Breaking Down SMR With Dr. Laura Graye – Replay

 

In what is possibly one of the best episodes in the history of Change Proof Podcast, Adam Markel dives into an enlightening conversation with Dr. Laura Graye, an expert in metaphysics and higher consciousness, dedicated to helping leaders and individuals elevate their awareness and transform their lives. They explore the profound ways in which we interpret our life stories, including those of hurt and betrayal, and discuss the power of transcending these narratives for personal growth and positive impact. Dr. Graye and Adam delve into the origins of anxiety and the shifting age of the midlife crisis, providing insights into choosing a midlife calling over crisis. This thought-provoking episode encourages listeners to reflect on their mental, emotional, physical, and spiritual resilience, making it a must-listen and share-worthy conversation. Tune in and learn how self-manifested reality plays an important role in our journey as conscious beings!

 

Show Notes:

00:11:18 – Metaphysician

00:19:28 – Intuition

00:24:30 – Consciousness

00:31:30 – Self-Manifested Reality

00:49:51 – Detachment Or Disconnection From Self

00:56:39 – Greater Self Awareness

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Breaking Down SMR With Dr. Laura Graye – Replay

I am your guide to embracing change and becoming change-proof. I hope this episode finds you in great spirits and ready for some valuable insights. Before we dive into this replay, I want to remind you that life is an unpredictable journey and sometimes, the best lessons come from revisiting past conversations.

This episode is one of those gems, a replay featuring an incredible expert guest that we’ve had the pleasure of hosting before. As always, thank you for being a part of the community. Your commitment to growth and resilience inspires us every day. Without further ado, let’s rewind the clock and dive into this incredible replay episode. Get ready to be inspired and motivated and become even more change-proof.

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Welcome back to another episode of the show. You’re going to love my guest. Her name is Dr. Laura Graye. She devotes herself to helping professional leaders and personal clients recognize the meaningful role that metaphysics plays in all of our lives and how we can tap into higher consciousness to improve any situation we face. Regardless of the industry professional pathway or one’s daily life experiences, each and every person is asked to raise their level of consciousness in service to human evolution. You are going to enjoy this conversation that I have with Dr. Graye, so sit back and get ready.

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Laura, I know people are always seeking you out for your insights, etc. This is not the first time probably. God knows how many times you’ve been introduced and all that good stuff. Outside of the bio, your CV, your history, etc., what’s one thing that’s not part of that standard Introduction for yourself? What is one thing right at this moment that you would love people to know about you?

My soft and naive heart.

Say more about that.

I probably present more as a little bit highly intuitive or a fast and complex thinker. Sometimes, those supersede or overshadow this beautiful, soft, and really naive heart that has so much hope for everything and so much love for everything. Whether it’s a pencil on my desk, you, anyone that I’m talking to, or a tire on the side of the road, I live in that place of that connection and the feeling of love, that heart-opening space.

That’s such a beautiful response. As one of my kids would say, I’m marinating in that right at this moment. It is so beautiful to love everything. It’s a Ram Dass meditation. There was something with one of our children when they were young. We were listening to this where his voice, Ram Dass, has got this great, beautiful, deep voice. In that meditation, I remember it being, “Love everything.” That’s what came up for me when I was listening to you say that. Some people might be squinting their eyes or whatever they’re doing as they’re reading this. It’s entirely possible. You could try it out. You don’t have to take my word for it.

In fact, don’t take my word for it or Laura’s. Try it out for yourself. See what it’s like, even for a few seconds, to love everything. Love the inanimate things like the pencil on your desk to a human being that you may know, not know, love, like, not like, agree with, or not agree with. What could it be like for a moment to love everything?

I’ve got a blow dryer. It has one of those extender things on the top to straighten your hair. Every morning, when I turn the blow dryer on, that extender thing pops off. It makes this really loud clanging. I love the blow dryer and the little extender, but I extended it because I wasn’t loving that moment every morning. That was an irritation. I then thought, “I can completely love this irritation. It’s even extending to love every moment of your life. It’s not that my extender getting blown off is the most difficult moment in my life, but you can find love in those agitations. Maybe they’re playing and having fun. Turn it into something that you can love.

There’s no question we were meant to talk. I got to congratulate the members of my team that made sure that you got on this show. I love having business talks. We’re going to talk about business, for sure, but at the root of everything business being one thing, we’re human beings to start with. If we’re not having a terribly great human experience of our lives, then I don’t know what any other form of success would mean, frankly.

Exactly. It is that place. I might as well go deep quickly. That’s how I ride. I remember living my life very much from a place of a deep, inborn and innate sense of loving experiences. My life wasn’t easy. My first son, when he was 23 months old, was taken by DSS. We were down in Florida. He spiral fractured his femur bone from his hip all the way down to his knee. It was his 5th break and he was only 23 months. We were living in Boston. He was failing to thrive. The pediatrician was on it, but we could not figure out what was happening.

When we made our way to the emergency room when his femur spiral fractured, they took down 23-month-old, fifth break, and failure to thrive. That is a recipe for, “We’ve got a potential neglect and abuse case.” They took him away. No amount of anything, no amount of money, or this or that could pull us out of a system that we had gotten suddenly pulled into. That system is a wonderful system when it’s needed. I’m glad they checked on us, but it was the amount of terror.

It was 36 hours and then we got him back. At that time, I was able to have a life experience where I could not love that moment. I couldn’t find my faith or an understanding of where any of that would be potentially a good lesson or anything. It spun me. What it ended up doing is it is so pivotal to how I understand that not everyone comes in with faith or how to have a sense of faith or something deeper than your humanness. That’s what people really need in these moments and times to build that resilience.

