You’re listening to the Transform Your Life from the Inside Out podcast. This is a throwback episode to episode number 109, and that episode is titled, “A STD Just For You.” Now, STD, sexually transmitted disease. No, that’s not what I’m talking about. Many years ago, I heard my sister say everyone should have an STD in life, or everyone should be STD or something like that. But what does STD stand for? Easy. It stands for surrender, trust, and no doubt.
So in this episode, I literally take this apart, dig into it, and talk about really what it means to trust. And we look at if it’s hard for you to surrender and not doubt, maybe you’ve been a control freak in your life. Maybe you’re trying to control your life. So in this episode, we’re going to look at your intention, and we’re going to look at ways that you stay trapped by control. And maybe you don’t even know it. So we’re going to start actually trusting, surrendering, and not doubting the universe so we can all create more, be more, and do more, and have more in life. Enjoy the episode.
Hi, I’m Jim Fortin, and you’re about to start transforming your life from the inside out with this podcast. I’m widely considered the leader in subconscious transformation and I’ve coached super achievers all around the world for over 25 years. Here you’re going to find no rah-rah motivation and no hype because this podcast is a combination of brain science, transformational psychology, and ancient wisdom all rolled into one to take your life to levels you’ve never thought possible. If you’re wanting a lot more in life, to feel better, to heal, to have peace of mind, to feel powerful and alive, and to bring more abundance and prosperity into your life, then this podcast is for you because you’re going to start learning how to master your mind and evolve your consciousness. And when you do that, anything you want then becomes possible for you. I’m glad you’re here.

So you’re probably wondering STD. All of us have learned for the most part that STD stands for sexually transmitted disease. That’s not the kind of STD that I want to talk about in this episode. Many years ago, I’m just laughing here. I’m giggling as I’m saying this, but many years ago, my sister and I, we were talking and my sister’s married to a shaman. And we were talking and she said, “brother, you need an STD.” And I’m like, “what are you talking about?” And basically she started laughing as well. And she said, “STD: surrender, trust, and do not doubt.”

This is something that’s been at the forefront of my mind for many, many years and something that I want to share with you in this episode. So hopefully by the time that we’re done, you’re like, “yeah, right on. I want an STD, at least the kind that Jim is talking about.” And when I say I want, of course, there are concepts we’re talking about. It’s not like you can put your hand on it and carry it like it’s a package or anything. But definitely, these are places that we want to live from. What I want to do in this episode is I want to take apart and as best I can put these into a context for you so that you can use them in your own life. I’ve also discovered that living with STD has made my life so much easier and so much more peaceful. And I don’t know about you, but there’s a lot of crazy things going on in the world. Oh, crazy comments on Instagram and Facebook and people losing their heads and people running around like chickens with their head cut off. And I’m telling you, the easier that you can make your life and the more that you can integrate STD, the better your life is going to be.

When we talk about STD, let’s take each of the letters apart. S stands for surrender. I feel like it’s an episode of Sesame Street when I do that. S stands for, you know, whatever. But anyway, S here in the way that I’m using it is surrender. And obviously surrender can mean a lot of different things to a lot of different people. But there’s a phrase that I want to say that I live by. And I find that the more that I keep this phrase in front of me, the more that I do live by it. But this phrase is this: I surrender to the power that rules my destiny. I surrender to the power that rules my destiny. And that can be a lot of things for a lot of different people. Basically, and this rabbit hole can go very deeply, but basically it just means that I let go. I let go because I’m on this planet. I’m a cosmic being. Who knows how long I’m going to be on this planet. My intention is a lot of years, but who knows?

