Episode Transcript
Push, push, push. Try harder. Do more. This is what most of us have been taught about how to get anywhere, and to be honest, it quietly drains the very things we need to actually get where we want to go.
My name is Darren Bennicke, and in this, the third chapter of the Change Series, we're going to be looking at the right response. That is shifting from making things or forcing things to happen, to allowing them to occur, and how this is a natural way of doing and being.
In this chapter we're going to be talking about what forcing things actually costs you, what allowing things looks like in real life, and where the whole series lands. That's basically something I've stood by over the past 10 to 20 years: you can feel good no matter what. You can know what's right for you, and you can allow that to emerge naturally. You don't have to force anything.
The problem: push, push, push
To begin with, let's look at the problems that we come up against. No matter how hard you try, you just can't seem to make things go right. You can't seem to take that final step into what you consider to be success. A more brutal way of putting it is you can't get your shit together.
So we're always trying to make things better. Normally we do this by trying to do more, try harder, push, push, push. And it doesn't help that this is all through the media, all through social media: this idea of hustle culture, that you've got to push, you've got to work harder and try harder.
But what that normally does is create stress in your system, and it actually ends up destroying the very things you need to be successful. That's a calm, clear mind. It's trust in yourself. It's feeling good about yourself, feeling good in your body, and tuning in to your inner guide, your inner knowing, which is essentially the definition of the word intuition. Intuition means inner knowing.
So once we destroy those things, the calm, clear mind and the feeling good, we're behind the eight ball. We're actually destroying the very things that would have led to us developing capacity and perseverance and resilience and adaptability and a growth mindset and self-mastery.
What we're left with is complete and utter exhaustion. You can keep that push, push, push going for a little while, but after a while it's just impossible to maintain. You feel exhausted, and then you don't trust yourself, and then you think you're broken. Then you start to feel hopeless, and you think you're never going to find success and that your situation is never going to change.
So it's this negative feedback loop. You feel more powerless, you feel worse about your circumstances, and once you get to this point you're on an empty tank. You've got no energy left, and it's hard to do anything on an empty tank.
Why it keeps happening: the shape of your awareness
So why does this keep happening? For the most part, it's because it's how we've been designed. Most of the time we're just reacting to life, and this is because our lives have been shaped for us. Our awareness has been shaped. Our thinking processes have been shaped.
You've just got to look at the first 20 years of your life. Your parents are there, instilling the values and beliefs that were instilled in them. Then you go to school, and there are all the structures and ways of doing things: you have to do it this way, you can't do it that way. By the time we get out into the workforce, we start at the bottom of the ladder and have to work our way up, fitting in with all the different ways of doing things.
So our awareness starts to take on this shape, and that shape creates distortions in our space. We end up with a life that doesn't fit, that doesn't feel right, and doesn't make sense. All of that starts to create stress, and so our everyday living becomes just dealing with the stress and reacting to it. Something happens, we put that fire out. Something happens, we put that fire out.
So to even find the time or the space or the energy to contemplate what it is that we want, or how we want to do things differently, or to work towards a different life, is almost an impossibility. And if it's not an impossibility, it seems like a heck of a lot of work.
What normally happens when we do create this space is that, because we're still charged and stressed and anxious, and we might even be slightly depressed, we get the opportunity to respond, but it's normally the wrong response. It's based on these pre-shaped ideas of how we're meant to be living. It's what's known as a conditioned response.
So we make these conditioned responses, they don't work out, and then we think it's our fault. But it's not. All it is is that we have reduced capacity, reduced awareness, and reduced connection to what I call your energetic signature, or your true self.
My journey: from white-knuckling to awareness
My personal journey was probably exactly the same as yours. I had a slightly neurodivergent way of living, not by my own design, but I was always pushing and pushing and pushing. I've got to stop this, I've got to fight that, I've got to try this and try that. I was just white-knuckling my way through life, relying on the strength of my character and the coping mechanisms I'd built up to deal with everyday life. Otherwise it would have engulfed me.
