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for 27% off site wide. That's helixleap.com slash breakdown for 27% off site wide. helixleap.com slash breakdown. Shhh. Shhh. Hi, I'm Maya and Viallik. I'm Jonathan Cohen. And welcome to our breakdown. This is something really fun. That's about to happen. We are sharing something today that was previously only available on Jonathan's sub-stack page. John, what's your sub-stack page called? It's called practical spirituality. This conversation that Jonathan and I had is about one could say the invisible architecture that is shaping your reality. What does that mean? A question I ask all the time is am I seeing the world as it is? Or am I just seeing the narratives that I have built in order to survive? Do I need to update my perspective in order to have more connection, have more opportunity, have more peace of mind? So many of the fights that we have with each other, not you and me, but all of us in general, misunderstandings, but in many cases it's a misunderstanding between what you think the story is based on your own personal trajectory as opposed to what's the dynamic that's happening? And the more we can understand the sort of unconscious stories that we tell, the better we can go into the present without being burdened by the past. Sometimes we also talk about timelines, what timeline are we living in? As we've grown up, we have built narratives based on ourselves at a certain age. What is true in the present moment? How do we integrate that? How do we update? How we view the world now? And how we see ourselves in order to live more freely? One of the reasons we wanted to share this conversation with you is because Jonathan invited me to his sub-stack page to kind of have me explain anything that we could get to, that would be neurobiological or neurophysiological. And what we do talk about and we're so excited to share with you is how the grooves in our brain get laid down by the stories we tell, and how easy it is for new experiences to be categorized along the deepest grooves, which in many cases may not even be accurate. How is that going to determine how you interact with your family, with loved ones, with potential dates, with friends, at your job?'s what we're gonna talk about today. And mine does an amazing job explaining the neurophysiology. The other thing that we talk about is that each one of us have a handful, maybe even just a few, core narratives that are actually shaping most of how we see the world. And if we can start to understand those, we can begin to shift them.

We really hope you enjoyed this episode.

And please join us over on Substack on My and Be Alex Breakdown on my page and also Jonathan's Page, Practical Spirituality, where, as you can tell, sometimes I will appear. But we're so excited to share this episode with you today. And we do lives every week, so make sure to join us over on Substack so that you can be the first to hear this kind of content, but we are so glad to share it with you now.

Break it down.

You don't even know what we're going to talk about yet, but I'm going to give you the pitch, ready? Okay. Imagine if I were to tell you that each one of us, every moment of every day, is often caught in a distorted version of reality that we are making up. I would believe that. Imagine that every single one of our thoughts is actually just the tiny thread that if you start to pull, you will discover more thoughts and stories and whole narratives connected to to just those little thoughts and we think our thoughts are true. We begin to learn how to disconnect from them to watch them. But what's actually happening is they're not just thoughts one way after another. They are this interconnected twirling twine of mess that we have constructed often in a way to keep ourselves safe from early childhoods, to predict pain and disaster and hardship, and we are trying to protect against that. And we've built these narrative constructions. And so while I believe that meditation is super important to not associate with the thought and follow them, sometimes untangling the thoughts and finding the narratives, the core story in the tangle of thoughts can help us become free to see the world differently and to experience life in a completely different way. I followed that. I like that. I'm into it. There's actually an exercise that I have done where you analyze fears from this perspective. You try and untangle the fear and get to the root fear, try and get to the root of what's actually going on. The example I like to give is like if I were to tell you, you know, I'm afraid of losing my job, you could ask a dozen people, they're going to have as many answers as to why they're afraid of losing your job.