When I say that I surrender and I let go and I surrender to the power that rules my destiny, basically what I mean by that is, and I’ll talk more about it later in this episode, is that I can’t control anything. There’s nothing that I can control in my life. Speaking of control, many people believe in our culture that you can control your thinking. And you hear that a lot. But the truth is that we don’t control our thinking, we choose our thinking. And to show you that you cannot control your thinking, I mean, how many of you have had something pop into your head and you’re like, “why am I thinking this? I don’t want to be thinking this. This is, you know, get out of my head.” And hopefully showing you that is that that’s partly brain-based. But we don’t control anything, even our thinking. We simply choose our thinking. So that being said, what I’ve recognized over the years is that it’s powerful for me and it brings a lot of peace and a lot of well-being when I stop trying to control things and I simply allow life to happen and life to unfold in front of me.
I’m going to go a couple of different places in this episode, but when I say surrender, what does that mean? So for me, surrender is basically, it is what it is. I mean, I can’t control anything. So what is in front of me is what is in front of me. Now, there are all kinds of things that I can choose to think about it, but whatever happens from moment to moment in my life is what is. And I’ve noticed over the years and in my own life, the greatest source of unhappiness for people is plain and simple, not accepting what is. And look at your own life. I mean, how much unhappiness do you have? What things are you unhappy about? And for the most part, if you look at what you’re unhappy about, it’s because you’re not accepting of what already is in your life. So what I learned long ago is that when I… now it doesn’t mean I can’t change it obviously or influence it, but when I accept what is in the moment, a sigh there, it becomes like, “okay, I can breathe and I can move from here.”
But I see many people fight themselves. They fight themselves for a lifetime about what is in their life, and they cannot accept what is in their life. And I want to share this with you. What is in your life is something that you’ve co-created. There’s something that I was told many years ago, and it’s a very powerful phrase. And when we get our mind around it, literally, when we get our mind around it, it’s like, “whoa, okay, what’s going on here at a higher level of karma?” But I was told one time that there is nothing in your life without your agreement. And I had somebody trying to argue with me one time saying, “well, I didn’t agree to cancer and I didn’t agree to this and I didn’t agree to that.” And the reality is, is yes. Everything in your life is, you know, you are in agreement with it at a higher level of your beingness. At a soul level, you are in agreement for the lessons that it’s… I was going to say teaching, but it’s not teaching you, for the lessons it’s presenting for you to learn while you’re on this planet.
And I notice also, and trust me, everything I’m sharing here, been there, done that, and, you know, I got the certificate and the plaque and the award and everything else, metaphorically speaking. But so many people fight with life. And I was told many years ago, this was directed at me from a shaman, and he said, “you know what? All the fighting you do, you’re not wearing out the world. You’re not wearing out me. You’re wearing out yourself.” So look at your own self. How many things are you fighting with in your own life because you won’t accept what is and you won’t surrender to what is and you fight and you fight. And I see so many people and I’ve been there. And I’ll give you an example in just a minute. But I see so many people fighting themselves and their whole day is about a fight and most of that fight is in their head.
I read many years ago a quote that Mother Teresa said and she said… and this was a very impactful quote for me… she said, “what you fight weakens you.” And I probably read that 20 years ago. And I thought to myself, and then it was in conjunction with what the shaman told me, that when he said that you’re not wearing out the world, you’re not wearing out me, you’re wearing out yourself. And then when I read that quote from Mother Teresa, “what you fight weakens you,” I’m like, well, there you go. I mean, that makes perfect sense. No wonder what I’m in my head fighting with. And I used to be, I would fight with myself in my head about, which I’ll get to in just a minute. Or have you noticed or often noticed how often you’re fighting in your head with other people and they’re not even with you. They’re somewhere else. You’re fighting with your mother or your father or whatever it might be, and they’re not even with you. And the reason you’re generally fighting is because you’re not surrendering to what is.
