Podcast 12 – Rules, Rules, Rules – Pt. 1

Beginning from the day we're born, and even the time we're born, as you'll hear, we start getting programmed to “do life”.  There are two critical time periods in our early development that greatly affect the rest of our lives.  Also, there are genetic predispositions, maternal and paternal (or whomever you were raised by) influences, sibling, society, religion, observation, interpretation, success, failure, pain and pleasure.  All these and more are the ingredients of what formulated your life, and we create rules and beliefs around all of these things.  Problem is….you only have to look at someone else's life to realize that all the beliefs and rules we construct for ourselves, don't necessarily hold true elsewhere!  Then….we have to be willing to take a look inside.

This podcast is Part 1 of exploring how so many of these factors influence who we are.  This is the groundwork.  In Part 2 we'll explore how we can consciously and subconsciously modify or altogether alter this programming to take us in the direction we want our lives to go.  And if you're a parent, this material can help you a lot as you are in the awesome and magnificent task of formulating a human soul.

TRANSCRIPTION:

This is Subconscious Mind Mastery podcast number 12.

Hi! My name is Thomas Miller. Thank you for joining us, if you can pick this up on iTunes or you if you caught us off the website at subconsciousmindmastery.com, whether it’s your first stop in or whether you are a subscriber, welcome back. We have quite a topic that we’re going to talk about. In fact why don’t we start a sequel because looking through all the notes that I have in front of me, there’s no way that we’re going to get through this in a normal 20 minute session. And I’m trying to keep these to 20 minutes because asking for five or six minutes of your time is a lot to ask, 20 is, you know, that’s even bigger. But trying to say let’s do this for 45 minutes or an hour together at the same thing, I just, I don’t know, maybe the Twitter generation has influenced me, I’m trying to settle on 20. I don’t know how that’s working for you but I don’t think we’re going to get through everything that we have to get through in near that. So this is probably number 12, number 13, and it might even roll into number 14. But we’ll get started. Now, I have to tell you I’m a little bit excited and a little bit intimidated at getting ready to do this podcast because I know where we’re going. I have quite a few pages of outline notes.

But basically I’m going to tell you how I turned my life around and the ingredients or the recipe. This is the recipe. This is the potpourri. This is the stuff that went into, if you were to say, “Wow, how do I turn my life around?” You know, if you ask the question, if you were to ask me, “How do you turn your life around? I don’t like where I am, I want to go some other direction.” And it might not be your whole life. Let’s just don’t say it, may not be as dramatic as what it was for me. It just might be, you’d like to shift a particular area of your life. A lot of people are looking to change their career path. Or you might want to live in a different geographic location. Whatever it is, I think you’re going to find something very helpful in what we’re going to talk about. At the same time as we unravel this, especially as we get to the crescendo it might get a little emotional for you, especially if there are some deep scars, so be aware of that. See there’s no way that on a podcast like this I’m looking at a microphone. I have no idea who’s beyond it and behind it. And I don’t know about you and what’s going on in your life. But I can only imagine for a podcast that’s already reached over a dozen countries, and has had a lot of downloads, that there are a lot of slices of life. And so I empathize with wherever you are.

You might be on top of your game and you’re looking to push it a little bit farther, to perform a little bit better. If that is the case, welcome, I think you’ll get something out of this. You might be in the depths of despair. And you might not know what tomorrow even holds. And if that’s the case I think you’ll find something of value as well. So mostly, thank you for listening, this is my story. This is what I did. And I trust that somewhere you’ll lock on and find something that jumps out at you, that you can take and run with for yourself, because really the answers, folks, the answers are within you. Now, it’s great to get outside resources. We need them. You need to read books and go to seminars and get counseling if that’s appropriate, and listen to podcasts, and digest material and read blogs and there’s a great support community out there. But it’s all outside of you. And what I want you to be especially careful is that you don’t listen to anything that doesn’t point you back to yourself because ultimately the answers are within. And that’s what we’re going to see. I think by the end of this series you’ll see what we’re talking about. Now listen, I was a tough case and this is the reason that I’m doing this podcast now and this blog, is to say that, “Look, if it can work for me, it can work for you.”

