Hello there.
When we are born we cannot conceptualize ourselves
as separate beings from our parents, mom especially.
We think that we are an extension of the world around us.
This is because we just came from oneness.
We can't comprehend separateness yet.
As we grow, we gradually develop.
We understand that we have autonomous desires,
autonomous needs,
preferences.
This is when the table flips.
And instead of us experiencing ourselves
as extensions of everything around us,
We experience everything around us,
as an extension of ourselves.
When we transition into this phase of development,
we essentially develop an egocentric world view.
I want you to imagine the average two-year-old.
The average two-year-old has an egocentric, worldview.
They are the center of the world around them,
and the world around them is an extension of themselves.
this is why they take so much responsibility as children.
For example, Mom and Dad got a divorce.
"It must be because of me."
The two-year-old does not practice
considering externally yet,
and so when the two-year-old cries.
It's not really concerned with the effect that has on Mom or Dad,
it's concerned with expressing the way that it feels.
Some of you may have seen a two-year-old interacting
with a little baby kitten or a puppy.
Let's pretend the two-year-old is interacting with a kitten.
The two-year-old doesn't really conceptualize
of the way that the kitten feels yet.
So the two-year-old goes over and it picks up the kitten by the neck
because that's the most convenient way for a two-year-old
to pick up a kitten.
and when the kitten stirs squealing and writhing around in pain and distress,
the two-year-old doesn't know what's happening.
So let's pretend that Mom and Dad don't intervene,
and this two-year-old keeps holding the kitten by the neck
and eventually the kitten dies.
The two-year-old is going to be really confused
about what just happened there.
The reason, is that the two-year-old wasn't attuned
to the experience of the kitten.
Attunement is being or bringing into harmony
a feeling of being at one with something.
The best way to Imagine attunement,
is to imagine sitting in your car
and reaching out for the radio dial.
If you want to hear the music being played at a specific frequency
like 98.2 Fm,
you need to tune your own radio dial
to 98.2 Fm, and then you will hear the music.
Your own radio dial needs to be brought into harmony with
or become one with the radio channel you want to receive,
in order to perceive that radio channel.
It's no different with other beings including people.
If you want to see someone,
hear someone, feel someone, understand someone,
you need to attune to them.
You need to tune into their frequency.
Tune into them so that you are able to feel or imagine
the other person's emotional experience.
To understand what they are feeling.
This is what allows you to know what to do in any given situation
to end conflict or to improve a situation or to assist someone.
Attunement is what gives rise naturally to empathy.
You don't have to work on empathy
if you can completely understand someone else's perspective
and the way that they feel.
However some people,
even though we would love for it to happen naturally on its own,
some people do not evolve out of that egocentric worldview
that is so common to early early childhood.
They stay in it.
In fact the most dangerous people in the world
are people who are not attuned.
They are trapped in the egocentric bubble.
They are not much better than the two-year-old
running around with kittens holding them by their neck.
Only this time, those kittens are people.
When you are in a relationship with this kind of person,
you end up feeling lonely, unseen, unheard
unfelt, misunderstood and ultimately abused.
You will feel like you're living in an entirely different reality
than the other person.
You will feel this way because, you quite literally are,
living an entirely different reality than the other person.
which is why when you express
the fact that you feel abused by them,
they will have no idea what you mean,
any more than the two-year-old has any idea that they were the one
that killed the kitten.
Essentially you and this person are on entirely different frequencies,
and they're unwilling to tune into yours.
It's the same as trying to find harmony when you're on 98.2 Fm
and your partner is on the 5:30 a.m station.
So much about the development of attunement
has to do with the way that we are raised.
We learn to be attuned to other people,
when other people are attuned to us.
Ask yourself the following questions:
"Do I feel like my parents understood me when I was little?
Or even tried to understand me?"
"Did they see into me and feel into me and have empathy for me,
and adjust their behavior accordingly or not?"
"Did they acknowledge how I felt?
Or did they invalidate it?
Telling me I shouldn't feel that way?"
"How did my parents treat me
when I was cranky frightened or upset ?"
For the sake of your own understanding
once you finish this episode
I want you to watch my video on YouTube titled:
The Emotional Wake-up Call
Here's the thing,
when your parents or your caregivers in your life
aren't attuned to you in childhood,
it causes you as a child, to go one of two ways.
Now there are some variables
as to why a person goes one way versus the other,
but for the sake of this episode,
I just want you to understand that a child
who is raised by an adult that is not attuned,
goes one of two ways,
either they go the first way,
which is to decide that their survival
depends on completely disconnecting,
tuning out, to the people around them.
