Empower Your Mind, Empower Your Life: A Look At Self-Manifested Reality (SMR) With Dr. Laura Graye

Wow. That's such a beautiful response. And I'm like, as my, one of my kids would say, I'm marinating in that right at this moment. I'm like, so beautiful to love everything. I think it's a Ram Dass meditation, or there's something with one of our children when they were young and we listened to this where his voice, Ram Dass has got this great Beautiful, deep.

Yes.

Like, I think in my next career, my next pivot, I'm gonna be a late night DJ. Yeah.

And I want— you've got the voice for it.

I wanna have that Ram Dass voice to do it. Yeah. You know, really deep and beautiful, luxurious. And in that meditation, I just remember it being love everything. And that's what I got, what came up for me when I was listening to you say that. Like, that it is entirely possible as Some people might be kind of squinting their eyes right now, or whatever they're doing as they're watching, listening to this, etc., that it's entirely possible. You could try it out. Look, you don't have to take my word for it. In fact, I would say don't take my word for it or Laura's, but try it out for yourself. See what it's like even for a few seconds to just love everything. Love the inanimate things like, you know, pencil on your desk to a human being that you may know, not know, love, like, not like, agree with, not agree with. Right. But what could it be like for just a moment? And to just love everything.

I've got a blow dryer and it has one of those extender things on the top. It's to straighten your hair. And every morning when I turn the blow dryer on, that extender thing pops off and it makes this like really loud clanging. And of course, I love the blow dryer and I love the little extender, but I then extended it because every morning I wasn't loving that moment. That was an irritation. And then I just thought, wait, I can just completely love this irritation. So it's even extending to love every moment of your life. Even the— not that my extender getting blown off is the most difficult moment in my life, but those agitations, you can really find love. Maybe they're just playing and having fun. Yeah. Turn it into something that you can love.

I really hope you're enjoying this episode of the Change Proof Podcast. If you've not yet gone out and gotten your own copy of Change Proof, it's not too late. You can get your copy right now by going to changeproof.com and not only getting the book and all the bonuses there, but getting access to our proprietary resilience assessment tool. It'll just take you 3 minutes to do, and it's something that will really help you to utilize the book even more effectively to create practices And rituals and habits that will increase your mental, emotional, physical, and even spiritual resilience for the long term. Again, go to changeproof.com to get your copy today. Yeah. There's no question we were meant to talk. I'm going— I gotta definitely congratulate the members of my team that made sure that you got on this show because That's

good.

I mean, I love having business talks. We're gonna talk about business today for sure. Right? But at the root of everything, business just being one thing, we're, we're human beings to start with. If we're not having a terribly great human experience of our lives, then I don't know what any other form of success would mean, frankly.

Exactly.

Yeah.

Yeah. And it is. It is that place and might as well go deep quickly. That's just sort of how I ride. So I remember living my life very much from a place of just a deep, inborn, innate sense of loving experiences in it. And my life wasn't easy. And then my 23-month-old, my first son, when he was 23 months old, he was taken by DSS. We were down in Florida. And he spiral fractured his femur bone from his hip all the way down to his knee. And it was his 5th break. And he was only 23 months. And we were living up in Boston and we had had— he was failure to thrive and the pediatrician was on it, but we could not figure out what was happening. And so when we made our way to the emergency room, when his femur spiral fractured, they took down 23-month-old, 5th break, failure to thrive. I mean, that is just a recipe for— we've got a potential neglect and abuse case. And they took him away and no amount of anything, no amount of money or this or that could pull us out of a system that we had gotten suddenly pulled into for— I think that system is a wonderful system when it's needed. And I'm glad they checked on us. But the amount of terror— and that day, oh, it was 36 hours, and then we got him back. But in that time, I was able to have an experience, a life experience, where I could not love that moment. I couldn't find my faith or an understanding of where any of that would be potentially a good lesson or anything. And it spun me. But what it ended up doing is it is so pivotal to how I understand that not everyone comes in with a faith or how to have a sense of faith or something deeper than your humanness, that that's what people really, really need in these moments and times to build that resilience.

Yeah. I gave an interview this morning. I thought I'd said this to you right before we hit record for a paper on the East Coast, a business periodical that was wanting to talk about resiliency, given this most recent event where cargo ship from Singapore runs into bridge, bridge collapses, 6 people perish. And of course, now the ripple effect of that is that there are folks in Baltimore and their shipping industry.

Yeah.

All moving. The ripple goes from that immediate event all the way to— and you can just extend so far. For example, to Detroit, where they're waiting on parts for cars, and those parts from cars are not coming in now.

It says, like, $80 billion of economic impact.

Yeah. And there are those smart people that can calculate numbers like that and then throw them out. I don't know to what degree it's truly accurate, but people, just for scope purposes, like, well, how big is that building? Like, it's— 5,000 meters high. I mean, whatever. It's like, you know, we need a number, even if that number isn't entirely accurate, to just sort of grab the scope of it. But it's a massive— right, it's a massive sort of wave to keep to the water there, right? It's a huge wave that ripples out, and people are in that state of shock on some level that, that it's occurred, that was so sudden, you know, that was unthinkable. Is it— was it predictable, not predictable? Like, it's all that kind of stuff going on. But to come to that from a place of being in tune in— I wanna get to your work in the world. I wanna use this as a way to do that, to be in harmony, to be grounded, to be coming from guidance that is deep within us that you might even call truth.

Yeah.

You know, that resides in us so that we can actually move forward in moments when We're seized by how little is in our control and how much can really be confronting and threatening to life, limb, and pursuit of money. Right. All that kinda stuff. I would love to use this as a way to go into what it is that you do in the world, because while we started in this place, we— I thought— think we must have started here. Yeah. Because it forms a foundation for anything else that we're gonna be able to talk about. And certainly, any problems that we wanna try to be creative about solving, we need to start from a place, a foundation. So, Laura, would you tell our listeners and our viewers, like, what do you do?

