Transforming CPTSD through Spiritual Habits | with Eric Zimmer

Hello everybody, My name is Eric Zimmer. Welcome to this presentation on transforming your trauma into triumph. And at the heart of it is really this idea that it is our difficulties that often lead to our best and most powerful insights into life and ways of living and gifts that we can give the world, but we don't get there via an easy path, right? We really do have to go through a process of transformation, and I have created a program called Spiritual Habits that helps us actually do that transformation. But before I do that, I really wanna start a little bit with kind of me and my story. Then I'm gonna tell you a little bit about how I arrived at spiritual habits, I'm gonna talk a little bit about the word spiritual, What does that mean? Because that may be a term that resonates with many of you, but it may not resonate with many others of you, you may not like that word. But I wanna talk about what I mean, ‘cause I have a very broad and general use of the word. Then we're going to talk about what spiritual habits actually are. What does that mean? We'll talk about what they aren't. After that, then I'm gonna walk you through some behavioral principles and a spiritual principle, and we'll put it all together into a spiritual habit. And that is an ambitious amount to cover in a very short amount of time, but we will see how we go.

So a little bit about me, for purposes of this conversation, I think it's just worth talking about my recovery experience. I got sober at the age of 24, I was a homeless heroin addict, I was living in the back of a van, and it's not a Chris Farley joke, but I actually really was, I was looking at going to jail for something like 50 years, I weighed a hundred pounds, I had Hepatitis C, I was basically dying and I was able to get sober, we'll talk a little bit about that. And I stayed sober for about eight years and then I went back out and I drank again. And while, while I was drinking, I did not go back to heroin, I was drinking smoking marijuana, but that's an important part of the story because it leads to spiritual habits and so we'll get there, but I just wanted to give you a little broad overview. In addition to recovery from alcoholism, I have dealt with and contended with depression, kind of all my adult life, probably a lot of my childhood life, and you know, the conference is about trauma. My traumas tend to be more in the lowercase t trauma category than the big traumas. I had a couple things, big things happen, but primarily it was a lot of living with a really, really angry father, living with a depressed mother and just sort of not getting the things that I needed as a child to develop in the way that is optimal. And thus ended up basically, you know, needing to nearly kill myself with heroin in order to feel okay about myself. So where I want to go now is talk a little bit about that first time in recovery and share what happened in those eight years kind of what then happened that led me to drink again, and then coming back from that.

