m not taking responsibility for it, like I said. It’s something that’s moving through me at this moment. It came in when it wanted to come in, and it’ll leave when it wants to leave. I really see it, that these kinds of things, even when we don’t like them, they have the same kind of wisdom, as the weather and fighting them is just as useless as fighting or complaining about the weather. So that was the first thing I wanted to say: It’s the taking of our moods personally, that that really makes them sticky. And it’s that resistance, or that is resistance and it that just tends to make the situation worse rather than better. In the past, I think I would have noticed too that because of all the resistance that I would have been doing the moods that I didn’t like lasted way longer, and were much more extreme and were much more painful for me. So yeah, there was just a lot more suffering. because of what I believed was happening because of the responsibility that I believed that I had for that mood. It seems to me, and this is why I wanted to post this today, record this today and then record a follow up for next week, after a few days, it seems to me that there is always wisdom in these low moods, that’s at least been my experience. If you go back to Q&A episode 9, that one’s about depression and it ties in really nicely with this episode. And what I saw, and you can listen to the full episode there, but what I saw with the periods of depression that I experienced, was that there was some wisdom to them. The way that I describe it is the tide had gone way out. So, every

Innocently, we can fall into a habit of resisting the experiences our lives bring us. We resist the challenges, the heartache, the struggle. But what if that’s where the juicy stuff is? Author and coach Phil Goddard joins me to talk about embracing all that life has to offer, even when it’s painful or challenging, and the wisdom and delight that can arise as a result. Phil Goddard brings a uniquely compassionate understanding of being human into his work as an executive trusted advisor, leadership mentor, and relationship coach, to help organisations develop teams in which people love to work, love to lead, and love to create. Phil’s work centres around transforming relationships and leadership through developing a deeply grounded understanding of the principles behind our human experience and the nature of how our experience of life is created He has worked with Hollywood actors, international models, journalists, artists, authors, film directors, corporate executives, and numerous business owners, leaders and entrepreneurs. A prolific writer, ghostwriter, and author of 5 books, he is also the host of the award winning Coaching Life Podcast, and The Loving Being Human Podcast. You can find Phil Goddard at his website philg.com and on Facebook. You can listen above, on your favorite podcast app, or watch on YouTube. Notes, links, resources and a full transcript are below.  Show Notes On the gradual move from the tech world and people management to coaching How in the absence of resistance to life, love arises How our search for something can often obscure our view of it What are compensating strategies for perceived inadequacies? On our entirely normal and natural need to be seen and validated Resources Mentioned in this Episode Book: The Road Less Traveled by M. Scott Peck Book: The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People by Stephen Covey Book: Tasting Mangoes by Phil Goddard Book: It’s Not About the Food by Alexandra Amor Book: Musings on Love by Phil Goddard Mavis Karn’s letter The Secret Book: It’s That Simple by Mavis Karn Transcript of Interview with Phil Goddard Alexandra: Phil Goddard, welcome to Unbroken. Phil: My gosh, thank you for inviting me. Delighted to be here. Thank you. Alexandra: And from such a long way away. You’re the second person this week that I’ve spoken to from the southern hemisphere. So thank you. Thank you for beaming your way all the way to Canada. Phil: Only just the southern hemisphere, I think. We’re pretty close to the equator here. And yes, almost the opposite side of the world, I think. Alexandra: Like if you put a pencil through the globe? Phil: The American East Coast is pretty much, I know, from the time difference, that’s 12 hours, right? And I think ours is something like 15 or whatever says. This is what you’re saying to record. I record I’m essentially on the next day, and I recommend it. Today’s a good day. Alexandra: Isn’t that a funny thing that we’re here we are in the present moment, and yet you’re on Wednesday and I’m on Tuesday. Phil: Some deeply profound lesson in there somewhere? Sure, we can find it. Yes  Alexandra: Why don’t you tell us a little bit about your background and how you got interested in the Three Principles? Phil: So probably, like many who even listen or have come across the principles I searched, didn’t know what I was searching for. For most of my life, I’ve got a background in electronics and technology. And my first career was very much in technology. I spent 26 years in total in corporate, a lot of leadership positions. I loved those. I had my first team leader role will be part of a small team of four or five people in 1991. And I just loved that I had some responsibility, as we all have anyway, of course, but some influence as we all have as well over other people. This was a formal responsibility. So it’s really like from there that I really got, I guess, aware of my interest and curiosity in people. And, I was doing all that stuff about reading leadership books, personal development books and stuff, but it really kicked off in 1998. A spiritual exploration kicked off then when my first marriage broke down. And my brother-in-law at the time handed me M. Scott Peck’s book The Road Less Traveled. It’s a beautiful book because he opened the book with the line, “Life is difficult” and then spends the rest of the book explaining how once we can truly accept with grace, that actually becomes a little bit easier. So in answer to your question, I was on holiday in Sharm El Sheikh in Egypt in March 2004. So 19 years ago, I was reading The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People by Stephen Covey. And I haven’t gone back to this line for many years. So I might have even been quoting it incorrectly. But it doesn’t matter. Because it’s a line in the book, whic

If you experience anxiety this podcast episode will help clarify where it comes from, what it is, and how simply knowing these two things will change your anxiety for the better. You can listen above, on your favorite podcast app, or watch on YouTube. Notes, links, resources, and a full transcript are below.  Show Notes What is anxiety really trying to tell us? Where does anxiety come from? What information is anxiety sharing? What can we do about anxiety? Resources mentioned in this episode Podcast: A Little Peace of Mind Book: A Little Peace of Mind by Nicola Bird Transcript of Episode Hello explorers, and welcome back to a Q&A episode of Unbroken. This is Q&A Episode 11 and I’m so happy to have you here. My name is Alexandra Amor and these are the episodes of the podcast where I answer your questions.  So just a reminder, you can submit a question that you’ve got about unwanted habits, anything like that, to alexandraamor.com/question. There’s a form there you can fill out and I’ll be happy to answer your question on a future episode.  Today the question is, “What is anxiety?” This is a topic close to my heart, because I’ve got a funny story about my own personal experience with anxiety that I’ll get to in just a second.  Very simply, anxiety is our body’s way of letting us know that we’re caught up in some insecure thinking. That’s all it is. It’s very simple. It’s actually the opposite of what it can look like to us, which I think is what makes it such an interesting topic. It’s not a problem. And we’ll talk about why that is in just a second. It’s not something we need to manage or control. Very similarly to cravings that we have when we have an unwanted habit, anxiety is information from the wisdom and the the universal life energy that’s within all of us. So we’ll talk about that a bit more in just a second. Right now, I want to share my personal experience, just so you know, that I know whereof I speak. For years, I experienced a form of anxiety that I would describe as urgency. The really funny thing about it is I didn’t know that that’s what it was. Put a pin in that, because it’s really interesting that we misunderstand the messages that are coming from our body and our wisdom. And that was absolutely true for me. For as long as I could remember, I felt a sense of urgency. I wouldn’t say of course, I can’t say 100% of the time, but a lot of the time, especially around work, and also around things like running errands, for example. So that was one that was really puzzling for me. If I had a list of, let’s say, four errands that I needed to run, I would be out doing them and I would get to the second one, and start to feel this sense of urgency like I just needed the errands to be finished. Inevitably, probably nine times out of 10, maybe more, I would just say “Oh, forget it” about the last two errands on the list. And I would go home. That was because that information that was going on in my body, that feeling of urgency, felt like information to me that was pertinent to the situation that I was in. It was only much later once I began to explore this inside out understanding that I realized that that wasn’t what it was. And the funny thing is, I never would have described myself as an anxious person. Like I said, it was very specifically a sense of urgency that I felt. And then I was listening to Nicola Bird’s podcast, A Little Peace of Mind, probably back in 2018 and she had a guest on and I don’t remember who the guests was. But as they were having their conversation, the guest just happened to mention that urgency was the same as anxiety, it was just in a different form. I was really struck by that. It really turned my world upside down. It was one of those moments. I just thought wait, what, wait a second. Until then I had been really attracted to her podcast. I listened to it every week. And I really enjoyed it. And the funny thing was, if I had thought about it logically, I didn’t understand why that was that I was really enjoying it. And then when this guest said that thing I realized oh okay, I now I get it, I can really relate to what was going on when her guests would talk about anxiety because like the guest said, urgency is just another form of anxiety. So once I saw that I was absolutely thrilled. I’m going to go on and explain a little bit more about anxiety and that kind of thing. But the nice thing is about exploring this understanding was that what I noticed was that gradually, without really do without doing anything, really, the anxiety or the urgency that I felt, just started to fall away. I still experienced it occasionally. And I’ll talk about that in a minute, too. It just, it was so interesting to me that simply by looking in this direction, by learning

