In this latest episode, I reveal why the words to Roxette’s “Listen to Your Heart” isn’t just feel-good advice—it’s scientifically backed wisdom your body’s been trying to tell you all along.
I break down the biology behind intuition, explain why your mind keeps you stuck in familiar (but soul-crushing) territory, and share simple practices to tune into the expansion vs. contraction signals your body is constantly sending you.
Whether you’re standing at a crossroads, feeling disconnected from your current path, or exhausted from overthinking every decision, this episode offers a refreshing alternative: trusting the intelligence you already carry within.
Learn to distinguish between fear-based thinking and heart wisdom, and discover why the most courageous pivots don’t come from logic—they come from truth.
Perfect for anyone ready to stop gaslighting their own inner knowing and start making decisions that actually feel aligned.
Covered In This Episode
In this episode, you’ll discover:
Your heart holds more wisdom than your mind.
Clarity doesn’t come from overthinking—it comes from stillness.
The body knows the truth before the brain does.
Heart coherence can unlock your intuition.
Expansion feels peaceful, even when it’s scary.
Fear often disguises itself as logic.
You can build confidence without certainty.
Slowing down helps you hear what matters.
You already have the answers—you just need to listen.
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Chapters
00:00 Introduction and Course Reminder 01:07 Welcome to The Courageous Pivot Podcast 03:31 Recap of Previous Episodes 05:46 Tuning into Your Heart 07:40 The Science Behind Heart Coherence 13:28 Practical Exercises for Heart Coherence 20:18 Final Thoughts and Reflection
Links and Resources
A Perfect Pairing With This Episode
Rise & Shine: A Guided Approach to Heart-Led Living and Leadership
If you’ve been feeling the nudge to lead your life from a more heart-led place—but aren’t quite sure where to start—Rise and Shinewas made with you in mind. I created this course as a companion to the Courageous Pivot journey, to offer a gentle and practical way to reconnect with your inner knowing.
It’s not about fixing anything—it’s about remembering what you already know, building trust in your own inner guidance, and learning how to recognize and respond to that quiet wisdom that lives in all of us. With simple tools, reflective practices, and heart-centered meditations (including 5-, 10-, and 15-minute options), Rise and Shine is here to help you move through your days with greater clarity, intention, and yes—joy.
You can dive in at your own pace—with audio options for listening while folding laundry, walking in the park, or baking a fresh batch of cookies. The course is designed to be as practical as it is profound, bridging the gap between self-awareness and inspired action.
If you use social media, you know about the loved and loathed “algorithm.”
As small business owners, we are constantly trying to figure out how to beat it, and then, of course, it changes.
As consumers of content, we know that more of the same—plus more of the same—will keep delivering us more of the same, landing us in an echo chamber. We become less able to see or hear what we’re not regularly seeing or hearing, allowing us to ignore anything that falls out of sync with our belief set. It’s a beautiful way to entrap yourself (and mostly your ego) in your own confirmation bias. Why be uncomfortable, challenged to learn or have empathy for another’s perspective when you can always just feel right?
Enjoy on the go with an audio recording of the post in its entirety. Full written post below.
Let’s get technical for a moment: An algorithm is a step-by-step set of instructions or rules designed to perform a specific task or solve a problem.
When it comes to social media—and also our life—we get to choose the energy of our own algorithm. We have the capacity to influence it, guiding how we meander through our day and navigate life’s little and big challenges.
It can be easy to fall into the doom and gloom of what surrounds us, chasing the ongoing dopamine fix or adrenaline surge. If you’re not mindful about this, you may find yourself feeding a low-vibrational algorithm for your life. As humans, we are wired to spiral down. We are conditioned to keep our eyes peeled for threats. That survival instinct is why we still exist.
How Do We Break Free from a Living Doom Scroll?
How do we free ourselves from a low-energy life algorithm?
Recently, I was home alone for a whole week. Just me. This wasn’t in the plans, but it’s how it evolved. Suddenly, for the first time in as long as I could remember, I had no plans and no schedule. I became finely attuned to how my time was being spent. And without anyone else’s energy to bounce mine off of, I also became acutely aware of how I was feeling.
In short, I began to mindfully curate my life frequency—the personal algorithm of what I was willing to be served.
