Why are some habits easy to form (immoral, illegal or bad for your health, as my dad used to say)  - but the ones we actually want, are far harder to set up? 'Watch your character, for it becomes your destiny'  - Lao Tsu mapped the progress from habits of thought (and we would add habits of feeing) towards the truth of what we become.  In this week's podcast, we take a deep dive into the neuroscience of habits: how they form and how we can set ourselves up for maximal success with the ones we *actually want*.  We map the core science of what makes our habits move from simply things we do once, to things that we do without thinking them... that then have a core impact on who we are and how we design our energy through the days, both as individuals and as a culture. We look at the absolute basics of reinforcement (positive and negative) and how habits become enduring - by becoming easy, obvious, attainable and definable and having four distinct parts: a trigger/cue that tells us this behaviour needs to happen now; a desire; the behaviour; and the reinforcement or reward. Taking a particular behaviour of listening to a 5 minute visualisation we look at how to anchor this as a habit within our existing behavioural sequence, with a deeper dive into the nature of intrinsic reinforcement. We look four of the main internal reinforcers: Dopamine, Serotonin Oxytocin and Endorphins. We explore clean loops, backchaining and real world applications of habit-building. 

How do you create heart coherence and inner resilience?  This episode of the podcast explores the ways we can balance head-mind and heart-mind to create the kinds of inner equanimity that allow us to flourish, whatever the outer world throws at us.If we’re going to reach conscious evolution, we need to be able to stand in balance in the world – a key part of which is that we learn how to open the routes from head to mind to heart so that we can begin to feel what we choose to feel – rather than reacting to our amygdalas.The early podcasts opened the concept of ReAwakening into Connection with the Other-than-Human world. The previous podcast opened the door to Growing into Coherence – the ways in which we can use the fact that ‘what fires together wires together’ to develop a practice of close and open focus meditations.This podcast explores the routes towards Heart Coherence – which develops outwardly as regularities in heart rate variability. There is more on this at the Heart Math Center: and at the Mind Life Institute.The ability to build coherent heart-based sensations – of joy, or compassion, or love, or gratitude, or wonder, or awe… or whatever it is most open to us and most available in the moment as a default sensation that we can revert to in moments when we don’t need to be thinking about something else. Because what fires together wires together, if we can begin to develop theseThe second part of the podcast explores intent focused meditations – the ability to hone our attention into a clear, clean intention in a way that manifests in a changing reality in the world – focused on the creation of conscious evolution.Leading from these, we come to the last two parts of the four step route towards conscious evolution: Asking for Help, and Letting Go.In Asking for Help – we need to take our place in the web of life, and ask ‘what are we here for’ in ways that yields answers that are clear, coherent and constructive. So we have to be able to ask in ways that are free of ego, judgement, projection and fear. We need also have built a set of authentic, grounded relationships with the Other-than-Human world so that we can ask for help and hear answers that make sense to us. This requires that we hone our faculties of attention so that we can interpret the responses as they come to us – this is part of the practice that will take us forward. Each of us needs to understand our own internal landscapes so that we can make our own interpretations cleanly. This is a hugely personal practice that takes time – and a degree of trust – to develop. Trust grows over time and we need to build it.and then – when we can stand in balance; when we can become fully coherent so that we are able to stand in our own power, cleanly and clearly; when we have practiced asking questions in ways that yield clean, clear, coherent answers…Then we can balance on the knife edge of the moment so that we are pure awareness, knowing that all we have to do is ask for help in that space of unknowing where all that we have to do is ask for help and wait for the answers in a place where we can hear cleanly. And this is not going to be a one-hit event. It’s a thing we build to and then we practice it over and over – and if enough of us are practicing this, then this practice will yield a sense of the future iterations that take us to conscious evolution.This isn’t hard. It’s not rocket science. It’s just going to take quite a lot of us, working together.If this sounds good to you, there's more detail - and meditations/visualisation at https://accidentalgods.life 

