The Day You Turn On the Light (Why Awareness Feels So Heavy)

What if the most important day of your life wasn't the day everything changed…

…but the day you finally saw what had been there all along?

Most people expect awareness to feel peaceful.

Liberating.

Like the moment everything finally makes sense.

But if you've ever started therapy, hired a coach, experienced burnout, gone through a divorce, or simply reached a point where you couldn't keep living on autopilot…

You know awareness often feels anything but light.

It feels overwhelming.

In this episode of The Aligned Human Project Podcast, Dawn Elgin explores why awareness often feels heavier before it feels lighter—and why that's not a sign something is wrong.

It's a sign you've finally turned on the light.

Blending neuroscience, nervous system regulation, predictive processing, the Five Elements, and Field + Form: The 12 Laws of Co-Creation, Dawn introduces one of the most powerful metaphors in The Aligned Human Project: The Room.

You'll discover:

•  Why awareness doesn't create the burden—it reveals it 
•  How childhood meaning becomes adult identity 
•  Why your brain protects familiar stories over truthful ones 
•  The neuroscience of the pause and conscious choice 
•  How the Witness interrupts automatic survival patterns 
•  Why awareness alone doesn't create transformation 
•  The difference between awareness, alignment, and creation 
•  How the Five Elements reveal conditioned survival expressions 
•  A simple daily practice to help life show you what you're ready to release 
•  Why healing isn't about fixing yourself—it's about remembering who you've always been 

The room didn't become full overnight.

It won't become clear overnight either.

But the moment you turn on the light…

You become free to choose differently.

⏱️ CHAPTERS

00:00 The Weight of Awareness
 03:16 Understanding the Room of Our Mind
 09:24 The Journey of Cleaning the Room
 23:56 The Power of Choice and Transformation
 35:27 Listening to Life's Guidance
 47:43 The Journey of an Aligned Human
 50:44 Outro

🌿 TAKE THE NEXT STEP

If this episode resonated, I'd love to invite you deeper into The Aligned Human Project.

✨ Take the Five Elements of Alignment Assessment and discover your unique stress patterns, survival adaptations, and pathway back to alignment.

✨ Join The Aligned Human Circle, our free community where we practice conscious awareness, nervous system regulation, and embodied transformation together.

✨ If you're ready for deep personal change, explore Align Your Life, my 12-month journey through Field + Form: The 12 Laws of Co-Creation.

Because awareness isn't the destination.

It's the doorway.

And remember…

You are the Witness. You shape your field. Your field shapes your life.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

