READ TIME: 12m
DR JOHN DEMARTINI - Updated 1 year ago
Dr Demartini shares how to embark on a beautiful journey to authenticity as you become conscious of the feedback systems helping guide you to your true self.
Everyone wants to be loved for who they are. For some, this may appear to be a fairly obvious statement. However, in my work as a human behavior specialist, I meet thousands of people who find it challenging to be their authentic selves and often grapple with what they refer to as ‘imposter syndrome’.
Many of these individuals tend to exaggerate or minimize themselves relative to others, and attempt to inject the values of others into their lives or try to project their values onto others. As such, they often lead a life of quiet and futile desperation instead of revealing the magnificence of who they truly are.
Here's something I teach as part of my signature 2-day program, the Breakthrough Experience, and something I am inspired to share with you today:
Your physiology, psychology, sociology, theology, and even the greater universe, is attempting to guide you towards authenticity through a variety of FEEDBACK SYSTEMS.
If you are wise and pay attention to these feedback systems, you are far more likely to rediscover and move towards being your true authentic self.
I vividly remember reading Walter Cannon's book, "The Wisdom of the Body," during my early years in professional school when I was studying physiology and neurology. In his book, Cannon explains how your body possesses extraordinary mechanisms to regulate and maintain equilibrium.
For instance, if your body temperature rises, the hypothalamus in your brain activates a series of autonomic responses, including sweating, to cool you down and restore balance. Sweat is a crucial tool in moderating your body’s temperature fluctuations.
Similarly, when you are cold, your body responds by shivering, thereby mobilizing energy and heat to elevate your temperature. This is a simple yet powerful example of your body's homeostatic feedback system to restore your physiological equilibrium.
Another example is your blood sugar levels. Whether you experience hyperglycemia or hypoglycemia, your body has specialized mechanisms involving insulin and glucagon to decrease or increase your blood sugar levels accordingly.
Your hunger and satiation is regulated by the release of ghrelin produced in the stomach stimulating the hypothalamus which in turn drives an increase in appetite and balanced by leptin produced in adipose tissue signaling a decrease in appetite.
Your blood pressure is also carefully regulated by baroreceptors, to try and bring about homeostasis.
In fact, every neurotransmitter, hormone, and physiological response, including pH levels, possesses its own interoceptive negative feedback system, working internally to maintain homeostasis in your body.
While homeostasis is something many people are familiar with, you may not be as familiar with the term “allostasis”, which is another wonderful example of how your physiology adjusts to the feedback it receives to bring you back to equilibrium.
- Homeostasis is the body's ability to regulate and maintain stable internal conditions. It aims for stability and consistency, resisting change and working to keep things steady.
- Allostasis, on the other hand, takes a more dynamic and adaptive approach. It recognizes your body and the environments you encounter are constantly changing, and provides you with the ability to regulate and adapt to meet the demands of the moment.
In other words: Homeostasis is a state of equilibrium, of balance within the organism, whereas allostasis is the overall active process of adaptive change necessary to maintain survival and well-being.
I like to use ‘stress’ (or as I actually refer to it as distress) as an example to explain allostasis. When you encounter a stressful situation, your body activates the ‘stress’ response, which involves the release of ‘stress’ hormones like cortisol and adrenaline.
These hormones help you deal with immediate challenges by increasing your heart rate, boosting your energy, and sharpening your focus. This is an example of allostasis in action, as your body deviates from its resting state to meet the demands of the stressor.
Once the stressful situation has passed, your body seeks to return to a state of balance. So, both homeostasis and allostasis are important mechanisms that work together to support your overall health and well-being, often without you being aware of it.
Let’s broaden our discussion around feedback systems to include your PSYCHOLOGY:
When you experience heightened ‘positive’ emotions, elation, or intense excitement, your body activates specific feedback systems to bring you back to a state of calmness. It does this by counteracting any elevated levels of dopamine, oxytocin, serotonin, and endorphins in your body.
Let's say you win a big cash prize in a lottery. Initially, you might feel an overwhelming sense of joy, excitement, and happiness. However, as time goes on, your body's feedback systems kick in to restore balance.