Is this easy to do?
No. Especially when you have a job, a partner, a pet, a kid (or three)—in other words, commitments, obligations, and responsibilities beyond yourself and your own basic needs.
You could also argue that when you have all of those things—people, pets, and life to take care of—you must be even more mindful of what you can control so you can capitalize on the opportunity to live at the highest vibration of life.
Is this making sense to you?
How Do You Shift This?
Start paying attention.
Reading a novel that stirs up anxiety and makes it hard to fall asleep? Read something else.
Using social media in a way that fuels isolation, wasteful wants, or less-than self-talk? Change who you follow or opt-out altogether.
Working too much to avoid addressing what needs to be addressed in your life? Cushion your resilience so you can face it head-on.
This isn’t woo-woo—it’s the science of energy and the quantum field.
Just as we can choose the tone of voice we use to respond to someone, we also choose the energy we bring to our life.
When it feels like, time and time again, you’re being thrown off course—before blaming others or circumstances outside your control—first, ask yourself:
What is within my control that I can shift?
The answer will always be: Your own energy. Your own perspective.Your own response in any given situation.
Ultimately, the algorithm you are curating for your life.
A Small But Impactful Courageous Pivot
An easy shift of your life algorithm? Short of throwing your phone under the bus, start curating a highlight reel of your own life. Rather than mindlessly scrolling through others, take some time and scroll through your own camera reel. Remember the moments you have forgotten, seek out the joy and start noticing the highlights in your present day. Where our attention goes, our energy flows. Curate that algorithm mindfully, for as I said at the beginning, more of the same will deliver more of the same. Choose mindfully what you are calling in more of.
Free Resource Library
Enjoy more than 40 downloadable guides, recipes, and resources.
It is a significant task to tame our minds and connect with our hearts, especially amid external influences that divide and manipulate. As we navigate complex beliefs and divisive rhetoric, fostering unity and compassion becomes paramount for our shared humanity. Let’s step back from the chaos, find inner harmony, and strive to spread love and peace in our daily interactions.
Heart-led living requires us to tune into the whispers of the heart and invite those messages to be amplified. Easier said than done, no doubt, especially when we’re inundated with thousands of messages everyday triggering us to do the exact opposite.
To be clear, this isn’t about becoming ‘soft’ or weakened, or needing to hop onto the woowoo train. No. Leading and living from the heart invites us to tune in to the root of our confidence, where we are in complete alignment with our soul and becoming wildly strong.
To tune into our hearts, we must first quiet our minds and reflect on our core beliefs, and distinguish between those rooted in love or fear, abundance or lack, unity or division. Failing to do so makes us susceptible to societal chaos and propaganda, disconnecting us from the source of universal love and reality.
We cannot tune into our hearts when we have never taken a moment to try and tame our own minds, to ask the most basic of questions:
What do I believe?
Why do I believe what I believe?
Are the core beliefs I have built my life upon based on love or fear? Abundance or lack? ‘Us’ vs. ’Them’?
Without asking big questions of ourselves and sitting quietly to explore the answers honestly, free of ego, we become easy prey.
When society is in chaos we get swept into the game. We easily become manipulated by the propaganda, the fear, and internal soul conflict that becomes reflected in our day-to-day interactions.
Our pain points have been tapped and we are lost- further disconnected from the heart, the source of universal love, as our minds become less hinged to what is real.
We all have our inherent biases, but it is only when a foundational truth is challenged that more people wake up and rise up against the new agents of war: manipulative messaging, catch phrases, trending hashtags, and cancel culture, where every mobile device is the weapon.
The thing about propaganda is that most people can only see it conflict strongly with a pre-established belief, and in most cases, there is a pre-existing social network that is also in agreement.
We think we see it so clearly as we ask:
How is everyone being manipulated by this? it’s so obvious…
How can you of all people not see?
They’re spreading lies.
Can’t they see how clearly this stance contradicts what they were outraged about last month?
It takes a lot ego-checking to see the persuasive messaging and manipulation when it aligns with our existing beliefs and confirms our own biases.
We especially love when a person who, for all superficial reasons, should be with the ‘other side’ but instead affirms our beliefs and views. We love that. That gives us an I told you so and even one of *yours* says I’m right affirmation.
