219. Stages of Awakening

I’m Jody Moore and this is Better Than Happy, episode 219, Stages of Awakening.

This podcast is for people who know that living an extraordinary life is not easy or comfortable. It’s so much better than that. This is Better Than Happy, and I’m your host, Jody Moore.

Hello, everybody, welcome to episode 219. How’s it going? How are your kids adjusting to school? You got everybody settles? You’re packing lunches again. Here’s a little tip I figured out; if you hate packing lunches and you can’t figure out why because it doesn’t seem like that big of a job but it really does get annoying, here’s something I figured out made packing lunches so much better.

Actually, I’m pretty spoiled now because last year my husband decided to start going to the gym early in the morning, so he gets up and makes the lunches before he goes. But before that, here’s what I figured out. For some reason, it’s the gathering up of the kids’ lunchboxes and then cleaning out the garbage that they didn’t throw away from the day before and then packing it all up that makes packing lunches extra tedious.

So I don’t do that part anymore. I make the sandwich and get out the crackers and fruit and drink and whatever else is going to go in the lunch, and it does in a little pile, one for each child. And their job is to find their lunchbox and come along and clean it out and pack up their lunch before they leave for school.

And I don’t know why it’s such a little thing that made such a big difference. We have lunch piles and the kids gather them up and it’s totally easier now. There you go, I’ve got all kinds of good tips, what can I say?

Alright, we’re going to talk about stages of awakening today. This is an episode that I literally woke up this morning thinking about. I took no more than 10 minutes to make a little outline, and I’m recording it. so, sometimes I have an idea that I’m so excited about and I have it so kind of mapped out in my head what I want to say so that I can super quickly do a podcast like this.

And unfortunately, sometimes when those ideas come, I don’t get to sit down that day and record it, so it’s just a good day today that I get to share it with you while it’s fresh in my mind. And I’m excited to get this out to you because one of the things I’ve noticed – I’ve been doing this podcast for a while. Some of you are brand new, which by the way, welcome, so happy that you’re here – others of you have been listening for a long time and still many of you have actually been working with me really closely.

You’re clients of mine. I’ve coached you. You have been in my Be Bold program, and or you’ve come to live events. And some of you I’ve worked with really intensely even for like a full week. And what I notice – and I don’t mean to say that this is linear, I don’t mean to say that you start with the podcast and you’re at phase one, and then you come in the program and you go to phase two.

Everybody kind of has their own journey in terms of how they move through these phases. But I do notice that sometimes people think something’s gone wrong because of how the dynamic shifts the more you understand the tools I’m teaching you here and the more you apply them to yourself. And especially I’ve noticed this to be my own experience of these tools and this work.

So I want to spell it out for you today to just give you kind of a more bird’s eye view of what it looks like and what’s available to you and what’s possible as you implement these tools. And as I create podcast episodes, my hope is that you can take what I teach you here and feel lots of changes in yourself and in your life. And I know many of you do because you share that with me.

But there is, of course, a lot more possible and available to you when you really dive in and you really apply what I’m teaching you through the other programs that I offer. So if you love what you’re learning here, I highly encourage you to explore getting coached, come to a live event, or come into my program and get some coaching and let’s take you through these stages.

Let me break them down for you though. So, I’m going to break the stages of awakening down into three stages. And as I was thinking about this writing my outline for this podcast, it made sense to me to sort of use the analogy of a day, of going throughout a day.

So, stage one is sort of the sunrise. It’s when the sun starts coming up. A lot of times, when people find me, they’ve been in night time, they’ve been in darkness. And I don’t mean to say that their life is terrible. For many of my clients, they have many parts of their lives that are going very well. And in fact, sometimes the problems they’re bringing to me, they say, “I feel like this is a trivial thing and like I shouldn’t be having this issue because so many other parts of my life are going so well.”

Other clients have a lot of challenges going on in their life. But in some area or another, there’s darkness, right?  And so as you start learning the tools – and maybe some of you can attest to experiencing this as you started listening to the podcast, that it feels like the sun is starting to come up.

This first sunrise phase is what I call awareness. What’s happening is that you’re gaining awareness of what’s really true. You’re gaining awareness about what is actually creating your experience versus what is not, okay. The brain, by default, thinks that things outside of us create our experience and our results and our emotions, but we learn here on the podcast that that’s not true at all, that we are the creator of our own experience. That is the truth. And that awareness, while it can be somewhat hard to take in the beginning, is actually really, really powerful. That’s the sun starting to come up.

You gain awareness of yourself. And instead of focusing on trying to become aware of everything outside of us, we shift the focus to becoming aware of what’s happening internally. That is where the sun starts to come up.

Now, this awareness usually is about things that happen in the past. And I don’t mean all the way back to your childhood. We don’t spend a lot of time diving into the past unless necessary, which sometimes it is, but for the most part, I’m talking about we’re just gaining awareness over what your creating for yourself after the fact, after you’ve already created it.

So typically, it’s based on maybe patterns that you see in your life. So for example, maybe there’s a person in your life who you find it challenging to be around. If you have someone in your life that you have a hard time being around them one time, one thing happens, one incident occurs and then everything goes back to normal again, you’re probably not going to worry about that. You’re probably not going to bring that to me as your coach.

