Chapter 38 - You Are Not Cursed - You're Conditioned

You Are Not Cursed: The Script You Didn’t Know You Were Following

What if bad luck isn’t bad luck at all?

In this thought-provoking episode of Burn It Down and Begin Again, Erica explores a powerful question: Why do some people seem trapped in the same painful patterns over and over again? Is it bad luck, a curse, fate—or something much deeper?

Drawing from neuroscience, quantum theory, psychology, manifestation, and personal experience, Erica examines how our beliefs shape our reality and how the stories we inherited in childhood often become the scripts we unconsciously live out as adults. From the Reticular Activating System and the Observer Effect to the teachings of Bruce Lipton, Joe Dispenza, and the controversial Seth Material, this episode challenges listeners to rethink everything they believe about destiny, healing, and personal power.

Erica also shares her own journey through addiction, recovery, trauma, illness, and transformation, revealing how changing her identity and beliefs ultimately changed the trajectory of her life.

If you've ever wondered why the same problems keep showing up, why some people seem stuck in cycles of struggle, or whether it's truly possible to create a different future, this episode offers a powerful new perspective.

Because you are not cursed.

You are not broken.

And the story you're living today doesn't have to be the story you keep telling tomorrow. 

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Transcript

Erica 0:00

You know that one person, the one where you ask, how was your week? And you already brace yourself because something is always on fire. The car is broken down, the relationship is imploding, the checks are bouncing every single week. And they call it bad luck, maybe call it being cursed. We say some people just have it rough. But I don't think that's what's happening. I think some people are reading off a script they didn't even know they were handed, and today I'm telling you who wrote it and how to rip the pages out. Welcome to Burn It Down and Begin Again, because sometimes the only way out is through the fire. I'm Erica, and this is my story, told one chapter at a time, not to relive the pain, but to reclaim the power that was buried beneath it. I share it boldly because I know I'm not the only one. 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 women we were meant to be. How we can transform pain into purpose, rebuild life on our own terms, and show what is 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, good morning. It's Erica, and welcome to Burn It Down and Begin Again. It is a beautiful day, I can tell already in Las Vegas, Nevada. Henderson specifically is where I am. That's my little corner of the world. I'm sitting here with my faithful dog Cato. And it is a good week for me, guys. If you followed me, you know that I've been very sick. And man, I'm so sick of talking about being sick, but I I have been, and I can tell you that I have finally turned the corner this week. I know myself so well. It's interesting because once you get to a certain point of meditation, prayer, reflection, um, you know, from an observer standpoint, you really begin to know like the inner workings of yourself. And I definitely didn't have that in my former life or really any time in my life because I was always so busy uh running the business of life, right? It becomes very frantic. And then we forget to listen to that inner voice. And honestly, so many of the problems that we have, the negative feelings that we have, can be resolved. I mean, it's really simple and people make it more complicated by slowing down and taking the morning, especially to wake up and have that time with yourself. And you know, it's possible even with little kids, okay? So Elise, who you met last week, perfect example. She has little kids that get up, you know, Johnny on the spot, five o'clock in the morning, right? And they're little and they require a lot of attention. So what she does, she gets up at like 3:30, sometimes, you know, 4 a.m., and she takes time for herself where she plans her day, she goes over like what she needs to accomplish, has some time in her mind to kind of formulate what she wants her day to look like. And I do the same thing. And honestly, if you do that, no matter what your circumstances are, I don't care how busy you think you are, you can make the time. And morning is the most important time, also followed by the evening. And so in the morning, you know, I get up, I do my red light therapy, I go over in my day what that's gonna look like, what I want it to look like. And I always start with a prayer of gratitude. And you know, right before this podcast, I go into a little prayer where I, you know, what do I want to share with people listening? What do I want to give to them? And you know, this podcast is not making me any money, and you know, it maybe it will and maybe it won't. Who's to say? But that is not why I'm doing it. Why I'm doing it. My mission, if you will, is I want to give back. And uh, I was watching Graham Hancock and he's struggling with the. I don't know if you guys know who he is, but he's an archaeologist, but he's uh he's mainstream for sure, uh, in terms of just being public. But he, for years, he's done all the Netflix specials. He's kind of controversial though, because he takes a different view on what we've been taught. And the mainstream guys that are like the standard archaeologists, they all hate him and they talk a lot of smack about him. But I think he's an amazing and fascinating guy. And anyway, he was on uh Diary of the CEO, which is my favorite podcast. And he was talking about, you know, very realistically potentially being at the end of his life. He's got some serious stuff going on with his art, going in for a surgery, and he