 

I gave an interview. I’d said this to you right before we hit record. It was for a paper on the East Coast, a business periodical that wanted to talk about resiliency, given this event where a cargo ship from Singapore runs into a bridge, the bridge collapses, and six people perish. The ripple effect of that is that there are folks in Baltimore and the shipping industries. The ripple goes from that immediate event all the way. You can extend so far, for example, to Detroit, where they’re waiting on parts for cars and those parts from cars are not coming in.

This is $80 billion of economic impact.

There are those smart people who can calculate numbers like that and then throw them out. I don’t know to what degree it’s truly accurate. For scope purposes, how big is that building? It’s 5,000 meters high. We need a number, even if that number isn’t entirely accurate, to grab the scope of it. It’s a massive wave to keep the water there. It’s a huge wave that ripples out.

Metaphysician

People are in that state of shock on some level that it has occurred. It was so sudden. It was unthinkable. Was it predictable or not predictable? There’s all that stuff going on. I want to get to your work in the world. I want to use this as a way to do that, to be in harmony, to be grounded, and to be coming from the guidance that is deep within us that you might even call truth that resides in us. We can move forward in moments when we are seized by how little is in our control and how much can be confronting and threatening to life, the pursuit of money, and all that kind of stuff.

I would love to use this as a way to go into what it is that you do in the world. While we started in this place, I think we must have started here because it forms a foundation for anything else that we’re going to be able to talk about. Certainly, for any problems that we want to try to be creative about solving, we need to start from a place or a foundation. Would you tell our audience what you do?

I love that you sit grounded because that is something that I lead with. This is not an airy-fairy kind of being. I am deeply grounded in my body and the vibrational essence of who I am, but in a very grounded way. I’ll start there. I am a medical intuitive and a metaphysician. A metaphysician is someone who looks at clients or patients coming in and looking at the meta-full consciousness spectrum of how our lives are impacted.

How does our consciousness, our mental state, and our emotional state affect our anatomy and physiology? Is there a downward causation? What is happening in our unconscious and our subconscious? What is happening in our dreams? What’s happening that is creating difficulties in our reality? How are we creating our realities? That includes the physicality of our bodies. That’s in a nutshell.

I teach a course on medical intuition. It has morphed into a course. While I had designed it for doctors and nurses, it’s usually about 1/3 doctors and nurses, 1/3 of holistic practitioners, and then 1/3 of people who want to tune into their intuition and recognize that that is the most powerful part of our being. It is being able to plug into that truth, especially when times are difficult.

You brought this up earlier, but I wrote a book some years ago called Pivot. It’s a pivot story of many people, including my own pivot out of being an attorney for a couple of dozen years and then moving into a very different space, the one I’m in and have been for many years. I want to get to the origin story of your pivot if there’s one. Regardless, I want to understand how or when it is that you discovered that these were talents that you had and this was a desire that you had to serve in this particular way.

You’re a very beautiful woman. You have great energy. You’re very positive and intelligent. I’m going, “You could do anything in life.” You could have been a doctor. I’m sure you could have been a lawyer or accountant. Anything you’d like to do, I’m sure you could have done. Why you dialed in or were drawn to this, I want to understand that. I’m sure people are curious too.

It’s interesting because a lot of people have those pivot moments where they maybe move through life thinking they’re going in the right direction and then something happens. It’s like, “I’ve got to pivot.” For me, there was a nonstop hum underneath saying that I was not necessarily in the right direction. I went through my life, and if I felt like I was not going in the right direction, I would say, “This is me experiencing this.” If I was in a relationship that I knew wasn’t right for me, I could sit comfortably and say, “This is me experiencing being in a not good relationship.”

I didn’t have the, “I’ve got to get out of this relationship. I’ve got to get moving forward.” I was having this observer and this experience of a human experience. I’ve always had a pretty solid observer outside of my human experience. That’s probably the piece that makes my story a little bit different, although a lot of people have that observer.

From what age did you become aware that that was even a thing?

I was probably about eight years old. What ended up happening was I was born with a very rare condition, which we didn’t know about. It is perfect that I told the story about my son because, at the end of that story, my son was diagnosed soon after that femur break with something called osteogenesis imperfecta or brittle bone disease.

I then was diagnosed at 33 years old with osteogenesis imperfecta, which is brittle bone disease. When tested, it showed that I had 67% less collagen than the average 33-year-old. I’m 55. It would be that I have 67% less collagen than the average 55-year-old. That speaks directly to my density. I am 67% less dense than the average person. I’ve got little skinny bones. There’s not a lot to me. My bones have holes and pores in them.

What ended up with my experience, which I didn’t understand until I was 33 and got that diagnosis and things, my pivot moment was, “Now I understand why there has been a different experience for me that I haven’t been able to articulate where I could be moving through something and almost be not there.” I was living in so much human fear of not having enough body and bone and not being able to ground in.

My pivot moment was at 33 because what I had been seeing and feeling all made sense. Up until that point, it hadn’t made sense, but it was there and I was aware of it. It was things like being able to walk into a room and be able to pick out the person. You could have 25 people there and I would immediately be able to pick out whose liver was most deteriorated by tapping in, feeling, and having me feel it in my own body. It’s hard to describe, but I’d fill the space in my body with someone else’s energy, and then I could feel that energy and then move that energy out, fill it in, and run and scan.

This was nothing that I had any support or family members who understood what was going on. It was a silent experience for me. I was about eight years old when I mentioned something to my mom. I can’t even remember what the conversation was. I should ask her how it was that I figured out that something different was going on for me.

Anybody in your family in the medical field?

Not really. We’re more lawyers. Now, there are, but no.

You’re from Boston. Is that right? You are originally from the Boston area.

I grew up in Saratoga, upstate New York, went to school in Texas, and then came back to Boston.

Intuition

 As I was listening to you describing that, I thought to myself, “I don’t know why it makes sense.” I’m sure people are sitting there going, “As odd as what we read, it wouldn’t be what we would’ve expected to read,” kind of thing. I heard it for the first time as everybody else did. I go, “That   makes sense.”

