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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, my friends, and welcome back to the Aligned Human Project. We've probably spent nine months walking a path together. We started with awareness. Who am I beneath everything I've learned to call me? Then we started to look at conditioning, the beliefs that we inherited, the stories we absorbed, the survival patterns that once protected us, and then quietly began organizing our lives. And over these past few months, we've been exploring alignment, not as something you achieve, but as something that you practice. Who am I practicing becoming? But I've been sitting with a question lately that I think changes the reason we do all of this work. Because when I first began my own healing, I thought healing was a destination. I genuinely believed there would be some magical day when I would arrive. I wouldn't get triggered anymore. I wouldn't doubt myself. I wouldn't fall into those old patterns. I'd have done enough work. Maybe you secretly been waiting for that day too. But somewhere along the way, the question changed for me. You see, I stopped asking, when will I finally be healed? And I started asking a different question. What becomes possible because I'm healing? And that question changed everything. Because suddenly my healing wasn't only about me. It affected my marriage. It affected my children, my friendships, my clients, the people that I lead, even the stranger who happens to encounter me on a difficult day. My inner work changes the experience other people have in my presence. And once I really understood that, healing stopped feeling like an endless project of, you know, fixing myself, quote unquote. And it became capacity, capacity to love differently, to listen differently, to tell the truth differently, and to lead differently, to stay present in moments when an older version of me would have defended, controlled, appeased, maybe shut down, or even walked away. And that's where I want to begin today. Because maybe after nine months of asking who we are and who we're becoming, another question is ready for us. What will our lives leave behind? And I don't mean after we're gone. I mean what gets left behind after a conversation, after a meeting, after dinner with your family, after someone spends an hour in your presence. What remains in the room after you leave it? There's a story I keep thinking about as we enter this next chapter. It's called The Man Who Planted Trees. And it was written by, I think it's Jean Giano. I could be wrong there. And I want to be clear, this is a fictional story. It's a parable, not a historical account. It's about a man named, again, I think it's Elzierde Bouffier, and he lives alone in a barren region of province. And the land around him is desolate. Villages have emptied, and water is scarce. The landscape has been stripped, almost bare. And this man begins doing something incredibly ordinary. He plants acorns, one at a time. He carefully sorts through them, chooses the strongest, walks into the barren landscape and pushes them into the earth. He doesn't have an audience. He isn't launching a movement. Nobody is applauding or even noticing. He isn't even guaranteed that the trees will survive. He simply plants, day after day, year after year, thousands of acorns. And many don't make it, but some do. And slowly, almost imperceptibly, a forest begins to emerge. But here's the part of the story that matters. The trees don't only create trees. As the forest grows, the conditions around it begin to change. The water returns. Wildlife returns. And the air changes. People begin returning to the village and to the villages around that have been abandoned. And life becomes possible where life had been disappearing. One man's quiet, repeated actions changed conditions for people he would never know. And I think that's why the story has stayed with people for generations and with me, because it asks us to reconsider what influence actually looks like. Maybe the most important thing we leave behind isn't our achievement. Maybe it's the conditions our lives helped create. When we hear the word legacy, most of us think about end of life, about history books, buildings with somebody else's name on them. Maybe we think about awards, money that gets left to children, something sufficiently large that the world remembers we were here. But I think that's only one kind of legacy. You see, there's another kind being created in ordinary Tuesday mornings. The way you speak to your partner when you're tired. What happens when your child tells you something you didn't want to hear? How you respond when an employee makes a mistake, whether someone feels they have to manage your emotions before they can tell you the truth. How you treat a person making your coffee, whether you admit when you're wrong, whether your presence creates more room for another person to become themselves or less. You see, those things seem small, but human lives are largely made from really small things. Things about someone who profoundly affected your life. It may not have been the person who gave you the greatest advice. It was maybe someone about whom you felt different. Maybe you felt seen, capable, safe enough to tell the truth. Maybe they believed something about you before you could believe it in yourself. You may not even remember exactly what they said. But you remember who you experienced yourself as in that presence. That's influence. And most of the time we have no idea that it's actually happening in that moment. This is where science and spirituality begin having really interesting conversations. Because human beings don't simply live in environments. We are part of one another's environments. Your nervous system is constantly receiving information. The tone of someone's voice, facial expressions, predictability. Maybe it's threat or connection, whether it's safe to have disagreement, whether belonging feels conditional, whether you need to protect yourself. You see, the brain uses previous experience to anticipate what is likely to happen next. So relationships become part of that learning. And repeated experiences with