The Hidden Mental Patterns Keeping You in Rooms You’ve Outgrown—and How to Burn Them Down

Selena Tatum: Welcome back folks. You are tuning into the Empathy Lab. My name is Selena Tatum and today's episode, we are at episode 12. It is Sunday morning at 922, so I'm recording it live on the same day as the day before. There was a snowstorm happening, so I'm looking out the window. Snow is swirling. And today's episode, the room you think you deserve or burning down the architecture that can't hold you anymore. because it's been a week and this is not going to be a gentle episode because I need to tell you about a sequence and the sequence is the lesson. I also need to apologize to all the listeners because I did lock in and say forever in a day that our episodes wouldn't go over 21 minutes and the last two have been about 45 so I really appreciate you all for giving me some of your extra time because I did make myself accountable to a certain time to all of you and I went over twice. Thank you for staying me. ⁓ And this episode, really gonna try to lock it in at no longer than 25 minutes. ⁓ And with that, we've to into it because it's not gentle and it has a lesson. So, and also Monday night. happened came and went this week. Those of you there in Quebec, you know that we had a massive windstorm. So a lot of us were locked out of power for over 30 hours. And I had a presentation the next morning, something I prepared for something that mattered. And I sent the deck for the presentation, music, all the things, clean email looking forward to it. Thank you very much for in the bag. And at the same time, folks, because I follow the stars and the astrology, I want to be totally honest with you with what was happening underneath that email. Underneath that email, I was watching the weather because we were told we were supposed to have a massive snowstorm on Monday, knock out things for Tuesday, et cetera, et cetera. And I wanted to make sure that the weather wouldn't knock out what I had to do the next day. The storm is coming. And before I even had words for it, because as I told you, I just sent the email, everything was clean, I experienced what we call a mental fluctuation, or we call them in yoga. A vitri, right? And a vitri is a mental fluctuation. It's a wave that springs from a groove so old you can't even clock it arriving. You're not even like, this is coming. It's ⁓ subtle, it's there. And as I said, in the yogic tradition, we call these vitris. And vitris ripples the mind that rise from samskaras. Samskaras will give the full definition, but those of you that have been listening for a while probably know what they are. Those of you that don't, go back, come here, meet me back here after you've gone through episode one through nine. If you don't want to, I'll tell you exactly what they are. So, samskaras arise from ripples, right? And the samskara, well, samskaras don't arise from the ripples. The ripples arise from the samskara. The samskara is a deeply worn channel, and that channel's been carved by years, sometimes generations, of repeated experience. I want to be honest with you, we don't decide to have a vitri. It is there. It rises. ⁓ this one, sounded like, please let me not have to show up tomorrow. Please ⁓ the storm be my reason ⁓ disappear. And I've just told you, sent the deck, had the email, all the things, ⁓ and that moment I wanted to shrink. A couple of episodes ago I told you how I wanted to shrink when I didn't want to announce my CEO Award of Excellence and I ended up doing it. That's the work being done in real time. And I'm explaining some more work I'm doing in real time because it also is probably something happening to you. And sometimes it feels better when you know that someone who seemingly has it all together, not that I do, so don't even put me in that box, is also experiencing the same things. And that waves and experience had a root in the Clash of Framework that we've been discussing and I've been demystifying and making it super plain, bap bap simple language like the Barbies we love to see on Instagram these days. The Clash of Framework is the, or are five mental patterns that cloud our perception. Deborah Anadale says it best, they are the five mental patterns that cloud our perception or allude our journey to happiness. And they keep us running what I called in the previous episodes, inherited scripts. And inherited scripts, we've been mapping across the entire arc over the last three episodes. This particular one I was dealing with is abinvinacia, right? So think of it you were to just imagine, see, or it's part of the nervous system. And the nervous system that claims to the familiar shape, even when that familiar shape or routine is Causing you mentally physically emotionally spiritually anatomically It's the bodyguard who hasn't been told that the event is ended like the jam is over You can leave club has been cleared out the bodyguard is still there Minding the door still pulling you towards an exit when something feels like a threat. That is what Abanisha will do. Okay, and Underneath it so I had a few so I'm taking you all through what I went through just a couple of days ago in the making of this episode, not making the episode, I made the episode, I wrote about it after, so I was like, wow, this is literally what I'm doing in