When we are struggling with an overeating habit, does that mean that we’re extra sensitive to the thinking that’s going on within us? This is the question I posed to my friend Jonelle Simms. We go deep into the source of our thinking, if we can in fact be ‘too’ sensitive to it, where our moods come from, how little control we have over them, and much more. After having a significant insight that fundamentally changed her understanding life, Jonelle left her career as a corporate trainer, curriculum developer, coach, and organizational development specialist to work in support of those in her community facing the challenges of poverty, homelessness, illness, addiction, and marginalization. She created the ProcrastinationPublications.com website in 2013 simply as a resource for herself and those interested in the Three Principles. No new resources have been added since 2018, but she keeps the site live for anyone to access. Her occasional blogs can be found on the website, with the more recent ones posted regularly on her 3P Services page on Facebook. You can find Jonelle Simms at ProcrastinationPublications.com or on her 3P Services Facebook page. You can listen above, on your favorite podcast app, or watch on YouTube. Notes, links, resources and a full transcript are below. Show Notes The relief of realizing how our experience of life is made up Viewing depression from a different perspective On the impermeable line between experience and circumstances How we are always feeling our thinking Resources mention in this episode Pransky and Associates Jack Pransky Michael Neill Barbara Patterson Mavis Karn Transcript of Interview with Jonelle Simms Alexandra: Jonelle Sims, welcome to Unbroken. Jonelle: Thank you, Alexandra. Alexandra: It’s nice to see you. Jonelle: Nice to see you, too. Alexandra: Today is going to be a little bit different. I’ll just explain to the listeners that it’s going to be less of an interview and more of a conversation since you and I are friends. And I had this subject come up that I was interested in.  So before we jump into that, why don’t you tell us about your background, how you got interested in the principles. Jonelle: I’m somewhat retired right now. But my background was in training and people development. And for a long time, I spent learning how to fix myself and other people through self-help. But I still suffered a little bit from ongoing depression.  At some point, I just eventually gave up because I got fed up with trying to fix myself. And at that time, when I came across the three principles, and I think there’s some significance in that, although who knows, they say, once you surrender, then you all of a sudden, you see things that you didn’t see before, so or when the student’s ready, the teacher appears.  But I wasn’t looking so I stopped reading books, I stopped doing all of that stuff. And I just happened to come across a blog of a former manager that I used to work for. And she mentioned working with someone else that I knew. And they were working with these people called the Pranskys.  I knew everything about self-help but I’d never heard of Pransky before. So I just googled their name. And I came across this thing called the Three Principles movie site, which doesn’t exist anymore, it’s stored on another website. Anyway, I just watched a couple of the videos, Syd Banks and George Pransky, Linda Pransky, and then Jack Pransky.  And it was about an hour in probably watching them and thinking how unprofessional the videos were like, they’re just, these people having these conversations. I just was snickering, or they’re laughing at the time and are being amused by it. And at some point, I just heard Jack Pransky say: “How can we take ourselves seriously in light of the fact that we’re making it up?” I’d never heard anything like the before. I had a huge physical change from one moment before I was fully in the heaviness of my experience of life in thought. And the next moment, I was just free of it all. I realized how all my suffering had been self-created through my thinking unknowingly and innocently. And I just experienced a spiritual awakening; I felt this experience of impersonal unconditional love. And I realized, this is what God is. This is what all the ways have been pointing to throughout time. So the experience lasted about three days. And then I slowly started getting back to, how I felt before.  But since then, I’ve always had that as a North Star for me, there’s a truth in that for me that I can keep on leaning back into. And I’ve just been unwrapping that for the last 10 years since but it’s slowly realizing the next layer of personal crazy of thinking that I added to my existence that makes me suffer. So much smell I came across the principles. Alexandra: What effect

The present moment fascinates me. In the past I’ve been afraid of it. Or, at the very least, cautious about it. I’ve taken training with horses as my teachers to try to be more connected to it. Gradually, I’m beginning to see that there is nothing to fear in the present moment and that, in fact, it might hold many answers to my questions, especially about unwanted habits. Transcript of episode Hello Explorers, and welcome back to another Q&A episode of Unbroken. Today’s question is: what does the present moment have to do with ending an unwanted habit? I wanted to talk about this because I’ve been exploring the present moment a little bit more lately, and really enjoying that exploration and also have a bit of a history with being uncomfortable with the present moment. I’ll talk about that as well, toward the end of the episode.  The first thing I guess I want to say about the importance of the present moment when it comes to resolving an unwanted habit, like overeating, is: It is in the present moment that we can even just begin to notice what’s happening.  When we’re really caught up in our thinking, and which is like jumping onto a train and just getting carried along, and we can be 1000s of miles away, without even realizing what’s going on, down that train of thought. So the first thing about the present moment that’s really helpful is that it just helps us to notice just what’s happening at a very basic level. We can notice that we’re feeling the drive to overeat, we will notice that there’s some tension within us around food and eating, we will notice those sensations in our body, or we’re much more likely to notice them, when we, remember, or just simply have a moment of dropping into the present moment. The second reason the present moment is important when it comes to ending unwanted habits, is that it’s really going to help us noticing what’s going on with our thinking. First of all, we’re going to notice that we’re thinking, and that’s really helpful, because noticing that we’re thinking, enables us to see that there’s us, the observer, the intelligence of the universe that is flowing through this person. And then there is the thinking that occurs in our brains, in our brain boxes. That kind of observation is really helpful because it creates a little bit of a gap between ourselves and our thinking.  It’s so easy to get caught up in our thinking and believe everything that our brains are saying to us. And that’s just the human condition, there’s nothing wrong when we do that. There’s nothing to be embarrassed about or to feel like we’re getting it wrong, as it were. That’s just the human condition. When we’re able to recall that there is a present moment also happening, and I’m saying it that way, because I don’t want it to seem like it needs to be a practice or that this is a prescription at all, because the present moment is always there. It’s not something we need to create. It’s not something we need to manage or manufacture. It’s there with us at every moment. If we can simply remember to fall into it every once in a while, that will begin to build our awareness of how powerful it is and how helpful it can be for us. Especially when it comes to noticing the difference between the fact that we are thinking and the fact that we’re able to observe that that’s happening. The third reason that the present moment is so important to resolving an unwanted habit is that the present moment is really where wisdom, insight, fresh thinking and deeper understanding exist. So, our problem solving brains tend to live either in the future or in the past. When they’re in the future, they are innocently problem solving, anticipating problems, imagining scenarios that might happen, and then trying to figure out solutions to those scenarios, even though they don’t exist yet. How often have you had an argument with someone in your head? I do it less often now but I used to do it all the time; my brain trying to anticipate what might happen, and then create my response to that thing, even though the thing hasn’t happened yet, just as a way, and then again, innocently, our minds are just simply trying to protect us and keep us safe. So they’re very often off in the future, fearful and anxious and worried and concerned about things that haven’t even happened yet, or they’re very often in the past and thinking about how we could have done things differently, or feeling feelings that that are coming up, because of something that happened in the past. If and when we can remember to just drop into the present moment, as I said, that’s where fresh insight, fresh thinking, wisdom, all those kinds of things exist, and are available to us. And so it’s

When it comes to resolving unwanted habits, the 12 Steps of Alcoholics Anonymous have become the most popular and widespread approach. In this conversation, Greg Suchy shares some of his experience with AA and how he transitioned to the 3 Principles approach for dealing with unwanted habits and addictions. Greg Suchy spent years in the Alcoholics Anonymous program before he found the 3 Principles. Now, he helps others to find the peace of mind that is innate within them that makes addiction unnecessary. You can find Greg on Facebook. Show Notes Noticing how differently the 3 Principles view addiction and unwanted habits from a program like Alcoholics Anonymous On Bill Wilson’s belief in healthy experimentation Does peace of mind come from working through the AA steps? Or is it innate? Resources Mentioned in this Episode The Unity Church Alcoholics Anonymous Big Book Joe Bailey’s book: The Serenity Principle Dr. Amy Johnson’s book: The Little Book of Big Change Transcript of interview with Greg Suchy Alexandra: Greg Suchy, welcome to Unbroken. Greg: Thank you, Alexandra. Good to be here. Alexandra: It’s really nice to see you again. Why don’t you tell us about your background and how you found the three principles? Greg: I found myself in recovery for alcohol and other addiction issues back in 2012. And through that whole process of just seeking answers, that didn’t seem to be very easily accessible at the time, I ended up finding a group at a church that I was checking out at the time, a Unity chapel. Unity is more of an open-minded metaphysical church.  And, so it drew my attention, and I’m checking things out. And they had this new meeting. They just had three principles, didn’t even explain what it was. I felt drawn to it and showed up. This wonderful couple, Bob and Marty, that just seeing a lot of the webinars and whatnot, they just took me in and Bob especially just he pulled me aside and just like dumped all this information on me about how the three principles and how they apply to addiction and all this stuff.  And I’m sitting here thinking this is way too simple. There has to be more to it. Where are the steps, where are the requirements of how to do this and stuff. It was just so foreign to me the idea that maybe I’m already okay, that was such a foreign idea. Because, in 12 Step programs, it’s all about your disease, you’re always going to be sick, you’ll always be fighting this.  So this was, at first, it wasn’t much of a relief, just because I was thinking, this is BS. Can’t be that easy, yet simple, but in a very short amount of time, it really started just sinking in of like, a lot of the stuff I’ve experienced at times, when things were going well, and I wasn’t really reaching out to escape. I’m like, Well, what’s that about? Why is if I’m truly addicted to this thing, and it’s this disease, and something that I’ll always have to fight, then why is it there are times I don’t have to fight it? And it’s not because I wanted to not fight it if it would just happen naturally, just like when you’re driving, and maybe you’re a little frustrated or running late or something, but you come out of some trees, and suddenly there’s this gorgeous sunset.  And everything just falls away, though you just return to that place of well-being that we all have. It was just the three principals really helped put words to what I already felt. What I already knew inside but didn’t know that. I knew if that makes sense. It was there. Just how do I how do we put this into words? Alexandra: And you had been in the 12-step community for a little while before this meeting, right? Greg: Close to four years at that point. So the whole time I was feeling like there was something more, there was something else that was missing from that puzzle, there was a couple of pieces that somebody left down at some point. Alexandra: And I remember, the last time we spoke you had a mystical experience before, while you were in the 12-step program? But before you found the three principles, is that right? Greg: I did. It was I was actually exactly five months into recovery. I had gone to a meeting for Thanksgiving Day, it was just a gratitude meeting. And it was, 200 some people in a school gymnasium and everybody got 30 seconds to say what they were grateful for. And then it moved on to the next person.  It lasted about an hour and 20 minutes, hour and a half of just all these beautiful feelings and it was wonderful sharing and the energy that gratitude brings is so intense and so incredible. And when we ended the meeting and all joined hands to say our prayer as soon as I touched the people I wasn’t there in physical form anymore.  I saw the energy behind life. I saw the way that everything was one and that it’s the same energ