It wasn't until all of that stress and anxiety and push, push, push caught up with me in the form of a chronic back condition that I had to stop and think. I literally had to stop and think, because my life fell apart. I could no longer do any kind of physical work, which is what I'd grown up with and how I earned my money, and I fell into a pit of despair.
My healing journey actually started out of necessity, because I had to reconnect with my body. That's when I discovered body awareness. As you become more aware, you get a deeper connection, and this awareness actually opens up. You develop more capacity, then more connection, and you start to take notice of things. You start to see things, and you start to connect all the pieces.
This is the progression from body awareness to mind awareness. Then, because of my interest in healing and energy, in who we are, why we're here and what we're here to do, I started to make more connections, and I started to explore energetic awareness. I realised that your mind and body are perfectly designed to understand energetic awareness.
This is essentially how Non-Ordinary Living was born. It was how Dynamic Self-Awareness was born, and how the deeper version of my work, Mind-Body Energetics, came about. It was just making the connections between mind and body and energy, and then allowing that process to unfold.
Less effort, more ease
I could no longer rely on brute strength and pushing. I realised that the same kind of effort I was putting into my physical reality was being mirrored in my mental and emotional states. All this push, push, push was creating stressed, anxious and ultimately depressed states as my nervous system and energetic systems started to shut down.
As I moved into more states of awareness and greater connection, I realised I didn't have to apply as much effort. The less effort I applied, the better I felt. As I reduced the amount of effort and found different ways to interact with life, I started to feel better. As I started to feel better, my awareness expanded, my connections developed and strengthened, and things started to click and come together.
My path started to emerge. It became crystal clear what I was here to do. As you come back into what I call the neutral state and start to clear away that charge, you regain capacity. More and more of your system comes online and starts to activate and connect, and your energetic signature starts to express itself. The person you were born to be is there underneath it all, and when you clear it all away, it starts to emerge.
A living practice
So I started to live my life with a mission. I turned it into my own personal mission to figure myself out: who I am, why I'm here and what I'm here to do. I call it a living practice, because it's not something I do between certain hours. It's who I am. My living practice is in each and every moment. Each and every moment I'm becoming more aware, more connected, more sure of who I am and why I'm here, and that is starting to emerge more.
I'm creating the conditions necessary for success. The flip side of that is I'm removing chaos from my life. As I get better and better at this and my living practice develops, I'm slowly starting to realise success.
Now, at its core, success just means to continue. It literally means the very next step. When you only need to focus on the very next step, and all you need to do around that is create the right conditions, there's no real effort involved. You still have to interact and you still have to contribute, but it's not the same as having to work through all these imposed shapes on our awareness, the distortions those shapes bring about, and the stress, anxiety, tension and pressure those shapes and distorted spaces create in your life.
When you're living inside those shapes, you're already behind the eight ball. All the pressure and tension you feel in your mind and body is your system trying to self-correct. But because we're collapsed into these different states of awareness, because our shape has been predetermined for us throughout our lives, there's no give. We've never been taught how to return to neutral.
From goals to intentions
As I became more aware of my body and mind, of the energetic nature of reality and the energetic nature of my own self, I realised I didn't have to make anything happen. The simple truth is this: I went from setting goals and thinking about what I had to do and how I was going to do it, to just developing intentions.
The root of the word intention just means "to stretch towards." So I based my intentions not on any kind of goal, not "I want to do this" or "I want this amount of money." I based them on my energetic signature: what it felt like to be me.
When my mind and body were connected and aligned to these intentions, I began to respond rather than react to life. It was like I'd turned a switch on, and the essence of my life was playing out in front of me, stretching out before me. All I had to do was maintain that state, walk, and look for the very next step. The conditions were right for me to succeed, and the very next step just kept presenting itself.
So instead of reacting, I was becoming the source of my own success. I was starting to express my own signal, and when you become the source, you receive the right resources. Again, this gets back to energetic awareness. It's just how energy works. The more you understand it, the more you realise that we're disconnected from energetic reality and disconnected from our own awareness of self.