Challenging this is hard work for the brain.
We watch the news networks, follow the accounts, and now it seems, keep only the friends that affirm us.
We share the stories that make us right and call ‘misinformation’ to those that make us wrong. We immediately say the other is lying (and they may very well be), doing whatever it takes to make us feel more and more right.
With all of this, what we are actually doing is disconnecting further from the heart. Without realizing it, as we feel so empowered and right, we too have become agents of division.
What a thing to witness, watching people shuffle around every other week to work out the new “team” they’re on with whatever issue we are to be outraged about, and working out who from the old team is coming along to this new one. Along with this, we now check in on who we are now disappointed by and must separate ourselves from. It’s a rapid action of follows and unfollows to remain in our safe, belief affirming echo chamber.
It gets tricky though.
For when we are persistently swayed by the all mighty external messaging powers, we lose our way, don’t we?
Many of us can see it. Having complex beliefs around complex topics is complex to reckon with.
When you can see it from the outside, what you are witnessing is a complete loss of self as the heart and mind cannot contend with the ridiculous hypocrisy and most basic impossible conflict of how one stance can’t actually exist in alignment with the last one taken.
We lose the ability to tame our own minds, to tune into our hearts, and to truly know thyself.
We forget that we are all human, and we are all connected.
The human species requires deep connection for basic survival, but the ongoing need to align with a side only causes more division- especially when that alignment is based on what was read in memes or trending videos (which are, of course, just more of the aforementioned tools of control).
To continue creating separation from others only serves our own growing sense of aloneness and separation from our own souls, while feeding the thin veneer of righteousness.
What we are all feeling is our basic sense of humanity: outrage at the suffering, and a yearning for justice that will never come through aggressive, divisive action.
Where does it end?
We choose.
The answer to all of this is easy to speak, but takes a monumental amount of work to accomplish.
It can end when we all find ourselves standing alone, completely divided over the abundance of very real issues we are told to take a side on to the point where we each exist utterly and completely alone, afraid to broach difficult topics and have the necessary difficult conversations. The result of this culture, of course, is that we silence the now nearly inaudible wise whisper of our own heart, and give in to the pull of the tide, the all encompassing, ear splitting roar of the media machine.
Or it can end when we decide to join hands, tune in and live and lead from the heart, to not allow that external voice to get any louder and instead work to amplify the whisper of the heart. It ends when we choose to love, allowing the infinite tidal wave of compassion that exists within all of our hearts to take the lead.
It ends when we look up from our screens and into each others eyes and see that we all want the same thing.
We smile.
We serve.
We love unconditionally.
We aim to be the joy, the delight, and the inspiration in someone else’s day.
We operate from kindness.
What if we extricate ourselves from the nitty gritty horrific details? Yes, you can know the news, but then step back and get centred. Get into coherence, into harmony, and ask, what can I do today to be an agent of love and peace? How can I choose, in this moment and the next, to live and lead from the heart?
Free Resource Library
Enjoy more than 40 downloadable guides, recipes, and resources.
The Summary: In today’s divisive world, fostering critical thinking requires questioning ingrained beliefs. The challenge, of course, lies in separating oneself from the mind, a skill seldom taught. The burden of societal expectations hinders our pursuit of true joy. Reconnecting with inner wisdom and questioning the mind leads to slow but transformative progress, offering a path to health and happiness amid external distractions. Embracing joy becomes a rebellious act, unlocking individual power and connection to one’s heart.
How badly do you want those knots of anxiety and worry to untangle? To not wake up feeling overwhelmed with the weight of the world (and your household needs) on your shoulders? What would it be worth to you to rise most days feeling loved, appreciated and with a sense of deep peace? It is all possible but there is a catch. To experience true joy in our lives requires us to live against the grain in just about every facet of life. Finding our way to such thriving requires that we question the accepted paradigms of the culture as it is today – that happiness ultimately will come one day when we earn more, spend more, have more, do more and be more. Too often this extends to the idea that in order to have it all, others must also have less.
The short version: Turn off the news, shut off your phones and live your life. The more deep you go down the rabbit hole, the more you drag your spirit down, the less joy you embody. Th equation is that simple.