In this episode, we look more closely at HOW to grow into coherence.There are four obvious types of meditation, mindfulness, contemplation – whatever you want to call it– and  we explore how these  four types form the foundation of this work. All of them help us to build our focused attention into intention.As we’ve said already, the key to successful practice – to building enduring habits – is to evoke a background affective texture (that is, a feeling) that is intimately woven with the act of our practice. The feeling of Joyful Curiosity – the child-like wonder of something truly magical happening – is the key to this. If each breath, or each moment of watching a candle flame, or a leaf or whatever we choose, is utterly magical, then it’s far more likely to be engaging and we’re far more likely to want to bring our mind back again to the single point of focus.And then we move to Open Focus meditation, which is the same kind of life skill, but spread out into everything we experience in the moment: everything we see, hear, smell, taste, feel – all of it, as it happens, in the moment. This is an eyes open meditation and a really good grounding for becoming fully present through the days.Find us at: https://accidentalgods.life

Of the four steps to conscious evolution and the paradigm shift that we need, this is the one that most people have explored at some point. This is the place where we shift our brain patterns from beta pattens to theta, delta or – rarely so far, but I think it’ll become more frequent – gamma.  This is where we make the most of the fact that what fires together wires together so that we can begin to have more control over what we think and what we feel, so that in the end, we can reshape both.  This is where we learn to focus our attention, to build a clear and concise intention; where we remember what it is to balance on the knife edge of the moment and free ourselves up from the endless iterations of our fears of the future or despair at the past. This, effectively, is where we find what it is to be the best of ourselves.  And the good news is, this is the easiest bit to work on – it just takes time.  So we’ll explore the beginnings of this – of what we can do and why, and what the implications might be for our integration and our end goal of conscious evolution. And then in the next episode, we’ll look explicitly at how we can do it.  In this third episode of the Accidental Gods podcast, we dive more deeply into what Growing into Coherence actually means and how we might approach it.Find us at: https://accidentalgods.life

Re-Awakening into Connection is the core of what Accidental Gods is about – the return of our heritage, our birthright, our ability to live in context with the web of life. It’s not long in evolutionary terms, since we were a part of the living world, able to ask questions, and answer the questions that were asked of us.  Now, as we stand on the cusp either of catastrophe or extraordinary change, we need to regain that capacity: we need to re-awaken our innate abilities so that we can take our part in the web of life, in full confidence that we are the right people in the right place at the right time to do whatever is asked of us to affect the change the world needs. So – how do we do this?  How do we bring ourselves to a point where we can walk out into the natural world and open ourselves to a conversation that is going on every moment of every day and every night – without us?  How can we ask questions and hear answers in a way that feels as if we are part of a genuine, authentic, reciprocal relationship?  How can we become clear enough that our listening is not tainted by our egos, our judgements of self or other, our projections and our sheer terror of getting things wrong? (or right).In this podcast, we talk about this, and propose some answers. None of this happens overnight. We can’t undo the domestication of a lifetime in a few minutes – but it can be done. We are born able to connect. We just need to remember how.  And then we need to take our place in the web of consciousness with a sense of integrity and confidence that we’re the right people in the right place at the right time, doing what is needed of us – without ego, projection or fear.  It’s fun. Trust me.Listen to the full episode here or find out more and read the transcript at https://accidentalgods.life/awakening-into-connection/Find us at: https://accidentalgods.life

Conscious evolution could be our next evolutionary step - a radical shift in what it means to be human. In this episode we outline the steps that we believe could lead us on the path to a co-creation of a new future for humanity. We are the accidental gods - all of us - we are the generational era that stands on the brink of species level extinction. For the first time in the history of evolution on this planet, one member of one species could conceivably wipe us all out.  We didn't plan this, but it's where we are.  What can we do? No problem is solved from the mindset that created it.  So we need to think beyond our current expectations of ourselves. We believe that we are ready to make the next evolutionary step.  Not a tweak to our DNA, but a change in consciousness - a choice consciously made, to step into all that we can be. So this is what we're here for at accidental gods - to chart one way, to inspire, to bring together all the best of what we can be. This introductory episode puts forward our proposition that conscious evolution is not only timely, it's essential if we're going to survive to the next decade and begins to open the doors to how, collectively, we might get there.  This is a paradigm shift, the emergence from a hypercomplex system - and as such, the end point is, by necessity, impossible to imagine from here.  But what we can do is shift our mindset so that we are making steady iterative steps towards a different future. As a starting point, we list the four steps we believe are integral to our progress: (Re)Awakening into Connection: Growing into Coherence, Asking for Help (of the other than human world) and Letting go of all that we believe to be true. If you haven't read the Deep Adaptation paper, it's sobering, but useful: http://www.lifeworth.com/deepadaptation.pdfFind us at: https://accidentalgods.life