Designed To Be Awake - Episode 2 - A Healed Mind

What would your life look like if you stopped trying to control it? In this episode of Designed to Be Awake, I explore the life-changing idea: “A healed mind does not plan.” This doesn’t mean we stop taking action—it means we stop forcing outcomes from fear and begin living from trust, presence, and alignment.

I share a personal story about the moment my body said a clear “no” to the life I was living—leaving a job that burned me out, facing financial fear, and rebuilding from truth instead of trauma.

We talk about being guided, using the body as a spiritual GPS, releasing control as a trauma response, and how the I Ching became an unexpected teacher and mirror.

This episode is a soft landing and a bold invitation to trust yourself. You were never meant to push through life. You were designed to be awake.

Transcript

You are listening to Designed to be Awake with Mick Kubiak.

Today's episode kind of goes all over the place.

The method for recording this has been to drop into a space of just openness and listening and simply sharing what comes out.

So I think for this episode I just want to say like let go.

Don't try to make sense of every transition.

Don't be trying to get something out of it.

You let go and you just drop in and you're just feeling the words.

So as always I hope that it brings you closer to the reality that you're already awake.

Hello and welcome to another episode.

I am your host Mick Kubiak and today I want to talk about that experience of when you come across a quote or a passage in a book you're reading or you hear someone talking about something and a phrase just lights up for you.

Maybe you do or don't have this experience as well but I think we all do because almost everyone I know pulls quotes from life and posts them or puts them somewhere or shares them in the course of a conversation.

And today I want to talk about the quote which is a healed mind doesn't plan.

But it came to me a couple years ago and I cannot remember how or where and I just was like what?

Yes I know this.

This is true.

And it gave me so much insight to myself and we can kind of dive into this pretty deeply because I understand how overwhelming that could feel to someone who's a big planner and I also understand that these quotes are meant to be guideposts and they're not a hard and fast rule.

We do live in a culture that requires calendars and like showing up on time for lunch dates and business and work and all of that and I would just encourage you to be like okay I'm going to accept that and I'm also going to say if it's the case that a healed mind doesn't plan why don't I experiment with it and see like what does that mean?

And for a long time I just had that first sentence of the quote and the quote is longer than that and it goes on to talk about how a healed mind listens for guidance,

Listens deeply so that it can hear that voice,

Feel that sense of direction that comes from a deeper place than the ego mind,

Right?

Which is like I want to do this and so I've got to make this happen and sort of forcing and projecting and wanting and needing and not trusting and the idea here is that there's a trustingness in the healed mind.

The healed mind knows that it comes from elsewhere and remains connected to where it came from even as it lives this life,

This earthly life with tables and chairs and trees and laptop computers and phones and people and all of it but this healed mind and even as I keep saying it healed mind I feel my body both deeply relax and also enliven and that's what I've come to know as my body's signal for truth.

That's the truth.

When I hear something in my body does this thing I'm like oh that's the truth.

It's safe to move in this direction and when my body sends me other signals it's like oh that's not true.

Whatever this person is saying or whatever someone's telling me I need to do not true and so I just don't do it and this is something that even before I heard this beautiful sentence a healed mind doesn't plan was already alive in me but it was appearing to quote-unquote normal people as resistance,

Right?

Unwillingness,

Shut down and I think this is a great opportunity to talk about resistance and the problem with deciding that you know that what's happening to another person is that they're resisting because what's really happening there is they don't want to do what you think they should do.

They don't want to do what you want them to do and no matter how smart or wise you think you are that's your indication to back off and imagine like maybe there's something I'm not seeing.

