You’re listening to the transform your life from the inside out podcast. This episode is titled escaping the lion’s cage. I want to recount the story here that inspired this episode. And actually it was from earlier today. I wasn’t quite sure what I wanted to do in this episode, but I was at whole foods and I know, you know, a lot of employees there. Sedona is a small town and there was a guy there that I know that, you know, is there every day he works there in the deli section.

His name is James and James is trapped in life. But here’s the thing, which is the lion’s cage to some degree. He doesn’t know that he’s trapped. And what he keeps trying to do is to get untrapped and he wants out of the lion’s cage, which by the way, is a mental cage, but he keeps choosing to endure the lion’s cage. And then here’s the kicker. He sees that endurance as a victory.

He’s trapped, but he doesn’t know that he’s trapped and he sees that he’s trapped as a victory, which is what I call the lion’s cage. And you may be at some places in your life living this very same way. So if you want out of the cage, keep listening. Hi, 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 escaping the lion’s cage in the introduction, I was talking about James and Whole Foods, you know, living in Sedona, a small town. know 50 % of the employees in the store there. I’m there every day. I grab lunch there and I do it basically just to get out of the house.

So I know everyone in the pre-prepared food section. It doesn’t matter. I mean, it doesn’t not really have a story, but I know that they’re there and I talk to them, et cetera. And there’s one guy that I have. I have a lot of admiration for his name is James. He’s probably 75 or so. And James, can tell how he’s feeling based upon his voice tone. Now James is about 75 and he has lymphoma and he has a particular type of lymphoma.

Generally, I’ll check in with him every couple of days. You know, how are you feeling? How are you doing? And he goes through just constant year long chemotherapy. And I know he was taking some oral chemotherapy for a while and then he was taking traditional chemotherapy and then he mixes and matches. But I’ve been talking to James about healing. And actually, I even gave James the book, The Power of Your Subconscious Mind. Now, did he read it? No, he told me he has not read it. And I gave it to him maybe six months ago.

whole different podcast episode to talk about that. But anyway, we’re talking earlier today and James has a really positive attitude and he’s always talking about how strong he is mentally and he’s on the planet because he won’t give up. He said that before he said to me, I will determine when I leave the planet. Well, that’s great. I respect that and I agree with that. But James also is very stubborn in that

James knows all the best ways to endure life on the planet. So I was talking to him a little bit about his subconscious mind and James was, his body language was showing me he was a bit dismissive and he was listening to be kind and be respectful when I was talking about the subconscious mind, but he was also being dismissive kind of like, I know that, I know that you don’t need to share anything with me.

And he said to me, he goes, I’ve been like this. I’ve been sick for eight years. I know how to get through this. And my thought was without judgment. I was like, if you’ve been dealing with this for eight years, you don’t know how to get through this. You’re literally battling your way and fighting your way through this. Now, James could apply to anyone in life. mean, many people are battling their way through life.

whether it’s money, health, relationships, whatever it is. Here’s where James is trapped. At a prefrontal cortex, meaning thinking, executive part of the brain level, James even said to me, quote, goes, I’m very positive about my healing. It doesn’t matter. And the reason why is if you air quotes, see yourself as sick subconsciously,

It doesn’t matter how you see yourself analytically because analytically, meaning in your analytical thought, you could be saying every day in every way, I get healthier and healthier, or you could be saying things like, you know what? I’m going to beat this and I’m going to endure this and I’m a strong person and whatever it might be in terms of your positive self-talk. And unless that becomes subconsciously ingrained,

Like when I said, every day in every way, I become better and better, which is work from Dr. Emil Cui. Unless it’s ingrained subconsciously, we literally can be sick every single day, but talk to ourself about being positive and how positive we are. But guess what? It doesn’t change the subconscious identity. So his prefrontal cortex is positive about being or not sick or healing, whichever way he’s thinking about it.

But what he is accepting, here’s the vital word, what he is accepting is that he is sick. When I say accepting, analytically, prefrontal cortex, he’s not accepting. But if he did not accept it subconsciously, then it wouldn’t be a reality for him. So at a subconscious level, he is accepting and he owns and he sees himself as a person that has lymphoma.

and is sick. But in the analytical mind, he’s like, no, I’m positive. I’m positive. I’m positive. Year one, year two, year three, year four, year five, year six, year seven, year eight, I’m positive, but I’m still sick. And he even said to me when we were talking, he goes, I’ve had this for eight years and I’m still alive. And he gave me examples of how other people that he knew of also had the same physical ailment.

and they were no longer on the planet. And he was using his positivity to justify that that positivity was keeping him alive. Now, maybe, maybe not. I don’t know that. But what I do know is what he literally was resistant to focusing on was what if he focused on, let me rewire my brain, let me rewire my thought processes.