I’m not going to go too far in this episode, but in NLP, Neuro Linguistic Programming, there’s a concept called parts and that we have parts to the personality. To give you a quick example of that, one part of you may want to lie on the couch and another part of you wants to get up and be productive today. So we can say there are different parts. But where I want to go here, and I’ve been here, I’ve been here, trust me, is that many parts of ourselves bicker with each other. You know, you’ve got one part of you that wants to do something in life and another part of you talking you down. And then what a lot of you get into, and like I said, I have been there and it’s very exhausting. What a lot of people get into is bicker in my mind. Bicker one, you know, part A is bickering with part B. Bicker, bicker, bicker, bicker, bicker, bicker. And what I’ve noticed, and there’s some neuro research that demonstrates this, is that we get emotional about that, all the bickering in our head, and we get emotional about how we feel about it and everything, and that quite literally wears us down. For many of us, and for me many years ago when I did it, it’s actually quite exhausting.
So what I want you to look at is how much, because you’re not accepting what is, because you’re not surrendering, how much do you fight with in your own mind about the world around you, your parents, what people are posting on Facebook, on CNN, on Reuters, or Fox News, or whatever. How much are you fighting with in your own mind because you’re not accepting what is? I also want to point out again, I’m going to say it for the second time, it doesn’t mean that you can’t change and influence what is, but what is, is.
You know, earlier today, I don’t share a lot on Facebook, my personal Facebook. I really haven’t used it in a lot of years. And to be candid with you, just being transparent, the reason I don’t post on Facebook is I get tired of all the noise, all the opinions and all the armchair quarterbacks. And mainly to me, it’s just noise. But I shared something today that is, in my observation, truth. And it’s been truth for a lot of years. And I took it down because when I posted it, I’m like, you know, I even said this is going to, you know, irritate a lot of people, but I’m going to share it. And then I’m like, you know, take it down. And the reason why is because a lot of people that read it, a large portion that read it are going to say, “well, that’s not true,” because I’ve observed it is true. They still haven’t seen the truth in it. And then they’re going to want to fight and bicker about it. And I’m like, why would I want to bring that energy into my life? So the first part of this episode is, you know what? Just exhale and surrender. Because what is, is.
And I want you to think about this part of the episode and think about your own life. I mean, I see so, so many people, especially adult children, they’re trying to control their mother or father. And they don’t like the way their mother or father is. And you can pick anyone in your life if it’s not your mother and father, but they don’t like the way their parent is. “My father’s not loving enough. My mother’s not this, appreciative enough,” or whatever it might be. And they spend all these years, instead of saying, “you know what? My father is not loving enough. It is what it is. Or my mother’s not appreciative.” And by the way, these things have come up in coaching, my coaching program, so I see a lot of this. But you know what? Your mother is who she is. Your father is who he is. Surrender to that. Surrender to letting people have their own experience of life. Surrender to letting people be who they are.
But what a lot of us do, and I have been there, is we entangle like a spider web in not who people are, but who we want people to be based upon our models of reality. And then when they’re not fitting into our model of reality, that’s when we’re definitely not surrendering. And we’re having all of these thoughts about how other people should be. So your takeaway from this first part of the podcast is what is, is. So we’ve tackled the S.
Next is T, S-T. And for me, that is trust. And I mean that in two ways: trusting myself and trusting the universe. And that’s a big thing. I mean, come on. I mean, literally trusting the universe. How do we even get our mind around that? And I’m going to dig in a little bit here as we go. But let’s go here first, trusting yourself.
I remember many years ago, I was in a transformational program. This was probably 10 years ago. And it was a very small group. It was designed that way. There were only eight people in the group or 10 or something. And one of the coaches in there said, very skilled coach, and towards the end of the weekend, I think this was on Sunday, and it was like a three-day or four-day weekend. It was, like I said, it was a lot of years ago, but I remember this aspect of it. I was talking about trusting, and she said, “yes, Jim, and that also means trusting yourself.” What I learned long ago, is that we doubt ourselves, which is not trusting, when we get into right or wrong thinking, when we get into good or bad thinking. “Am I doing it right, and am I doing it good, or am I doing it wrong, and am I doing it bad?”
