The “Aha!” Moment That Saved Me From Flying Over the Cuckoo’s Nest

Have you ever reached a point in your life where you had lost hope? Where you felt so deep down in the gutters that even some uplifting news wasn’t enough to get you out of the hole?

I’ve been there and I can tell you from experience that there is never enough uplifting news to get you out of that kind of dark place.

What it does take however, is a total shift in consciousness – a paradigm shift.

One of my greatest shifts in perception actually happened during a corporate sales training seminar with Blair Singer. It helped me tame one of my darkest “inner dragons”.

In 1977 a chemist by the name of Ilya Prigogine won a Nobel Prize for his studies on the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics. Just, stay with me for a sec.

All it says, for example, is when a tree falls into the forest it will eventually rot and decay. Over time it will fall apart and its structure will go into more and more disorder – or chaos. So the 2nd law states that when things are left alone in our universe it will eventually go into disorder and chaos. Things fall apart, and ultimately crumble and fall. Get it?

However, further studies showed that nature actually creates order out of what appears to be chaos.

If you take any organism and pass energy through it, it will take that energy in and pass it out. Any organism does this. Simple right?

But an interesting thing happens when we start adding more and more energy to it. The organism becomes overloaded and over “pressured”. It’s called “perturbation” in physics. Perturbation is basically upsetting the status quo of a system.

Prigogine found that as you increase the energy, or pressure, you begin to exceed it’s ability to hold that energy and it begins to vibrate.

Have you ever had too much to handle?  Too much stress and problems to deal with? Have you ever been perturbed? Or felt like you had so much pressure that your head was about to explode?

As the pressure increases, an organism vibrates until it gets to a point where it seems it can’t take any more. But under the right conditions something amazing happens!

And this is what Prigogine won the Nobel Prize for:

When the organism appears to reach it’s threshold, it vibrates as if it’s going to blow. It pauses for a moment and then BANG! …But, it doesn’t blow.

It actually changes and EVOLVES into a more complex structure that is able to handle the extra pressure.

Remember your teenage dramas? Maybe, maybe not. But I bet they’re not as horrible as they seemed back then. And I bet your headaches and problems that you had many years ago are nothing compared to the challenges you face more recently, right?

Problems never go away, it’s a part of life. As someone once told me, the only people that have no problems are dead!

How we choose to perceive those hardships is what makes all the difference.

Have you ever met anyone who seems to have the same problems reoccurring in their life? Sometimes adversity and hardship can be so unbearable that we choose to run away from it, or not to completely deal with it.

The thing is, when we don’t evolve and grow, we’re only capable of handling so much “pressure”. Our threshold never increases.

Imagine a 30 year old with the emotional threshold of a teenager! This happens because of failing to face and overcome major adversities! Some people live such comfortable lives that there’s no opportunities for quantum leaps in growth.

This realization was a major “aha-moment” for me. My consciousness radically shifted and my life changed forever. It was the perception change I needed to have the courage to face my “inner dragons”.

The great thing about paradigm shifts is that they don’t happen gradually. Unlike our mental conditioning or programming that took years to develop in our unconscious, “aha-moments” are instant.

Now whenever I’m faced with challenges or hardships, I remind myself that it’s perturbation. It means growth and liberation is on the other side. The saying, “no pain, no gain”, really has meaning here.

Push through the pain! It can be the most unbearable thing for you in that particular moment. But what doesn’t kill you truly does make you stronger!

Take the tree that fell in the forest, for example. It sinks into the soil, decays, and under the pressure of the earth, over time, turns into coal. Under even more pressure and over time it can turn into a diamond. Something much more complex, much stronger, and able to sustain huge amounts of pressure.

So it has been scientifically proven that the way nature evolves, (transformational growth), is under pressure. It’s by overloading thresholds. This is how we grow!

Is it any different from working out at the gym, pumping our muscles to the point of exhaustion in order to build them? Or taking classes and learning new things until our minds feel like they’re going to melt in the process of developing them? This is the way nature works. It’s only human nature that tends to run from the process, because it hurts our emotional egos so much.

People want to grow in all aspects of life. But the process of perturbation is a major crossroads for most people! Here’s why:

As an organism starts to evolve, it releases energy. It’s a natural chemical reaction usually in the form of heat. But, when humans release energy it’s usually in the form of EMOTIONS.

And since pressure usually invokes stress, the emotions that are released are things like fear, anger, frustration, etc.

We’re not generally taught how to deal with this kind of emotional expression, cause it’s perceived as negative. So we’re conditioned to suppress it, deny it and look down on it, instead of properly expressing it and understanding how to use it.

If we don’t allow the emotion to release, it’s like stunting the process of growth or natural evolution.

This “aha!” moment was probably the most significant breakthrough in perception of my whole life!

I no longer viewed problems and hardships as negative. Instead, I began actively looking for the lesson in it. And when I couldn’t find one, (which happens more than I want), I “trusted” that I’d get through it and would be able to “connect the dots” or understand it later.

This change in perception has even been a major breakthrough in my marriage. It’s most likely the same reason why 50% of marriages actually make it!

Whenever my wife and I have our “heated debates”, we’ll actually interrupt our negative pattern and celebrate! Yeah, we’ll actually celebrate, and even slap each other a high-5, cause we KNOW something good is coming!

I can’t tell you how many times this has proven to be completely 100% true!

Understanding the natural process of “perturbation” is the key to overcoming hardships, whether they’re in our personal lives or professional lives.

Haven’t you noticed that whenever you’ve successfully overcome major adversity, others hardships don’t seem as tough anymore?

If we don’t tame this “dragon” within us, one of two things will happen:

Either we’ll store up all that suppressed pressure until we do BLOW UP and crack. Or we’ll keep having to face reoccurring patterns and challenges in our lives that are limited to our emotional threshold.

In nature, change is constant. We’re either growing or withering away. We can choose not to deal with “pressure”, but remember that the 2nd law will then take over – disorder and chaos.

Prigogine had an astonishing second finding that was part of his Nobel laureate. It has to do with what happens when an organism finally evolves that is totally unpredictable!

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