What do I do exactly? Well, and I love that you said grounded because that is something that I lead with, is that this is not an airy fairy kind of being. I am deeply grounded in my body and in the sort of the vibrational essence of who I am, but in a very grounded way. So I'll start there. I am a medical intuitive and a metaphysician. So a metaphysician is someone who looks at clients or patients coming in and looking at the meta full consciousness spectrum of how our lives are impacted. So how does our consciousness and our mental state and our emotional state affect our anatomy and physiology? Where is there a downward causation? So what is happening in our unconscious, our subconscious? What is happening in our dreams? What's happening that is creating difficulties in our reality? How are we creating our reality? And that is including our physical, our physicality in our bodies. So that's in a nutshell. And I teach a course on medical intuition. It's really more a course. It has sort of morphed into a course while I had designed it for doctors and nurses. It really has morphed into— it's usually about one-third doctors and nurses, and then there's about a third of holistic practitioners, and then a third of people who are really just wanting to tune into their intuition and recognizing that That is the most powerful part of our being, is being able to plug into that truth, especially when times are difficult.

Yes. So I'm gonna— I self-servingly, because you brought this up earlier, but I wrote a book some years ago called Pivot, and it's a pivot story of many, many people, including my own pivot out of being an attorney for a couple of dozen years and then moving into a different very different space, the one I'm in these days and have been for many years now. And I wanna get at the origin story of your pivot, if there's a pivot. But regardless, I wanna understand how it is that you, or when it is that you discovered that these were talents that you had, that this was a desire that you had to serve in this particular way. Because you strike me as, you know, you're a very beautiful woman. You have a great energy. Like, you're very positive. Thank you. And so— and intelligent. I'm going, you could do anything in life. You could have been a doctor. I'm sure you could be a lawyer or accountant. Anything you'd like to do, I'm sure you could have done. So why you dialed in or were drawn to this, I wanna really understand that. I'm sure people are curious too.

Yeah. So it's interesting because I do think a lot of people have those pivot moments where they maybe move through life thinking they're going in the right direction, and then something happens and it's like, whoa, I've gotta pivot. And I think for me there was a nonstop hum underneath saying that I am not necessarily in the right direction. Meaning, how do I explain this? I went through my life, and if I felt like I was not in the right direction, I would just say, this is me experiencing this. So if I was in a relationship that I knew wasn't right for me, I could sit comfortably and say, but this is just me experiencing being in a not good relationship. And I didn't have the, like, I've got to get out of this relationship, I've got to get moving forward. I was just in having this observer, having this experience of a human experience. So I've always had a pretty solid observer outside of my human experience. And I think That's probably the piece that makes my story a little bit different, although I think a lot of people have that observer.

And from what age did you become aware that that was even a thing?

Yeah, I was probably about 8 years old. And what ended up happening was I was born with a very rare condition, which we didn't know about, which this was perfect that I told the story about my son because the end of that story was my son was diagnosed soon after that femur break. with something called osteogenesis imperfecta, or brittle bone disease. I then was diagnosed at 33 years old with osteogenesis imperfecta, which is brittle bone disease. And when tested, it showed that I had 67% less collagen than the average 33-year-old, or I'm 55 now, and it would be I have 67% less collagen than the average 55-year-old. And so that speaks directly to my density. So I am 67% less dense than the average person. I've got little skinny bones and there's not a lot to me, and my bones have holes in them, pores in them. And so what ended up my experience, which I didn't understand until I was 33 and got that diagnosis and Things. So there would be my pivot moment was, okay, now I understand why there has been a different experience for me that I haven't been able to articulate, where I could be moving through something and almost be not there and living in so much fear of a human fear of not having enough body and bone, not being able to actually ground in. So I guess my pivot moment was at 33 because it all made sense what I had been seeing and feeling. And up until that point, it hadn't made sense, but it was there and I was aware of it. Things like being able to walk into a room and be able to pick out the person. You could have 25 people there and I would immediately be able to pick out whose liver was most deteriorated. Just by tapping in and feeling and having it— me feel it in my own body. So I'd sort of— it's hard to describe, but I'd fill the space in my body with someone else's energy, and then I could feel that energy and then move that energy out and fill it in and sort of run and scan. But this was nothing that I had any support or family members who understood what was going on, and it was a silent experience for me. And then I think it was about 8 years old when I mentioned something to my mom, and it was there that we— and I can't really even remember what the conversation was, and I should ask her how it was that I figured out that something different was going on for me.

Wow. And anybody in your family in the medical field, or it's not really—

Not really. We're more lawyers. And yeah, that's more what I Now there are.

And from Boston, is that right? You originally from Boston area?

Grew up in New York. Grew up in Saratoga, New York, upstate New York, and went to school in Texas and then came back to Boston.

Right. Wow. So as I was listening to you describing that, I thought to myself, it just— I don't know why it makes sense. I'm sure people are sitting there going, as odd a sort of what we just heard wouldn't be what we would have expected to hear kind of thing. And I heard it for the first time just like everybody else did.

Yeah.

But, yeah, that totally just makes sense.

Yeah.

And when I say that, so this is interesting for me. I'm going, I only can say it makes sense, not because my head tells me it makes sense. It's not my brain that can add up everything you just said and go, oh, that, that's an equation. And I was a lawyer for a lot of years. So the, the if then equals whatever, like, there's no logic to it. But my, some other part of me

Yes.

Which I'm gonna ask you to describe for people what that is. Yeah. It's saying to me, this makes sense. And you could try to convince me other, like, somebody else could say to me whatever they wanna say to me. And I go, now don't call BS on any of that because I'm telling you what I just heard makes sense.

Right. Yes. And what you're talking about, if we split it into, is intuition. And so intuition is this Ever-present sense. It is so much deeper and beyond the brain. And we all know, I mean, we've all heard the word intuition, but if you want to understand your intuition, we can say that there is the intuitive mind, the intuitive heart, the intuitive body, and the intuitive soul. Mm-hmm. And we are all running, if you can think of pathways as intuition just moving through you. And Kim Chesney, Who wrote the book Radical Intuition. I have to just— she has done such an amazing job of bringing sort of an etheric, really hard thing to pinpoint into some sort of categorization. And she and I subscribe to that same mind, body, heart, soul intuition.

And we— So not male, female, like we've mostly heard women's intuition, right? That's— I grew up hearing that a lot. So We're not talking about gender. We're talking about mind, body, heart, soul.