What is depression really? Is it a problem? Is it a sign there’s something wrong with us and our psychology? Or is it something else? In this episode, Alexandra reflects on her personal experience with depression and what she saw about the role it plays in our divine design. You can listen above or on your favorite podcast app or read the notes and full transcript below.  Show Notes Beginning with the understanding of our innate wellness Alexandra’s personal experience of depression How depression can be like sailing the ocean Why resisting any experience, including depression, only increases our suffering Can depression be seen as a safety mechanism? What is caterpillar soup and how does it relate to depression? On how the drive to overeat and depression are related Transcript of episode Welcome back, Explorers, to another Q&A episode of Unbroken. I’m your host, Alexandra Amor. Today the question is: what is depression?  It’s going to sound like initially that it doesn’t really have anything to do with resolving an unwanted habit. But the two really are tied together. And I’ll bring that together toward the end of the episode. So the first thing I need to say is I’m not a doctor. This is not a prescription, this is not a diagnosis. What I’m really going to do today is explore what depression looks like, to me based on my own personal experience. And I always, always, always want to encourage you, dear listener, to go to your own wisdom. It’s great to listen to, and to get information from, other people, of course. That’s how we learn. And then I always feel like the second step should be that we bring that home to ourselves, and see how it fits with us and see how it fits based on our own experience, and explore it with the aid of our own personal wisdom. And find out if what you’re hearing is true for you or not, it might be completely different. So I encourage that, as you’re listening to this episode. The second thing I want to say before we jump in is just that I’m talking about depression, specifically not about sadness, or grief, which I experience as being very different from depression. So that’s just something to keep in mind. We’re beginning with the premise, or understanding, that we are all being lived by a Universal Intelligence. I need to begin there because that understanding is really important to the rest of what I’m going to explore. So the same way the planets are being spun and the grass is being grown and the flowers are being bloomed, that same universal intelligence or energy is flowing through all of us. It’s innate, meaning you don’t have to create it, it’s not something you have to search for, or manage in any way. It’s just there within all of us. And that’s another important point that it’s within everyone, every single human, every single creature, I think, and living being on the planet is imbued with that Universal Intelligence. We wouldn’t say that some trees are part of nature, and some aren’t. It just doesn’t work that way. So if you think you might be the exception to that rule, that is definitely not the case. So that’s the foundation for what we’re going to explore today. And what that really looks like is that we are whole and well, always, that this wellness, that is the innate essence of who we are. So even when we’re ill, even when there’s illness within our bodies, we are still innately whole, no matter what’s going on with us physically. So given that, very often, though, depression can feel like a problem. As though something has gone wrong with us as though, there’s sand in our gas tank, that there’s something that’s broken there that needs to be fixed, especially I think, when people struggle with depression chronically. What if depression is also part of the innate Universal Intelligence that is living through all of us? So that’s what we’re going to talk about today. I’m going to share a little bit of my personal experience now, and I’m going to do that because that’s going to shine a light on what I see to be true about depression. And of course, I feel like if I hadn’t experienced depression I wouldn’t be able to talk about this. I always feel like I need to experience something personally in order to reflect on it and see if there’s any fresh thinking there about it. For example, I’ve never been a mother. I’ve never given birth. So I would never presume to speak very specifically about the experience of childbirth. But depression is something I can speak to, because I have experienced it. And I really reflected on what was happening as it was happening, because I was already learning about the three principles understanding. I experienced my first really serious bout of depre

Clare Assante knows whereof she speaks. For years she struggled with anxiety, which also created a binge eating habit. And like so many of us, she tried All. The. Things. to try to manage, control, and eliminate those struggles. Thankfully, Clare discovery the 3 Principles, which not only helped her with the anxiety and binge eating, they softened the blow when she received a potentially devastating health diagnosis. Clare Assante suffered with anxiety for 25 years; it made her world very small and she was doing less and less. She had tried many things but nothing helped long term until she came across an understanding of how the mind works that helped her to navigate life without getting caught up in all the drama. Clare is now a certified Change Coach and works with those struggling with anxiety, depression, unwanted habits, health anxiety or anything that’s making life feel like hard work.  You can find Clare Assante at BlindsidedByThought.com. You can listen above or on your favorite podcast app or read the notes, links, resources and full transcript are below. Show Notes On the difference between the other approaches Clare used to try to deal with anxiety vs. the 3 Principles Processing a devastating health diagnosis with a grounding in peace and well-being How our unwanted habits work to quiet our insecure minds How our thinking surprisingly isn’t personal On the value of living in the unknown On coaching teens about their innate resilience Resources Mentioned in this Episode Clare’s Parenting Teens More Gracefully Facebook group Dr. Amy Johnson Nicola Bird Transcript of Interview with Clare Assante Alexandra: Claire Asante, welcome to Unbroken. Clare: Hi, Alexandra. Thank you for having me. Alexandra: My pleasure.  Tell us about your background and how you got interested in the Three Principles. Clare: I was a very worried child who spent my whole childhood just worrying about things and not really knowing that was what it was. And as I got a bit older, it took hold as anxiety, really. And then, I struggled with severe anxiety for about 25 years. And it just got worse and worse. I literally tried every single possible thing that I could find and threw a lot of money at it. And, even these weird and wonderful things that you think, maybe this is the one. I did find a lot of them, a lot of the things, temporarily did the trick. I thought, “I found it found it last”, and then it was just, I think, where it just didn’t shift enough, nothing shifted enough. So then I would end up back to square one again. And then eventually, I found the three principles, which were just something completely different. Alexandra: Can you describe the difference between the two approaches that you saw? Clare: I think the main thing that I would probably describe it as is the fact that with all the other things, you’re basically trying to fix the behavior. So it felt like white-knuckling, and you’re just not really getting anywhere with that.  Whereas with three principles, you are changing something so deep within you that once it’s changed, there’s no going back. I always say it’s like when someone shows you a magic trick, and you’re completely fooled by it, and then they show you how it’s done. And then you’re like, Well, I can’t even believe in that again.  And that’s what three principles gave me. It was like having an instruction manual, to my mind, my feelings, my emotion, everything where I couldn’t look at it at the same in the same way again, it just looked completely different. And I think that’s what like, almost like a soul shift is, isn’t it? Where it’s so deep you can’t ever go back again. Alexandra: That’s such a great metaphor or analogy, that magic trick one. I love that. I haven’t heard that before. That’s awesome. Your website is called Blindsided by Thought. Tell us why you came to choose that name. Clare: So about six years ago, I was diagnosed with an eye disease. And it is something that takes hold of the cones inside of the back of the eye. I don’t know exactly how it works. But at some point, it will take my vision. Part of it, I’m not sure.  I went for just a routine eye test. They obviously saw something and sent me to the hospital. And the doctor didn’t even really tell me what it was. It’s like, oh, you’ve got this thing called retinitis pigmentosa. So that’s a bit of a mouthful and must Google that when I get home. I googled it.  And it had like blind, and I was like, that can’t be right. Surely they would have made a bit more of a facile or given me a leaflet or website to look at. But that’s what it was. So then I was thrown into this work world of the complete unknown where everything I looked at, there was no specific time scale.  Nobody could tell me when or how,

One of the misconceptions we innocently carry is that our happiness can only begin when we overcome our overeating habit and lose weight. Today I examine whether that’s true, and if not, what else might be true about our experience of an unwanted habit. Resources Mentioned in this Episode Freedom From Overeating (and other habits) online course Armchair Expert podcast episode with Ed Sheeran Transcript of the episode Hello, explorers and welcome back to another Q&A episode of Unbroken. I’m really happy you’re here.  Today I want to talk about the question: Will I be happy when I stop overeating?  I wanted to explore this a little bit because yesterday I was doing a bunch of house cleaning, and I was listening to an older episode of Armchair Expert. That’s a podcast hosted by an actor and director from the United States called Dax Shepard. And the episode I happened to choose was an older one and his guest was Ed Sheeran. Ed Sheeran, if you don’t know, is a musician from the UK. They started to talk about this really interesting thing that I wanted to share, because it ties in so beautifully with what we’re learning about the Inside-Out understanding. So at some point in the interview, Ed was sharing a story about how his biggest goal as he was growing up and learning to be a musician was to have a sold out show at Wembley Stadium. And that was a North Star that kept him going. It was very specific. It wasn’t a sold out show at any other stadium. It was specifically a sold out show at Wembley Stadium. And he talked about how that happened eventually to him when he became really popular, and he had that actual experience.  What he shared was that when it happened, and the show was over, and he walked off stage, he didn’t feel the big feeling of euphoria and a feeling of having reached the peak of the mountain, that he’d made it, that everything was great and all those things that we think that we’ll experience when we reach a very specific goal like that of his.  And then Dax Shepard shared that he had had a similar experience. And his was around money; he thought that if he earned a certain amount of money, that he would feel all those feelings of euphoria and happiness and peak of the mountain stuff. And he didn’t say it on that particular episode, but I’ve heard him talk about it before. So I’m going to add a couple of extra things in here, that he had, in his mind a very specific amount of money. When he was raised they didn’t have a lot of money. He was raised by a single mom. And they were, it sounds like, it a little bit poor. His Northstar was that if he had a million dollars in the bank then he would be happy, that would be the thing that would fix all his problems and create that sense of that peak of the mountain feeling for him.  I’ve heard him tell this story a couple of different times around this subject. He was flying from somewhere to somewhere else. And I should say DAX is a self-professed recovering alcoholic and drug addict. But at the time of this story, he was actively drinking. He had time before his flight, so he went to the airport bar and had as many drinks as he could get into himself, before he had to go to his gate. And then he had an epiphany.  He realized that there he sat – I believe the story is he was he had been at one acting job, and he was flying to go to another one, so his dream of being a working actor had come true, and he literally had a million dollars in the bank. He had worked enough that that was the amount that was in his bank account. And he realized he was more miserable than he had ever been.  So I reflected on this, after listening to that episode, and was thinking about it last night, and I realized these stories are such a good example of the things that I talk about and that we explore here on this podcast. There’s a few different things I want to reflect on and point to as well.  The first is that what both of stories point to really accurately is that our experience doesn’t come from the outside-in, it comes from the inside-out.  You’ve probably got examples where you’ve heard famous people or rich people say the exact same thing: they have a goal of owning a big house or owning a certain number of hobby cars, or going on certain vacations, being able to do certain things. And they realize that when they do that, it doesn’t make a difference to their good feelings about themselves, just like Dax and Ed said. And so I just really love it that those examples and all the other ones we hear really do point to the fact that our experience comes from the inside-out. If it came from the outside-in, then in both those cases, Dax and Ed would have had all the really great feelings that they anticipated that they would have. The reason I bring this up is because I’m going to circle back aroun