The heightened levels of dopamine, oxytocin, serotonin, and endorphins that were responsible for your initial elation start to normalize, and you begin to return to a calmer state.
This process of your body regulating the emotional response is an example of hedonic adaptation, where the intense excitement gradually subsides and becomes more stable over time.
So too, your psychology possesses homeostatic tendencies.
The more I researched and the more I discovered the intricate homeostatic mechanisms governing the human body’s neurotransmitters, hormones, and signaling molecules, as well as the interoceptive system responsible for restoring emotional balance, the more I realized the depth to which the human body actively works to keep people authentic.
For example, when you experience pride and exaggerate your self-worth, you are not being authentic.
Similarly, when you experience elation and become manic, you tend to lose touch with reality, focusing mostly on your perceived positives while disregarding your perceived negatives.
Conversely, during moments of shame, you tend to become fixated on your perceived shortcomings, and are mostly unconscious of your strengths.
What you may not yet know (and this is something that tends to surprise the majority of people who attend the Breakthrough Experience) that in these instances, your homeostatic mechanisms kick into gear in an effort to awaken you to full consciousness so you can become fully conscious of both the upsides and downsides equally, simultaneously.
These homeostatic mechanisms that kick in are often referred to as “intuition” - an internal negative feedback system (negative meaning it’s moving back in the direction of balance as opposed to a ‘positive’ feedback system that’s going out to greater polarization).
These feedback systems are intricately woven within your physiology, encompassing neurotransmitters, signaling molecules, hormones, and other physiological responses, all working in unison to help you return to authenticity. This intricate mechanism also seeks to strike a balance between the past and the future in an effort to keep you firmly rooted in the present.
What's interesting is that the moment you perceive something with a subjective bias and become conscious of only the positives, your body swiftly responds by activating different hormones and neurotransmitters to restore equilibrium. This explains the fleeting and ever-changing nature of your emotions and internal chemistry - they often come and go within minutes.
Wilhelm Wundt, known as the father of experimental psychology, described simultaneous contrast and sequential contrast over a century ago.
Sequential contrast occurs when you initially see the positives in someone or something, only to later discover the negatives, or vice versa. It's like a yin and yang dynamic, where the terrific and terrible aspects coexist but you only see one at a time.
Your perceptions can sometimes also be skewed due to subjective biases, where you perceive things with a false positive on the positives or false negative on the negatives. Your homeostatic mechanisms will work to try help you to see things as they truly are.
Consider relationships, for example - they tend to have their ups and downs, moments of liking and disliking, but overall, they fluctuate around an average.
This homeostatic mechanism also strives to keep you authentic because when you exaggerate or minimize yourself, you aren’t being your true authentic self. And if you aren’t being your true authentic self, you are highly unlikely to express the magnificence of who you are and live the extraordinary life you are capable of living.
In my many years of teaching the Breakthrough Experience, I've observed not only the internal physiological and psychological homeostatic mechanisms, which I refer to as autotelia, but also an external feedback system, known as heterotelia.
- Autotelia strives to maintain balance, authenticity, and purpose in your life. This is mostly through self-reflection, self-awareness, and self-regulation to realign you with your highest values and goals.
However, you also experience this externally. This is where heterotelia comes in.
- Heterotelia aims to restore balance and homeostasis by providing resistance or assistance factors based on your behaviors and attitudes. It can manifest as criticism, challenges, humbling circumstances, or uplifting support, all aimed at guiding you towards authenticity and maintaining overall stability within the collective society.
I've long been fascinated by the interplay between our social environment and our perceptions of life. When people attend the Breakthrough Experience, they often share experiences of being criticized, challenged, or ridiculed by others. During the two days, I teach them that when you become cocky, puffed up and elevated above equilibrium, there are sociological mechanisms at play to bring you back down. I refer to these as deflating resistance factors. They manifest as criticisms, challenges, or humbling circumstances aimed at restoring you to homeostasis, balance, and equilibrium.
