When we’re looking to change an overeating habit we can innocently get caught up in the noise in our heads that talks about diet plans and strategies for mastering new habits and willpower. Alternatively, what creates real change – including dropping an unwanted habit – is learning to pay attention to the ‘signal’ that is available to all of us. That signal is universal intelligence and it’s built into us and it’s also built into our unwanted habits themselves.

You can listen above, on your favorite podcast app, or watch on YouTube. Notes, links, resources and a full transcript are below.

Show Notes

Resources Mentioned in this Episode

Hello explorers, and welcome to Q&A Episode 49 of Unbroken. I’m Alexandra Amor. I’m here today with some comments, a discussion, an exploration about the signals that we receive versus the noise that’s going on within us, and how that this can affect an overeating habit and resolving that habit and weight loss and all those yummy things.

I’ve been thinking about change a lot lately in my personal life, and I do, of course, all the time.

I think I might talk about that in more detail on a future Q&A episode. But it’s just this feeling of having resolved sort of 98% of my overeating habit. And the residue that’s left the sticky stuff at the bottom of a cup when you’re having – I don’t drink coffee, but I think sometimes if you’re drinking coffee, the sort of the sludge at the bottom is thicker than what you’ve been drinking. That happens for me when I drink hot chocolate. So the chocolate at the bottom of the cup is always a little thicker than everything else.

I’ve been contemplating that. And because of that, I’ve been thinking a lot about what I’m going to share on today’s episode. This came up during a conversation with Nikon Gormley, and he’s going to be on the show next week, February 7, I think, or 8th or whatever the Thursday is. And he brought up this metaphor that Michael Neill talks about, which is a metaphor for change.

It’s a metaphor for paying attention to the spiritual nature of ourselves, rather than just paying attention to our personal thinking, all that kind of thing.

I wanted to talk about this because I think it’s really important to see the differentiation between what we’re looking toward in this understanding, the landscape where we are going to for answers, versus the landscape, the places that we’re used to going for answers. When I say that, what I mean is, we’re used to looking for answers to things like a ton of effort. We’re used to looking to create change with effort, and willpower, and structure the programs that we follow, and those sorts of things.

In this Three Principles understanding where we’re looking for answers is really quite different than that.

You’ve heard me talk about upstream and downstream. So this is the same sort of subject, it’s the same subject, essentially. And I’m going to use different words to describe what I talked about when I talk about upstream and downstream. I like the consistency, that pretty much all the metaphors we talked about in this understanding are always pointing to the same thing. And when it starts to come together for us, it’s it can seem so simple. And when it hasn’t kind of clicked yet, then it can seem a little bit complicated, but please rest assured that it isn’t.

So we tend to think of change as requiring a lot of effort. And this, of course, comes up at the beginning of any year because people are talking about things like dry January, and developing new eating habits for the new year. And taking 90 days to change a habit and that kind of thing.

That actually is really reassuring when we come to these places of stickiness of where we feel a little bit stuck, or it feels like there hasn’t been any change or movement in quite a lot of time. That’s what I’m feeling lately. I’m just dealing with this last stuck 2%. It feels like to me that that may not be the case, maybe it’s something different. But that’s what it feels like, to me, just in my personal experience at this moment.

Let’s now talk about this signal versus noise metaphor. What Michael Neill means when he’s referring to more signal, less noise, that’s how he tends to phrase it, is that when we’re looking for change, and even when we’re looking for guidance, or help with making a decision, or anything like that, what we want to turn toward is the signal in our life, we want more signal.

And what those two things are, the signal is that Universal Intelligence that I always talk about. The innate wisdom that is within each of us, that is signal. It is clear and clean, and universally intelligent, just as the name implies, and there’s so much potential in it, and creativity. And it’s accessible to everybody all the time. And that’s where insight comes from. Insight comes to us via that signal.

I’ve talked in previous episodes about how our personal thinking, our minds are like a closed loop system. Our minds know what they know. And there isn’t really any new information coming in from just our little personal minds, our personal thinking, anything new and creative, and unexpected. And all that good stuff is coming from Universal Intelligence, via insight.

There’s a lot of information there, I’m not denying that at all, a lot of information there. It’s limited in scope. The artificial intelligence only knows what we’ve fed it, the information that we’ve given it. And our personal thinking is a bit the same in that way that it only knows what it knows. And it only knows what it’s been taught and what it’s understood up to this point. Anything fresh, and new and unexpected, or creative is going to come from another place, it’s going to come from Universal Intelligence, and wisdom. Whatever word you want to use to describe that.

There’s always going to be personal thinking that we’ve got, and there’s nothing wrong with that. That’s how we are designed. And the challenge becomes learning to hear it, to hear the personal noise, of course, we’re going to be aware of it, but not listen to it, if you see the difference.

In the past, for example, I would have listened to all that noise. And I’ll just give you an example that just occurs to me now. I’ve talked about how I think I talked about it in It’s Not About the Food, how I tried so many different systems and plans and self-help approaches for weight loss and for resolving an overeating habit that I ended up, over the years, circling back to ones that I had tried before and trying them again and failing at them again.

So that’s an example of responding to the noise.

And because I didn’t know that I could access universal wisdom, Universal Intelligence, then the only place I could go was to the noisy place, to the place where my personal thinking would come up with new plans and new or old ideas for how to manage an overeating habit and control it. And really get it under wraps, and all that kind of stuff.