This doesn’t mean we are to ignore the absolute horrors and tragedies of our world. Not at all. But we also can’t let it all overwhelm us and determine the energy we conduct our lives with.
To be joyful becomes rebellious.
We are trying to survive but have forgotten what it means to thrive. Our natural state of being is to be joyful, well, healthy, vital, brave, optimistic and experience a true sense of belonging, connection and unity. This is a human in the full expression of humanity. We are born here and as we exit childhood, forget too quickly.
We can remember what it is we have always known but it requires that we take radical responsibility for where we are today, have the bravery to accept what isn’t working and the discipline to do the work to change what needs changing in both our minds and the moment-by-moment choices we make in our lives. Like shooting for the stars, adjusting the trajectory even slightly can land us somewhere entirely different.
This of course is no simple task. It’s not as simple as deciding it to be so.
To thrive and live joyfully means we are not eating the same food, working with the same goals, watching the same movies, reading the same news, shopping at the same stores, or valuing what we’re supposed to value in the ways in which we’re expected.
This is why living joyfully might be our greatest act of rebellion.
To be joyful is in direct contrast to the norms. We meet up with friends and instead of gossiping, expelling on the chaos of our lives, or how we aren’t enough, we spiral up, we share, engage, hope and dream. We look for solutions for our challenges and how we can be part of the unity solution for the world. We live today as we planned for yesterday and continue planning to level up tomorrow. We think critically and question everything. Is this (still) working?
To live joyfully is shifting the metrics used to measure success
Doing this in our world today, amidst the divisive influences that surround us, requires us to deeply know our own minds and hearts, to learn to question just about everything, and of course, to brave real answers, even if the result could be a shattering of the foundational values we have lived from.
We have not been trained in our culture to separate the self from the mind, let alone be able to know one’s own mind and question whether what it tells us to be true. We may have heard wisps of the words that we are not our minds, but who actually practices this? To question what our minds tell us, that voice inside your head, is at the root of critical thinking.
Is this actually true?
What if the opposite is true?
Do I truly believe this, or is this just what I’ve been told my whole life?
To make the teaching of critical thinking standard practice would undermine a system that requires, for its own survival, that we follow blindly and accept the division as normal.
We get carried with the tide. We lose our joy. We wire into the fear and become lost to ourselves.
We pack our bags, and carry them on our shoulders, full to the brim with intergenerational trauma, the stories we are told by our parents and grandparents, the blatant lies and false beliefs we’re bombarded with from educators, headlines, government, and society in general.
We carry these packs around with us as the anxiety, fear and longing for peace bubbles up within without knowing how to touch it. We keep adding to the burden we carry and the joy slips further away.
We were never given the keys to access this place within us, to get back what we lost.
In general, we have forgotten the skills we need, the work we need to do, and that it is available to us always. What we need to do is simple: amplify the whispers of our own hearts and follow the path of being well and joyful. We tap into our intuition, the heart wisdom that only knows the signs and signals of the present moment we are in. Can it really be that simple?
Simple? Yes. Easy? Not at all.
The challenge, why most are scared away, is because that inner knowing does not lie and cannot be denied. Once you listen to those whispers, they get louder, more powerful, and you see the accuracy of it all. We start to see that we can’t achieve the goal of joy, peace, love, health and happiness with aggressive action, followed by instant gratification. It’s a slow creep of progress where one day we feel more joy in a single minute of the day then we did the day before. One drop at a time.
But when we can do this– ask the questions of our mind, and live with the exquisite intention of living joyfully, the work is being done. The baggage we carry falls away, slowly to be sure, but it’s happening, and we soon become buoyed by the tidal wave of both insight and compassion. We remember that all of life is connected.
Looking around. Is this working?
We are tired, overwhelmed, burnt out. Health in mind, body and spirit is achieved by the few who have the mind to break free, while too many remain plugged into the screens that continuously highlight the lack in their lives, and that filling that void comes from everything other than the true solution of looking within and summoning the discipline to do the work.
In time, we may find ourselves on the brink of it. The distractions have gone quiet for a moment. The momentum and motivation is building but then– BOOM.
