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Have you ever had one of those days where everything seems to go wrong? Someone cuts you off in traffic. Maybe an email arrives that instantly puts you on the defensive. Or maybe the offensive. A conversation that doesn't go the way you hoped or planned. Your plans fall apart. Maybe your body feels tired. And by the end of the day, you're left wondering, why is this happening to me? I think we've all asked that question at some point. I know I have. But what if it's the wrong question? What if life isn't happening to you? What if life is continually inviting you into something deeper? Deeper awareness, deeper alignment, deeper freedom. Today I want to share one of the most practical spiritual practices I've ever adopted. A practice that has completely transformed how I experience challenges, relationships, leadership, and even my own healing journey. Because I no longer believe that life is standing in my way. I know that life is walking right beside me. And by the end of today's conversation, I hope you'll never experience a trigger or obstacle or even a difficult moment quite the same way ever again. Hello, hello, and welcome to the Aligned Human Project. I'm your host, Don Elgin. If you've ever looked around at your life that appears successful on the outside but feels disconnected on the inside, you are in the right place. If you've ever wondered why you keep repeating the same patterns, carrying the same emotional weight, or chasing goals that never quite bring you the peace you hope they would, you are in the right place. This podcast is about remembering who you were before the world told you who you needed to be. Together we'll explore the intersection of neuroscience, psychology, ancient wisdom, quantum science, and practical spiritualism to understand how awareness shapes our field and how our field shapes our lives, and why lasting change begins from the inside out. We'll talk about leadership, relationships, health, purpose, emotional well-being, and conscious creation, not as separate parts of life, but as reflections of one thing: our level of alignment. Because most people don't need another strategy, they need a new relationship with themselves. So whether you're leading a business, a family, a team, or simply trying to lead yourself with greater intention, welcome. Take a breath, become the witness, and let's begin. Hello, hello, and welcome back to the Aligned Human Project. Over the past few weeks, we have been walking a journey together. We've turned on the light, so to speak, in our internal room, and we've stepped into the room or at least up to the door. We began releasing some identities, some wounds that no longer belonged there. And we started asking a completely different question. Not, who do I need to become? But instead, who is trying to emerge? Today I'd like to take one more step. Because once you begin living from the witness, where we've zoomed out, life starts to look different. The events themselves don't necessarily change. People will still disappoint you, plans will still fall apart, you still have difficult conversations, and your nervous system still gets activated. However, your relationship with those moments will transform. And I've come to believe that transformation begins with the questions we ask. Questions shape attention, and attention shapes awareness. Awareness shapes choice, and choice shapes expression. And repeated expression shapes reality. That's why I often say awareness reveals, alignment chooses, and creation expresses. Every one of those begins with a question. For much of my life, I've approached problems the way many high achievers do. I tried to solve them. If something wasn't working, I'd work harder. I would learn more. I would read another book or two, take another course, because I love learning, and analyze the situation from every possible angle. I believed that if I could just understand enough, I'd eventually fix everything. And while learning has been one of the greatest gifts of my life, there came a moment when I realized I wasn't actually participating with life. I was actually trying to control it. Can anyone else relate to this? Maybe you had seasons where your calendar was perfectly organized, your goals so crystal clear. You were doing everything right. And yet life still refused to cooperate. That's usually the moment we begin asking, why is this happening to me? It's an honest question, but it does not lead us where we truly want to go. Because it subtly assumes that life is an obstacle, that life is something we need to overcome, that we're a victim to it. But what if it's not true? What if life is actually a conversation? What if every experience is offering information? Not about whether we're succeeding or failing, but about what your consciousness is ready to become aware of next. That single shift changed everything for me. Instead of waking up and wondering what problem or problems do I need to solve today, I began asking a different question. What am I ready to see today? And eventually that evolved into an even simpler prayer. Show me. Show me what I'm ready to release today. Then I stopped searching and I started paying