Today’s episode is about breaking through your Gratitude Glass Ceiling. I’m going to pull heavily from the work of Gay Hendricks today. We use his book, The Big Leap, in the Awake Living Course, which is all about upleveling your life through the five elements of deeper understanding and refinement. We use Gay’s book because there are a few things he describes very well. One concept is the Upper Limit Problem.

My dharma is to help people have breakthroughs. I use a lot of Gay’s work to help people expand and get grounded into that expansion. We use many tools from many teachings and teachers. I synergize the tools into a system that walks my members through upleveling. It works. We have breakthroughs left and right.

I practice what I preach.
I’m always a course member, while still being the head coach.
I’m really good at kicking out pedestals and experimenting with my members.
In today’s episode, I tell a personal story about what’s happening as I break through my own upper limits. I give you a very real life example of how I break through my Gratitude Glass Ceiling.

Happy Thanksgiving!

I rap about Breaking Through Your Gratitude Glass Ceiling:

• How the Upper Limit Problem uses our physiology to moderate our emotions
• The importance of being present in our emotions and absorbing them while they’re happening
• How to savor and expand into natural good feelings while developing a bigger tolerance for things going well in life

What you’ll get out of tuning in:

• Learn what happens to our bodies and behaviors in the Upper Limit Problem
• See what a real-life example of the Gratitude Glass Ceiling looks like
• Find out how to transcend the Upper Limit Problem

Links:

• Body Thrive Book 
• Gay Hendricks’ Book, The Big Leap 
• Evolve Your Connectivity Skills

Related podcasts:

• Busting Glass Ceilings on the Dharmic Path with Grace Edison
• How to Live an Awake Life + Health Breakthrough
• The Subtle Physiology of the Dharmic Path with Dr. Kulreet Chaudhary

Show Highlights:

• 1:00 — There’s a lot of good science and psychology around showing that, as humans with our reptilian brain stems, we only allow ourselves to experience a certain degree of emotion until we then shut ourselves down. The emotion can be joy, gratitude, abundance, thrive — we only allow ourselves to feel as much as is comfortable, meaning as much as we’ve allowed ourselves to feel that emotion in the past or how familiar it is from the past.
• 2:30 — Humans have an internal barometer in our emotional body, and when the amount of emotional current is stronger than what’s familiar, it makes us shut down. We find a way to unground ourselves. We make our nervous systems revert to a more familiar state.
• 4:30 — Cate shares a real-world example of a familiar emotion and a situation in which she energetically shut down based on how she had experienced that emotion before. Without the values of Awake Living, our energy bodies contract when experiencing familiar (and often negative) emotions.
• 10:00 — When our bodies reach their emotional limit and try to shut down, what we need to do is give ourselves the space to feel into those emotions as they happen. Meditating is an ideal way to do this, allowing us to simply sit with the emotions and move with them so they don’t create ama.
• 13:35 — As Cate’s example shows, we can practice gratitude for a learning experience — gratitude for the Glass Ceiling — and it gets easier once we’ve processed the emotions for which we’re grateful.

Favorite Quotes:

• “I just kept grounding and expanding, grounding and expanding.” –Cate Stillman
• “I always recommend ‘take it to the cushion.’” –Cate Stillman
• “Allow the time and space for the digestion of emotions.” –Cate Stillman
• “It feels like calibration and recalibration… I feel this incredible outpouring of gratitude.” –Cate Stillman
• “More gratitude than ever for all of the things that go wrong. So much more availability for all the things that go right.” –Cate Stillman