Yeah. And I've got to tell you, I think that it is a misnomer that it's women's intuition. I think that there are men, businessmen who are actually accessing their intuitive mind and thinking it's just thought. I think some of our incredible investments, people who are making incredible investments, and even you as a lawyer, you probably access your intuition as far as this is what I just need to say this. I just need This is where they're gonna go, and you've had a precognitive sense of something. So I think what happens is men tend to be more intuitive mind pathways or intuitive bodies. I love— I don't know if you're on social media, but there are some videos where it's a compilation of videos of dads grabbing their kids right before they, like, fall or, like, get hit by a lawnmower or something. And there is no doubt, like, that's incredible physical intuition. And the wife isn't moving as quickly, and she has a different type of intuitive, either intuitive soul or intuitive heart. So if we were going to separate them, I do think this is a big, like, broad stroke. Maybe men generally have intuitive bodies and minds. And women have intuitive hearts and souls, that the pathways are just different. But we actually have all 4 of them. Each of us have them.

Right. Just more highly or less highly developed in a holistic way.

Exactly.

Exactly. But everybody must have some aspect of—

Of all 4.

Each of them. Right.

Exactly. Exactly. And we're just— we are, by society, drawn to hone one or the other. So if you are drawn to hone your physical body, along with it will come physical intuition. And if you're honed to— if you're drawn to hone your mind, along with it will become an intuitive mind. And if your heart and soul are where you are drawn, then those will be your intuitive places.

Yeah. Now, when you said that you're a metaphysician, among other things, where my mind went was that I've been greatly influenced by metaphysics in my life, my adult life. And primarily through a teacher that somebody that who I never met, but I've read and read and read. In fact, I start my day every day with part of a reading from this particular person who was a metaphysician. And I wanna see if there's a distinction between this type. So the gentleman's name is Emmet Fox, and people may or may not have heard of him, but he's written some pretty remarkable things. And one of those things I did at the end of the year for people that heard the New Year's podcast that I did. was around this concept of a mental diet and the 7-day mental diet. That was an Emmet Fox principle. So metaphysics is really, in that regard, almost, if not an actual spiritual practice for me.

Yeah.

So when you say you're a metaphysician, is it that kind of metaphysics that people are wondering, or is it different? And how would you distinguish them?

I would say it is. It is that. And I think it is a bridging. So where a metaphysicist comes in, or sometimes it's softer said as a humanitarian, but a metaphysicist is coming in at a time when someone has essentially forgotten that they are anything but human. And that is an incredibly terrifying and terrorizing experience. And so Emmet Fox or myself, and I'm not putting myself at Emmet Fox level, but that experience of Someone who can help reconnect you or re— and this isn't, it's not necessarily about knowing God, although there are many metaphysicians, that's what we're talking about. It is about knowing a deeper sense of yourself and your higher self, whatever you wanna call that. I don't think because we have to split the human experience into people say that there's a spiritual experience and there's a human experience. That's not really true. Yeah. So it's hard to speak to something that is, it's more about consciousness. I think that's the best way to describe it is that consciousness is everywhere flowing within us. And based on typically trauma or our culture, we can lose our ability to tap into the consciousness flowing right through us.

Yeah.

So I'll move away from any kind of sort of spiritual, religious, and just There are vibrations of consciousness at all times. You and I are talking. I can hold this up. Consciousness, dark matter, dark energy is flowing right through us. It goes through all of our cells. And in those moments, and that's where intuition comes in, is as you're sitting here and we were talking and you had that, that just feels right. In that moment, something in your body was able to shift. From reading what's going on in your cells to the consciousness flowing through you. And it grabbed it, brought it into your cells, brought it up to your brain, and created an intuitive moment that said, that just feels right.

Yes. And consciousness is another way to describe awareness. Right?

Yes. Yeah.

Yeah. So for people that are maybe either not so familiar with this language and haven't been studying this kinda thing, and it's new, and it was certainly new to me. 12 or so years ago when it hit me, or people that may even be listening to this and going, they don't wanna lean into something religious, let's say.

Right.

Or even spiritual, which is, you know, even there's a maybe for it. Right?

Exactly.

We're not going down that road. That's not the road.

Not at all.

We're on either. And regardless of whether you believe in God, don't believe in God, call that God or don't call that God, but that's not what we're talking about. But the consciousness piece is a big deal. Because, for example, in whatever area of your life, whether it's you and I having this conversation and my trying to gauge whether I'm leaning into what you're saying, agreeing with it, getting it, whatever it might be, there's an element of an awareness that's happening for me.

Right.

And then there's also something that's going on behind the awareness or under the awareness that is deeper. And this does come— and I love the fact that Emmet Fox will draw upon the Bible or scripture for some of the principles because I want to understand that book. I don't want to understand it as a person who's a religious scholar or somebody who's deep in religion because I'm not. But I want to understand it nonetheless because it is one of the most powerful things that the world has ever known.

Right.

There's almost nothing that's been more powerful than that book, interestingly enough. Or what comes out of it and what people interpret from it. So there's a part of it where he quotes, and I don't get hung up on the gender here, but this is just, I think, what it is verbatim. As a man thinketh in his heart, so is he. And you could replace that with woman. Of course, it's what he describes as the meaning of that is that it's not literally as you think in your heart. But the heart being a symbol for your subconscious.

Yes.

So from a psychological standpoint, your heart is not literally your physical heart.

Right.

It's thinking from your heart, or as you think in your heart, it's your subconscious, meaning it's that deeper understanding, including what emerges, I suppose, in your sleep as regards that. Because to consciously assent to something, to say yes to something consciously, We say yes to things all the time that we don't really believe in. And our thoughts are constantly flowing like this stream that never ends. And good thoughts, crazy thoughts, smart thoughts, stupid thoughts, they're constantly, like, literally passing before us all the time. How could that possibly be us unless we're like walking lunatics?

Right.

But what we really are, to use your word, our essence, Is what's in our heart is in our subconscious as to who we are.

Yes.

That makes sense to you? Yeah.

100%. Right. And it's expressing that through our— it's to me, there's oneness and separateness. And what is the most beautiful thing is here you are separate. We can look at you and see that you're separate and you have a black shirt on and black framed glasses and your skin is this color, and all of those things that have us seeing a somewhat reality of your separateness. And what is the most powerful is when you flow oneness consciousness through that separateness and express it, because that gives it its unique quality. You are bringing that unique quality in, into life and manifest.

