Chapter 33 -Your Truth Is the Only Truth That Matters!

Your Truth Is the Only Truth That Matters!

What if the most powerful truth in your life is the one you choose to believe?

In this deeply thought-provoking episode of Burn It Down and Begin Again, Erica dives into the power of perception, belief, manifestation, healing, and personal sovereignty. From addiction recovery and religious conditioning to neuroscience, quantum theory, and the stories we tell ourselves, this episode challenges listeners to rethink the narratives shaping their reality.

Erica shares her personal journey through alcoholism, emotional healing, burnout, illness, and rebuilding her identity from the ground up. Drawing inspiration from thinkers like Dr. Joe Dispenza, Bruce Lipton, and Florence Scovel Shinn, she explores how thoughts, emotions, and focus literally shape our biology, nervous system, and life experience.

This episode is a reminder that you are not trapped by your past, your labels, your trauma, or someone else’s version of reality. You have the power to opt out of the stories that no longer serve you and consciously build a life aligned with your truth.

If you’ve ever questioned who you are, what’s real, or how to reclaim your power in a chaotic world, this conversation will meet you exactly where you are.

Because healing begins the moment you decide: “That is not my story anymore.” 

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Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

You've gone down the rabbit holes, the vaccines, the slave reality, the matrix, debunking the Western medical system, chemtrails, COVID, aliens. And after all of it, all those hours, all of those rabbit holes, all of that research, they're all true. But none of them have to be your truth. The most dangerous thing you can do is anchor into someone else's truth so hard that you build an entire reality around it and you can't get out. The most powerful thing you will ever do is decide that's not my story. Whether it's your relationship to religion, the stories you tell yourself about your childhood, who you are right now, or your relationship with addiction, you can decide that's not my story anymore. Stay with me. Today we're going deep because your truth is the only truth that matters. Welcome to Burn It Down and Begin Again, because sometimes the only way out is through the fire. Too many of us carry stories like mine of trauma, silence, survival, and shame alone. But healing isn't just about surviving what hurt us. It's about becoming the people we were meant to be, how we can transform pain into purpose and rebuild life on our own terms and show what's possible when we rise to the strongest version of ourselves. If you hear yourself in my words, know this you're not crazy, you're not broken, and you're definitely not alone. This podcast is part of Chicology. Real women, real stories, and real transformation. We're here to break cycles, rise higher, and create lives that radiate power, purpose, and passion. So if you've walked through hell and you're ready to grow, evolve, and rebuild, then stay with me. There's hope here, there's healing here, and there's an army of us rising with you. Now, let's begin. Well, you guys, welcome, welcome back to Burn It Down and Begin Again. This is Erica, and I am so glad to have you here today. I really want to thank all of you guys that have subscribed and joined and listened to this podcast on a weekly basis. Cannot tell you how much it means to me. The goal of this podcast has always been the same thing, which is if you feel that you are broken or lost or completely falling apart, wherever you're at, that you can find a voice out there, any voice, but mine, I'm here for you. If you need to know that it is possible to rebuild, my story was pretty desperate and harrowing. If you listen to the first three episodes, I almost died from addiction, thought about ending my own life, and got out of a really toxic marriage, rebuilt my life, and I never thought it was gonna be possible. Today, my life is beautiful, and I mean it's not without its challenges, but I do have a beautiful, happy, full life, and I want you to know that it is possible. So we're gonna dive into all kinds of things on this podcast from healing to concepts to books to theory to health. Basically, this is just kind of an all-in deal where we talk about healing, but we also talk about living our best lives. So I want to welcome you. You can find us on TikTok, you can find us on Instagram, Facebook under the name Vern It Down and Begin Again. You can also find me under my personal channel on Facebook or Instagram. Instagram is eGill3404 or Facebook Erica Gill. And you can follow me there. I also give updates there. So one thing I did want to plug today before we get into today's episode, I am really excited about something. My best friend Elise and I just launched a brand new channel called Take Us With You. You can find it on TikTok and Instagram right now. Search at take us with you official, all one word, and you're gonna see the logo of two women. They're backspacing the camera, arms kind of interlaced that says Elise and Erica. Basically, the concept is exactly what it sounds like. We want to take you with us on road trips, vacation destinations, food worth driving for, experiences worth having, all of it. We've been to so many places and we want to share those journeys that we've been on with you. And then we're also planning some really great new stuff. We got some road trips coming up, a lot of adventures. We've been going on adventures for years together, and we finally decided to stop keeping all that great stuff