So when I got sober, it was 1994 in Columbus, Ohio, and there were not very many options for getting sober. Matter of fact, there was exactly one and it was Alcoholics Anonymous. And Alcoholics Anonymous is a 12 step program, many of you may know it, you may like 12 step programs, you may dislike 12 step programs, they've saved my life twice. I don't think they're perfect, I think there are a lot of great options out there today, but for me, at that time, that was what was available. And in addition, 12 step programs talk about a spiritual approach, and again, in Columbus, Ohio in 1994, the spiritual approach that was on offer was the Christian God, right? And I didn't really believe in God, and yet I was so broken and so scared that I came in and I said, you know what, I have to get sober, I will do anything, I will try and believe anything. And so I worked really hard to believe in this God that came in from sort of above and came into our lives and made us sober and intervened in our lives. And while this is a perfectly valid belief for many, many people, it wasn't for me, but I tried really hard to believe it, and then around seven years sober, six and a half years sober, my wife and I went through a divorce and she came home one day and said, I'm in love with someone else. She left me and she took my two year old son while actually, I shouldn't say she left, I left the house and, but I was separated from my two-year-old son and I was in a tremendous amount of pain, and my spiritual life and spiritual beliefs just kind of crumbled. So fast forward, I stay sober about a year and a half, and I eventually go back to drinking. I went back via the usual path for many of us that achieved long-term sobriety, which is where I went, well maybe it's not that bad, you know, I was younger then, I was doing heroin. We all know that's a bad idea, I've done all kinds of therapy and I've been through all these programs, I've done all this work on myself, maybe I can handle drinking again, and the short version of that is, no, I couldn't for a little while, I could. Eventually, it got bad enough, and it got to the point where, although my life looked very different on the outside, I wasn't homeless, I wasn't going to jail. I was every bit as sick on the inside as I had been before, and so it became clear that I had to get sober again. So I knew I was coming back and I was coming back to 12 step programs, ‘cause that's what I knew. And still, this was a time where there weren't a lot of options on order. So I was coming back to 12 step program, but I faced a problem, and it was that the 12 steps are a spiritual orientation. We talk about a power greater than ourselves, we talk about spiritual awakenings, and I was like, well, if I'm gonna work the program, then I need a spiritual life, but what do I believe in? And where I landed was on an insight that really sort of fundamentally changed me and my life over a period of time. And that insight was that I actually believed if I lived my life by certain principles, things like acceptance, things like being present, things like being generous if I lived according to those principles, then I could stay sober and I could handle whatever life brought me, not that life would only bring me good things, which was sort of an immature spiritual understanding, but a belief that I could handle whatever life brought me by living according to these principles. And so that was enough for me to get started and get sober. So this was, I don't know, 15 years ago, 16 years ago, I don't even remember the exact date, I didn't keep track of sobriety date because after you've had eight years and you lose it, it's pretty hard to be like, well, I'm gonna count the days ‘cause it just feels depressing, so I just let it go, but it's been somewhere between 15 and 16 years ago that I was able to come back. And since then I, I worked in the software business, but about eight years ago, I started a podcast called The One You Feed Podcast. And in it, I interview people really about how we feed our good wolves. There's an old parable, we all have two wolves inside of us, a good wolf, a bad wolf, which wolf wins the one you feed. And this was in my recovery life was very obvious, right? It wasn't even so much that I was feeding the bad wolf as so much as the bad wolf was eating me. So anyway, about eight years ago, I started this podcast and I started it because I needed it, I was in a difficult marriage, my depression was acting up, I had started a solar energy company, it had failed. I just needed something to hold onto and I thought this would be a good idea, and it turned out to really be. And since then I've talked to over 500 people, some of the smartest people in the world about building a life that's worth living about healing ourselves, about transforming are tragedies into triumphs. And so out of that came, I started doing a lot of one-on-one coaching, and about four years ago, I created a program called Spiritual Habits, that was my attempt to bring together everything that I had learned in my recovery life and all the years of therapy and personal growth in all the interviews I had done, in all the people I had coached, and kind of put it into a framework that I thought allowed us to experience real transformation. So that's where spiritual habits came from, was out of that desire to find a spiritual life that works for me. So what does spiritual mean in the case that I'm using it? I define spiritual as really what matters most to us, it's about connecting to the things that are most important to us and living by those things. So much of our life is lived in this sort of autopilot sense, or we're living out of our trauma, right? We're responding to life from this broken, this traumatized place, or we're responding out of life by what we've been cultured to believe, or what the pressures of our job are, instead of really being able to say, okay, what's most important to me and how do I put that into action in my life? How do I make sure that, as Stephen Covey famously said, that I'm putting first things first, that's what spiritual is to me. So the Spiritual Habits program works with people of any religion, any philosophical tradition, or none at all or there's a lot of people out there who reconsider themselves spiritual but not religious, this sort of person also the program speaks to.

So what are spiritual habits? Well, I'm gonna share something here with you on my screen. So what spiritual habits are, is they are some spiritual principles that are rooted in ancient wisdom, that are taught across all spiritual traditions, whether it be Christianity, Buddhism, Islam, Judaism, many other religions, no religions, philosophical traditions, Aristotle, Socrates, that these things, principles show up again and again and again across all of these, and so what I did is I really looked at all these different traditions and said what seemed to be the key points that everybody agrees on, that people have always said, this is foundational to living a good life. And so, spiritual habits take those principles with the other thing that I have studied extensively, which is how we change our behavior, the science of behavior change. We know a lot these days that we didn't used to know about how people actually change. And so spiritual habits take these ancient spiritual traditions principles and combines it with these behavioral principles that create spiritual habits, which are ways that we can really embody these ideas in our lives, that we can actually live them so that we can get the benefits from them and get the gifts that come from living according to these principles. So that's what spiritual habits are.