We’re pointed in a new direction. Pointed at a new distraction. THAT is the cause. They are to blame. We remain plugged in to the frequency of fear and make that our reality. Find the evidence to prove it to be true. Me versus them. Blame and shame so responsibility is never taken.
We must keep asking: What is mine? What have I collected that is not? What is true and real? What beliefs are beneficial to me and others, and which are harmful?
The one truth we can trust is that which is truly good and beneficial to the full expression of the human, is also good and beneficial to our collective.
To live joyfully in a world pushing us to be sick, divided, forever wanting, othering, heads down working, and relinquishing any sense of personal responsibility is truly the greatest act of rebellion.
We each individually have more power within us than we’ve been led to believe. Now is the time to tap into it. Your health is your wealth. Your connection to your heart is your super power. This could change everything. Joyful living, tuning into your heart’s wisdom is what will make us wildly powerful, empowering and magnetic.
Free Resource Library
Enjoy more than 40 downloadable guides, recipes, and resources.
The Summary: In today’s divisive world, fostering critical thinking requires questioning ingrained beliefs. The challenge, of course, lies in separating oneself from the mind, a skill seldom taught. The burden of societal expectations hinders our pursuit of true joy. Reconnecting with inner wisdom and questioning the mind leads to slow but transformative progress, offering a path to health and happiness amid external distractions. Embracing joy becomes a rebellious act, unlocking individual power and connection to one’s heart.
How badly do you want those knots of anxiety and worry to untangle? To not wake up feeling overwhelmed with the weight of the world (and your household needs) on your shoulders? What would it be worth to you to rise most days feeling loved, appreciated and with a sense of deep peace? It is all possible but there is a catch. To experience true joy in our lives requires us to live against the grain in just about every facet of life. Finding our way to such thriving requires that we question the accepted paradigms of the culture as it is today – that happiness ultimately will come one day when we earn more, spend more, have more, do more and be more. Too often this extends to the idea that in order to have it all, others must also have less.
The short version: Turn off the news, shut off your phones and live your life. The more deep you go down the rabbit hole, the more you drag your spirit down, the less joy you embody. Th equation is that simple.
This doesn’t mean we are to ignore the absolute horrors and tragedies of our world. Not at all. But we also can’t let it all overwhelm us and determine the energy we conduct our lives with.
To be joyful becomes rebellious.
We are trying to survive but have forgotten what it means to thrive. Our natural state of being is to be joyful, well, healthy, vital, brave, optimistic and experience a true sense of belonging, connection and unity. This is a human in the full expression of humanity. We are born here and as we exit childhood, forget too quickly.
We can remember what it is we have always known but it requires that we take radical responsibility for where we are today, have the bravery to accept what isn’t working and the discipline to do the work to change what needs changing in both our minds and the moment-by-moment choices we make in our lives. Like shooting for the stars, adjusting the trajectory even slightly can land us somewhere entirely different.
This of course is no simple task. It’s not as simple as deciding it to be so.
To thrive and live joyfully means we are not eating the same food, working with the same goals, watching the same movies, reading the same news, shopping at the same stores, or valuing what we’re supposed to value in the ways in which we’re expected.
This is why living joyfully might be our greatest act of rebellion.
To be joyful is in direct contrast to the norms. We meet up with friends and instead of gossiping, expelling on the chaos of our lives, or how we aren’t enough, we spiral up, we share, engage, hope and dream. We look for solutions for our challenges and how we can be part of the unity solution for the world. We live today as we planned for yesterday and continue planning to level up tomorrow. We think critically and question everything. Is this (still) working?
To live joyfully is shifting the metrics used to measure success
Doing this in our world today, amidst the divisive influences that surround us, requires us to deeply know our own minds and hearts, to learn to question just about everything, and of course, to brave real answers, even if the result could be a shattering of the foundational values we have lived from.
We have not been trained in our culture to separate the self from the mind, let alone be able to know one’s own mind and question whether what it tells us to be true. We may have heard wisps of the words that we are not our minds, but who actually practices this? To question what our minds tell us, that voice inside your head, is at the root of critical thinking.
Is this actually true?
What if the opposite is true?
Do I truly believe this, or is this just what I’ve been told my whole life?
