Empower Your Mind, Empower Your Life: A Look At Self-Manifested Reality (SMR) With Dr. Laura Graye

 

Are you ready to see what doesn’t exist yet? This interview with Dr. Laura Graye will ignite your imagination and equip you with the tools to bring your wildest dreams to life. Join us as we explore the power of conversations, relationships, and fresh perspectives. Discover what it takes to truly build the future and the secret sauce for innovation: it’s all about feeding your mind with the right ingredients!

 

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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Empower Your Mind, Empower Your Life: A Look At Self-Manifested Reality (SMR) With Dr. Laura Graye

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. Every person is asked to raise their level of consciousness in service to human evolution. You are going to so enjoy this conversation that I have with Dr. Graye. 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. God knows how many times you’ve been introduced and all that good stuff, but outside of the bio, outside of your CV, your history, etc., what’s one thing that’s not part of that standard introduction for yourself? One thing, right this moment that you would love for 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, and it sometimes supersedes or overshadows a beautiful, soft, and naive heart that has so much hope for everything and so much love for everything, whether it’s like a pencil on my desk or you or 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,” at this moment. It’s so beautiful to love everything. I think it’s a Ram Dass meditation or something with one of our children when they were young and we listened to Ram Dass. He’s got this great, beautiful, deep voice.

I think in my next career, my next pivot, I’m going to be a late-night DJ. I want to have that Ram Dass voice to do it. A deep and beautiful, luxurious voice. In that meditation, I remember, love everything. That’s what came up for me when I was listening to you say that it is entirely possible, as some people might be squinting their eyes right now, that it’s entirely possible.

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

I’ve got a blow dryer and it has one of those extender things on the top. It’s to straighten your hair. Every morning, when I turn the blow dryer on, that extender thing pops off and it makes this loud clanging. Of course, I love the blow dryer and I love the little extender, but I then extended it because every morning, I wasn’t loving that moment.

That was an irritation and then I thought, “I can completely love this irritation. It’s even extending to love every moment of your life. Not that my extender getting blown off is the most difficult moment in my life, but those agitations, you can find love. Maybe they’re playing and having fun. You have to 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 because I love having business talks. We’re going to talk about business in this episode, for sure. At the root of everything, business being one thing where 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.

Exactly and it is that place and we 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, innate sense of loving experiences. My life wasn’t easy and then when my son was 23 months old, he was taken by DSS. We were down in Florida, and he spiral fractured his femur bone from his hip down to his knee.

It was his fifth break, and he was only 23 months, and we were living up in Boston, and he was failing to thrive, and the pediatrician was on it, but we could not figure out what was happening. When we made our way to the emergency room, his femur spiral fractured. They took down 23 months old, fifth break, and failure to thrive.

That is a recipe for a potential neglect and abuse case. They took them away and 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. I think that system is a wonderful system when it’s needed. I’m glad they checked on us.

The amount of terror and that day, it was 36 hours and then we got in back, but in that time, I was able to have an experience, 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, but 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 that’s what people need in these moments and times to build that resilience.

 

I said this to you right before we hit record. I gave an interview 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. Of course, now the ripple effect of that is that there are folks in Baltimore and their shipping industry. The ripple goes from that immediate event and 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 now.

This is like $80 billion of economic impact.

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

It’s a huge wave that ripples out, and people are in that state of shock on some level that it’s occurred that it was so sudden that it was unthinkable. It was predictable, not predictable. All that stuff going on but to come to that from a place of being in tune, 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, to be coming from the guidance that is deep within us that you might even call truth, that resides in us so that we can move forward in moments when we’re seized by how little is in our control and how much can be confronting and threatening to life, limb, and pursuit of money, all that stuff.

I would love to use this as a way to go into what it is that you do in the world because while we started in this place, we, I thought, 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, any problems that we want to try to be creative about solving. We need to start from a place, a foundation. Laura, would you tell our readers what you do?

