Hello, and welcome back to practicing human, the podcast where every day we're getting a little better at life.

I'm your host, Cory Muscara, and in today's episode, we're going to talk about something I call

recalibration periods. More to come on that in a moment. First, let's settle in together with the sound of the bells.

Okay, so a topic theme that I've been integrating more in my teachings the last couple of years,

talking about more explicitly is the theme of alignment. I discuss it in different ways.

One of the entry points into that conversation is learning to parse the distinction between what we

might call the ego voice and the soul voice. And if we orient to the ego as this

sense of what we should do and how we should behave, or even a list of

subconscious programming about what to say, what to believe, how to act, that's based on survival

mechanisms, ideas we've learned throughout our lives of who we need to be in order to be safe,

loved and protected, then we can imagine how much of our life is often driven by that ego space.

And as I've mentioned before, living purely from that ego space can never lead us to fulfillment,

because the arising of the ego and everything it believes in comes from some fundamental experience

of being separated and wounded and not good enough. And so all the patterns that arise from

that place are basically trying to get that. But there's a delusion to it because

they're trying to get that comes from this idea of once that's all arranged, once that's all safe,

and I'm protected and I have this and that, all these things I didn't have that I thought I needed,

once that's all good, then I'll be complete, then I'll be happy. And part of maturity,

especially spiritual maturity is the recognition that there is no arrangement of external conditions

or people in your life or things that makes that go away, that gives that fundamental sense of

completeness, of okeness, of deep fulfillment and peace that is just there to your core.

You can give you temporary moments of that where the chemical cocktail of like need to get that,

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