attention. There's still participation, but one was force and one was flow. Now let's pause for a moment and look at why questions are so powerful. Your brain is not simply collecting information, it's actively filtering reality. Every second, millions of bits of sensory information compete for your attention. If your brain tried to consciously process all of them, you become overwhelmed almost instantly. So instead, it filters, it predicts, it decides what deserves your attention based on what it believes it's important. This is one of the reasons your questions matter so much. When you ask, why is this happening to me, your brain begins to immediately search for evidence that supports the question. It looks for problems, it notices injustice, it highlights frustration. Not because those things are the whole truth, though, but because that's the question you've asked it to answer. Now imagine asking something different. What is this showing me? And suddenly your attention begins to shift. Your brain begins looking for patterns instead of villains, lessons instead of enemies, and opportunities instead of obstacles. The event hasn't changed, but your relationship to the event has. Every question you ask directs the spotlight of awareness. And wherever awareness shines, choice becomes possible. How beautiful is that? The witness doesn't force reality to change. The witness changes the quality of attention brought to a reality. That's why awareness is so powerful. Not because it controls life, because it changes how we participate with it. Last year, back in May, I went to a retreat. And although I was excited to go for to the retreat, I was actually really nervous as well. It was my first time traveling without my husband after my brain injury, as well as my first time going to an all-women's retreat, which was very different for me. As I got there, I was a little nervous and kept watching. And I have a pretty good morning ritual. And at the time, my morning ritual was to wake up, make a protein coffee, and then start doing my spiritual reading and journaling and contemplating a little heart coherence and move into my day. As I was there, we started a practice of what I changed into what I call brain dumping. So the idea is that we just creatively write whatever is in our head. So we dump all the noise so that we can come into flow with spirit, with source, with the universe. And so as we started this process, I would go through my brain dumping. And then I got into the habit of asking a question. And so in the beginning, it would be brain dumping, why is this happening? You know, you're getting out your frustrations and your worries and your concerns. And as I left there and took the practice into my life, I committed to my coach that I would do this practice for 90 days. And that's a big commitment for me, as I could imagine it is for you. So you're going to commit to 90 days of continual practice and not let yourself down. Not only not let yourself down, but you are going to be accountable to not only your coach, but to the other people that were there at the retreat. So I committed. I committed into doing this practice of brain dumping as well as doing an intention setting practice. And as I started going through this, I started to ask a question. And often the questions which started off with why is this happening, all of a sudden it started to shift even deeper. Now I had shifted many years ago from the language of the victim, which is often why is this happening to me, goes to what is happening for me. And when we're in survival mindset, this is often a place that comes into it. And then we start to shift as we move to an aligned mindset is what why is this happening through me? In other words, what is expressing here? And I began to start shifting the language of my work. And as I was going through this, I would ask, what is in my way? And I knew that triggers were something that needed to be bumped. I had read lots of work from, well, Michael Singer especially had brought this up. He uses the concept of the thorn. A wound or a trigger is like a thorn in your in your side, so to speak. And we don't want anybody to bump it because it hurts. And so we protect that wound. But the job is actually to bring the wound to the surface to say, thank you for the bump. Thank you for being triggered, so we can become aware of where we need to do our work next. And with this, I started asking the question in my brain dumping, in my journal every day, trigger me. And so I was pretty aggressive at the beginning of this practice. And so every single day I would ask to be triggered. So it was a pretty intense summer last year as I was going through this. And I refer to it often when I'm talking about last summer as the summer of inconvenience, because I got a lot of wounds being triggered, were old, old wounds, not only from my childhood, but originally that started off, you know, in adulthood and then childhood and then going all the way down into infancy and working through these wounds. As I've continued to progress through this work, I started getting a little gentler. So part of wanting to be triggered was what is in the way of me being in constant flow state. And so the