Now, I’ve titled this Rules, Rules, Rules because what you’re going to see as we unpack this is that through the experience of life we construct all kinds of rules around how life should be. And these are formulated from our childhood, from our earliest development. And there are some specific key things that happen early on that trigger these rules and their development. And then we live the rest of our life out in the context of these rules. For me, mine came a lot from church. If you’ve listened to some of the past podcasts, you know I came from a fundamentalist Christian family in Tulsa, Oklahoma. And we had a lot of rules. We had family rules and we had church rules. And the thing about church rules is they’re from God. So it’s man’s interpretation of God, but it’s when you’re taught that it’s from God, from a man or a person or your mother, you’re taught as though this is the way it is. And there’s no bending. Now, there’s a lot of great truth in all religions. And there’s a lot of great truth in Christianity. But there’s also a lot of manmade crap that will lead you off course and can really mess your life up. Now, that’s another subject for another time. We’ll get into that later. But you get the point, that we build a lot of rules around our lives and unraveling those rules, unthreading those rules is what really made the change for me.

I mentioned counseling a minute ago, now some of you are taking counseling sessions working with a therapist. And I did as well, spent quite a bit of time and money on therapy, particularly surrounding my first divorce which was when I was 39/40 years old, right in that timeframe. And while there were benefits and I learned different perspectives, it didn’t really help. It didn’t connect for me. And that’s what I’m saying is, I know there are a lot of people out there that have grabbed onto a lot of different resources. And there’s still something missing. And there was for me, and it was really frustrating to not be able to tie all of it together. And I’m going to tell you how I did and what ingredients went into me tying it together. And like I said, hopefully some of that will help, but counseling didn’t. Now, I’m not discounting counseling and therapy, there are some great therapists out there. I had a couple of really good ones. But there are some that will just waste your time and money.

And that’s what a doctor said to me, she said, “Look, just go to Landmark Education, it’s some of the best, cheapest counseling you’ll ever get.” And that is an awesome program. And I would encourage you, if you are in counseling and therapy and you wanted to look, if it’s not working for you and you wanted to look at something else look up Landmark Education on the internet, find a place close to you and give it a consideration. You can always just go check it out and see if it’s something that you’d like to explore. But it really did help open me up to a new dimension that I wasn’t getting from traditional therapy. I think the gap for me in counseling was that it was kind of like a Band-Aid on a wound, but the wound hadn’t healed yet, you know, it felt better, it stopped some of the bleeding. But in the end the wound was still unhealed and it was only a matter of time until it got infected again. So what I had to do was get even under that layer of skin and heal it from a deeper area. And that’s what I’m going to tell you in this podcast, because it was like turning the Titanic for me and avoiding the iceberg.

So we build all kinds of rules and constructions around our life. And they’re so deep and they’re so built in that you don’t even know when you’re exercising one of your rules. I was having dinner with one of my college roommates last night. We still keep in touch and meet regularly and we were talking about this very thing. And he was telling me how there were subtle little things that would come up that other people would have to tell him. “Now see, look, you’re doing it right there.” And he was like, “Oh my gosh, really.” So this is where a good buddy can help you along the way too, somebody that’s an accountability partner or somebody that will help you walk down this journey, because there are a lot of blind spots. I have a coach right now and my coach is absolutely amazing. And my coach will not let me get away with saying something that takes me back to one of my old patterns, catches it right there in the spot and just nails it and then I have to face it and deal with it. But these rules are programmed or built into our life from several sources. They’re learned by observation. They’re taught by others, our parents, our church, our social setting or surrounding, school teachers etc. You get the point.

Now, some of who we are just comes genetically prewired. And I didn’t really understand the full context of this until I opened up, I let a rule down, I laid a rule aside and started studying astrology, not the predictive form, I’m talking about the personality traits side of astrology. But see, growing up for me astrology was always of the devil. And that was one of my rules and it wasn’t until I finally looked at it from a standpoint, you know, there’s some really amazing consistent information that I’m seeing here. I found a guy by the name of Mark Husson, he’s one of the Hay House authors and has a radio show on Hay House Radio which is an internet website, if you haven’t been there you ought to check it out, hayhouseradio.com. And Mark Husson is one of the guys I listened to over there and Darren Weissman is the other. And I’m going to talk about Darren little bit later on. But while I was working, doing like what you’re doing right now, I would listen to some of Mark Husson’s shows and really found it interesting because he would talk mostly about how somebody’s … well, your birthday, how your birthday affects your personality and the way that you naturally tend to respond to life’s situations. And it really is an amazing study on both behavior and interaction. So it’s how you interact with other people. And when you start to learn some of this you’ll see how not only you are wired, but how other people are wired.