So I wanna move into— I said we would talk about business today. So it doesn't seem like maybe we are, but we are. Yeah. I promise we are tuning into this, this concept of what our awareness is, what our consciousness is, and what our subconscious or unconscious is, I think is really important, especially in light of what you said about intuition. Because How do you solve complex problems? Like, we've got a lot of world problems today, and, and we had a lot when I was a kid. So I don't know that much— that context hasn't changed much. They're just different. For those that maybe think this is the worst time in history, in 1969, the year I think that you were born, it was the worst time in history for people that were going through Vietnam and through civil rights movement. Yeah. I was born in '65. And take any time in history and it's kind of been like that in modern history that people have felt that existential threat. World War II, Korea, World War I. I mean, terrible, terrible stuff. So, and yet we've evolved through all of it, been resilient through all of it, which I wanna talk about a little later. But to solve complex problems, we have to tune in. I believe as a business person, we have to tune into imagination. We have to tune into our ability to innovate in the face of what is Like a chaos of sorts.

Mhmm.

To do that, your conscious mind, that monkey mind where the thoughts are just rapid fire all the time, that's not really a great way to do it and not really a great, like, an effective way. So when you work with people in, in business or in medical space, you're also looking for answers that aren't readily apparent to the conscious mind, body, heart, soul. Am I got that right?

Yes. Absolutely. Absolutely. And I hope this jump brings us back. I think it will. One of the things that I work on is something called the self-manifested reality, SMR. And it is a theory around that our triggers, that whatever our triggers are, are actually that we recruit events, circumstances, and people to reflect for us that which we do to ourselves unconsciously.

I want you to repeat that because a lot of people who are in some form of pain repetitively, like, people, they can't trust people. They're betrayed. They lose money. People cheat them or whatever. They often will assign the blame to the perpetrator throughout their lives. Now, this is deep psych— I'm gonna say for sure, guys, listen. Yeah. This is deep psychology. There's not beginner stuff here. So, frankly, if— and I don't normally do this, but I don't know if, if you might be triggered by some of what we're about to talk about. It might be if you're driving a car, maybe pull over. find a parking, hit pause, come back to this. I just wanna say that because this is not like the shallow end of the pool. Okay? Over to you, Laura.

Yeah. Awesome. Thank you. Yeah. That's a good disclaimer. So the self-manifested reality is that the theory that we recruit events, circumstances, and people to reflect for us that which we do to ourselves unconsciously. So let me start with Why would we ever do that? What is going on? So our experience is that we are here. If I can look at Adam, you came into this world and you have a mission, and your mission is soul-based to have an expression of yourself out in the world. So we're just going to say you are product Adam, and you are— let's just call it your CE soul. So we'll have it as a business. You are the business of Adam. And you are there at 1, 2, 3, 4 years old, and your first consumers are your parents and maybe an older sibling. And those consumers are giving you feedback, and you've got a little R&D research and development team inside yourself that is looking for the feedback of how to shape yourself. And what ends up happening is Over time, you begin to reallocate what you were naturally here to express. It's just something that happens. It happens that you flew in that your mom's upset when you are doing something that is too loud or too expressive or whatever. And you see that your kindergarten teacher really appreciates when you listen and you are people pleasing. And so we internally begin to reallocate. And if we have a creative department and an assertive department and an aggressive department and a lazy department, whatever it is, we end up taking energy from the things that we are not getting recognized positively for. And we move that energy into the areas that we deem in this feedback That are better for us, and we lop off a lot of the parts to ourselves. So we may not be identified as creative, or I'll give you an example from me. Assertive as a young woman was really not— I didn't get a lot of points for that. What I got was being attuned, being emotionally really tuned into what was going on, to be there to help people, to assist those things. So my departments inside of me became that I took a whole bunch of allocated energy and I allocated it to my attuning emotional intelligence, really that part of me, and my assertive— any kind of me first that I was given to, which I needed to bring the ideas that I had, these incredibly sort of a little ahead of pioneering ideas if I didn't have my assertiveness, I wouldn't have been able to do that, which was what was happening in the first part of my life, is that assertiveness was then put in a closet, and all of a sudden I am just emotionally attuning, and I'm attuning to extremely assertive people. So now I'm recruiting extremely assertive, aggressive people because I have aggressively hidden my own assertion. So what you find are you can look at your triggers, whether someone is— has betrayed you, then your trigger is that you are somewhere betraying yourself. If you are abandoned, you are abandoning yourself. If you are getting abused, or if someone is too aggressive, there is a part of you that is abusing and being aggressive. If you are being criticized and someone is critical of you, then there is a part of you that is criticizing and criticizing yourself. And somewhere at a very young age, the CE soul who was connected to our mission turns into what I call the CE ego. And that CE ego is this ego that begins to produce a product that is so far from our mission statement and so beginning that monkey mind that we move away from our path. And most of us find ourselves pretty unhappy. And the triggers in our life are actually what will bring us back to our natural essence, reintegrate it, if that makes sense.

So interpreting this, you're saying that people need to explore more deeply those things which at some point people are probably Keeping it the farthest distance they consciously can.

What? You nailed it. Exactly. So people either don't wanna be triggered because it's irritating, or they think that how they're triggered, they begin to judge themselves. Like, why am I so triggered? I shouldn't be triggered by them. I should accept them. I should accept them. Well, that's after you recognize what triggers you about them. Because whatever triggers you about them, Is what triggers you internally.

Yes. And there's a statement, and this is a rough statement. I wanna get your take on it. Victims are perpetrators. I've heard that said.

Yes.

Again, that's why I gave my own little warning at the start of this, because to hear that, to— I'm so glad you created the context you did for me to be able to say that.

Yes.

Because that's a rough statement. Victims.

So I, I will follow that statement up with 2 even stronger. The victim archetype is the strongest archetype, and until we actually are able to take the victim out of our unconscious, we will be acting and our aggression will come from our victim state. SMR literally heals and yanks and pulls the victim out of the unconscious, and we are a victim to ourselves. And that doesn't mean I am not in any way— this goes so much deeper. You can look, and I can— I'll speak, let's say, for being a woman. So I can say, well, wait a second, though. Women are really victimized. Okay, that is a collective victimization that women share in our unconscious. That's ours until we pull that out of our unconscious. Yeah. That is what we are going to be recruiting towards us. Am I saying that every— the minorities and the people who are victimized, that may have been put in your unconscious many, many generations before you were born. I'm not saying that you put it there, but it is ours to pull it out.