I brought up my personal struggle at the moment, specifically, so that I could say that, at this time, while that struggle is going on, while I seem to be dealing with the sludge in the bottom of the cup, I’ve noticed how easy it is to get to get pulled away by my personal thinking, and for my personal thinking to imagine that it has the answers. And what I prefer to do, and what I’m learning to do more and more all the time, is instead, to listen to the signal.

And that can be tricky to do, because our personal thinking is so loud and persuasive. And if we’re at the very beginning of this journey, like I was a few years ago, and we don’t have the experience of listening to the signal, and waiting for the signal to tell us to bring us insight, so that we have a higher or a shifted level of consciousness, when we’re not sure that that’s going to show up for us. And we haven’t yet experienced what it’s like to be able to trust that that’s there, then of course, it’s harder. It’s harder to trust it when we’re not practised at that.

When you’re learning to swim, it’s sometimes can be hard to trust that the water will hold you up. But eventually, we all begin to realize that that’s the case. And it’s universally true. There isn’t anyone who couldn’t go into a body of water and float. It’s the same for every single person. And when we begin to see that and begin to trust that the signal is there, then that’s when we can we begin to see more change for sure.

What I’m doing at this time is just remembering that the signal is there, and that it will guide me out of this place. And that listening to the noise, paying attention being distracted, trying to dive into what would we call it the particulars of the overeating problem, like the particular bits of the habit that are that are torturing me right now. And trying to figure out how to fix those things, kind of manually, like making rules about not eating this kind of food on that kind of a day that kind of thing. That’s where the noise lies. That’s noise for sure. And and what we’re looking for is signal.

It’s not something that’s broken about us. It’s not something that we need to fix about ourselves. It’s information. It’s feedback. That overeating habit itself is letting us know letting me know at this time that I’m paying too much attention to the noise or that there is noise there. There’s some noise, some personal thinking that’s going on that I’m paying attention to, and that I’m perhaps blind to that I can’t really see something that’s not true but that I believe is true.

The habit itself is what alerts us to the fact that this is going on. It’s saying there’s a better way, there’s a calmer, quieter, more connected to source version of yourself. And if you manage to not get caught up in the noise, then that connection to Source will show you answers about what’s going on with you in the moment. And what that noise is specifically about like, it’s, it’s usually something like, at least this has been my experience.

Thinking that doesn’t serve us and of course, a belief is just a thought that we’ve thought a whole bunch of times. And it’s kind of been ground into our neural pathways. But there’s thinking there that isn’t serving us. And it isn’t one specific variety.

Whatever it is for you, in any given time, is going to be different than what it is the next time or what it is for me at this moment. But that signal that you’re getting, that dashboard light, as some people put it, is the habit itself, your habit. Your unwanted habit is letting you know that you are listening to the noise, and that there’s an opportunity now to instead turn toward the signal.

The iceberg metaphor is that in this understanding, if you picture an iceberg in a body of water, what we’ve done in the past, what the noise has got us to do when it comes to changing an unwanted habit is climbing to the top of that iceberg, and chipping away with our ice pick and trying to change the iceberg that way. And that’s what the noise gets us to do. It gets us to take that kind of action, like I talked about at the very beginning of this episode.

Whereas in this understanding, what we refer to is that if we raise the temperature of the water, the iceberg melts all on its own. So when I talk about raising the temperature of the water, what I’m talking about is listening for signal and having insights. And then the temperature of the water does rise and the iceberg melts all on its own.

I’ve shared examples of this in my book, It’s Not About the Food, where I talk about my soda habit that fell away all by itself. I’ve had so many other habits like that just fall by the wayside and not even know nudge me or bother me anymore at all, without any effort on my part other than learning about this understanding and learning to listen for the signal instead of listening to the noise in my head.

I was thinking about this the other day; I happened to be walking down the aisle in the grocery store with the potato chips and cookies and soda and all that kind of stuff. And I couldn’t remember the last time I had a craving for something like that. I used to have potato chips nearly every day. In the evening that was my evening snacky food and that just never happens anymore.

The more that I listened to people talk about this understanding, and the more that I grasped that we benefit so much from leaning toward connecting to universal wisdom, and Universal Intelligence and insight, and that, in that place, I wish it was a place I could actually physically point you to. But by paying attention to that, that is where change comes from. That’s the landscape that creates change.

So what we’re doing in this understanding and on this podcast, is we’re exploring a way to have more signal in our lives and less noise. And I think that’s about all I have to say about that.

I hope it makes sense. I hope it’s been helpful for you. If you’d like to hear more, or if you have a follow up question about this subject, you can go to AlexandraAmor.com/question. There’s a form you can fill out. And I will answer your question on a future episode. It can be anonymous.

I would love to know, what trips you up.

What doesn’t make sense about exploring this understanding? Where do you feel stuck in your exploration? Is there anything that that just isn’t resonating for you or isn’t quite making sense? And having that information for me is really helpful, because then I can answer that question. I can create an episode that answers that question. And because if you’ve got that question, no doubt more people do as well.

So that’s it from me. I hope you’re doing well and I will talk to you again next time. Bye.

Featured image photo by Benjamin Voros on Unsplash

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