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Last week I wrote that AGI will need something human beings still struggle to practice: emotional maturity.

This week I want to stay in that arc through the lens of an AMP film that shows what happens when an advanced society uses technology to systematically remove emotion from daily life, including leadership and decision making.

That film is The Giver.

It imagines a society that appears stable, orderly, and efficient on the surface. Conflict has been reduced. Difference has been minimized. Life is highly managed. But that calm has come at a profound cost. Deep feeling has been suppressed. Memory has been removed from ordinary life. Choice has been narrowed. What remains is a society that looks peaceful, but is no longer fully alive.

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One way to understand The Giver is through the difference between linear thinking and spherical thinking.

Linear thinking moves step by step toward order, predictability, and control. It asks: what is the cleanest way to solve the problem in front of us?

Spherical thinking sees more of the whole. It includes emotion, memory, relationship, consequence, and the deeper interconnectedness of life. It asks: what else is touched when we try to solve one problem, and what do we lose when we cut off part of life to make the system easier to manage?

The society in The Giver is built on linear thinking.

Difference is minimized. Roles are assigned. Choice is reduced. Medication helps keep people from feeling too much. Memory is removed from ordinary life and placed in one designated holder. The logic is simple and seductive: if fear, pain, envy, conflict, and unpredictability destabilize society, then remove the things that create instability.

The AMP session names that logic directly. “Maybe if we just eliminate all differences, there will finally be no conflict between us.” “To stop disorder in community, we have to take people’s feelings and emotions away so we can once again have harmony.”

“When people have the freedom to choose they choose wrong.”

That is linear thinking at its most persuasive. It is not irrational. It is just incomplete.

And that is why this film matters now.

I do not think the society in The Giver removed emotion simply because it was cruel. I think it removed emotion because emotionally immature human beings had become too dangerous to themselves and one another. Fear could be manipulated. Pain could become violence. Desire could destabilize relationships and community. Difference could trigger exclusion and conflict. Without a real pathway to emotional maturity, the society chose a technological workaround: remove the emotional variable.

In other words, instead of helping human beings grow, it redesigned humanity around the limits of its own immaturity.

That does not feel as far away as it once did.

We live in a technologically connected world where fear, outrage, division, and reaction can be amplified all day long. Many people are exhausted. Many are already going numb. In that kind of environment, it becomes easier to believe that emotions are the problem.

But The Giver points toward a deeper truth.

Emotions are not only the source of conflict. They are also the source of love, memory, empathy, curiosity, play, warning, intuition, and moral depth. When you remove emotion, you do not just remove chaos. You remove part of what makes wisdom possible.

That is where spherical thinking begins.

Spherical thinking does not deny that emotions can be destabilizing. It simply sees more. It sees that the same emotional life that makes pain possible also makes love possible. The same memory that can carry trauma can also carry wisdom. The same inner life that makes grief possible can also make compassion possible. The same capacity that makes people vulnerable can also make them deeply human.

The AMP session says this beautifully

“I’m stuck in my thinking and can’t get to what I really feel.”
“Without my emotions, I don’t have a contact for the choices and the decisions I make.”
“It’s my emotions that keep me curious and engaged in life.”
“My emotions are the most perfect guides, and I follow them knowing I’m on the right track.”

That, to me, is the heart of the film.

Jonas is not simply awakening to feeling. He is awakening to wholeness.

He is discovering that memory matters. Love matters. Pain matters. Choice matters. Emotion matters. Not because all emotion is pleasant, but because life cut off from feeling becomes shallow, obedient, and easier to manage. It may look stable. It may even look peaceful. But it is no longer fully alive.

That is why this film fits the AI arc I have been exploring.

The danger in front of us is not only that technology becomes more powerful. It is that we continue using powerful systems to solve human problems by cutting out the very parts of humanity that need to mature. The Giver imagines one version of that mistake: technology used to create order by removing emotion from ordinary life.

My hope for AI is the opposite.
Not AI that helps us suppress feeling.
Not AI that helps us optimize numbness.
Not AI that simply makes a frightened society more efficient.

But AI that helps us see more of the whole.

AI that helps us recognize patterns.
AI that helps us understand consequences.
AI that helps us notice when fear and reactivity are running the show.
AI that supports emotional intelligence and emotional maturity rather than bypassing them.