What do I do exactly? I love that you said grounded because that is something that I lead with is that this is not an airy-fairy being. I am deeply grounded in my body and in the 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 do our consciousness, mental state, and emotional state affect our anatomy and physiology? Where is there a downward causation? What is happening in our unconscious, our subconscious, what is happening in our dreams? What’s happening that is creating difficulties in our reality? How are we creating our reality and that includes physical, our physicality in our bodies? That’s in a nutshell and I teach a course on medical intuition.

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

Yes. I’m going to self-serving because 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 different, very different space, the one I’m in these days and have been for many years now.

I want to get at the origin story of your pivot. If there’s a pivot, but regardless, I want to understand how it is that you, or when it is that you discovered that these were talents that you had, that this was a desire that you had to serve in this particular way because you strike me as you’re a very beautiful woman.

You have great energy like 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 be a lawyer or accountant, anything you’d like to do, I’m sure you could have done. Why did you dial in or were drawn to this? I want to understand that. I’m sure people are curious too.

It’s interesting because I do think 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 and say, “I’ve got to pivot.” I think for me, there was a nonstop hum underneath, saying that I was not necessarily in the right direction. Meaning, how do I explain this? I went through my life and if I felt like I was not 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, having 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 I think 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 and what ended up happening was I was born with a very rare condition, which we didn’t know about. This was perfect that I told the story about my son because the end of that story was 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 a brittle bone disease, and when tested, it showed that I had 67% less collagen than the average 33-year-old. That speaks directly to my density. I am 67% less dense than the average person. I’ve got little skinny bones and there’s not a lot to me and my bones have holes in them, pores in them. What ended up my experience, which I didn’t understand until I was 33 and got that diagnosis and things. There would be 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 not be there.

Living in so much human fear of not having enough body and bone, not being able to ground in. I guess my pivot moment was at 33 because it all made sense what I had been seeing and feeling. Up until that point, it hadn’t made sense, but it was there and I was aware of it. 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 and feeling and having it, I 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 and fill it in and run and scan. This was nothing that I had any support or family members who understood what was going on and it was a silent experience for me. I think it was about eight years old when I mentioned something to my mom and 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?

No. We’re more lawyers.

From Boston, is that right? Are you originally from the Boston area?

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

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, a what we heard wouldn’t be what we would have expected to hear a thing. I heard it for the first time, like everybody else did, but that makes sense. When I say that, so this is interesting for me, I only can say it makes sense not because my head tells me it makes sense.

My brain cannot add up everything you said and say, “That’s adequate.” 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 to people what that is. It’s saying to me, this makes sense and you could try to convince me like somebody else could say to me whatever they want. I’ll say, “Now, don’t call BS on any of that because I’m telling you what I heard makes sense.

What you’re talking about, if we split it, is intuition. Intuition is this ever-present sense. It is so much deeper and beyond the brain and 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, and we are all running.

If you can think of pathways as intuition, moving through you and Kim Chestney, who wrote the book Radical Intuition. She has done such an amazing job of bringing an etheric, hard thing to pinpoint into some categorization. She and I subscribe to that same mind, body, heart, and soul intuition.

Not male, female, like we’ve mostly heard women’s intuition. That’s what I’ve been hearing a lot. We’re not talking about gender. We’re talking about mind, body, heart, and soul.

Yes, and I’ve got to tell you, I think that it is a misnomer that it’s women’s intuition. I think there are men and businessmen who are accessing their intuitive minds and thinking it’s thought. I think some of our incredible investments, people who are making incredible investments, and even you as a lawyer, you probably access your intuition as far as saying, “I need to say this.” “This is where they’re going to go.”

You’ve had a pre-cognitive sense of something. I think what happens is men tend to have more intuitive mind pathways or intuitive bodies. I love 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 and the wife isn’t moving as quickly and she has a different type of intuitive, either intuitive soul or intuitive heart. If we were to separate them, I think this is a big broad stroke. Maybe men generally have intuitive bodies and minds, and women have intuitive hearts and souls, and the pathways are different but we have all four of them. Each of us has them.