the lab every day. Underneath the admonition was Asimita, the identity protector, the part that has decided very precisely how much space you're allowed to occupy. And that will, that part, Asimita, will enforce that ceiling from the inside. even when nobody outside is asking you to shrink. They're asking you to show up and be amazing, asking me to be like, yo, let me tell you something about being amazing. This is what happens when you try to be amazing. Don't be too much. Don't let them see you full-sized. The ceiling is still there. Stay under it. It is safe under this umbrella. And underneath that, underneath both of those, we had Avidya. Avidya, Deborah Angel says, many writers and scholars who write about, well actually not lot of people write about clashes, but there are a few, okay, say and know that Avidya is the root of the five clashes. So it's what gives the clashes legs. Think or imagine or feel or go and look at your bed. Your bed has four posts, right? And then you have your mattress. So Avidya is the root of all of them. And when we talk about Avidya being ignorant, It's not ignorance in the way that we usually mean it. Not a lack of information, It is ⁓ It is the body still reading the earned room as if it were the inherited one. It's still running yesterday's threat assessment on today's earned ground. It's the person that's saying, I'm gonna pay you yesterday's price even though it's today, right? To quote. 21st century street philosopher Fat Joe. Yesterday's price isn't today's price. A video wants you to pay yesterday's price. Back to what's happening I am very aware ⁓ these subtle grooves being run. And I say grooves, some of you know me as the legendary DJ Sirius Black. So these are songs that I don't necessarily wanna play, but they're fillers, okay? I sent the email anyway, hey, I'm looking forward to it. And as I said, both things were true simultaneously. I had the wave rising, vitreous are firing, samskaras are grooving. I'm like, I don't wanna hear this track. And at the same time, we have the sovereign act of me going to do the damn thing anyway and sending the email and sending the deck and being very, very happy. And you can see the clashes running and They're running in the background and they're running in the earned room chosen regardless. So regardless of what I wanted, they chose that room. They wanted to run those tracks, those songs in that room. And I was like, ⁓ no. My friends, this is not enlightenment. Okay, what I'm experiencing is not enlightenment. what I am sharing with you is not like, hey, I've had an aha moment, guess what? And we're gonna have a soulful Sunday, okay? This that I share with you, that is practice. That is the difference between a clear groove and one that's in mid redesign. I'm aware that these things are firing. I'm aware that it's happening. I'm aware that I'm running a conversation in the background and I'm still gonna do the damn thing anyway and I'm still gonna hope that I can play small, right? So difference between a clear groove and one that's in mid redesign. Sometimes I'm in mid redesign. Let's fast forward to Tuesday. 5.35am in the morning, the power goes out. How do I know? Our generator clicks on. And it's very, it sounds like ⁓ a dishwasher or a vacuum cleaner running. It's really not that loud. Power goes out, and here I am lying in bed. The exit wave I'd been hoping for has arrived. I was like, wow. Power goes out. It's March 17th. It's St. Patrick's Day. It's the day before the new moon or the day of the new moon. We're still in Mercury retrograde. Can I get a what what? Okay. I got up, I gathered myself and I said, you know what we're gonna do? We're gonna send another email. We're not gonna say I'm sorry. This is such a disaster. Please forgive the inconvenience. I didn't start the snowstorm. I didn't take the power off and I definitely didn't start the wind. I might have prayed for it a lot. I just gave the facts. This is the outage. the situation, here is where I am, clean, simple, plain. Two emails, folks, two emails, two acts of choosing the earned room while those mental patterns are still running super loud in the background. Not heroically, this wasn't Tatum being a hero anywhere. In the middle of the weather with the waves still different, still different, was not different, still present. I needed to choose differently anyway. And I thought to myself, you know what, girl, you come out on a podcast, you send, you know, ⁓ newsletters out on your LinkedIn, you write articles on your sub stack, you run experiments on this in the lab. You need to be able to do this because this is what you do. Still present, choosing differently anyway. And then my friends, 28 hours without electricity in Quebec March. A generator that we've now used three times. Animals, my wonderful setter and a tuxedo cat. My beautiful child, anxious as all hell because his nervous system doesn't regulate easily when the routine of the day, the architecture of the day collapses without warning. So my guy's getting up, preparing to do his homeschool run. ⁓ we don't have internet because I found out that... Even though you have a generator, for some reason, internet companies and their signals, again, I don't work in any of this, they call it a dirty signal. So you cannot have internet when you have a generator. Okay, fine, I