to ourselves. So whether it turns into something big or we just end up having the world's greatest tax write-off, we're showing up and we're bringing you along for every single moment. So I would love to see you there. Again, you can find us on TikTok and Instagram. And soon to be coming along is going to be YouTube for some long content. At any rate, I want to get into the challenge of the week. If you guys have been following me, you know I have been on a health journey. Pre-cap. I started getting sick right around April the 20th. I called out for a few days. I came back to work. I ended up calling out again. I was just, you know, feeling super sick. And I went on PTO, was feeling better. I was on antibiotics and some other stuff. Got back. I felt fine. I went to work for a couple of nine-hour shifts and that kicked my ass. And I ended up getting sick all over again, going into urgent care. I didn't even have a primary care doctor. I know that's bad, but I didn't because I never get never get sick, you guys. They updated the x-rays and everything. They said that I had bronchitis. They gave me another course of antibiotics and some other stuff. I ended up being sicker. I went back to urgent care again. They told me that they thought I had mycoplasma. I went to finally, this has been so crazy. I got a primary care physician that finally agreed to see me. They agreed. They said, you know, we can't tell. We don't have the blood tests. We're going to take them, but you know, we think it's mycoplasma. They got the results back. They found something that confirmed it was mycoplasma. They gave me more medication then, specifically antibiotics for the mycoplasma, which is wagging pneumonia. I felt better with that. But then I started coughing and wheezing again on Sunday, extended my leave of absence. So now I'm on complete leave of absence because at the urgent care, they told me that uh I had bronchitis and I also had histamine response. They prescribed steroids and some kind of inhaler that I had to use with a nebulizer and some kind of allergy or histamine blocker or something. My God, you guys. So I'm finally, I mean, literally, and you guys got to understand, I wasn't sick, like, oh, you know, I'm sitting around at home. I mean, I was sick, flat on my back. My butt was aching because I was laying in bed so much. I tried, you know, I'm I'm never sick. I mean, like, and if I get sick, I'm the kind of person that can sleep it off, no big deal, and I'm good to go. But I think what I learned from this, honestly, because it did wipe me out so completely, where I would get up and just do a couple of simple things, and literally I could not function after that. I slept like 16, 18 hours a day. I'm not kidding you guys. Uh, it was wild. I haven't been sick like this in a very long time and it scared me. But I do believe, as much as I love my job, I have an absolute situation where I am the kind of person that I show up and I don't just give 100%, I give 110% every single day. And I give a lot to the team. And because we are such a busy store, we don't have standarund time, there is a lot of mental pressure, and I've shared this with you guys. But absolutely that makes a difference when you are burning the candle at both ends. I have a lot of other projects and stuff that I do, and I'm a busy woman, right? I got a family, but I'm trying to hustle, side hustle, make money. But that job is 40 hours a week, sometimes a little less, sometimes more. And my days can range anywhere between seven and a half, eight hours generally, but usually they're gonna be nine hours and sometimes even 10 hour days. I get like what a half an hour lunch break, and you know, if I'm lucky, I squeeze in a 15. It's not a lot. And I've been going so hard for so long. And ever since we turned into this experience store, the pressure has been real. There's been a lot of focus on us, a lot of uh focus on our particular store. Uh, we are considered one of the best stores or the busiest store in town for sure. And so they really, as a corporation, spend a lot of time looking at our progress and stuff like that. So performance is key. And I think just not taking care of myself enough in terms of that response that you get from cortisol, right? Never shutting down, never shutting off, never taking the time to do that. Unfortunately, that is what happened to me. That cortisol kicked in and I think I just got worn down, worn down, worn down. The doctor that I saw on Sunday told me this is what I think happened to you, because we pieced it together. I had my complete medical history, I had AI helped me put together timeline of events, when I went to see who, what prescriptions I was given, my symptoms. So she was able to look through it like a whole comprehensive picture. And she goes, Okay, I think that you were run down. I think that you have histamine issues because this last year has been really, really bad with allergies. And then I think it snowballed into catching things, and every time you were prescribed an antibiotic, your system got weaker. And it makes sense when she went through the whole thing. It was the first really good explanation I had because I gotta tell you, I was really pissed off. I'm like, why can nobody give me a straight answer? Or do I have this or do I have that? What the hell do I have? I think at one point in the beginning, they said HMPV, HMPV, I don't even remember. I got so many different pieces of information. All I know is that I am definitely on the road to recovery. I feel it, this uh steroid. She said, if you take the steroid, you're gonna feel a lot better. And she wasn't kidding. I really, really do feel