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

More highly or less highly developed holistically, but everybody must have some aspect of each of them.

Exactly and we’re we are by society drawn to hone one or the other. If you are 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, where my mind went was that I’ve been greatly influenced by metaphysics in my life, my adult life, and primarily through a teacher that somebody that who I never met, but I’ve read and read. In fact, they start my day every day with part of a reading from this particular person who was a metaphysician. I want to see if there’s a distinction between these types. The gentleman’s name is Emmett Fox, and people may or may not have heard of him, but he’s written some pretty remarkable things.

One of those things I did at the end of the year for people that read the New Year’s episode was around this concept of a mental diet and the seven-day mental diet that was an Emmett Fox principle. Metaphysics is, in that regard, almost, if not an actual spiritual practice for me. When you say you’re a metaphysician, is it that metaphysics that people are wondering or is it different? How would you distinguish them?

I would say it is that and I think it is a bridging. Where a metaphysicist comes in, or sometimes it’s softer said as a humanitarian, but a metaphysicist is coming in at a time when someone has essentially forgotten that they are anything but human. That is an incredibly terrifying and terrorizing experience. Emmett Fox or myself, and I’m not putting myself at Emmett Fox level, but that experience of someone who can help reconnect you or re and this isn’t, 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 and your higher self, whatever you want to call that, because we have to split the human experience. People say there’s a spiritual experience and a human experience, but that’s not true. It’s hard to speak to something more about consciousness. I think that the best way to describe it is that 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. I’ll move away from any spiritual, religious, and there are vibrations of consciousness at all times. You and I are talking. I can hold this up, consciousness, dark matter, dark energy is flowing right through us. It goes through all of our cells and in those moments, that’s where intuition comes in.

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

As you’re sitting here and we were talking, 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.”

Yes. Consciousness is another way to describe awareness, right? For people that are maybe either not so familiar with this language and haven’t been studying this thing and it’s new, and it was certainly new to me 12 or so years ago when it hit me or people that may even be reading this and saying that they don’t want to lean into something religious, let’s say or even spiritual, which is, the universe may be great.

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 in my trying to engage, whether I’m leaning into what you’re saying, agreeing with it, getting it, whatever it might be, there’s an element of an awareness that’s happening for me.

There’s also something going on behind the awareness or under the deeper awareness. I love the fact that Emmett 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 deep in religion because I’m not, but I want to understand it nonetheless because it is one of the most powerful things that the world has ever known.

It’s that almost nothing more powerful than that book, interestingly enough, 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, I think, what it is verbatim, “As a man thinketh in his heart. Is he.” You could replace that with a woman, of course. It’s what he describes as the meaning of that is that it’s not literally as you think in your heart, but the heart is a symbol for your subconscious.

From a psychological standpoint, your heart is not your physical heart. It’s thinking from your heart or as you think in your heart, it’s your subconscious, meaning it’s that deeper understanding, including what emerged, I suppose, in your sleep as regards that. To consciously ascend to something, to say yes to something consciously, we say yes to things all the time that we don’t believe in and our thoughts are constantly flowing like this stream that never ends.

Good thoughts, crazy thoughts, smart thoughts, and bad thoughts are constantly literally passing before us all the time. How could that possibly be us unless we’re walking lunatics? What we are, to use your word, our essence is what’s in our heart is in our subconscious as to who we are. Does that make sense to you?

One hundred percent and it’s expressing that through. It’s 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’re separate and you have a black shirt on and black framed glasses and your skin is this color and all of those things that have us seeing a somewhat reality of your separateness. What is the most powerful is when you flow oneness and consciousness through that separateness and express it because that gives it its unique quality. You are bringing that unique quality, into life and manifest.

 

I said we would talk about business. 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. I think it’s important, especially in light of what you said about intuition, because how do you solve complex problems? We’ve got a lot of world problems today.

