Matt's Audio Letter of the Week

All right, hey there, and welcome to this edition of the Feel Better Letter.

This is Matt, and today we're going to talk about having a paradigm shift. A paradigm shift is really about taking something that you're seeing a certain way and twisting it completely on its head. It’s like having a completely new understanding of something—a complete recontextualization.

Paradigm shifts are such a powerful way to create change in your life. If you're dealing with OCD, anxiety, stress, chronic pain, panic attacks—and you're stuck in a loop with them—you might find yourself in a recurring cycle, whether it's recurring episodes or something you're just dealing with on an ongoing basis. If you’ve tried to make changes in your life or tried to fix or help yourself, and it's not working, a lot of times it's because you're operating from a certain point of view—a certain paradigm—that isn't allowing you to be successful.

A good example of this is OCD and anxiety. For anyone who's seen The Matrix, it's a great example of a massive paradigm shift.

You have the main character, Keanu Reeves—well, his character is named Thomas Anderson—and he believes he's living in the real world. He thinks there’s this cyber world and internet that he logs into to talk to people. What he doesn’t realize is that there's this entire thing called The Matrix, and the whole world he lives in is actually a computer simulation.

When he wakes up out of the Matrix, he finds himself in a completely new paradigm. It’s actually a kind of dystopian future—it’s not the year 2000 in New York or whatever. He’s in a pod, being used as a battery. So he wakes up from that, becomes Neo, and everything changes. That’s the kind of paradigm shift I’m talking about here.

When you look at fear as something external—something outside yourself that you're trying to overcome—it can feel too overwhelming to make any progress. We see it as this external enemy.

But when you understand that fear is actually internal—something created through your beliefs and emotions—you begin to work with it completely differently.

For instance, if you see contamination as the issue, you’ll see everything outside of you as contaminated. That’s overwhelming, and you’re not going to make any headway. If you see every person as triggering and try to overcome all those external triggers, it's going to be very, very challenging.

But if you understand that fear exists within your consciousness—and that you project it onto things outside of you—then your triggers are merely bringing up that fear, and it’s all really an illusion.

Take someone with contamination OCD, for example. One of the most important realizations they could have is that this is just an illusion. You’re not actually trying to avoid getting AIDS everywhere you go—that perception is based in fear and illusion. You’re not actually exposing yourself to HIV in daily life. You're exposing yourself to the fear of it.

Same goes for any form of OCD, intrusive thoughts, fear of panic, all of it. There’s nothing outside of you that causes panic. It’s all within you.

When confronting fear, you have to stop seeing it as something outside of yourself and start seeing it as something within your consciousness. What we do to escape that knowledge is project it outside of ourselves. And that is the paradigm shift I’m hoping to help you make today—understanding that fear doesn’t exist anywhere outside of you.

If fear existed outside of you—if things outside of you caused fear—they would cause fear for everyone. They would be the universal cause of fear. But they don’t.

If doorknobs really caused fear, they’d cause fear for everyone. If going to a certain diner caused panic attacks, it would cause panic attacks for everyone.

It’s your own beliefs and your own stored fear that come up. When you understand that, you begin to work with fear from a completely different place.

That’s really what TBC is about. That’s what the Triple-A Response is about. That’s how you break the loop of fear. You first have to accept the paradigm that fear is not outside of you—it’s within. Most of the time, we project it in order to avoid acknowledging that.

So that’s what I want to present today—as an idea to sit with this week and weekend: start looking at fear correctly. Understand that the mirage you project outside of you is just that—an illusion. It’s not the thing we’re actually trying to confront. It’s all within.

So yeah, that’s what I have to say today. Wishing you all a great weekend.

And again, if you're looking for help on this journey and you're interested in working together, please fill out an application for TBC. We run groups three times a week, we have our full 12-week program, our app, all our resources—and I’d be happy to help you.

Talk to you all soon.