What if the most important day of your life wasn't the day everything changed, but the day you finally saw what had been there all along? Most people think awareness should feel exciting, liberating, powerful, maybe empowering. But if you've ever started therapy, hired a coach, experienced burnout, gone through a divorce, lost someone you loved, or simply reached a point where you couldn't keep living on autopilot, you know that awareness often feels anything but light. It feels overwhelming. Today we're going to explore why awareness often feels heavier before it feels lighter. Why that isn't a sign you're doing something wrong. And why I believe the day you turn on the light is the day your life truly begins to change. Because awareness doesn't ask you to become someone new, it invites you to see what you've been carrying. And once you've seen it, you have the freedom to choose differently. Hello, hello, and welcome to the Aligned Human Project. I'm your host, Don Elgin. If you've ever looked around at your life that appears successful on the outside but feels disconnected on the inside, you are in the right place. If you've ever wondered why you keep repeating the same patterns, carrying the same emotional weight, or chasing goals that never quite bring you the peace you hope they would, you are in the right place. This podcast is about remembering who you were before the world told you who you needed to be. Together we'll explore the intersection of neuroscience, psychology, ancient wisdom, quantum science, and practical spiritualism to understand how awareness shapes our field and how our field shapes our lives, and why lasting change begins from the inside out. We'll talk about leadership, relationships, health, purpose, emotional well-being, and conscious creation. Not as separate parts of life, but as reflections of one thing: our level of alignment. Because most people don't need another strategy, they need a new relationship with themselves. So whether you're leading a business, a family, a team, or simply trying to lead yourself with greater intention, welcome. Take a breath, become the witness, and let's begin. Hello, hello, and welcome to the Aligned Human Project. I want to begin today with a simple question. What have you finally become ready to see? Not what are you trying to fix? Not what are you trying to achieve? Not what are you trying to become? What have you become ready to see? I've been thinking a lot about awareness lately, not as a concept, but more of an experience. Because I don't think most of us are prepared for what awareness actually feels like. We're told that awakening should be peaceful, that insight should immediately bring freedom, that once we understand ourselves, everything will naturally fall into place. That is not what I've experienced. And it's not what I've witnessed in thousands of conversations with clients over the years. Awareness rarely begins with peace. It usually begins with, oh, oh, I've been doing this for years. Oh, that's what's been running me. Oh, that's why I keep repeating the same pattern. It's not the feeling of finally having all the answers. It's the feeling of finally seeing the question you've been living. And that can be incredibly confronting. Not because awareness creates the burden, because awareness reveals the burden that was already there. That's why I often say awareness allows us to observe. Alignment allows us to participate. The light doesn't clean the room, it simply allows you to see it. I want you to imagine something. Imagine you've lived in the same house your entire life. There's one room you almost never go into. Every once in a while you crack open the door and you toss something inside, and then you close it. You get on with your day. A painful conversation. Into the room. A criticism that you never let go of. Into the room. A belief that says, I'm not enough. End of the room. A trophy that convinces you your worth comes from achievement into the room. A fear of disappointing people into the room. You never stop to organize it. You never question whether it belongs there. You simply keep adding to it because that's what you've always done. Then one day, someone walks beside you. Maybe it's a therapist, maybe it's a mentor, maybe it's a book, maybe it's your body saying, I can't carry this anymore. They don't fix the room. They don't tell you what to throw away. They simply reach over and turn on the light. Have you ever had one of those moments where you suddenly see something that has always been there? You can't unsee it. You can't unknow it. You can't go back to pretending the room is empty. That moment changes everything. Not because the room changed, but because you changed. Or more accurately, your awareness changed. And that's the beginning of alignment. So let's explore why that moment can feel so emotionally overwhelming. From the perspective of neuroscience, your brain is constantly trying to build an efficient model of reality. It takes millions of pieces of information and compresses them into patterns. So you don't have to consciously evaluate every situation from scratch. That's actually extraordinary. It's a survival advantage. Without it, you'd spend your day relearning how to open a door, drive a car, reorganize nope, recognize people you love. The challenge is that your brain doesn't only create patterns around skills, it also creates them around meaning. As children, we don't simply experience events, we interpret them. A parent is emotionally unavailable. One child concludes, mom is