can have a coffee. We use my phone as a hotspot for him to attend his classes. But it didn't regulate him. Something was still off. And I have, on top of all of this, the invisible checklist running at full capacity. being the sacrificial wall, as I said, the load bearing wall last week for all of it. So here I gave you all a really lovely 45 minute podcast on Sunday about, and what are we doing come Monday, Tuesday? Not what I told you to do in the podcast. And still trying to move through what I told you to in the podcast, because hey, I got to practice what I preach, right? Power came back on Tuesday night. That's not the stress. Wednesday came and Wednesday night, the first night of a new cycle. we know, or maybe some of you don't know that it was Navaratri, right? So that's the Hindu New Year, Navaratri, the nine nights of the goddess. We have the new moon and it's a new season starting and it's about exactly one thing though, right? Or a few things. One of the major things is burning down what no longer serves us. So that's something new. can move through. And I went to sleep in that energy of the burn. Thursday morning, I woke up and I was boiling. Not sad, not anxious. I was lit all the fuck the way up. Like you couldn't even stand next to me. I was not having a hot flash. I could go outside and melt snow. And my whole day, Thursday into Friday was, ⁓ hell no, we are not. doing that anymore. That was not a wave. That, ⁓ hell fucking no, yeah I cussed again. We are not doing this shit anymore. That was a groove breaking. That was a Samskara refusing, like me talking to me to the Samskara, I'm not running this script anymore. The deck on Monday was my first crack. The outage on Tuesday was the second. 20 hours of being the wall and with pressure building all around me was like the straw that broke the camel's back. Wednesday night was my threshold and Thursday morning the body walked through and was like, man, fuck this. That precise somatic experience that I've just walked you through that was my experience, maybe it was your experience too, this is what this episode is about. Not the single clean act of courage. the accumulation, it's the accumulation of small acts, each one performed in the presence of active kaleshas running their script, active mental patterns that makes the burn possible. And this is what we're gonna get into right now. So we're looking at the yantra, the architecture of mistaken rooms. So over the last three episodes, we looked at the blocker arc and. I've now called it the blocker arc. Actually, my listeners called it blocker arc. Three episodes, three categories, and it's been asking one question underneath everything. All the protocols, all the frameworks. The question I've been posing to everybody, myself included, is why do we keep shrinking in rooms we've already earned? We've earned the right to be in these rooms and yet still we walk into them and we shrink as though we're not supposed to be there. We hope that no one discovers that we really don't think we're supposed to be there. And here is the answer I keep arriving in my research. It's not because we lack confidence. It's not because we haven't done the work. It's because the body doesn't update the room assignment automatically when the address changes. It's like we're all still in grade eight when we're actually in grade 10. The body's like, what are you talking about? You can move into the earned room, the career, the relationship, the life you built with your own labor, your own data. and you can still be running in the previous operating system of the room you came from. The bully room, the scarcity room, the room where taking up space had consequences that were real and lasting. In the yogic tradition, a samskara is a groove. I've been talking about it for like the last 16 minutes. And it's a channel worn into the nervous system by repetition. Every time a room gets cold, when you were too big, every time... something would have happened when you spoke your truth by every generation. Every generation has passed a script down. You know, we don't rock the boat now. Don't be too big now. They moved the script forward because for them it worked. The samskara, I want to be clear, doesn't announce itself. It's not like, hey, I'm a samskara. I'm this one. I'm here. It doesn't do that. What it does do is it generates vitreous as I was saying. waves, mental fluctuations that rise before you even have words for them. They are the preemptive apology forming the, I'm sorry, before anyone has spoken. It's the ceiling, that invisible glass ceiling we talk about, enforcing itself from the inside. As I said earlier about five minutes ago, the clashes are five mental patterns that keep those grooves running. like a track you don't want to hear it's like the album gets down and it starts over again and keeps running the same thing that's a mental pattern that's a groove if you're new to this framework is like you saying go back to episode 9 and 10 we map them fully over there here is the architecture needed for today for sunday avidia is the root the misperception so we're going to start with avidia well we're going to start with a lot of them but avidia as i said earlier is the root the misperception that you were still in the room that the script was designed for. So you're still