When it comes to resolving a relationship with food, there are two factors involved: our bodies and our thoughts. These two brilliant systems work together and getting to know them both more intimately can help us find peace with unwanted habits. Becs Steel is both a registered nutritional therapist and a rewilding guide so we dive deep into this subject and explore how both our thoughts and the feelings in our bodies affect our ability to eat well. Becs Steele works with her clients to empower them to regain confidence and vitality through diet and coaching. Her areas of interest are mental health, anxiety, depression, hormones & weight loss. She is a registered nutritional therapist and a coach. You can find Becs Steele at BWellNutrition.co.uk You can listen above or on your favorite podcast app or read the notes, links and resources below. A full transcript is also below.  Show Notes On what rewilding is and how it informs Becs’ coaching and nutrition practice The importance of connecting with our bodies Do you know that you are the safe space? On the twin drivers of overeating: emotion and thought How understanding that life works from the inside-out helps with parenting Resources Mentioned in this Episode Dr. Amy Johnson’s podcast Changeable Rohini and Angus Ross’ Rewilding Guides Program Transcript of Interview with Becs Steele Alexandra: Becs Steele, welcome to Unbroken. I’m really happy to be talking to you today.  Why don’t you tell us a bit about yourself, your background, and how you got interested in the three principles? Becs: It was probably about ten years ago now. I had my daughter, and I was working. And I thought, actually, I just really want to retrain in something that I’m passionate about.  So I studied nutrition. And that took four years because I had babies in between and things. And I then thought, as I started practicing nutrition, there’s more to it than just nutrition. There’s more than just giving people the perfect diet and sending them on their way and seeing them maybe once and then in six weeks’ time. And it was around that time that I found the principles I was in quite a similar understanding, actually, with a couple in America that I was listening to. Then somehow I stumbled across Amy Johnson’s podcast, Changeable. And I listened to an episode on that. And suddenly, I just saw things so differently, even though I’d been in a very similar understanding for a very long time and had quite deep experiences.  This was like, wow, I’ve seen something on a whole new level around our thinking, and how everything is thoughts and how our world is created through our thinking. And, then I thought, I actually really want to combine nutrition with that. But I didn’t feel ready because I felt like I wasn’t entrenched enough in the three principles. And then, about two years ago, did Rohini’s Rewilding Guides program. And that for me was like that gave me the confidence to then bring it into my practice. Alexandra: Oh, nice. What does rewilding mean to you? Maybe you could explain that to us, what that word means, and how it affects the work you do? Becs: I loved Rohini’s program because it was like embracing all of us, all parts of us, the hidden parts that we’d kept small or hidden away because they were not okay, the parts of us that maybe weren’t allowed to be expressed as we were children or anger. I never saw myself as angry, being able to be angry or express it in a healthy way. Even though it would rise up in me it was like that wasn’t okay or being sensitive. The parts that we say are not okay, I found that on the training it was like, well, actually, all of my experience is okay. And I can start to express these parts of me that I have suppressed for so long. So that was really eye-opening for me, that program. And then I started to bring that understanding into my practice, to see how people really do keep these parts of themselves under wraps, really, and how they can affect all their areas of their life. But they’re not aware of how they are. So for my practice, it’s really about bringing people much more aware of their bodies, because I think what happens is that we disconnect from our bodies. A lot of people, not everyone, but a lot of people disconnect. And that’s through even as a child have not being able to express your emotions, being told to be quiet or have this biscuit. This will calm you down.  Go and play outside or distract, ignore. So, these are subtle ways we are not allowed to express ourselves. And maybe disconnect from the body because there’s the things that going on in us these feelings and emotions and sensations, that we’re not allowed to feel, we’re not allowed to express it in a healthy way.  And actually, over time, people start to just disconnect from their e

When it comes to breaking unwanted habits we’re up to our eyeballs in understanding. Why then do we struggle to change? In this Q&A episode, Alexandra answers Carmen’s question about her habit, what she knows and understands, and what else there is to see. You can listen above or on your favorite podcast app or read the transcript below. Transcript of episode Hello, explorers, and welcome to a Q&A episode of Unbroken. I’m your host, Alexandra Amor. And I’m super excited today because I have my very first question from someone other than myself. So I’ll get to that in just a second.  If you would like to submit a question about resolving unwanted habits, you can do that just like this person did today at alexandraamor.com/question, and I would love to hear from you.  Today’s question is from Carmen. And here’s what she says:  After 7 to 10 days of eating reasonably and being conscious, I always have three to four days of falling back into my old behavior. Even though I’m aware that it is just my thinking, and that I am thinking, I still prefer to eat all the sugary foods and overeat. Why is this? I am completely conscious, and still put eating too much and the wrong things over losing weight and eating healthy. I know that this is not bad. And I try not to judge myself. But I just think it would be better and much easier to stick to good eating instead of de motivating myself over and over again. After all, I want to eat healthier because of an insight. So how can I forget about that every so often. And then she sent a couple of little points of clarification about her eating. So she said:  I don’t restrict myself, I try to eat less than before, by only eating sugar every second day. But I still eat enough. I don’t skip meals, and I eat bread, pasta, etc, whatever I feel like.  And she also says:  Even when I am completely at peace, and at my home base and connected to myself, it can still happen that I go and buy chocolate or cookies, and then eat until they are all gone.  Thank you so much Carmen for your question. I really, really appreciate it.  I want to address a couple of really, really juicy topics that are here in your question. This is such a great question. And I love it so much. So let’s jump in.  The first thing I want to address is in the early part of your email here actually, in the first paragraph, one of the really interesting things you say is, “…even though I am aware that it is just my thinking.” This brings us to a really important point about the difference between understanding and insight. You do mention that you have had an insight later in the email. But I want to start here with this clarification. We would say you’ve got under some understanding, which is fantastic. And I really feel like you’re really headed in the right direction. That you’re experiencing your thinking. So that’s really great. And I’m thrilled.  What you need now is more insight.  You said you’ve had at least one insight about food or about your eating habits. But what that question that you put forward points to is that you need more insights.  I want to talk about that and about the difference between understanding and insight.  The example that I thought of is learning to drive. I remember that when I was learning to drive what they had us do first of all, before we even got in the car, was I had to read kind of a an education book about driving. I also had to go to a class, it might have been more than one day. And I had to take a written test at the Department of Motor Vehicles, or whatever it was called at the time I was in Alberta, and do that written test. And if I passed that, then I could have my learner’s permit, and I could start to actually get behind the wheel of a car. When that happened, when the second part of that happened, and I did get behind the wheel of the car, that was a completely different experience to the learning and the understanding that I had about driving before I actually got in the driver’s seat. So it’s the same subject, but two very different experiences that I had.  When I got behind that driver’s seat, suddenly it was it was just very real. There I was, I could press the gas, the car would go, I could press the brake, it would stop. There were other cars whizzing by all that kind of stuff.  What I’m pointing to in that example, is the difference between understanding and insight. So, that example it’s a little clunky because insight isn’t always mechanical. We’re not doing something physically physical. But it gives you a good idea, I hope anyway, about how it really feels in our body when we understand something logically, and clinically, versus when we have an insight, and suddenly, everything just becomes cl

In January 2023 I was delighted to spend two days in the hills above Malibu, California with Cassandra Ogier and three beautiful horses. Those two days were powerful; they taught me about my energetic boundaries, the easily accessible (but often overlooked) quality of presence about my being, and that when it comes to experiencing emotions and other energy in my body, there is nothing to be afraid of. I am so pleased to have Cassandra on the show this week to share how she weaves the 3 Principles in with her equine guided empowerment work. Cassandra Ogier is a respected member of the Equine Guided Education & Equine Therapeutic communities. Her experience spans over 15 years as a leader in the development of horse-based personal reflection and educational programs.  She is a Certified Equine Guided Educator and a seasoned mentor and guide. Her approach to Equine Guided Empowerment® through immersion in the living intelligence of horses and nature, breaks new ground in partnering with horses rooted in the concept of free beings, horses and humans, joining together in partnership to achieve awareness, insight and understanding. You can find Cassandra Ogier at TheReflectiveHorse.com and on Instagram @TheReflectiveHorse. 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.  Show Notes Learning about innate well-being after burnout and a cancer diagnosis How horses reflect the flowing, temporary nature of life How nature helps us to be in the present moment, and be in our bodies, which helps to connect us with our innate well-being Why connecting to our bodies creates space for insight Resources Mentioned in this Episode Moved by Wonder, Living in Awe wild horse retreat with Cassandra and Natalie Benway Other events at The Reflective Horse Sydney Banks’ books Dicken Bettinger’s website Natasha Swerdloff’s website Rohini Ross’s website Transcript of Interview with Cassandra Ogier Alexandra: Hi, Cassandra, welcome to Unbroken. Cassandra: I’m really happy to be here. Alexandra: I’m so happy to have you here. I should have said your last name as well. It’s Cassandra Ogier.  Why don’t you start by just telling us a bit about your background. And then how you found the principles. Cassandra: I’m an equine guided educator, which means that I work with horses to help support human development, which I will go into a little bit more. But my background is as a coach in that modality, and also as a registered three principles practitioner, and I run a company called The Reflective Horse. And we can share a little bit more about that the reflection of the horses and our and our true nature.  I also run a teaching program that expands the reflected horse program out to other facilitators being able to also share equine guided empowerment, as I call it. And it is very much an inside out based coaching modality that we thread all the way through the mastery teaching program. Alexandra: That’s great. And how did you come across the principles? Do you remember? Cassandra: Yes, I remember really clearly. And when I was just contemplating your questions, and thinking where did it sort of all begin for me, and so the actual point of me, coming to the principles, what I was thinking about sharing was that it was like a developing a presence for me, over years and years. The horses at the beginning of my life really acted as a very solid presence in my life, when there was a lot of chaos and confusion, and not great things happening in my childhood. I was always able to go to the horses. And what I obviously realized, as I as I grew up, was that they were fully present. I wasn’t that great with humans, around them. And I didn’t like school, and I really was, pushing against all of that. But really, my career ended up being present for humans.  I worked for 10 years, or a little more than 10 years, in the film industry, in England, in the casting department. So putting actors in theater and, and TV and film. It was really about being present for people, and helping them to understand that things weren’t personal, because obviously, in that industry, you’re being judged and you’re being assessed, and all of this thing. And as a creative person who was bringing in the type of person we wanted for a role, within that I just did a lot of, I suppose, coaching in that way of, helping people to understand it’s not about you, this is just the circumstances.  Then I had three sons, and that is all about presence, and bringing up children, and, having that flexibility, and then as my children grew up, I got reunited with horses. And I actually was running a very successful business in equine therapy or equine guided education. I had a little bit of a distorted view of what being in servi