struggling. Another concludes, I'm not important. A teacher criticizes an assignment. One child will hear, I can improve. Another hears, I'll only be loved if I'm perfect. The event lasts a moment, but the interpretation can last a lifetime. And over time those interpretations become our beliefs. And those beliefs shape our thoughts, and our thoughts influence our emotions, and our emotions drive our actions. Our actions become habits, our habits become patterns, our patterns become identity, identity becomes personality, and personality begins creating our personal reality. It all begins with meaning. That's why awareness is so powerful, not because it changes the past, because it allows us to question the meaning we've been carrying from the past. The witness doesn't erase the event. The witness lovingly asks, is the meaning I've been living still true? That's the light. That's the moment everything begins to shift. So last week I was teaching on a Facebook Live in our aligned human circle. And I gave the analogy that I often see when it comes to our stuff. We can think of like it started from the term keeping our skeletons in a closet. And I always think, where do those ideas come from? Like, where does that comment come from? And there's lots of references to this when we do shamanic work. We'll go into the interior castle. We've seen this be talked about from different spiritual state sages. And so for myself, I started to see them as rooms. And we have a room that is inside of us. It's a room that we are given at birth. And this room, when we get it, it comes partially furnished. And the furniture is hand-me-downs from our parents. Our parents, some of those things they got from their parents, and some of them they got from their parents. So some of them have been handed down for a long time, and they're pretty old, and nobody really knows where they came from or how they started, but it felt disrespectful to get rid of them. So they just keep passing them on. So you get this room when you're little and it comes partially furnished. As you grow, it accumulates. It accumulates all of the little things that happen to you. All the dramas, all the traumas. Not only trauma, but your perception of an experience, every experience you didn't allow to fully pass through you, every time you learned something, every belief, every hurt, every emotion that you either resisted or clung to. They are all filling up this room. Now, you're unaware of it. It's just what everybody does. You just put it in the room. We compartmentalize. Going to work, put it in the room. Leave your stuff at home. So you just keep putting stuff in the room. And you don't really do anything with it. You just keep putting it in because one day you might need it. Or maybe you feel guilty throwing something out, or you're not sure what to do with it yet. So you just keep putting it in the room. It's almost like an attic. It just keeps accumulating junk. And because it's not in your way of your everyday life, at least not much. It's not a problem. You just keep accumulating. And then you start to get curious. There is a moment where maybe it's a book, a podcast, a person that comes into your life and they start talking about awareness. Maybe it's your meditation. You start a practice, contemplation. Maybe it's a spiritual journey. And you start to become aware. See, awareness is light. We can think of your awareness as the beam of a flashlight that you point at different things. And so in this room, there's a light switch and a light. You've never turned it on. Maybe sometimes when you open the door, you kind of get like the backlighting. So you're a little aware of what's in there. You know, you kind of remember some of the stuff you threw in. So it's in there somewhere. You can get to it. But you just keep closing the door. But awareness is when we open the door and we flick on the light. And the first response we usually have is overwhelm, not relief. So here you are, you're starting your meditation practice, you go into the silence, you finally get a moment of spaciousness, and you become aware of your thoughts. You become aware of your pulls, your addictions, maybe to drama, maybe to certain types of thoughts. And this is what awareness is like, and all of that's in the room. And once you become aware of it, you can't unsee it. So here we have the room, and our first response with this overwhelm is oh my God, look at this freaking chaos. We feel embarrassment, maybe shame, guilt, and we close the door and we walk away. Meditation's not for me. And then maybe you go back because you can't unsee it. And it actually makes it worse. So here you instinctively shut the door, survival instinct. I don't know what to do with all of this, so I'm just not going to do anything at all. But the laws teach us that even abdicating your power is still a choice. So you have to make a choice to go into the room. And the room is what's causing your suffering, not the outer world, not what people have said and done. It's the accumulation, the hoarding of all of this mental and emotional baggage that has caused your suffering. Pain is inevitable, but suffering's optional. We're going to experience that and we will feel things like heartache and guilt and grief. But we didn't need to suffer. We didn't need to keep holding on to it. And this is what the Buddha was talking about. But now we're aware. And awareness actually creates responsibility, not shame. And so the room didn't become full overnight. It came full over the course of decades. And so it's