may not come out of the surgery. There's a good likelihood. And anyway, he talked about what's important. And he just, if you get a chance, listen to that. Or, you know, you don't have to watch it. It's video, but you can listen to it just as easily. That's what I did. He's so eloquent. And he talks about how really when we leave our lives, we should leave with as few regrets as possible and knowing that we did what we could to positively affect the people around us. And I hope that you guys always keep that as your basis of living rather than just being, it's very easy in this world when we're worried about bills and oh my God, my car's broken and this and that. You know, how can we go back to what's really important? And I think that for me, every day when I get up, uh, you know, I gotta live life, I gotta do my thing, I gotta pay my bills, but I want to give back and I want to tell people that are listening at the other end of this podcast. And I don't think I have a huge amount of viewers, but it's not bad. You know, I got some people that very consistently download from all over the world. And I want to say to you that you are not alone in your struggles. Every single person on this planet is going through something. Very few people have cotton candy lives. Even the people that look like they have cotton candy lives, they are going through it in some way. That is kind of the nature of human existence, right? We kind of just stumble through life from one happy moment to a sad moment. And, you know, those happy moments, they seem like they're few and far between, with a lot of upheaval and, you know, problem solving and issues in between. But truly, if we begin to change our traject trajectory and understand that we get to live this life. However, we were born into it, whatever circumstances we were born into, we're the masters of our faith and the captains of this ship that we call our life. And a big part of that is giving back to other people that are around you directly. That's how we can impact the world. So this podcast is going out to everybody who feels like maybe they don't have a voice, or maybe they're alone, or they don't have anybody to talk to, or they feel like they don't know how to start over again. They don't know how to even pick up from where they're at. It is possible. We all have good days, we all have bad days, but believe me when I tell you, your life can change, even if you think it's impossible. I stood on the edge of a cliff where literally I did not believe there was any coming, any way I could come back from where I was. And I did. And I didn't do it alone. There were the people that loved me that surrounded me, and there was the loving force of the universe that that was always there to give me a boost as long as I was heading in the right direction. I got my hard knocks too, but that's how we learn, right? So that is why this podcast exists. So, guys, we are going to tackle a subject today, which is bad luck. Is it real or is it something that's created? But before I do that, I'm going to do what I always do, which is my challenge of the week. So, my challenge of the week actually isn't really a challenge. I mean, it is, but it's really more of a like a challenge to myself. How far can I go? I am on the edge of a new part of my life. Being sick was hard. I was home for, I mean, I got sick April 20th. And guys, I'm just coming out of it. I'm 100% pretty much right now. I'm gonna say I'm 98. Okay. But I was very sick with, you know, respiratory stuff. And I never realized, because I'm very healthy, that it could hit that hard. But I'm looking at it now and I'm like, wow, that served a purpose. Because prior to this, I was definitely living at a more frantic pace. And rather than saying I get to, I was saying I have to. And there was resentments building up inside of me that I didn't quite know how to completely wash away. Uh, you know, feel like, fuck, I gotta go to work and fuck, I gotta do this, and ah, you know, it's just we all get that way, right? Where we're overwhelmed. And I think that now I am after that time off and having a lot of quiet time, a lot of time to reflect and go through different things. I really see that I get to choose whether I'm overwhelmed or not, and I get to pick the direction of my life from here forward. And I have chosen a little bit of a different direction. I'm not gonna get into it completely because I'm still in the process of manifesting, but I have a vision. I had an experience actually. Uh, I was introduced to some new ideas this last week, and I am going to take those ideas and I'm going to run with them. I've got my wonderful partnership with my friend Elise, and I am going to manifest something that is new and different. And you guys just watch me. So I'll share more when I can. But the challenge of this week is really just to take that mindset going forward when I get back into the grind, which I'm going to on Thursday, I'll be back at work and be able to carry this wonderful feeling of creation and newness back into the grind and balance all of that, which is a challenge, right? Okay, let's get into it. So I want to start with the person listening that already has it in their head right now. You know who you are, the one where bad things don't just happen to them. It just seems like they're drawn to them, like they've got a magnet stitched into their clothing. It's not just one thing, it seems like it's everything: relationships, money, health, random freak accidents that make people around them go, wow, again. And eventually the people around them start asking that question out loud, or at least to themselves, God, is this person cursed? Everybody knows somebody like that. Or maybe you feel like that person is you. And for years, the answer to why this happens was either bad luck or something supernatural, right? People