Apologies my friend, I thought I had scheduled this to be sent on Friday.

I must’ve forgotten to hit schedule or something.

Here it is:

You lose 12 years of your childhood sitting in a box.

You spend 4 years in an expensive box.

You waste 40 years in a really big box.

…then you're buried in a tiny box.

Society will shove you into box after box after box.

Unfortunately, most people let them.

They allow the box to become their reality.

So today, we're busting out the shrooms.

We're going to talk about why the way you navigate reality is preventing you from:

• Freeing yourself from childhood trauma

• Becoming your highest self

• Achieving financial freedom & quitting the 9-5 you hate

From here on out, you will never be put in any boxes.

Because ultimately, the way you navigate reality determines your quality of life.

1. Your reality is not what you think it is.

18 months after you are born, something major happens:

You create boundaries.

No, not the kind you make when your little brother chews on your Legos.

I mean the boundary you place between your "self" and that which is not your "self."

(Yeah, we're going there. Pass the weed.)

For example, you might consider your hand part of you, but the device you're reading this on might not.

In other words, your sense of self begins to crystallize.

Suddenly, you are not your pacifier, but your pacifier is in your mouth.

You are not your crib, but you are on your crib.

This boundary between self and "not-self" is fundamental to how you and every human ever navigates reality.

2. To make sense of reality, humans split it into pieces and called it "knowledge."

The fundamental boundary of self and not-self is even more important for one reason:

It gives way for human knowledge.

For knowledge to exist, there must be a knower (Though I will admit this is heavily debated in many circles).

As we grow older, we begin to place more boundaries.

The green stuff is plants.

Those objects are toys.

That's food.

Don't eat toys.

Don't eat plants.

Eat that yellow gooey shit mom keeps feeding you.

If you follow this over the course of human history, it eventually turns into the complex body of knowledge we have today.

Neuroscience, biology, mathematics, science, art, history, philosophy.

What separates these fields?

Boundaries. Specifically, the boundaries we place.

The arc of human knowledge is to "find" and create more boundaries within reality.

...which is fine, actually. Knowledge has been pretty useful for us and organizing them like this makes it easier to navigate.

But the problem begins when we confuse these boundaries for the reality in itself.

3. Anxiety is worry over a reality that doesn't exist.

Let's take a look at anxiety, for example.

You convince yourself an outcome (usually the worst case scenario) is inevitable. Your mind lives out at that future outcome as if it is your present reality. Then, you start making hasty decisions that destroy your progress.

Anxiety is worry over a reality that doesn't exist.

It's when some part of you is so convinced that that which is not reality, is.

This applies to childhood trauma as well.

In my case, my parents way of arguing was to lash out at each other. As I child, I was conditioned to fear argument. This followed me throughout my life, where I became extremely non-confrontational.

This came to a head when I got into my first romantic relationship.

Like all couples, we went through the whole butterfly phase, but once we got into our first argument, I handled it in the way only I knew:

By bottling it up and avoiding confrontation until our "arguments” into lashing out at each other. It ultimately sank that relationship.

Over time, I learned that conflict isn't really about arguing, it's about understanding. It doesn't need to be vitriolic.

All that to say:

In the realm of conflict, I did not know how to navigate this aspect of reality.

Childhood trauma is a model of navigating a reality that no longer exists.

Why You Feel Stuck

Ultimately, this is why you feel stuck (and why I still get stuck).

It's not even a victim mindset anymore, it goes beyond that. You are operating with a defective model of reality, or some aspects of reality. You confuse the tools you developed from trauma, anxiety, and society with the reality in itself.

Your family may have told you to follow a certain path in life, and you confuse that with the only path. You may have been labelled “the shy kid” and now you feel obligated to continue playing the part.

But the good news is:

Like any software, you can update it.

Because none of these are reality. These were false projections of reality. Somewhere along the way, you downloaded these into your model of reality, which means you can get rid of them.

You can change your model of reality to be more in alignment with reality itself.

With time, you will change your reality.

That’s it for this week.

Next week, we will go over a way of being that’s all about being in tune with reality itself.

Hint: it’s in the name of the newsletter ;)