The pressure that comes from cravings can feel almost unbearable. It can be so powerful that it distracts us from other areas of our life. Is there a way to handle this? In this Q&A episode, Alexandra addresses this concern, talks about why it exists and what we can do about it. 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.  Transcript of episode Hello explorers, and welcome to another Q&A episode of Unbroken. I’m your host, Alexandra Amor.  A reminder that I’d love to hear from you. I’d love to hear your questions about an overeating habit or another habit that you’re struggling with. You can submit that your you can submit your question to alexandraamor.com/question. The question today that I’m going to address is this:  When I feel a craving, it feels like life and death. How do I stop that?  So this, again, is a question from my struggle with overeating. And I hope it’s helpful for you to talk about this. When I experienced food cravings, they did really feel like life and death, they felt like I was possessed, it felt overwhelming in my body. Every once in a while, I would bump into someone really unkind who, if I was explaining that feeling, they would say something like, well just put your fork down, like, what’s the big deal? Just stop going to the fridge.  But the driving feeling that I experienced, wasn’t one that obviously was that easy to deal with, to battle to set aside and just pretend that it wasn’t there. Now I know enough to know that that feeling is part of our divine design, and that it was trying so hard to get my attention. And that’s why the feeling felt so strong. And I’m grateful for it. I’m grateful for how strong it was. I’m grateful for how persistent it was because it finally did get my attention.  As I began to explore this understanding, the Inside-Out Understanding, and began to see what those cravings were really about that’s when they began to fall away.  Let’s go back to when they feel like life and death, which you may have experienced as well. I’ll just say a little bit more about what that felt like, in the hope that this might resonate with you. It felt like the craving, like it was on my mind and in my attention. If I was sitting watching a TV program and had a craving for potato chips, let’s say, I could think about very little else until I dealt with that, until I went and got the potato chips.  I could try to ignore it. But it did take a lot of energy to do that. And it often felt like the other things that were going on in my life, the volume went down on them, because I was having to pay so much attention to the craving in me and trying to fight with it. And then eventually I would just give up, of course, it was too hard. It took too much energy. It really felt compulsive. And again, that’s for a reason that feeling is trying to get our attention.  So I want to say a couple of things about this.  One is that when we feel that driving need, it’s not a comment on our moral failing, or our lack of willpower, like I talked about in last week’s episode, or our inability to take care of ourselves.  It’s not a comment on those sorts of things. And of course, that’s how we interpret them, right? We’re trying to get rid of the drive to overeat, we’re trying to stop it from coming around. We’re trying to circumvent it with all the tools and strategies that we use. And when we fail at doing that it can be really devastating. I know for sure that I had 30 years of feeling like a failure, feeling like I had this one task that I wanted to do which was just to stop my cravings or overpower them with my will. I failed and I failed again and again and again for all those years. And in one way, failing was a relief, because then I wasn’t using all that energy to fight the craving. But then of course, on the other hand, it felt terrible because I was falling down on this goal that I had set myself.  So yeah, a lot of kind of complex and, and feelings that were in opposition to one another. And we all know that cycle. I’ve even seen it described in some of the old paradigm psychological texts that I studied in relation to trying to heal this problem. That the tension of the craving builds up and up and up. And then there’s relief that comes with giving in to the craving, and then recrimination starts. And that goes up around in the cycle. And then the whole thing starts all over again. I’m very familiar with that. And I suspect you are too.  So that was the first thing that I wanted to say that, that when we can set aside any thoughts and feelings that we have beating ourselves up for fighting cravings and then failing and giving in to t

Innocently, when we are struggling with an overeating or binge eating habit, we can come to believe that peace of mind exists outside ourselves. We can believe that ‘if’ or ‘when’ certain scenarios happen – like, when we stop overeating or binge eating – only then we will feel peaceful and begin to love and appreciate ourselves. Today coach and podcaster Beka Elle is here to share that, actually, peace of mind and feelings of well-being exist within us all the time. We cannot ever be separated from them. And it is when we lean into this idea that we begin to experience lasting change. Beka Elle helps people come home to themselves. Whether it’s feeling stuck with unwanted habits and anxiety, or feeling a lack of purpose, she points people back to their own innate wisdom. she is passionate about helping people find freedom from their limiting beliefs. You can find Beka Elle at BekaElle.com and on Instagram @beka.elle.coaching 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.  Show Notes How are thinking is so changeable yet our essential nature is constant On the different approach the inside-out understanding takes to healing issues with food and overeating or binge eating How our minds innocently try to optimize our experience of life Why holding onto thought patterns doesn’t set us free Learning to welcome all feelings and how that improves our relationship with food and ourselves Resources Mentioned in this Episode Dr. Amy Johnson Beka’s post: Guilt around food choices isn’t helpful Beka’s post: The gift of bad habits The Lived Podcast Beka’s monthly free Soul Huddles group Transcript of Interview with Beka Elle Alexandra: Welcome to unbroken Becky Gagnon. Beka Elle: Thank you so much, Alexandra. Alexandra: I’m so glad to talk to you.  Why don’t you start out tell us a little bit about your background and how you got interested in the Inside-out Understanding  Beka: I came into this understanding out of desperation actually. I struggled for about 12 years with cycles of eating disorders, which started out as innocent dieting in my teenage years. And then that turned into overly restrictive dieting, where I lost too much weight. And then my body fought back and I became a binge eater. Then I became a bulimic, when I felt like I couldn’t get the binge eating under control, but I still felt like I needed to lose weight. So I struggled with that. And then there was depression and anxiety in there too, sort of just this overall feeling of feeling lost, not feeling like myself, whatever that meant. Feeling as one feels when they’re just over identify with their own mind. Since the mind changes like the weather, it felt like I changed with the weather and just feeling like I didn’t know why I was here. I always felt like I needed to lose weight or be better in some way, or prove my worth in some way. So I started with that for about 12 years and tried a whole bunch of things from traditional therapy to different like spiritual understandings, techniques, different types of diets. I thought that if I was just addicted to sugar or something or some food and if I eliminated that, then all the problems would go away. But of course, none of that really worked. I happened to stumble upon Dr. Amy Johnson, just from searching on Google, for somebody to help me with binge eating. And I ended up doing coaching with her for I forget how long the package was, I think maybe nine months or something. And slowly but surely, I just began to see things in a totally new way. Then I trained with her to be a coach. And now I coach people to help with those same things and more. Alexandra: You said something really interesting in there. Well, you said a few interesting things. You said your “body fought back with the binging”. Can you say a bit more about what you see there? Beka: The way this looks to me is, our body is really wise, and wants to keep us alive. And so when we restrict too much, the mind interprets that as a period of starvation or restriction. And there’s some brain science that points back to as we evolved the mind would become obsessed with food after periods of non restriction, so that if you saw a bunch of berries, or whatever, you would eat all of them in order to be able to stay alive for for any upcoming periods of starvation. So that’s how I see how my brain reacted to that, and just how brains react to dieting in general. I see this cycle with a lot of my clients, too, it’s where it’s just like, anytime there’s like some restriction or they are trying to lose weight. They’ll go on some diet that’s either eliminating a ton of different kinds of foods or just not enough, they’re trying to eat under a certain number o

Why are diets so hard to stick to? Why do we fail more often than we succeed? The answer comes down to the brilliant way we are designed and when we work with this design, instead of against it, that’s when our unwanted habits begin to fall away. Transcript of episode Hello explorers! Welcome to this Q&A episode of Unbroken. I’m your host, Alexandra Amor. Today I have a question for you. First I want to say to please let me know if you have questions about letting go of unwanted habits. You can do that at alexandraamor.com/question and I’ll answer your question on an upcoming Q&A episode. I’ll be happy to do that. Today’s question is, again, from me, back when I was really struggling with an unwanted over eating habit. I can only ever stay on a diet for three days. What’s wrong with me? This was something that I really struggled with, and you might as well, which is why I’m posing it. This question of willpower, and how we’re supposed to be able to have the kind of willpower that enables us to circumvent, I guess, I would say, an overeating habit. Get over it, get under it, get around it. We live in a culture that’s very willpower oriented, I’ve noticed, in the diet and weight loss and letting go of unwanted habits industry. The other thing I noticed was that a lot of places or people that want to support us to let go of an unwanted overeating habit, at least my experience was, that what they were doing was giving me alternative ways to have willpower. What I mean by that is the things that we try, for example, counting food points, having a maximum number of points that you’re supposed to be eating every day, and then assigning each food a number of points and adding those up. Or restricting the kind of food that we eat. So only eating certain things, not eating other things. All those kinds of examples are, to me now looking back, it looks like ways of bolstering our ability to have willpower, and we’re trying to strengthen our willpower. In fact, one of the healing-your-overeating-habit programs that I tried was one where it was all around the science of willpower. And getting ahead of how much willpower we have every day. The person who created this, felt that or saw in the psychology and science literature, that we have a limited amount of willpower every day. It’s like a gas tank. And when we run out, according to this theory, that’s when we fall back on over eating habits. And so the idea was that you did a bunch of stuff to make sure that your willpower tank didn’t get that empty. I remember reading that book on an airplane going to Ontario to visit my family many years ago, probably in 2015 or 2016. And thinking, oh, yeah, this is it. This really makes a lot of sense, which it did. Innocently, I grasped onto it and gave it a try. And maybe like you I lasted three days, and then it all fell apart. Maybe a week at the most. So here’s my answer to why that happens. And the first thing I want to say is that you’re not a failure, if that’s happened to you. And this isn’t about a lack of moral character on your part or even a lack of willpower. It’s really not about that. It can look that way. And of course it does and the diet industry really tells us that there’s a lot going on in that willpower area. But what I’ve discovered through the exploration of this inside-out understanding is that the answer doesn’t lie there at all. When we’re trying to apply willpower to overcoming an overeating habit, or any other habit, we’re trying to circumvent the way that we’re built, the innate and divine engineering that’s within all of us. In a way, the reason we aren’t able to do that, the reason we fail very often at these things, is because you can’t do that. You can’t fight Mother Nature. The way that we’re designed is so much more powerful than our little brains can organize. What is really going on, is that with a craving, with the feelings that we have about food and the drive to overeat, that’s a signal from our body. And it’s trying to tell us something. It’s like the check engine light in a car, or I also use the example of a flagger on a on a road. It’s not something you want to ignore. And what I teach is that when we look in that direction, when we see the wisdom of that signal, it’s really just a signal, that’s what cravings are, from our divine engineering. That’s when the need for the check engine light or the flagger on the road goes away. But if when we try to circumvent that with willpower, with increasing our willpower, and as I said, get around or over or under our natural desires to overeat it’s like trying to hold back the tide with a beach towel. I think that’s how I said it in my book. It’s like trying to stop a storm, a big rainstorm, or a s