Now, I wanna talk briefly about what spiritual habits are not. Spiritual habits are not something that takes the place of recovery work, for example. So if you're recovering from a substance abuse issue or an eating disorder or any other sort of behavioral issue, these are not something that takes the place of the need for very specific recovery work. I think particularly early on, it's important that we have some rooting in a program that helps us with the very specific thing we're dealing with. So in my case, it's really important to be in 12 step programs with people who suffered from drug addiction, alcoholism. These don't take the place of therapy, right? If you need therapy, and I did even after working the 12 steps, multiple times, I needed a lot of therapy. So spiritual habits don't take the place of therapy, they don't take the place of trauma work. If you've suffered deep trauma, there are ways of healing from that and while these are a great support to that, they're not a replacement for it. And finally, they also don't take the place of medication if that's what you need. And the reason I say this is, it's very common for us to do what's called a spiritual bypass. And what this means is we take a principle, let's take a principle like acceptance. And the idea of acceptance is if you can't change something then work on accepting it and allowing it to be the way it is. And so we will hear this and we'll think, well, that's a great idea, I should really do that. But what we will do then is take something to really difficult that happens to us, and instead of learning to work with those emotions in a skillful way, and then use acceptance, we will use acceptance as a way of pushing those emotions down and out in the same way that we might have used drug addiction or whatever our coping mechanisms are. Spirituality can be a way of that, of doing the same thing. And so we don't want these spiritual principles to step in and be a way of avoiding the difficulty of life, right? We still want to face difficulty. We want to feel what we need to feel, we want to learn to work with our emotions skillfully, and we want to take some of these perspectives that some of the spiritual teaching can give us, right? It's a both and kind of situation.

So now what I want to do is talk first about some of the behavioral science aspects of this, because that's where we're gonna start with the behavioral principles that I think underlie the spiritual habits program. Before we jump into the behavioral principles though, I do want to just share an idea with you that I think can be really helpful. This is from the Persian poet Kabeer, and he says that wherever you are is the starting point. And what that means to me is that wherever you are at this current moment, no matter how broken you might feel, no matter how damaged you might feel, no matter how far down you are or how much growth or recovery you've had, wherever you are right now, is the starting point. And it's the perfect starting point for you because the path to healing ourselves really has to go right through the center of our lives, it has to happen in our lives, in our time. And so wherever you are right now is the starting point for the next thing that you do and the next thing that you do, and so I find this a really comforting idea that I come back too often. All right, now onto the behavioral principles at the heart of the program is this idea that little by little, a little becomes a lot. We do not change and heal overnight. It just doesn't work that way. We may have some big insights that really open things up for us, we may have a moment where we feel like some big rock drops away, and these are wonderful when they come, but most of the healing journey is little by little, a little becomes a lot. There is a scene, if you were to film the movie of my life, where you would see me sitting in a treatment center in Columbus, Ohio. It was an old abandoned tuberculosis hospital, total disaster area. And I was there and they said, we think you need to go to longer term treatment, and I originally said, no, I'm not gonna do that, and I went back to my room and I had a moment where I just had, as we call them in recovery, a moment of clarity where I saw like, if I go back out there, I'm probably going to die. And so I went back and said, I will go to treatment, right? So in the movie of my life, that's this fundamental big moment. And sure it is a big moment, but there are thousands and thousands of little moments between then and now that have also shaped my healing and my recovery. So it's little by little, a little becomes a lot. And this is great news because it means we don't have to do huge things, it means we can take a little step, a little step, we can have a moment here, a moment there, we can forget about it, we can come back to it. But things accumulate over time. Now there's a downside to this rule too, which is that the negative things that we do, the negative behaviors we engage in the negative thought patterns that we engage in, they accumulate over time and become a lot. And so for a lot of us, where we are particularly struggling, it is because there's been this long accumulation of these things. But the way we unwind that is little by little, but it does turn into a lot, and I wanna give you an example of what type of transformation I think is possible.

So 25 years ago, as I mentioned, homeless heroin addict, looking at going to jail for 50 years. And now flash forward to about a year ago from now, and my mom falls and she breaks her hip and she goes to the hospital and then I take her home and she asks me to go to the pharmacy and pick up her medications. So for about four months, I go to the pharmacy and I pick up her medications and I bring them to her.

And one of the medications is Oxycontin. And what's amazing is not only did I not want to take them, it was a while before it even occurred to me how amazing it was that I was carrying it around without thinking about it. I would've robbed you at gunpoint for that once upon a time, and now I'm carrying it without even thinking about it. So that's the type of transformation that is possible. But again, that happens little by little, a little becomes a lot. So we'll come back to this again and again, but the heart of the spiritual habits method is this idea of let's just do a little bit today, a little bit this morning, a little bit this afternoon. How do we find little moments in our lives where we can reflect, where we can practice and watch those add up over time?