also not going to become empty overnight. So what we need to do is start looking at emptying the room one thing at a time. And maybe we start with the thing that's closest to us or something shiny. And you open that door and you see a trophy. And you go, oh, I don't remember that trophy. I thought that trophy or that ribbon when I was seven years old for winning a race. Can't get rid of that. Why would I need to? It's a good memory. I'm gonna hold on to that. But you have somebody like me nearby, and I go, Hold that trophy is great. However, our journey is to climb this mountain, a mountain we'll call self-realization. We each have our own mountain. And so far, you've been climbing this mountain since the moment you were born, and you have just gotten to base camp one. And the reason you've only gotten to base camp one is you've been carrying this whole room with you, and it's heavy. And so every single thing in this room slows you down. It creates time. And your job is to get to the top of the mountain. That's your purpose. Not what you're wearing, not the kind of steps you take. Your purpose is to get to the top of the mountain. And so you can get to the top of the mountain in this lifetime, or it can take multiple lifetimes. And the choice is yours. Radical self-responsibility. Your job is to clear the room. That room was never, ever, ever designed to hold anything. That room was pure potential. It still is. You just aren't aware of its potential because it's filled with shit. And your job is to empty the room one item at a time. So maybe as you're looking at this trophy, you go, no, no, no. I, you know what, I don't mind. I like the trophy. It's a good memory. I'm going to keep it with me. I have no qualms climbing this mountain with the trophy. So you put the trophy back in. I go, okay, it's your room. What would you like to take out? And so you take something else out, and you think, you know, this isn't going to work for me. Or, or maybe you grab a doily and it's the doily that belonged to your grandmother. And you're like, well, I can't throw this out. That would be disrespectful. I have to hold on to it. And the thing is, your grandparents are not that doily. Your grandparents are beautiful creatures that were also carrying the doily. And your grandmother, she doesn't actually want you to carry the doily. When she was alive, her ego, her accumulated room dead because they matched. And she didn't want to feel like she'd carried this whole doily for no good reason. So she passed it along. But once she left her body, she became like a guardian angel. And she's been walking behind you, whispering, get rid of the doily. I'm not the doily. It's just a doily. I live inside of you. You don't need to carry that anymore. I'm so sorry that I gave it to you in the first place. I didn't know what else to do. I did the best I had. So will you hold on to it or will you let it go? Our job is to get rid of every single thing that's been accumulated in that room. Now, the easiest way to do this is often to do a bit of a reorganization. We'll start with piles. Well, this one makes me have a happy memory, so I'm going to keep those. And so we're going to keep those in the room. This one, does it spark joy? So we'll bring Marie Kondo in here and we'll think of this in terms of reorganization of the room first. So the first thing we'll do is we'll reorganize the room. It's the first real stage, right? We have awareness, we pause, and then we choose. But the stage here of releasing and letting go, there's stages to it. And the first stage is to work on getting rid of all the things that are burdensous, that are really heavy and holding you back. And so the first question we can ask is does this spark joy? And we can go through all the things in this room just asking that question. And half the room, if not more, will be empty by the time we're just done this. And we can do this for decades. And then you'll get to a place where you've got good memories in there. And then you start to think, well, wait a minute. That trophy, that trophy, it has that good memory, but it also really drilled in the idea that I had to achieve things to be loved. So although the moment was good, it actually has some burdens linked to it. So now that I think about it, I'm gonna get rid of the trophy too. And then you get back to grandma's doily and you stare at it, and you think about what a lovely woman she was. Or maybe she wasn't. And you look at the doily and you say, I wish you peace. And you politely fold the doily up and you put it in the donation box. And slowly but surely we work through stage two, emptying the room of all the things that still weigh you down, tying you to the past, stopping you from being. Present. The job is to fully empty the room. And it's okay if it takes your entire lifetime. That is your purpose. And as you start getting traction at cleaning your room, we can call it spring cleaning. The second purpose we all have is to help others do the same. So maybe as you're cleaning your room and you're taking this stuff to the dump or to the secondhand store or wherever, you start talking to other people about what you're doing. Now, this is how it worked for me, and it's been really cool. You start helping them do the same, second intrinsic purpose. One is to get to the top of the mountain and we do it with the empty room. Two is to embody this practice, not just know it, but fully embody it. And then three is to help others do the same. Those are your intrinsic purposes. How you do this, that's extrinsic. How