would come down to that conclusion, something happening to you from the outside. But the more that I've lived and the more that I've actually studied the science behind how the brain and the body work, the more I believe we are truly living a script, one that we have written ourselves. I'm gonna prove that to you. Usually without even knowing we picked up that pen. And that's the thing, it's all subconscious. There's a concept in quantum physics called the observer effect. And at the subatomic level, particles do not behave the same way when they're being observed versus when they're not being watched at all. The act of observation changes the outcome. Now, mainstream physics is going to tell you that applies to particles, not just your Tuesday. Fair enough. But there is a real and serious conversation happening among physicists right now about whether consciousness itself is more than just something your brain produces as a byproduct, whether it's a field. And if it's a field, then what you expect, what you predict, what you brace yourself for might not just be a mental habit. It might be quietly participating, it is, by the way, in what actually shows up in your life. I firmly believe this. Now there's another piece of science, it's called the reticular activating system. We've talked about this before. It's a filter at the base of your brainstem, and its entire job is to take the millions of pieces of information hitting your senses every single second, and then it decides what's actually worth your attention. And it does this by matching incoming information against what you already believe. So your brain, it was never built to show you reality exactly as it is, it was built to show you confirmation of what you already expect. That makes sense. If you expect the floor to drop out from under you at any given time, your brain becomes extremely good at finding that floor. Now, I went down a rabbit hole last night and I want to bring it up today because I thought it was truly fascinating. Hey, love YouTube. I don't know why I subscribe to the movie channels. I suppose it's for my kids because I really don't watch them unless there's something very specific. I love YouTube because I can dive into everything. I can dive into psychology, to, you know, astrophysics, to geology, to concepts like this, metaphysical stuff. And this was fascinating. Now, I don't discount people that channel, okay? But I don't really pay a lot of attention to it. But I did come across this body of work called the Seth material. And something about this caught my attention and I started to listen to it. And by the time it was finished, I was really kind of blown away because it encompassed every single belief that I have, but somebody was saying it out loud. So all the things that I never really articulate, that I believe in myself, it was like it was speaking it to me, and I'm like, God, that's what I already believe. So let me tell you, this woman, her name was Jane Roberts. She was in New York living her life as a normal woman back in the 1960s. She had no background with anything. She wasn't studying metaphysics, she wasn't a medium, she wasn't looking for any of that stuff. She was just a, you know, part-time writer. She loved to do poetry. And one day she was sitting at her table doing what she always did, writing some poetry. And she said that by her own description, it felt like one minute she was there and the next minute she wasn't. And she left her own consciousness. And when she came back, and she when she left, she saw all these things and she kind of went to this other place and she had this knowledge. It wasn't really a voice, but something was like instilled in her. And when she came back, she said it was a very obvious, like landing back in her, almost like boom, landing back in her chair. And there was all of this writing that she had written, pages and pages and pages that she doesn't remember writing. Now, I know a lot of you are like, okay, Erica, but I have read many cases of things like this happening with people. And why not, you guys? Our mind is a radio, it's a transmitter, it picks up on stuff, and we also can transmit ourselves. We, I believe, and it's science is proving it, that we literally have just lost the ability to communicate with one another telepathically. We have lost so many things by the hardening of our pineal gland and by the nature of modern society. There's no silence anymore. Everything's filled with mechanical, I mean, the world is filled with 5G, you know, stuff going on. All of these signals that we can't see floating through the air, it has silenced what we were built to do. So I believe this woman had a real experience. And I want to push back on the people that automatically dismiss it as like woo-woo. I do not believe that. I truly believe if you look at ancient India and you look at Buddhists and people that really get into meditating, they will all tell you that this is true. So think about your mind like a radio, right? It doesn't create music, it tunes into a frequency that's already out there and translates it into something that you can hear. So, for whatever reason, this woman's mind tuned into a frequency that most of us never access. Channeling, under that name or a hundred other names, has been documented across human history forever. You could trace it back to Pythia at Delphi, the oracle that entire ancient civilizations traveled to consult, believed to speak in a trance state, delivering messages that shaped the decisions at the highest levels of government for centuries. This is ancient human traditions. You see it in biblical prophets receiving and delivering messages they described as coming through something else rather than from them, from God. It's the same thing. Okay, so Edgar Casey would enter a deep sleep state and deliver what he called