Last Friday, I got the chance to see Deepak Chopra lecture on his new book, Super Brain. In true Deepak fashion he started by taking us on a journey through the universe, the vastness in size and the comparative smallness of human beings. From that perspective the fact that we are conscious being able to perceive the universe is amazing. Then he went on to talk about consciousness and science’s inability to explain where our thoughts come from. I was fascinated. Then it started, I was suddenly feeling really hot, I looked around and everyone seemed to be in tank tops and fanning themselves, in San Francisco on a cold January night. Ok, I thought, I’m not the only one, so I took off my scarf and jacket and sweater to see if I could get more comfortable. Then I started to get really sleepy and it was difficult to focus. It didn’t make any sense. I was excited to be there. I’d been looking forward to it for weeks.
A week or so prior to the lecture, I was reading Untethered Soul: The Journey Beyond Yourself by Michael A. Singer, and I was at the part that said to watch yourself, to listen to the voice inside your head that is always talking and just take note of it. Notice what it says, notice when it talks a lot, notice it like it’s your roommate. It’s sort of a funny exercise because I would be deeply in my thoughts, chatting away with myself inside my head when I would suddenly remember to listen to the conversation instead of be a part of it. So given my past week’s internal work, I started to play the witness during Deepak’s lecture, and I realized that there was part of me that wanted to listen and part of me that didn’t. The chatterbox in my head was talking away about being tired, hot, uncomfortable, wondering what other people were thinking, it would not shut up. So there I was trying to hear through the banter of my own thoughts about where thoughts come from!
The whole experience reminded me of something that Gabrielle Bernstein had said at her May Cause Miracles book launch in answer to a woman’s question regarding her business. The woman said that she really believed in what she was doing but that she hadn’t seen the financial results yet so how could she stay positive that the results would come? Gabrielle said that your external hustle has to match your internal hustle. In other words, do your internal and external work. She gave the example that yes, she practices meditation and focuses on right minded action but she also sent out a gazillion emails to promote her event. I liked that answer a lot but even then, in reference to myself, I thought of the external more than the internal because I figured I’ve got the internal down, I do that. I really need to focus on the external. But actually, after playing the witness to myself for just a couple short weeks, I realized how difficult I make things for myself. I sabotage myself all the time. I have a “roommate” that doesn’t necessarily want me to learn, or grow, or go BIG. I wanted to share this exercise because I found it so valuable to play the observer to myself, it’s made me feel lighter, slightly amused, and made it clear that a little more internal hustle can go a long way and actually makes the external hustle easier.