Some people might say, I don't want to lose status. Some people might say, I don't want to lose the paycheck. Some people would say, I don't want to lose the ability to socialize with that person. I have a crush on, right? What is your particular fear, right? About whatever it is. And those are going to be different, But generally, what I have found is that they tend to resonate around the same few core fears usually for each person. I'd be afraid I wouldn't be able to socialize with you anymore if I lost my job. That's an accurate fear. Okay, I'm going to walk you through a few things that take what you just said and drill it down even further to show that interactions we're having are actually potentially real. Because it's easy to do with a fear, right? You're like, okay, maybe I have a fear, I'm actually afraid of something else. Sure. What if you don't even really see the nature of an interaction you have with someone? You say, oh, they don't like me. Oh, yeah. Or I'm not likable. Correct. Let's dive in to the filters that we are using every single day that are constructing our reality. So every thought starts with a story. That's just an idea to plant in the minds of our listeners as we continue. So everything you think has some story behind it. Every thought is the beginning of the story and most of us don't realize we are living inside ones we don't even consciously construct. The challenge and the outcome of today's exercise is to start to be aware of how a single thought is actually backed up and supported by an enormous number of stories that you may not be actively writing. You may be playing these out. I was just given an exercise on this from a book that I'm reading. You didn't know that, and so I'm curious what you're doing. I're going to connect this to the work of Bruce Lipton. Okay. The notion that these stories are actually our early, brief programming. And, and we're going to explore them. So, quick example, they didn't text me back. I must have done something wrong. Oh, totally. It's my favorite thing to assume. This shouldn't be so hard. Maybe I'm not good at this. Maybe I'm not good. I texted someone that we both know like four days ago, and I didn't care back. And usually this person responds very quickly. And the reason I was texting them was because I felt a disturbance in the field. I felt a sense of things not being right and that this person may have been a little bit annoyed at me. And it happened like in October where they asked me something and I kind of misunderstood what the ask was and I kind of dismissed it and I didn't really take it seriously.

And like two months later, it came back to me in this horrible feeling and I was like, you know what, I really need to make this right. So I wrote to them and I said, I feel really, I wish them happy New Year and I felt really badly about it and I acknowledged that, hey, I misunderstood this and I really like to make it right with you. And then I didn't hear back. it it wore on me and I had all the feelings. I had all the stories. And each time one of those things happened, that one of those stories came up, I would remind myself, wait a second, this is probably not accurate. So first of all, worrying about anything technically doesn't make it, it doesn't really change the probability. I mean, it doesn't change the probability in the positive for sure. Second of all, what we fear, it's almost always worse than reality. I'll say that. There have been though, and I'm not, I don't know about this particular interaction, but there have been times in my life where I did mess up, I did misatext, I missed a call and the person was upset, right? And it's not so much like what did I do wrong, but what's the lesson that I'm being offered here? So you and I have been doing something recently that I think actually we could share here because it's a fun practice related to story. We have been acknowledging the possible reframe of something that may previously have annoyed us. You being silly and playful and putting things on your nose and people being like, my, I'm stop it. You're interrupting this very powerful conversation that's unfolding about the nature of reality. I previously could have been like, she doesn't value my ideas. She doesn't take this seriously. She was recruited as the neuroscientist expert on this. And now she has a cross sticker on her nose. Or the sub stack community and she's making light of this, you know, but instead, but instead I said I value your playfulness.

That's really nice. This actually happened. You sent me an email of something that you had sent to someone else. No, no, no, no, no. You would have said, who is this person? Why did you send them? I don't need them in our business blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And instead, and I could hear all of those thoughts happening from two hours away, but instead,

when you, when you, you wrote back.

So. instead and I could hear all of those thoughts happening from two hours away. But instead, you wrote back. So yeah, Jonathan had emailed something and my first thought indeed was, why did he email this and what is this? And I did and I like, I got my defenses up and I got my back again. And you had a lot of story, right? You had a lot of story in that. Consum went in the face about it. And then I realized I have to take a pause. That's not a serene reaction. So I thought about it. And even if I want to bring up to Jonathan at some other time, why did this person get emailed, I wanted to acknowledge that he took initiative and something and that he pursued an avenue. And that was very ambitious of him. And that was sincere. That's the thing too, right? That's sincere. Even if I have other thoughts, that's sincere. Let's now connect story and all the stories that happened. Let's really slow it down because when we try to identify the stories that are driving our lives, it's a very slow and meditative act to deconstruct them, to find the core root of it. What often happens is we have this reaction, we feel an intense emotional rush, we have logical rational thoughts to justify that emotional rush and then we take action. That's how most people live most of their lives. But instead what we're suggesting and trying to encourage is the deconstruction of that drive, that reaction. So in that moment, you had a thought or you had an emotional rush and then you had a thought that one feeds the other. So let's unpack the somatic experience and then identify the ideas that were running through your head that you thought were real. Like this person should be an emailed. Why did they email her versus him? Talk about the somatic experience and then the rational experience. Well, a lot of people are not even aware of being aware. Right? That like we actually are constantly experiencing things in our bodies that can indicate an emotion or a story. You know, someone said emotion is different than thought. We are not stoned. We're a lot more fun if we're stoned. When something troubles you, there is almost always a somatic correlate to that. And a lot of people would say like,, I don't need to think about that. I don't wanna think about that.