So it's an intergenerational trauma of sorts.

Yes.

And we get back to a point of inflection, which again, this is not easy to deal with, Of personal responsibility.

Yes.

And this— look, we're bordering on some stuff that's super controversial in our world right now. I don't typically get very political on this show, and I don't mind, but I don't actively try to go there.

Right.

But I feel like this is a really important conversation. And also, we're not gonna give any directives here. There's not— I'm— at least I'm not going to say this is how you, quote unquote, should do it or this is not a prescription for your change. This is just a conversation around ideas that maybe the collective you, and I'll include myself, that we haven't fully— not just that we haven't fully considered, maybe not even aware of, considered and then assimilated, or to use your word, integrated, which I love. I think that's really fundamentally— Yeah. Because it's where you see repetitive, where there's abuse or there's traumatization that occurs In a repetitive way, it doesn't make sense. You don't understand it, how that could possibly happen. But what you're sharing explains a lot of that. And it also is—it's you're not in that moment that you become aware that this is a possibility or that this is something you could consider, you could noodle on, you could discard if you feel like it's bullshit. You could do whatever you want with it. But when you do that, you are now. Responsible for yourself, taking responsibility for your life. You own it.

Yes.

It's nobody else's story. It's nobody else's journey. It's nobody else's problem to solve or opportunity to experience. I mean, it's grand, breathtaking, miraculous opportunity on the other side of not understanding why you've been the way you've been or why Others have been the way they've been to you or towards you.

100%. Because what you and I are both saying is it is— I think so, correct me, I don't want to say that this is what you said, but what I am saying is it's kind of irrelevant how this all ends up in our unconscious. It's irrelevant in the sense of, yes, you could have situations in which you are abused or you have been betrayed, and these are cellularly vibrationally built into your body, either generationally, and you come in with that, and then it is for you. The victim mentality creates fear, and it creates distrust, and it creates a really difficult reality. And so it's in this moment when you go, oh my gosh, I can actually pull that out and create a reality in which I am no longer victimized, that I'm no longer in that triggered state.

Yep.

And that is fully, solely every human's experience and opportunity, regardless of where they are.

Yes, it literally is liberation.

Yes, that's exactly. And it is liberating from yourself. And that's the piece, is the liberation is from yourself. And however you managed, whatever your unconscious got wired. I mean, these are just neural wiring. I work really big on, on recognizing that moment by moment as children, we are just wiring, wiring, wiring, trying to learn everything. And those wires get really— they wire and fire together. And unwiring those things. And one of the biggest pieces is disempowerment. And how we get wired to a disempowered state. And then it is unwiring the disempowerment and the— how you unwire your disempowerment is through figuring out what your triggers are. The triggers show you. It's like—

I wanna ask you a really tough question as you're reaching back for the book.

Yeah. This isn't a book, but this is— remember when we were little, these were plaque-disclosing tablets. They were the little purple things you chew and it shows where plaque is on your teeth.

Yeah.

And triggers are the plaque-disclosing tablets of our psyche. It shows you where you have a stuck neural wiring that needs to be unwired to bring you to your empowerment.

That isn't in the big picture about someone or something else. It's not about something structural. It's not about some other person or some other entity, even though it might be in that moment. The big picture. That's the small picture. In the big picture, it's about you and how you're interpreting all of that. Is that— or processing it, I suppose.

You are. Yes. It's both how you're interpreting it and also what you attracted. That is just like these little disclosing tablets. You've got a knot in here. Let's just say that you keep being betrayed. So there is a knot in your unconscious That you somewhere are betraying yourself. And that betrayal is sending a honing signal, a homing signal, and it is bringing someone who is going to be one of your greatest lessons as far as if you pay attention, they're going to betray you because they vibrationally are resonant. That's what it is.

This is why it's tough, really tough to hear sometimes. And that's why Earlier, I said just pull over or push pause or whatever if you're not ready to hear this, because the degree to which you have to take ownership of your life is different than maybe it's been in the past where, again, there's just a lot of people who play the convenient part in the play that is your life of being the one that stabs you in the back or whatever the freaking situation is. Right?

Yes.

So, and that's, again, that's a tough pill to swallow. especially depending on where you are in your journey. Look, I'm a 50-some-year-old person. I've had a minute to deal with some stuff. And if you're at a different stage of life, not just chronologically, but emotionally—

Consciously.

Yeah, exactly. You know, it might be really difficult for you to swallow that pill, and you don't have to. So I'm not telling you you've got to. That's not what Laura is saying. But it really is important that we just discuss it, especially in a world where it seems like And this is where it borders on the political. And I want to get your thoughts on this, where it seems like there's at least— I don't want to put in a judgment or in a form of a statement. There's at least some conversation around, are people getting softer? Are people becoming more easily triggered? Are we only creating more opportunities for people to find that they are the victims of someone else, as opposed to looking for structural solutions to the challenges of their lives? That all reside within them. Any thoughts on that, Laura?

Yeah. So I think that we're almost like opening the oven on an unbaked cake. So it looks pretty gooey and like, not sure that I wanna eat that. And I think what we have is we have generations who, and older generations who were hardened and didn't pay attention to their triggers. They just barreled through it, and they didn't look at what was triggering them, and they didn't unwire things. They just resolved and barreled through. And that's the way you did it. That's how we did it in our time.

And that's not what we're advocating, just to be clear.

Right. Oh, yeah. Yeah. I'm just sort of now— and then we have the pendulum is swinging, and we have this younger generation that is paying attention. To their triggers. And I think that they— because I work with so many of them, while there may be this sense of screaming about their triggers, which looks soft, they are addressing them for the most part. They are starting to have consciousness around that this is my issue. This is my issue, and I have to deal with it. And I know it doesn't look like that. That's why I use the metaphor. No. I'm

glad you used that particular metaphor, especially in light of the concept of hard and soft. And so that was beautiful. That was perfect. I think it's like, in our work, having, you know, we're a resilience research firm, and we also deploy solutions in organizations that want to meet their people where they are. Right?

Right.

I'll open this door up for just a second to say that we don't live in silos. As a prior generation, it was, hey, you don't bring your problems to the office.