in the bully room, but you don't really need to be in there anymore. It is not a lack of intelligence. It is literally the nervous system running an outdated map and an outdated operating system. You're standing in the earned room in the relationship and the job and in the, the, in the parenting and the, in the wherever. And the AVIDIA is showing you a map of the inherited one, the one you had before. The one that told you you'd never be in this room and now you're in this room and it's still running that one. It's still in the misperception that you can't actually be in here. From that misperception, okay, Asimita then grows. Asimita is the identity protector, the part of you that has set your visibility limit and will hold that line. You can only be as visible as your left ear now or as your left eye. you go over to the right eye, no, no, no. Because these want to harm you or Asamita is like, I wanna fuck you up. No, that's not it. Because it believes, the groove believes based on the map that Avidia is running, the misperception that Avidia is running, that full visibility is still dangerous. If you jump out of the cave, a saber-toothed tiger is gonna eat you. So we need to stay in there. Asamita is the inner enforcer of a boundary that that the earned room never required. We don't have a saber tooth type. Mammoths aren't running around anymore. We don't need to do that. assamites are still there. And it works on the small and on the large. Following that, we have abovinesha. Abovinesha runs the exit strategy. It's like the guy you call to get out of something. The clinging to a familiar shape. What you know. Why do we want to go? Why do we want to go to Italy when we've always gone to France? Like, why do we want to go to Bermuda when we've always gone to Barbados? know, clinging to the familiar thing. The thing that says like the cup has to go there because the cup has always been there and God forbid you move the coffee machine. It's the pull toward the door when the room asks too much of your full self. Let me escape now. The bodyguard is still patrolling the event, but the jam is over. The lights are on. Everybody's makeup is the way it looks for those of you that would be out in the club back in the day. You know what Burger King lights look like or what people look like under Burger King lights. Now, I'm gonna say her name now because we're really into her hair. Adrienne Marie Brown teaches us that the fractal is the map, right? For those of you that are like, what's a fractal? Emerging strategies, it's all there. I'll give you the page numbers. You can find the ad in the liner notes of this episode. And she says, what is happening at a small scale? just said that before. is happening at a large scale, Which means the vitri that is rising in your body, ⁓ so the one that was rising in my body before I sent the email, let me not have to be seen and present tomorrow, ⁓ is the same groove running in your career, in your relationships, in the life actively building. Please let me not be seen. ⁓ It's the same happening everywhere. That little subtle line is happening everywhere in your life, happening everywhere in my life. But guess what? I'm on a podcast, my own podcast, being seen and heard all the time, working against Ava Venetia, right? I'm not working against, I'm to redesign. However, you cannot redesign the room if you don't know which groove is furnishing it. Which track is playing in that room that you want to change? You actually have to know the track before you blend it, like in order to beat match properly. But we're not going to get into a DJ lesson here because I'm already at 21 minutes and I promise you guys it'll be done by 25. Ho ho. Okay. This week, to give it a bit more clarity, I was in a conversation with a friend. She came in resistant. She's like, this work isn't for me. I'm not cut out for it, she said. And then something cracked open. because she was tirading and then I, you know, I listen, listen deeply so I can say this what I saw, what I heard, this what I felt. And in her tirade, that was very refreshing. I watched something crack open, as I was saying, I watched something cracked open. I watched her crack open. And she asked out of nowhere, Selina, is this an ego death? Am I experiencing an ego death? And I said, yeah. And here's what I want you to understand. We stay in the rooms we think we deserve, not the ones we actually belong in. So we will stay somewhere that we think, where we think we deserve to be, not allowing ourselves to go where we're supposed to. And I said it to her before I even knew I was saying it. And it was funny because we were texting and talking and memeing. So it came out in the text and I was like, I wanted to let you guys know that you're probably doing this too with your friends, that this is what happens when the work goes deep enough. When the groove you have been redesigning becomes a transmission you offer to someone else without planning to. I had no fucking idea I was gonna say that to her. I had just gone through 28 hours of no electricity, did everything, praying I wouldn't be seen, rescheduling stuff, ⁓ inner outer things happening. And here is my good friend telling me she doesn't think she's good enough. She doesn't like the room she's in. She's been bullied. A whole bunch of stuff. And this is