We had a lot when I was a kid. I don’t know that much. That context hasn’t changed much. They’re different for those who may think this is the worst time in history. In 1969, the year I think that you were born, it was the worst time in history for people who were going through Vietnam and the civil rights movement. I was born at 65 and take any time in history and it’s been like that in modern history that people have felt that existential threat, World War II, Korea, World War I, terrible stuff.

Yet we’ve evolved through all of it and been resilient through all of it, which I want to talk about a little later, but to solve complex problems, we have to tune in, I believe, as business people, we have to tune into imagination. We have to tune into our ability to innovate in the face of what is like a chaos of sorts.

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

To do that, your conscious mind, that monkey mind, where the thoughts are rapid fire all the time. That’s not a great way to do it and not a great, effective way. When you work with people in business or 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?

Yes, absolutely, and I hope this jump brings us back. I think it will. One of the things that I work on is something called the self-manifested reality, SMR. It is a theory 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 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. I’m going to say for sure, this is deep psychology. There’s no beginner stuff here.

Frankly, if, and I don’t normally do this, but I don’t know if you might be triggered by some of what we’re about to talk about, it might be if you’re driving a car, maybe pull over. Find a parking, hit pause, and come back to this. I want to say that because this is not like the shallow end of the pool. Over to you, Laura.

Yes, awesome, thank you. That’s a good disclaimer. The self-manifested reality is the theory that we recruit events, circumstances, and people to reflect for us that which we do to ourselves unconsciously. Let me start with why would we ever do that. What is going on? Our experiences that we are here, if I can look at Adam, you came into this world and you have a mission and your mission is soul-based to have an expression of yourself out in the world.

We’re going to say you are product Adam and let’s call it your CESoul. We’ll have it as a business. You are the business of Adam and you are there at one, two, three, or four years old, and your first consumers are your parents and maybe an older sibling and those consumers are giving you feedback. You’ve got a little R&D, Research and Development, team inside yourself 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 you flew in and your mom’s upset when you are doing something too loud or expressive or whatever. You see that your kindergarten teacher appreciates when you listen and you are people-pleasing.

We internally begin to reallocate and if we have a creative department, an assertive department, an aggressive department and a lazy department, whatever it is, we end up taking energy from the things that 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 lock off a lot of the parts to ourselves. We may not be identified as creative, or I’ll give you an example from me. Assertive as a young woman was not. I didn’t get a lot of points for that. What I got was being attuned, being emotionally tuned into what was going on, to be there, to help people, to assist those things.

My departments inside of me became that I took a whole bunch of allocated energy and I allocated it to my attuning emotional intelligence, that part of me and my assertive me first that I was given to which I needed to bring the ideas that I had, these incredibly a little ahead of pioneering ideas. If I hadn’t had my assertiveness, I wouldn’t have been able to do that, which was happening in my first part of life. Assertiveness was then put in a closet, and all of a sudden, I am emotionally attuning and I’m attuning to extremely assertive people.

I’m now recruiting extremely assertive, aggressive people because I have aggressively hidden my assertion. What you find is that you can look at your triggers, whether 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 if 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 CE soul 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 that we move away from our path, most of us find ourselves pretty unhappy. The triggers in our life are actually what will bring us back to our natural essence, reintegrated, if that makes sense.

Interpreting this, you’re saying that people need to explore those more deeply things, 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. Why am I so triggered? I shouldn’t be triggered by them. That’s after you recognize what triggers you about them because whatever triggers you about them is what triggers you internally.

 

Yes and there’s a statement, and 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 little warning at the start of this because to hear that, I’m so glad you created the context you did for me to be able to say that because that’s a rough statement. Victims are perpetrators.

I will follow that statement up with two even stronger. The victim archetype is the strongest archetype and until we can take the victim out of our unconscious, we will be acting and our aggression will come from our victim state. SMR heals and yanks and pulls the victim out of the unconscious. We are a victim to ourselves. That doesn’t mean I am not in any way, this goes so much deeper. You can look and I’ll speak let’s say for being a woman.

