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Today is a super special day for me. As this episode is being released, I'm celebrating my 51st trip around the sun. In fact, if everything has gone according to plan, I'm spending today walking through Stonehenge and Avonbury on a spiritual pilgrimage. Places where humans have been gathering for thousands of years to ask some of the biggest questions, such as: who are we? Why are we here? How do we live in harmony with something greater than ourselves? As I thought about recording today's episode before leaving, I couldn't think of a more fitting conversation. Because birthdays naturally invite reflection. Not just on what we've accomplished, but also on who we've become. And perhaps an even better question: who are we still becoming? Today I want to invite you to one of the most compassionate shifts I've ever experienced. A shift that transformed the way I look at healing, at relationships, leadership, and even my own past. Because I no longer ask, how do I fix this? I ask, what created the conditions that made this necessary? That one question has changed my life. And I have a feeling it just might change yours too. 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. First of all, thank you. Whether you've been listening since the beginning or you've recently joined this community, thank you. Thank you for walking this journey with me. Birthdays have a way of slowing us down. They remind us that life isn't measured only by time. It's measured by awareness, by presence, by the courage to keep becoming more fully ourselves. As I walk through ancient sacred places today, I'm reminded of something that has become clear to me with every passing year. Healing isn't about becoming someone else. It's about remembering what has always been true beneath everything we've learned to carry. Over the past few weeks, we've been exploring the invisible field that shapes our lives. We've discovered that our thoughts don't exist in isolation. They're reporting something. We've explored the law of coherence, how our beliefs, our thoughts, emotions, our nervous system, body, and consciousness continually interact to create a field from which our lives are expressed. And today I'd like to take one final step, just a little bit deeper, because understanding the field naturally leads to one question What created the field in the first place? The answer isn't your thoughts, the answer isn't your behavior. The answer isn't even your personality. The answer is meaning. Meaning creates belief. Belief creates the field. The field creates the conditions, and the conditions produce the symptoms. And the symptoms always point us back to the meaning. That single progression has become one of the foundational teachings of my work because it changes the way we see ourselves. Instead of asking what's wrong with me, we begin asking what happened to me, what happened that made this response make perfect sense. That question doesn't create excuses, it creates compassion. And compassion is the doorway to awareness. One of the greatest misunderstandings of personal growth is the belief that we have to fight our symptoms. We fight anxiety, we fight scarcity, we fight burnout, we fight people pleasing, we fight perfectionism, we fight ourselves. But here's what I've learned. Symptoms are intelligent. They didn't appear by accident. Nothing happened to you. They emerged because at some point in your life they solved a problem. Perfectionism may have protected you from criticism. People pleasing may have helped you stay connected. Hypervigilance may have helped you anticipate danger. Those strategies were not flaws. They were adaptions. They were the best answers your younger self could find with the awareness and the resources available at that time. That realization changes everything. Because the moment we understand that our symptoms once served a purpose, shame begins to dissolve and curiosity takes its place. And curiosity changes the quality of our attention. Instead of trying to eliminate the symptom, we become curious enough to understand the field that created it. That is where transformation begins. One of the most remarkable things we've learned from neuroscience and psychology is that the brain is fundamentally a meaning-making organ. It isn't simply recording events. It's continually asking questions such as, what does this mean? Or what does this say about me? What should I expect next? And those interpretations shape our internal models of the world. Over time, repeated meanings become beliefs. And beliefs influence what we notice. They influence what we expect. They influence how our nervous system prepares for the future. They even influence which thoughts arise automatically. And this is why two people can experience remarkably similar circumstances and carry completely different realities. The event is not the whole story. The meaning assigned to the event becomes the architecture from which the rest of the story is built. And that architecture can change, not because we erase the past, because awareness gives us the freedom to assign a new relationship to it. And that's the beginning of liberation. Not changing history, changing the field from which history continues to be lived. Let's imagine that two