The next behavioral principle is really make it so small, you can't say no. So when it comes to building any kind of habit, if we find that we're not doing it, one of the reasons might be that we're simply trying to do too much. So for years, I was convinced that meditation would be really helpful for me, and by years, I mean starting in like 1990, so a long time ago. And so I would read a book about meditation, I would get inspired, and they would say, well, you should meditate for 30 minutes a day. So I would set out to meditate 30 minutes a day, and I might do it for a day, I might do it for a week, I might do it for a month, and then I would stop, and then I would do it again for a day, a week, a month, I would stop and I just could never get any sort of consistency going. And it wasn't till right about when I started this podcast that I learned this idea of really make it so small, you can't say no. And so what I did was, I just said, you know what? I'm gonna meditate for three minutes a day, but I'm gonna do it every day because three minutes, I can't make an excuse for in my mind, right? If I'm not doing it, it's very difficult for me to come up with a good, good reason. So I started doing three minutes a day, and then I was able to get consistent and then build out to a longer meditation habit. Now, sometimes we'll start really small like this, and then it'll build out. Other times we stay really small and a lot of the spiritual habits practice is one that I'll introduce you to later. It's not that the goal is to keep growing it, it's that it remains very small. But what we're looking for is ways to practice, ways to heal that can happen in the context of our day-to-day life, which are usually busy without us having to take a ton of time away and that happens by finding these small moments.

The next principle is to focus on getting started. So if you've made something so small, then you, this isn't so important because there's, it's, you've already sort of shrunk it down. But if you're trying to do something bigger, let's say you've realized that journaling for 20 minutes is a exercise your therapist gave you as part of your trauma recovery, but you find you're not doing it consistently. One of the things that I think happens to us is that when it comes time to do something, I think our brains do a very subconscious calculation. And it looks a little bit like this, our brains say, well, you know, I've got this much energy and the thing I need to do is gonna take this much energy, so I can't do it, right. So, I have this much energy right now when I feel inside and journaling takes this much energy, I can't do it. So if we focused on getting started though, we don't worry about that, then it can allow us to get over that. So with journaling, you might just say, okay, what I'm gonna do is sit down where I journal, I'm gonna pick up the journal, I'm gonna write two sentences, and then after that, if I can't do it or I don't, I can't stay with it, then okay, I can set it aside, but I'm gonna break it down to this really little thing that I can start. This basic idea is been how I've run my life, and my business for a number of years. Anytime I face resistance, I just focus on getting started. Oh, I gotta get on the exercise bike today, I'm gonna do a 60 minute ride, and my brain goes, I'm sitting on the couch and my brain's like, well, Eric, we only have this much energy and we know a 60 minute ride is this much energy. And so instead of just concluding I can't do it, I go, all right, how about Eric, you just go put on your bike shoes and get on the bike. And then my brain goes, well, I have this much energy that takes this much energy, then I'm on the bike. And once we get started, we often find that momentum builds another behavioral principle. We tend to think that motivation occurs and then an action happens. But sometimes it has to be opposite of that, sometimes we have to start an by hooker, by crook, we get an action started, and then motivation comes after. And so this focus on getting started is a way of working with that. And then finally, is to be specific. Know what you're going to do, when you're going to do it, where you're going to do it, how you're going to do it. The more specific you are the better chance you have of doing it. Now over time with habits, you also have to be flexible, you have to realize like, okay, well I may not be able to do it at the same time every day if I have kids and one of them gets sick, but to start specificity is really important. And I'll give you an example. So if I'm like thinking I need to be in better shape, so I'm gonna get in better shape, that's not a very useful idea, right? I'm not gonna be able to do much of anything with that. If I instead go, the way that I'm gonna get in better shape is by running, okay, well, that's a step towards being more specific, but still not great. If on the other hand, I get to, all right, I'm gonna run three days next week, much better, right? I'm narrowing in. If I get to, I'm gonna run Monday, Wednesday, Friday at 7:00 AM for 30 minutes around my block, that's really specific. And the reason this is important is when we're not specific, then what's happening is we're having to figure out what we're going to do, and then do it all kind of at the same time. And that figuring out takes energy. So for example, if I'm not clear on when I'm running, so let's say it's Monday morning and I'm like, well, should I run this morning? I don't know, I mean, I don't feel great, and so I could do it tomorrow morning, yeah, but tomorrow I got kind of a busy day, so maybe I shouldn't, maybe I should do it today. Well, maybe I'll do it after breakfast sometime, no, if I go after breakfast, I'll be full, right? You could see what our brains do, they just do this spinning, and so then we're worn out and we don't do anything when we're specific. When Monday morning comes at 7:00 AM to go run and we can put all our energy right onto that thing. So specificity is really our friend when we're trying to build habits to start with.