Jason Shiers was my coach for several months in 2022. It was through our work together that I felt I reached a tipping point in my understanding of why my overeating habit existed and was then able to see it transform and release. Jason has been through it. He can share so deeply about the transformation that comes from being in this inside-out conversation because he was on a search for years to ease his own suffering and find solutions for his addictions and unwanted habits. It was only when he found the 3 Principles that he found answers to the questions that had been haunting him for years. Jason Shiers is a Certified Transformative Coach with 25 years of digital creation helping people free themselves from suffering. He has been been working with people and helping to change lives for as long as he can remember in one way or another, while going through his own change, and learning about how the mind works. You can find Jason at WideWorldCoaching.com and on Facebook @jvswwc. 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.  Show Notes How relentless searching for answers is a sign of our innate well-being Using personal development as another part of the search for peace How the heaviest thing we ever carry is our thoughts The life-changing discovery that we are never broken On addiction being part of the body’s innate intelligence Why behavioural change is the end result, not where we start when we’re trying to change an unwanted habit How is this approach to healing addiction different than the 12 steps? Resources Mentioned in this Episode Jason’s podcast: Misunderstandings of the Mind Michael Neill: The Secret to Effortless Change Jason’s article about addiction and interview with Dr. Bill Pettit Transcript of Interview with Jason Shiers Alexandra: Jason Shiers, welcome to Unbroken. Jason: Thank you. Excited to be here. I’m wondering what we’re going to talk about.  Alexandra: I’m excited to have you here. And I’m turning the tables on you because you have your own podcast about this understanding called Misunderstandings of the Mind. I’ll link to that in the show notes. Why don’t you tell us a bit about your background and how you got interested in the three principles? Jason: Well, so long story. I’ve  shared it today, in a different way, this morning on another thing that I was on, and it always it gives me a sense of gratitude, to go back sometimes and look at the chaos and the craziness in the things that I did. My life was very full of chaos, and chaos to me means everything that I could do to avoid myself, in the extremities, with drugs and alcohol, and bodies and weight loss and extreme diets and seeking, searching for myself: money, sex, relationships, everything, gambling, prostitution, anything I could, at the time, just to escape myself. I started off with a horrific childhood; the tragic loss of my dad when I was young, and then using and medicating, finding a way to cope with my internal world using something externally. I didn’t really care too much what it was, over the years. So, drugs, alcohol, food, relationships, they were all my coping mechanisms. Now, they were are what I used to escape myself. And then, for many years I was in the field of psychology, as a traditional psychotherapist, and there was more seeking in different ways, but still seeking. Seeking myself unknowingly, in psychological concepts and qualifications and status is because it really, like if this thing here that I called Jason needs to be someone in the world, it has to get things, like things being anything outside of myself, status, money, titles, letters after my name, qualifications, credentials, recognition, I thought I needed those things to be okay. It was probably one of the reasons why I did so many qualifications in the psychological world, and they were all in service of finding happiness, but none of them contributed to that. I did all those things, I completed them at the end, every time I felt deflated and thought, “Well, maybe it’s the wrong way to another qualification.” Every time it never did what I thought it was going to do. For me, it didn’t give me that endless confidence or real belief in myself or any of those things. There’s so much to that story, the endless seeking with weight, I know, we’ve talked about this. To the point of having six or seven cosmetic surgeries to change my body on the outside, hoping that somehow it would make me happy on the inside. Even twice waking up in a third world country having been put to sleep and had a surgery. I was thinking about that today, how desperate did I have to be to go to a third world country? Not necessarily a backstreet hospital. It felt pretty safe but it was a cheap hospital to be put to sl

The title of Alexandra Amor’s book about healing the drive to overeat is It’s Not About the Food. How is it possible that a ‘problem’ related to eating too much can not be about the food we consume? 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.  Transcription of the Episode Hello, and welcome back explorers to another question and answer episode of Unbroken. I’m your host, Alexandra Amor. I’m here today with a question from early on in my exploration of this understanding. If you would like to submit a question to be answered here on the show, please go to alexandraamor.com/question and you’ll see a little form there. You can submit your question to me using that, and I’ll be happy to answer it. Today, the question is actually about the title of my book, It’s Not About the Food, which you see here behind me. And why is it called that? Why is overeating not about the food? To answer that, I’m going to tell you a little bit of a story, first of all, kind of an analogy. For years, I’ve had this weird little pain in my mid upper arm. So for those of you just listening it’s sort of between my elbow and my shoulder midway, on the outside. And it definitely doesn’t feel like nerve pain. It’s more like a kind of a pinching feeling when I make certain motions. I would say about 10, or 12 years ago, I went to massage therapy and I explained to the girl, and she got me to point to exactly where the pain was. And then she worked on that pain for, I want to say two or three appointments. And it really didn’t move the needle at all. And so I kind of left it. It’s not debilitating, it’s not interfering with my quality of life at all. I just notice it sometimes and it would be nicer if it wasn’t there. So I just kind of left it alone, because we weren’t really making any progress. Then a week or two ago, I was at a different massage therapist and she was asking me what we wanted to focus on that day. And almost as an afterthought, I said to her, “Oh, and also, by the way, I have this weird pain here in the middle of my upper arm between my elbow and my shoulder.” I pointed to it, and instantly, I mean, right away, she said, “Oh, yeah, that’s because your rotator cuff muscles are really stiff and tight.” I got her to explain what rotator cuff was. And it’s apparently a series of muscles kind of around your shoulder. And they have something to do with your with our shoulder blades. I can’t explain it entirely. I’m not a massage therapist. So what she did then was she worked on those muscles a little bit during that session. And she gave me some exercises to do on my own at home. I’ve been doing those; stretching my arms and doing various things to relieve or release some of the tension of that rotator cuff muscle. And this pain in my arm is actually improving. After the massage session, I got her to explain what that was. And she said what it’s called is referral. So there’s something that can happen in one part of the body and it will refer to a different part of the body. So that’s exactly what was going on here. That rotator cuff muscle, according to this massage therapist, is not connected in any way to my the middle of my upper arm. There aren’t any nerve paths that lead from one to the other. The muscles aren’t connected directly. And yet, this tension in my rotator cuff muscles is causing this pain in my arm. What it is, she said, is a tendon that’s being pinched between two I think she said two muscles. I walked away from that and thought you know what, that’s really interesting because there’s a real parallel with this understanding that we’re exploring, the Inside-Out understanding. And it’s this and it’s and it’s exactly why my book is called, It’s Not About the Food. And that is that when we experience food cravings and the kind of pressure and drive that causes us to develop an over eating habit or any other kind of habit, the drive the impulse the craving for cigarettes or alcohol or gambling or whatever it is. We innocently like the first massage therapist I mentioned, we go in, and we try to address the problem where it exists. So that original massage therapist massaged my upper outer arm, because she thought that that’s where the problem was. And that’s exactly what we do when we have these habits; we use willpower to try to prevent ourselves from participating in our habit, we abstain from the things that we feel we have a habit around, or in the case of food, we try to curb our eating and constrict and control and manage it. I talked about that in a previous episode about the beach ball and trying to manage keeping the beach ball under the