I was, as a kid, I was raised to do things… I’m thinking as I’m saying this… I was raised to do things right, meaning I had to get the A, I had to be at the top of my class, I had to be good at sports and all these kind of things, which was the right way. And as children, we learned that when we do things the right way, we get approval from our parents. And I spent a large part of my life with the right or wrong, good or bad thinking. And a coach of mine many years ago said, “Jim, get off the right or wrong, good or bad thinking because it keeps you trapped. And when you’re thinking from right or wrong or good or bad, you don’t take action. And when you don’t take action, you don’t get things done.” So years later, maybe, you know, a lot of years later, I’ve been through this for a lot of years. Not only do I deal with this anymore because now I just put things out. I mean, I got an email the team sent to me from somebody listening to the podcast, and they said, “I like how unpolished the podcast is.” I mean, it’s just me sitting here with a microphone talking to you. I could have a studio and all this kind of stuff, but I don’t because I’m not concerned about, “oh, this is right or wrong or good or better or best or any of that.” I’m just actually focused on what I’m doing.
So when I say that we don’t trust ourselves, what I mean… that’s a big thing here at this podcast. I mean, you know, what is yourself? I mean, are we talking your soul, your cosmic self, your higher self, your ego self? But most of us don’t trust our egos, meaning our identities and who we are and our sense of self. And most people don’t trust the idea of like, “I’m John Smith and I can do XYZ.” But the truth is this, this is the truth, is that you are much more powerful. You’re a cosmic being. You’re infinitely powerful. You are much more powerful than your ego self. But in the world we live in, we’ve been conditioned not to trust our ego selves, which is the smallest part of who we are. And as I said, most people don’t trust themselves. I can relate. And what I want to share there when I say most of us don’t trust ourselves, go back to what I said a little earlier. It’s not that we can’t trust ourselves. It’s that we’re afraid of making a mistake and we don’t trust ourselves to go ahead and take action on something because we’re afraid of making mistakes. I also want to say that, and I’m sure a lot of you listening right now can relate to this, is I used to be a master at second guessing myself. I mean, oh my gosh, I mean, I could second guess myself all day long. “Is that right or wrong, good or bad?” So as I bring this up, and it just popped in my mind to mention this to you, as I bring this up, look at your own life. I mean, do you go through your entire days… and if you do, I’m sure you do it quite a bit… do you go through your day and second guessing yourself all day long?
Okay, speaking of trusting ourselves. Now, self and mind are two very different things. I mean, I think when we think of self, we think of 3D ego, the body that we walk around in. But you also have mind. Mind is partly consciousness and running through you. And when I say mind versus the self, I mean, let’s look at a radio and the programming. You can have a car radio, and that’s the mechanical aspect of it, but you have the programming coming through, which is the music. So your mind is the music. But what I want to point out is that most of us don’t trust, and I’ve been there, most of us don’t trust the power of our mind and the power of our unconscious mind. What we’ve been conditioned to do in this… really viscerally, if we can see it, we can touch it, we can smell it with the five senses, we then think, “oh, okay, I understand it.”
But what about trusting the power of your unconscious mind? So a question for you: do you 100% trust your unconscious mind? Now, if you’re like most people, you’re probably sitting there, standing there on the stairmaster, whatever, thinking, “well, you know, I’ve never thought about it in that way.” But let’s bring this down to carbon, to the 3D body that we’re in. So your unconscious mind basically works with your autonomic nervous system, which basically is responsible for keeping you alive. So a question that I have for you is, do you know how to make your hair grow? If you have hair, some of you might not have hair, but do you know how to make your hair grow? Do you know how to keep your heart beating? Do you know how to breathe? These things, at least the heartbeat and the breathing, are the responsibility of the autonomic nervous system, which is actually driven and regulated by the unconscious mind. Regulated might not be the right word. Perhaps it’s a responsibility. I can say it that way. Responsibility of the unconscious mind to keep the autonomic nervous system functioning.