 

I can say, “Wait for a second though, women are 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. Am I saying that the minorities and the people who are victimized 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 and we get back to the point of inflection, which again, this is not easy to deal with, of personal responsibility and we’re bordering on some stuff that’s super controversial in our world right now. I don’t typically get very political on this show, and I don’t mind, but I don’t actively try to go there.

I feel like this is an 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 may be the collective view and I’ll include myself that we haven’t fully considered.

Maybe not even aware of, considered and then assimilated, or to use your word integrated, which I love, I think that’s fundamental because it’s where you see repetitive, where there’s abuse or there’s traumatization that occurs repetitively, it doesn’t make sense. You don’t understand how that could happen, but what you share explains much of that.

Also, you’re 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, or you could discard it if you feel like it’s nonsense. You could do whatever you want with it, but when you do that, you are now responsible for yourself, 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 grand, 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 towards you.

100% because what you and I are both saying is, 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 of, yes, you could have situations in which you are abused or you have been betrayed, and these are cellularly, vibrationally built into your body, either generationally, and you come in with that.

Then it is for you. The victim mentality creates fear, it creates distrust and it creates a difficult reality. It’s in this moment when you say, “I can pull that out and create a reality in which I am no longer victimized, that I’m no longer in that triggered state.” That is fully 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

Yes, it literally is liberation.

Yes, that’s exactly and it is liberating from yourself. That’s the piece. The liberation is from yourself. However, you managed, whatever your unconscious got wired. These are neural wiring. I work big on recognizing that moment-by-moment moment as children. We are wiring, trying to learn everything.

They wire and fire together and unwiring those things. 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.

I want to ask you a tough question as you’re reaching back for the book.

This isn’t a book, but this is remembered when we were little, these were plaque-disclosing tablets. They were the little pink-purple things you chew and it shows where plaque is on your teeth. The 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 at that moment. The big picture, that’s the small picture. In the big picture, I suppose it’s about you and how you’re interpreting all of that or processing it.

Yes, it’s both how you’re interpreting it and also what you attracted. That is 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 somewhere are betraying yourself and that betrayal is sending a homing signal and it is bringing someone who is going to be one of your greatest lessons as far as if you pay attention. They’re going to betray you because they vibrationally are resonant. That’s what it is.

This is why it’s tough. It is tough to hear sometimes and that’s why earlier I said, pull over or push pause or whatever, if you’re not ready to hear this, because the degree to which you have to take ownership of your life is different than maybe it’s been in the past where again, there’s 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.

Again, that’s a tough pill to swallow, especially depending on where you are in your journey. Look, 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 chronologically but emotionally. It might be difficult for you to swallow that pill and you don’t have to. I’m not telling you you’ve got to. No, it’s not what Laura is saying.

It is important that we discuss it, especially in a world where, and this is where borders are in the political, and I want to get your thoughts on this. I don’t want to put it in a judgment or a form of a statement. There’s at least some conversation around, “Are people 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, Laura?

I think we’re almost like opening the oven on an unbaked cake. It looks pretty gooey and I’m not sure that I want to eat that. I think what we have is we have an older generation who were hardened and didn’t pay attention to their triggers. They barreled through it, didn’t look at what was triggering them, and didn’t unwire things. They resolved and barreled through and 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.

Yes, then we have the pendulum swinging and this younger generation paying attention to their triggers. I think that because 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 that this is my issue. This is my issue and I have to deal with it. I know it doesn’t look like that. That’s why I use 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. I think it’s like in our work, having the aware resilience research firm and deploying solutions and 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, “Hey, 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, your hours for the next eight to 10 hours or whatever it is. 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, in the car, et cetera.

What we see in our research is that people are more, and there’s no debate about this. Anxiety is at levels that have never been tracked before. People are more anxious. Many are depressed and suicidal ideation is higher. People are burned out or near that place more and more frequently. That being the case, the facts, 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 pain?