what I had to say to her. And I realized, ⁓ my gosh, nothing prepared me for this. I've been living this. That is the difference between knowing the framework of what something is and being changed by it. And this is where this arc has been taking you. This is where these last three episodes have been taking you. Right here, minute 2402. Not to a vocabulary, but to a room that we're about to step in together. The earned room. And this is the one we're gonna map today. I'm gonna give you the feel guide to the mistaken rooms and I'm gonna take up a bit more of your time. So I'm gonna go back on what I said, because I did want to deliver this in 21 minutes. However, my somatic experience took longer than the time it needed to in my liner notes for when I was supposed to say what I needed to say. So I'm gonna take up the space. I'm gonna take a bit more of your time. And if you want to pause and go and get something to drink and come back or be like, you know what, I'm gonna finish listening to you next week, tomorrow, whenever, that's cool too. I know the transmission has been out there. I'm going to pull it into a fractal. Because the mistaken room doesn't exist in board rooms, it exists at the kitchen table, it exists in your bedroom, it exists in the inner monologue you give yourself, it exists in the relationship with your kids, with your friends. The pattern at each level though is the same. You are in the earned room running the inherited rooms operating script. Double occupancy, full price on both. Three rooms, let's look at each one. Mistaken room number one, the work room, the board room, call it what you want, okay? You have the credential, the data, the years of pattern recognition. You walk into the meeting and you present the recommendation cleanly, no tail, no jest. You've been in the episodes. You walk out of there, everything landed, and you spend the next four hours wondering if you're too much. Yo, was I too direct? Was I too certain? Did I not answer enough questions? Did I give them too much of information? You did exactly what the ARC asked you to do, and the 2 a.m. runs anyway. You do what you're supposed to do, 2 a.m. audit starts, voice starts going. The architecture, the routine of this, you are technically in the earned room where you fought tooth and nails to be in because you know you're supposed to be in there. The groove, the samskara, is running the address of the bully room. The passive blocker is gone, but the channel that generated it is still alive. That is abhidhnaishna doing what it does, protecting a self. that no longer needs protecting in this room. In this way, you earn the right to be here. You have full credential to be here. You don't need to be protected. The void hold worked. You held the line. You were clean. You said what you had to say. You didn't put any fillers, any blockers in there. But one clean sentence is not enough to update a nervous systems threat assessment. You gotta keep doing it. The groove needs more evidence than that. It needs more proof that, you're actually supposed to be in here. Because even though you know you're supposed to be in there, there are still threads of you that still think you're not supposed to be in there. And here's the tax you're paying. I call it the mistaken room tax or the MRT, right? You do the work of the earned room while paying the emotional rent of the inherited one. So you worked your ass off to get to that room where you're in, but you're still paying rent in another room that you inherited that you didn't even ask for. The credentials that you have are real. wave of self doubt is inherited. Both are running at the same time. You're paying two rents. Let's talk about it. I'm paying two rents, you're paying two rents, your friend's paying two rents. I'm damn sure your mom and your dad were paying a couple of rents. Let's keep it moving. Mistaken room number two, we're gonna talk about the kitchen table. As I said earlier, you built this life. You chose this partnership, this home, this daily routine, and you're standing in the kitchen, you help build, cause you stay home and enjoy your mortgage. You're managing everyone else's nervous system. You're holding invisible checklists. You're being the wall because the groove of being indispensable, needed all the time, is still furnishing the earned room that you built and made brick by brick. The channel that's running on your TV of your inner mind says, love needs you, requires you to hold everything. If you dare put something down, the whole structure fails. That being needed is the price of belonging. Here's the architecture. The room has changed, but the groove didn't. So you changed rooms. don't know those of you that went to Circus or Sona, those of you that are in Montreal know what I'm talking about. Let's say the clubs had multiple rooms. So you now, the room has changed. You're now gone from the hip hop room to the alternative room, but you're still playing hip hop tracks. The groove didn't. You moved the furniture, but kept the operating system. This is what we call the sacrificial competence samskara. The deeply worn channel carved by someone in your ancestry or in your lineage that needed to be indispensable because it was the only safe form of power, P-O-W-E-R, available to them. Abhivanasha running the exit strategy in