better. So the lesson that I have learned is that I've really got to find a way to take care of myself better and get more rest in. Even though I try and get my eight hours, and even though I do all my peptides and my vitamins and my good nutrition, and you know, I take care of myself, I exercise. Apparently, it's not enough because I was worn down. So, going back, they've recommended that I wear some fancy masks, not for everybody else, but just so I don't get sick again because my immune system is so shot for four weeks. I don't think I can handle that, but I can handle it for a couple of weeks, I guess. So I ordered those masks. I hate masks. If you know anything about me, I never got my COVID shot. I'm not a believer in that. Um, I don't like masks, but in this case, I do agree. I did the research, and yeah, it seems to make sense. So, anyway, that has been my journey. But yes, definitely my challenge of the week has been just trying to get well, sleep as much as possible, just basically getting into a place where I can get back to work. And I am supposed to go back to work on Saturday, thank God, because I've been losing my mind at home. And I learned that honestly, my work is so important to me. A lot of people would think, oh, how nice you get a vacation to sit at home. That is not the way my mind works, you guys. I mean, I hate sitting at home. I hate doing nothing. I hate not being able to connect and perform. But I think the thing that I hate the most is not being able to contribute or to be of service. And I realize that laying in bed, I miss work. I miss being able to help people. I miss being able to be of service to my coworkers, to my clients, you know, I could even to my kids. I've been so knocked out, I haven't been able to do anything, right? And that is such an important part of my identity that that was the hardest part, honestly, of being sick. It was just really, really tough, you know. But at any rate, let's get into today's episode. Your truth is the only truth that matters. I think that this is a great concept to dive into because that seems to be something I see so many opinions on social media. The world is full of opinions. Everybody gets mad when everybody doesn't share the opinions. I think that's ridiculous because the truth is your opinion about yourself and what you think about the world is the only one that matters. Who cares what anybody thinks? But you'd be surprised at how many people struggle with that. So this is the thing. Let's start with going to be the rabbit hole problem. So if you're anything like me, you've gone down a lot of rabbit holes. Is coconut oil good for you? I still genuinely don't know. I think it is, depending on which expert you follow, which study you read, which YouTube video you found at midnight, the answer changes, right? And that's coconut oil. It's just the most basic thing. But when you bring in things like vaccinations, the government control, if we're living in a simulation, our spirits and ghosts real, what happens to us after we die, what religion is correct, whether free will exists at all. Did we make the moon landing? I could go on and on. You will find compelling, well-sourced, intelligent evidence on every side of every one of those conversations. I want both sides of the equation so I can kind of start to form an opinion. That's not a problem with the research. That's just the nature of this reality. It is extraordinarily responsive to what we believe. So when you go looking for proof that the world is dangerous, controlled, you're gonna find it everywhere. The world confirms it every time. Let me give you a great example. I'm a believer in seeing numbers, repeating numbers. Now, I post it all the time on my personal Instagram, literally all day long. It doesn't matter. I could be working with a client, I could be doing anything, not thinking about the time. I'll glance at the clock and I've got 1111, 222, 444. I mean, always. I mean, I see it on license plates. I see it in how many people have liked my posts. It's crazy, right? And that it just shows up for me. When you consciously decide that the world is abundant and that life is always moving you towards something better, you're gonna find that too, equally everywhere. This is not positive thinking as a coping mechanism. This is how consciousness actually works. Let's look at what science actually says. Dr. Bruce Lipton, one of my absolute favorites, a cell biologist and the author of many books, but my favorite is of all time, is the biology of belief, taught me so much. I cannot recommend to you guys to read this book enough. He spent decades studying how our cells respond, not just to chemistry, but to perception. His research shows that the signals that our brains send, based on what we believe to be true, uh, change the behavior of our cells at a genetic measurable level. I mean, let that sink in, not metaphorically, but literally. So he said, and I quote, the moment you change your perception is the moment you rewrite the chemistry of your body. And I have found that to be true. So the moment you change your perception, not your circumstances, guys, not your bank account, not who's in your life, but your perception, that is when your body chemistry changes. Another one of my favorites that I talk about all the time, foundational stuff here, Dr. Joe Dispenza, he takes it even further. His work, backed by brain scans and measurable data, shows that when we rehearse a new way of being in our minds, our brain can't distinguish between the imagined experience and the real one. The neural pathways form either way. The body begins responding to a future that hasn't even happened