To make the teaching of critical thinking standard practice would undermine a system that requires, for its own survival, that we follow blindly and accept the division as normal.
We get carried with the tide. We lose our joy. We wire into the fear and become lost to ourselves.
We pack our bags, and carry them on our shoulders, full to the brim with intergenerational trauma, the stories we are told by our parents and grandparents, the blatant lies and false beliefs we’re bombarded with from educators, headlines, government, and society in general.
We carry these packs around with us as the anxiety, fear and longing for peace bubbles up within without knowing how to touch it. We keep adding to the burden we carry and the joy slips further away.
We were never given the keys to access this place within us, to get back what we lost.
In general, we have forgotten the skills we need, the work we need to do, and that it is available to us always. What we need to do is simple: amplify the whispers of our own hearts and follow the path of being well and joyful. We tap into our intuition, the heart wisdom that only knows the signs and signals of the present moment we are in. Can it really be that simple?
Simple? Yes. Easy? Not at all.
The challenge, why most are scared away, is because that inner knowing does not lie and cannot be denied. Once you listen to those whispers, they get louder, more powerful, and you see the accuracy of it all. We start to see that we can’t achieve the goal of joy, peace, love, health and happiness with aggressive action, followed by instant gratification. It’s a slow creep of progress where one day we feel more joy in a single minute of the day then we did the day before. One drop at a time.
But when we can do this– ask the questions of our mind, and live with the exquisite intention of living joyfully, the work is being done. The baggage we carry falls away, slowly to be sure, but it’s happening, and we soon become buoyed by the tidal wave of both insight and compassion. We remember that all of life is connected.
Looking around. Is this working?
We are tired, overwhelmed, burnt out. Health in mind, body and spirit is achieved by the few who have the mind to break free, while too many remain plugged into the screens that continuously highlight the lack in their lives, and that filling that void comes from everything other than the true solution of looking within and summoning the discipline to do the work.
In time, we may find ourselves on the brink of it. The distractions have gone quiet for a moment. The momentum and motivation is building but then– BOOM.
We’re pointed in a new direction. Pointed at a new distraction. THAT is the cause. They are to blame. We remain plugged in to the frequency of fear and make that our reality. Find the evidence to prove it to be true. Me versus them. Blame and shame so responsibility is never taken.
We must keep asking: What is mine? What have I collected that is not? What is true and real? What beliefs are beneficial to me and others, and which are harmful?
The one truth we can trust is that which is truly good and beneficial to the full expression of the human, is also good and beneficial to our collective.
To live joyfully in a world pushing us to be sick, divided, forever wanting, othering, heads down working, and relinquishing any sense of personal responsibility is truly the greatest act of rebellion.
We each individually have more power within us than we’ve been led to believe. Now is the time to tap into it. Your health is your wealth. Your connection to your heart is your super power. This could change everything. Joyful living, tuning into your heart’s wisdom is what will make us wildly powerful, empowering and magnetic.
Free Resource Library
Enjoy more than 40 downloadable guides, recipes, and resources.
It is a significant task to tame our minds and connect with our hearts, especially amid external influences that divide and manipulate. As we navigate complex beliefs and divisive rhetoric, fostering unity and compassion becomes paramount for our shared humanity. Let’s step back from the chaos, find inner harmony, and strive to spread love and peace in our daily interactions.
Heart-led living requires us to tune into the whispers of the heart and invite those messages to be amplified. Easier said than done, no doubt, especially when we’re inundated with thousands of messages everyday triggering us to do the exact opposite.
To be clear, this isn’t about becoming ‘soft’ or weakened, or needing to hop onto the woowoo train. No. Leading and living from the heart invites us to tune in to the root of our confidence, where we are in complete alignment with our soul and becoming wildly strong.
To tune into our hearts, we must first quiet our minds and reflect on our core beliefs, and distinguish between those rooted in love or fear, abundance or lack, unity or division. Failing to do so makes us susceptible to societal chaos and propaganda, disconnecting us from the source of universal love and reality.
We cannot tune into our hearts when we have never taken a moment to try and tame our own minds, to ask the most basic of questions:
What do I believe?
Why do I believe what I believe?
Are the core beliefs I have built my life upon based on love or fear? Abundance or lack? ‘Us’ vs. ’Them’?