And then the last behavioral principle is simply that what we practice, we strengthen. This echoes back to little by little, a little becomes a lot. This is, I've got a guitar on the screen here because I'm a guitar player and I know that if I practice guitar, I get better, it's just that simple. And so whatever we practice doing, we will get better at. So with any of these spiritual habits, we get better at them the more we do them. And again, the same holds for this in reverse, right? When we practice bad behaviors, we strengthen those, when we practice avoidance, we strengthen avoidance, when we practice denial, we strengthen denial. Whatever our thing is, we strengthen it. So what we wanna do is find ways to put good habits, behaviors, thought patterns into our life, do them little bit by little bit, and over time those strengthen and grow.

The next piece of behavioral learning that we need to do is to understand triggers. And triggers simply mean something that occurs that makes us remember to do something else or want to do something else. If you're familiar with addiction, recovery, you have heard this word often triggers, and we usually mean them in a negative sense. My mom triggers me and I want to drink, right? My going to this neighborhood triggers me ‘cause I used to buy drugs there, trauma has triggers, right? I find myself in a certain situation and it triggers something in me. So we know how triggers can be used for the negative. What we wanna learn now is how to use triggers for the positive to encourage us to do different things, because the biggest problem that I find with practicing some of these spiritual principles in our lives is that we forget, we might remember in the morning and then we get busy and we don't think about any of those things again till that night or maybe the next morning, or we forget for days at a time, right? So remembering becomes a really important thing and triggers are a way to remember.