This is interesting for me. I can only say it makes sense, not because my head tells me it makes sense. It’s not my brain that can add up everything you said and go, “That’s an equation.” I was a lawyer for a lot of years. There’s no logic to it, but some other part of me, which I’m going to ask you to describe for people what that is, is saying to me, “This makes sense.” Somebody else could say to me whatever they want to say to me, and I’d say, “Don’t call BS on any of that because I’m telling you what I heard makes sense to me.”

Everyone has an intuitive body, mind, heart, and soul. Share on X

What you are talking about is intuition. Intuition is this ever-present sense. It is so much deeper and beyond the brain. We’ve all heard the word intuition, but if you want to understand your intuition, we can say that there is the intuitive mind, the intuitive heart, the intuitive body, and the intuitive soul. We are all running. You can think of pathways as intuition moving through you. Kim Chestney, who wrote the book Radical Intuition, has done such an amazing job of bringing an etheric, hard thing to pinpoint into some sort of categorization. She and I subscribe to that same mind, body, heart, and soul intuition.

It’s not male or female. We’ve mostly heard women’s intuition. I grew up hearing that a lot. We’re not talking about gender. We’re talking about mind, body, heart, and soul.

I’ve got to tell you that it is a misnomer that it’s women’s intuition. There are businessmen who access their intuitive mind and think, “It’s a thought.” Even you, as a lawyer, probably access your intuition as far as, “I need to say this. This is where they’re going to go.” You’ve had a precognitive sense of something.

What happens is men tend to have more intuitive mind pathways or intuitive bodies. I don’t know if you’re on social media, but there are some videos where it’s a compilation of videos of dads grabbing their kids right before they fall or get hit by a lawnmower or something. There is no doubt. That’s incredible physical intuition.

The wife isn’t moving as quickly. She has a different type of intuition. It’s either an intuitive soul or an intuitive heart. If we were going to separate them, this is a big, broad stroke. Maybe men generally have intuitive bodies and minds and women have intuitive hearts and souls. The pathways are different, but we have all four of them. Each of us has them.

More highly or less highly developed in a holistic way.

Exactly.

Everybody must have some aspect of each of them, right?

Exactly. We are, by society, drawn to hone one or the other. If you’re drawn to hone your physical body, along with it will come physical intuition. If you’re drawn to hone your mind, it will become an intuitive mind. If your heart and soul are where you are drawn, then those will be your intuitive places.

When you said that you’re a metaphysician among other things, my mind went to the point that I’ve been greatly influenced by metaphysics in my adult life. It was primarily through a teacher, somebody whom I had never met, but I’ve read. In fact, I start my day every day with part of a reading from this particular person who is a metaphysician. I want to see if there’s a distinction between these types.

Consciousness

The gentleman’s name is Emmet Fox. People may or may not have heard of him, but he has written some pretty remarkable things. One of those things I did at the end of 2023, for people that read the New Year’s episode that I did, was around this concept of a mental diet and the seven-day mental diet that was an Emmet Fox principle. Metaphysics is in that regard if not an actual spiritual practice for me. When you say you’re a metaphysician, is it that kind of metaphysics that people are wondering about or is it different? How would you distinguish them?

It is that. It is a bridging. Sometimes, it’s softer said as a humanitarian, but a metaphysicist is coming in at a time when someone has forgotten that they are anything but human. That is an incredibly terrifying and terrorizing experience. I’m not putting myself at Emmet Fox’s level, but it is that experience of someone who can help reconnect you.

It’s not necessarily about knowing God. Although there are many metaphysicians that’s what we’re talking about. It is about knowing a deeper sense of yourself, your higher self, or whatever you want to call that. People say there’s a spiritual experience and a human experience. That’s not true. It’s more about consciousness. That’s the best way to describe it. Consciousness is everywhere, flowing within us. Based on typical trauma or our culture, we can lose our ability to tap into the consciousness flowing right through us.

Consciousness is everywhere. It’s flowing within us, but we can lose our ability to tap into that. Share on X

I’ll move away from any kind of spiritual or religious. There are vibrations of consciousness at all times. Consciousness, dark matter, and dark energy are flowing right through us. It goes through all of our cells. In those moments, that’s where intuition comes in. As you were sitting here and we were talking, you had that “That feels right.” At that moment, something in your body was able to shift from reading what was going on in your cells to the consciousness flowing through you. It grabbed it, brought it into your cells, brought it up to your brain, and created an intuitive moment that said, “That feels right.”

Consciousness is another way to describe awareness, right?

Yes.

For people that are maybe either not so familiar with this language, haven’t been studying this kind of thing, and it’s new, and it was certainly new to me several years ago when it hit me, or people that may even be reading this and don’t want to lean into something religious or even spiritual, we’re not going down that road. That’s not the road we’re on either.

Regardless of whether you believe in God, don’t believe in God, call that God, or don’t call that God, that’s not what we’re talking about. The consciousness piece is a big deal. For example, in whatever area of your life, whether it’s you and I having this conversation and my trying to gauge whether I’m leaning into what you’re saying, agreeing with it, getting it, or whatever it might be, there’s an element of an awareness that’s happening for me. There’s also something that’s going on behind the awareness or under the awareness that is deeper.

 I love the fact that Emmet Fox will draw upon the Bible or scripture for some of the principles because I want to understand that book. I don’t want to understand it as a person who’s a religious scholar or somebody who’s deep in religion because I’m not. I want to understand it nonetheless because it is one of the most powerful things that the world has ever known. Interestingly enough, there is almost nothing that’s been more powerful than that book or what comes out of it and what people interpret from it.