The shift: from forcing to allowing
So the shift is going from having to make things happen, using force and effort that's all outside of you, with a sense of disconnection, as if you're constantly relying on the application of force to get anywhere. It's tiring. It's exhausting.
We move towards developing a living practice of allowing things to occur. We do that by creating the conditions necessary for success to continue, and by allowing our intentions to flow from this state.
The only way this can become a reality for you is to try it yourself. You have to develop your own living practice. And what I've found is that even what I'm telling you is a tool. It's designed to be used until you no longer need it.
When you apply this feel-good-first philosophy, when you start to trust your own knowingness, when you create the right conditions that allow your energetic signature to express itself, it removes the effort from change. Because it's the effort we have to apply that causes all the stress and overwhelm and indecision in your life.
The more we practise coming back into this neutral state, which is where this connection happens, the more we connect to our energetic signature and develop the potential state. It's the potential for success. It's what we can create. It's like the conditions necessary to plant the seeds of your intentions. So it's all connected: you feel it, you sense it, you see it, you believe it, you become part of it, you act from it.
Emergence and inspiration
When we allow life to emerge from this state... Emerge actually means to dip or immerse, and so to come out of. So the first step is not an action or an effort. It's actually an inflow. We receive inspiration.
We're holding this intention, this energetic state that is an expression of our energetic signature, and life responds. The resources you need come to you as inspiration of the very next step. If you're constantly outflowing, constantly in effort, constantly pushing, pushing, pushing, nothing can come in. Inspiration can't come in, and nothing's going to emerge, because it's got to dip in first.
As you allow this immersion process to happen, as you start to receive inspiration and the next step presents itself, the expression of your true self is allowed to come forth, and you begin living in a flow state.
The flow state: inflow, outflow and transflow
It's not just one way. There's got to be inflow, outflow and transflow, which is the integration. We're allowing energy in at the same time as we're holding the expression of ourself. They're both happening at the same time.
Once you allow this process to happen, everything just finds its place. Instead of the need for excitement and pumping your hands in the air, change is more about your system settling. The way to know you're becoming successful in the change process is that your system actually starts to settle. Everything finds its place.
So rather than a series of problems that constantly need solving, this flow state emerges naturally and happens on its own. You've just got to keep the state active and keep it open, so it's not continually collapsing and you're not reverting back to reacting.
The result: power from within
The result, from my personal experience, and it seems to be across the board with people I've worked with, is that you move from the exhaustion of trying to make things happen to the empowerment of allowing things to occur. This whole process is its own source of power. This is literally what empowerment means: power from within.
So the through line of all this, for myself, is that I can feel good no matter what. I can literally change my own state, bring it back to neutral, and connect to my energetic signature, and by doing so I feel good. And I don't mean a sense of excitement or "rah, rah, rah." It's just that it makes sense, it feels right, and it's working for me.
Once I access that state, the neutral and potential state, things start to animate. I feel good, I know exactly what's right for me, and I don't have to force anything. And these three states of body, mind and energy start to restore themselves. I start to gain stability, I start to gain trust, and I start to gain ease.
Your next step
The next step for you, if you choose to accept it, is to head on over to nonordinaryliving.com and check out the models and the practice. Discover the return path. This is how you become unbound from these stuck and collapsed states of awareness, and learn to unwind back to the neutral state.
That's Minutes to Mastery. Once you've learned the models and the practice, you go into Minutes to Mastery, which is basically a very, very slowed-down version of the process. Once you get the hang of it you can do it in an instant, but rather than telling you you can do it in an instant, I've slowed it down so you can get a feel for it.
From Minutes to Mastery you learn to unwind and unbind, and then you access the neutral state. From there you go to the Neutral State Workshop, which is also free. The Neutral State Workshop teaches you how to inhabit and maintain the neutral state, which quite naturally flips you (there's literally a flip point) into the potential state. You become more aware, more connected, and your natural self starts to come forth and express itself. And when you get your flows right and everything's in proportion, success becomes a natural state.
So head on over to Non-Ordinary Living. If you've got any questions, please reach out to me on social media or via email, and I'll do my very best to answer them.
Over to you.