Right.

Clear. Right? As soon as you walk through that door, whatever is going on in your life, it's over. And now you're mine. You're ours for the next 8 to 10 hours or whatever it is. People bring their trauma with them everywhere. They bring it to work. They bring it wherever they go. They bring it to the— on the subway and every other place that they are, in the car, etcetera. What we see in our research is that people are more— and there's no debate about this— anxiety is at levels that have never been tracked before. People are more anxious and Many, many are depressed, and suicidal ideation is higher. People are burned out or near that place more and more frequently. So that being the case, the facts, so to speak, how does what you're saying potentially impact the fact that what we see around us are a lot of people in that kind of pain?

Yeah, thank you. That's a great— it's such a— again, we're in the middle of the cake, and we're making big shifts because What we really could look at is back in the day, while we didn't bring our problems to work, they were right there, and we were operating from a place where those problems were creating decisions and choices that were maybe ego-based or something that they were there, but they were just hidden and covered. So I think first is anxiety. The way I look at anxiety is a detachment or disconnection from self. So our body, the autonomic nervous system, it creates anxiety to let the body know. And we have got hundreds, billions of neurons, and they're supposed to be connected to our heart and our lungs and everything. We're supposed to be embodied beings and grounded. And those neurons send information up to our head and say, we're good. We're all connected. We've got attachment. We're connected and we're grounded. What's happening is we are so visual now, the social media. I don't even wanna get into all of those things, but everything is so externalized. Mm-hmm. That there is a rare time when someone has their neurons actually connected and reading and feeding their autonomic nervous system from their own body. Our neurons amazingly can read everything our neurons can diagnose in ourselves. As a medical intuitive, I know this to be true. What I can diagnose in my own body, my own heart rate, my own pulse, all of those things, I can also. Intuit if my neurons are picking up and reading somebody else's. So if we are constantly out and our neurons are out reading, reading, reading, and threat assessing, our autonomic nervous system goes, wait a second. We've got one heart rate coming in. We've got another heart rate coming in. We've got a whole bunch of visual stuff coming in. We are going to be sending out an alert of anxiety. Anxiety is just the autonomic nervous system saying, Something is off here, and we're not grounded in our body.

Right. So sympathetic nervous system is saying there's a threat, and our bodies are just responding as as evolutionary.

Exactly.

Right. We've been trained. This is how we deal with threats.

Exactly. Exactly. We're just not reading our own. We're not reading ourselves. We're not embodied and grounded in our body. So I can say that that's where anxiety is, and then depression. As we were talking about, it's a lack of expression of self. It is an inability to express self. So that comes from a different energetic in the sense of if we have been repressed and we are not able to express ourselves, and that happens over and over and over and over and over again, you get into a state of depression. And it's only then when we get to anxiety or depression, only when we've already there, then someone can say, No, no, no, no, no. There's a chemical issue here. And what I'm saying is that chemical issue happens after these energetic issues.

So there's this clog, if you will.

Yes.

And things are not flowing. And then when things get toxic as a result of that backup, then there's the need for—

But if someone's saying, no, I am I'm depressed. It's showing up in my numbers. Those numbers, our brain creates neurotransmitters, which creates that chemistry, and that chemistry then gets tested as depressed. We've gotta go back here to the unconscious and say, what created that?

Go further upstream. Right? Right. So often we're treating symptoms. We're treating things later on. You know what? We're gonna have a couple of minutes left, but I can't help myself. I gotta— I wanna ask you this. I feel like many people, because we're thinking about it, we're talking about, especially again in a business context, we use the term emotional intelligence or emotional acumen, I think is being used as well. Now, I would say that having kids that are of an age range from millennial to Gen Z, these are more emotionally intelligent beings. They are more conscious beings than I was growing up, than my cop friends, peers. Certainly than my parents and then my grandparents. As you said, people were really quite a bit different years ago, and not in the best way, not from an evolutionary standpoint. That's the goal. Go back to the good old days. So they weren't good old days anyway. They were just days. Right?

Right.

So everything is moving forward. Everything is, from my standpoint, purely net positive. That's why when you got on this and you and I saw each other immediately, What I got was simpatico. Like, this is another net positive person, not because we're Pollyanna, but because that's just what evolution teaches us. So kids today, and I work with leaders who are trying to understand younger generations or younger demographic, and they have attitudes about them and they have judgments about them. And I'm like, no, this is like the advanced whatever the iPhone is up to. They're that latest, like, version.

They're amazing.

And the kids being born today, like, little babies, they're that next version, etcetera. But I'm curious that in and among those people that are more emotionally intelligent, have higher emotional acumen, that are also experiencing this higher level of anxiety, how do you reconcile those 2 things if there's even an answer to that that you could—

Yeah. Yeah. So I look at it as one and the same in the sense of we had midlife crises between 37 and 43, let's say. And they are having midlife crises earlier because they are able to handle the emotional disruption that is happening. And so they are being brought into and evolving much more quickly. So I have kids the same age, and they are brilliantly emotionally attuned, but they were not ripping Like we were to keep it together through high school and college and in your 20s. There was a lot more gripping that was happening for us. There was so much more shame and just a lack of compassion for having emotional experiences where these sort of softer, which I don't think they're softer at all. I think they are so incredibly powerful.

Yes.

But Appearance of soft is that they are able to openly and outwardly express, and when they do, it doesn't get repressed. So then they are not being. There's going to be at our age, there's going to be less, or in their thirties, there will be less betrayal, less abandonment, less rejection, less of that because they will have dealt with those things.

Yeah, that's the good news, especially and truly for those. That may be listening that are dealing with these things, and we all deal with it. So just to be clear, right? This is not a— there's nothing— I hate it when it feels like it's a judgment of sorts or that you're judging yourself because you have the feelings that you're having. But ultimately, that's the problem you wanna— it's weird to say it, but greater self-awareness is the problem you wanna have. We wanna become more sensitive, not less. Yes.

Exactly.

We don't wanna go back to being obtuse or being callous because somehow or another, people equate that with resiliency. Because when we think about resiliency, this may be the last question here, Laura, but I wanna get your thoughts on this. Think about resiliency, the ability to have greater perception, self-perception to begin with, and then perception of others that's possible because you're tuned into yourself. I don't really think you could possibly Tune into anyone else if you're not first tuned into yourself. But that will produce resilience, mental, emotional, physical, spiritual resiliency. Thoughts on that as our final question?