Let me reprogram my subconscious mind. He’s not focused on that. And every time I brought it up, which has only been twice because he’s been resistant and I’m not going to try to get him to do anything he doesn’t want to do. He’s literally listening to me with what they call deaf ears. He’s not listening. Well, that’s his choice. And then what he does is, and by the way, I like James a lot. He’s a really, really good guy. He’s a good man.

And I do wish he would let me help him, but that hasn’t come to pass. So what James has done is when he goes into his self commentary about I’m positive, I’m positive, I’m positive. I’m alive because I’m positive. Other people that were not as positive or not alive. Then he uses that to confer ego advantage. And that’s his blindness right there because my thoughts were, and I didn’t say it.

And James can be open-minded. You got to catch him at the right times. My thought was is, James, your thoughts analytically are positive, but what are your thoughts subconsciously? And if you want to know what your thoughts are subconsciously about any area of your life, all you’ve got to do is look at your external environment. If you want to know what your subconscious thoughts are about health,

Look at your health. You want to know what your subconscious thoughts are about wealth. Look at your bank account. And you know, the irony or the interesting thing is none of us hear anything until we want to hear something because I told him, James, you can heal yourself. The body is designed to heal. And what’s so interesting is he’s like, and he had a glove on, he was working and he had a rubber glove. took it off.

and showed me where he had a gash on his hand and he had just a scar there. He really couldn’t see the scar and he goes, I know I can heal because I had a big old gash here and the doctor said it would take XYZ amount of time and I healed it in a lot quicker amount of time. But notice the lack of awareness here. He had the belief that he could heal his hand, but when it came to his body and lymphoma, he’s not operating from that same belief.

Because if he was, then he would have already healed from the lymphoma. The body can heal from anything. Not an opinion. You look out in the world, you do research, the body can heal from anything. So I want to share a metaphor with you here related to the title of this episode. What if I put you on a lion’s cage and you had to constantly fight and run from the lion? Think about that. What if I put you on a lion’s cage and you know, lions

can be hungry and ferocious and you constantly had to fight and run from the lion. Well, that’s what James is doing because the lion is his cancer. The lion is his chemo. He does this quite extensively. mean, I have a lot of respect for the guy for the mental endurance that he goes through, but it doesn’t need to be so hard on him. But these are choices he’s making because he doesn’t know any differently. In my observation,

He can be a bit open-minded, but he’s not really, really open to healing or finding other ways because every time I bring it up again, a few times in different conversations, he shuts me down. So where James is, is he is strong mentally, but he loves the fight as opposed to seeking the healing. He loves the fight with the lion. He loves

the fight and the cage. Now doing this for 32 years, what I would have to guess, and I use the word ego advantage a bit ago is the fight gives him ego advantage about how strong of a person he is. So the more that he fights, the more he gets ego advantage of, yes, I’m a strong person. I will get healthier. I will be well, or I will beat this or whatever it is, or I will. What he’s doing is enduring.

because if you had it for eight years, you haven’t healed it. You are enduring it. So think about that. He literally gets advantage from the fight, which I would suspect is the reason he doesn’t want to leave the lion’s cage because if he left the lion’s cage, he wouldn’t have that fight anymore. And then he wouldn’t have the ego advantage. So to summarize this part of what I’m sharing and the scenario that I’m talking about, James is basically saying

literally in his identity and his self-talk without even recognizing it, I can stay in the cage. I’ve learned how to fight the lions. I am positive about fighting the lions. I am strong about fighting the lions. And that has given him the ego advantage and he’s adopted that. But James is also adapted to fighting the lion as opposed to realizing that at any point he could just

leave the cage. So remember this last metaphor because I want to ask you some questions about this metaphor and your own life a little later in our time together. My thought about being in the lion’s cage, meaning something being hard in life. We can take the lion’s cage for anything in life. As I said earlier, we can take the lion’s cage and we can think about our finances, our health, our relationships, whatever it might be.

And what we do is through social conditioning and social indoctrination and years of being on the planet and being indoctrinated and conditioned, we don’t learn to thrive. We learn to do what James has done. We learn to adapt. We learn to fight the lions. When in truth, we can just get out of the cage.