yet as if it already has. So let's take a look at real studies that show that. Look up athletes with hooked up to uh electrodes doing their event in their mind while they're being monitored. So the guys are sitting in a chair, they close their eyes, get into a meditative state. We're not gonna top athletes. They are instructed on exactly how to do the process and they're hooked up to electrodes. So they basically, if they're a runner, say, right, they imagine themselves like literally, and when I say imagine, they visually see it, they smell the smells, you know, feel the feel the air on their skin, the sun on their skin. They reach down and they grab some chalk and they put it between their hands or whatever they do, they are having all of that. They feel the emotion of the excitement and the hope and the nervousness. They go through everything, every single sensation, including running the entire race. So they do it in real time in their mind, and then what it feels like to win. Did you know that when they actually went and did the event that they were rehearsing for mentally a little bit later, that and they were hooked up, okay, two electors both times, the mind could not tell the difference between the perceived reality in this exercise they did while they were laying down meditatively and the actual event itself. That is so powerful. Dispenza says your personality creates your personal reality. So your personality is nothing more than how you think, how you act, and how you feel on repeat. Change the loop and change the reality. Guys, read his books, life changing. Now, here's one you may not have heard of, or unless you're really into manifestation, but Florence Scovel Shin. She was a pioneer in manifestation. She was saying all of this back in the 90s, a hundred years ago, before the neuroscience existed to back it up. She wrote a book called The Game of Life and How to Play It, and she was radical for that time. Your word, she said, what you speak repeatedly and what you declare becomes your world. It becomes your reality. She was describing the law of attraction before anybody was using that language. You gotta read that book. It is incredible, but the language will get you a little bit, right? Because it's obviously written back in the 20s, but she was a freaking pioneer. That woman was amazing. All right, let's talk about religion. The Bible carries this too. If you're a religious person or people are like, oh, manifestation, you know, a lot of religious people, that's dabbling in magic. No, it's not. Whether or not institutional religion is your path or not, it's not mine, but the text is loaded with this concept. Okay, let's look at Proverbs 23:7. As a man, as a man thinketh in his heart, so is he. Job spoke his fear into existence, and he was consumed by it, and it materialized. That is not punishment at all, you guys. That is not a punishment from God. This is a description of how reality really operates. Romans 12, 2. Be transformed by the renewing of your mind. The Bible, many, many other cases, just look it up, go into your AI and say, Can you give me examples? Like you're a religious person of where the Bible talks about creating our reality through thoughts. And Jesus talked about it. I mean, my gosh, you guys, I'm just giving you a few. The instruction has always been there: renew the mind, change the thought, and change life. That is not new information. It's been around forever. Every religious text talks about it. We forgot it. Or we were taught to outsource it into a church, a government, an expert, or a program or a relationship. And this is what I have learned. I think that is the biggest problem. That is literally becomes our whole reality. If something happens there, then we don't have an inner uh relationship with ourselves where we have all of our self-confidence based around our relationship with ourselves and our belief system. We are putting our belief system into religion. And I do struggle, and I'm gonna do an episode on religion. Let me just make it clear, guys. It's not that I don't believe in God. I do, but I don't believe in God the way that most people do. I do not believe in a heaven and hell as it is described in the Bible. I think that the texts were rewritten, they were selectively chosen for mass control. And I can I've studied this. I can give you dates, I can tell you when, I can tell you what was pulled out, I can tell you how all of this was manipulated. And it was done simply to control the population. I struggle with that. The more I've studied, and I mean, believe me, I'm a studier, the more I've studied every religion, the more I have gone down every single path and looked for common denominators and truths, the more I find that people spend their lives defining themselves by a set of rules that was created by man only to control, and they are not using their inner dialogue with themselves and the relationship they have with the creator or the universe to define who they are. And I I really, really struggle with that. We'll talk about that maybe next week. Let's talk about the addiction model, and this is my truth. This is where the concept stopped being theory for me and became the most undeniably, undeniable reality of my life. Addiction, specifically my truth. This is where the concept stopped being theory for me, and it became really the foundational cornerstone of my life in terms of reality. I was in AA. I was I had a very bad drinking problem. It's all referenced in the beginning episodes, and I was a full-blown alcoholic. I struggled. I went into program. Program is great for me for a period of time. There was a point where I woke up