It seems that in our present-day culture we have an attitude that our bodies are something to be conquered, mastered, and controlled. We object to the feelings in our bodies, often to the point that we mistrust everything about them. However, what my guest today, Tania Elfersy, points out is that our bodies are wise and that we can always rely on that wisdom no matter what we’re going through, be it menopause symptoms or food cravings. Tania Elfersy has a passion for revealing rarely discussed truths about women’s life-cycle events. She is a transformative coach, speaker, writer and educator. Since 2015, Tania has been supporting women through perimenopause and menopause, allowing them to reach natural symptom relief, and a greater sense of well-being. You can find Tania Elfersy at TheWiserWoman.com and on Facebook @TheWiserWoman. 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.  Show Notes The power of insight to create physical changes Who is the wiser woman within? How the body shares its wisdom through discomfort Why having a ‘lighter experience of life’ matters to our experience of health How our bodies only ever express love for us Resources Mentioned in this Episode Tania’s book: The Wiser Woman’s Guide to Perimenopause and Menopause Eckhart Tolle Michael Singer Transcript of Interview with Tania Elfersy Alexandra: Tania Elfersy, welcome to Unbroken. Tania: So happy to be here. Alexandra: I’m so happy to have you here. Tell us a little bit about yourself and how you came to be interested in the Inside-Out understanding? Tania: I am originally from the UK. I live in Israel. I’ve lived here for almost 30 years. I am in my mid 50s, which is significant considering what I do for a living, which is supporting women through midlife change, through perimenopause and menopause, helping them have a much lighter experience of this fascinating time. I am coach and author, speaker, educator, trying to bust through the myths of women’s health, and also the misunderstanding that we have around our emotional spiritual health, mental health as well. I’ve been around the 3 principles since 2015. I was sucked into them after a very quick experience of an insight. I was a lucky one that quite soon after I discovered the principles, I had a major life changing insight, just around the nature of thought. At the time, I was experiencing a lot of perimenopause symptoms, physical, emotional, night sweats, two weeks of PMS, and lots of migraines, skin problems, bit of hair loss, all kinds of things just to make your life joyful. And I had this insight around thought and within days all my symptoms cleared up. That made me see that there was something very interesting in this inside-out understanding. Since then I’ve been exploring it more and more and sharing it in the context of women’s health. Alexandra: I love that story. And it’s such an interesting one because it just happened so quickly for you. I occasionally mention that as an example of how we just never know when an insight is going to strike and how it will impact us. Tania: Yes, I was in the bathroom. I wasn’t anywhere special. So anyone who had the idea that we need to be under the right moon, or something like that, that wasn’t my experience of it. I read certain people that have a similar understanding like Eckhart Tolle and Michael Singer. And I was impacted by this whole nature of the observer of your thoughts. So I’d already seen something around that. But that hadn’t changed anything in how I felt about my health, or I was experiencing my health or other things in my life. And then just really getting to know the principles that was sort of the major change point for me. Alexandra: Nice. So let’s maybe kind of start at a foundational level. Your website is called The Wiser Woman. Tell us why you chose that name. And who that is? Tania: It’s not me. I mean, she’s in me, and she’s in you. But it’s not only me. When I was getting to understand more about the principles and the concept of Mind, I felt that that term was a bit misleading, because it makes us think of what’s going on going on up here in our head. And I was seeing the innate intelligence throughout the body and I was trying to find a way to describe that innate intelligence. The best thing that that came up for me was the wiser woman because it really felt like there was me with my little mind and my little thoughts, trying to run the show, and then there was something much deeper, and it is an intention within me that I could actually relax into it when I remembered. And that whole concept of a guided self or a guided intelligence, or God, some people, I’m sure we would rather call it or a divine intelligence, however we want to call it whatever feel

Traditionally, we think of our unwanted habits as problems. They need to be fixed and eliminated. They are a sign of a flawed character. What if that isn’t true? What if we are designed perfectly and our unwanted habits are pointing toward that innate health? Transcript of Episode Hello Explorers! Welcome back. This is episode three of the Q&A episodes of Unbroken podcast. I’m your host, Alexandra Amor. As I mentioned last week, what I wanted to do in this first few episodes that I’m calling Q&A episodes is answer questions that I had at the beginning of the exploration of this inside-out understanding. If you would like to pose a question, please do that, I’d love to answer your questions. And you can do that at alexandramor.com/question. So please shoot me an email of using the form on that page and I’ll be very happy to answer your question on a future Q&A episode. As I mentioned last Monday, what I want to talk about today is our divine design. So the question that I might have posed a few years ago would have sounded something like this: I’ve heard people say that our unwanted habits, and our cravings are actually part of our divine design, and they’re not a problem. How is that even possible? So that’s a such a great question. Thank you for asking. And here’s how it looks to me, here’s what I understand at the moment. We are as human beings, we have very what people describe in this understanding as a kind design. So we’re designed perfectly well. And we all have innate health and innate well being. And at our core, at our essence, we are peace, we are love, we are calm, and a very good feeling. One of the things that’s happening when we’re experiencing an unwanted habit, even though it can look like something like self sabotage – I mean, that was something that I felt. I must hate myself, I must be doing something terrible to myself. Why would I do that? – when I experienced my unwanted over eating habit. I would get really caught up in that kind of thinking, trying to dig down and figure out why I didn’t like myself so much that I was doing this thing that I hated. Saying it out loud, like that so succinctly, I realize now it doesn’t make any sense. But that was my innocent misunderstanding at the time. Unwanted habits that we have our never sabotage, they’re never something that we’re doing because we don’t like ourselves. We are, as human beings always, simply trying to feel better, to return to that place that we know is innate within us that that natural state of calm and peace and well being. To me, what it looks like is that the experience that we have of unwanted habits is an instinctive drive, to help ourselves to feel that way, to feel even a little bit closer to peace and calm. And because it’s so instinctive, because it’s so apparent in people all over the planet, there’s not a single group of people who don’t experience that compulsion. Everyone experiences this. When we look at that, that tells us that therefore it’s something built into our design. It’s just not a matter of our cultural upbringing, or our geographic location. It has to have something to do with the way that human beings are designed. Unfortunately, I think what’s happened in the old paradigm of psychology, which was more of a pathology based understanding, where we’re viewed as being broken in these places, and we have to be fixed, this inside out understanding or the 3 principles as it’s also known takes the opposite view. Sydney Banks articulated this back in the 1970s. Lots of other wise people have articulated it as well, he kind of pulled it all together. What he saw is that we are always innately whole, and well. And so what that leads us to see then, is that an unwanted habit a craving, is, actually it’s two things: It’s ourselves wanting to comfort ourselves and to feel those feelings of peace, which I talked about a minute ago. And then it’s a second thing as well. It took me a long time to really see this. It’s actually that feeling of craving, or what I call it the drive to overeat. That was how I felt that. It was a really unwanted feeling. And it was a tremendous amount of pressure. The only thing that would relieve it would be to eat the foods that I wanted to eat. So that feeling is actually a call from our divine selves, our innate well being. All it’s doing is reminding us that we are entirely whole and entirely well, and that it’s just that we haven’t seen that for ourselves insightfully yet and fully. And, again, it can seem like quite a paradox to say that, and to hear it. I’ll just speak personally, until I started to see for myself that that was the case it really looked like my cravings, my overeating, was a problem, like it was as a serious problem that had to be fi

This is part two in our series about the book Addiction: One Cause, One Solution. My guest is Barbara Sarah Smith, who co-authored the book with my guest from Episode 1, Christian McNeill. Barbara shares about her connection to the subject of addiction recovery, why it matters to her, and how she sees addiction differently now that she understands the principles of mind, consciousness and thought that shape our human experience. Barbara Sarah Smith is retired from her work as a mental health practitioner where she worked for over 40 years in various settings including acute health care, hospice, outpatient mental health and addictions treatment.  In 2014 she was introduced to a new, principle- based understanding of mental health that has transformed her life as well as her client’s lives in extraordinary ways. Rather than a pathology based lens, she now teaches her clients about our innate emotional health and resilience. 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.  Show Notes How our past has the ability to affect us only as long as our thinking is focused on it. On the universal nature of wanting to feel better Our fluid experience of life and how that helps with addiction recovery Resources Mentioned in this Episode Book: Addiction: One Cause, One Solution Jamie Smart on subtractive psychology Book: Women Who Run With The Wolves by Clarissa Pinkola Estés You can find Barbara Sarah Smith at GiftsOfInsight.net and on Facebook @GiftsofInsight. Transcript of Interview with Barbara Sarah Smith Alexandra: Barbara Sarah Smith, welcome to Unbroken. Barbara: Thank you. Lovely to be here with you. Alexandra: I’m so happy to have you here. This is part two of our series on Addiction: One Cause, One Solution, which is the book that you co-authored with Christian McNeill. So I’m so glad to have been able to speak to the both of you. Barbara: Well, it’ll be interesting to see how this plays out. Alexandra: We were just I was just saying before we started recording, for our listeners that many of the questions today that I’m going to ask Barbara are similar to ones that I’ve asked Christian. I did that deliberately. Because I think sometimes from different voices and different perspectives, we can hear different things, they might just strike us in a different way. So that’s the reason for that.  Why don’t you tell us a little bit about your background and how you came to discover the three principles? Barbara: Okay. Well, I’m an MSW by education. And I have been in the field of social work in all different forms for 46 years, I really loved it. I had a private practice for about 45 years before coming to this. And I really loved my work, I had a very full practice, very full practice. Years ago, I really started to burn out, I thought, I’m just not sure what we’re doing here is really helping anybody because I was seeing some people for years. And it just, I just didn’t have the same feeling I wasn’t showing up in the same way. And that didn’t feel good. So anyway, very long, very long story short, a colleague of mine introduced me to the principles. Or at least she introduced me to someone who she said, could introduce us to this. And I was absolutely, first of all, very skeptical, and extremely skeptical, and, but really no clue that there was anything that was going to be different than what I already knew after 46 years in the field.  So I really didn’t want to meet with this woman who was on her when I didn’t have any interest, but they wanted me to do it. And I thought I’d be nice and do it. And when she started talking about this and used words like wisdom and common sense and intuition, it just really piqued my interest. And that sort of drew me in and it was six months off again. Maybe not. Then finally, I think very skillfully, at some point, she really recognized that something had shifted and recommended that I go for an intensive, which was the turning point for me. Alexandra: Oh, nice.  And given your background in therapy and social work, and you ran a retreat center for a while, didn’t you?  Barbara: Yes. Alexandra: Is there anything you can pinpoint that that kind of helped you to, to flip the switch to see the difference between this paradigm and the pathology related one? Barbara: Honestly, I would love to know that myself. Yeah, I don’t know. I don’t even know why I stayed with it. I don’t know. I didn’t have the money. But for some reason, I kept going back to it, I think in part because I was really, I had to keep working. So I needed to do something and I knew I couldn’t do what I was doing. So part of it may have been desperation. But I don’t know when when the tide started to turn. I’ve thought off and on. But I