People often talk about fighting things and Mother Teresa said, what you fight, weakens you. Even when people, I’m going to go off tangent here for a second. When people are fighting cancer, they get into a full blown fight, fighting the cancer, perhaps as James is doing. It can be any other illness. What you fight, weakens you. What you want to do is embrace it, understand the message, release it.

and let it go and use your subconscious mind for healing. But again, this applies to anything in life. So getting out of your cage, getting out of the lion’s cage is really about two things. Number one, and I say this kindly to anybody listening because this applies to me as well. Realizing you don’t know as much as you think you know. Ponder that as a matter of fact, and this applies to me as well.

And you could say, but how does it apply when you’re doing the podcast? What I’m going to say here is that you really don’t know anything about anything. If I ask you how to make your fingernails grow, you probably couldn’t tell me. If I ask you how you make your hair grow, you probably couldn’t tell me. If I ask you how you make your teeth come in as a child, you couldn’t tell me. If I ask you to tell me how your heart pumps blood verbatim, literally.

You probably couldn’t tell me. We think we know so many things, but we know absolutely nothing. And to get out of the cage, we have to realize we know nothing and we have to actually open up the possibility. But beyond that is, and here’s a big one and the biggest obstacle for a lot of people, courage. You have to have the courage to get out of the cage. And later on, I’ll talk about why we don’t have the courage.

which is brain-based and how to actually jump over that to get out of the cage. And I’ll do that in the secret podcast. What you want to be careful with in life is arguing with circumstances. If you’re like James and you argue that you’ve done it for eight years and you’ve got it all figured out and you don’t need any help, you’re positive and you’re all these kinds of things.

Again, third time, I really liked James and I have a lot of respect for James. As a matter of fact, if I didn’t like James, I wouldn’t be trying to offer him assistance in some way and healing. He doesn’t really know to a large degree what I do for a living. And that may be that I haven’t built credibility, but we do get along well. We have some nice chats every time I’m in there. But here’s the thing. If you argue that you’ve done your life, however way you’ve done it, your health, your wellness, your money,

And this is the way that life is. No one can help you because you’re fighting to stay in the cage. And the reason you’re fighting to stay in the cage is because you think you already know what is what. And as I just said a bit ago, in reality, none of us know anything. What lion’s cage have you created for yourself? Think about that. What lion’s cage? And I’ve said three times now, maybe it’s

an abundance of bills. Maybe it’s bad health. Maybe it’s just never being able to find or create, better said, better to create a loving and healthy relationship. And so what many people do, if you’re in a lion’s cage, you’re going to run and you’re going to run fast away from the lion. Why? Because you’re running for your life. But how many of you are running for your life? Maybe you’re listening right now. You’re trying to get your head above water with your bills.

Maybe it’s your health. Maybe you keep having recurring health issues. Who knows what it is for you. But what I ask is how come you keep running instead of getting out of the cage and getting out of the cage is understanding that number one, this is subconscious. And number two, it is your brain working from survival mode until you understand those two things really well. You’re going to be running in the cage.

A little offshoot here, even what I’m sharing right now is everything I’m saying. Many people aren’t listening. They’re hearing. Hearing is biological. Listening is psychological. And when we listen, we’re like, okay, and working with a shaman, I can tell you this. And I’ll come back to my thought. There are many times that I’ve heard and I’ve listened to things that I’m like, I don’t want to hear this and I don’t want to listen to it.

why because I was in fear mode, fight or flight, whatever it might’ve been. But I heard it and I listened because I knew that when things were coming to me, the intention they were brought with was pure, loving, openhearted intention. So I would sit there and take my medicine, so to speak. But I recognized to be more, do more and have more in life, I have to work from opening up and that I don’t know how to do a lot of things.

And even when people talk to me about doing things that I think I already know things about, maybe I don’t know as much about it as what I think that I know. And I need to listen to other people. mean, hell, even here in my own business, my tech team laughs at me because in a good way, we get along extremely well, the entire team and I have an amazing team. They laugh at me because I don’t even know how to send our email server auto-responder, whatever you call it. If you ask me to send out a group email to the list,

I have no clue how to do it. I’d have to watch videos and tutorials and YouTube videos and all that because I have no clue how to do it. So basically the team does it all because they know how to do it. But so many of us know nothing, but we think we know so much, whether it’s working out or health or wellness or money or love. Politics is a big one in the world. Most people don’t know jack shit, but many people are preaching. the left, the right.

I have degree in political science as well as psychology. can tell you most people have no fucking clue what they’re talking about. When it comes to politics or economic policy or tariffs or all these kind of things, they know nothing about it. I know more than most people and I still know nothing about it. And we have to recognize that’s a good way to put it. Wherever you are, you may know more than other people, but it doesn’t mean you are exhausted on the subject and know everything about it. That’s the way out of the lion’s cage.