 

Yes, thank you. We’re in the middle of the cake and making big shifts because what we could look at 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 that was there, but they were hidden and covered.

I think first is anxiety. The way I look at anxiety is a detachment or disconnection from self. Our body, the autonomic nervous system, creates anxiety to let the body know that we have 100 billion neurons and they’re supposed to be connected to our heart and our lungs and everything. 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 attachment, we’re connected and we’re grounded.”

What’s happening is we are so visual now, the 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 amazingly can read everything our neurons can diagnose in ourselves. As a medical intuitive, I know this to be true. What I can diagnose in my own body, my heart rate, my pulse, all of those things, I can also intuit if my neurons are picking up and reading somebody else’s.

Our neurons can diagnose in ourselves as a medical intuitive. Share on X

If we are constantly out and our neurons are out reading and threat assessing, our autonomic nervous system goes, “Wait a second.” 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 and we’re not grounded in our body.

Right. The sympathetic nervous system says there’s a threat and our bodies respond as evolutionary. We’ve been trained, “This is how we deal with threats.”

Exactly. We’re not reading ourselves. We’re not embodied in grounded in our bodies. I can say that that’s where anxiety is. Then depression, as we were talking about, it’s a lack of expression of self. It is an inability to express self. 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 when we get to anxiety or depression, only when we’re already there, then someone can say, “No, no, no, there’s a chemical issue here.” What I’m saying is that chemical issue happens after these energetic issues.

There’s this clog, if you will, and things are not flowing. When things get toxic as a result of that backup, then there’s the need for word.

If someone’s saying, “No, I am, I’m depressed, it’s showing up in my numbers.” In those numbers, our brain creates neurotransmitters, which create that chemistry, and that chemistry then gets tested as depressed. We’ve got to go back here to the unconscious and say, “What created that?”

Go further upstream. Often, we’re treating symptoms. We’re treating things later on. You know what? We’re going to have a couple of minutes left, but I can’t help myself. I want to ask you this. I feel like many people, because we’re talking about it in a business context, use the term emotional intelligence or emotional acumen, which I think is also being used.

I would say that 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, than my friends, peers, certainly than my parents and then my grandparents, as you said. People were quite a bit different years ago and not in the best way, not from an evolutionary standpoint.

That’s the goal. Go back to the good old days. They weren’t good old days. Anyway, they were plays. 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 like this is a net positive person.

Not because we’re Pollyanna but because that’s what evolution teaches us. Kids today, and I work with leaders who are trying to understand younger generations or younger demographics, and they have attitudes about them and they have judgments about them. They’re like, “No, this is the advanced.” Whatever the iPhone is up to, they’re the latest version.

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

I look at it as the same, in the sense that we had midlife crises between 37 and 43, let’s say, and they are having midlife crises earlier because they can handle the emotional disruption that is happening. They are being brought into and evolving much more quickly. I have kids the same age and they are brilliantly emotionally attuned, but they were not ripping like we were to keep it together through high school and college, and in your 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 where these are softer, which I don’t think are softer. I think they are so incredibly powerful. Appearance of soft is that they are able to openly and outwardly express themselves. When they do, it doesn’t get repressed. Then, there’s not going to be at our age. There’s going to be fewer in their thirties. There’ll be less betrayal, abandonment, rejection, and less of that because they will have dealt with those things.

Yes. That’s the good news, especially in truly for those who may be reading this who are dealing with these things. We all deal with it. To be clear. 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. Ultimately, that’s the problem you want.

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. We don’t want to go back to being obtuse or callous because, somehow or another, people equate that with resiliency when we think about resiliency. This may be the last question here, Laura, but I want to get your thoughts on this.