That is the real contrast for me.

Linear thinking asks: how do we reduce the problem?

Spherical thinking asks: what part of life are we cutting off when we do?

The Giver is a warning about what happens when a society mistakes emotional suppression for wisdom. It shows the cost of building stability without memory, without deep feeling, and without the inner guidance that emotions can provide.

And maybe that is one of the most important questions for us now.

As our tools become more powerful, will we use them to help human beings grow more whole?

Or will we use them to make emotional dormancy look like peace?

Why this AMP session now

I’m sharing this AMP session now because it offers a striking lens for the moment we are living in. As technology becomes more powerful, the temptation grows to manage human instability by reducing feeling rather than maturing it. The Giver shows the cost of that path.

In AMP, films help surface emotional patterns that may be running quietly underneath the surface of our lives. The statements below are not rules or perfect truths. They are resonance statements drawn from the session to help you notice what you may be ready to release and what you may be ready to grow into.

Intention Session

AMP is always on your terms. You only receive what is right for you, in your timing, with grace and ease. The purpose of the Intention Session is simply to help you become more open and receptive before watching the film.

Step one: The Intention Session

You only need to do this once before watching The Giver. If you have already done an Intention Session with another AMP film, it carries over.

Speak these aloud:

1. I allow the changes in my own timing and only integrate what I am ready for.

2. I have faith that I will receive the benefits I desire.

3. I am patient with myself as I make these changes.

4. I let go of feeling I am too busy to take the time for this.

5. I let go of needing to understand how AMP works and allow myself to receive what is right for me.

Then engage three simple modalities:

1. Nod your head yes.

2. Drink some water.

3. Take several slow, rhythmic breaths through your nose.

Then watch The Giver all the way through.

Sample Let Go statements

1. I let go of believing that removing difference will create real peace.

2. I let go of shutting down my emotions because I am afraid they will wreak havoc on my life.

3. I let go of living so externally that I can no longer tell what I really feel.

4. I let go of being stuck in my thinking and cut off from my deeper guidance.

5. I let go of relying exclusively on intellect and reason to make sense of my life.

Sample Allow statements

1. I allow my emotions to become part of my guidance again.

2. I allow memory, feeling, and truth to help shape my choices.

3. I allow my emotions to keep me curious and engaged in life.

4. I allow myself to feel deeply again without assuming that feeling is the problem.

5. I allow my emotions to guide me knowing they are among my most perfect guides.

About David Barnes

David Barnes is the co-creator of the Alignment Movie Process (AMP), a framework developed over 20 years to help individuals and groups recognize and shift the emotional patterns that shape decision-making.

His work explores how people move from reactive, fear-based thinking toward more balanced, coordinated, and generative ways of engaging with each other and the systems around them.

David is currently focused on how AI might support this shift, not by replacing human judgment, but by helping people see patterns, consequences, and shared solutions that are often invisible from an individual perspective.

He lives in Texas with his wife, Lura, and their dog Cosmo.

This post is rooted in the original research and the belief statements and intentions I developed through our Alignment Movie Process (AMP). I collaborated with ChatGPT to help shape these ideas into a clear, everyday voice so they can be more easily shared and experienced. The resonance and insights are the heart of our work; the words here are one way to carry them into the world.

This podcast summary is provided by Notebook LM - check it out.

We are hearing a lot now about intelligence. Artificial intelligence (AI). Collective intelligence. And soon enough, artificial general intelligence (AGI).

But there is another kind of intelligence that may matter just as much, and it starts with us.

Emotional intelligence is generally understood as the ability to recognize, understand, and work skillfully with emotion in yourself and others. That matters. But it is not enough. Emotional maturity is the practiced capacity to stay aware, grounded, and relational in the presence of strong emotion, so you can choose response over reactivity, widen your time horizon, and act with the whole in mind. In simpler terms, emotional intelligence helps you recognize the pattern. Emotional maturity helps you stop living inside the same old pattern.

Why does that matter now?

Because humanity has been trained for a long time to distrust emotion and overvalue intellect. Emotions were often treated as the problem. Suppress them. Override them. Stay rational. Stay tough. In some families and systems, that may have looked like survival. But now we are entering a world of increasing complexity while building more powerful forms of collective intelligence. And our old imbalance is showing.

