You’re listening to the Transform Your Life from the Inside Out podcast. This episode is titled The Alchemy of Absolute Surrender. The truth is most of us spend our lives playing defense against a world that we think is challenging and many times people think it’s out to get them or get us. We fight our health problems. We fight our bank accounts. We fight the economy. We fight our bad habits. We fight politics. We fight life. And then we wonder why we’re completely frustrated, exhausted, and some people will even say hopeless. What if I told you the reason you’re struggling in life isn’t because your problems are too big, but it’s because the things that you’re fighting and dealing with literally, listen carefully, literally have zero power over you. And that is the truth. And in this episode, we’re going to explore the spiritual concept of power and surrender and how to start taking your power back from all the cultural brainwashing that you’ve experienced over a lifetime. So if you want to start reclaiming your authenticity spiritually and your power, keep listening.
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.

Okay, so in this episode, we’re talking about spiritual power. And in the intro, I said we’re going to start talking about how you and how we give up our power to cultural brainwashing and how to start taking that power back. Before we even get into the episode, thank you for your patience and thank you for bearing with me. You know, if you’ve listened for any amount of time or even recently, you know that I moved from one state to the next. And where I moved, it’s a small town and it’s very challenging to get things, especially audiovisual lighting and microphones and different things that I’m trying to do to my office up to bring the best possible experience to you guys. So right now, I’m still in the process of setting my office up, working on the sound quality, the visuals, the lighting, an appealing background and everything else. So while I’m doing that, again, thank you for your patience while I’m getting every bit of that done. And my intention is to have it done by the next episode. So we shall see what happens.
Okay, today we’re going to talk about commonly held beliefs about many, if not all the aspects of your life and how you’re living from your cultural brainwashing and you’re not living from the spiritual truth and power and authenticity and even the seniority of you spiritually. You’re not living from that place. Why? Quite simply, we’ve learned to be all the brainwashing that we’ve experienced over a lifetime. So I want to talk about a couple of different areas of life.
And first, in no particular order, I want to talk about money. If you’ve listened for any amount of time, you know that for many years I struggled with money. And the brainwashing that I experienced was I grew up poor. And I grew up learning that the world is hard and you have to struggle. And you’ve got to work for your money and you’ve got to fight for what you get. And you’ve got to hustle and all these kind of things. But a commonly held belief, like me, that many people hold is, and I’m going to actually start shifting some of your thinking in this episode. We believe, and I did for many years, that my business, my income, my job, my clients, my students, everything, all these things that I mentioned, that you probably have many of these things as well, especially the clients or the business or whatever, I believed these things were the source, listen carefully, the source of my money. And I thought, even though I really didn’t articulate it, I thought, well, if I lose my source, meaning if I lose my students or I lose my clients or my following or whatever, if I lose these things, then I’m going to lose my supply. And if I lose my supply, that means I’m going to lose my money.
As I mentioned, I grew up poor. So I lived in this belief very pervasively for 30-something years of my life. Now, I wasn’t broke in my late 20s and 30s after college or 20s and 30s and late 20s and 30s after college, but I struggled and I hustled. And I would grind it out. And I worked really hard for the amount of money that I made. And I, like most people, would make money. And then I would actually, in my mind, lose money. And it was a constant battle to get ahead in life, to start saving money, and to start building a lifetime of financial prosperity. If you’re listening to this episode, which you are, then I’m sure that you can probably relate to some of this as well. You look at your life externally. And you look at your home right now and your car and your money and your 401k and all these kind of things. And you automatically think, well, I have these things because of my life, of my business and my company and my podcast or whatever it is that you do.
I’m going to slow down here. Notice something here. All these things that you believe that provide your supply, meaning your clients, your money, your podcast, your business, whatever it is, all these things are what I call externals. They come from outside of you. All these things, they don’t come from within you. They come from outside of you. They come from the circumstances you have created. And again, many of you, if not all of you, I can’t say all for sure, because we have massive amounts of people who download the podcast. But again, we’ve all learned this brainwashing culturally. We’ve learned that what I have in my life right now comes from the outside. But the truth is this, your job or your business or your clients or whatever it is, these external things, they are not the source of your supply. They are merely the channel through which supply comes to you and comes into your life.