And guys, I’ve got to tell you, I was blind to how other people were wired. I didn’t go over to the other side of the fence and try to see life from their perspective. But when I started to study and learn this I realized that there are so many different ways that people view the same world. And so if I’m dealing with somebody who sees it from one perspective and I know where my perspective is and I know what my natural tendency is, it’s made it so much easier for me to interact with other people. I’m a Scorpio and I work with a Pisces. And Scorpios and Pisces interact well together. And so as I’ve understood the guy that I work for and how he looks at life, sure enough, when he reacts in certain ways I just run it through that filter. Yeah, there you go. I understand, I get it. And I’m able to just let stuff bounce off because that how he’s responding, it’s not how I would respond. But I get that he looks at it through a different prism. The other thing that I think is interesting about this side of astrology, not the predictive side, the predictive side gets a little bit more dicey, but the other thing is that this will show you where the energy is more highly concentrated in your life at a given time. Now, I’m a firm believer that you have ultimate choice, and that’s the power of what we’re going to get to by the end of this, is the freedom to choose. But I do believe that everything around us is concentrated and focused energy. And at certain times, energy is more concentrated and focused in certain areas than in others.

And I have no idea how people 6,000 years ago without the internet, figured all this out. But it is an amazing study. Enough about that subject, I just wanted you to get the point, it really opens you up to some really neat cool perspectives. And if you’ve never studied it before, hey, lay down your rule and give it a shot. But the point is when we’re born we have a natural perspective of how we’re going to interact with life itself, before we’ve even taken our third breath, that’s just born into us. That’s how we would naturally respond to something, if we had no influence and no training and no external input, if we were just literally in a perfect vacuum from the day we were born and then we started somewhere out there to respond to life, this is the way that we would naturally do it without any training, without any rules, no interpretations, just the way we would respond naturally. But that’s not the way it works out is it? Because then we start to live life and we have those critical early formative years. Now, if you’re really trying to understand why you are the way you are and why life is the way that it is for you, you have to go back and revisit those first five or six years of your life. And this is what I say, I realize that at this moment we’re crossing into some dangerous territory because for some of you those first five or six years were full of emotional and even physical pain. And if that’s the case then I want you to listen to me a little bit more distantly, alright, keep it out there as just a resource.

Don’t go too far into this emotion right now, listen through this whole thing. And I want you to get the context of this and then you can go back and fit it into how it fits your situation. I didn’t have physical abuse, I had quite a bit of mental and verbal impacts on my life, but I was never physically abused. And I get that if you have been it is one of the scars of life that is the most, I so respect where you are because it is huge and it carries all the way into your adulthood. There is a way to deal with it, I firmly believe that, but I totally get that if somebody says to you, “Go back and look at the first five or six years of your life”, you might have icicles going down your back right now. But it’s ultimately something that you have to address if you’re going to permanently change. I’m talking about getting out of the spin cycle. Let’s don’t keep going around and around and around and not getting anywhere in our life, this is about finally putting this to rest. And yes, there is some discomfort with it. I spent a year journaling about this period of my life and cried buckets of tears. So I’m not saying that this is a painless escape. It’s gnarly, it hurts. It was difficult for me to get to the point of revisiting this. But I’m telling you, in order to heal it, I’m talking about not putting another fresh Band-Aid on a still sore wound, I’m talking about let’s go in and heal the wound.