other humans help shape expectations about what relationships are. Can I tell the truth here? Can I make a mistake? Can I say no? Will you still love me if I disappoint you? Do I have to perform to belong? And those aren't merely intellectual questions. They are sincerely embodied experiences. Research on social connection consistently shows that supportive relationships matter enormously for human well-being. While chronic relational stress can become a significant physiological burden, psychoneuroimmunology takes us even further by studying the communication between psychological processes, the nervous system, the endocrine function, and immune activity. In leadership research, psychological safety gives us another window into that exact same principle. When people believe they can speak honestly, ask questions, admit mistakes, and challenge ideas without being humiliated or punished, different behaviors become possible. More information becomes available. Learning becomes possible. Innovation becomes possible. Repair actually becomes possible. And these may sound like separate fields of study. I don't think they are. I think they're different windows into the same house. Human beings affect the conditions other human beings are living inside. And that means our healing doesn't stay inside of us. Neither does our fear, but neither does our alignment, neither does our survival. So we can carry field into relationships. And relationship is where field becomes form. This is a piece I wish we talked about more. We tend to frame healing as personal liberation. And it is. You suffer less, you understand yourself more, you develop capacity, you stop recreating certain patterns. It is beautiful, but that's not where it ends. I will caveat here that your emotions and your triggers are your problem and they are your responsibility to heal. Someone else's emotions and their triggers is their responsibility to heal. It doesn't mean, though, that we don't have connection and relationship while we're doing this work, which does mean we need to bring in a whole lot of compassion, curiosity, and courage to remain present while we're doing the work. So now imagine you've spent years believing disagreement means rejection. So every time someone disagrees with you, you feel it. You're triggered, your chest tightens, maybe your jaw clenches. You feel the impulse to defend, explain, prove, draw, appease, or attack. And that's contraction. And I want to be really clear about how I use that word because contraction isn't bad. It isn't evidence that you're unhealed. It isn't something you need to spiritually rise above. Contraction is information, not instruction. Something in you perceives a need to protect. The practice isn't to shame that contraction or force yourself into expansion. It's to become present enough to notice it and become curious. What is this trying to protect? And that allows compassion to enter. And does this protection need to choose what I do next? Because now there's a little space, and that space is awareness. And perhaps instead of defending yourself, you stay. Maybe you can listen. You breathe, you get curious, and allow the other person to have an experience that is different from yours without immediately making their difference, mean that you're unsafe. See, something just changed. Not only inside of you, you changed the conditions of that relationship. Your partner just had a different experience of disagreement. Do that repeatedly, and you're creating a whole new relational information. This is what I mean when I say healing expands capacity. And this is also where the actual process of transformation becomes much more practical. Awareness allows me to notice contraction. Release means I don't have to keep gripping the old protection. Rewiring happens when I practice another response. And then expansion becomes increasingly available because I'm no longer organized entirely around defending myself. And embodiment is when that different response begins becoming how I actually live, not simply simply something I have to understand intellectually. So we have the awareness, we release, we rewire, we expand, and then we embody, not as another five-step formula. You have to get perfect, as a movement, as a practice of returning. Because healing isn't the finish line. Healing changes what we become capable of creating. And you can always think of healing as letting go, letting go of whatever's creating that contraction. And this connects to a metaphor I use throughout my work called the room. If this is your first episode, here's what I mean by that. Imagine that somewhere inside of you is a room that began being furnished before you were old enough to consciously choose what went into it. Your family helped furnish it. Culture helped furnish it. Your relationships, your experiences, even experiences you wish witnessed other people having. Things that happened to you and the things that you witnessed in the world around you. Beliefs about love, worth, safety, success, belonging, relationships, and what it meant to be you became the furniture, the decorations. And eventually you lived with that furniture for so long, you really stopped seeing it as furniture. You thought it was simply reality. Or worse, you thought it was you. Awareness is light. And suddenly you can see the room. And once you can see it, you can begin asking, what actually belongs here? Is this mine? What am I ready to release? What needs to move? What was someone else's furniture that I've simply spent my entire life arranging myself around? And here's where this connects to today's conversation. Eventually, we aren't only living inside the room we inherited. We're helping furnish rooms for other people, our partners, our children, our teams, our friends. What are they learning about love in relationship with us? What are they learning about disagreement? About truth, failure, belonging, worth, about the ability to be their authentic self. What are repeated responses teaching them as normal? That's where healing becomes contribution. There's someone I think about when I consider this kind of influence. Fred Rogers. So Mr. Rogers' neighborhood looked almost absurdly