reverse. Don't leave the labor or you will be left. Stay indispensable or you'll be abandoned. a lot of, if you do this now, very consequential. The tax you're paying, the MRT, you exhaust yourself, run yourself ragged, maintaining a groove, the earned room never required. It never asked you to be indispensable. You're in partnership, you're in a wherever, you you bring your side. The wall you're holding up is a wall in a room you no longer live in. You're paying rent on a samskara, you've already outgrown. I know that one hurt a lot of you. you're paying rent on something you've outgrown. Say it loud and proud. Because when you say it, when you know it, it's conscious. It becomes very aware in your psyche, in your awareness, and you can't unsee it. I was gonna make a really bad joke, but I'll say it for next time. Room number three, the 2AM audit room. You did everything right today. Perfect. Excellence at its like, wow, okay, like, whoa. You dropped the tail, you held the void, you sent the email without the apology, you let the sentence land without a buffer, and at 2 a.m. the wave rises up anyway, your eyes pop open, and it sounds like, who do think you are? You know, they're gonna figure out that you don't belong there. You know that, right? Like, they're gonna figure out that you have no idea what you're doing. You were too much today, you were too loud, you were too certain. The architecture. is the Groove's last line of defense. The 2 a.m. vitri mental fluctuation that fires when all the daytime protocols have held because if it can't get you in the meeting or at the kitchen table, it's gonna get you in the dark. And the dark is where burning can happen. But sometimes we don't want things to burn. In yogic tradition, these mental patterns, and I've said it before and I'll say it again, run deepest in the liminal space between sleep and waking, where the conscious editor has gone offline and the oldest grooves run without interference. This is avidya in the dark, the misperception running without the counterweight of the waking mind. For those of you that are super yoga philosophy geeks or tantric geeks and you're like, gala stuff Selena, it's years of study. This that I just talked about, and I'm gonna say it, it's Chaitra Navaraj, if you read the first Karta of the Devi Mahatma, it talks about the 2 a.m. Not in the way that I'm saying it to you. Read the story, listen to it, go on YouTube. I'll put a link in. you know, the liner notes where can go listen to a really cool guy say the story and you kind of get what I'm putting out here. The voice at 2 a.m. is not prophecy. It's a wave rising from a groove that was carved in someone else's room. Somewhere in your beautiful framework, someone needed that internal regulator to fire in the dark, as I said. before because the consequences of being too much in the light of day were real. That wave is an ancestor's protection protocol that hasn't yet received the update. And I'm going to tell you, don't need to fight it. You need to tell it where you actually are. Hey, it's me. Now let's look at the redesign. We're closing down the episode and I want to leave you with things you can work with. Every episode in this arc has moved the intervention point. Episode nine, catch the word after it exits. Episode 10, catch it before it exits. Episode 11, hold the guilt after the system pushes back. Today we're going... earlier than all of that. So as you can see, I've been mind mapping you through these last few episodes. We're going back before the protocol, before the push pack, before the wave fully forms. This is the moment where you are between the boardroom or the bedroom and the kitchen, let's say, boiling, where you're going to work. So from the kitchen to the boardroom and you're boiling. And you need to know precisely what you are burning down and why. Why can't this exist in my framework anymore? I'm putting a hard red line on this. Before any framework, before any protocol, before the three questions I'm about to give you, I want to give you two questions you're gonna ask yourself. Your body already knows how to answer them. I'm telling you this beforehand. These questions work because they bypass the grooves defense system. The misperception cannot argue with a somatic binary. like the clasius cannot argue with something somatic that's been put in. The survival fear cannot negotiate with a yes or no. The body knows the answer before the inherited pattern has time to intercept it. And we could do this with these two questions. If you want to grab a pencil and write them down, it's your listing to me or you want to pause here and take it if you can. However, here are the two questions. And these two questions were taught to me by someone who I hold really dear, one of my mentor, teachers, muse, my friends, Tracy Stanley. Question one, is this life affirming? Question two, is this life enhancing? I want you to run those on everything. Everything. The role you're playing, the groove you're running, the feeling you keep accepting, the rent you keep paying, the sentence you were about to soften, the architecture you've been holding together for two weeks while the power was out. I'm talking about myself. Is this life affirming? And is it life enhancing? If either of these two is a no, you already know what the next move is. You