There’s a part of it where he quotes, and I don’t get hung up on the gender here, but this is what it is verbatim, “As a man thinketh in his heart, so is he.” You could replace that with woman. What he describes as the meaning of that is that it’s not as you think in your heart, but the heart is a symbol for your subconscious.

From a psychological standpoint, your heart is not literally your physical heart. Thinking from your heart or as you think in your heart, it’s your subconscious. Meaning, it’s that deeper understanding, including what emerges, I suppose, in your sleep is regards that. To consciously ascend to something or say yes to something consciously, we say yes to things all the time that we don’t really believe in.

Our thoughts are constantly flowing like this stream that never ends. Good thoughts, crazy thoughts, smart thoughts, and stupid thoughts are constantly passing before us all the time. How could that possibly be us unless we’re walking lunatics? What we really are, to use your word or our essence is what’s in our heart and subconscious as to who we are. Does that make sense to you?

Self-Manifested Reality

One hundred percent. To me, there’s oneness and separateness. What is the most beautiful thing is here you are, separate. We can look at you and see that you are separate. You have a black shirt on and black-framed glasses. Your skin is this color, and all of those things have us seeing a somewhat reality of your separateness. What is the most powerful is when you flow oneness consciousness through that separateness and express it because that gives it its unique quality. You are bringing that unique quality into life and manifesting.

 

I said we would talk about business in this episode. It doesn’t seem like maybe we are, but we are. I promise we are. Tuning into this concept of what our awareness is, what our consciousness is, and what our subconscious or unconscious is is really important, especially in light of what you said about intuition. How do you solve complex problems?

We’ve got a lot of world problems. We had a lot when I was a kid. That context hasn’t changed much. They’re different. For those who may think this is the worst time in history, 1969, the year that you were born, was the worst time in history for people who were going through Vietnam and the civil rights movement. I was born in ‘65. Take any time in history. It has been like that in modern history, people have felt that existential threat, such as World War II, Korea, and World War I. It was terrible stuff and yet we’ve evolved through all of it and been resilient through all of it, which I’ll want to talk about a little later.

To solve complex problems, I believe, as a business person, we have to tune into imagination. We have to tune into our ability to innovate in the face of what is a chaos of sorts. To do that, your conscious mind, or that monkey mind where thoughts are rapidly firing all the time, is not a great or effective way to do it. When you work with people in business or in the medical space, you’re also looking for answers that aren’t readily apparent to the conscious mind, body, heart, and soul. Did I get that right?

We should tune into our ability to innovate in the face of chaos. Share on X

Absolutely. I hope this jump brings us back. I think it will. One of the things that I work on is something called this Self Manifested Reality, SMR. It is a theory around our triggers that whatever our triggers are, we recruit events, circumstances, and people to reflect for us that which we do to ourselves unconsciously.

I want you to repeat that because a lot of people who are in some form of pain repetitively where they can’t trust people, they’re betrayed, they lose money, people cheat them, or whatever, they often will assign the blame to the perpetrator throughout their lives. For those who are reading, this is deep psychology. This is not beginner stuff here. I don’t normally do this, but if you might be triggered by some of what we’re about to talk about, if you’re driving a car, maybe pull over, find a parking spot, hit pause, and come back to this. I want to say that because this is not the shallow end of the pool. Over to you.

Thank you. That’s a good disclaimer. The Self-Manifested Reality is the theory that we recruit events, circumstances, and people to reflect on what we do to ourselves unconsciously. Let me start with why would we ever do that. What is going on? Our experience is that we are here. You came into this world and you have a mission. Your mission is soul-based to have an expression of yourself out in the world. We’re going to say you are Product Adam.

Let’s call it your CESoul. We’ll have it as a business. You are the business of Adam. You are there at 1, 2, 3, or 4 years old. Your first consumers are your parents and maybe an older sibling. Those consumers are giving you feedback. You’ve got a little R&D or Research and Development team inside of you that is looking for feedback on how to shape yourself.

What ends up happening is, over time, you begin to reallocate what you were naturally here to express. It’s something that happens. It happens that your mom’s upset when you are doing something that is too loud, too expressive, or whatever. You see that your kindergarten teacher really appreciates when you listen and you are people-pleasing. We internally begin to reallocate.

If we have a creative department, an assertive department, an aggressive department, a lazy department, or whatever it is, we take energy from the things we are not getting recognized positively for. We move that energy into the areas that we deem in this feedback that are better for us. We lop off a lot of the parts to ourselves, so we may not be identified as creative.

I’ll give you an example. For me, assertive as a young woman, I didn’t get a lot of points for that. What I got was being attuned and being emotionally tuned into what was going on to be there, help people, assist, and those things. My departments inside of me became that I took a whole bunch of allocated energy and allocated it to my attuning emotional intelligence part of me and my assertive any kind of me first that I was given, which I needed to bring the ideas that I had. These incredible a little ahead of pioneering ideas.

If I didn’t have my assertiveness, I wouldn’t have been able to do that, which was what was happening in the first part of my life. That assertiveness was then put in a closet. All of a sudden, I am emotionally attuning. I’m attuning to extremely assertive people, so I’m recruiting extremely assertive, aggressive people because I have aggressively hidden my own assertion.

You can look at your triggers. If someone has betrayed you, then your trigger is that you are somewhere betraying yourself. If you are abandoned, you are abandoning yourself. If you are getting abused or someone is too aggressive, there is a part of you that is abusing and being aggressive. If you are being criticized and someone is critical of you, then there is a part of you that is criticizing and criticizing yourself.

Somewhere at a very young age, the CESoul who was connected to our mission turned into what I call the CEgo. That CEgo is this ego that begins to produce a product that is so far from our mission statement. Beginning that monkey mind, we move away from our path. Most of us find ourselves pretty unhappy. The triggers in our life are what will bring us back to our natural essence, reintegrated if that makes sense.