Especially their primary caregivers.
And to retreat into the egocentric bubble,
where the only thing that is real, the only thing that matters,
and the only thing that is valid, is their experience.
Separate from the world.
Or we learn the opposite.
That our survival absolutely depends
on being hyper attuned
to the people in our environment, especially our caregivers.
We become hyper vigilant.
We are literally so tuned in,
so tuned into the frequency,
so that we can feel every single subtle shift happening in a person,
so that we can anticipate everything they're going to do,
and to keep ourselves safe that way.
Now neither extreme is particularly healthy.
If you're the hyper attuned person,
then you usually have to tune out to your own emotions,
and tune out to your own experience and own truth,
so that you can completely tune into somebody else,
and to be at their beck and call.
So that you can stay safe.
Obviously, that's not healthy.
However, the dysfunction in this world
owes itself to those people
who go into the egocentric bubble,
and who are only concerned with their own experience.
And whom see everything in their reality
as nothing more than an extension of themselves.
Wars own themselves to this type of personality.
In fact, the polarization of both types of children,
the hyper attuned and the egocentric,
owe themselves to the unattuned person.
for that reason, I am going to say to you today,
that it is critical that you learn how to attune to one another.
You cannot be attuned to a child
and have them grow up narcissistic or codependent.
You cannot be attuned to someone
and drop a bomb on them or shoot them.
You cannot be attuned to someone
and say the wrong thing to them.
you cannot attune to someone
and stay in denial about his or her reality
And the bottom line is,
unless you learn how to attune
your relationships will be riddled with conflict
and painful for everyone around you.
eventually making it painful for you too.
So how do you attune?
Step 1: Attunement begins with the choice.
The choice to attune.
That may seem fairly abstract for you.
But I promise you that if you're not attuned,
you made the choice at some point, not to be.
It's similar to choosing if you are in your car
and you want to listen to a specific radio channel,
choosing to tune your dial to 98.2 Fm,
If that's what you want to hear.
You're not going to understand this
at the heart based emotional level yet,
so I want you to understand this
at the mind based level first
I want you to think about this in terms of you being aware of,
or watching the world around you.
Consider that you are living your life
in a bubble where nothing can come in.
There are layers and layers between you and them.
You've got to pop that bubble,
so you can see and feel them and hear them
and really tune into their frequency.
Start making a practice of watching the world
as if you're an FBI agent whose job is to perceive,
every single thing you can perceive about your environment
and the people in it.
I want you to make a game of it.
2.: Face your resistance to coming out of the egocentric bubble.
Absolutely 100%,
your bubble, your let's say, there's only me in the world,
and I needed to retreat into the ego-centered bubble
and not become attuned people,
it's a coping strategy.
And coping strategies exists for a reason.
Because you think you risk something by attuning to someone.
So you've got to be honest with yourself.
"Why don't I want to attune to other people?"
What would attuning to other people mean?
What would be so bad about really seeing them
or feeling them, or understanding them,
or perceiving their reality?
The bubble is all about controlling your reality.
So I want you to ask yourself:
"Why do I need to control my reality?"
Often times, if you talk to people who live in an egocentric bubble,
they will justify the fact that it's good,
because their, let's say reality,
isn't being contaminated by everything else in the world.
But here's the thing;
You are confusing deliberate creation of your reality
with resisting reality.
They are two different things.
The egocentric bubble, like an addiction, is an escape.
It was created as a resistance to what is.
This is why inevitably,
instead of it leading to a wonderful, miraculous life,
it leads to negative results,
like failed relationships and aloneness.
Step 3.:
Attunement requires that you understand
that people think and subsequently feel
in ways that are both similar and different
to the way that you do.
A person who is not attuned, will project.
For example, you might imagine
that if you were in someone else's position
you wouldn't feel how they felt.
You will probably tell them purely how you would feel
if you were in their situation.
But you do so from the egocentric perspective of your past experiences,
your privileges and your current level of awareness instead of theirs
Instead of this giving rise to true empathy
it is merely a projection disguised as empathy.
This is why, if you were a person who has never experienced
serious consequences as a result of being criticized,
you might say:
"If were in your position, I wouldn't take what they said personally."
In other words,
Imagining how you would feel in their shoes
is a perfect thing to do,
up until the point
where you are forgetting that you stepping into their shoes
with all of your perspective,
is not you getting out of your egocentric bubble and into their shoes.
It's you taking your egocentric bubble into their shoes.
4.: I want you to notice the aspect of you,
that only really cares about other people feeling good,
and that it allows you to avoid conflict.