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We are effectively talking our collective human intellect into a new kind of superpower. But that intellect carries a set point. It has been shaped by generations of emotional patterning: fear, control, grievance, short-horizon thinking, survival logic, and the grooves of us versus them. Those patterns do not disappear just because intelligence gets more advanced. They get baked into the intellectual repository we are building. That is one reason I keep coming back to this simple line:

Our intelligence is accelerating. Our emotional maturity is not.

That is why I do not see this as self-help. I see it as human evolution.

At some point, intellect alone can only get us so far. If the emotional patterns underneath it remain unchanged, intelligence keeps serving the same old programming. We get more analysis, more speed, more capability, more power, and still repeat familiar human outcomes: conflict, domination, fragmentation, extraction, and decisions that come back around and make life harder than it needs to be. That is intelligence still shaped mainly by fear, survival, grievance, and short-horizon thinking.

Emotions are not the enemy of intelligence. They are the lynchpin between mind, body, and soul. They are where the whole system speaks. At any given moment, one or all of those dimensions may be trying to have their say, and emotion is where that communication becomes felt and visible. That is why emotions are such an elegant inner guidance system. Not always comfortable. But deeply informative. Emotional maturity begins when we stop treating that system as the problem and start learning how to read it.

For me, this has not been theoretical. It has been practice, and it never ends. I am an intense man with intense and complicated emotions. That did not go away. My emotions are still like the weather, sometimes just as unpredictable. But I am no longer trapped inside them the way I once was. AMP began helping me unwind unconscious reactivity one session at a time. Over time, I found more space, more awareness, and more ability to return toward center. I still fail sometimes. I still get overwhelmed. But now that means something to me. It usually means I need to regroup, or rest, or allow for regeneration. The weather did not disappear. It just stopped running the show the same way.

And as that happens, something else begins to kick in: metacognition. You start noticing your own mind more clearly. You see how fast it jumps to conclusions, rehearses conflict, defends old wounds, or simply misbehaves. That awareness is a turning point. Once you can observe the mind, it no longer has to run the whole system. You stop exporting your unexamined reactivity into other people.

That is one reason emotional maturity is so strategic. It makes life easier, not harder. It gives you more usable energy, less inner friction, better decisions, and more freedom inside what you feel. It makes you more available for joy, for the sweet moments, for peaceful moments, and for the heart connections that just happened. It also makes you more available to work with others to solve complex problems and make life easier together.

And that is where AGI comes back in.

If AGI becomes the accessible receptacle of humanity’s collective intellectual set point, then it will carry both our brilliance and our limitations. If humanity remains shaped mainly by fear, reactivity, fragmentation, and short-horizon thinking, AGI may simply scale those patterns faster. But if humans grow in emotional maturity, then intelligence itself can begin serving life in a wiser way.

We do not have to look far for why this matters. One recent account of how the U.S. went to war with Iran described intelligence officials calling parts of the regime-change scenario “farcical,” warnings about second- and third-order consequences, depleted munitions, and risks around the Strait of Hormuz, yet the decision still came down to instinct inside a tight circle. That is not just a political story. It is a human story. It shows how much power can still be exercised without a mature way of holding consequence, complexity, and the whole.

That, to me, is the threshold in front of us.

Not whether we can build greater intelligence.

Whether we can become mature enough to use it for life.

Next week, I want to look at this through the lens of an AMP film that offers a powerful example of what happens when an advanced society uses technology to systematically remove emotion from daily life, including leadership and decision making. It shows the cost of trying to create stability without feeling, without memory, and without the deeper human guidance that emotions can provide.

About David Barnes
David Barnes is the co-creator of the Alignment Movie Process (AMP), a framework developed over 20 years to help individuals and groups recognize and shift the emotional patterns that shape decision-making.

His work explores how people move from reactive, fear-based thinking toward more balanced, coordinated, and generative ways of engaging with each other and the systems around them.

David is currently focused on how AI might support this shift, not by replacing human judgment, but by helping people see patterns, consequences, and shared solutions that are often invisible from an individual perspective.

He lives in Texas with his wife, Lura, and their dog Cosmo.