You’re trapped in lions in the lion’s cage because of a lack of awareness. And I mean this kindly because it all applies to me as well. Ignorance, meaning you don’t know what’s available to you. You don’t know what’s possible for you. So where many people are, maybe you are as well. Many of us are enduring life and this won’t apply to everyone, but it’ll apply to most people.

If you’re living in North Korea, I guarantee you, you are not listening to this podcast episode. If you look at what North Korea has done the last three to five years, how they have fortified the entire country with landmines, electric fences, their defection rate has dropped dramatically from like 2,500 people a year, 10 years ago to like 200 people a year now. There’s nothing, almost nothing to do but endure.

I don’t know, a handful of people every year get out, it’s in the tens or hundreds and low hundreds of even that. But everyone else listening is if you’re not creating the life that you want and life is humdrum and you’re not getting what you want, you are enduring life. And when you are enduring life, you are trapped. So like James question, what’s your money look like?

What’s your health look like? What are your relationships look like? Because many of us, we don’t embrace these things and say, let me resolve them to becoming more. Be do have got to be more before you can do more, before you can have more. Many of us just fight and we fight the creditors and we fight the bill collector when we fight the landlord and we fight the money and we fight the government and we fight crump and we fight Biden and we fight the tariffs. No, it’s not about fighting.

It’s about adapting and understanding who you are in your abilities and then adapting to those higher abilities in you. All these places that you’re trapped, they’re not you. They are simply adoptions of your mind and adoptions you have made through not being open, not expanding your awareness and not looking at other ways to be do or have things. In the secret podcast, I want to talk about

how your brain, because part of this is mental, part of it is brain based. I want to talk about how your brain keeps you trapped in the lion’s cage and how to escape it. And I’m going to give you the exact formula in this secret podcast. And I’m going to show you how your brain was designed to keep you trapped. This is why so many of us want different things in life. And no matter how much we say it or how positive we are, like I talked about earlier, we never create it.

Why? Because there’s a part of your brain that will do anything and everything that it can to keep you trapped and stuck exactly where you are. So to get access to that secret podcast, go to jimforton.com slash app, jimforton.com slash app. Join my B2F Insiders and there you’ll have access to the secret podcast plus coaching for me twice per month. Okay. Your transformational takeaway to escape.

The lion’s cage. Einstein said that a problem can never be solved at the level it was created. You have to go to a higher level. But what many of us do is I’ve already alluded to is we are insistent that our current thoughts and behaviors and actions are correct. We are insistent that this is the way that you do it. Now I’m trapped in a lion’s cage and I’m running and I’m exhausted and I don’t like it.

But I’m going to be insistent and I’m going to continue the current thoughts and behaviors and actions. Even though I bitch and moan and groan about the lion’s cage, I’m going to be insistent with my current thoughts and behaviors and actions. And I’m going to do nothing different. I’m going to keep doing what I’m doing and I’m going to endure. That is you trapped in the lion’s cage. You know, you probably have heard this many times before.

If nothing changes, nothing changes. Personally, I am not a fan. you know anything about me or listen for any amount of time, I’m not a fan of platitudes. I am not a fan of cliches, so to speak, unless there’s truisms behind them. And you’ve heard before that nothing changes unless nothing changes. That’s not true. A more accurate statement would be nothing changes until you.

change. Ponder that. Nothing changes until you change. And so if you don’t change, you will stay trapped in a lion’s cage running from the lion. Back to this person that I’m talking about. He’s of the opinion that his model of reality is the correct model of reality. And he’s not open to changing that model of reality.

Why? Because in his mind, he has evidence that his model of reality works. But looking at it from my point of view, you have evidence that your model of reality works to keep you into being an endurant human being. But your model of reality doesn’t bring you the feeling good and the peace and the joy and the things that you want on a daily basis. This is why it is so vital that we recognize that

You’ve heard it before and I know you’re hearing it here and I’m going on with this a little bit and sharing. We tend to say, I want to be, do and have different things in life. But then we metaphorically cross our arms and say, nope, I want to be more and do more and have more, but I’m not going to be more and do more and have more to be more, do more and have more. Meaning you’ve got to be the change. You’ve got to do the change to have the change.

But we won’t do that. We want the change, but we won’t be more to do more to have more. And then final comment on this. I did a podcast episode on this. Everything in life has a price. Ponder that everything in life has a price. So the question for you is what price are you willing to pay to escape the lion’s cage? Generally speaking, the price is pretty much free for most people.

But the price you would pay would be the discipline of learning to use the mind to free yourself from the lion’s cage. Thanks for listening. I’ll catch you on another episode or over on the secret podcast. Bye bye.