simple compared with children's television today. Just one man, a cardigan, and a quiet voice in a neighborhood. I know I'm totally dating myself, but I love this show. Long pauses that television producers would probably be terrified of now. But underneath that simplicity was an incredibly intentional environment. Rogers wasn't merely giving children information. He was creating conditions, slowness, uh, predictability, acceptance. He was giving us emotional language and permission to have difficult feelings without becoming a bad person because you experienced them. He spoke to children as though their interior lives mattered. Think about what that means. Millions of children repeatedly encountered an adult on television who communicated, in essence, you don't have to earn your worth from me. Your feelings can be spoken. You matter before you've achieved anything. Fred Rogers couldn't possibly know what every child did with that experience. He couldn't track every conversation that it influenced, every parent who softened, every child who found language for something very frightening, every adult who decades later remembered what it felt like to be spoken to that way. That's the strange thing about contribution. We rarely get to see where it ends. And maybe, maybe we're not supposed to. Maybe our job isn't to manage the ripple. Maybe our job is to become responsible for what we're putting into the water in the first place. I have been intentionally doing this unlearning work, as I often refer to the healing world, the journey of letting go. I've been doing this work now actively for about 13 years, 14 years, 13 years, somewhere near there. I read my first personal development book, so to speak, or spiritual development book, was The Four Agreements. And I read that about, oh gosh, probably about 17, 18 years ago, it was recommended to me when they thought I had breast cancer, which I didn't. And so that was kind of the beginning of it. But about 13 years ago, I really delved deep into the personal development world. And part of it was I got into a network marketing company. They really encourage you to become a better version of yourself. And I started doing Miracle Mornings. And in Miracle Mornings, um, I was recommended to read the Seven Habits of Highly Effective People. It's by Stephen. Kobe, I think it is. And in there, he um has this practice where you close your eyes and you visualize that you walk into this room and you realize that it's a funeral. And you sit down at the back of the room and you're just listening and watching the people. And someone gets up to speak, and you realize it's your funeral. What do they say? And so you read this, you kind of close your eyes and you walk yourself through it, and it rocked my world. At that time in my life, it was normal for me to work somewhere between 60 and 80 hours a week. I was on multiple boards. Um, I had two kids at home and a hubby that it was my love of my life, still is. Um, and the only thing that I could come up with, oh, it's gonna hurt, was she was a really good worker. And that stopped me in my tracks. Yeah, I was there and yeah, I did all these things, but really it was about like my efforting. And it shook me to the core. That moment was all about leaving a legacy. What is the legacy you're leaving behind? What do you want people to say at your funeral? Every single day that you're alive, you have the ability to shape that. And most of the time, we unconsciously move through our lives, not even thinking about that. And I'm not talking about like, what do people think of me? What do people, you know, say about me, all those things that are very egoic. I'm talking about what we're talking about today. I'm talking about impact. What is the impact I'm having? And I'm and I'm gonna caution this because often, you know, we can struggle. We're in contraction. I have good intentions, you have um, but it has a uh an impact on you. You're triggered. Again, your triggers and your emotions are your responsibility to heal. I'm not into codependent relationships. However, I am responsible for that impact, for bumping into it. And so if you think about you're walking down the street and you bumped into somebody, you'd be like, oh, sorry about that. You know, or even worse, if you bumped into somebody and you knew they were hurt, you'd be like, oh my gosh, I'm so sorry. And yet somehow when we do it emotionally, we kind of defend. Well, I didn't mean to. Why are you being so sensitive? And I've been there too. It's because it's it feels uncomfortable or vulnerable. And you don't want to take responsibility for other people's feelings. It's not natural. But even that moment of, oh, sorry about that. What's what's going on? And then having a conversation and staying present with somebody through the discomfort of their emotions. It doesn't mean we take them on. That's dysfunctional empathy. It's about being present and allowing somebody to have the space to process without turning your back on them or making it about you or leaving them in the cold. It's about being able to stay present with somebody. So that book, that moment, I'll never forget it. I remember sitting at my desk. I remember reading, it was black outside. Miracle Morning was a 5 a.m. start for me, trying to get kind of all these healthy habits in. So wake up one hour earlier. Um, Miracle Morning is written by, I'm blanking on his name, but it'll come to me afterwards. I'll try and put it in the show notes for you. Um, it's uh another great book that I really love. Um and and that moment of legacy was a turning point. You see, that day I walked into the into work and I became really aware of my tone of voice. I became aware that when my teams, you know, made a mistake or screwed up, I watched their body language as they braced. And now, for the most part, in terms of leadership at that time, I was running lighting showrooms. And I was always big on self-responsibility. I was also really big on owning it or protecting my team from someone else. For people to see them as incompetent or judge them. So often I would be quite protective, but I'd rarely admit if I was wrong. And so it was like learning how to lean