Maybe there's something I don't understand about what that person is experiencing and I run afoul of this myself often because of course as a therapist and a coach I fall into the trap of thinking like I know what this parent needs to do or I know what this client needs to do and oftentimes that aligns and I'll be like what about this and they'll be like that's amazing I'm going to do that and then they do but sometimes that doesn't happen and they're like no and in that moment I've come to honor what that person is experiencing and go a little deeper into what they're experiencing and it's so rich and it's so valuable to do that for the people in your life you know to just mirror like yeah it doesn't feel right to move forward right now does it tell me more what's happening for you and then when they do move forward there's this like full-bodied commitment this this full alignment with what they know is the right thing to do because their inner compass went that's north go that way and it's a beautiful thing to observe in someone and it's a beautiful thing to experience in yourself one of the first times that I really started to learn to trust this in myself was about seven or eight years ago now when I was working for a company doing coaching and I was making like sixty thousand dollars a year living in Los Angeles basically single mom and I was working like 60 hours a week I was wearing many hats I was seeing many clients it was super intense and I really have a lot of love and respect for that organization as it was because I learned so much I got thrown in at the deep deep end of the pool and it was sink or swim and it was both you know enervating and exciting and all of those things and I learned so much and when I look back it's like it was a crash course in being a coach and a therapist being part of a team all of these things so I'm deeply grateful but there came a moment when it was so clear that I needed to go that what had been serving me and teaching me was now starting to kill me literally I don't blame the organization for that at all it was within myself I don't know how to what to call it but inside myself I felt like I was dying it was a lot of that kind of like I'll wake at three in the morning in a cold sweat waking up feeling dread unable to sleep working really hard anyway and it was very painful a very very painful period of time and I caught myself a couple times doing some kind of like red flag things like driving way too fast after having had a couple of drinks on Sunset Boulevard coming from the Soho house back to the west side those of you who live in LA can sort of map that out in your heads and it's a difficult thing to confess here I confess it in the full knowledge that we all do this we all do these things we all deny and suppress and resist and then this sort of denied suppressed emotions start to have a life of their own and you catch yourself doing things that are like okay that that could have been deadly and I had like a real wake-up call with that one where I was like oh my god what am I doing I mean it was literally like I was behind the wheel of the car and I woke up in that moment was like whoa what am I doing this is really really fucking stupid and scary and I took that in so it was like the wake-up moment the moment of identifying the shadow and I sat with it and I recognized how sad I was how lonely I felt how isolated I felt like it was just me carrying everything in my world and I was just like exhausted and overwhelmed and I saw no end to it and I had the thought too like okay I am not suicidal like I would never have said I want to kill myself because for so many reasons now I had been suicidal in the past so it's not something I'm unfamiliar with but having a child there were a number of things that just kept me out of that zone but what I saw was that I was doing things and living in a way that was gonna potentially eventually take me out by accident in quotes yeah by way of a car accident by way of getting really really sick because I could feel in my body how the way I was living was making me sick and eventually fate sort of intervened and the company I was working for got purchased I guess is the way you would put it and this new group of people came in and the vibes were so off for me I had loved the company as it was when I joined it it was the scrappy upstart thing everyone was really authentic and weird and everything I like in people you know outside the box it was a really cool organization and when it got purchased all those weird things started happening like oh we're gonna have this corporate retreat and you're all gonna wear the same t-shirt and I'm like oh my god no I do not wear a uniform that is not me and this never would have happened in the prior manifestation of this place and it was so uncomfortable I always describe myself in those moments like a cat on a leash you know have you ever put a cat on a leash they don't they will just fall down I mean that's my experience maybe they're just the cats I have known they will just literally collapse because it is so antithetical to their nature to be in that situation it's so humiliating for them that they just fall apart and that was kind of me and I would always do something weird roll up the sleeves or like you know I'd have to do something to be like f you and so there was a lot of motivation the signs were lining up it was time to leave and strike out on my own so once I saw that and all of these things sort of piled up for me I knew I had to and the moment I realized I was like oh my god I immediately felt better and I started to get really excited about building my own private practice up about continuing the work I had learned how to do in that company but doing it my own way on my own and I was so excited about it I started telling people I'm leaving I'm moving on I'm going to start my own private practice I'm so excited what I saw was that people would get really scared for me and I know it was coming from a place of love and concern but they would be like are you sure about this like you have a kid you need security what are you doing and they would say things like all right if you're going to do this you have to get a website and you have to get a business card so for some reason this was the thing you got to do these two things and then also maybe I did join some networking group and I was like oh all right you know we'll see and for whatever reason I was not scared which again is just one of those things you can really trust your body there are times when everyone is like don't do that and your body is just like I'm good I've got this but I honored what people were saying that makes sense starting my own business I should have a business card and yeah why not have a website okay but the truth was every time I went to sit down and make the website or like learn how to make a website or design a business card I would find my body just going limp it just couldn't move like my hands were heavy in my lap I would try to get them to raise up to the keyboard of the computer and do things but they were just like no so I was beginning to be in that space of listening to my body as this instrument that's tuned into something deeper and wiser than my monkey mind can ever know and I just started to be like yeah I'm not gonna do that I'm just not doing it and then I would think well what do I want to do and I found what I wanted to do was meet with people who I'd been working with over the past six years at this job and meet with them one-on-one and it was only certain people for example I only wanted to meet with people I actually genuinely liked like I would meet with you and I would hang out with you anyway I would have a glass of wine or a cup of coffee with you anyway so I started calling those people and being like hey I'd like to meet and take you out for coffee and tell