So I want to talk about some different types of triggers that we can use. So I'm gonna share my screen here and we're going to talk about types of triggers. So the first type of trigger is a time-based trigger. This, we're all familiar with this, you put something on your calendar and when that time comes, you do it. You set an alarm to go off and when the alarm goes off, you do it. But this can be very helpful, right? We can set alarms for ourselves. So I set alarms often throughout my day if I wanna remember to do something or sometimes if I'm like, you know what? I wanna spend five minutes in quiet multiple times a day, I'll set an alarm to go off at each of those times ‘cause I won't remember otherwise. So we can use time-based triggers and they're very helpful. The other's a location-based trigger. A location-based trigger is something like every time I go into the kitchen, then I will do this thing or every time I'm at a red light or every time I go to the bathroom, but there are locations that happen that can trigger us to do something. The third type is a proceeding event. So these can be really helpful if you don't want to be locked down to a specific time or if things don't always occur for you at the same time. But certain activities always occur. So, for example, a lot of people I know will say after I walk the dog, then I will journal or after I walk the dog, I will meditate ‘cause walking the dog happens every morning or after I make my coffee, because if you're a coffee drinker, that tends to happen all the time, every morning after I brush my teeth. So preceding event can be a great thing to anchor a new habit or behavior to just be sure that that preceding event always happens or happens, you know? Very, very often, you know, like 95% of the time upwards. Otherwise, you're anchoring yourself to a unstable trigger. But preceding event can be a really helpful trigger. The next, and this is kind of the holy grail of all of this, is what I call an emotional state trigger. And we all know what these are, and again, they generally work for us for the bad, and they generally happen very subconsciously. Something happens to us emotionally, and we respond, and again, we may not even see it happen, right? We may just, it may, we just may be on the other side of the behavior or the thought and be like, well, how did that happen? But if we look, we can see it. Oh, I got on the, I called my mom and after I got off the call with my mom, I had a drink or my kids didn't put their shoes away, and I yelled. So what we can do though now is learn to use the emotional state. Can we see the emotional state happening? And then give it a different response. There's something called the habit loop. And the habit loop basically says you have three things that make up a habit. The first is there's a cue or a trigger, something happens. Then we have a behavior that happens in the middle. And then finally we have sort of the reward or the consequence of that behavior. What they say often is that the way to do this is the triggers, the cues may not change. So, but the behavior can, so for example, what I could do is after I talk to my mother, I will call my best friend. After I talk to my mother, I will, take a hot bath, right? We put something after the triggering event that is positive. So we use our emotional states to allow us to do something positive versus our emotional states driving us to do something negative. And the way we develop this is via something called, I call it continuous interior awareness. There's lots of different words for it, but it basically means we become more and more conscious of what is happening inside of us at any moment, what we're feeling, what we're thinking, what's going on in our body, that we start to see those things, we start to recognize them, oftentimes we start to catch them earlier in the process, not when, you know, we're all the way at a 10, but when we're at a four, we're like, oh, I feel the pot starting to boil. Okay, now what is it that I want to do? So triggers, that's another type of trigger. And then finally there's a type of trigger we use in the spiritual habits program a lot, and it's a random trigger. So on Apple there is an app called Mind Jogger. I think on Android, it's called Randomly Remind me. There are others like it, but what you can do is you can set it to go off randomly a certain number of times a day during certain hours. So this can be great to just say, have it go off five times from 8:00 AM to 8:00 PM and when it goes off, you can put a message for what you want it to say. And so let's just say you wanted to develop more of this continuous interior awareness. The thing your phone would go off, you'd look at it would say, what's happening inside me? And you would just take a ten second pause, what am I thinking? All right, I'm thinking about how much my husband just, you know, really made me angry. What am I feeling? Well, really tense in my neck and my shoulders, and I just feel, you know, anger. Okay, good, I don't even have to do anything with that, right? But by doing that, by being prompted to do that five or six times, we start to do it more naturally because we're reminded to do it, and so the random trigger can be a really helpful one. So the next thing that I wanna share is an idea that also comes out of the spiritual habits program and it, they're called still points. And what I mean by still point is a short amount of time that happens multiple times a day where you can reflect or do something. So for an example, a still point could be the example I just gave. There's a moment where you're reminded, say maybe via the random trigger. And what you're doing in that still point is just asking yourself, what am I thinking? What am I feeling? You could at another time have a still point where when the still point occurs, you just take five deep breaths, you could use any of the triggers we talked about to be still points. So some people have established really powerful still points by every time I go to the bathroom, they do something but the great news is once we get these still points established throughout our day, once we're in the habit of doing them and we have methods triggers to remind us to do them, we can then put anything we want into that still point. So if you are focusing on being more accepting of what's happening in the world, right? Then you could have a practice that every time the still point occurs, you reflect on what can I change and what can't I change about this situation? You just bring that idea to mind and you think about it. Again, these are little things, but little by little a little becomes a lot. So getting these still points created gives you architecture in your life that can be enormously powerful for really building new thought and behavioral patterns into our lives.