into the discomfort, as Brene Brown would say, of having to say, I'm sorry, lean into the discomfort of knowing that you've had a negative impact on someone. That moment changed how I saw myself in relationship to the world. That people weren't going to be talking about me based on what I was intentionally doing, on my intentions. They were going to be remembering me based on my impact. When they were speaking, did I listen? Did someone feel completely seen and completely heard in my presence? Can I stay in the uncomfortable silence and just hold that space? It's funny how you remember certain books of in your life or certain people, as I said before, as impact moments. A boss that believed in me long before I believed in myself and completely was a pivot point where my life changed. A book where it impacts you and you start thinking or becoming aware of your impact on everyone else. And it begins the importance of changing, not just for you, but the impact that you're making to everybody else. That book probably has rippled out into every single area of my life. And I will be forever grateful. And it's not that I don't, you know, go into habitual behaviors at times. Of course, there's times I contract, I protect, I get triggered too. But awareness allows us to come to the pause and the healing aspect, the compassion, the clarity, the calm, far faster. And from there we can go back in and have difficult conversations and have humility and really change other people's experiences of us. The point isn't to say, look, how I'm healed I am. The point is an old pattern doesn't have to continue through one more relationship, or maybe every relationship. See, maybe healing isn't complete when the wound stops hurting. Maybe healing becomes contribution when someone else no longer has to live inside the conditions that wound once created. The five elements helps us have another beautiful language for this because each of the elements asks, what are you cultivating? Wood creates direction. When wood is aligned, the people around us can experience clarity, movement, possibility. And fire creates connection. So aligned fire brings warmth, expression, and the experience of being met. And then earth nourishes. So aligned earth creates conditions where people can receive, belong, and be supported without becoming dependent. And metal creates discernment. Aligned metal gives us boundaries, integrity, and the willingness to release what no longer serves the whole. And then water creates depth. Aligned water makes room for stillness, wisdom, restoration, and the unknown. And we contain all five. Our work isn't simply to figure out which one we are, it's developing the capacity to recognize what this moment requires. Because other people experience our elements too. Wood can become direction or pressure. Fire can become warmth or overwhelm. Earth can become nourishment or overfunctioning. Metal can become discernment or it can become rigidity. And water can become wisdom or withdrawal. That's field becoming form. And this is where alignment becomes relational. Not am I being spiritual, but what does my way of being create around me? And underneath all of this is another relationship that I've been thinking about even more deeply. And that's the relationship between what we call the divine feminine and the divine masculine. Now, this isn't a gender. This is not men versus women. I'm talking about two movements of creation that exist within all of us. There are moments when life asks us to listen, to receive, to allow, to intuit, to surrender, create spaciousness for something we cannot yet see. And there are moments when life asks us to choose, to discern, to structure, to act, to protect, bring something into form. And we need both. The feminine without the masculine can remain possibility without embodiment. And the masculine without the feminine can become force, regression. And perhaps alignment is learning to harmonize them, to listen before we act, to act when action is required, and to surrender what isn't ours to control without abandoning what is ours to choose. Field and form, being and doing, receiving and creating, not opposites, but partners. And this is why I increasingly think about leadership as environmental. Vision matters. Strategy matters. Execution absolutely matters. But human beings have to live inside the conditions where all of that happens. Every leader creates an emotional environment. Every parent does too. Every teacher, every clinician, every partner, every human being, really. So what happens when somebody brings you bad news? What happens when someone challenges you? What happens when you're disappointed? What happens when you're under pressure? What happens when somebody needs something you don't have the capacity to give? See, those moments teach people what the environment actually values. Not the mission statement, not the family motto, not what we say we believe, experience. Repeated experience becomes expectation. Expectation influences behavior. Behavior repeated across groups becomes culture. And culture becomes part of the room someone else eventually inherits. Think about that. Something that began as your unconscious contraction can eventually become someone else's furniture. And something you become conscious enough to release doesn't have to. That's why this work matters beyond us. When field and form increasingly match, when what we say we value resembles what we actually behave or how we actually behave, particularly under pressure, people experience coherence, and coherence creates trust. That's the architecture of trust. Trust changes what becomes possible between human beings. So here's what I'd love for you to practice this week. Before you enter one meaningful space, pause. Your office, your home, um, a meeting, whether that is business or personal meeting, whether it's dinner with your family, a different a difficult conversation, a a client session. Before you walk in, take one slow breath and come back to center. And then ask yourself, what conditions do I want to help create here? Not how do I control what happens? Not how do I get everybody to like me? And not how do I make this go perfectly? What