Think about that for a moment. Your clients, your podcast, your business, whatever it is, we think these things provide our money, therefore they are our source. They are not our source. They are the channel through which source comes. Now, that’ll make more sense as we go. But the moment you realize that your true source is internal, your true source is not the external things. Your true source is, are you ready? Your true source is your consciousness. And the second you get this, and I mean get it at a deep level, you stop panicking about external conditions. You stop panicking about your business basically or maybe not doing the kind of business you used to do in the past. You stop panicking about maybe not having a lot of clients right now. And you realize that because everything comes from consciousness, and everything comes from source, you recognize, very simply, that if one door, meaning one stream of clients, maybe one big client, if that closes, you start to recognize when you’re actually starting to assimilate what I’m sharing here, you recognize, okay, everything comes from consciousness, and one door closed, but you know what? Consciousness, it never runs dry. Source, it never runs dry. And because it never runs dry, it’ll simply just come through a different door or in a different way or in a different direction.
Remember, if you’ve listened for any amount of time, I’ve apprenticed with a shaman now for 30 years. He will, from time to time, say about himself, I am a sorcerer. And as a sorcerer, I go to source for everything. And when you actually start getting what I’m sharing with you, I don’t mean just really understanding, but you get and you know at a profound level, you recognize and you start to recognize and you realize that the job and the money and the 401 and the business or whatever, these are not the source of your supply. Supply is money and abundance. They are not the source. They are simply an avenue. And because they come from source, if this avenue closes, other avenues can open. Let that soak in and start looking at your life. Look around your life now and notice things come and things go, whether it’s money or physical things in your life or people or homes or whatever it might be. Things come and things go. Life ebbs and it flows. But everything in the universe comes from source. And when you come to know that, there’s no reason, there’s no purpose to have any kind of fear around money or lack or losing business or a client leaving or whatever. Because remember, ebb and flow. And it all comes from source.
Okay, next, I want to talk about resistance and fighting your problems. Let me ask you a question. And by the way, I learned this one the hard way also, and I did this for many years. So the question is, when a major problem appears in your life, what are your first thoughts and reactions? Now, if you’re like most humans, your first thought is, oh, shit, this happened. I didn’t expect it. I don’t have the money. I didn’t plan for it. I don’t like this. I’ve got to change this. I have to fight for this. Or I’m going to resist this. Or I’m going to use my willpower and I’m going to grind and I’m going to struggle and I’m going to hustle and I’m going to roll my sleeves up and I’m going to work 24-7. And I’m going to take action to conquer this circumstance or to conquer this problem.
Now, let that sit for a second. Look at your life. Look at your past. How many problems have unexpectedly shown up in your life? And by the way, that’s part of the experience called life. It happens to all of us. went into conquer, fight, fix, eliminate, or in some way mitigate this problem. Well, the reason we do that is because we are brainwashed and we are taught to do that. And when I say brainwashed, we have been brainwashed since we were little children into thinking that we can fix anything and we can solve anything in life and we can tackle anything in life as long as we struggle, and we fight, and we’re responsible, and we fix that.
Ponder that for a moment. Look at your own life, because I’m going to actually start flipping that for you. The truth is this, and please get this, because in my opinion, this is mind-blowingly powerful when you come to know this. I mean, it’s like, whoa, holy shit, this is powerful when you get it. Let me actually segue here, or just I want to interject the thought here. As I read many years ago, someone asked Mother Teresa if she would fight against the war or march and not fight. Can you imagine Mother Teresa with an M16? No, I’m sorry. Someone asked Mother Teresa if she would march against the war in Vietnam. And she said that she would not march against the war, but she would march for peace. And she said, because what you fight against weakens you. So you think about all these problems and all these things that you may be dealing with right now that you actually think is a problem, and then you fight it and you tackle it and you struggle with it and you wrestle with it. Here’s what I want to share.
The moment you fight a problem, the second you fight a problem, you inadvertently declare that that problem or situation or circumstance is real and it’s powerful enough to oppose life itself. Now, what do I mean? What do I mean when I say oppose life itself? Basically, life is consciousness. And when we actually start opposing life, we are actually simultaneously opposing consciousness, and consciousness is the life force and fabric of the universe. So understand this. When you’re fighting, and you’re tackling, and you’re planning, and you’re scheming, first, all these things don’t eliminate the challenge or the problem. But all these things are resistance, and recognize this. This resistance. All the scheming and tackling and planning and all these kind of things, we actually feed the problem. And that’s what I request you understand. The second you tackle a problem, you’re not solving the problem. You’re actually feeding the problem. You’re not destroying the problem. You’re feeding the problem, because you’re keeping the problem alive with the energy of your consciousness.