It’s those people that you notice that you consistently struggle around them, you consistently feel irritated by them or you consistently feel jealous of them or some other negative pattern that happens in your interactions with a particular person or maybe a particular group of people, right? So we’re going to gain awareness after the fact. We’re going to take specific examples of, like, the interaction that you had with them last week or last month. What happened? What were you thinking? What were you feeling? And what result did you create for yourself in that situation?

So even though that is in the past, it’s still very, very useful. It’s still going to provide you that level one stage one awareness that is so powerful because, as you become aware of yourself and what you’re creating and your role in all of it, you gain so much leverage back.

You gain this perspective that gives you a way to alter your experience in the future because odds are, you’re going to keep seeing that person. Or at the very least, you’re going to be thinking about that person. You’re going to keep creating the same result until you have the awareness of the result that you’re creating currently.

So this can be true with, again, a challenge in your life that you’re dealing with. It can be true with regards to your money situation, your finances, like I said, your relationships. It can even be true though with regard to goals that you’re trying to pursue.

When you gain awareness about the real reason that you haven’t achieved your goal yet or the real reason why you’re maybe not even taking action towards that goal, you’re avoiding that goal, that level of awareness is so powerful. And you can, of course, then use this awareness as you move into your future. That is stage one – super powerful. I hope that you’re getting that, like I said, her eon this podcast.

Stage two I compare to sort of noon. The sun is high in the sky now. Everything is pretty lit up and is pretty bright, and so I call stage two illumination. You have a pretty good understanding of what’s true now. It’s not so mind-blowing the first time you hear that thoughts create feelings and you see that example in your life.

You’re like, “Oh yes…” It doesn’t mean that you sometimes don’t overlook it and need it pointed out, but you understand the concept so well and you’ve seen it over and over again that the world is somewhat more illuminated to you than it used to be.

In stage two, we do a lot of thought swapping. So you understand clearly enough that your current thinking is creating your current problem, that you’re then able to find a different thought and you start training your brain to focus on that different thought and then you create a different result for yourself in your life.

Now, this is pretty cool, right? This illumination phase feels really good. It feels like a transformation of yourself because suddenly certain areas of your life, if you choose to focus on them and run models on them, things that maybe were challenging for you for even a very long time start to get a lot better.

Your marriage that you thought was always going to be hard and challenging becomes so much more enjoyable and peaceful. Your relationship with yourself starts to improve and your confidence. You start pursuing your goals. You start making progress in the things that you want to be doing in your life. So this is a fun phase, this illumination phase.

This is often the phase that I see a lot of people who come into my coaching programs start to experience. In this phase, you are able to identify your current model and then you’re able to identify what I call an intentional model, meaning the thought that you want to have, the feeling you want to have, the action you want to be taking to get the result that you want.

You have this awareness of what it is. You have this awareness that it’s possible and you can work towards living from intentional models. I notice people are in this illumination midday phase a lot of times when they start seeing other people’s models. Sometimes, we can’t help but try to point it out to people because we’re so excited by how it’s changed our lives. We start saying things like, “You know that’s just a thought.”

And we are so excited, we want to teach everyone the model. We want to show everyone what we’ve learned because of how it’s shifted things for us in our lives.

Now, as awesome as phase two is, what I’ve found is that there is a third phase available, my friends. There is a third phase of awakening. And this third stage is beautiful. It is the sunset.

Here in Spokane on Labor Day, we were able to go up and hang out with some friends at their lake cabin on Coeur D’alene Lake and we were driving home from a beautiful day across the lake, over the bridge that goes across the lake and the sun was setting and the sky was lit up and it was beautiful.

As nice as middle of the day is, as nice as it is to have the sun high in the sky and the weather warm and nice and everyone smiling, there’s something about sunsets that is even more beautiful. And phase three is what I call embracing humanness.

In this phase, you no longer try to do thought swapping, at least not so quickly. What you realize is that the human experience does include pain and it does include discomfort. And you have such a deep level of understanding that you’re the creator of all of your pain and discomfort that it’s not scary anymore.

You don’t have to hurry and solve for it and fix it. You’ve practiced feeling those emotions and you know what they are, which is just vibrations in your body and you know how sitting with them and experiencing them makes you more aware of them, makes you more alive. It makes your experience here on this earth even richer that you don’t have to hurry and get rid of them.

Now, this is a challenging phase for me to describe because I know it sounds a little crazy. Like, why would I want to sit in pain and discomfort? But the truth is, there is actually a lot of beauty in our suffering at times. There is a piece behind it. There is even a piece with other people being in discomfort.

You don’t feel like you have to run around and explain the model to everyone because you’re at peace with people being wherever they are in their own journey and choosing whatever experience and results they want. You don’t have to judge people or try to solve for their problems all the time. You can just more genuinely love and experience people as they are and know that nothing has gone wrong.

So, let me give a couple of examples here. First example that I like to think about when it comes to this kind of embracing of humanness is going to the movies. I love going to the movies, so does my husband, so do my children. That is one of our favorite activities, to go to a movie.