Okay, back to my point. Are you sitting there in the morning and you’re in good health and saying, “hmm, okay, I wonder, can I trust my heart to beat today? Can I trust my brain to function today? You know, can I trust my fingernails to grow today?” So think about that. Can I trust my lungs to pump air? So think about that. And you know what? You probably have never thought about that because you automatically trust these things will happen. You don’t trust your unconscious mind with the simplest of things in your life. So when we talk about, obviously, trusting, I go back to the question, do you trust your unconscious mind?
Not going to go into it here, a whole other podcast, because I know this one’s going to go longer than I wanted, is trusting your mind. You know, do you trust your mind to interact with universal divine mind? You know, Carl Jung called it, and Jung actually piggybacked along in with Freud with the conscious mind and the unconscious mind. And then Jung, I think, was the one who coined the phrase collective unconsciousness, which I call divine mind. So do you trust your mind to actually even co-mingle with the collective consciousness, with divine mind? So what I want to share with you is simply recognize where you are in all of this and simply let go. Relax into it.
Now, these thoughts are just popping through my head as I’m going here. But even trust… when you’re attached to things, you’re not trusting. Most people attach to physical things. Like, for example, people attach to money. And the reason people attach to money so much, and I did that because I grew up poor, the reason people attach to money is because they think there’s not going to be more money later. So we become hoarders, which I did as a kid in my 20s, is because we’re attached to it. We don’t trust that, you know what, I had $1,000 come into my life. Well, that came in somehow, whether you’re recognizing you trusted it or not to come in. And guess what? If that thousand came in, another thousand or 10,000 or 100,000 or a million can come in. But we don’t trust the universe and we don’t trust ourselves. We don’t trust our mind that that’s going to happen to us. So the question that I have for you is this: what would have to happen for you to begin trusting your unconscious mind? And when I say unconscious, I also mean subconscious. But what would have to happen for you to trust your unconscious mind 100%?
Now, I’m pausing there because, see, you already trust your unconscious mind 100%. You trust it to keep beating and your fingernails growing and your lungs, you know, breathing and all these kinds of things in your brain working, you already trust it, but you trust it with the air quote, big things, not even knowing you’re trusting it. But what about trusting it with the little things like setting your intention and bringing money into your life and bringing health into your life and bringing relationships and the things that you want to create in your everyday 3D life.
So trusting the universe… I mean, holy mackerel, how do you get your mind around that? So let me give you a couple of perspectives that I work from. Number one is everything is in divine order. You can call it cosmic order, divine, if that word doesn’t work for you. I mean, some people actually take and they put this into organized religion and they’ll say things like, “well, God has a plan and there’s a master plan that God has.” Where I work from is that everything is in divine order. And I work from: I am exactly where I need to be. And what’s happening to me is exactly what I need to be happening to me right now. I’ll repeat that again. Because I’m going to use the word believe, but I’ve observed also there’s a divine order, is I’m exactly where I need to be. And what’s happening to me is exactly what I need in my life right now. And the reason why I believe it’s happening and I need it right now is because I also believe that every single thing that happens to me, even things that I’m like, “well, I’m not a fan of this or I don’t, you know, I’m not thrilled about that,” I believe that everything that happens to me happens so that I may grow and evolve spiritually and I may grow and evolve myself here, which basically I believe that I’m on the planet to learn lessons. So whatever happens here, whether I like it or I don’t like it, which is my ego, it happens so that I may grow and evolve.
So I work from… and a shaman said this to me, my brother-in-law said, I remember the day, it was 1996, I remember exactly where I was. And he said to me, he said, “every single thing that happens to you, every single thing that happens to you is a blessing. And it happens so that you can grow and you can evolve.” And that’s why I think it’s pretty easy for me to trust the universe, trusting the divine order, because I can see, even if I can’t ego see, 3D see, I can see at a higher level that everything that’s coming into my life is coming so that I may grow and evolve as a being.