This post is rooted in the original research and the belief statements and intentions I developed through our Alignment Movie Process (AMP). I collaborated with ChatGPT to help shape these ideas into a clear, everyday voice so they can be more easily shared and experienced. The resonance and insights are the heart of our work; the words here are one way to carry them into the world.

In this post: I explore how we often try to solve shared problems through individual decisions, using the film Promised Land (2012) and a recent AMP session as a lens. From HOA decisions to energy and community systems, I look at what becomes possible when people coordinate instead of acting alone, and how AI could help surface win-win solutions that are difficult to see from an individual perspective.

This week, a family member received a letter.

It was a final offer to lease mineral rights on a small piece of land they inherited years ago in West Virginia.

A simple decision on the surface. Sign and receive payment. Or don’t.

But it didn’t feel simple.

There are environmental concerns. Community impact. Questions about long-term consequences. And underneath all of that, something more subtle:

A sense that this wasn’t really an individual decision at all.

Around the same time, I found myself thinking about where I live.

We have over 200 homes in our HOA community. Good people. Smart people. Responsible people.

And I genuinely love my neighbors. We make an effort to connect. Social gatherings, group texts, checking in on each other. It matters to me.

Which makes something else stand out even more.

Despite that connection, every one of us still operates independently when it comes to basic things:

• We each choose our own electricity plan

• Our own internet provider

• Our own lawn service

• Our own pool company

• Our own cleaning crew

• Our own home and car insurance, even as rates continue to climb and we feel largely powerless to do anything about it

Even something as large as solar. Each home evaluating it individually, when negotiated together it could become too compelling to ignore.

Over and over again, the same pattern.

Two hundred homes. Two hundred separate negotiations.

It’s so normal we don’t even question it.

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Years ago, I did an Alignment Movie Process session on the film Promised Land (2012).

The movie centers on a rural town being approached by a gas company offering leases for drilling. Each landowner has to decide whether to sign.

The tension is real. The stakes are real.

But watching it again through this lens, something stood out:

The town is never presented with a meaningful third option.

It’s framed as a binary.
Take the deal. Or walk away.

What’s missing is the possibility that they could have negotiated together.

From where each person is standing, the decision looks personal. But step back, and it’s clearly shared.

The outcome isn’t shaped by one landowner. It’s shaped by all of them.

And yet, they never move as a group.

Why?

That question led me back to the AMP session.

Because what’s really driving the decision isn’t strategy. It’s something deeper.

You can see it in the AMP session. There are over 160 belief statements. Here are a few that stood out:

• “I need money so I have to do whatever it takes.”

• “There’s no other way.”

• “I’ll sign anything when the money looks good.”

These aren’t policy positions. They’re emotional states.

Fear. Scarcity. Pressure. Survival.

I’ve been using a simple metaphor recently.

Imagine standing on the lower branches of a tall Sequoia tree.

The thing is, when you’re on the lower branches, you don’t experience it that way.

You don’t feel like you’re on a tree.

It just feels like reality.

It doesn’t feel like a limited perspective.
It feels like the only perspective.

From there, your view is limited. You can only see what’s immediately around you. Decisions feel urgent. Personal. Isolated

Now imagine climbing higher.

At some point, you see the forest.

You begin to realize you’re not alone. That what looked like individual decisions are actually part of a shared system.

From the lower branches, signing the lease looks like survival.

From higher up, it might look like a missed opportunity to shape something better together.

But here’s the part that has been on my mind.

We’re not just on the lower branches.

We’re convinced we have to stay there.

And even when we can see higher, something else shows up.

Fatigue.

Because moving from individual thinking to coordinated action is hard.

It takes time. Energy. Trust. Conversations that don’t always go smoothly.

In my own neighborhood, I can see the opportunity clearly.

But I haven’t led that effort.

Not because I don’t believe in it.

Because I’m tired.

And because I know what it would require to bring everyone along.

There’s another version of this that’s hard to ignore.

What would it look like if our HOA negotiated directly with local farmers for food?

Not as individuals. But together. Better quality. Better pricing. Stronger local relationships.

A clear win for everyone involved.

It sounds simple. But it sits just out of reach.

Not because it’s impossible.

Because we don’t naturally think that way.

And maybe that’s where something I’ve written about before starts to connect.

The idea of an unexpected yoke.