Think about resiliency, the ability to have a greater perception, self-perception to begin with, and then the perception of others that’s possible because you’re tuned into yourself. I don’t think you could possibly tune into anyone else if you’re not first tuned into yourself, but that will produce resilience and 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. Literally, that was my thought. He nailed it. I think I can’t honestly add to anything. What you said was so beautiful and powerful. You can’t be attuned unless you know yourself and to know yourself, you must know yourself mentally, emotionally, physically, and spiritually. From that, you build a resiliency of, I repeated what you said, which was beautiful.

Laura, I have so enjoyed this conversation and honestly, I want to do a part two.

I would love that.

Maybe as part of part two, for our readers out there, if you’ve got questions that you want to address or challenge anything that you read, whatever comes up for you, we love it if you go to Adam Markel Podcasts, leave your questions or comments there or of course, 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.

Yes, that’d be so much fun.

None of this is easy. It’s not, “Don’t want to be tried about it.” You’ve been studying this you’ve been working this has been your area of focus and expertise for a few decades, right?

Yes.

Good, me too. Love that and Laura, I’ve so enjoyed this conversation that I can only imagine how other people have also experienced it.

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

All right, Laura, we closed out the show and then were having a conversation, we’ll leave things for part two, questions, challenges, all that good stuff, but there was one thing that came out that we feel like we need to discuss. I’m going to take it up super fast, hopefully. I did a TED talk some years ago, and the true line was this concept of loving your life no matter what.

I wake up in the morning, I put my feet on the floor, I say four words, “I love my life.” For me, 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, there are people when I’m starting in that moment, taking a breath even, people are taking their last breath in that exact moment.

It’s sacred, too. It’s a holy situation. I did that TED Talk and when it was published. It got a lot of views, but I also got a lot of flack and some of the stuff that people commented on was, “How dare you?” “F you.” “Like literally, if you knew what my life was like, you would never have the audacity to say to me, love my life no matter what.” Laura, we were talking about in the context of the victim that one thing we didn’t do, 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.

Yes, because if you think about energy, 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, and that energy gets plugged into your body. It’s now moving inside you in that disempowered state.

What often can happen with victims is unconsciously, sometimes consciously, they use victimization to be able to retaliate and their retaliation is justified. They can take all of this pent-up power that they have learned they aren’t able to express naturally. They need to have a reason to express it. 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. It’s amazing when we look at it, It’s the human mind trying to heal the physical body because when we hold back our energy, that creates disease in our body. Even the victim, on an unconscious level, their mind is finding a way, 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, but it’s justified and it is, like I said, low consciousness. It has a lower level of consciousness.

On some level, and we’ve agreed that we’re doing this little 10-minute addendum here because this could be in lots of places. It sounds like it’s positive on one level because if a person is doing that, let’s say they consider themselves like a justice warrior, as many people have coined themselves these days.

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

I would say, I think positive is maybe too strong of a word. It is the body’s way. It’s natural. Yes, it is the body’s and mind’s way of saying, “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.”

Now we have got to wire another part of the brain that allows that expression. What will that do? Look at this. We have a victim mentality that allows justification. Look at how in car accidents or whatever, you get remediation. When your car gets hit, there is this retribution. You are victimized.

There’s a recovery. The personal injury lawyers out there are loved.

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. Then it comes, let’s go back to the beginning of that conversation where I was saying that I was extremely assertive as a child.

I learned my own wiring. I wired myself. My mom didn’t come in and stick something in and wire society didn’t, but I watched and watched and realized this assertion is unattractive. That’s what I decided. I repressed my assertion and then walked out and my reality was one in which I met assertive, aggressive people who were drawn to pull that out in me.

I either had the choice once they were aggressive to me, I could have wired a justified victim, attacked them, and be 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, “Wow, that’s war. There’s the plaque.”

This is the experience where we were talking about. If we’re challenged, you put this show 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.” Because if I’m creating a reality where 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 and 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, not to any extreme level, but I was bullied enough that it impacted me and my self-esteem and all that thing.

