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After a week of naming the ledger, distinguishing suppression from discernment, and clearing out the fiction of normal, the question that remains is practical: what do you actually do with all of it? Brian Mattocks gives a direct answer. You do not analyze, fix, tear down, or commit to dramatic change. Not yet. Right now the work is building a skill, and the skill is interoception: learning to rea
Show Notes
After a week of naming the ledger, distinguishing suppression from discernment, and clearing out the fiction of normal, the question that remains is practical: what do you actually do with all of it? Brian Mattocks gives a direct answer. You do not analyze, fix, tear down, or commit to dramatic change. Not yet. Right now the work is building a skill, and the skill is interoception: learning to read the instrumentation that your body has been providing your entire life, mostly without your conscious participation. The practice is not complex. Sit with where you are holding tension. Notice what your body is still carrying from the day. Cycle through awareness and reflection without rushing to resolution.
Brian uses the image of a race car running in the red without a visible gauge as a way to frame what the sensitivity is for. It is not fragility. It is instrumentation. You cannot address what you cannot see, and you cannot see clearly if you have been trained your entire life to ignore the signals. The episode closes with a concrete weekend assignment: find one moment from the past week where you calibrated or adjusted or swallowed something, run your body back through it, and ask the single question the week has been building toward. Was that discernment or was it suppression? No reporting required. No action required. Just honesty with yourself about which one it was. That capacity to tell the difference is where the process of becoming free actually begins.
Key topics this episode:
- Why awareness and reflection must precede any attempt at change
- The interoceptive practice: cycling through what am I feeling and where did it come from
- Sensitivity as instrumentation, not fragility
- The race-car-in-the-red metaphor for running past your own warning signals
- How this awareness creates data useful for solo practice and for work with a mental health professional
- The weekend assignment: one moment, one honest question, discernment or suppression
The week ends where real work always begins: not with a plan, but with the ability to see clearly enough to make one.
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- Jorge
Creators and Guests
What is A Mason's Work?
In this show we discuss the practical applications of masonic symbolism and how the working tools can be used to better yourself, your family, your lodge, and your community. We help good freemasons become better men through honest self development. We talk quite a bit about mental health and men's issues related to emotional and intellectual growth as well.
[00:00] We've covered a lot of ground this week.
[00:02] We started with the story of the friend that you don't have to perform for the flow state
[00:07] where everything kind of felt aligned and you lost track of time.
[00:12] They're two experiences of the same thing, which is what it feels like when the chains
[00:16] go slack and you get a moment of genuine freedom.
[00:20] We named the ledger and the currency that it runs on.
[00:23] We made the distinction between discernment and suppression, two things that look identical
[00:29] from the outside, but cost completely different amounts on the inside.
[00:33] And we cleared out the fiction that there is a normal because you can't do honest work
[00:39] on your own account while you're measuring it against an imaginary standard invented by
[00:45] someone that doesn't exist.
[00:48] Today, we're going to close the week by talking about what do you do with all of that?
[00:54] The answer is simpler than you might expect after five days of this.
[00:58] You start reading, not books yourself, not analyzing, not fixing, not tearing anything down, not committing
[01:10] to any sort of dramatic change.
[01:11] It's not like we're going to get a new diet tomorrow.
[01:15] Right now, you're building a skill, the skill of interoception.
[01:21] And you're just learning to read the instrumentation of your body.
[01:29] And it's been running this whole time, your entire life without maybe your conscious participation.
[01:39] The practice that we introduced this week is how you're going to sit down.
[01:45] You're going to think about where am I holding tension in my body right now?
[01:49] Where is my body still telling the story that I didn't want to see that happened during the day?
[01:56] What am I feeling relative to what I did?
[02:03] If I'm out of whack, whatever that is, just note it.
[02:11] We're not trying to fix it yet because more often than not, as you cultivate this understanding, you gain increased sensitivity.
[02:25] And in that sort of initial phase of gaining the sensitivity, you're going to build the ability to go through these cycles of awareness and reflection.
[02:42] Awareness and reflection.
[02:43] Awareness and reflection.
[02:44] What am I feeling?
[02:46] Where did it come from?
[02:46] What am I feeling?
[02:47] Where did I come from?
[02:48] There's the two first phases in the process of fixing anything.
[02:54] And you're going to iterate through them on a regular basis.
[02:58] This important process where you cultivate sensitivity, again, not to create fragility, right?
[03:09] We're not trying to become more fragile.
[03:11] We're trying to understand the instruments.
[03:13] You can't continually run a race car in the red if you can't see the little needle and the part of the dial that's painted red.
[03:26] It just feels like it's loud and noisy and not working correctly.
[03:31] We're trying to get to that level of sensitivity because as we improve our ability to understand what it is, it's actually happening, what we're feeling, what's going on.
[03:42] We can then understand where it comes from.
[03:47] Get to things like root cause and then we can get to things like fixing it.
[03:51] But now is not the time.
[03:54] Now is the time to cultivate that awareness because what that will buy you over time is the ability to then choose.
[04:04] You want to be able to choose what to do.
[04:07] Maybe in the moment with more freedom to be able to say, hey, I need to respond in this situation that's maybe more authentic to who I am as a person.
[04:19] Maybe a choice to pursue.
[04:22] Settling up that debt or not that recurring sense of burden that you carry by masking who you are in everyday life.
[04:32] We're going to get to more of that over the course of the next couple of weeks in this show.
[04:42] Don't forget, just like I talked about earlier this week, when this stuff gets too heavy, getting help is not a sign of weakness.
[04:49] It's a sign of strength.
[04:50] It is a courtesy.
[04:51] It is the most courageous thing you can do to help yourself, your friends and your family.
[04:56] Building this noticing is going to add currency or add capacity or add data that you can then share with a mental health professional should you find yourself in a situation where you can leverage one.
[05:10] If you can't or if you're not in that position or if you don't feel it's appropriate, that's okay too.
[05:16] So having this sensitivity, cultivating this understanding is all going to be useful for you as a solo practitioner to try and figure out essentially where are these stories that you've told yourself about who you are and about the way you should act coming from and how much are they essentially punishing you by virtue of them existing.
[05:38] We'll get to all of that in the upcoming weeks.
[05:43] Here's your charge for the weekend.
[05:44] Pick one moment from the past week, one regular moment where you calibrated or adjusted or swallowed something or performed the version you think was the right choice.
[05:59] Well, I'm looking for the crisis, but just run your body back through the week.
[06:04] Find out where it lived physically.
[06:06] Ask the question that we've been building towards all week.
[06:08] Was that discernment or was it suppression?
[06:12] You don't have to tell anybody.
[06:13] You don't have to do anything with the answer.
[06:16] Just get honest with yourself about which one it was.
[06:18] That's the whole assignment.
[06:20] Because when you can tell the difference between the chains that you forged and the responses that you made that were on purpose, you begin the process of freeing yourself.
[06:34] From the identity and the shackles and the behaviors you've created because you were worried about normal.
[06:43] We'll be back next week.