universe was willing to work with me. And so it triggered me every single day. I would have a trigger that would come up and I would need to work on it. Now, when you're first being triggered, it's hard to remember that question you asked first thing in the morning. But usually by the time I got home and I'm talking to my husband about my day, I would become aware of what was going on again and I would work through it. And so this went on for months. So then as I started to get more into flow state, I had begun downloading and then did down, finish downloading the 12 laws of co-creation, what I refer to as field and form. And then I started downloading the Aligned Human Project. And I was my question started to become what is interfering with my ability to fully embody being a practical spiritual teacher and guide? That's the question I ask. And so it started to evolve more into show me. So this also came through my coach, who is definitely more gentle with the journey, um, and and saying, show me. And she kept saying to us, just ask the universe to show you. Show me, show you what you need to know. Now, for me in my work, it's always about show me what is interfering with my alignment. And so I began the prayer of show me. Now, my personal practice every morning when I wake up is to, even before I get out of bed. So before I do my brain dumping, before I do everything else, I have this one piece that I do. So before I get out of bed, the question that I go through is I first connect. So I call to the highest vibration of love and light to join with my highest self, and I ask for your guidance. Please use me, please lead me, please show me the way. And within show me the way, I then ask, show me what I need to let go of next. Show me what I need to release. Show me what's interfering with my self-realization. However, you want to language that, but show me. And I just let the question flow naturally. So it's not regimented the exact same way every day, but I have a show me piece to it. Then I get out of bed, I begin my morning rituals, you know, brush your teeth, all that good stuff, brain dump. I'll write it again. So now I've taken it from just being a connection of an ethereal process, of a subtle process, and then I put it into physical form by writing it. Then I do a heart coherence meditation where I've done this in recording. You can always refer back to it. Um, and it takes about, you can do it as short as three minutes. I think my short recording on this is about five. And so we just come into coherence, start breathing and slowing our breath down for a couple minutes. Then we bring a memory or a person, a place, a thing that brings us into a state of gratitude, of appreciation. Um, maybe you recall a memory that really connects you to a sense of love. And then we bring that into our heart. So what we're doing is creating coherence using gratitude or appreciation with heart and mind. And then from there, we set our intentions for the day. Because now we set our intentions, but with the language of, I'm so happy and grateful now that. And so we're bringing this from a state of gratitude. And we'll really deepen this as we move forward through August is this concept of the field and how do we shift this? And so stay with me over this quarter because we're really going deeper and deeper into this. We'll go into the field of mind and how we shift this. What is it that we want to create? And then we'll be going into trust, the foundation of trust, and how we bring this forward from these states that we've been talking about this month, next month, as we continue on. So it just keeps evolving as we go. So I tell you this because my piece, my centering came when I finally stopped trying to control things and I started getting in flow with things. Our old mindset believes that we need to control its part of safety, whereas a newer mindset is about awareness, awareness even over certainty. So as we ask better questions, we can start to notice a different experience throughout our day. It's not that anything's a coincidence, although the word is co-created instance. It's that we create this availability for curiosity instead of hypervigilance. You see, peace arrives the moment we stop fighting the conversation life has been trying to have with us all along. If life is a conversation, how do we know what it's trying to say? The answer is much simpler than we've been taught. You see, we pay attention. We pay attention to what gets our attention, not just what happens, what happens inside us when it happens. Think about your day. Think about your day yesterday. There were probably dozens of conversations, probably in emails, there was traffic, maybe you had some family or friends that were there, some coworkers. Think about your experience with social media or any unexpected delays in your day. Most of those moments came and went without much thought. But a few of them probably caught you. Maybe someone spoke to you in a way that immediately made you feel defensive. Maybe someone ignored your opinion and you felt invisible. Maybe someone questioned your work and suddenly you felt like you had to prove yourself. All of those moments matter. Not because the other person