children standing side by side, they experience the same event, the same classroom, the same teacher, the same words. One child walks away thinking, I'll work harder next time. The other walks away believing I'm not smart enough. The same event with a completely different meaning. Now, fast forward twenty years. One person approaches new opportunities with curiosity. The other hesitates, overthinks, second guesses themselves, and quietly believes they're going to fail before they've even begun. What changed? Not the event, the meaning. That's why I say events shape us, but meaning organizes us. And once meaning becomes repeated, it becomes a belief. And repeated beliefs become the lens through which we see ourselves. The lens becomes so familiar that eventually we stop seeing the lens. We simply call it my personality. I'm just an anxious person. Oh, I'm just a perfectionist. I'm just the responsible one. I'm just independent or hyper-independent. I'm just not good with money. No, those are not identities. Those are adaptions that have been practiced so many times, they feel automatic. That is one of the most liberating realizations I've ever had. Because if personality is largely practiced, then personality can be transformed. Not by rejecting it, by understanding it. Memory is one of the most misunderstood functions of the human brain. Many of us imagine memory as a filing cabinet. We assume we can store an experience exactly as it happened. Then, whenever we need it, we simply pull the file out. But that's not how memory works. Every time we remember something, we're reconstructing it. The brain doesn't retrieve a new recording, it rebuilds the experience using pieces of memory, emotion, present context, and current beliefs. That's one of the reasons two siblings can remember the same childhood totally differently. Their experiences weren't identical because their meaning wasn't identical. This matters because it means the past isn't only stored events. It's carried in interpretation. And interpretation can change. Not because we deny what happened, not because we rewrite history, but because we become aware of the meaning we've been carrying forward. This is one of the reasons practices like contemplation or mindfulness, therapy, somatic work, tapping, hypnosis, journaling, and intentional reflection can be so transformative. They don't erase the past, but they do create enough safety for us to revisit old meanings, but with new awareness. And when a meaning changes, our beliefs begin to shift. And when a belief shifts, the field changes. When the field changes, the conditions change. That is the architecture of transformation. So as you probably have heard me talk about, I like to do some brain dumping in the morning and I often will ask a question. Now, a year ago, the question that I would ask is, or the request was, trigger me. And I've softened it off a bit because it was getting a little intense. But the point was I wanted to be triggered so that I could see what I needed to release next. This year I've been a little gentler. So I often ask within my brain dumping, what do I need to let go of next? What's standing in my way from becoming the greatest version of myself, from self-realization? What's standing in my way from whatever is coming next? Show me. And I like the show me prayer. It's gentle, but it's loving, and it makes us stay aware of what's happening in the day. Instead of looking at the day as a series of things that's happening to us that we have no control over, it's a reminder that there's active participation. It's also a reminder that we're always being answered. So a few weeks back, I was talking with some friends and I'd made a point comment about not knowing who my father was and that there had been this one person that my mom had said was my father when I was a child. My mom passed last year. And then there's this other person, they have the same name, who my entire family says is my birth father. And so we were discussing this. I had made a comment about who this person was. And a friend of mine was like, Oh, I know who that is. I used to work for the company. Anyways, she ended up giving me his last name and we started talking about it and we discussed about reaching out. And I was like, Yeah, I'm not, I'm not gonna reach out. And I have my reasons, and a lot of it's because I don't really feel a reason to disrupt somebody's life. And I just said, you know what, I'm just gonna absorb it and we'll see what comes. I'm not gonna make any hard or fast rules, but at this time I'm not reaching out. And she assumed that the reason was a fear of rejection, which is a fair reason to come up with. So we go forward. I'm working with uh counselor, uh psychotherapist, Carol Look. Um, she's fantastic. You can find her on YouTube. And she uh does tapping and she's magnificent. So we're doing some work. I'm working on a block or a sabotaging behavior with my work. And she says to me, Do you think that it's a fear of rejection? And I'm like, why are you bringing this up? And I'm like the second person to say this to me. So she's like, What do you mean? I tell her about what was going on about discovering, you know, the name and and the whereabouts of the potential birth father. And we start talking about it. And she's