So I just am gonna ask you right now to do just a very quick reflection, and that reflection is, you know, based on what we've just talked about, what trips you up the most when creating and sustaining a habit. You know, what tends to get in your way when you're trying to change behavior, it might be that you're not being specific enough, it might be that the strong emotional reactions take over. So just take a second and just reflect what gets in your way of creating new behavior patterns, and has anything I've talked about so far given you any ideas for how you might change that? I'm just gonna let you think for a second. And then the second part of the reflection is what behavior change principle we talked about earlier do you think will help most? So would it be little by little, a little becomes a lot? Would it be focus on getting started? Make it so small, you can't say no, what we strengthen, we practice, being specific or learning to use triggers more wisely. Which of those do you feel like might help you with whatever it is you're trying to do? All right, now we're gonna transition into one of the spiritual principles we use in the program. There are actually nine of them, so we're not gonna go through all of them, but I've given you the framework of behavior change. There's a lot more to it, but that gives you something to work with. Now, let's pick a principle, and the principle I'm gonna start with is just a very common and core principle to all change, and it is simply intention and attention. So I'm not playing word games here. I'm actually talking about intention and attention, and I'm gonna talk about what I mean by each of those things here in a little bit more detail, but intention simply means how I want to be, who is the person I want to be? How do I wanna act, or how do I wanna respond? So that's the way I'm using intention, not in the ways that very often are used where well, we just set an intention that we're gonna have a car and something you know is gonna materialize, we're not manifesting things from the outer world. In this case, an intention is who do I want to be? How do I want to respond? It's back to that idea of what's important to me. So we can create all kinds of intentions, there's a line from the Yana Ashad, which is in the Hindu tradition, which says that you are what your deepest desire is, as your desire is, so is your intention, as your intention is, so is your will, as your will is so is your deed, as your deed is, so is your destiny. So going back to what we want, what matters to us is really important. And then out of that we can create intentions. Does that make sense? So we can set intentions at different times, one way of setting an intention is simply to set a daily intention. So, a daily intention would be, I want to be more kind today, or I want to stay sober today, or I want to not snap at my children today, it could be any number of different things, but it's a general orientation. What's most important about today, right? I want to do the three practices that my therapist gave me that I know are gonna help me heal trauma today. Whatever your thing is, it's really helpful to have, you know, the most important thing about today as far as who you are and who you want to be, but then we can also set intentions before certain activities. So, for example, we could set an intention before dinner where we say, all right, my intention is to sit down and actually connect with my spouse or we could set an intention before a conversation, my intention in this conversation is that we are able to hear each other's point of view, we're able to talk about it calmly, and we're able to find a solution, right? By thinking about what we want before we go into that conversation, we're much more likely to approach it in a way that is gonna lead to something beneficial versus just sort of rolling into things as we tend to going from one thing to the next to the next without really thinking about why we're doing them or who the person we wanna be in those situations are. The other thing that's important with intention is to really think about this from an aspiration versus an expectation perspective. And what I mean by that is these intentions are aspirational. So my intention is to be kind today, well, I'm, maybe I'm gonna be kind in every interaction, but there's probably gonna be somewhere I'm not so kind or I'm indifferent or I'm not paying any attention. So we don't wanna set ourselves up for expectation, because expectation leads to us feeling discouraged and not wanting to keep doing it. So what we're doing is we're setting an aspiration, we're more than anything, we're setting a direction. This is the direction I want to go today, right? And so we wanna just make sure when we're setting intentions, that we are not setting hard expectations on ourselves, and that we're not setting ourselves up for another way to feel bad about ourselves.