Without asking big questions of ourselves and sitting quietly to explore the answers honestly, free of ego, we become easy prey.
When society is in chaos we get swept into the game. We easily become manipulated by the propaganda, the fear, and internal soul conflict that becomes reflected in our day-to-day interactions.
Our pain points have been tapped and we are lost- further disconnected from the heart, the source of universal love, as our minds become less hinged to what is real.
We all have our inherent biases, but it is only when a foundational truth is challenged that more people wake up and rise up against the new agents of war: manipulative messaging, catch phrases, trending hashtags, and cancel culture, where every mobile device is the weapon.
The thing about propaganda is that most people can only see it conflict strongly with a pre-established belief, and in most cases, there is a pre-existing social network that is also in agreement.
We think we see it so clearly as we ask:
How is everyone being manipulated by this? it’s so obvious…
How can you of all people not see?
They’re spreading lies.
Can’t they see how clearly this stance contradicts what they were outraged about last month?
It takes a lot ego-checking to see the persuasive messaging and manipulation when it aligns with our existing beliefs and confirms our own biases.
We especially love when a person who, for all superficial reasons, should be with the ‘other side’ but instead affirms our beliefs and views. We love that. That gives us an I told you so and even one of *yours* says I’m right affirmation.
Challenging this is hard work for the brain.
We watch the news networks, follow the accounts, and now it seems, keep only the friends that affirm us.
We share the stories that make us right and call ‘misinformation’ to those that make us wrong. We immediately say the other is lying (and they may very well be), doing whatever it takes to make us feel more and more right.
With all of this, what we are actually doing is disconnecting further from the heart. Without realizing it, as we feel so empowered and right, we too have become agents of division.
What a thing to witness, watching people shuffle around every other week to work out the new “team” they’re on with whatever issue we are to be outraged about, and working out who from the old team is coming along to this new one. Along with this, we now check in on who we are now disappointed by and must separate ourselves from. It’s a rapid action of follows and unfollows to remain in our safe, belief affirming echo chamber.
It gets tricky though.
For when we are persistently swayed by the all mighty external messaging powers, we lose our way, don’t we?
Many of us can see it. Having complex beliefs around complex topics is complex to reckon with.
When you can see it from the outside, what you are witnessing is a complete loss of self as the heart and mind cannot contend with the ridiculous hypocrisy and most basic impossible conflict of how one stance can’t actually exist in alignment with the last one taken.
We lose the ability to tame our own minds, to tune into our hearts, and to truly know thyself.
We forget that we are all human, and we are all connected.
The human species requires deep connection for basic survival, but the ongoing need to align with a side only causes more division- especially when that alignment is based on what was read in memes or trending videos (which are, of course, just more of the aforementioned tools of control).
To continue creating separation from others only serves our own growing sense of aloneness and separation from our own souls, while feeding the thin veneer of righteousness.
What we are all feeling is our basic sense of humanity: outrage at the suffering, and a yearning for justice that will never come through aggressive, divisive action.
Where does it end?
We choose.
The answer to all of this is easy to speak, but takes a monumental amount of work to accomplish.
It can end when we all find ourselves standing alone, completely divided over the abundance of very real issues we are told to take a side on to the point where we each exist utterly and completely alone, afraid to broach difficult topics and have the necessary difficult conversations. The result of this culture, of course, is that we silence the now nearly inaudible wise whisper of our own heart, and give in to the pull of the tide, the all encompassing, ear splitting roar of the media machine.
Or it can end when we decide to join hands, tune in and live and lead from the heart, to not allow that external voice to get any louder and instead work to amplify the whisper of the heart. It ends when we choose to love, allowing the infinite tidal wave of compassion that exists within all of our hearts to take the lead.
It ends when we look up from our screens and into each others eyes and see that we all want the same thing.
We smile.
We serve.
We love unconditionally.
We aim to be the joy, the delight, and the inspiration in someone else’s day.
We operate from kindness.
What if we extricate ourselves from the nitty gritty horrific details? Yes, you can know the news, but then step back and get centred. Get into coherence, into harmony, and ask, what can I do today to be an agent of love and peace? How can I choose, in this moment and the next, to live and lead from the heart?
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