conditions do I want to contribute? Who do I want to be in this situation? Do I want to contribute to honesty? Maybe curiosity? Maybe it's courage, compassion, maybe it's spaciousness, maybe it's clarity, and then enter. At the end, don't ask, was I perfect? When you're leaving, I want you to ask, what became more possible because of how I showed up. You may not know the answer, and that's okay. The man planting the acorn didn't know either. So plant away. Maybe this is what all of this practice is really giving us. Not control over life, not life being predictable. See, people aren't predictable. Relationships aren't always calm. And the world out there is not always peaceful. And if my peace depends upon life becoming peaceful first, I'm gonna spend a very long time waiting and being disappointed. The practice is learning to return to center while life is still moving, to become, in some sense, the eye of the storm. Not numb, definitely not detached, but present, grounded enough that when contraction comes, I can notice it without immediately becoming it. And from that center, different capacities become available. Calm, uh, clarity, curiosity, courage, confidence, connection, even creativity, the eight C's of the higher self. Not because we forced ourselves to become those things. Because when we aren't using all of our energy protecting ourselves from the storm, there is more of us available to meet it. And maybe this is where healing begins moving towards something even deeper: self-realization, the gradual disentanglement of who we truly are from everything we've learned to identify as ourselves. The witness becomes easier to recognize. The room becomes something we can observe rather than something we unconsciously mistake for ourselves. We can be in this world without every movement of the world deciding who we are. And from there, the question changes again. We began this year asking, who am I? And then why am I like this? And then who am I practicing becoming? And now, what becomes possible because of who I'm becoming? That's the threshold we're standing on. Because every day we're creating something, a conversation, a relationship, a family culture, a workplace, an emotional environment, a memory. Maybe eventually we're creating a movement. We don't get to control exactly what grows from any of that, but we do get to participate in the conditions. And if the room is new language for you, or you've heard me mention it, but you've never really explored the teaching, I want you to go back to watch the teaching on the room, or listen to it. I'll link it in the show notes. And if you're watching this on YouTube, you'll find it below as well. Start there because once you can see the room, so much of what we've been talking about today begins to make sense. And if this conversation has brought up some contractions in your body, I've also linked my heart coherence meditation. Don't just think your way through this work. Let your body participate too. And maybe this episode isn't one you keep to yourself. Send it to someone you genuinely like to have this conversation with. Maybe it's your partner, maybe it's a friend, maybe it's someone you work with. And instead of talking about the weather or what everybody's doing this weekend or talking about someone else, maybe you ask each other what becomes possible for the people around us because of who we are becoming. Those are the conversations I think we're actually hungry for, not more attachment created through shared fear, scarcity, gossip, or outrage, deeper connection, curiosity, truth, presence, the conversations that actually help us grow and get to know one another more deeply. And of course, this conversation is deeply connected to the work inside Align Your Life. The book takes you much deeper into field and form and the 12 laws of co-creation, not simply as ideas to understand, but practices to live. You can find out more about the book and access to the book portal through my website. And you can purchase Align Your Life through Amazon and other retailers. And please check your local bookstore as well. And if you already have your copy, make sure you use the companion library alongside it. Don't just read the ideas, practice them. Because knowledge is rumor until it's embodied. Because awareness changes what becomes available. Practice changes what becomes embodied, and embodiment changes what becomes possible. Next week, we're beginning a new chapter inside of the Aligned Human Project. We're moving into what I'm calling the architecture of creation. And I want to be really clear. We're not spending the next few months talking about how to manifest harder at all. We're going to explore conscious participation. And we're beginning with the realization that I think changes the entire conversation. See, you are already creating. So if you've been walking this journey with me, make sure you're subscribed because these conversations are intentionally building upon one another. We're not just collecting episodes. We're building something together. I want to leave you with that image of a man walking through a barren land with a pocket full of acorns. He couldn't command a forest into existence. He couldn't guarantee rain. He couldn't control what seeds survived. He couldn't know who might someday sit beneath the shade of a tree he planted. He could only tend his part. And maybe that's enough. Maybe the world doesn't need more of us trying to become extraordinary. Maybe it needs more of us becoming conscious of what we're planting in our homes, in our relationships, in our workplaces, our communities, in our own bodies. Because you may never know every life your life touches. You may never see every ripple. And you certainly won't control what happens after you leave. But you can become responsible for what you're putting into the field. So maybe the question isn't only what will my life leave behind. Maybe an even deeper question is what becomes possible in the field because of the way I chose to be here? That's a question worth living. Remember, you are the witness. You shape your field. And your field shapes your life. 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.