You don't have to, but, and there's information in that. So what's a very classic, you know, classic somatic response, tightening in the chest, right? Tightening in the chest. Another one, a clenching in the gut, a constriction in your throat. You know that feeling when you're trying not to cry,

but you want to cry, and it kind of feels like a pain, kind of like an ache in your, well, maybe it's just me. It feels like an ache in your throat and behind your head. Those are somatic indications that something feels constricted, caught, something is stuck emotionally as it were. So I think this notion that there is a somatic correlate. Many of us shoot right past that and we go to what we think is a legitimate feeling. A lot of people don't know this. I did not know this and I studied the brain and nervous system. The course of emotions is that something will happen and you will have a spike in intensity and, you know, happy to talk about like the neural correlates of that and all the things, you will have a spike in intensity and it causes a rush of sensation and neurochemical things. It's fascinating. It causes blood to flow different places. If we're talking fight or flight, you literally will have a difference in blood distribution. If anyone's ever had brain fog from something intense happening, it's literally because all systems are not thinking, what's the rational response to this? The systems are thinking, do I need to run or do I need to punch someone in the face, right? So that will peak. And most of us react from that peak. Most of us think that we're responding, we're actually reacting. and the key is to respond and not react. When that peaks, and it even can happen with a positive emotion, if you tell someone you love them, right, as you're having an orgasm, I don't know if you're going to feel that when you're not having an orgasm. The notion is the place when we're at the peak of emotional intensity is typically a lower brain reaction and not a response. A response looks like, I'm going to let that peak settle. I'm going to let it stabilize. It doesn't mean that if we're upset that we're no longer upset. It means that the rush that our primitive body, we are just animals. The The rush that we get, especially if you're a person who has a startle reflex, if you have any trauma, if you get startled, right? The response you could choose is either to fight, to flee, to freeze or to fawn. Once that comes down, we actually get to see where things lie. That's when you let the physiology quiet down and see what does the cognitive part of me say? What does the somatic part of me say? What's the story behind it so that I can respond? I purchased some used furniture from a friend of mine and I completely rushed the time frame of being given the price and saying yes and do you think? And that's all I needed was to pause because pausing takes away the urgency. It takes away the excitement. It takes away the intensity. And that is like one of the greatest gifts I think that we can give. You know, our nervous system is that gift of pause. Like nothing is life or death, unless it's life or death. Beautifully said, so much wisdom in what you just communicated and I love your examples. Mine be Alex Raychan is supported by optimizers. I struggled to get good quality sleep and I just thought like, oh, it's stress, but I learned during paramanopause and menopause, your hormones shift and it affects your magnesium levels. Low magnesium makes everything harder, not just sleep, but focus, moods, stress tolerance. That's why we added magnesium breakthrough by bioptimizers to our nightly routine. It's a blend of seven different forms of magnesium designed to support relaxation and overall sleep quality. Try it, see if you wake up more rested and refreshed. You've got nothing to lose and a lot to gain. Bi optimizers offers a 365 day, no questions asked, money back guarantee. Magnesium breakthrough is a fantastic way to improve that hormonal imbalance that especially happens with magnesium. And then you have better focus, you have better sleep hygiene in general. Bi optimizers makes it so easy. Here's what you get when go to bioptimizers.com slash breaker and use the code breaker. 15% off your entire order and a free bottle of mass signs. That's bi optimizers best selling digestive enzyme added to your order automatically when you use our exclusive code. That's a $20 product free on top of your discount. This is a limited time offer while supplies last.

You cannot get this on Amazon. You can't get it in stores. The offer exists in one place. Our link, our code, that's it. So if you were already thinking about trying it, this is the sign. Go to buyoptimizers.com slash breaker, use the code breaker, grab it before it's gone. Make 2026 the year you finally start sleeping again. This episode is sponsored by Wondering Jews, an open-door media brand. If you've ever found yourself feeling like you have more questions than answers, you're in good company. The Jewish people have been like that for thousands of years. Wondering Jews with Michal and Noam is a podcast where two of today's most dynamic Jewish voices, Michal Beton and Noam Weissmann, dig into the biggest questions about life through a Jewish lens. It's the kind of conversation where you'll laugh, learn something new, and probably shout and disagreement at least once. Michal and Noam tackled the tough topics, like anti-Semitism in America, what happens after we die, and the future of religion, with guests like Brett Stevens, Michael Rappaport and Sarah Herwitz. And this past month, in honor of Jewish American Heritage Month, they've been celebrating

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