you walk, how you move, what uh car you drive, all those things that are all exterior. They're secondary. Those three steps. So you think we gotta go awareness, pause, choose. Those are our steps. Awareness is just the first. The second portion of that is stages. Get rid of the things that don't bring you joy. Get rid of the things that maybe brought you joy, but you realize are actually still holding you back. And then finally, we clear the room out completely, and we have full self-realization, pure potential. And we are completely present because there is nothing distracting us anymore. Three by three by three, we start emptying the room. So we'll summarize it. We have the room. The first reaction is usually not overwhelm, or is overwhelm, not relief. And we want to shut the door again. That's just the compulsion. But awareness creates a responsibility, not shame. And the room didn't become overfill overnight, and it's not going to be empty overnight. So we have to have compassion so that we leave the light on instead of running away. Maybe that's the real beginning of healing, not the day you finally fixed yourself, but the day you became willing to keep the light on. So what happens after that light comes on? This is where many of us can become extremely discouraged. We assume that because we can now see the pattern, the pattern should disappear. I wish. But that's not how change works. Think about the room again. So we've turning the light on doesn't magically organize 40 or 50 years of accumulated belongings. It simply allows you to see what you've been carrying. That's the awareness. Alignment is something different. Alignment begins when you, well, I guess it begins the moment you choose differently. Not just once, though, but over and over again. I think this is one of the biggest misunderstandings about this personal growth journey. We've been taught that awareness creates transformation, but it doesn't. Awareness creates possibility. Choice creates transformation. That's why I often say awareness reveals. Alignment chooses, and creation expresses. Those three sentences have become the backbone of everything I teach, because they're not just ideas, they're ways of living. So let's take a moment and look at what's happening inside your brain when you begin to make different choices. When something unexpected happens, say a criticism, a difficult conversation, maybe somebody forgetting your birthday, a disagreement with your partner, your nervous system responds before your conscious mind has even finished interpreting the event. That's not a flaw. It's biology. Your brain is constantly asking one question. Am I safe? Long before it asks, Am I aligned? The amygdala rapidly scans for anything that resembles previous danger. If something feels familiar, even emotionally familiar, your body prepares for survival. Your heart rate increases, your stress hormones begin circulating, your muscles tighten, breathing becomes shallower, your attention narrows, and all of this is happening incredibly quickly, long before you've consciously chosen how you want to respond. This is why people often say, I don't know what came over me. Well, something did. A beautifully intelligent survival system that has spent years learning how to protect you. The problem isn't that your nervous system responds. The problem is when it becomes the only voice that we listen to. And this is where something extraordinary becomes possible. See, between the trigger and your response, there is a moment. Sometimes it's only a breath, sometimes it's only a heartbeat. But that moment, it changes everything. Because that's where the witness lives. Not in the past, not in the imagined future, but only here, in this present moment. The moment you pause, you begin engaging the prefrontal cortex, the part of your brain responsible for reflection, emotional regulation, empathy, perspective taking, and conscious decision making. In other words, the pause is not passive. The pause is neurological. Every conscious breath strengthens your ability to respond rather than react. Every time you interrupt an old survival pattern, you strengthen a new neural pathway. This is neuroplasticity, not becoming a different person, becoming more available to who you have always been. I love using driving analogies because, well, it's like low-hanging fruit. I'm often in my car, I drive to work and from work, the office almost every single day. So it's a common place that we have to get into. And it's a common place that I find people get triggered. Even I remember watching Eckhart Tolley in Vancouver, probably about seven years ago, eight years ago, maybe, and I was watching with my husband. And while he was on stage, he actually dropped an F-bomb talking about the traffic in Vancouver. And I laughed so hard because it made me realize this is something that happens to all of us. So just think about it. You're driving down the street. Maybe you need to get somewhere and you're late. People in front of you have been driving slow. Finally, you're just going to turn a corner, you're going to go a different route. And maybe somebody makes you miss a light. They trigger you. You have tension start happening in your body, your heart rate increases, your uh shoulders get more tense, your breath gets shallower, and you start getting caught up in the thoughts. So your body's reacted before your mind's even caught up. And then that little voice, she starts happening. They shouldn't be doing this. That person's an idiot, whatever it is. And you start