Now, why and what does that mean? I want to take you back to 2014. I was having dinner with my brother-in-law and my sister, Don Xavier, my brother-in-law, a shaman. And again, it’s just, I’m such a broken record. I’ve done this for so long. And people will say, well, why do you say he’s your brother-in-law and the shaman like every time it comes out of your mouth? Well, the reason why is we were adding new people every week and they might not know that. So anyway, let the broken record continue for a second. We were having dinner and I was telling him about this weekend that I went to in Florida with a friend of mine that’s also a coach. She’s a PhD and a transformational coach. And the whole weekend, it was four days of psychodrama. And basically you are physically acting out trauma, and things from your past. And Don Xavier said, and of course I have free will and I have choice, but he said, don’t do that. And he was saying it very compassionately, but he said, don’t do that. Because when you do that and you play all of that out again, you’re bringing all that energy from your past, you’re rekindling it and bringing it right back into your future today.
So think about that for a moment. Consciousness is energy. And we want to let the old consciousness stay where it is. The old phrase, something along the lines of let the dead stay buried or something like that. Here’s the point. Consciousness is energy. And conscious energy is what keeps things alive. You and your body are conscious energy. fighting a problem, I think you’ve probably already figured this out based upon what I’m sharing with you, fighting a problem keeps the energy of the problem alive. So the fastest way to dissolve a problem is what I call non-resistance. And what is non-resistance? Non-resistance is withdrawing the fear and energy that was sustaining the problem in the first place. When you withdraw the energy, it’s like cutting off oxygen to a burning candle. You ever done that before? Maybe you see a candle in a jar in a glass. You put a lid over it and boom, the flame goes out almost instantly. Why? You cut off the oxygen.
So when you actually cut off the consciousness and the energy to the problem, it might not dissolve in terms of your appearance right away, but you’ve cut off the supply. You’ve cut off the consciousness to the problem and you’re withdrawing the energy. And what happens is that problem through consciousness will go away. I could dig into this deeper right now, but I’m not going to. And the reason why is working with a shaman for decades now, I’ve never given the answer. As much as I want the answer for many things and have never been given the answer. And basically, what I’ve been told is, it’s a metaphor. What I’ve been told this metaphor is, Don Xavier would say, I hide Easter eggs for you. And I hide the Easter eggs, but you have to go find the Easter egg so you find the prize. If I tell you where the Easter egg is, you have to do nothing, you have to expend no energy, and you don’t get any value when you don’t appreciate the prize.
So I could share with you right now, and I will every time in different ways, but I’m just going to tell you right now, my only request is this in this episode. Everything is consciousness and everything is energy. Where you hold your attention is where your consciousness is. And whatever your consciousness is, it’s like a mirror. That’s what you project. And what you project is what you bring back. And notice what you’re doing. Part of your analytical mind says, okay, I get that. I may want to try that, but I need to go do things to air quote, fix this problem that I have. We are so conditioned to tackle, to fight, to hustle, to grind. We’re so brainwashed. We do these things thinking, okay, that’s how we fix the problem. That’s how we get movement. Not even recognizing what we’re inadvertently doing is we are projecting in the consciousness, we have these freaking problems. Why? Because we’re trying to solve the problem.
Now, I know philosophically that makes sense to you, but practically it might not make sense yet. But I promise you, once you start grasping this and wrapping your mind around it, and you start letting go, kind of like you kind of pry your fingers, I’m laughing, pry your fingers loose from I have to do, I have to fix, I have to create, I have to make shit happen. And you let that go. And then we start recognizing that everything is consciousness based upon where we hold our attention. You will find things in your external life shifting and you’re going to be scratching your head going, well, wow, that’s shifted. I got lucky, you’ll say. Oh, well, you know, I had good fortune or something happened. And this problem doesn’t exist anymore because something shifted over here. Well, what shifted over here, metaphorically speaking, is what shifted in here, which is in your mind, which is in your consciousness.
Okay, so I want to talk more about effort. But now I also want to talk about the personal air quote, I. And this is going to relate a bit to trying to fix problems, trying to fix life. A universally held belief is, and this was mine for many decades, and you might have heard me talk before over the years about be, do, have. Be, do, have is you’ve got to be before you can do before you can have. But we learned to be the doer. If you look out in your life, look out in the world, we’re taught from the time we are small kids, if you want those new sneakers, you have to go do something. If you want extra money, you’ve got to do something. And we’re taught very pervasively that we are doers.