one day in program. I had done everything. I was staying sober, and I started listening to the people in the group. And one thing became more clear to me with every meeting I went to. These people were kind of romanticizing in my mind. And hey, I am not knocking program for people, again, like religion, right? You do what works for you, but this is just for me, guys. Only for me. I felt that there was a like a romantization of the addiction for the purpose of the newcomer. My name is so-and-so, and I'm an alcoholic. Right there, it's reinforcing everything that you don't want to be in that opening statement. I don't agree with that. I don't identify with that anymore. Did I have a drinking problem? Yes. Was an alcoholic? Yes. Can I ever drink again? Absolutely not. But I don't identify as an alcoholic because I am no longer. I do not drink. I haven't drank in what, six years? I don't think about it. It's not even a temptation, it's gone. I feel like a lot of the reasons that people leap relapse a lot in program because people do is because they are, I'm so and so and I'm an alcoholic. Let me tell you about what my life was like. I fell downstairs, I lost my children, I was in jail. I mean, man, and these people share the stories for the newcomer. I get it, but this becomes their fabric of their not only their healing process for addiction, but it's the story they tell themselves over and over and over, reliving those negative things over and over and over. And then it becomes their social structure because you only hang out with alcoholics. It is no wonder to me that so many of these people are in a constant state of freaking relapse and they don't heal. For me personally, I woke up one day and it wasn't even that far into my final sobriety. And I'm like, you know what? What am I doing here? I am not an alcoholic anymore. I feel that it has been lifted from me. I'm going to focus on other things. And I walked out and I never went back. I still have wonderful friends that I made in program. And interestingly enough, those people have left program too. They are of a like mind as myself. I'm not saying that if you're an AA, you're a follower, because a lot of people really use that as a social outlet. I think that that is important and I think that people need that. I don't need that. You have to decide what is right for you. Okay. The addiction model was huge for me because that's where I started making definite changes for myself in terms of my relationship with myself, in terms of what I thought about myself, right? I don't even say I'm a recovered alcoholic. So I am healed. I am fully 100% healed. I don't need substances to feel good. I am much more comfortable being 100% sober in my life in every single way. I like who I am better. I can deal with my feelings as they come up. I don't feel the need to numb anything anymore. I've learned how to walk through the pain without picking something up to uh medicate myself. And this all comes from hard work. Man, you guys, if you want to get well, if you want to fix something in your life, do the fucking work. We're in a society, guys, where we just want the easy way out. There ain't no such thing if you want to heal your life. There ain't no such thing. If you want to get better, do the work. And the work starts with learning to understand who you are, your relationship to the creator, to the universe, and understanding who you are as a person and your truths. I cannot tell you how important this is. My dad, he was an alcoholic. This is a great example. He was wonderful when I was little. He was loving and safe and kind, the kind of father he felt protected by. Then he did this rapid, crazy change when he started drinking. He became somebody that I didn't recognize. It was frightening. And that home that had been home stopped feeling safe. By high school, I figured out for me that alcohol made all of that disappear. It was my exit. It was the one thing that made my life manageable. And by college, it was full-blown addiction. So my relationship with alcohol became that. It got worse and worse and worse. I needed it more and more and more. Quit working. And then you end up in this addictive pattern, and it practically destroyed my life. The change for me was when I had this life-altering experience after my mom died and I went into the hospital and I almost died because of it. I decided at that moment that I was going to fight. I was going to not have my kids have that horrible, sad fucking story of me dying. I was not going to let that happen to them. I was going to somehow, even though I had tried everything in the world, I was going to find my way out. And I did. You can hear more about that in, I believe it's episode three. But the bottom line is I think we have to remember that that is a powerful example. Most people are like, oh, if you don't go to program, you're never going to recover. Maybe. I think a lot of people that are addicted and they just can't, and I know me, I tried everything. I tried program, I tried freaking diets, I tried self-help, I tried psychology, you know, I tried everything. Nothing worked. It was when I made that decision after my run-in with death that I truly was going to change my life. And I felt it deep down inside. And some of those books that I had been reading by Lipton and Dispenza started to kick in. And I was able to create my own model for what it looked like to be whole and not need to be self-medicated. And the need to drink never came back. And I cannot tell you what a powerful experience that was. I want to be clear. I am not telling you to leave program if it's working for you. Again, if those rooms are saving