You know, this thought about trusting the universe… I’d mentioned, I think in the last episode about sitting at my house in Sedona and the Sedona night sky and how beautiful it is. I mean, you can just see the Milky Way on a clear night. And I started thinking about trust and it popped in my mind and I wasn’t getting too deep about it, but I’m like, you know, we trust on the planet, we trust the moon’s not going to just flip out one day and crash into the earth. I mean, we trust that the sun’s going to rise tomorrow. We trust that food’s going to grow. We trust that air is going to be here tomorrow. We can trust in the big things in life, but it’s so difficult for so many of us to trust in the little things of life, like how am I going to make money? Little things, little bitty things. How am I going to make money? How am I going to get a new job? How am I going to repair my relationship? How am I going to talk to my husband, my wife, my kids, my mother, my father? All these things that I consider to be little bitty things in the grand scale of our life. We don’t trust that we’re going to be able to get through it. “Am I going to get through this speech when I’m standing up talking in front of people? Am I going to get through this, that, or the other?” We don’t trust the little things, but we trust the big things. And I find that to be such an irony in our lives.
You know, when we talk about trusting the universe, as I said just a minute ago, I mean, that’s such an expansive even thought. How do you even get your mind around it? And then you could even go into, well, what is the universe? And do we live in multi-universes, multiverses, and all this kind of stuff? And for me, when I say the universe, it’s the all. It’s the great grand mystery. It’s the divine. It’s all of creation. And ironically, we actually don’t want to trust the universe because we want to trust our own little ego self. But the irony is that you have no choice but to trust. But a lot of us don’t see that.
You know, I find it so interesting how we place our trust. And when I say place our trust, I mean on a human level. I mean, I’ve always found kind of humorous when people say, “have a safe flight.” And the reason why is because when I get on the airplane, I don’t have any control over what’s going to happen on that airplane. So people will say, “have a safe flight.” I think what they mean is I’m wishing you a safe flight. But many times when people say, “have a safe flight,” it’s almost in my mind that’s kind of inferred or implied that I have control over the safety of the flight. And I don’t. But where I’m going here is every time, which I don’t fly a lot these days, but every time I would hop on an airplane, guess what? Without even thinking about it, I was trusting the two people sitting in the cockpit to get me where I needed to be or where I was going safely.
And I remember seeing something on the news many years ago, how this Egyptian plane, I think it was Egyptian over the Atlantic, literally just nosedived right down into the Atlantic Ocean. And the only explanation, I believe, was back then, a lot of years ago, is that one of the pilots committed suicide and took the whole plane down with him. There was a lot of controversy. Well, he was Muslim and Muslims don’t commit suicide, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. But the whole point got me to thinking back then is that, you know what? Is how much do I trust? And I haven’t even put any thought into the trust, but yet how little do I trust myself or my unconscious mind or the universe? So what I want you to look at is what things in your life are you putting trust in that you really have no influence over? And what things can you put trust into that you do have co-creation and influence with? And I’m going to share with you in my experience, one thing that you can put trust into and you have co-creation with is your mind and divine mind. And you do that by using your will and setting your… which I talked about a couple of episodes ago.
Okay, so the D is in do not doubt. That’s another big one. And I’ll tell you how I reconcile all this in my own mind at the end of this episode. But do not, you know, do not doubt. Basically, to me, it means surrender and trust. And surrender and trust who and what? Well, at a small level, trust myself. And at a large level or a bigger or a macro level, trust my mind, trust divine mind, and trust the universe. As I said just a couple of minutes ago, the way that I operate is basically just setting my intention and letting it go. Because at that point, it’s basically out of my hands.