caused something inside of you, because they revealed something that was already there. They bumped into it. That's why I don't see triggers as our enemies. I see them as invitations. They're simply asking, would you like to become aware of what's still organizing your choices? That's a very different relationship with life. Instead of trying to avoid discomfort, we become curious about it. Not because we enjoy suffering, we don't enjoy pain, but because discomfort often points us toward the next opportunity for freedom. There's a fascinating reason this works. The brain is constantly comparing the present moment to the past. Every experience is filtered through previous experiences, emotional memories, and predictions about what might happen next. Not that. If something resembles an old wound, your nervous system doesn't wait for the full investigation. It prepares for survival. That's why your body often reacts before your conscious mind understands why. Maybe your shoulders tighten, your stomach drops, your breath changes, your jaw clenches, maybe you even pull fully back and there's a squeal or a scream. An emotion appears almost instantly. That isn't weakness, it is efficiency. Your nervous system is doing exactly what it was designed to do. The challenge is that survival is designed to answer one question, how do I protect myself? Whereas alignment asks a different question. What is this moment inviting me to become aware of? That one shift moves us from reaction to response or participation. When we pause instead of automatically reacting, something extraordinary happens. The prefrontal cortex, the part of our brain involved in reflection, emotional regulation, empathy, wise decision making comes fully back online. We're no longer trapped inside our first emotional impulse. We have access to perspective. And perspective creates choice. This is why I say the pause is one of the most powerful spiritual practices you will ever develop. Not because the pause changes the event, the pause changes the relationship you have with the event. And that changes everything. So I'll give you an example of this in real life. I started this practice. And just this winter, I was going to an event. And on before I went, I did my morning ritual and I asked the question, what do I need to let go of? What is in my way? And then I just released and carried on. Got ready, worked out, got everything going, and we began. I left home, I got in my car, and I always have an audiobook going. So as I start driving, I've got to stop at work and then go to this event. So I'm driving to work and I'm listening to this book on the five elements by Dr. Charles A. Moss, and he's talking about wood elements. And he points out that the stress response of the wood energy is anger, irritation, and frustration. And if it goes too far, it can actually move towards hostility and grudges. And I was like, hmm, it sounds pretty aggressive. I don't think this is me. Now, I'm a very, very dominant wood energy. So I'm listening to this and I'm like, that doesn't sound like me. I don't think I hold grudges. And as he continues talking about grudges and what we can do to release grudges, um, I turn the corner. And as I turn the corner, I start following this bus. And on the back of the bus is this woman's picture. And as soon as I see this picture of the woman, I immediately roll my eyes and go, ugh. And as soon as I do it, I like all the hairs on my arms and my neck all stand up. And I look down at my radio and I start laughing. And as he's still talking about grudges, and I'm like, oh, I guess grudges are where we're working next. I immediately burst out laughing. Now I'm going to tell everybody about this. You maybe even heard me talk about it on the podcast. Because first off, I like to keep myself humble. So I love sharing when I have a very human moment. And I always remind everybody that we are a spiritual being having a human experience. So don't put me on a pedestal. I don't want to be there. I will fall off. And in all fairness, I can't really handle another brain injury. So that's not really fair. So let's just keep me as human as possible here. And I love to reserve the right to be human and remind us it's not to get us off the hook, but it's to stop shame. So here I am, I'm following the bus. I see this lady. I roll my eyes. I'm like, ugh. And then I start thinking about it. This grudge that I was holding was from a moment in time, maybe 13 to 15 years ago. And I start thinking about this. Like, why are you so irritated with this person? And I go back and I think of the event and and how she behaved and and um the entire, the entire experience around it. And I'm like, dude, you gotta let this go. Like, are you the same person that you were 13, 15 years ago? Absolutely not. So then why are you holding her to this moment, to this snapshot? And I started to think about this with all grudges, all little wounds that we carry with us, that I carry in this filing cabinet in my inner room, the filing cabinet of those that have crossed me, those that have hurt me, embarrassed me, humiliated me. All these things we'll call it the file of grudges. And I'm like, oh yeah, we got to start emptying that