like, Well, do you think it is a fear of rejection? I'm like, I don't think so. Like, it doesn't feel like it's coming up, but let's go ahead. So we start doing some tapping on it, and it's not coming up as a trigger. And so a couple things happen and a couple of words are used, and all of a sudden I'm like, oh, that was something. She's like, What is it? And I'm like, there's a feeling of shame. And so as we keep tapping, we finally the words come up and I say illegitimacy. And she's like, What? And I'm like, it's it's about being illegitimate. Anyways, we go back and we realize there's some terms that were used that we would never use in this world, in in this time. And there are words and language that we used probably in the 70s and 80s and earlier, things like illegitimate bastard. So not really uh complementary terms. And so for a child to come up with that term means it was probably overheard. And so when we were going back into it, it was about releasing this feeling of shame and embarrassment around my um my coming into this world, around, you know, my being born out of not just born out of wedlock, it's it's a whole story that is uh my mom's story and and and how I came forward. So as I was working through this, I was like, oh yeah, like I have a lot of shame about being illegitimate. And so this fear, and when I pull back and and uh we tap through it and lots of shame, lots of guilt, lots of emotions come up over the next few days. And I'm working through it. I do all the work I give you guys is the work that I do with myself. So I'm really trying to work through this a lot of compassion for myself, a lot of compassion for my mom, a lot of compassion for my potential birth um father. And so as I'm moving through this though, I'm chatting with my business partner and good friend, and I'm telling her about my week because it'd be a pretty emotionally raw week. And as we're talking about it, she says, Oh, well, that makes sense why you always are like collecting certifications. And I'm like, Well, what do you mean? And she said, Well, of course, because you're trying to be legitimate. And I was stunned because I hadn't even thought about it. I had always assumed that my striving to learn was two things. One, I have a voracious appetite for learning and understanding myself. I love human behavior, I love understanding why we do what we do. I like to understand it. I like to help other people understand themselves because there's a freedom in that and it fills me up. I love my work. And so here I'm thinking, okay, well, I love learning. And I'm like, but I also knew that a big chunk of, you know, having certifications was to say that I had certifications, which I thought a lot of it was about feeling insecure about, you know, being uh I moved out from my home when I was 15 years out old and I dropped out of school. I went back to school and did education, but you know, I always had this insecurity that I didn't go to university when I was a kid, and I was always felt like I was less than. And part of that's because we learned that in school. We learned that, you know, if you want to be something in this world, you need to go to university. And so it really, really was hard for me. So, and and I say that to you as a person that owns a clinic, that has highly educated people all around me, and a business partner that also has a voracious appetite for education and learning and words. And, you know, we talk about it all the time. But it was interesting to me that when I got here, because we're talking about meaning making. So the point was is that here I was, this little child that had made meaning about the words that she was hearing. Some of those words were said to me. And the meaning that I took from that is I was less than. I was less than because I didn't have two parents. I also went to a school where I was the only child for a long time that didn't have two parents. And after a while, there was one other girl. So there's only two of us that only have single moms in the whole school. So I think I'm I'm in school in elementary school in, I would probably have started school about 1980 and going through elementary school in the 80s. And so here I'm I've got this meaning, though, that I've made about my value, about whether or not I'm worthy of showing up in this world. I share that with you because here I'm thinking that I'm doing my education one because I love it and certifications and because it helps people, which is true, but there was a deeper driving meaning that was coming up with it. See, the issue wasn't about learning. The issue wasn't actually even about ambition. The issue wasn't discipline, the issue was meaning. The meaning attached to being an illegitimate child. That meaning quietly organized decades of striving. Not because I consciously chose it, because it became part of the field that I was living from. The beautiful thing is when that showed up, it wasn't shame that I felt anymore, it was relief. Because suddenly there was nothing wrong with me. Everything started to make some sense. See, the behavior appeared admirable, and my awareness uncovered the deeper meaning. And the meaning had been organizing my personality for decades. And because of that, compassion replaced the self-criticism. The moment meaning became