My true thought was, well, he nailed that. There's nothing else to say. I literally, I, that was my thought was, well, he just nailed it. I think I can't honestly add to anything. What you just said was so beautiful and powerful. You can't be attuned unless you know yourself. And to know yourself, you must know yourself mentally, emotionally, physically, spiritually. And from that, you build a resiliency of— I literally just repeated what you said, and it was beautiful.

Laura, I just have so enjoyed this conversation. And honestly, I wanna do a part 2 because I feel like there's this— and maybe as part of the part 2, for listeners out there, if you've got questions that you wanna address or challenge anything that you heard today, just whatever comes up for you, we really love it if you go to AdamMarkel.com/podcast. Leave your questions or comments there, or of course on the website, you can email our team at team@adammarkel.com as well. And then for part 2, if Laura's willing, maybe we'll take some of these questions and challenges.

I love that.

And have at it with that. Yeah?

Yeah. That would be so much fun.

This is not easy. None of this is easy. And it's not— don't wanna be trite about it. Like, you've been studying this, you've been working. This has been your area of focus and expertise for A few decades, right? Yeah.

Yes.

Good. Good. Me too. Yeah. So love that. So love that. And Laura, just so much enjoy. I've so enjoyed this conversation that I can only imagine how other people have also experienced.

I've had a wonderful time. Thank you so much. It's just been wonderful talking with you.

All right, Laura. So we closed out the podcast, and then we were having a conversation, which all right. This will be— we'll leave stuff, we'll leave things for part 2. Yeah. Questions, challenges, all that good stuff. But there was one thing that just came up that we just feel like we need to discuss. So I'm gonna tee it up super fast. Hopefully. I did a talk, a TED Talk some years ago, which the through line of it was this concept of loving your life no matter what. And so I wake up in the morning, I put my feet on the floor, I say 4 words. I say, I love my life, which for me is I'm grateful. I'm grateful for my life, even if it's imperfect, no matter what the day is gonna hold. This is this brilliant opportunity ahead of me. And frankly, there are people when I'm starting in that moment, taking a breath, even there are people taking their last breath in that exact moment. So it's sacred too. It's a holy situation. But when I did that TED Talk and it was published, you know, got a lot of views, but I also got a lot of like flack. And some of the stuff that people commented on was, how dare you? F you. Like, literally, if you knew what my life was like, you would never have the audacity to say to me, love my life no matter what. So, Laura, we were talking about in the context of the victim.

Yes.

That one thing we didn't do, we didn't go there at that moment, was to talk about what else victims tend to do When they haven't integrated what you were discussing before.

Yes. Yes. Because if you think about just energy, let's just talk on an energetic level. So I am here and I have 100 pounds of energy to move out and express through me. And then when you're victimized, that gets disempowered and that energy gets literally plugged into your body. It's just now moving inside you at that disempowered state. So what often can happen with victims is unconsciously, sometimes consciously, they use victimization to be able to retaliate, and their retaliation is justified. So then they could take all of this pent-up power that they have learned they aren't able to express naturally. And now they need to have a reason to express it. The only way I can come into my power is when I am fighting against disempowerment, and that gives them the justification to then attack and have their power moving out. It's actually amazingly, when we look at it, it's the human mind trying to heal the physical body, because when we hold back our energy, that creates disease in our body. So even the victim, on an unconscious level, their mind is finding a way, any way, to have power to move and express the energy so it doesn't sit and create cancer and stagnation in the body. And it is a low consciousness, but it is a consciousness to get their power out, but it's justified. And it is, like I said, low consciousness. It has a lower level of consciousness.

So on some level, and, and we've agreed that we're just doing this little 10-minute addendum here. Yeah. Right. Because this could, of course, could go in lots of places. It sounds like it's positive on one level because if a person who is doing that, let's say they consider themselves like a justice warrior, as many people have coined themselves that these days, and in doing so, they're expressing so that it's not stuck and they are empowered to do that.

Yes.

It helps them to not get cancer or not become disabled by what Depressed. That's inside them.

Depressed and anxious.

Which sounds like it's positive on some level, but it's not entirely positive, perhaps, to the people that they're focused their energy toward, perhaps.

Well, right. And I would say, I think positive is maybe too strong of a word. It is the body's way.

It's natural, or—

It's natural. Yes. It is the body's way and the mind's way of, okay, so the body says, we've got a lot of energy. that the mind up there has told you you cannot express, and you have set up a reality in which you are getting victimized, which says you cannot express, you cannot express. Now we have got to wire another part of the brain that allows that expression. What will that do? Oh, well, look at this. We have a victim mentality that allows justified— I mean, look at how we just in car accidents or whatever, you get remediation. When your car gets hit, there is this retribution. You are victimized. And so

there's a recovery. The personal injury lawyers out there.

Exactly. Exactly. And so what ends up happening is the mind wires itself as a way we need to express energy. How can we express energy? We have to find justification because we were never allowed to express our energy naturally.

Right.

So then it comes— let's go back to the beginning of that conversation where I was saying I was extremely assertive as a child. Then I learned my own wiring. I wired myself. My mom didn't come in and stick something in and wire. Society didn't. But I watched and watched and watched and realized this assertion is really unattractive. That's what I decided. And I repressed my assertion. And then I walked out, and my reality was one in which I then met assertive, aggressive people who were drawn to pull that out in me. And I either had the choice where I could— once they were aggressive to me, I could have wired a justified victim and attacked them and been justified as a victim. Yes. Or I could look at why is it that I keep attracting this? What is it in my psyche that keeps attracting this aggressive behavior? And then I learned to love it. Wow. That's war. There's the plaque. This is this experience where, and we were talking about this, if we're challenged, if you and I, you put this podcast out and they say, oh my gosh, what? Screw the two of you. You don't know what our lives are. That is then for me to say, ah, I still have some plaque in there. Because if I'm creating a reality where more aggressive people versus, wow, you changed my life when I heard this, then that is my work to do. I'm not going to be like, oh, I got another aggressive person.

Because that just creates this vicious cycle that keeps repeating itself over and over. And we wonder why the same things happen. I'm gonna end with the story that matches to what you said. And I'm only saying this, sharing this because of what you just shared.