getting caught into it. Your face, your body language, maybe you're even yelling inside your car. But because you're doing this work, there's this moment where you pause. And this is my experience. I remember driving down the street, guy cuts me off. Actually, no, I was driving down the street and the guy ran a red light. And I was like, the first thought, of course, was to very much like judge him and yell. And as it happens, all of a sudden the thought comes in: does this thought align with who you want to be? And say, I'd been working on this. I mean, meditating for years at this point. And I was like, no. So then what's the next best possible thought you can have? And it's like you're you're climbing up the rungs of a ladder out of the pit of the old pattern. You got sucked into that drama. You got sucked into the quicksand. And then you just start trying to climb your way back out. So the first thought maybe was he's an idiot. And then the second thought, okay, well, what's the next best possible thought that you can have? Obviously, that guy wasn't paying attention. Okay, what's the next best possible thing you had that you have? Well, it's a good thing that I looked both ways. What's the next best possible thought you can have? Well, that happened. And then you let it go. This is our options. These are our opportunities that we have while we're doing this work. That's just one little thing. Because, see, before this work, what that would have looked like is somebody ran a red light, I'd have lost my shit, I'd been pissed off and having fake conversations in my head the whole drive home. Then I would have gotten home and saw my husband and I would have told him about this idiot that's on the road and how people are stupid out there, and it would have gone into this huge negative conversation. Why? You have no idea what was going on in that car. You have no idea what that person was going through. Are they responsible for running the line? Yeah. Of course they're responsible for themselves. Am I responsible for myself? Yeah. And I don't get to blame other people for my behavior. So here's the thing: the triggers, they're going to happen automatically. And your body is going to react even before your mind can catch up. Awareness is going to be noticing that moment, but without judging it. When we take that moment and we pause just enough to create some space for the witness to participate, we make one different choice, which ends up creating a completely different experience. Maybe transformation isn't found in those extraordinary breakthroughs. Maybe it's found in ordinary moments where we finally become present enough to choose. To choose, just let it go. This is one of the biggest reasons I love working through the five elements. Not because they tell us who we are, but because they help us recognize how consciousness is expressing itself through us in this moment. When survival is running the show, wood may express as force, control, frustration, or relentless striving. And fire may express as approval seeking, overconnection, or performance for acceptance. Earth may express as rescuing, overfunctioning, or carrying everyone else's emotional load. Metal may express as perfectionism, criticism, or believing worth must be earned. Water may express as hesitation, withdrawal, or staying invisible to remain safe. But notice something? None of those expressions are your identity. They are simply conditioned expressions of consciousness attempting to create safety. And if they were learned, they can be transformed, not through force, but through awareness, through presence and one conscious choice. That is alignment. So now we understand something incredibly important. Awareness is the light. We flick the switch on. The pause invites the witness into the room, to the threshold. There's still one question remaining. How do we know what to work on next? Ironically, life has been answering that question all along. We just haven't been listening, or we didn't understand what it was trying to do. So now we've turned on the light, we've begun to understand the room, the accumulation of all of our shit. We've discovered that awareness isn't the same as change. We've learned that between every trigger and every response, there's a moment where the witness can participate. Now comes the question I hear all the time, Dawn, how do I know what to work on next? And my answer surprises people. I don't think you go looking for it. I've tried. I think life is already showing you. For years I approached healing like it was an excavation project. I thought if I could just dig deep enough, remember enough, analyze it enough. Eventually I'd uncover every limiting belief and every wound. And it was exhausting. Then something shifted. Instead of searching, I started asking. Every morning, I pause, I take a slow breath, and I become super present. I have a little prayer that I was taught as the show me prayer. Show me what I'm ready to release today. Not next year, not everything, but just today. And then I go live my life. That simple practice changed everything. Because life began answering. Not through lightning bolts, not through mystical visions. Sometimes they'll come through, though through ordinary everyday moments, a conversation, a reaction, a disappointment, oh, a trigger, a feeling. Life had been speaking all along. I just hadn't been listening, or at the very minimum, I didn't understand the language. So let me give you an example of this. I started this portion of my practice about last May. I've talked