visible, freedom became possible. The greatest breakthroughs rarely happen because we discover something new. They happen because something we've been carrying finally starts to make sense. I'd like to take us back into the room one more time. So, first, if you are new and you haven't heard me talk about the room, the room is how I describe the space that's within side of us. So think of it as the field of mind, but more. So inside of us, each of us is born with a room. And we we inherit items into this room, things that are passed down to us. Kind of like when you move out into your first apartment and your parents give you maybe their old cutlery, their old dishes, some old furniture, and we start building our first place. With you stuff. And this room's a lot like that. We inherit things through epigenetics and ancestry. We carry and start building our room up from meaning making. So we start to develop our beliefs from experiencing the world around us, but through the perception, the lens of a child. And we store and we we put all this stuff into our room to furnish it. And then as life goes on, we just start to dump things in the room, kind of like a teenager who just like throws their clothes all over the place. And when we ask them to clean it up, they just shove it under the bed. So that's a lot what this room's like, though. Somebody hurts you at work, toss it in the room. You feel like you were criticized, toss it in the room. You had a bad breakup, heartache, toss it in the room. You were embarrassed or humiliated, toss it in the room. And you'll throw some good things in there too, some good memories, but we just keep filling stuff up into this room. We don't really pay attention to it. We don't question it. We just keep tossing stuff in the room. And then one day, for some reason, whether that's a podcast, a book, uh, a TV show, a spiritual teacher, a coach, a counselor, anything, somebody suddenly helps us. Hey, did you know there's a light switch? And when you flick the light on, the light is awareness. Light is pure information. That's why source, God, mother, father, God, source, whatever you want to call it, is pure light, the highest vibration of light. And that's where we come from, each of us a divine spark. And so we flick on the light that is awareness, and suddenly we can see the room. Up until now, it's just been shadows. This is why a lot of people, they don't want to meditate, they don't want to know what's inside. But that's your purpose, your intrinsic purpose. So here we are, we have this room. You open the door, you flick on the light, and you go, holy shit, this thing is chaos. If you're me, I turned on this light just before I turned 40. So I had 40 years of accumulated garbage in this room, and I look like a freaking hoarder. And I'm like, I, that is too much. So many of us close the door and maybe you pour a glass of wine. And you can't really ignore it though. The room's there. You're never going to be able to undo it. So you always know it. And no amount of drinking or numbing is going to change this. The only way to get through this is to open the door and start dealing with it. No different than any other type of spring cleaning. So you can imagine now it's time. And so we start opening this room and we need to start going through each item. And the question I ask you to think about when you pull out a belief or you pull out a memory, you pull out an emotion of shame or pain. And you're like, I, you know, well, I got to keep this because it protects me. I only want you to ask yourself one question. Does this spark joy? That one question will tell you whether or not it really should stay in the room or not. So I'm coming at bringing us back into this room. And I'll be using this analogy pretty much every week. So now imagine you're cleaning and the filing cabinet is getting lighter. The thermostat has been adjusted. The room is beginning to breathe again. Then in the corner, you notice an old pair of glasses. You've been wearing them for so long, you forgot they were there. So you take them off. And for the first time, you realize they weren't actually helping you see the world. They were coloring the world. Every person, every opportunity, every challenge, every relationship, filtered through the lenses you didn't even know you were wearing. Meaning is like that. Meaning becomes the lens. Beliefs keep polishing the lenses, and eventually we stop questioning whether they're accurate. We simply assume that that's what reality looks like. Awareness is the moment we remove the glasses. Not because the world changes, because we finally see more clearly. The world isn't always asking us to change what we're looking at. Sometimes it's inviting us to change what we're looking through. So if beliefs are lenses and if awareness allows us to remove the lenses, how do we begin living from a field that reflects who we truly are rather than who survival taught us to become? That is where I'd like to leave you today. The more I understand this work, the more convinced I become that every leader is a meaning maker. Every parent, every teacher, every coach, every manager, every partner. Whether we realize it or not, we're constantly helping people assign meaning to their experiences. Imagine a child making a mistake. One