readings on health and spiritual matters. A lot of people say he was demonic. He wasn't demonic. People just like to put a skew on things that they don't understand, and it's and it's unfair because I believe that this is something that we're all meant to do. Could we potentially tune into something dangerous? Sure. If our mind isn't in the right place. I mean, there's a lot of you know, warning, even in the Bible, it talks about that. We have to protect ourselves, and that's a whole nother episode. However, let's get back to this woman. So, regardless of your personal belief about where it comes from, I think we can just agree that this isn't some fringe idea, right? So Jane Roberts was not out to sell books. She genuinely had this experience and she changed the lives of a lot of people. So between 1963 and 1984, in a trance state, she was able to get herself into, this woman delivered 10 complete books and thousands of recorded sessions. Her husband sat there the entire time and transcribed every single word as it came through. So we're talking about thousands of hours of material. That's the background. So last night I sat watching this documentary that just covered a basic of what happened. And I was so profoundly affected to the point where I'm seriously considering doing an entire podcast episode on the material alone, because I believe what came through in the sessions was not only life-altering for a lot of people, I believe it might be the essence of truth once you strip away all the dogma and all the judgment, all the fear, all the control, all the manipulation that gets layered into us by every single system we grew up inside of. When you peel it all back, and if you look at it with fresh eyes, what is left is something stated that is so profound, I can't even really describe it to you. It's just amazing. I mean, it just covers everything. So I'm gonna give you just kind of an overview because I think the core of it is gonna land for anybody listening and it's gonna kind of get into, well, it's gonna get into what our topic is today. So the central idea is that your beliefs, your thoughts, and your emotions, they're not passive. Joe Dispenza, guys, they're active forces that shape what you experience in the physical world. So every single moment, whether you're aware of it or not, you are projecting your inner world outwardly. And that projection is what creates the events, the encounters, even the physical conditions of your own body. If you believe that life is working against you, you're gonna keep running right into situations like that. Prove you're right, because you are a magnet. Your mind is a magnet. I don't know how many times I can tell you guys what you believe is going to show up over and over again. If you expect good things to come easily, you're gonna start noticing that doors are already open. And the material for these Seth stuff is very clear. It isn't just a cute way of saying, oh, think positive. It's actually claiming that literally your belief is the architecture of reality itself. And science is discovering this. If you guys go down a rabbit hole, literally quantum science, quantum mechanics, quantum physics, all aspects of science that are have to do with the quantum aspect, are pointing at that. All you got to do is start looking for it on YouTube. Proof that they're believing, like, yes, the what was it, Schrdinger's cat, right? Is it dead or is it alive? I've explained this concept before. It all depends on whether you look at it. The particle entanglement that we've talked about, where one particle affects another particle, separated by a whole universe. They can actually see that and they can understand that your thoughts are literally the building machine of everything around you. And there's a bigger piece of this too, which is the idea that existence itself functions like a training ground. And I believe that a stage where different forms of consciousness come to learn how to work with energy, how to take a thought or an emotion and watch it become something physical and tangible. Think about that, before being able to access anything bigger or more expansive beyond this life. So if indeed, which I believe we are, I know we are, beings that are only using this body as a vehicle to experience life, say it's a school, okay, where we come in and we learn how can this thought, this pattern of living, this pattern of thinking, create the life that I'm experiencing. We learn how to manipulate energy in order to have an experience before we can go on to the next place, right? We are co-creators. We are not passengers sitting in the backseat of our own lives waiting to see what happens next. I'm so passionate about this, you guys. I wish I could just reach out to all of you guys suffering. You are the creator of your experience. So I think that's kind of why the Seth materials took off the way they did, honestly, because when you look it up on YouTube, it's fascinating. When you understand what came through from this Ceth, you know, whether you believe in that kind of stuff or not, it's universally true. There's nothing evil about it, there's nothing weird. It hits on some level that just clicks. I think that inner part of you, it's basically the foundation underneath the entire law of attraction movement that came after it. And I do believe that it was part of that creation, but the law of attraction has always existed. And if you read the secret, which I've also recommended, ancient civilizations used the law of attractions, the Egyptians, the Greeks, everybody. They knew the secret that what you think you become. Look at some of the greatest people of all time. Plato, Marcus Aurelius, great writer. They all knew this. So you are the one building your life piece by piece, expectation by expectation. So now I'm gonna bring it all the way out of the clouds