about it on other episodes. And what happened was I was in a retreat with my coach, and we started a practice which I changed and morphed it into what I refer to as brain dumping. So every morning I get up, I dump into my book any negative thoughts, any worries, any anxiousness, whatever it is that I'm feeling this morning. What did I bring forward from the day? What am I still worrying about? Or maybe it's curiosity that I'm feeling. What's today gonna bring? So I will dump out anything that I'm worried about, dump out anything that's still bothering me. And then I always like to ask questions. And so I started asking the question originally last year, the question that I would say was more of a command, which was trigger me. Trigger me, show me the next thing I need to let go of. And now I shifted it. So I went through trigger me all last year, talked about a lot in the podcast and on my YouTube. And I had lots come up. I actually refer to last summer as the summer of I'm an inconvenience. It was the inconvenience summer. So I worked through all of these wounds that were constantly triggered about being an inconvenience and my fear of being an inconvenience, my inability to ask for help because I didn't want to be an inconvenience. It went deep, deep, deep until we got to a birth wound that was linked to the belief my life is an inconvenience. It was a pretty aggressive year. So I worked all the way through this. And after that, I started going, okay, there's got to be a bit of a gentler way. And although I didn't want to lose the speed in which I was working through, I did want to learn how to be a little bit gentler with myself, which is not my natural, or I shouldn't say natural, isn't my habitual way of being. And so I started to switch it a little bit. I do my brain dumping. I always have a prayer that I say every day. I call to the highest vibration of love and light to join with my highest self and I ask your guidance. How may I be of service today? Please use me, please lead me, please show me the way. And I started asking a question at the end of that. What's interfering? Show me. Show me what's the next thing that I need to work on. Or show me the next thing I need to become aware of that's interfering with my intentions, with my intention to make it to the top of this mountain. Show me. And then I let it go. So fast forward, it's a few months back, and I'm going to go to an event. Now, that morning, I do my brain dumping, I do my heart coherence breathing, I ask my question, show me, show me what I need to be doing. At this time, I am reading a book and I'm also listening to it at the same time about the five elements by Dr. Charles Moss. And as I get in the car, the book automatically comes on, and Dr. Moss starts talking about wood elements, which is what I am. I have a uh my dominant element is the wood element. And he's talking about how when wood elements become really maladapted, their stress emotions are anger, irritation, frustration. And when they get really maladapted, they can not only become judgmental, but they can become quite hostile and hold grudges. And I was like, I think that's not me. And that's a little excessive. I maybe was there in the past, but like that's definitely not me. And that is honestly what I'm thinking is I'm listening to him talk about this. And I'm like, I'm still listening to him, but I'm driving down the road and about four or five minutes into the drive, I turn the corner and there's a bus in front of me. And on the back of this bus is this woman. And this woman, as soon as I see her face on the back of this bus, I roll my eyes and I'm like, ugh. And as soon as I do it, I pick up that he's talking about how wood elements hold grudges. So I'm looking at my radio of my Jeep. And then I'm looking at the back of this bus. And I'm looking and I'm like, oh, this might, this is uncomfortable. This might be a bit much. And I'm aware, and it's not like this person did anything like crazy terrible. We're talking maybe 13, 15 years ago, handling the releasing out of a, we were on a joint board together, and how she left the board and how she behaved. And I just never let it go. She had embarrassed me, she had acted out in my business in front of clients, in front of my staff. And I just was like, well, you're dead to me. So that was my attitude back then. And here I was going through this, and I was like, grudges. You want me to release all of my grudges. Okay, this is the next place I need to work on. So I'm gonna find this funny. I'm gonna keep going with this just so you can understand how much the universe will co-create with you. So I'm driving down this road, the bus stays in front of me until I finally turn off. I'm laughing because I'm like, all right, like this is this is pretty funny. Jump into my office for a moment, grab some stuff, and then I head up to the place where this event is at. I walk in the door, and this person was the first keynote speaker, and I miss them speaking, and I was okay with it prior to that morning. As I walk in the door, this lady that I know says hi and says, Oh, it's too bad you missed the first speaker. She was magnificent. She did such a great job. And I'm like, oh yeah, that's too bad. And I'm laughing. So I'm like, oh my gosh, this is so awkward. Like, so awkward. I walk into the room, I put down my stuff at a table, say hello to the people that are at the table I'm gonna sit at, and I walk over to get a cup of tea and walk right into the person. And I'm like, oh, hi. I heard you did a great job speaking, and