adult says, What's wrong with you? Well, the another says, What can we learn from this? It is the same event, completely different meaning. One creates shame, and the other creates growth. Now imagine a leader responding to failure. One creates fear, and the other creates psychological safety. One teaches people to hide their mistakes, and the other teaches people to learn from them. Culture isn't built through policy. Culture is built through repeated meaning. The stories a family repeats becomes the family's field. The stories a team repeats becomes the team's field. The stories society repeats becomes its culture. That's why conscious leadership begins with conscious meaning. Because the meaning we consistently create becomes the field everyone around us begins living inside. I'd like to leave you with a practice that may become one of the most powerful that you've ever done. Slow it down, breathing into your pelvis, slowly letting it out, and bring to mind one pattern you've been trying to change. Maybe that pattern is perfectionism. Maybe it's people pleasing. Maybe it's overworking. Maybe it's constantly feeling like you're behind. Now ask yourself, what symptom am I trying to fix? And I want you to just write it down, whether on paper or on your phone, and then ask what belief makes this symptom feel necessary? Don't force the answer. I just want you to stay curious. Come into the quiet and then ask what meaning gave birth to that belief. Now, if a memory comes, I want you to welcome it. If an emotion comes, I want you to welcome it. If nothing comes, that is completely okay as well. Simply remain present. Stay present in your body, present with the breath, present with the question. And then ask the question that changes everything. If that meaning no longer organized my field, how would I naturally think? How would I naturally feel? How would I naturally lead? How would I naturally love? Who would naturally emerge? Notice what happened? You didn't force a new personality. You simply gave your deepest nature room to breathe. That is alignment. As I walk through Stonehenge today, I'll probably spend a lot of time thinking about time, about the generations who stood there before us, the generations who will come after us. And one thought keeps returning. Every generation inherits something. They inherit stories, beliefs, ways of seeing the world. And some of those gifts serve us beautifully. Some quietly ask to be transformed. I don't believe we're here to reject the past. I believe we're here to redeem it, to honor the people who came before us by refusing to pass forward the suffering they unknowingly pass to us. That doesn't dishonor our ancestors. I think it fulfills their deepest hope. Because if they could stand behind us today, I don't believe they'd ask us to carry their fear or their shame or their scarcity or their grief. I think they'd gently smile and say, you can let go of that now. That's what healing looks like. Not carrying the filing cabinet another generation, not handling the thermostat to your children, not passing the glasses onto the next person in line. Healing is the sacred act of letting go, putting down what no longer belongs to you, so that what continues through you is wisdom, its compassion, its presence, and its love. That is how we honor truly the past, not by recreating it, by transforming our relationship with it. This week I invite you to become a student of meaning. Not just your thoughts, not just your emotions, meaning. Every single time you notice a familiar pattern, pause and then ask, what meaning have I been living from? And then ask, is this meaning still worthy of organizing my life? Does it spark joy? If the answer is no, take one slow breath. Thank the younger version of yourself who created it, and lovingly choose again. If today's conversation resonated with you, share it with someone who's been carrying a story for far too long. Maybe they don't need another strategy. Maybe they need permission to see their stories with new eyes. And if you'd like to go deeper, download the five elements of alignment assessment and continue exploring the patterns that have quietly been shaping your field. I want to leave you with this. Your life is not being created by one thought or one event or one decision. Your life is being cultivated through the meaning you consistently allow to organize your field. Compassion opens awareness, and awareness reveals the meaning. Meaning creates belief. Belief recreates the field, and the field creates the conditions. And those conditions produce the symptoms. And the symptoms point us back to the meaning. There's your circle. So alignment changes the field. Creation changes the experience. That's the journey. Not becoming someone new. Remembering who you were before survival convinced you to become someone else. Because you are the witness. The room can be emptied. The filing cabinet can be emptied and tossed. The thermostat can be reset. The glasses can come off, the garden can flourish. And the mountain of self-realization that we're climbing is climbed one conscious choice at a time. You shape your field. Your 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. Alignment chooses, and creation follows. 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.