because I don't want to leave you up there. I do want to challenge you, though, to listen to that. I want to talk about Joe Dispenza and Bruce Lipton, and they're my favorites. I know I keep going back to them. But basically, Joe Dispenza has a background in neuroscience science, but he was a chiropractor. He had an amazing experience where he was able to actually change his life. He had an accident. They said he'd never walk again. Guess what? He walked. Lipton spent his career as a cell biologist studying epigenetics, which is the science of how your environment and your beliefs change the way your genes express themselves without ever changing the DNA underneath. Go back and listen to that one again. So both of them have this incredible belief that they share with us in these books how, with their scientific background and understanding and knowledge, how this works. And they spell it out for you piece by piece, how you can change your life. He talked at length, Dispenza, about how people spend their entire lives bracing for that next bad thing, constantly preparing for whatever's about to go wrong. And from a pure survival standpoint, that made complete sense for most. Of humans' history. If you expected the worst and prepared for it, you were more likely to survive through, you know, a period of time that was difficult or your whole life, and that's going to go on in your genes. Genes actually store memories. The problem is that wiring doesn't know the difference between an actual saber-toothed tiger and a tense email that you get from your boss. So you're 40, 50, 60 years old and you're still flinching at good news because it's some part, there's this ancient part of you in your DNA where your nervous system really never got the memo that the threat is gone. And this is a very real thing, guys. The other piece that both of them come back to again and again is that whether you're manifesting a positive life or a negative one, it ultimately comes down to choice, even when it doesn't feel like a choice in the moment. The habits you repeat emotionally and behaviorally are what cascade into what eventually shows up around you. And they tie this directly to self-worth. You cannot pull abundance towards yourself if some part of you genuinely believes that you're not allowed to have it. And that is something that many people really have to face. A huge piece of the actual work, according to both of them, is recognizing when you've settled into the role of victim and making the conscious decision to stop renewing the lease on that role. And I will tell you that I had many years of therapy and I highly recommend it's hard to find a good therapist, right? The insurance system, they kind of just throw you somebody. So if you can find a great therapist, that's awesome. But if not, pick up some books on psychology, on different things that basically explain to you why you work the way that you work, why you think the way that you think, how your childhood basically set you up with certain thinking patterns. And honestly, if you're in AA, which I'll talk about a little bit later, that's a big part of their process, which again mirrored psychology almost exactly, which is we go back and we relive the worst moments in our life. We basically review our whole life and we begin to understand where a lot of the belief systems that we have come from. That's very important. You have to know where your belief systems came from. So I want to be careful because there is a version of everything that I just said that turns into blaming people for their own trauma. I am not saying that. I never will because I made so many mistakes and literally had these difficult experiences. And a lot of it was because of the belief system. I've talked about that a lot in former episodes, that I was given as a child, my coping mechanisms that I was given as a child, and then how I attracted a mate and built a life with that, those belief systems in place. Now I have a new belief system, understanding myself, and my life is a direct reflection of that, you guys. I gotta tell you, I mean this sincerely. I only have good things happen to me. I literally, like, even being sick, you know, I literally, it was frustrating. I go through the human part of the emotions of like, fuck, you know, I can't afford this, and oh my God, like, okay. But then when I finally, and it didn't take me that long, but I just, you know, made peace with it, and I thought, okay, this is gonna teach me something. And I opened myself up to extra meditation, extra time, extra naps, extra loving myself and and and nurturing myself, doing the things that I wasn't doing in my usual grind. I saw very clearly a different path ahead of me, which I'm gonna be following. There's a reason for every single thing. And I truly have nothing but good things happen to me all the time. I meet the most wonderful people. I get the most unexpected gifts of love and friendship and just people being nice to me for no reason wherever I go. I'm just going in looking like crap into the local 7-Eleven. And this guy that looks like he stepped out of Thug magazine tips his hat and opens the door for me. Why does this happen to me? Because I expect it, you guys. I expect that I'm gonna meet fabulous people, that I'm gonna have a great, literally, it is so ingrained in me. And I gotta impress that upon you. If you wake up every day and you just fucking know that only good things are gonna happen to you, watch what happens to your life. But it's not a switch that you flip. You gotta get there. So back into it. There is a difference between what was done to you and what you keep doing with it after the fact. That distinction really is the entire episode in one sentence. Because here's what this actually looks like when you watch it play out in real life. I know people personally, and I bet every