your life, stay. That is your truth and it's valid. Again, who cares what I say? I'm just telling you what's right for me. Live your life. Do what works for you. Your truth is your valid truth. I would never tell you to walk away from something that's keeping you alive and moving forward. What I'm saying is, again, just for me, continuing to define myself as an alcoholic was building the exact reality or reinforcing the one that I was trying to escape. The label was the cage for me. This is just for me. Now let's talk about your brain confirms what you believe, because I think this is really important. There's a biological reason that this works. Your brain is a system called the reticular activating system, the RAS. It's a filter that your brain receives millions of pieces of information every single second, and the RAS decides what gets through to your conscious awareness. It filters based on what you have told it, what you believe, what you expect. You buy a new car and suddenly that car is everywhere. Your car was always everywhere. Your RIS wasn't flagging it, but now it is because your mind is focused on it. So whatever you decide is true, your brain goes into work finding evidence for it every single day without effort on autopilot. Take a look at my numbers thing that pop up all day long. You know, is it some mystical thing? No. I just, my brain is somehow connected to finding these numbers. And it continues to confirm your reality around the clock. Take two people and they go through the exact same experience and come up with completely opposite stories. One says, this destroyed me. The other one says, wow, this made me. Both are telling their truths because their brains have been building different cases the entire time. So the question is not what is the real truth. The question is, what truth do you want to build a life around? Opting out, guys, is always an option. All those rabbit holes and all the theories about who controls us, what forces are at work, what this reality really is underneath the surface. If you allow those things to be your reality, they will be. The slave reality, the energy harvesting, the addiction theory, the scarcity programming. Step into any of it, decide it's your truth, your existence, and that's where you're gonna live. Your brain is going to confirm it. Your life is gonna reflect it. Free will is a real thing, right? It means you can opt out from anything at any time, from any framework, from any story, from any label that someone else has handed you that you've been carrying around like you thought it was yours. The scarcity program might have been true for you in a past lifetime. It might be completely true for people around you right now. It may have been absolutely real for you growing up. You can acknowledge that it was real and decide that it no longer belongs to you. The addiction story that was real for me for years. And then I looked at it one day and said, nope, it doesn't belong to me anymore. I walked away and I've never looked back and it worked for me. That is conscious choice. That is what it means to be a sovereign human being in this reality. Democrat, Republican, racial tension. We could go on and on. What kind of bullshit are we believing in and buying into because the media has created a story around it to distract us, guys? It's all a bunch of crap. Every morning I do 20 minutes of red light therapy, and some people use that time to scroll. I use it as sacred space-time, I pray, to the universe that I am a part of. I believe that there's something so much bigger than me and it's working in my favor. I anchor into that literally every day. I go through my gratitude list, like not generically, guys, very, very specifically. The way that you know my life feels, how grateful I am for it, that I'll go on and on and on. And I literally will get into a point where I'm tearing up almost every single day because I'm so filled with gratitude. And then that is when I go into how I envision my life, what I want for myself. Going in from that feeling of gratitude is the foundation of manifestation, but it's aligning with the universe with all these wonderful feelings of gratitude and then connecting to the me that I want to be. I talk about what I'm building, not like as a distant fantasy, but it's already done, right? Working on my own terms, being present for my grandchildren, traveling and experiencing the world. I could go on and on. I have so many different goals that I have, but I speak them into existence and I imagine in that place of mind coming from gratitude how I envision my life. I see myself walking down the streets of uh London and stopping and getting a coffee and you know, going into the bookstore. And I literally act as if I'm there in my mind. I'm having the experience, all this rich experience in my mind, and I'm feeling the feelings of how excited I am to be there. Watch, I'm gonna be there before you know it. I mean, there's so many different things that I think about. 