And if you think about when we go to the movies or watch TV or even read a book, however you like your entertainment, we like a story that causes us to feel emotion. We want a story that takes us from highs and from positive emotions down to even lows or intense or what we would describe as more negative emotions.

We like the experience of feeling our feelings in a movie because we don’t have this thought behind all of them, which is, oh no I need to fix this. We know it’s just a movie. We know it’s created by the story we’re watching or reading or listening to and so we don’t feel this urge to solve for it and get out of it; even the uncomfortable emotions.

So, if you think about a dramatic movie that has highs and lows, those are the movies we leave saying, “That was so good, you’ve got to go see that movie.” When you are in this third phase of awakening, when you are in the embracing your humanness phase, then your life becomes like a movie that you are watching. You yourself become like a character that you observe.

And it doesn’t mean that you never do any thought swapping. It doesn’t mean that you never run models and choose intentional models, but not as frequently. There’s certainly no rush behind it. Sometimes just the observance of yourself in your current model is enough that you automatically let go of it and move into more useful models.

This is a phase that I’ve been able to experience at times and then at other times I slip back into phase two. I feel like I have a long way to go still in my own awakening, which I think is exciting because to think that it can only get better is pretty cool.

I think that Jesus Christ was a perfect example of this phase. It’s not that he never experienced negative emotion, of course he did. But he didn’t think that something had gone wrong when that happened. He didn’t judge people or try to control people or try to change things outside of his control. He just said yes to all of it. He embraced all of it, the entire experience that he had while he was here on Earth.

Now, I also think that moving through these phases of awakening is, like I said, not necessarily a linear process. I think that phase three is where we become aware though of the 50-50. So if you find yourself asking – and let me back up, for some of you who haven’t heard me talk about the 50-50, it’s the idea that 50% of our life is actually supposed to be uncomfortable. It’s supposed to be negative emotion. It’s supposed to be pain and suffering even. That is a human life. Nothing has gone wrong.

So when you’re in phase three, you really embrace that and you’re able to experience that contrast in a way that serves you. At the same time, you can recognize that improving yourself, improving your situation and achieving goals and all of that is a fun way to live, but not because it will shift tings to 70-30.

Whenever people ask me, “Why does it have to be 50-50, why can’t it be 80-20?” Then I know that they haven’t experienced phase three yet. They haven’t experienced sitting with their own pain and knowing that it’s not a problem. It’s nothing we have to escape. It’s just an emotion.

So I think the natural question that this poses is, so how do we do this? How do we move through these phases? Well, I think there’s a lot of ways and a lot of tools. I think that it’s a spiritual process. I think it’s a spiritual progression. But of course, the ways that I work with most closely have to do with coaching. That is what I get the privilege and honor of ding with my clients in all the content I’m creating, in everything I’m putting out there to you guys through my body of work is designed to try to move you through these phases.

So, if you’ve never been coached by a good coach – there’s all kinds of coaches out there, find one that does causal coaching if you want to move through these phases of awareness. There are a lot of coaches who are there to just teach you what to do in your action line. There’s nothing wrong with that, but it’s not going to move you through these phases of awakening.

So, find a good coach who knows the model, so that means they were trained at The Life Coach School, and get coached. Experience someone holding space for you and showing you what’s really true. And I promise you, there is very few other experiences in this lifetime that will match it.

Listen to coaching. Again, those of you that are in Be Bold understand the power of listening to coaching because it does not have to be you in the hot seat for you to gain the kind of awareness that coaching will bring you.

Do your self-coaching. If you want to do it every day, great. But if you can’t commit to every day, that’s okay too. But take moments when you can at whatever frequency you choose to, to put your brain down on paper, to play with it, to question it, to put it in models, to continue to show yourself the truth.

Be willing to challenge yourself mentally and emotionally. Stretch yourself, just like you would go to the gym and lift weights if you wanted to become physically stronger, you would challenge your muscles, you would tire them out, you would give them a reason to rebuild themselves. You have to stretch yourself mentally and emotionally in order to strengthen yourself mentally and emotionally.

Keep an open mind. Some of you want to hold on so tight to your painful beliefs that you make it very challenging for yourself to move through these phases. Just try loosening your grip a little bit. I do this all the time by reminding myself, I could be wrong, the Lord’s ways are not my ways.  His thoughts are not my thoughts.

So what’s really true, I’m only even going to get a tiny glimpse of here on this Earth and I could be wrong about all of it. And that brings me to the last thing that I recommend, which is to just question anything that’s not serving you. Anything that’s not serving you is up for grabs.

Be open minded, question the areas where you’re causing yourself pain, and be willing to be uncomfortable in the name of your own awakening. Thanks for joining me today, you guys, have an amazing beautiful rest of your week and I will see you next week. Take care.

If you have a question about something you’ve heard me talk about on this podcast or anything else going on in your life, I want to invite you to a free public call, Ask Jody Anything. I will teach you the main coaching tool I use with all of my clients and the way to solve any problem in your life, and we will plug in real life examples.

Come to the call and ask me a question anonymously or just listen in. Go to jodymoore.com/askjody and register before you miss it. I’ll see you there.