Retraining the Heart

@November 10, 2024 10:06 AM (EST) – @November 10, 2024 11:26 AM (EST)

The One Thing

Expand on why working with trust is a good first step and why you committed to it for a year.

• This chapter is compelling and very educational. It feels like the capstone on one act of your personal story, and it feels like it comes at the right time too. The only thing I’m left wondering about is why trust is so important and how/why you chose it as one of your first major practices for consciousness evolution.
• It’d also be very helpful for an ambitious, aspiring reader to hear more about how you remained disciplined and dedicated to this practice for an entire year. There’s space in this chapter for a couple paragraphs that serve to motivate the reader and to describe how diligent you were, which would help your credibility.
• I’d like to know more about your morning practice, in a little more detail. Maybe this comes in the next chapter, but you may want to add a couple more details to this chapter too, so that I can picture what you were doing during the year of trust.

Feedback

• This whole chapter flows well, moves at a nice pace, and has a cohesive structure. The only improvements I think you need to make here are small details.
• This is an instance where it'd be clever and more compelling if you stated this as a claim. For example: "My lack of trust was so deeply entrenched that it would often take me out of a calm, relaxed state for no reason." By stating it as a claim, you get away from the “and then I learned” feeling of the current version:

When I began to acutely observe when I was taking out of a calm, relaxed state, I started to realize how deeply entrenched my lack of trust was.

• How is “an innate sense of trust” different from unconditional well-being? Here, it seems like you're defining them in the same way, but I expect that there's a really interesting, nuanced distinction between them. Can you explore that? Is innate trust just one step toward unconditional well-being? Is it specifically about detaching from outcomes, whereas unconditional well-being is more wholistic and multifaceted?

Possessing an innate sense of trust means you have an internally generated confidence that everything will work out. It’s not dependent on the outside world meeting some criteria because it is cultivated within. This was originally attractive to me because it would help me move off the roller coaster of conditional well-being.

• I love this sentence. It's such a punchy, insightful, authoritative claim.

Most people operate with a conditional sense of trust propped up by an illusory sense of control of the external world.

• This is really strong rhetoric. You’re both telling people how it is and meeting them where they are (holding their hand while kicking their ass):

Anytime you notice yourself reacting this way, it’s likely you’re responding to life from your patterns instead of from a deep state of trust. The only reason I know these patterns so intimately is because I lived with so many of them for a long time.

• As a reader rooting for you on this journey, this is a satisfying development. It makes me admire your dedication to your practice and makes me want to cultivate something like it for myself.

I focused on building trust this way for a year. Between my daily morning sessions and sporadic evening sessions, I performed this exercise on trust alone hundreds of times. During that year, I noticed my automatic response to life shifting. Instead of ambient anxiety being the backdrop to any part of my life I hadn’t figured out, there was a growing capacity to rest in the uncertainty.

• Minor: The phrase “as a refresher” phrase makes me want to skip over this sentence. Without it, the sentence feels immediately relevant and important, which it is.

As a refresher, wWhen your heart’s open, you experience life with qualities such as unconditional trust, openness, love, gratitude, and reverence for reality as it is. The true Self is undisturbed by life unfolding because it is one with it. This is your natural way of being; you’ve just forgotten and been conditioned out of it.

• Alt. chapter title: “The Year of Trust” (I think was in your last version.)
• I really like how you introduce the term consciousness evolution. And I feel like I understand each of the three parts you list here. That makes me feel ready and excited to read on, and it reminds me how much I've already learned. This is really effective and well delivered.

For the remainder of the book, I’ll use the word consciousness evolution to describe the process of evolving your consciousness ecosystem in an uplifting way. Consciousness evolution includes the process of expanding awareness, shifting the information in your reference system, and opening of the heart.