Interpreting this, you are saying that people need to explore those things more deeply, which, at some point, people are probably keeping at the farthest distance they consciously can.

You nailed it. Exactly. People either don’t want to be triggered because it’s irritating or they think that how they’re triggered, they begin to judge themselves. They’re like, “Why am I so triggered? I shouldn’t be triggered by them. I should accept them.” That’s after you recognize what triggers you about them. Whatever triggers you about them is what triggers you internally.

 

This is a rough statement. I want to get your take on it. Victims are perpetrators. I’ve heard that said. That’s why I gave my own little warning at the start of this. I’m so glad you created the context you did for me to be able to say that because that’s a rough statement.

I will follow that statement up with the victim archetype as the strongest archetype. Until we are able to take the victim out of our unconscious, we will be acting and our aggression will come from our victim state. SMR heals, yanks, and pulls the victim out of the unconscious. We are a victim to ourselves. This goes so much deeper.

 

I’ll speak, let’s say, for being a woman. I can say, “Women are really victimized.” That is a collective victimization that women share in our unconscious. That’s ours. Until we pull that out of our unconscious, that is what we are going to be recruiting towards us. The minorities and the people who are victimized that may have been put in your unconscious many generations before you were born. I’m not saying that you put it there, but it is ours to pull it out.

It’s an intergenerational trauma of sorts. We get back to the point of inflection, which is not easy to deal with, of personal responsibility. We’re bordering on some stuff that’s super controversial in our world. I don’t typically get very political on this show. I don’t mind but don’t actively try to go there. I feel like this is a really important conversation. Also, we’re not going to give any directives here. At least I’m not going to say, “This is how you “should” do it,” or, “This is not a prescription for your change.” This is a conversation around ideas that maybe the collective view, and I’ll include myself, are maybe not even aware of, considered, and then assimilated, or to use your word, integrated, which I love.

Where there is abuse or traumatization that occurs in a repetitive way. It doesn’t make sense. You don’t understand how that could possibly happen. What you’re sharing explains a lot of that. Also, you are not in that moment that you become aware that this is a possibility or that this is something you could consider. You could noodle on it. You could discard it if you feel like it’s crap. You could do whatever you want with it.

When you do that, you are responsible for yourself. You are taking responsibility for your life. You own it. It’s nobody else’s story. It’s nobody else’s journey. It’s nobody else’s problem to solve or opportunity to experience. It is a breathtaking, miraculous opportunity on the other side of not understanding why you’ve been the way you’ve been or why others have been the way they’ve been to you or toward you.

100%. Correct me. I don’t want to say that this is what you said, but what I am saying is it’s irrelevant how this all ends up in our unconscious. It’s irrelevant in the sense that you could have situations in which you are abused or you have been betrayed. These are cellularly vibrationally built into your body generationally and you come in with that. For you, the victim mentality creates fear, distrust, and a really difficult reality. In this moment, you go, “I can pull that out and create a reality in which I am no longer victimized and I’m no longer in that triggered state.” That is fully and solely every human’s experience and opportunity, regardless of where they are.

The victim mentality creates fear. It creates distrust and a difficult reality. Share on X

It is liberation.

It is liberating from yourself. That’s the piece. The liberation is from yourself. These are neural wiring. I work really big on recognizing that moment by moment, as children, we are wiring and trying to learn everything. Those wires wire and fire together. One of the biggest pieces is disempowerment and how we get wired to a disempowered state. It is unwiring the disempowerment, and how you unwire your disempowerment is through figuring out what your triggers are. The triggers show you.

Do you remember when we were little? These were plaque-disclosing tablets. They were the little purple things you chew, and they show where plaque is on your teeth. Triggers are the plaque-disclosing tablets of our psyche. It shows you where you have stuck neural wiring that needs to be unwired to bring you to your empowerment.

Triggers are the plaque-disclosing tablets of our psyche. Share on X

That isn’t in the big picture about someone or something else. It’s not about something structural. It’s not about another person or entity, even though it might be in that moment. That’s the small picture. In the big picture, I suppose it’s about you and how you are interpreting all of that or processing it.

It’s both how you’re interpreting it and also what you attracted. Like these little disclosing tablets, you’ve got a knot in here. Let’s say that you keep being betrayed. There is a knot in your unconscious that you are betraying yourself somewhere. That betrayal is sending a homing signal, and it brings someone who is going to be one of your greatest lessons. If you pay attention, they’re going betray you because they vibrationally are resonant. That’s what it is.

This is why it’s really tough to hear sometimes. That’s why earlier I said, “Pull over, push pause, or whatever if you’re not ready to hear this.” The degree to which you have to take ownership of your life is different than maybe it’s been in the past. There are a lot of people who play the convenient part in the play, that is, your life of being the one that stabs you in the back or whatever the situation is. That’s a tough pill to swallow, especially depending on where you are in your journey.

I’m a 50-some-year-old person. I’ve had a minute to deal with some stuff. If you’re in a different stage of life, not just chronologically but emotionally, it might be really difficult for you to swallow that pill, and you don’t have to. I’m not telling you you’ve got to. That’s not what Laura is saying. It is important that we discuss it.

This is where it borders on the political. I want to get your thoughts on this. I don’t want to put it in a judgment or in the form of a statement, but there’s at least some conversation around whether people are getting softer. Are people becoming more easily triggered? Are we only creating more opportunities for people to find that they are the victims of someone else as opposed to looking for structural solutions to the challenges of their lives that all reside within them? Any thoughts on that?

Yes. We’re almost opening the oven on an unbaked cake. It looks pretty gooey, and we’re like, “I’m not sure that I want to eat it.” What we have is we have older generations who were hardened and didn’t pay attention to their triggers. They barreled through it and didn’t look at what was triggering them. They didn’t unwire things. They resolved and barreled through. That’s the way you did it. That’s how we did it in our time.