And then when we’re doers, what follows next is we start thinking, okay, I’ve got the plan. I’ve got to create a strategy. I’ve got to produce. I have to actually start working towards an outcome. And then, and then I have to make it happen. And if I don’t make it happen, then guess what? For many of us, we think, okay. If I don’t make it happen, shit’s going to hit the fan. I can’t pay my car payment. I can’t pay my visa payment. I can’t pay my rent. I can’t pay my mortgage. I can’t do this. I can’t do that. Notice all the noise. The truth is this. The personal human ego, the container, the container that you call you, it cannot actually heal, prosper, or create harmony. What it does is it calculates, it struggles, it plans, and it worries. And the brainwashing is that we are taught that we, the physical container, we have to fix, we have to create, we have to do, we have to execute. And if we don’t fix and create… do and execute, nothing will happen in our life. And that is not true.
And let me give you proof of that in a very simple way. Look at your left hand or your right hand. Now, if you’re driving, please be careful. Right now, all that I want you to do is don’t do anything. Just simply look at your hand. And again, if you’re driving or you’re doing something that requires your attention, please be careful. Now, if you can, open and close your hand. That’s it. Open and close your hand. And the question that I have for you, what did that? And you might be thinking, well, my hand did that. No, your body has no consciousness. And to prove that, look at a dead body. It doesn’t open and close its hands because it has no consciousness. It has no life in it. It’s your consciousness that opens and closes your hand. It’s your consciousness that is the cause and the effect is opening the hand. We all want the effect. We want the money. We want the outcomes. We want the homes. We want the cars. We want the effects. And we think we’re going to get the effect by doing.
But you have to look at the cause of the effect. And the cause of the effect, based upon what I just shared with you, the cause of the effect. It’s not the doing. It is the consciousness because the consciousness in you that does that is the intelligence in you. And we all have this infinite intelligence in us. But you know what? We don’t even think about it. So right now this second, to prove that to you, that most of us are not even conscious of being conscious, what’s keeping your heart beating right now this second? What’s keeping your eyeballs looking at whatever you’re looking at right this second? What’s keeping your lungs inhaling and exhaling right this second? Well, that’s universal intelligence, and you’re not even conscious of it right now in this moment until I bring your attention to it.
But you know, the very gentle example that I really like, and this just dawned on me one day, and I’ve talked about it a half a dozen times, and this one little vignette, there’s one little sharing right here. This came to me one night, probably about 10 years ago. I don’t know, seven, eight, nine, 10 years ago in the kitchen. And it’s changed my life. And there’s even a whole episode, probably two or three years ago, titled, Are You Smarter Than a Potato? And there’s one little vignette, segue, whatever you want to call it, that I want to share. Imagine that you’re preparing dinner. And as you’re preparing dinner, you cut your finger. Maybe you’re chopping up some artichokes. I don’t know what you’re doing, but you cut your finger. Now, you don’t have to go to the ER, you don’t need stitches or any of that, but your finger bleeds. And then what, I don’t know what you do, but what I do is I rinse it out, I go to the bathroom, grab a Band-Aid, put the Band-Aid on, and I go about what I’m doing. Now, what we do not do is we don’t look at our finger all night long and think, and I guarantee you, you’ve never done this. We don’t look at our finger and go, oh no, oh, oh, I hope my little cut, I hope it heals. I need to help it heal. I need to focus on it. I need to meditate on it. I need to visualize or imagine every single day this little cut that I have on my finger healing. We don’t do that. We simply put the Band-Aid on it and we forget about it. And what happens next day? The finger’s already healing again. Even that night, the blood’s already coagulated. Take the Band-Aid off. Next couple of days, your finger is fine.
What healed the finger? Well, you didn’t notice. You did not air quote do anything. What healed the finger is your consciousness. And I’m going to tell you right now, I’m going to be talking about consciousness as I reinvent the podcast. I’m going to be talking about consciousness over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over again. Why? Because that is the foundation of your life. Consciousness is the foundation of the universe. It’s whatever you want to call it. It’s universal intelligence. We can call it consciousness. We can call it the quantum force. We can call it the force, the supreme force, divine mind. Or we can even call it God. But it’s the foundation of everything.
