ACTualized Living W/ Erik

Alright, welcome to this week's livestream video. I'm excited to see you all and connect here for just a bit here this Friday. I hope you're all doing well. I know I am. This week it's starting to get a little bit chilly and remind me of the winter season coming up and so preparing myself mentally and physically for that to come. Hopefully you got a chance to watch the video I released earlier this week. And if you didn't, I really encourage you to go check it out either after this live stream or maybe you're watching this live stream after, after I've already gone off and maybe hit pause and go watch that here before going forward.

But last week I introduced this idea that maybe our idea, our perspective of what it means to be, well, could use some adjustment. Often we frame wellness in the perspective of being without something or with something or having a certain feeling or emotion constantly present in our lives. And unfortunately, that can just lead us to more turmoil, feelings of stuckness, difficulty, knowing which way we're headed in this life and often feels out of reach. And so today, just want to put forth an extra step into what maybe a different idea of wellness can look like.

And I'm going to do it using these two pens here. And so I've got a little exercise that if you have a few pens in your area. Thanks, Luke, for the fashion comment. I've noticed I've been wearing this hat in like three videos, so you'll see this often, I guess. But I got these two pens here, and if you have two pens somewhere nearby you, I'll encourage you to grab a couple as well and join along with me here. Because from my perspective and my experience, rather than our source of being unwell, being the fact that we have these thoughts, feelings, things that don't feel so comfortable all the time.

But it's our relationship to them, how we allow them to dictate our decision makings and what we choose to do in our life. And so if you have these two pens here, I'm going to have you put a pen in your right hand. We'll start with your right hand. And in this right hand, this pen is going to represent your struggle. Right? So the things we hold on to, our anxieties, our worries, our pain, our discomfort, these things that we just really don't want in our lives. Or maybe it's a memory or experience or something that makes us feel like we're on the outside or other.

And I want you to grip this pen with all the strength and tightness and emotion that we hold closely to that real struggle we have. And so if you're holding this pen, anything like me right now, you should have a fairly tight grip around that sucker. Like so tight, almost like you could, you know, smash it into oblivion, right? Which is often what we want to do with these parts of ourselves. And now what I want you to do is I want you to look around and see something that you should typically be able to pick up with this hand, right?

And now, without moving anything about your hand holding on just as tightly. And maybe it's even starting to become a little uncomfortable. Now, I want you to try to pick that thing up. So for me, I have a little tissue box over here. You might not be able to see it, but I'm going to try to pick that thing up and I can maneuver it around. But let's be honest, it's impossible. Holding tightly onto my struggles, it's hard to do anything or focus on anything else. We're going to switch pace here. I'm going to encourage you to look at your other pen here.

And this pen represents the same exact thing, right? Still your struggle, still the same exact things. But this time, instead of holding it tightly in our palm, we're just going to let it sit there and be there. We haven't changed anything about what it is or whether or not it's with us. It's there, but we're going to change our relationship to it. How much we allow it to get in the way of us being able to take action. And so now with this pen loosely in your grip, and you're able to kind of move it around, do what you need to do.

I want you to find that same object that you couldn't pick up before and try to pick it up pretty easy. Now, this example may feel silly, may feel obvious, but the deeper point here is when we're constantly fighting to extinguish ourselves from what is natural and human struggle, pain, anxiety, so on and so forth, when we try to fight those things out of ourselves, it just ends up consuming all of our energy and attention, taking it away from our ability to actually take action in our life. Actualized change the name of this live the reason I'm here actualized change comes first when we're willing to loosen our grip a little bit.

Thank you all for being here. I appreciate the comments and engagements. Good to see you, Luke. And we've got some other people here as well. And so nice to see you all. Thank you for joining in and tune in next week, I've got a video coming that is a pre recorded video where we're going to explore the five reasons we should change the medical model of wellness. And so some interesting stuff to dig into there. And once again, I'll be going live next Friday around this time to catch back up with you all.

So thank you. Take care. Enjoy the beautiful weather. Bye.