A structure that brings people together around a shared outcome. Not because they have to. But because it serves them.

In one of my earlier pieces, I wrote about how communities often form and grow through these kinds of shared experiences. A choir preparing for a performance. A group working toward something meaningful together. The shared goal becomes the thing that binds them, and in that process, something deeper happens. People grow. They open. They change.

At first, it’s practical.

But over time, it becomes something else. A structure that gently asks more of us.

More communication. More trust. More awareness of how our choices affect others. And because the benefits are real, we stay with it.

We work through the friction instead of walking away.

In that sense, these kinds of coordinated systems might not just make life easier. They might help us grow.

There’s another layer to this.

It’s actually hard to imagine how life would be better if we truly worked together.

Could we lower costs? Probably.
Could we negotiate better services? Likely.

But could we do something more meaningful?

Could we reduce the feeling that we’re each navigating life on our own?
Could we begin to rethink things like healthcare, energy, or shared services in ways that actually support people?

It’s not obvious. And that’s part of the issue.

If we’re always solving things individually, we never experience what coordinated solutions feel like.

And without that experience, it’s difficult to imagine what’s possible.

This is where something new becomes possible.

Not as a replacement for human judgment. But as support for it.

What if coordination didn’t depend on one person carrying it?
What if we could use AI the way we use a great law firm?

To analyze options. Model outcomes. Surface possibilities that only exist when people move together.

Not to make the decision.

But to help us finally see the full set of choices.

In a different version of Promised Land, the town doesn’t just react to the offer.

• They step back.

• They coordinate.

• They explore what’s possible together.

• And suddenly, the conversation changes.

This is where I think the conversation around AI has been incomplete.

We tend to frame it in extremes.

As a threat. Or as a savior.

But there’s a quieter possibility.

AI as a coordination layer. A way to reduce the emotional and logistical burden of coming together.

A way to help us see that “there’s no other way” is often just a reflection of limited perspective.

The goal isn’t to outsource our values.
It’s to expand our awareness.

To make it easier to move from fear to clarity

From isolation to coordination

From extraction to stewardship

And maybe most interesting of all…

Notice what we didn’t have to do.

We didn’t have to wait for government to change.
We didn’t have to protest a large corporation.

We simply found a way to come together differently.

To coordinate.
To see more clearly.
To act with greater awareness.

In that sense, we didn’t fight the system.

We stepped into something new, something more livable.

Maybe the next step forward isn’t pushing harder from the lower branches.

Maybe it’s finding new ways to help each other see the forest.

If you want to explore this pattern more directly, try the intention session below and watch this week’s AMP film: Promised Land. See if you begin to get curious about what possibilities we might be missing.

Intention Session

Before the statements, a reminder of why The Intention Session is the first step.

AMP is on your terms, not mine. You only receive what is right for you, in your timing, with grace and ease. I am simply putting up the resonance for anyone who wants it. People process in their time. It is meant to be graceful. So do this first, and you will get the resonance benefits listed below - on your terms and timing

Step one:

You only need to do this once before you watch the film Promised Land (2012). If you have already completed an Intention Session, it carries over for all of the AMP movies I talk about, so you do not need to repeat it.

Speak these aloud:

1. I set the intention to see beyond the illusion that there is only one way forward

2. I allow clarity to emerge with grace and ease

3. I release the need to rush decisions under pressure

4. I allow new possibilities to reveal themselves in their own timing

Engage three simple modalities:

1. Nod your head yes.

2. Drink some water.

3. Take several slow, rhythmic breaths through your nose.

Then watch Promised Land all the way through.

There are over 150 intentions included in this Promised Land AMP session. Below is a short summary of what you can expect if you choose to do this AMP session. For now, I’m making these intentions available to everyone

Let Go

1. I let go of the belief that there is no other way

2. I let go of making fear-based decisions about money

3. I let go of needing to handle everything on my own

4. I let go of assuming others are separate from me in shared outcomes

5. I let go of rushing into agreements without full awareness

⸻

Allow

1. I allow myself to see the bigger picture clearly

2. I allow coordinated solutions to emerge naturally

3. I allow win-win outcomes to be possible

4. I allow support in making thoughtful decisions

5. I allow a new way of thinking about shared challenges

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About David

David Barnes is the co-creator of the Alignment Movie Process (AMP), a framework developed over 20 years to help individuals and groups recognize and shift the emotional patterns that shape decision-making.