When there is that deep aspect of you
that doesn't really care about how other people feel,
except for how that creates problems for you,
you have the tendency to rush immediately
from problem to solution.
Know that the right or wrong thing to do in terms of action
comes second to fully having awareness.
When it comes to attunement
you cannot rush into action.
In fact, you cannot even see the right action
or see the solution until you're fully attuned.
Imagine seeing a fish in a tank that is visibly sick.
If you're this kind of person who lives in an egocentric bubble.
You might just rush to a conclusion about what to do to help the fish.
you might feed the fish.
Obviously, there's no improvement. Why?
Because if you really attuned yourself to the fish,
you would see, that what really needed to happen,
was that the water needed to be changed.
This is how it works with other people.
if it feels like a lot of what you're doing just is never good enough
Chances are you're not really attuned
to what the person needs,
because you're just trying to rush to a solution.
So you can get out of your own discomfort.
Step 5.: You need to tune into become aware of your own emotions.
We've been talking about the egocentric bubble.
It's easy to fall for the idea
that somebody who lives in an egocentric bubble,
is super unattuned to everyone else and super attune to themselves.
Not so fast!
If you had caregivers that weren't attune to you,
and thus you went into a narcissistic bubble,
Then you can't feel your own emotions either.
So now's the time to tune into them.
You have to become aware of them as they're happening in your body.
Your mind hijacks you out of your emotions.
And you tend to delude yourself,
that how you feel like you want to feel,
is how you feel.
But it's not actually how you feel.
When you experience things that either do cause an emotion
or that you think should cause an emotional reaction,
ask yourself the following questions,
and be as brutally honest as you can;
"What was my perception of what happened?"
"What was troubling to me about what happened?"
"What were the emotions that I felt at the time it happened?"
"What emotions am I feeling in this exact moment?"
"What do I really need from other people in this circumstance?"
Step 6. I want you to begin a practice
that I call 'The Octopus Technique'.
To understand how to do The Octopus Technique,
I want you to watch the Youtube video which I made called:
The Octopus Technique
You'll figure out everything in that video.
How to do it.
But when you come back from that exercise,
I want you to ask the following questions:
"What was this person's perception of what happened?"
"What was troubling to them about what happened?"
"What were the emotions that they felt at the time it happened?"
"What emotions are they feeling in this exact moment?"
"And what do I now know that they really need for me?"
Step 7.:
practice connecting with people one-on-one.
If you want a really in-depth look
as to how to connect with someone,
I encourage you to watch my video on [YouTube] titled:
How To Connect With Someone
But just for the sake of today's understanding,
give the person you want to connect with your undivided
unconditional focused presence.
Use body language that is open to them.
Become interested in them, ask them questions,
see into them, feel into them, listen to them,
seek to understand them and receive them exactly as they are.
Instead of seeing them how you would prefer to see them.
Which is your current tendency.
Step 8.: Be willing to be vulnerable enough
to feel strong emotions.
Chances are, if you live in an egocentric bubble,
you are very concerned with controlling
the way that you feel.
You want to feel good.
And you're convinced that connecting to other people
is going to make you not feel good.
You got to be willing to let yourself not feel good sometimes.
To feel strong emotions that make you feel just
a tiny bit out of control of your internal experience.
When you connect to somebody else and you attune to them,
you start resonating at the same frequency
and you start feeling the mirror of the emotions
that they're feeling in your body.
you're basically experiencing their reflection.
That means, if they feel sad, you might cry.
I'm asking you to be vulnerable enough
to let that kind of thing happen.
Think about how good it would feel
for someone to completely understand you.
Think of how good it would be to be able to have them
be so perceptive of your internal world,
that they know exactly what you need
and exactly what to say.
Think of how good it would be
to have harmony in your relationships instead of conflict.
And for your relationships to feel secure and safe.
This is the kind of relationship that is available to you
if you practice attunement with one another.
If you are not the kind of person who is naturally attuned
to other people, this has got to be a practice.
You're going to have to learn how to do it.
And in the beginning you're going to have to use
a lot of focus to do it.
Much like someone who's learning to do the backstroke in swimming
is going to have to focus really hard to begin with on that stroke,
and then after a while it's going to become second nature.
Attunement will become natural to you.
And once attunement becomes natural to you,
and you see the benefits of that attunement
especially within your relationship sphere of life,
you will see, that that isolated, disconnected
reality that you have built,
that as separate of the reality that anyone around you is experiencing,
is the true prison.
And you will see that that isolated experience that you were living,
even though you convinced yourself
it might have been pretty on the inside,
That is the place that you are truly unsafe.
Have a good week
Subtitles by: Tanya Duarte www.tanyaduarte.com