I'm sorry that I missed it. And for the first time in 15 years, Rather than turning my back or just walking away or ignoring this person, I engage. And I begin the process of letting go. See, the first thing that happened was I was given awareness of grudges, but I wasn't searching for a grudge. I simply asked an honest question. And life, it answered through an absolutely ordinary moment. My reaction, not the bus, contained the lesson. But the laughter with my judgment helped me with my awareness and helped me create self-compassion. See, that's co-creation. Not forcing life to reveal something, becoming aware enough to recognize the answer when it arrives. The more I teach this work, the more I realize this isn't just true for individuals. It's true for families. It's true for relationships. It's true for organizations. Think about how many teams spend their energy asking who's responsible? Who's to blame? How are we going to stop this from happening? Those questions often reinforce survival, because that's where they came from. What if the leader asks different questions? What is this conflict showing us? What opportunity is trying to emerge? What belief has quietly been organizing about our culture? What aligned choice is available now. See, those questions change everything because organizations have rooms too. Cultures inherit furniture. Teams inherit stories. Workplaces inherit beliefs. Alignment doesn't happen because someone writes new values on the wall. It happens because people become willing to turn on the light together, one conversation at a time. That's the heart of alignment operating system, not behavior management, conscious culture creation. Now I'd like to leave you with a practice for this week. I'm gonna call this one pause, feel, align. We've used it before, but we're gonna use it in something different. So the next time something activates you, don't rush. Pause. Take one breath and become aware. Start to feel into your body, feel into your feet, not analyze, not explain, not justify. Just feel. Feel the breath, feel your feet. Where do you notice it in your body? What emotion is asking to be acknowledged? What story is trying to convince you it's true? And then align. Ask yourself four questions. What is this showing me? What is the opportunity? Who is trying to emerge? And what will alignment choose? You don't need all the answers. You only need the next conscious choice. Because that's how transformation actually happens. Not in giant leaps, in ordinary moments, repeated with extraordinary awareness. The longer I do this work, the less interested I become in helping people fix themselves. Because I don't believe you're broken. I think you're buried beneath old beliefs, old identities, old fears, old survival strategies. The witness has never been damaged. The witness has simply been waiting. Waiting for you to turn on the light. Waiting for you to notice the room. Waiting for you to become curious instead of critical. Waiting for you to remember. That's why I believe healing isn't about becoming someone new. It's about lovingly removing everything that prevents your deepest nature from expressing itself. Awareness reveals, alignment chooses, and creation expresses. And that's the journey of an aligned human. This week I'd love for you to try one experiment. Every morning, every morning, before you check your phone, before you open your email, before the world tells you who it needs you to be, pause. Take one slow breath and simply ask, show me what I'm ready to release today. And then pay attention. Trust that life is already in conversation with you. And if today's conversation resonated with you, I'd love for you to share it with someone who's ready to turn on the light in their own life. And if you'd like to go deeper, download the five elements of alignment assessment and join us inside the Aligned Human Project. We're just getting started. I want to leave you with this. The day you turn on the light may not feel like the easiest day of your life. It might suck. It might feel overwhelming. It may feel emotional. It may feel like everything suddenly got heavier or made more chaotic. But it didn't. You simply became aware of what you've been carrying. And awareness is a gift. Because awareness gives you something survival never could. And that's choice. So this week, keep the light on and stay curious. Practice compassionate responsibility. And remember, you don't change your life the day you became aware. You change your life the day awareness changes your next choice. Because you are the witness. You shape your field. And your field shapes your life. Until next time, thank you so much for spending this time with me today. My hope is that you leave each episode not with more information, but with greater awareness. Because awareness is where every meaningful change begins. If today's conversation resonated with you, I'd love for you to subscribe, leave a review, and share this episode with someone who's ready to stop surviving and start living from alignment. If you'd like to continue this work, you can join us inside the Aligned Human Project community. Explore the free five-element alignment assessment, or learn more about Align Your Life, Aligned Living, and Alignment Operating System at Practical Spiritualism Co.com. Remember, awareness reveals. Alignment chooses, and creation follows. You are the witness. You shape the field, and the field shapes your life. Until next time, keep pausing, keep noticing, and keep choosing. I'll see you in the next episode.