That’s not what we’re advocating, to be clear.

We then have the pendulum swinging, and we have this younger generation that is paying attention to their triggers. I work with so many of them. While there may be this sense of screaming about their triggers, which looks soft, they are addressing them. For the most part, they are starting to have consciousness around, “This is my issue and I have to deal with it.” I know it doesn’t look like that. That’s why I used the metaphor of the unbaked cake.

I’m glad you used that particular metaphor, especially in light of the concept of hard and soft. That was beautiful. That was perfect. In our work, we are a resilience research firm. We also deploy solutions in organizations that want to meet their people where they are. I’ll open this door up for a second to say that we don’t live in silos. As a prior generation, it was, “You don’t bring your problems to the office. As soon as you walk through that door, whatever is going on in your life, it’s over. Now, you’re a mine  for the next 8 to 10 hours or whatever it is.”

Detachment Or Disconnection From Self

People bring their trauma with them everywhere. They bring it to work. They bring it wherever they go. They bring it on the subway and every other place that they are. It could be in the car, etc. What we see in our research is that, and there’s no debate about this, anxiety is at levels that have never been tracked before. People are more anxious. Many are depressed. Suicidal ideation is higher. People are burned out or near that place more frequently. That being the case, the fact, so to speak, how does what you’re saying potentially impact the fact that what we see around us are a lot of people in that kind of pain?

 

Thank you. We’re in the middle of the cake. We’re making big shifts. What we really could look at is that back in the day, while we didn’t bring our problems to work, they were right there. We were operating from a place where those problems were creating decisions and choices that were maybe ego-based or something. They were there, but they were hidden and covered.

The first is anxiety. The way I look at anxiety is a detachment or disconnection from self. The autonomic nervous system creates anxiety to let the body know. We have 100 billion neurons, and they are supposed to be connected to our heart, our lungs, and everything else. We’re supposed to be embodied beings and grounded. Those neurons send information up to our head and say, “We’re good. We’re all connected. We’ve got an attachment. We’re connected and grounded.”

What’s happening is we are so visual. With social media, I don’t even want to get into all of those things, but everything is so externalized that there is a rare time when someone has their neurons connected and reading and feeding their autonomic nervous system from their own body. Our neurons can amazingly read. As a medical intuitive, I know this to be true. What I can diagnose in my own body, my own heart rate, my own pulse, and all of those things, I can also intuit if my neurons are picking up and reading somebody else’s.

If we are constantly out and our neurons are out reading and threat-assessing, our autonomic nervous system goes, “We’ve got one heart rate coming in. We’ve got another heart rate coming in. We’ve got a whole bunch of visual stuff coming in. We are going to be sending out an alert of anxiety.” Anxiety is the autonomic nervous system saying, “Something is off here. We’re not grounded in our body.”

The sympathetic nervous system is saying, “There’s a threat,” and our bodies are responding as evolutionary.

Exactly.

We’ve been trained. This is how we deal with threats.

Exactly. We’re not reading ourselves. We’re not embodied and grounded in our bodies. I can say that that’s where anxiety is. Depression is a lack of expression of self. It is an inability to express selves. That comes from a different energy in the sense that if we have been repressed and we are not able to express ourselves, and that happens over and over again, we get into a state of depression. It’s only then that we get to anxiety or depression. Only when we’re already there can someone say, “There’s a chemical issue here.” What I’m saying is that chemical issues happen after these energetic issues.

There’s this clog, if you will, and things are not flowing.

If someone’s saying, “I’m depressed. It’s showing up in my numbers,” those numbers, our brain creates neurotransmitters, which creates that chemistry. That chemistry then gets tested as depressed. We’ve got to go back here to the unconscious and say what created that.

We go further upstream. Often, we’re treating symptoms. We’re treating things later on. We’re going to have a couple of minutes left, but I can’t help myself. I have to ask you this. We are thinking about it and talking about it. Especially in a business context, we use the term emotional intelligence. Emotional acumen is being used as well.

Having kids that are of an age range from Millennial to Gen Z, these are more emotionally intelligent beings. They are more conscious beings than I was growing up, as well as my friends, peers, and certainly my parents and grandparents. People were quite a bit different years ago, and not in the best way. It’s not from an evolutionary standpoint, which is the, “Go back to the good old days,” because they weren’t the good old days anyway. They were days.

Everything is moving forward. Everything is, from my standpoint, purely net positive. That’s why when you got on this and you and I saw each other immediately, what I got was simpatico. I was like, “This is another net positive person.” It’s not because we’re Pollyanna, but because that’s what evolution teaches us. I work with leaders trying to understand younger generations or demographics. They have attitudes about them and judgments about them. I’m like, “Whatever the iPhone is up to, they’re that latest version.”

They’re amazing.

The kids being born, the little babies, they’re that next version, etc. I’m curious. In and among those people who are more emotionally intelligent or have higher emotional acumen and who are also experiencing this higher level of anxiety, how do you reconcile those two things, if there’s even an answer to that?

I look at it as one and the same in the sense that we had a midlife crisis between 37 and 43, let’s say. They are having midlife crises earlier because they are able to handle the emotional disruption that is happening. They are being brought into and evolving much more quickly. I have kids the same age. They are brilliantly emotionally attuned but were not gripping like we were to keep it together through high school and college.

Greater Self Awareness

In our twenties, there was a lot more gripping that was happening for us. There was so much more shame and a lack of compassion for having emotional experiences. I don’t think they’re softer at all. They are so incredibly powerful. The appearance of softness is that they are able to openly and outwardly express, and when they do, it doesn’t get repressed. At our age, there’s going to be less. In their thirties, there’ll be less betrayal, less abandonment, and less rejection because they will have dealt with those things.