You know, saying all this reminds me of, I interviewed Rudy Ruettiger from the movie Rudy many years ago, probably 10 years ago. And I watched the movie Rudy a lot of years ago, and I’ve always enjoyed the movie. And in the movie, Rudy’s talking to one of the priests at Notre Dame, and the priest said something that struck me that’s stayed with me for a lot of years. He used the word God, which he was a priest at Notre Dame, so it makes sense. But he said something along the lines of, to Rudy, he’s like, “son, I’ve come to know two things in my life. One, there is a God. And secondly, I’m not that God.” And when it comes to what I’m sharing with you, there is a universe. There is whatever you want to call it. There is what is. And for me not to trust it, it would be ridiculous for me just to place all of my trust in my little bitty self. When I have all this power, I have all this power that I can tap into. And so do you. It doesn’t make any sense not to trust into… and I’m going to put it in one word that I’ve never used in a podcast before. Let’s call the universe God. It makes no sense not to trust in God when you’ve got all that power at your back and at your calling or beckoning calling. Let me put it that way.
One of my favorite phrases, and I’ve mentioned organized religion throughout this podcast many times, but one of my… and I’ve not read the Bible… this is one of my favorite phrases of all time is: ask and you shall receive, seek and you shall find, knock and the door shall be opened unto you. That’s a passage in the Bible and hopefully I got it accurate. But many of you, and I’ve been there, many of you, you ask and then you doubt, you seek and then you doubt. And then you knock on the door and then you say, “oh heck, what am I knocking for? Nobody’s home anyway. Let me turn around and let me leave.” So when I share that passage with you, ask and you shall receive, seek and you shall find, and knock and the door shall be opened unto you. How much surrender? How much trust? And how much have you let go of doubt when you’ve actually used that passage or some aspect of it?
Many of us need evidence so that we do not doubt. And I think, I’m just laughing at myself, I definitely, many years ago, you could have called me the Doubting Thomas or a Doubting Thomas. Excuse me, when I started working with a shaman, even in my early years, when I saw things that were non-ordinary, I was still that person, “well, how did that happen? Let me get analytical about it. Explain that to me.” And I’ve seen so many things over the years that are non-ordinary and outside of 3D comprehension, third dimension comprehension, that I don’t doubt anymore and I follow because the shaman that I work with has earned that trust and I’ve had enough empirical evidence over the years to no longer doubt.
But so many of us need evidence on simple things in life. You know, if I told you, for example, you can make a million dollars a year, many of you would doubt that. Why? Because you don’t have any empirical evidence. If I told you, if you’re not healthy, that you could be healthy, many of you might doubt that. Why? Because you don’t have any empirical evidence in your own life. And here’s a powerful place: I look at the Wright brothers. You know, the Wright brothers, the father of… what are they the father of? I don’t even know. Of flight or of airplanes or what? But anyway, the Wright brothers, many years ago, a hundred and something years ago, the Wright brothers were trying to fly when they had no evidence that they could do it. And that’s definitely surrendering and trusting and they’re not doubting. I mean, they weren’t there like, “heck, why are we doing this? This is not going to work. It’s not going to happen. Why are we doing this?” They definitely trusted in something. Now, I wasn’t there, but maybe they trusted in their understanding of aerodynamics. Maybe they trusted it in the universe. Maybe they trusted in the great grand mystery. Maybe they trusted in their little bicycle and its wings. I don’t know. But what I want you to really realize here is that they didn’t need evidence to convince them to keep trying. They trusted they could do something. Now, what could they do? No clue, but they trusted they could do something.
Okay, so we’ve talked a bit about obviously surrendering, trusting, and do not doubt. I want to slow down here for a moment, and I want you to look at your life the past 24 hours. How much surrendering have you been doing or not doing? How much trusting of yourself and the universe have you been doing and not doing? And in particular, how much doubting of yourself have you done in the last 24 hours? So take a good look at that because when we look at that, we’re like, “whoa, whoa, that’s a huge number for most of us.”