When we have an unwanted habit, what action should we take to deal with it? The answer may surprise you. 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 Mentioned in this Episode Book: It’s Not About the Food Submit your question to be answered on a future episode using this form Free video series: Finding Freedom From Overeating and Other Habits Transcript of Episode Hello, explorers, and welcome back to this Q&A episode of Unbroken Podcast. I’m very glad you’re here. I’m Alexandra Amor and these are the shorter episodes on Mondays where I answer your questions. Given that this is a brand new show, and as I said last week, I don’t have any followers yet to submit questions, what I’m going to do is search back in my memory and ask the questions that I would have asked all those years ago, or several years ago. If you have a question that you’d like to submit, I’d love to hear it. Submit it to alexandraamor.com/question, and I’ll have a look at those and answer them on upcoming Monday episodes. Today, I want to answer the question: What should I do about my cravings? This was something that I was, of course, really interested in and have been interested in for the last 30 plus years until I found this understanding. As I mentioned in last week’s episode, it might be good to go back to that first Q&A episode, I talked about how when we have unwanted habits, we tend to use a lot of management strategies to deal with them. They really feel like a problem. And we really try to get our arms around them and our big intelligent brains and manage those habits. So suppress them, control them, use willpower, use whatever tactics and strategies we can to control them and deal with them. I talked about how this exploring this understanding takes a completely different approach than that. So anything that we’ve tried in the past, a diet or measuring and weighing our food, or distracting ourselves, or anything like that is really a management strategy, and we’re looking in a completely different direction. So, given all that, the short answer to the question, What should I do about my cravings is nothing. There’s actually nothing you need to do about your cravings, about your over eating, about any maybe binge eating episodes that you’re having. They’re not a problem. And that’s why there’s nothing for you to do about them. The first thing I want to say, though, is that we are divinely designed, although hardly anyone points this out to us. But we are divinely designed to return ourselves to a state of equilibrium or peace, or calm, whatever word you want to use to describe that feeling of being peaceful, being calm, being in a state of feeling very centered, and grounded. All of that stuff is innate within us. We don’t have to do anything to get ourselves back to that state. So even when we’re really riled up, feeling disregulated, feeling really upset or jangled, or like we really want to lean into using our habit, because we’ve had a really hard day, or whatever it is, it turns out, there’s actually nothing we need to do, in order to come back to a place that feels really good within us come back to a very calm, quiet, peaceful state. We are designed for that to happen automatically, our within our bodies and within our minds as well. So when our minds get really stirred up, they too are designed to automatically and without any interference from us return to a state of equilibrium. Conversely, what’s happening when where thinking about our habit and about how to control it, how to deal with our cravings, we’re adding more thinking to what’s already there. We’re stirring the pot up, shaking up the snowglobe, though we’re doing that innocently. We’re adding another layer of busy thinking sped up thinking to a situation that is already like that. So it sort of heightens that. What we actually end up doing is making our interaction with the habit, even worse than it was perhaps at the beginning. I’ll use myself as a personal example. For 30 years, I tried to fix my overeating habit using all the self help tactics and strategies that you can mention. I mean, name something and I’ve tried it. And in fact, the other the other day, I realized one of the only things I didn’t try was acupuncture. But I tried hypnosis, I tried diets, I tried meditation, and mindfulness and emotional freedom technique, and EMDR, which is that thing that you do in therapy, I held two paddles, and it supposedly does something to your brain. Talk therapy, and just on and on and on. All these what I would consider to be healthy strategies to try to curb my over overeating habit. And it only ended up getting worse. Sometimes I saw a tiny bi

What if addiction is not a disease? What if addiction is caused by the same thing that causes fights with a spouse or anxiety about air travel or suffering about school grades: Thought. In this episode, Christian McNeill and I explore how thought plays such a huge role in our attachment to (or addiction to) substances, including alcohol and drugs, and how the solution to these attachments is simply seeing how being human works. Christian McNeill is an author, coach, and former barrister and tribunal judge. She lives and works in Glasgow, Scotland. 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.  Show Notes On the life-changing insight that ended an alcohol addiction How Christian’s creativity was enhanced by sobriety Recognizing and experiencing that insight is the key to change An insight about the importance of listening to oneself Co-writing a book from 2 separate continents Why variability of moods and life experience is nothing to be worried about What is ‘subtractive psychology’ and why does it matter? Resources mentioned on the show Christian’s book is Addiction: One Cause, One Solution Joe Bailey’s book about addiction is The Serenity Principle Sydney Banks’ book: The Missing Link You can find Christian McNeill at ElementsOfWellbeing.net and on Facebook at Recovery From The Inside Out. Transcript of Interview with Christian McNeill Alexandra Amor: Welcome Christian MacNeil to Unbroken. It’s lovely to see you. Christian McNeill: Well, it’s lovely to see you too, Alexandra. Thank you very much for inviting me. I’m delighted to be here honored to be here. Alexandra Amor: Oh, my pleasure. You’re going to be my first guest actually. So even more exciting. I’m thrilled to have you here. Why don’t you tell us anything about yourself that you’d like to share about your background. And maybe when you came upon the 3 Principles. Christian McNeill: Sure. Thank you. Yes, on the one hand, I have a background, a career in law, and I was a lawyer for a long time. And unbeknownst to me, at the same time, as I was training to become a lawyer, I was working out an alcohol addiction. I did not know that. I was not aware of that until it became a real crisis in my mid to late 20s. And at that point, I had a rock bottom kind of experience and followed immediately by a moment of clarity, and I got sober and it was a completely life changing shift. And although I had a lot of help from the 12 step movement in getting sober, the actual moment of clarity occurred more or less in a gutter in Edinburgh in a city street on a Saturday night. And almost everything I see or talk about now is kind of informed by hindsight. I see things differently, or I understand what was going on in a way that I didn’t at the time. I didn’t know that my life was going to change in that moment, but it did. And the thing that happened then was what had previously been a daily compulsion to drink. I mean, I was able to sort of function but I just had this daily compulsion to drink no matter what I resolved in the morning about being healthy and sober that day, it never, never worked out that way. And that compulsion disappeared in that moment. And I got into that whole sort of 12 Step thing and working the program and having a very different kind of life. That was really that was a great thing. It was a wonderful thing, but it was also I think it’s very countercultural here in Scotland. I live now in Glasgow, but I was living in Edinburgh at that point. And Scotland is a very boozy place. Everything is lubricated with alcohol, apart from some breakfast meetings, perhaps. Even more so then. I’m also not particularly secretive with it, but it became a bit of a secret side gig. It certainly wasn’t what you lead with. I had my career on the one hand, and then my secret side gig of recovery on the other. Almost just spontaneously, a lot of my latent creativity woke up at that time, and I’d always had this other interest in being good at art at school. I’d always been good at making things. I enjoyed that and really that just mushroomed. I got into things like stained glass at that point. I was enjoying the process of being sober, but I was still struggling a bit. And I think as I see it, now, I was still looking for answers outside myself, just not drink. My relationships became a bit compulsive and unhappier, frankly, than they’d been before. I think there was too much riding on them in my mind. There was a period where my smoking went through the roof. I quit that after a year. It didn’t even occur to me that this was a thing of looking outside yourself. I had some issues with overeating and bulimia and being out of control around food, and just various things like that. So, alongside the work, the secret gig,

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 ha

In this first episode of Unbroken, Alexandra Amor introduces herself, shares about the path that brought her to the Inside-Out Understanding and how it helped her let go of a 30-year overeating habit. She also shares why she works with people to help them let go of their unwanted habits. Alexandra Amor is an author, coach, and explorer who helps those who want to let go of unwanted habits, including overeating. For 20 years Alexandra has been writing both fiction and non-fiction books, all with the themes of love, connection, and the search for understanding. She began her writing career with an Amazon best-selling, award-winning memoir about ten years she spent in a cult in the 1990s. 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.  Show Notes Growing up in an alcoholic household and the affect that had Joining at cult at age 22 A very brief look at how cults work and how we get ensnared On the origins of an overeating habit and what I tried to fix that Learning about the Inside-Out Understanding Noticing changes starting to happen without doing anything How we innocently look in the wrong direction to try to fix an unwanted habit What this podcast will be looking at and who I’ll be speaking to Resources mentioned in this episode Book: Cult, a Love Story Book: It’s Not About the Food The online course: Freedom From Overeating Transcript of podcast Welcome everyone to Unbroken. This is episode one, and I’m your host, Alexandra Amor. I wanted to take the opportunity in this very first episode to introduce you to who I am, and why I’m here, and the work that I do and why I’m doing this podcast. So let’s dive in. About Alexandra Amor I’m an author, and a coach and an explorer. And I’ve chosen the title, Unbroken, for this podcast for a very specific reason. And those of you that are familiar with the Inside-Out understanding, or the 3 Principles, will know or perhaps maybe have an idea of why I’ve chosen that title. And for those of you that aren’t, that are less familiar with those things. I’ll explain along the way. I want to talk today about the reason I do this work, and one of the biggest reasons is that I had an over eating habit for 30 plus years that I tried to fix with all kinds of things, All The Things, as the kids say, these days, and nothing worked. It wasn’t until I found this, Inside-Out understanding that that started to change. So that’s one of the motivations behind the work that I do. I particularly focus on working with people who do have an overeating habit or other kinds of habits that are causing them suffering. And again, we’re going to talk about that a little bit more coming up here in just a moment. Childhood Trauma and then a Cult So a little bit of background on me. I had what I would call sort of your basic, growing up time, kind of a generic Canadian family; a mom and a dad and I had a brother, and my parents divorced when I was 11. Unfortunately, my dad was an alcoholic for his entire adult life and that really affected his behavior around everybody. I found him to be quite frightening, especially as a little child, but even into my adulthood. He was loud and big and scary, very angry. I know now that looking back that his alcoholism was, to him, it was a solution. It was a solution to the uncomfortable feelings that he felt. I think it was something that he used to soothe himself. With hindsight, I can see I have a lot of compassion for him, and a lot of understanding about what he was going through, but as a child, of course, not so much. I was frightened of him. I think what that led to was that when I was coming into adulthood, I felt very insecure, and uncomfortable in my own skin, and was really looking for answers. So that led to just after I left university, I was just about to turn 22 and I accidentally joined a cult in Vancouver. It was 1989 I guess. I should clarify and say that everybody joins a cult accidentally. Nobody does it deliberately. You join a group of people who have similar values or are fighting for a similar cause. Whatever it is, you have something in common and the group feels like a safe place initially. And in my situation, it certainly was the case; it was actually a meditation class. It was being taught in downtown Vancouver by a woman who fancied herself a psychic medium. And when she was teaching these meditation classes, and my mom had been going for a while and I had just moved to Vancouver didn’t know a soul other than my family, so I went along with her. How Cults Work With cults, then what happens is it just gets kind of weirder and weirder. But at a very slow pace that when you’re on the inside of it, you don’t really notice. And that’s how they get jobs, as they say. So, you know, at the time, I think I think I belie