20 minutes, guys, it sets the frequency for the entire day. Do it in the morning. The days I skip it, I feel the difference, and the heavier the world feels. So that's not a coincidence. One of the biggest things that I learned with this sickness and what being sick showed me, I believe, I choose to believe that everything that happens to me has a purpose and I get to assign the purpose. I can be grumbly and upset about it and feel victimized, or I can choose to see it as a learning lesson. I literally use this as for every single thing in my life. And being sick was no exception. Being sick for weeks, and guys, I was I've been out of work, God, since the 30th, and I had days off before that. Laying on my ass, like my ass cheek starting from laying in bed so much, but it taught me something. Not able to function, unable to push through, it humbled me in a way that I needed to because there's a big part of me that believes that I'm superhuman. I'm not gonna change that. I think I am superhuman, but it also taught me, I think the biggest reason I got sick, if I'm being honest, is I'm not gonna let anybody else show me up. I'm not gonna let those young guys at work be any better than me. I'm gonna show up 110%. I'm gonna give my all. And it's not a competitive thing because I'm really not competitive against people. I'm more competitive with myself. And I like to contribute, feed off of being able to give something back and having that removed from my life and literally just being, you know, my kids were great. They, you know, took care of me. They all have lives though, right? They work, they do their own thing. I spent a lot of time alone, just me and my dog. And it was something that really taught me that I need to maybe slow down a little bit. You know, I don't know what that's gonna mean for me. I love my job. I will not leave my job, I will not leave my company, but I think I might need to alter a few things in my schedule or my work environment. Ever since I started this new experience store, there's been so much more focus on us being very visible and there's so much more pressure I put on myself because I love my managers and I their success is my success. I don't want to grow with the company any more than where I'm at right now, but I do want them to grow. So I know that my level of performance is going to affect them. And the way that we work under a team structure commission, my level of performance is gonna affect my co-workers' paychecks. So, with that mentality, I think I show up every day really, really wanting to perform at my best. And sometimes that can be hard when I don't allow myself to take a break. So I've been on this health optimization path anyway for years. You guys know that peptides, supplements, red light therapy, training. I've lost over 70 pounds. I used to be pre-diabetic, I used to have high blood pressure, all of that is gone. By every measure, I'm the most health dialed in I have ever been. And I still got knocked completely flat. Lying in bed, I had that choice. I could spiral into why is this happening? You know, find every piece of evidence that my body is failing me, let fear take over. Oh my God, you haven't seen a regular doctor in a few years. What if something's wrong? Blah, blah, blah. I decided to call it what it was, which was a reset. My body said, Hey, Erica, sit down, pay attention, be still, remember what this is all for. In that stillness, I got clearer uh than I have been for a long time about what I want, about what I'm building, about what really matters, about what I want for the rest of my life. I'm 56, guys, you know, God willing, I've got another 30, 40 years. Wouldn't that be amazing? And I want good years, guys. You know, that clarity that I got was worth every uncomfortable day of being down because I walk back with a new appreciation for my coworkers, for my family, for my health, but also with a game plan, right? So if you're in a forced stop situation, whether it be health or career, relationship, whatever, don't just try to get back to normal. Ask what is the lesson? What is it showing you? It's showing you something, and then decide what is the spin you're gonna put on it for yourself. Are you gonna be victimized? Are you gonna be terrorized? Or are you going to use it as a stepping stone, a launcher into something better? You live in a reality that is at its core, shaped by what you believe to be true about it. That is not a slogan, that is biology, guys. It is neuroscience. That is the reticular activating system building your world in real time. That's what Dispenses brain scans confirm. That's what Lipton's cell research proves. What we focus on, our intent, our energy becomes real. Your thoughts are not passive. They aren't generative. They are literally building your world right now, whether you are directing them or not. The only real question is: are you building on purpose or by default? Build on purpose. You get to choose your own truth, guys. Not the loudest truth, not the one with the most YouTube views or evidence or the most Reddit threads. The one that you, when you sit quietly and you put your hand on your chest and you think about it, it feels like yes or no. This is who I am, this is who I'm not, this is what I'm building, this is what I want, this is what is real. Listen to yourself, trust yourself, anchor into that every single day. 20 minutes in the morning, and if you can, do it at night too. On your way to work in the morning in the car, speak it, feel it, become it. You are not a victim of your reality. You are the author. It is never too late to change the story. So, guys, that's my wrap for this week. I missed you all last week because I was too sick and I got on for 10 minutes. I'm like, I'm too sick. And that was me listening to me. But hey, it feels good to be back. I'm on the road to recovery. So thanks for being here. This is Erica, and I'll see you next week. Thank you for being here and holding this part of my story with me. If today's episode resonated with you, please don't stay in silence. Share it with someone who might need to hear it. And if you're walking through your own fire right now, know this you are not too broken, you are not too late, and you are never, ever alone. This is Burn It Down and Begin Again. I'm Erica, and I'll see you in the next chapter.