Really there are two critical age brackets that you have to take a look at, birth up to five/six/seven and then another really critical timeframe is the age between about 10 and 15. For a brief little period there I did a little bit of work a Christian ministry inside prisons. And one of the chaplains of this ministry said that a common thing that he saw among prisoners was that most men he was dealing with, guys that had been incarcerated had some significant major negative thing happen in their lives between the ages of, he said, 10 and 14/15. So I get, again that might bring a flashback for you that’s not comfortable. But let’s go into it and let’s see how we’re going to deal with it because there is a way out. And this thing doesn’t have to hold you for the rest of your life. From those early experiences, we all begin to formulate how life should be. Sometimes it’s just a coping mechanism. It’s survival. Sometimes we connect the dots. It’s an if then correlation, if this happens then I respond like this, I get this kind of result. And you see that pattern a couple of times and you build a rule or a belief around that. Some of it’s taught by our parents or other influences that we’ve already talked about.

So up until this point in my journey, I’d had a church background, had been to counseling, had been through everything that I could get my hands on from Tony Robins, had done almost a year’s worth of journaling, unpacking those early years of my life and it still wasn’t clear. And I kept asking the universe, I kept praying, I kept, show me, show me where the depth of, show me where the bottom of this is. Show me the beginning. Show me how I got completely here. Now, one of the things that kept pointing back was it was the relationship with my mother, yes, I would be one of those that they say has mother issues. In all of my journaling things kept pointing back to mom. Well, it just so happened that on Mother’s Day (how ironic) I was sitting in a Unity church Sunday morning service here in Dallas and they had a meditation from 10 until 11. It was a really cool thing. If you’ve never been to a Unity church, it’s not like your Baptist church or your Methodist church or your Catholic church, it’s quite a bit different. But they had a meditation. It was a bowl meditation where they play the bowls, the harmonic sounds from bowls. And did that for an hour and then went into their version of a worship service. And it was in that service on Mother’s Day, after that meditation that I literally had the veil pulled back and could look in and see my mother’s life from her perspective. And what I saw was a woman who longed to be loved. She never could meet her father’s expectations. She never was good enough.

She didn’t meet my dad until later in life and even in the post-world war 2 generation, they married quite late. Mom was about 30/31 when they got married. So in a generation where all of her friends were 10 years, celebrating their 10 year anniversary, my mom was just getting married. And I came along 12 months later. Now, there’s something else about my mom, she was off the charts extreme, okay, like if normal was a 10, it really exaggerated, was a 12. My mother was a 200. She did everything to excess. No, not excessive, off the charts excessive. And you can imagine, my dad was passive, I mean that’s the only way that could work, right, great man, tons of respect in his lifetime but he was passive in that relationship and he was passive as a father. So what I saw in church that day was this beautiful soul of this young woman in Tulsa, Oklahoma, who had a big hole in her heart and just wanted to be loved more than anything else in the world. And she wanted to give love. And if you don’t think it moved me to tears, I probably tried to contain it in the service, but once I got out in the car I just, you know, let it go.

Well, for her, when I came along in her 200 times excessive mode, you can imagine that I was a little bit over-nurtured. I was paid too much attention. And all of this started to get real clear to me too. I could see myself as a little baby, I mean it’s really weird. And I don’t want you to go off thinking this is, doo, doo, doo stuff. I’m telling you, from that experience on that Sunday morning, just the vision of this in my mind became so clear of this over-focus of attention and love and I appreciated it, but it was too much, it was over, it was excessive. And then 22 months later in the context of having 22 months, almost two full years of this hyper attention, one day mom goes away and my brother comes home. What the hell is this I ask, figuratively of course? But you get the point, because all of a sudden overnight all of this love and attention and affection that was all mine, was gone, or at least divided. But I had been so programmed that I needed that. What that did is it fired off two things right at that point. It fired off abandonment, over-dependency, particularly on women, and a great resentment toward my brother. And I was 22 months old and that ladies and gentlemen is how I began to live the rest of my life. Alright, let’s stop here. In our next podcast we are going to talk about how you can look back into the very essence of those early years, how you’ll see that you really at that point didn’t make a cognitive choice. I’m not going to say you didn’t have a choice, you didn’t make a choice. And we’re going to talk about how you can finally heal those wounds.

My name is Thomas Miller. Thank you very much for joining me through a difficult topic today. We’ll pick it up on the next one, podcast number 13.

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