What's That About?
By Les Mottosky
Internet access is like oxygen for the modern career and life. I was recently without a router for 5 days. While it didn't affect my 9-to-5 team responsibilities – thanks to my fave coffee shop – it drastically impacted 5-to-9.
Without internet in the evening a bunch of things changed.
Energy went through the roof. Productivity jumped. The 'currently reading' book pile shrank. Attention span noticeably expanded and sharpened. Creativity erupted. Appetite and cravings diminished. Sleep deepened. And that's just a partial list.
The biggest shift was a reduction in brain noise. This naturally fed a sense of greater ease and a noticeable increase in peace of mind. The monkey mind could finally CTFO: chill the fudge out.
This technological "inconvenience" forced a realization that maybe those "necessary" evening busy hours finishing off tasks, doing project research, the simple "tens minutes of joy" about a new running shoe innovation from a favourite shoe-tuber's upload (running shoe reviewers). Alternate history was replaced by radical presence. I could feel the deleterious impact of all that screen time.
Maybe all that progress, learning and growth ain't worth the squeeze?
Maybe it's maladaptive?
The benefits to no evening internet access weren't just observed, they were felt. When you feel a change in the body – exercise, diet, vacation – etc, it's typically an notification that something was out of balance.
I've come to see, while I can delude myself, my body doesn't have the capacity to lie.
As a highly active dude my brain – to this day – still insists I'm 22. This, on occasion, forces my 56 year old body to pick-up the tab for that deception.
But there's some significant, decades old evidence that our bodies hold the ultimate truth serum.
David Hawkins’ muscle testing ( or applied kinesiology) helps the body distinguish truth from falsehood: an outstretched arm stays strong under downward pressure when a true or beneficial statement/stimulus is presented, and goes weak for something false or harmful.
Hawkins, building on earlier kinesiology work, used this binary response to calibrate levels of consciousness, authenticity, and the truth-value of people, ideas, books, and events on his logarithmic “Map of Consciousness,” asserting it works independently of conscious knowledge by tapping a universal field of awareness.
All this sounds a little – or a lot – out there, until you start experimenting with it.
A super fun and simple way to do this is to test a product you know to be nourishing for you against one that's decidedly unhealthy. (You'll need a partner.)
Use an apple vs. a bag of skittles, for example.
Hold one of the objects in your dominant hand and extend your arm in front of you at a 90 degree angle from your torso. Simply hold this question in your mind: 'Is this healthy for my body?', then ask your partner to force moderate – and building – downward pressure on your out-stretched hand and observe at what point your strength starts to give out.
Switch to the other object, with the same amount of pressure applied by your experiment partner.
Then just notice.
It's a fascinating, fun and simple experiment. And on occasion, muscle testing can even help identify food sensitivities and/or allergies without expensive lab work.
Our bodies are so much more than meat-suits that get us to work and back.
Bodies possess knowledge and capacity beyond self-healing or the aching complaints of what our habitual lifestyle is denying them.
But we have to be paying attention.
Have you listened to enlivening wisdom of your body today?
Have you listened to your truth?
TAGS: #The Lies We're Sold
Les Mottosky
Writes to expand the capacity of the human behind the career.
Adaptation Strategist // I help organizations turn creativity into their competitive advantage by aligning leadership, culture and strategy to unlock adaptive innovations.
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