So, when you become excessively arrogant, you tend to attract tragic events to humble you. If your self-exaggeration is moderate, you likely encounter criticism and challenges. When you are down and minimizing yourself, you tend to attract others to lift you up. When there is a large crisis or need, it often attracts huge numbers of people to assist and help in whatever way they can. So, feedback systems are proportionate to bring about balance, equilibrium and authenticity.
Living a life of authenticity is one of the key reasons why I am inspired to teach the Breakthrough Experience most every week.
Living authentically is when you are most likely to have stability, wellness, clarity, sustainable business exchanges, financial, self-worth, stable relationships, leadership, health, fitness, and inspiration to our lives.
When you realize that everything in your life is on the way instead of in the way, and take notice of the myriad of feedback systems helping to bring you back to balance so you can be your true authentic self, that is when you take a giant step forward on your journey to self-mastery.
And this journey begins in your mind. At the Breakthrough Experience I teach how to override your brain’s fight-or-flight reactive and primitive responses, and instead activate the executive center of your brain that pauses, reflects, looks at the upsides and the downsides, mitigates risk, balances your thinking, and allows you to proactively respond with objectivity, creative solutions, and leadership.
I also help you identify your unique highest values – what is truly most important to you, because when you align your life what is truly most important to you, you are most likely to stop relying on the external world and its feedback systems to bring you back into balance, because you are already doing that from the inside.
I show you the steps to look at the emotional baggage you may be carrying with you, and how to bring those perceptions into balance. As a result, those memories and experiences become fuel that powers you instead of baggage that weighs you down.
This scientific method, known as the Demartini Method, is something you can apply to every relationship and situation in your life going forwards. It is a complete game-changer when it comes to being your true self.
Remember earlier when I mentioned autotelia and heterotelia – autotelia involves self-regulation while heterotelia relies on the world on the outside to help bring you into balance? The path of the master is autotelia, while the path of the masses is heterotelia. Relying solely on external factors, including religion and politics to determine how to be, is not the wisest way to become your true authentic self.
True authenticity includes embracing all aspects of your life
The belief that you can get rid of half of yourself – the traits you perceive to be negative - is a delusion that likely prevents you from embracing your authentic self.
I’m not interested in programs that encourage you to try to be one-sided and seek the fantasy of a one-sided individual, relationship or life. Although it may be opium to the masses, it’s futile.
Instead, I am inspired to help liberate you from years of self-judgment, self-depreciation, fantasies, phobias, and anxieties so you can have more resilience, adaptability, wellness, vitality, inspiration and self-love.
I am so inspired by this topic because my life transformed 38 years ago when I realized I own all the traits, both negative and positive, that I perceive in others.
You don't need to get rid of any part of yourself to be fully loved for who you are.
To Sum Up:
The secrets to being your true self include:
- Embracing your authentic self: Many people struggle with imposter syndrome and tend to exaggerate or minimize themselves in comparison to others. Embracing all aspects of who you are makes you more likely to lead a fulfilling and authentic life.
- Paying attention to the various feedback systems for authenticity: Your physiology, psychology, sociology, and even the universe guide you towards authenticity through feedback systems. Paying attention to these systems can help you rediscover and be your true self.
- Learning the wisdom of autotelia versus heterotelia: Autotelia involves self-regulation, while heterotelia relies on external factors to restore balance. Learning the tools to activate the executive center of your brain so you can be objective, proactive, neutral, balanced and authentic can be a game-changer on your journey to mastering your life and being your true self.
- Embracing all aspects of yourself, including any perceived negative traits: you don't need to get rid of any part of yourself to be fully loved and appreciated by others or yourself.
- Unlock the path to your true authentic self and embrace all aspects of your being: register for the life-transforming Breakthrough Experience and embark on a journey of self-discovery and empowerment.
Are you ready for the NEXT STEP?
If you’re seriously committed to your own growth, if you’re ready to make a change now and you’d love some help doing so, then book a FREE Discovery call with a member of the Demartini Team so we can take you through your mini power assessment session.
You’ll come away with a 3-step action plan and the foundation to empower your life.
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