Then I gave that TED Talk about how in 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 because one of us missed a save there and ultimately had to be impeccable in that environment, become a lawyer, and protect 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, but I was living this total on-guard life, always on guard, always looking at what suspiciously and fearfully about those things.

I was attracting more of that all the time, that aggression, as you said, living that aggressive life that ultimately put me in the hospital. Part of my pivot and the transition from that state of being was, at some point, to learn to be able to love that. Love myself and even love the part of me that was so weak.

I judged myself weak, vulnerable, ineffectual, and the kid that would get picked on. I didn’t love that kid because I turned that into, of course, 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, to love all aspects of yourself, then you can integrate those things to use your word earlier.

Then 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 happy, Laura, that you shared your situation and that we also discussed this publicly.

I want to talk about that for two seconds. It’s so beautiful because you also described that you unconsciously chose your profession, your first profession, to heal that there wasn’t a self-advocate. We see a lot of times what we are seeing when we see these massive warriors, 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 they have incredible hearts for advocating for the person, the underdog, as you did. What’s beautiful is you watch and something healed in you. Suddenly that piece, you were no longer saying, “I suck.” “I don’t need to advocate for someone else because I have found myself an advocate. My advocate is going to take me out of law and put me in something more for me.” That was a huge healing.

Right, because the through line 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 work well with organizations is all about teaching. It’s all about helping people have these kinds of conversations to develop resilience from within.

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

I’m so happy we did the adenum.

It was so awesome.

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

—

That was absolutely one of my favorite episodes, my favorite interviews. It would be on the greatest hits. We were into almost 400 episodes of this show, going back five or six years at this point. I love that conversation because we went to some places that frankly, they’re not easy places to go because we’re talking about how we’re wired.

We’re talking about the way that our life stories are interpreted by us, not by others, but by how we interpret them and what we do with that story that we’ve been telling ourselves for many years, including the victims’ story. The stories in our lives where we’ve been hurt, where we’ve been betrayed, where things have gone wrong, and trying to make sense of those things, then use them effectively as a tool for our growth, but also for a positive impact in the world.

That’s the special sauce. That’s the juice in life is to be able to transmute those things and transcend them. 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. I think this is a very provocative conversation. I think it’s one that you may want to read again, that you may want to share with other people.

I know I’m certainly going to share this with our community as well because I think it’s vitally important that we talk about it. We did talk about anxiety and its origins and how we, in many ways, I think that midlife crisis that used to happen around age 40 or between age 40 and 50 was typical, is happening younger and younger, earlier and earlier.

That the 20-somethings and 30-somethings are now experiencing the signs of that midlife anxiety, et cetera. 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. In that chronicle in the book, Pivot, which I wrote some years ago, we got to cover some things from a very different perspective.

I think this is a very valuable conversation and one that, again, I think is worth reading again 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 right now in response to what you heard. I think 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. No strings attached. You can go to RankMyResilience.com and get that assessment for yourself or others on your team for free. It’s three minutes. That’s the beauty of this assessment. Sixteen questions only for three minutes, nothing to it. If you’ve got questions for Dr. Graye, questions for me. We would love to create a part two to this conversation where we draw upon your comments and questions.

You can go to the Adam Markel Podcast to leave a comment or question there, or you can email us at Team@AdamMarkel.com and we will take those questions, get them all queued up for part two of this conversation with Dr. Laura Graye. Again, 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 and reviewing it, 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 to get this community to grow this community and get this message, these kinds of 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, and have a blessed and beautiful day. Ciao for now.

 

Important Links

• Dr. Laura Graye
• Pivot – Book
• Radical Intuition – Book
• Get This Moment Right: A SOLOCAST For The Year-End And New-Year Transition – Past Episode
• https://www.LinkedIn.com/in/lauragraye/

 

About Dr. Laura Graye

Dr. Graye devotes herself to helping professional leaders and personal clients recognize the meaningful role metaphysics plays in ALL our lives and how we can tap into 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. As a metaphysician, she applies her expertise in this space to the assistance of these humanitarian goals.