out. This is not serving you. As a matter of fact, I can see why the universe is showing it to me, because this is exactly what's interfering with my ability to fully embody being a spiritual director, a contrarian soul guide. So here is the opportunity. And this is the way the universe works. It will give you the answer every single time. All we need to do is stay open to the message. You might get it by overhearing somebody talking about somebody else and how irritating it is or embarrassing or how frustrating it is when this person behaves a certain way, and your hairs go up on the back of your neck because you know you do this. That is the universe giving you your answer. Work on that next. And so all of our little warnings are gifts. They're not coincidences unless you understand the basis of that word, coincidence, a co-created instance, co-created by you and the universe and another soul. So here we have it unfolding in real time. So first we'll break it down. We've got the honest question: what's in my way? I wasn't searching for a grudge. I wasn't even aware of them, it all of a sudden comes through. Comes through for not only a moment of it being said on a book, but also on the back of the bus. Then there's my reaction. It's not the woman on the bus, it's me. My reaction contained the lesson. And then the curiosity allows us to replace the judgment and so that we can come into alignment instead of self-criticism. That's what co-creation looks like. Not waiting for life to become easier. No one said life is easy. It's to become awake enough to recognize your life is responding to your questions all along. This is another reason I love working with the five elements. Not because they explain away our behavior. It isn't to justify or excuse, but because they help us recognize the kinds of invitations life naturally presents. When wood is expressing through survival, life may repeatedly invite us to soften control, release resentment, or choose flexibility over force. When fire is expressing through survival, life may invite us to stop performing for approval and begin expressing our authentic joy. When earth is expressing through survival, the invitation is to often receive as freely as we give. And remember that our worth is not measured by how much we carry. When metal is expressing through survival, life gently asks us to loosen perfectionism and discover the freedom of progress over precision. When water is expressing through survival, the invitation is to trust ourselves enough to step forward, even when certainty hasn't arrived. Different expressions, different invitations, the same loving intelligence. And that's why I rarely ask, why did this happen? Instead, I ask the question that has become part of my life, my coaching, and my leadership, which is what's the opportunity? Because every trigger carries one. Every disappointment carries one. Every conflict carries one. Every obstacle carries one. The obstacle isn't simply something to overcome. More often than not, the obstacle is pointing toward the doorway you have been looking for. Once you begin seeing life this way, something remarkable begins to happen. You stop waking up wondering what might go wrong today and start planning from there. And you begin waking up wondering, what wants to teach me today? And that simple shift changes not only the way you experience your life, it changes the way you lead it. That's where I'd like to finish our conversation today. The more I teach this work, the more I realize this isn't just a personal practice. It's a leadership practice, it's a parenting practice, it's a relationship practice, it's a cultural practice. Think about the questions we typically ask in organizations. We ask things like, who's responsible? Whose fault is this? How do we stop this from happening again? They're understandable questions, but they often come from a place of survival, from defense or offense. They're trying to restore certainty. They're trying to reduce discomfort. They're trying to find someone to blame so we can move on. Aligned leaders ask different questions. What is this situation showing us? What's the opportunity? What belief has quietly been organizing this team? What conversation have we been avoiding? What wants to emerge if we stop defending the past? Can you imagine how different that feels? One leader creates from fear and another creates curiosity. One creates compliance and the other creates trust. And I believe trust is one of the clearest indicators of alignment. I've shared this before, but it continues to deepen for me. Trust is what it feels like when someone's field and form are in alignment, when there's no gap between who they are being and what they are expressing. That kind of leadership changes people. Not just because it has all the answers, because it creates enough psychological safety for other people to begin asking better questions as well. That's how cultures change. One conversation, one pause, one aligned choice at a time. So I'd like to leave you with a practice that has become part of my daily life. And I call it the pause, feel, align. It's beautifully simple, and that's exactly why it works. When something activates in you, and it will, we