That’s the good news, especially and truly for those who may be reading who are dealing with these things. We all deal with it. I hate it when it feels like it’s a judgment of sorts or that you’re judging yourself because you have the feelings that you’re having. It’s weird to say it, but greater self-awareness is the problem you want to have. We want to become more sensitive, not less.

Exactly.

We don’t want to go back to being obtuse or being callous. Somehow or another, people equate that with resiliency. This may be the last question here. I want to get your thoughts on this. If we think about resiliency, it is the ability to have greater self-perception to begin with and then the perception of others that’s possible because you are tuned into yourself. I don’t really think you could possibly tune into anyone else if you’re not first tuned into yourself. That will produce mental, emotional, physical, and spiritual resiliency. Thoughts on that as our final question?

My true thought was, “He nailed that. There’s nothing else to say.” That was my thought. It was, “He nailed it.” I can’t honestly add to anything. What you said was so beautiful and powerful. You can’t be attuned unless you know yourself. To know yourself, you must know yourself mentally, emotionally, physically, and spiritually. From that, you build resiliency. I repeated what you said. It was beautiful.

I have so enjoyed this conversation. Honestly, I want to do a part two.

I would love that.

Maybe as part of part two, for the readers out there, if you’ve got questions that you want to address, challenge anything that you read, or whatever comes up for you, we’d love it if you would go to AdamMarkel.com/Podcast. Leave your questions or comments there. On the website, you can email our team at Team@AdamMarkel.com as well. For part two, if Laura’s willing, maybe we’ll take some of these questions and challenges and have at it with that.

That would be so much fun.

This is not easy. None of this is easy. I don’t want to be trite about it. You’ve been studying this. This has been your area of focus and expertise for a few decades, right?

Yes.

That’s good. Me too. I love that. I’ve so enjoyed this conversation that I can only imagine how other people have also experienced this.

I had a wonderful time. Thank you so much. It’s been wonderful talking with you.

We closed out the show and then had a conversation to leave things for part two: questions, challenges, and all that good stuff. However, there was one thing that came up that we felt we needed to discuss. I’m going to tee it up super fast, hopefully. I did a TED Talk some years ago. The throughline of it was this concept of loving your life no matter what.

I wake up in the morning, put my feet on the floor, and say four words. I say, “I love my life,” which, for me, is I’m grateful. I’m grateful for my life, even if it’s imperfect. No matter what the day is going to hold, this is a brilliant opportunity ahead of me. Frankly, when I start at that moment and take a breath, there are people taking their last breath at that exact moment, so it’s sacred too. It’s a holy situation.

When I did that TED Talk and it was published, it got a lot of views, but I also got a lot of flack. Some of the stuff that people commented was, “How dare you? FU. If you knew what my life was like, you would never have the audacity to say to me to love my life no matter what.” In the context of the victim, one thing we didn’t do because we didn’t go there at that moment was to talk about what else victims tend to do when they haven’t integrated what you were discussing before.

Let’s talk on an energetic level. I am here and I have 100 pounds of energy to move out and express through me. When you’re victimized, that gets disempowered. That energy gets plugged into your body. It’s moving inside you in that disempowered state. What often can happen with victims is unconsciously and sometimes consciously, they use victimization to be able to retaliate, and their retaliation is justified.

They could take all of this pent-up power that they have learned they aren’t able to express naturally and they need to have a reason to express it. They’re like, “The only way I can come into my power is when I am fighting against disempowerment.” That gives them the justification to then attack and have their power moving out.

Amazingly, when we look at it, it’s the human mind trying to heal the physical body. When we hold back our energy, that creates disease in our body. Even the victim, on an unconscious level, their mind is finding any way to have the power to move and express the energy so it doesn’t sit and create cancer and stagnation in the body. It is a low consciousness, but it is a consciousness to get their power out. It’s justified and is low consciousness. It has a lower level of consciousness.

We’ve agreed that we’re doing this little ten-minute addendum here because this could go in lots of places. It sounds like it’s positive on one level. If a person who is doing that considers themselves as a justice warrior, as many people have coined themselves, in doing so, they’re expressing so that it’s not stuck, and they are empowered to do that. It helps them to not get cancer or not become disabled by what is inside them.

Depressed and anxious.

It sounds like it’s positive on some level, but it’s not entirely positive perhaps to the people that they’re focusing their energy toward perhaps.

Positive is maybe too strong of a word. It is the body’s way.

It’s natural?

Yes. It is the body’s way and the mind’s way. The body says, “We’ve got a lot of energy that the mind up there has told you you cannot express.” You have set up a reality in which you are getting victimized, which says you cannot express yourself. We have got to wire another part of the brain that allows that expression. What will that do? In car accidents or whatever, you get remediation. When your car gets hit, there is this retribution. You are victimized.

There’s a recovery.

Exactly. What ends up happening is the mind wires itself as a way we need to express energy. How can we express energy? We have to find justification because we were never allowed to express our energy naturally. Let’s go back to the beginning of that conversation where I said I was extremely assertive as a child, but then I learned my own wiring. I wired myself. My mom didn’t come in and stick something in. Society didn’t. I watched and realized, “This assertion is really unattractive.” That’s what I decided. I repressed my assertion and then walked out.

My reality was one in which I then met assertive and aggressive people who were drawn to pull that out in me. I either had the choice where once they were aggressive to me, I could have wired a justified victim and attacked them and had been justified as a victim or I could look at, “Why is it that I keep attracting this? What is it in my psyche that keeps attracting this aggressive behavior?” I learned to love it. I was like, “That’s war. There’s the plaque.”

We were talking about this. If you put this episode out and they say, “Screw the two of you. You don’t know what our lives are,” that is then for me to say, “I still have some plaque in there.” If I’m creating a reality where there are more aggressive people versus, “You changed my life when I heard this,” then that is my work to do. I’m not going to be like, “I got another aggressive person.”