And until we live from that foundation, we can grunt and strain and hope and pray and wish and want. And shit is not going to change in our external world. Why? Because when we grunt and pray and hope and wish and want, what we’re simultaneously broadcasting to the universe is that we do not have that thing, and the universe is going to fulfill that. Why? Because what we are in consciousness is what we bring back to us. So please recognize this. Your job is not effort. Your job is what I just shared, a recognition and awareness that, guess what? The body doesn’t create anything. The body is the conduit. The body is the mechanism. The body is the container for consciousness.
So essentially what we want to do is we want to drop trying to force the universe. And trust me, at least in my own experience, that’s a big ask for a lot of us because it was for me too when we had to learn to drop because we’re so, again, conditioned and brainwashed to, I have to do. And if I do not do, no one’s going to do it for me and nothing’s going to happen. We have to actually recondition ourself to drop that brainwashed, archaic, outdated approach to life and recognize that divine intelligence, like I talked about the cut, the healing and everything else, is already working within us and through us with no conscious participation on our part.
Okay, so as I mentioned before, for those that want to go on the ride with me, my whole objective with this podcast and the New Direction is to shake you loose from the brainwashing and the imprisonment of what we believe is being, air quote, only human. We will often say, well, I’m a human being, and you’ve heard me say before. Now again, please don’t go out in the world and say, oh, Jim said I’m not a human being. Get the full story, okay? But when we identify as only human, you’ve heard me say before, when we identify as only human, we then inherit every single limitation of that identity.
So for right now, my only objective in this particular episode is to get you to start thinking maybe kind of like, spraying WD-40 on a really tight bolt. I’m just trying to loosen and saturate you and get you to start thinking from a new way. So my objective is to start planting seeds, so to speak, that you hear repetitively and you start thinking, okay, I’m going to follow along little by little. And not because you’re following me, but because you’re following deeper wisdom within yourself. Because I know that many of you listening, many of you listening right now, even though you still might be the air quote doer, this is resonating with you at some level. And that level is a deeper level of consciousness.
So in the next couple of episodes, we’re going to start exploring how. How did you become so brainwashed? How did you, how did we become so blind to this power and this authenticity and this spiritual cosmic seniority within us? Well, the reason we’re so blind is because the whole world is brainwashed and we look out on the world, whether it be our parents or a school or a church or the world in general, we look out on the world and the entire world is living in the brainwashing, therefore, and they teach the brainwashing to us, and we don’t know we’re living in the brainwashing because the entire world is living in what I call the invisible cave or the brainwashing.
For now, just be mindful and please remember that I said I’m going to be changing the name of the podcast in the next couple of weeks. I’m going to be changing the name to Brainwashed, Exit the Human Lie with Jim Fortin. So from this episode, remember the title. The alchemy of absolute surrender. What does that look like? We’re going to keep talking about that as we go. But what that really looks like is this. I’m going to say this very slowly, because I’ve been talking about doing, and now we’ve been programmed and brainwashed to do. You don’t need to fix your life. You don’t need to fight the world. When you stop feeding the illusion that external problems have authority over you, the struggle, the challenges, the shadows, they dissolve, they stop.
And what happens is, and I promise you, I know this. And if you do what I tell you to do, and you follow this and just start dabbling with it, you will find, I guarantee you, again, I promise you, harmony, flow, and peace start to become constants in your life. Plain and simple, your life is about to become one hell of a lot easier.
Okay, so we’re talking about brainwashing. And if you want to discover how brainwashed you have become without even knowing it, go to https://jimfortin.com/brainwashed and opt in to the brainwashed waitlist, but also take the free brainwashed audit. And when you do, there have been thousands of people that have taken the audit. And when you do, it’s going to become obvious at how brainwashed you have become. And that brainwashing is what stands between you and every single thing that you want in life.
If you found this episode valuable, please go to Apple and leave me a five-star review. Anything less than that is not going to help me. And if you’re listening on Spotify, leave me a star rating. I’d really appreciate that. Because that actually helps others know what to listen to or not to listen to. And the more people that we can help together, the better world that we can make for all of us. As well, please tell other people about this podcast. When you tell other people, maybe they’ll listen, maybe they won’t. But for those who do, it’ll also help them start creating a better experience of life. And what we put out is what we get back.
Okay, thank you for listening. And I’ll catch you over on another episode. Take care. Bye-bye.