Okay.

Like, so I, I was bullied as a child, not to any extreme, extreme level, but I was bullied enough that it, it impacted me and my self-esteem and all that kinda thing. And then I gave that TED Talk about how in my life at the time as a lawyer, I— but the origin story was the beach and this scene that happened on Jones Beach, where I learned how to be on guard. I learned literally how to be a lifeguard as a result of somebody—

Wow.

Of us missing a save there, and then ultimately having to be impeccable in that environment. And then becoming a lawyer and protecting people's rights. And I was a— did a lot of employment discrimination cases for plaintiffs in those cases and, and things of that sort. I became like the one that would defend the underdog and always going up against the bully. But I was living this total on-guard life, always on guard, always looking at what suspiciously and fearfully about those things. And I was attracting that more of that all the time. Yes. That aggression, as you said, living that aggressive life that ultimately put me in the hospital. And then part of my pivot and the transition from that state of being was at some point to learn to be able to love that. Love myself and even love the part of me that was so weak that I judged as weak and vulnerable and ineffectual. And the kid that would get picked on, I didn't love that kid because I turned that into, of course, they're picking on me because I suck.

Right.

Like, that's not consciously, but at that subconscious level. So when you do learn work on, and it's a lifelong work, honestly, to love all aspects of yourself, then you can integrate those things, to use your word earlier.

Yeah.

And then you don't have to perpetuate that cycle where you're, in my case, having to always live on guard, be in fear, and attract those reasons to be on guard, which is a very different way of living. It's a different experience of living for me. And so I'm really happy, Laura, that you shared your situation and that we got to actually discuss this. Public as well.

And I wanna say, I wanna just talk about that for 2 seconds. It's so beautiful because what you also just described, unconsciously, you chose your profession, your first profession to heal that there wasn't a self-advocate. And so we see a lot of times what we are seeing in this when we see these massive warriors, these advocates, We can look back at their childhood and see where they weren't necessarily able to advocate for themselves or they were bullied. And so they come out and they have incredible hearts for advocating for the person, the underdog, as you did. And then what's beautiful is you watch and something healed in you and you suddenly were that piece. You were no longer, I suck. I don't need to advocate for someone else because I have found my self-advocate and my self-advocate is going to take me out of law and put me in something that is really more for me. So that was a huge healing.

Right. Because the through line in my life is not advocacy in that regard. It's counseling. It's teaching. That's why the work that we do at our company WorkWell with organizations is all about teaching. It's all about helping people to have these kind of conversations so that they can develop resilience from within.

Self-advocacy.

Yes, exactly.

That's the piece. The difference is advocacy still takes the power away from versus teaching self-advocacy.

Wow. All right. Well, I'm so happy we did the addendum.

It was awesome. So awesome.

Way cool, everybody. We love you, and we hope you're having an amazing rest of your day, whatever you're up to. Thank you. Well, that was absolutely one of my favorite episodes, my favorite interviews. I mean, literally. It would be on the greatest hits. I mean, we were into almost 400 episodes of this show going back 5, 6 years at this point. But I absolutely love that conversation because we went to some places that frankly is, they're just not easy places to go because we're talking about, we're talking about how we're wired. We're talking about the way that our life stories are interpreted by us, not by others, but by how we interpret them and what we do with that, what we do with that story that we've been telling ourselves for many years, including The victim story, the stories in our lives where we've been hurt, where we've been betrayed, where things have gone wrong, and in trying to make sense of those things and then use them effectively as a tool for our growth, but also for a positive impact in the world. That's the special sauce. I mean, that's the juice in life is to be able to transmute those things and transcend them. And today, Dr. Laura Gray and I, we went there. We talked about that stuff, and we We talked about how victims can be perpetrators and what that very— that crucial and confronting statement actually looks like and means. I think this is a very provocative conversation. I think it's one that you may want to re-listen to, that you may want to share with other people. I know I'm certainly going to share this with our community as well, because I think it's vitally important that we talk about it. And we did. Talk about anxiety and the origins of it and how we, in many ways, I think that midlife crisis that used to happen around age 40 or between age 40 and 50 was kinda typical, is happening younger and younger, earlier and earlier, and that, that 20-somethings and 30-somethings are now experiencing the signs of that midlife anxiety, etcetera. I know when I was going through that earlier in my life on the path I was in a position where I had a glimpse at the edge and then chose a midlife calling instead of that midlife crisis. And then in that chronicled in the book Pivot that I wrote some years ago, but we really got to cover some things from a very different perspective. And I think this is a very valuable conversation and one that, again, I think is worth listening to, relistening to, and sharing with others as well. Also, if you'd like to take a bit of a snapshot of your own mental, emotional, physical, and even spiritual resilience right now in response to what you just heard. I think it's not a bad idea to do that if you've not taken that assessment. It's a tool that we offer. It's absolutely free to you. No strings attached. You can go to rankmyresilience.com and get that assessment for yourself or for others on your team for free. It's 3 minutes. That's the beauty of this assessment. 16 questions, 3 minutes. Nothing to it. If you've got questions for Dr. Gray, questions for myself, we would love to create a part 2 to this particular conversation where we draw upon your comments and your questions. So you can go to adammarkel.com/podcast to leave a comment or question there, or you can email us at team@adammarkel.com, and we will take those questions, get them all queued up for part 2 of This conversation with Dr. Laura Gray. But again, thank you so much as always for being a part of this community. If you love this episode, we'd love it if you would do us the great favor of taking a moment and reviewing it, providing it with that five-star review if that feels good to you or whatever makes sense on the platform that you consume this podcast. That's how the algorithm gets to know what you like. It gets to know what what might be valuable to other people as well, and that. has the collateral benefit of helping us to get this community, to grow this community and get this message, these kinds of conversations more widely dispersed. So thank you very, very much for your support as always. And wherever you are at this moment, I just wanna say thank you so much for being a part of the community and have a blessed and beautiful day. Ciao for now.

Thanks for listening. We hope you now have even more tools and greater insights to build resilience And become change-proof. Remember to leave a review on Apple Podcasts and you may be featured in an upcoming episode. For more resilience tips and strategies, including support for building change-proof teams, visit adammarkel.com. To get your own free resilience assessment, go to rankmyresilience.com.