So here's an example of an intention from the Buddhist teacher, Tinot Han, that I particularly think is fun. He says, waking up this morning, I smile. 24, brand new hours are before me. Now, here comes the intentions, I vow to live fully in each moment and to look at all being with eyes of compassion. So we're not gonna live fully in each moment because we're gonna not be paying attention for a lot of moments of the day. That's the way we are as humans, but it's an aspiration. And to look at all beings with eyes of compassion is also an aspiration. So that's an example of a daily intention, and you can set your own daily intentions. So very quickly now, why don't we just, again, another short pause for, you know, 30 seconds or so to allow you to reflect on what intention might you set that would most help you in your healing right now? What is an intention about the way you're gonna act or behave and just set one for today or tomorrow that would most bring about the healing and the change that you would like to see. All right, so now let's move to the second part of the principle, which is attention. The psychologist, William James said, our life experience will equal what we have been, what we have paid attention to, whether by choice or default. This is very much true, and you'll notice it. Your life experience, the actual experience of being alive, what's happening, how you feel, is very much a function, a product of where our attention is. And our attention can be lots of different places, so let's say I were to go out this afternoon, take a walk with my dog, my attention could be any number of different places. It could be on a median. I just had. Before I set out on my walk, and I'm thinking about, well, okay, then this happened, then that happened. It could be on a fight that I'm having with my sister. I keep bringing up family members by the way. I get along with my , my family very well, but not always, right? So, and certainly not so much in the past, but that's a common one, but substitute spouse, kid, friend, whatever for, you know, sister, right? But I'm thinking about a fight that I've been having with my sister over the last six months or six years, right? That's where my attention is or I could be paying attention to my dog and as she walks and kind of thinking about, you know, just watching her and kind of loving the fact of how she moves and being present with her or I could be paying attention to the trees or the feeling of my body moving, but depending on what I'm paying attention to and throughout one walk, I'm gonna pay attention to a lot of different things, right? I'm not gonna just stay with one thing for 30 minutes, but unless it's a six year old fight, in which case we all know how  we could stay with that for a long time, keep playing those conversations over. But you can see that whatever the various things I paid attention to during that walk, make that walk a very different experience, even though I covered the same ground in all those cases, the weather was the same in all those cases, but what I was thinking about where my attention was radically changed the experience of that walk. And so if we want a higher quality of life, if we want more moments of peace and contentment, of happiness, of freedom, then we have to watch where our attention is and learn to gently redirect it. There's a poet, Mary Oliver, and she says, to pay attention, this is our endless and proper work. It is endless, we are always having to think about where is my attention? This is that continuous interior awareness we talked about earlier. What am I thinking? What am I feeling? Where is my attention? What's going on in here right now? The more conscious we become of it, the more we are able to go, oh, that's not really where I want it to be, right? I'm replaying that thing my sister did to me six years ago for the 10,000th time. And I have set an intention that I wanna let that go, but there I am thinking about it again. So not a judgment of myself, I don't, you know, shame myself or berate myself. I simply go, oh, my attention's back on that again, where do I want it to be? This is that. So again, this continuous interior attention I'm talking about, and I like this acronym, C I A, because in essence, what we're doing is we're spying on ourselves, right? We're spying on what's happening inside of this, right? We're looking more closely at that. So now we bring these two things together, intention and attention, and we create a spiritual habit. So now let's bring those two things together. And what we want to do is begin to notice whether our attention is focused and oriented towards our intention. So what we wanna do is use one of the triggers a time, a location, or a random trigger, usually in this case is best for the spiritual habit we're trying to create, and it's a very simple spiritual habit, and it's when you get reminded again via any of those triggers, you simply then say, all right, where is my attention in this moment? Just what is, what is it? Where is it? No judgment, it's just to start to notice where is it? And then does that attention align with my intention for today? And if not, in what way could I move my attention to be more in line with my intention? So for example, let's say I set a daily intention, which is that I want to be more kind, and my phone dings and the thing goes off. I'm using a random reminder, and it says on the screen, where is your attention? And what was your intention? I just pause, this does not have to take a long time. And I go, where's my attention? Oh, I'm thinking about, you know, what a jerk, you know, people are because of the way they drive on the road, and I'm feeling really angry about that. And, okay, so that's where my attention is. What was my intention? It was to be more kind. Okay, well, how might I move my attention to something that's more in line with my intention? So in this case, I would simply go, all right, I wanna be more kind. What's a way to think about people on the road that would be more kind? And I might think, oh yeah, they're probably in a hurry to get somewhere. I've driven like a jerk when I'm in a hurry. So, okay, they're, you know, in that way they're a lot like me. And so it's just more kind or maybe there's something going on in their life that's really difficult and they're just in a bad mood and they're just kind of going on their way. And maybe I could just, you know, in my mind, wish them well. That's a way of taking my attention from where I don't want it to be and align it with my intention. And so that would be my, you know, my practice I would leave you with, right? Is to just work on this basic thing, what's important to me, who do I wanna be? And then noticing where my attention is on a regular basis, and just bringing my attention back in line with that, just, and again, if this is a constant process of redirection, it's not like we're gonna be like, well, I'm gonna be kind today, and then all day kind thoughts are gonna spill out, it doesn't work that way, right? But we can bring these things in place. Another example, I want to be sober today. Okay, great. That's a great intention. Ding, the timer goes off, where is my attention? Oh, I'm thinking about how nice it would be to have a drink. Okay, well that is not an intentional pattern that is gonna support my intention. So let me redirect where my mind is and it can be really helpful to have some specific redirects in mind. So when I think about having a drink, instead I will think about all the people in my life that I love, as an example. You've gotta find what works to you. These are principles that then apply to you in your life.

So that brings us to the end of this presentation. I thank you for listening. Thank you for coming to the conference. I hope you're getting a lot out of all the sessions. If you're interested in me and my work, you can go to oneyoufeed.net, “o n e y o u f e e d.net”. You can get access to that there. You can search for the One You Feed Podcast anywhere you get your podcasts. And I wish you all the best in your healing journey and in taking your tragedies and turning them into triumphs, taking your traumas and turning them into triumphs. This healing process is remarkable. It can change us in ways we can't imagine, and it can bring about benefits and love and kindness and support in our lives that we don't imagine. And so I wish all of that for you. Thank you.