single person listening to this, it's either you or you know somebody. You grew up in homes where love came with conditions attached. I had that, where safety wasn't something that you could count on. It was something you had to earn over and over and could lose at any moment without warning. And that was my childhood, and that was my marriage, and that was my lesson. I learned to create my own safety. What happens in a situation like this is that the nervous system organizes itself entirely around expecting the bad thing to happen. That's how we get programmed. That is not a character flaw, you guys, and that is not a personality trait. That is survival wiring, built into childhood, doing exactly what it was built to do. And that wiring doesn't just sit quietly in your head. It changes your hormones. It changes how you read completely neutral situations and changes the split-second decisions you make before you've even had the time to think them through. So from the outside, it looks like bad luck on repeat forever. But from the inside, it's just a body that never once learned what safe actually feels like, constantly scanning for evidence that it has a right to stay on guard, right? Even when something genuinely good shows up, that nervous system sometimes just can't let it land because it feels unfamiliar. That good feeling just feels foreign, and your body reads it as dangerous because you feel like you can't trust it. So I want to land this in hope because that's the whole point of this show. Here's what I actually believe. After all this digging, and guys, man, I have done so much digging, so much soul searching, so much just ripping through books and everything I could find and watching this play out in my life and the life of people that I love deeply. The pattern can change. It's not fast and it's not magic, and it is not simply positive thinking. You can't just positive affirmation yourself out of the wiring that took years to build, but it does take recognition of the pattern. And that means every single time you go down that and you like think something, oh, but there's that pattern again. There it is. You know, I love the idea of a bracelet, and I actually wear one on my left wrist all the time. And it is the evil eye. I'm really into the evil eye. That's a whole nother thing, but I love it. And this is just a very simple red string with an evil eye in the middle of it. And I wear it until it falls off, and then I put another one on. I never take it off, actually. And it's two-purpose, right? Twofold. I wear it as not protection. I don't believe that a piece of jewelry can protect me, obviously, but it is a reminder of my own ability to protect myself against incoming missiles, meaning people that have bad intentions, people that are just negative, blood-sucking, energetic vampires, anything bad, people that think bad thoughts about me, it bounces off me. So every single time I look at this bracelet, I know that these bad things are going to bounce off. And I also believe that it is a reminder for every single time that I go down that path of thinking maybe something bad. And I don't really do it much anymore. It's still there a little bit, but it was a reminder for me, like I am in control, I write the script. So that bracelet was a constant reminder that I could look at that just reminded me everything that I learned. This takes real inner work, guys. Therapy, somatic work, meditation, whatever path speaks to you, I recommend it all. Journaling. Go in and edit the script from the root, but first you gotta understand the root and where it was actually written. But guys, it can be edited, and that is the entire point of everything that we're talking about. So if you remember nothing else from today, remember that. The observer effects suggest that what you expect actually participates in what shows up in your life. The set material said almost the exact same thing decades before quantum physics caught up to it. I mean, it was it is quantum physics. That's what's amazing about it. It's literally quantum physics, like verbatim, long before we even called it quantum physics. And it ended up laying the foundation for an entire movement built around that one idea. This is the shift of consciousness now, guys. This is the cutting-edge shift of consciousness. You've got people that are the old world thinking, and you've got people that are beginning to really understand this concept. Make no mistake, there are two parts of society. One is shifting into an elevated mental and spiritual platform, and the other is just stuck in the dogma of the past. So I want you to hear me. You are not cursed, you are not broken beyond repair. You are learning. You are a soul, whether you recognize it or not, that is learning. You might just be reading off a script that somebody else handed you a long time ago. And the good news about any script is that you can rip out the page and write a new one. I want to actually answer the question right now because I can already hear some of you asking it, okay, this is a great idea, but how would I actually change my life one thought at a time? Where would I even begin? So I'm going to give you an example. I have a friend who reached out to me recently and they are still struggling on some level with alcohol. And I shared with you, of course, my journey that I'm a former problem drinker, but why I just don't do program anymore. And it has to do with the things that we put our tell ourselves on repeat, right? I don't want to hear, I'm an alcoholic. These are the bad things that happened to me. Program is great for me in the beginning. I don't want to poo-poo program. I think if it works for you, you should stay there. But I basically just outgrew it. I use that because I took what I needed. That's what we're supposed to do, right? And I moved on to another place. And