don't need more data. You do not need the system's permission. You do not need to wait until the groove releases you gracefully. This is the pattern interrupt. A no is a no. And a no is the beginning of the burn. So you want to highlight that. A no is the beginning of the burn. And remember what I said. If either of these two questions is a no, you know what happens next. Now once the body is answered, once the binary has done its work, once you've fractaled, here are three questions that tell you precisely what you are burning and what you're building in its place. These are self-inquiry questions. Question one. Whose ceiling is this? When you feel the limits, the edge of how much space you are allowing yourself to occupy, whose groove built that ceiling? Was that you? This is not an accusation. Use it as a ⁓ archaeology. Be Indiana Jones in your own mind. Now, this ceiling was probably carved before you had the vocabulary to question it, to name it. And then we run the binary. Is maintaining this ceiling life-affirming? Is it life-enhancing? If either of these is a no, it is not your ceiling to hold. The second question. What rent am I paying and to whom? The inherited room charges rent. Right, the room you inherited charges rent. You have to give a piece of yourself to the room. Performance rent, so that's one type of rent. So performance rent is always proving you belong. Invisibility rent, staying small enough to avoid the consequences of being seen. Indispensability rent, holding everything so nobody discovers you're not required to hold everything. Name the rent. Name the group it runs in, then run the binary. Hey, is paying this rent life-affirming? Is paying this rent life-enhancing? If either is a no, you are not obligated to keep paying it. Guys, these are things, this is what we do in the lab. This is the work we do in the lab. And we frame it for you all to have field notes to actually make this applicable. Question three, What would I do if I actually believed I was in the earned room? Specifically, I want you to ask that question. In the meeting, in this conversation, in this email, in this kitchen, in this life, if the floor under your feet was the one that you built yourself, what you say? What would you stop managing? What would you stop juggling? What would you let land without a tail? Is what I'm about to do life affirming? Is it life enhancing? If both are a yes, that's your move. I'll take you back to Monday evening. Opening my laptop to write that email, I did not have language for any of this. I had the wave rising, the glaciers were running, the chest, my back, in between my eyebrows, I could feel it. I'd take off my glasses, put them on again, take them off. At one point I thought I lost them. the inherited pattern running its most sophisticated and subtle move on me. And I chose the earned room anyway. Not because my groove had cleared magically, because I could see it and I could see it was the groove, not the truth of what was happening. As I said earlier, this is not enlightenment. This is practice. This is practice accumulated, act by act, email by email, sentence by sentence, One by one, pebble by pebble, that's how a groove breaks. Trust the no. That no is where the redesign begins. burn in the build. Now the thaw is not the end of the arc. The thaw is what makes the ground available. The burn, I want you to realize, is not destruction. The burn is completion. The email I sent on Monday evening was not heroic. It was a fractal. A small scale act of sovereign communication performed in the presence of active mental patterns because this arc has been building. the architecture for it sentence by sentence, episode by episode, one drop tail, one void hold at a time. The grooves that furnish the inherited rooms that we exist in were carved by people that love us. They survived. We are standing in the rooms they were trying to get us to. And from this room, this earned room, the one that we bought with our own data and our own labor and our own years of doing the work, those grooves that we all hold no longer need to run the old script. they can carry something new. What you pay attention to grows. Pay attention to the room you're actually standing in. Not the one the groove says you deserve. The one your labor built. The one your courage earned. The one your full-size unblocked period not a question mark self is allowed to occupy completely. I believe spring is coming. I believe the ground will be available. And the snow? is just trying to keep us clean. Something new is trying to move through the cracks that we made when you decided to drop the first just a couple episodes ago. Don't go back to that old room to water it this week if you can. You're not a guest in your own earned room. You live here now. It's been the Emphasis Lab friends. I'm Selena Tatum-Iles. I want you all to take care of yourself in this wild and crazy, wacky world we're living in right now. I want you to take care of each other. I want you to stay hydrated. Spring will be coming sooner than later, and we will all be here for it. I'm leaving here at 43 minutes and five seconds. I've asked for 20 more minutes of your time. because I want you to come out of the room that you think you deserve and be in the room you know that you've earned. I'll see you all next week. Peace.