you what I'm up to and that was the beginning of the next six years or so of my life maybe more and it has been amazing within a year I was making almost twice what I was making and working half the time I never did get a business card to this day I have no website and my whole practice is by referral and I love that I just love everything about it so a healed mind saved me the healed mind was like I don't care if anyone else thinks this is a good plan and I don't intend to do much planning around this decision I'm going to keep dropping in and listening for my next move I share this with all of you beautiful humans today if it resonates for you in any area of your life like is there any area where it would make sense to just take a little break from planning to maybe experiment with not planning also to look at what is your relationship to signs and clues and deeper wisdom than your egoic mind there's this amazing Mark Jones quote that I'll get and share again in another episode so I don't sort of botch it here but the gist is that the part of ourself that is grateful and knows itself to be divine and deeply entrenched in this underlying intelligence this invisible energy that just permeates everything that is the soul and the part of ourself that doesn't know any of that and is married to its own bondage is the way he puts it if I recall correctly attached to its own bondage is the ego and so this healed mind is deeply soulful it knows who it is it knows where it comes from and it doesn't need to describe that in terms that are understandable to those who are not soulful and I'm going to just shout out here I believe everyone is soulful even like the most hardened atheistic materialist absolutely soulful but they don't always see it or feel it or experience it or sometimes they do and they just describe it differently but for me that was just a really powerful moment something else that was really powerful for me during that time was a book and I really love this book I think it might be considered the oldest text but you know it's one of those things like tarot cards like astrology it's all in the occult it's esoteric and suffice to say I had been studying and respectfully playing with this oracular system of guidance for about you know 25 years at that time and I had gone through a number of phases with it because there are multiple translations there are multiple people who have made books about it and I found myself off and on with it because sometimes I would get too married to it like I couldn't make a move suddenly I didn't understand what it was saying and I was like is it saying I'm not really in love with my boyfriend oh my god when I would get that way I'd be like all right let's take some space let's tune back into our own intuition which was always a challenge for me I'm in such a different place now than I was when I was 20 25 where I really didn't know what to do I really didn't know and I really was profoundly out of touch with my own soul and I really really needed these external mirrors and they were so helpful they were miraculous to me and I would say I experienced that with astrology I experienced it with the tarot but the I Ching was my deepest deepest partner and I couldn't believe sometimes the accuracy and mysterious pointedness that came from that relationship so much incredible guidance about how to be human how to survive how to thrive how to trust how to surrender how to know beyond the shadow of a doubt that you are supported you are loved you are here for a reason everything here is supporting you everything here wants you here and yet we get programmed with a completely different story that's actually a total lie and I'm going to grab a sticky note that is stuck on my wall because it has a quote from the I Ching that describes something I want to share this is a definition of the collective ego from Carol Anthony and Hannah Moog and they describe the collective ego as a strange and deeply systematized structure of fear guilt divisiveness and the aggrandizement of all that is human rational and reductive I wrote this on a sticky note and put it in my kitchen it's just been there for four years and I rarely read it but here I am talking to you and I look up and there it is so what happens is this strange and deeply systematized structure is programmed into us when we're little when we're born we're just born into that story almost all of us and the undoing of that story is really how I spent the first 25 years of my adulthood other things were happening but underneath it the important work was unplugging from that machine and it was being plugged into that machine that had driven me to the edge to where I was doing stupid things dangerous things let's change the word stupid to dangerous things I was doing dangerous things and I was heading in a direction that was going to end me up sick and end me up hurt or something it wasn't the end of my life I was gunning for there it was the end of this programming I just couldn't do the programming anymore and it didn't really have anything to do with anything else it didn't have to do with money or being a single mom or any of that it just had to do with this story this lie that I was believing and so in that dark night at three in the morning I remembered the I Ching and I remembered actually this very specific version of the I Ching the oracle the cosmic way everything in my body was vibrating with you need that book and you need it right now and I threw the I Ching which is just it's the way you consult the oracle for advice and I got this profoundly accurate description of the moment it was like someone was looking at me and was like yeah I'm holding up a mirror this is how you feel it was exact and the advice was clear it was just like you gotta know that you are on a destructive path that if you continue to think and feel this way yeah you're you're falling into an abyss this is abysmal and it's also completely untrue and so you need to find a way and we will give you some suggestions of unplugging of snapping your fingers and waking yourself up and I started to feel the way I described it to people at the time was it's as if I've been frantically trying to construct what we would call a safety net right like I have to have this much money in the whatever and I need to provide this for my child and myself and oh my god oh my god like I was just frantically always trying to fix the net and build the net out and I had to control it all the time it was terrifying or I was going to fall through into the abyss and what I saw or felt is more the way was that there was already a net there and that it was just like maybe six inches to a foot underneath the net I was frantically trying to keep intact and I could just stop it and draw I am safe I'm already safe at the most profound level so sharing this story feels really just so valuable and vital to me partly because I work with people as a therapist and as a coach I just know how many of us are out there in that exact position that I was in at three in the morning sweating it out and I just want to be a voice of love and confidence and encouragement for you and please reach out for help if you need it trust that the world you're living in has everything you need to know the truth of your ultimate belongingness here in this world the importance of your being here in this world I'm so confident in your belongingness and I hope you are too thank you so much sending you so much love I'll see you in the next episode thank you so much for listening today this episode and every episode would be impossible without my amazing team the brilliant Chase Coughlin who not only edits every episode but also composed the music for the show Georgina Vasquez as well as Maya Young if you enjoyed listening please leave us a review thank you so much for listening and I will see you next time