That creates this vicious cycle that keeps repeating itself over and over. We wonder why the same things happen. I’m going to end with a story that matches what you said. I’m only sharing this because of what you shared. I was bullied as a child. It was not to any extreme level, but I was bullied enough that it impacted me, my self-esteem, and all that kind of thing.

I gave that TED Talk about my life at the time as a lawyer, but the origin story was the beach and this scene that happened on Jones Beach where I learned how to be on guard. I learned how to be a lifeguard as a result of so many of us missing a save there. It was ultimately having to be impeccable in that environment and then becoming a lawyer and protecting people’s rights. I did a lot of employment discrimination cases for plaintiffs in those cases and things of that sort. I became the one who would defend the underdog and always go up against the bully.

I was living this total on-guard life. I was always on guard. I was always looking suspiciously and fearfully at those things. I was attracting more of that all the time, that aggression. I was living that aggressive life that ultimately put me in the hospital. Part of my pivot, the transition from that state of being, was at some point to learn to be able to love that. It was to be able to love myself and even love the part of me that I judged as weak, vulnerable, and ineffectual. The kid that would get picked on, I didn’t love that kid. because I turned that into, “They’re picking on me because I suck.” That’s not consciously, but at that subconscious level.

When you do learn or work on, and it’s a lifelong work, honestly, loving all aspects of yourself, you can integrate those things. You don’t have to perpetuate that cycle where you’re, in my case, having to always live on guard, be in fear, and attract those reasons to be on guard, which is a very different way of living. It’s a different experience of living for me. I’m really happy that you shared your situation and that we got to discuss this publicly as well.

I want to talk about that for two seconds. It’s so beautiful because what you also described unconsciously was you chose your first profession to heal and there wasn’t a self-advocate. A lot of times, when we see these massive warriors or these advocates, we can look back at their childhood and see where they weren’t necessarily able to advocate for themselves or they were bullied. They come out and have incredible hearts for advocating for the underdog as you did.

What’s beautiful is you watch and something heals in you. You suddenly are that piece. You are no longer, “I suck. I don’t need to advocate for someone else because I have found my self-advocate. My self-advocate is going to take me out of law and put me in something that is really more for me.” That was a huge healing.

The throughline in my life is not advocacy in that regard. It’s counseling. It’s teaching. That’s why the work that we do at our company, WorkWell, with organizations is all about teaching and helping people have these kinds of conversations so that they can develop resilience from within.

It’s self-advocacy.

Exactly.

That’s the piece. The difference is advocacy still takes power away versus teaching self-advocacy.

I’m so happy we did the addendum.

It was so awesome.

Everybody, we love you. We hope you’re having an amazing rest of your day, whatever you’re up to. Thank you.

‐‐‐

That was one of my favorite episodes and my favorite interviews. It would be on the greatest hits.  We were into almost 400 episodes of this show going back several years. I loved that conversation because we went to some places that frankly are not easy places to go. We were talking about how we’re wired. We were talking about the way that our life stories are interpreted not by others but by how we interpret them and what we do with that.

We talked about what we do with that story that we’ve been telling ourselves for many years, including the victim story. Those are the stories in our lives where we’ve been hurt, where we’ve been betrayed, and where things have gone wrong and we try to make sense of those things and then use them effectively as a tool for our growth but also for a positive impact in the world. That’s a special sauce. That’s the juice in life, to be able to transmute those things and transcend them.

In this episode, Dr. Laura Graye and I went there. We talked about that stuff. We talked about how victims can be perpetrators and what that crucial and confronting statement looks like and means. This is a very provocative conversation. It’s one that you may want to re-read and share with other people. I know I’m certainly going to share this with our community as well because it’s vitally important that we talk about it.

We did talk about anxiety and its origins and how, in many ways, the midlife crisis that used to happen between ages 40 and 50 that was typical is happening younger and earlier. The 20-somethings and 30-somethings are experiencing the signs of that midlife anxiety, etc. I know when I was going through that earlier in my life on the path, I was in a position where I had a glimpse at the edge and then chose a midlife calling instead of that midlife crisis. That’s chronicled in the book Pivot, which I wrote some years ago. We really got to cover some things from a very different perspective. This is a valuable conversation, one that is worth reading, re-reading, and sharing with others as well.

Also, if you’d like to take a bit of a snapshot of your own mental, emotional, physical, and even spiritual resilience in response to what you heard, it’s not a bad idea to do that. If you’ve not taken that assessment, it’s a tool that we offer. It’s free to you. There are no strings attached. You can go to RankMyResilience.com and get that assessment for yourself or for others on your team for free. It’s three minutes. That’s the beauty of this assessment. There are 16 questions and it takes 3 minutes. There is nothing to it.

 If you’ve got questions for Dr. Graye and myself, we would love to create a part two to this particular conversation where we draw upon your comments and questions. You can go to AdamMarkel.com/Podcast to leave a comment or question there or you can email us at Team@AdamMarkel.com. We will take those questions and get them all queued up for part two of this conversation with Dr. Laura Graye.

Thank you so much, as always, for being a part of this community. If you love this episode, we’d love it if you would do us the great favor of taking a moment, reviewing it, and providing it with that five-star review if that feels good to you or whatever makes sense on the platform that you consume this show. That’s how the algorithm gets to know what you like. It gets to know what might be valuable to other people as well. That has the collateral benefit of helping us grow this community and get these conversations more widely dispersed. Thank you very much for your support as always. Wherever you are at this moment, I want to say thank you so much for being a part of the community. Have a blessed and beautiful day. Ciao for now.

 

Important Links

• Dr. Laura Graye
• Pivot
• Radical Intuition
• Get This Moment Right: A SOLOCAST For The Year-End And New-Year Transition
• Team@AdamMarkel
• Rank My Resilience