anyway, this person that I spoke with recently, they're still struggling on some level. And their situation is the perfect example of everything we just covered. Somewhere inside of this person, I believe, they label themselves as an alcoholic. And that label is very deeply ingrained. It's part of their identity. And it also is attached to their wounded inner child, which I believe has never fully healed. Not knowing this, I don't know all, I have not this person's therapist, but from the little that I can glean, right? But drinking is also a huge part of their social life. And a lot of people really are afraid of what it would look like to go out and say, no, I know that I drank and had fun with you guys and had all these experiences and we did wild and crazy things and danced on tables, but I'm not going to drink anymore. That kind of a thing. There's a stigma that people are attached to that. And you know what I have found, and this is myself personally, I'll just throw that out there. I don't give a fuck. I walk out there, my friends are drinking, people buy me drinks that they don't know me. And I'm like, ah, no, I don't drink. Why not? Oh, I'm a former problem drinker. I've been sober for years. Oh my God, I'm sorry. I didn't know. I'm like, hey, don't be sorry. It's fine. You know, I can have a perfectly good time without it. And that's it. I don't need any more explanation. But at any rate, back to this person. I don't know the exact reason. Maybe they're using it as a coping mechanism. But what happens is when we start drinking again, it begins eroding our thoughts, the clarity and the ability to control it. And we fall back right into that helpless state, that hopeless place of feeling like a victim of their own alcoholism, their own life, and there's no control. Now I want to be really clear. Alcoholism is real, it kills people. I am not minimizing that for one second. I personally have been able to not drink for years without working a program per se, but I did work the program for a couple of years and I just moved past it. So I just want to say very, very clearly, program did work for me. It was fantastic. I learned so much. The things that I learned in program saved my life. Okay. I just got to a place where I didn't need it anymore. And maybe some people look at that and they pass judgment on that. That's okay. This is my journey, not yours. But I want to make it very clear if you are struggling with drinking, the best place to start is AA. Okay, I'm going to say that straight up. But what I did after that was extensive psychological work. And when I say extensive, I mean deep, sustained, uncomfortable work. But more than that, I finally understood on a level past just saying the words how it actually works. And you can't just say, I'm the author of my life. You have to fundamentally bone deep understand that you are. So here's where I landed. I know I can never drink again. I have a reaction to it physically, mentally, spiritually, and it's different from how it affects other people. But I no longer hold the identity of being an alcoholic the way that I once did. It is not my identity. There's something that is identifying about that, right? I'm an alcoholic. I don't, I don't do that anymore. I'm not running that loop in my head. I am an alcoholic, I mean, meaning that I can't drink, but I don't identify that anymore because that loop for me builds an identity, and identities are sticky. They tend to prove themselves right, right? Just like we're talking about. What you tell yourself proves itself right. So maybe calling yourself an alcoholic, buying into that identity, keeps looping you back to the same problem. I simply don't do that anymore. I just say, hey, I dismiss alcohol entirely. It's simply not a part of my life. I wouldn't drink cyanide and I'm not going to drink alcohol. And rather than in reinforcing that old identity, I replaced it with who I actually see myself now through everything that I've learned. And I just keep coming back to those two names, which is Joe Dispenza and Bruce Lipton. So if you are struggling with anything right now, let me give you some real tools. Please go get Biology of Belief and Joe Dispenza's Breaking the Habit of Being Yourself. Get it on audiobook if you're not a reader. Listen to it over and over. Fall asleep with it, playing. It will go into your psyche. That's what I did. I actually played these books on audiobook, on repeat when I was sleeping. If you actually sit with those concepts on a deep level, not a surface level, a deep level, those two books alone are enough to literally change your reality if you really, really dig into them. Meditate on them, make a vision board, write down who you believe yourself to be, journal, have actual conversations with yourself about the life you're envisioning. And this is what I recommend. And they talk about it in a lot of different books. Write down, not the way your life is now, write down like your dream life. Like, I am so happy and grateful now that, and then just write down your dream life, the salary, your weight, your relationships, whatever it looks like. Stuff that you might be thinking when you write it down. This will never happen to me, but it's okay, write it down anyway. And then you're gonna put it on your mirror or someplace you can read it every single day, and you're gonna read it in the morning and you're gonna read it in the evening in a meditative state. I like to always do it after a period of gratitude. I go into my gratitude prayer several times a day, but in the morning specifically. And then I go through my, I have a vision board now. My vision, and I'm redoing it by the way, right now with some new stuff, but my vision board of what I envision my life to be. If you really do this, you will be shocked at how it shows up. I have my old journals where I wrote