So how do we get, how do I get to an STD? Surrender, trust and do not doubt. So how do we get to surrender, trust and do not doubt? For me, I’ve learned the way to do it is to let go of the illusion of control. When you let go of the illusion of control, it becomes, oh, exhaling, oh, becomes so much easier to surrender and to trust. And I’m laughing at even that when I’m like, how many of you mothers or fathers, you don’t trust your kid to do something, maybe even your teenagers, because you’re trying to control something they’re doing because you want them to do it the right way, which generally speaking is your way. But what I have found is this, and I know this in the depths of myself, is that I can’t control anything in my life. Just like the quote that I mentioned from the movie Rudy above, I can control nothing. I am not the universe. I’m a part of it. I’m a speck in it. But I am not the universe. I am not God. And I cannot control anything.
So this is what I tell people: control, because it is, control is an illusion. And when you get into control, you are controlled by the illusion of control. Now, that’s a mind bender, I know. So, control is an illusion, and when you get into control, you’re controlled by the illusion of control. But something else I want you to notice here is how toxic control can be. Control robs you of your peace of mind, and control robs you of your well-being. A little bitty case in point: let’s say you’re trying to control your kids and you’re sitting there and you’re in the kitchen and you’re washing dishes or cooking or whatever and you’re trying to control what your kids are doing out in the driveway and your control issue has you checking on them—and some of you are laughing because this pertains to you—you keep looking out the window checking on your kids because you want them to do something in a certain way, and I mean older kids, teenagers, whatever, and you’re trying to control the way they do it, yet you’re letting them do it themselves, but yet you’re checking on them the whole time. Well, how much peace and how much of the moment has it taken you out of, but how much peace has that robbed you of?
So what I want you to notice… I’m going to slow down here… what I want you to notice is how much stress you have in your life because you do not surrender, you do not trust, and you doubt. And you do that by trying to control things all day long. Now the question is, how much stress do you have in your life as a result of trying to control things in your life, which again is the opposite of an STD.
Given everything I’ve said in this episode, what I want you to do right now, wherever you are in the world or in your world, I’m assuming that your eyes are open… I mean, you could be lying down listening with your eyes closed, but I want you just to look at what’s right in front of you right now. Whether it’s your Stairmaster, people at the gym… well, people aren’t going to the gym right now because this is during the coronavirus and gyms are closed. But if you’re in traffic or you’re at home, it doesn’t matter. Wherever you are, look in front of you right now. And this is what I want you to answer to yourself: how much of what’s in front of me right now can I really control? And then look in front of you. Can you control that traffic light? Can you control someone else’s dog? Can you control someone else’s kid? Can you control who’s going to turn left or who’s going to turn right? Can you control what that clerk at the store says? Notice right in front of you right now, how much of what’s right in front of you can you control right this moment? And you can’t even control your thinking because notice how your thinking is hopping around and it’s happening completely automatically, which means you don’t control it. It comes from your unconscious mind and it comes from your brain, which is why I said we can’t even control our thinking. We choose our thinking, but go back. Go back again. Look in front of you, the news, Facebook, whatever. What’s in front of you right now? How much can you control? And that right there should encapsulate this entire episode and why it’s so important that we let go and we all contract an STD in whatever version we want to accept that as: surrender, trust, and do not doubt or letting go of doubt.
So remember, and I’ve just demonstrated to you, your takeaway this week is that control is… and the more you try to control things the less peace you’re going to have in your life. I also want to point something else out: you want more money, you want more health, you want more of everything? Be at more peace. Because… I’m not going to go much longer here, but people are very unhappy because they’re trying to control the world. Many people, because they don’t have money. So what they’re trying to do is trying to control their job or their sales funnels or their employees or whatever to make money. And I’ve always told people that people think that when they have money, they’ll be happy. But what I tell people is a happy life makes money. And it goes back again to surrendering, trusting, and letting go of doubt.
Okay, thanks for listening to this episode. I will catch you on the next one. And I have no clue what the title is going to be or what the next episode is going to be about, but I will catch you on that episode. Take care. Bye-bye.