first pause. Not because you're avoiding the moment, but because you are making space for the witness. So first we take one slow breath and we feel not to analyze, not to justify or explain, simply to notice. Where do you feel it in your body? So you feel something coming, pause. Where is it in your body? What emotion is present? What story immediately wants to take over? Can you stay with it for just a few more breaths without trying to fix it, without trying to make it go away, without making yourself wrong? Just witness it with compassion. It's kind of like a zoom out. And then we want to align. Ask yourself these questions. What is this showing me? What's the opportunity? Who is trying to emerge? What will alignment choose? And then trust yourself enough to make one conscious choice, not ten, just one. Maybe that's to shift the tone of your voice, your facial expressions. Because transformation isn't built through grand gestures. It's built through ordinary moments lived with extraordinary awareness. The older I get, the less interested I become in controlling life. Controlling creates drama. And the more interested I become in participating with it, which gives me peace. That doesn't mean I stop setting goals or dreaming or even creating. It simply means I stop believing that every obstacle is evidence that I'm on the wrong path. Sometimes the obstacle is the path. Sometimes the conversation you didn't want to have becomes the one that heals your relationship. Sometimes the business challenge you've been resisting becomes the catalyst for your next level of leadership. Sometimes the diagnosis becomes the invitation to finally listen to your body. Sometimes the trigger becomes the doorway to freedom. Life has a remarkable way of cooperating with us when we stop demanding that it cooperate with our expectations. That doesn't mean every experience is easy. It doesn't mean that we pretend painful things are somehow meant to happen. It means that once something has happened, we always have the freedom to ask, now what? What is this showing me? What's the opportunity? This is where our power lives. Not in controlling every circumstance, but in choosing how we meet each one. So this week I'd like to invite you to an experiment. Every morning, before you reach for your phone, before the world begins asking things of you or telling you who you were yesterday, I want you to pause, take one slow breath all the way down into your belly, into your pelvis, and then simply ask, show me what I'm ready to release today. Then go live your life. Not looking for problems, paying attention to opportunities, not looking for proof that life is against you, looking for evidence that life is inviting you to into something deeper. And when something triggers you, I want you to try to take a breath and smile. Not because it's comfortable, because you're remembering. You ask to be shown. Life is simply answering. If today's conversation resonated with you, I'd love for you to share it with someone who's ready to begin asking different questions. And if you'd like to explore your own patterns more deeply, I invite you to download the five elements of alignment assessment. It's a beautiful place to begin recognizing the survival patterns that you have quietly been organizing your choices around. I want to leave you with one final thought. Life is not happening to you. Life is happening with you every single moment, every single conversation, every single obstacle, every relationship, even every unexpected turn is another opportunity to become more aware, more present, more aligned. The questions you ask shape the quality of your attention, and your attention shapes your awareness. Your awareness shapes your choices. And your choices become your expression, and your repeated expression becomes the life you experience. So this week, turn on the light, become aware, keep that room inside you open and welcome whatever is trying to emerge. And when life places something unexpected in front of you, pause, feel, come into this present moment with yourself, and then align. And then ask that one question about what's the opportunity? Because awareness reveals, alignment chooses, and creation expresses. And life has been walking beside you this whole time. You are the witness. You shape the field, and the field shapes your life. Until next time, thank you so much for spending this time with me today. My hope is that you leave each episode not with more information, but with greater awareness. Because awareness is where every meaningful change begins. If today's conversation resonated with you, I'd love for you to subscribe, leave a review, and share this episode with someone who's ready to stop surviving and start living from alignment. If you'd like to continue this work, you can join us inside the Aligned Human Project community. Explore the free five-element alignment assessment, or learn more about Align Your Life, Aligned Living, and Alignment Operating System at Practical Spiritualism Co.com. Remember, awareness reveals. You are the witness. You shape the field, and the field shapes your life. Until next time, keep pausing, keep noticing, and keep choosing. I'll see you in the next episode.