these impossible lists of things that I never I thought, how can this ever happen? But shit, the book says to write it down, I'm gonna do it. Guys, I'm living that life right now. I kid you not. So back to the alcoholism thing. I think that's why so many people struggle to stay sober long term. They're not changing the actual interface that is running underneath everything. That's just my personal belief. For me, it's not about me, but and it's not a judgment on anybody else's path. But so many people are walking around repeating, I'm an alcoholic, here are all the horrible things I did when I drank. I'm so ashamed. I need to be forgiven for this. I need to hang around with other people that are doing the same thing. So I understand the intention behind that, but for me, the idea is remembering who you were so you never go back there. I get that logic, but what worked for me was removing that story completely. Instead of the loop, I simply say, I can't drink. I have a reaction to it. Whatever the reason is, it hits me differently, then it hits other people, and I used it as a coping mechanism, and it took me to places that I did not want to be. So I reject it completely in every form and I'm recreating a life without it. Period. I identify with other things and I replace it with other things, and I wrote an entire new strip script for myself. So again, I want to say clearly, a program worked for me for a while and it taught me real things, and I am not dismissing it. I just personally evolved uh beyond it for myself, and I evolved into what I was understanding, the my complete understanding now, that I am the master of my own destiny and I am the creator of the script of my life, my experience on this planet. So the only question that actually matters becomes what kind of experience do I want to have? And that's literally what I ask myself every single day. So if you're struggling with anything, whether it's feeling like, you know, bad things keep happening to me, or you're fighting an addiction, or your life just keeps taking turns that you never asked for, I'm asking you, and not lightly, please go read those two books. And I mean, really read them, ready to change your life on a deep level, ready to sit down and write the actual script for the life that you want. There is somebody that I love very deeply that experiences what I'm talking about. And this person, I believe, has a very deeply ingrained belief that love was conditional, that they're not loved for who they are. And they're struggling right now with identity, and they seem to have one bad thing happen to them after another, to where even people around them are saying, What's going on? And certainly they are as well. And I have to say, I truly believe it is because they are living in the script of lack of no belief in themselves, not understanding the power that they have to change their own life if they would simply do it. They are lost in a sea of uncertainty and of fear and of expecting that other shoe to draw. And that's sadly what shows up for them again and again because that is what they are attracting. So I know you guys know people like that, or maybe that's you. I promise you, with everything in me, I am living proof your life can change if you do the work. Here's where you start pick up Biology of Belief by Bruce Lipton and Breaking the Habit of Being Yourself by Joe Dispenza. Get a journal, write down exactly how you want your life to look in detail. Complete fantasy. It's like what you want. I mean, no holds bar. Don't be right. Oh, I can't write that because it's too unrealistic. It's cool. Just do it. No editing yourself, no deciding what's realistic. Write it as if it's already true. That's the important part. You know, I'm so happy and grateful that my life is, and then boom, put it down. All the dreams you have, all the bank account dreams you have, all the travel dreams you have, the relationship dreams you have, all those things. Write it in present tense, like it's already happening. Not someday, not eventually, but now. And what you wrote, read it every single morning after your gratitude prayer out loud. Spelling. Words are spells. Do not forget that. When you speak something out loud into existence, it comes. I cannot tell you that enough. What you speak out loud, I'm Erica and I'm alcoholic, or I'm Erica, I am healed, I am whole, I live a life that is beyond my wildest dreams. And I do. What would you rather have? What is your identity going to be? You decide. I wrote my own script, guys. It was pages long. And there are so many scripts that I've written, and I say it again. I am literally, I go back and I with just like I saved them all. It is with absolute awe that I look back and see that I'm living the life now that I once dreamed of, that I wrote, I remember the minute I wrote it, I never dreamed it would be possible. So the real question is this do you want to keep living the way you've been living, or do you want to live a life that you actually control where you're the one writing the narrative? Because if the answer is yes, it's gonna take constant vigilance. I'm not saying it's gonna be easy, but it can be done. I promise you guys, if you just take these steps and you just do these things faithfully, watch your life change. Thank you guys so much for being here. That's it for this week. And if today's episode resonated with you, please don't stay in silence. Share it with somebody who might need to hear it. If you get a chance on whatever platform you're on, please give me a star rating and maybe leave a comment. It helps other people, uh, the algorithm, you know, so other people can find this podcast if they need it. And don't forget, if you're walking through your own fire right now, 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 am Erica, and I will see you next week on the next chapter.