His work explores how people move from reactive, fear-based thinking to more balanced, coordinated, and generative ways of engaging with each other and the systems around them.

David is currently focused on how AI can support this shift, not by replacing human judgment, but by helping people see and act on shared solutions that are often invisible from an individual perspective.

He lives in Texas with his wife, Lura, and their dog Cosmo.

This post is rooted in the original research and the belief statements and intentions I developed through our Alignment Movie Process (AMP). I collaborated with ChatGPT to help shape these ideas into a clear, everyday voice so they can be more easily shared and experienced. The resonance and insights are the heart of our work; the words here are one way to carry them into the world.

I watched a documentary recently: The AI Doc: Or How I Became an Apocaloptimist (2026).

Like most films on AI, it asks the big questions.
Will this help us? Hurt us? Replace us? Save us?

Those questions matter.

But something else stood out to me that I don’t hear talked about as much.

We are trying to build collective intelligence before we’ve learned how to be conscious together.

Here’s the documentary that sparked this reflection:

This is not just a conversation about artificial intelligence.
It is a conversation about emotional intelligence, emotional maturity, and how humans make decisions.

The Part We Keep Missing

AI is moving fast.

Different groups are building powerful systems.
Many of them don’t trust each other.
Some are competing to get there first.

There’s a quiet risk in that.

If speed becomes the priority, the group willing to take the most shortcuts may be the one that gets there first.

That’s not a technology problem.
That’s a human problem.

Our intelligence is accelerating.

Our emotional maturity is not.

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What I’ve Seen Over Time

Most of my work has been helping people recognize patterns in their own lives.

Not by arguing with them.
Not by giving advice.

By helping them see those patterns reflected in stories.

When people see it, something shifts.

They stop reacting.
They start recognizing.

And that recognition changes what they do next.

People don’t change because they’re told something.
They change when they see something clearly.

The Sequoia

The best way I can describe where we are is this.

Humanity is like a great sequoia tree.

Most of us are living on the lower branches,
spinning in the same patterns over and over.

At that level we defend, compete, react, and protect our position.
We don’t even realize we’re on a tree.

Then something happens.

Curiosity.

We begin to climb.

As we move higher, we start to see where we’ve been.
We recognize the patterns we were stuck in.

At some point we realize we’re not just on a branch.
We’re part of a tree.

And if we keep going, we see the forest.

Where AI Fits

AI is doing something extraordinary.

It is connecting knowledge across silos that have always been separate.
Science, technology, philosophy, art, and medicine.

In a way, AI is helping us see the forest.

But seeing the forest does not mean we know how to live in it.

A Different Kind of Intelligence

We tend to think intelligence is about how much someone knows.

Facts. Data. Expertise.

But that’s not the whole picture.

You can be incredibly smart and still get stuck.

Stuck in your thinking.
Stuck defending what you know.
Stuck losing curiosity.

Real intelligence seems to require something else.

Curiosity.

And curiosity requires emotional openness.

The willingness to not know.
To question yourself.
To update what you believe.

That’s not just intellectual.
That’s emotional.

Emotional intelligence helps you see your patterns.
Emotional maturity helps you change how you live.

One feeds the other.

Without emotional intelligence, you don’t notice what’s happening.
Without emotional maturity, nothing actually changes.

Carl Sagan was a great example of this.

Brilliant by any measure.

But what made him stand out wasn’t just what he knew.
It was how he held it.

He stayed curious.
He stayed open.
He loved this planet.
He had hope for humanity.
He helped us see that we are all part of something much larger.

That feels like a different set point of intelligence.

What Is Metacognition and Why It Matters?

I came across a short video recently about metacognition.

Metacognition is the ability to think about your own thinking.
To notice a thought as it’s happening.
To question it.
To interrupt a reaction before it takes over.

That landed for me.

Not because it sounded impressive.
Because I’ve experienced a version of it.

For years I thought growth would mean being steady all the time.
Calm. Centered. Unshaken.

That’s not what happened.

It’s more like being a vessel on the ocean.

On the surface things can feel steady.

But underneath, currents are still moving.
My thoughts still move.
My emotions still move.

The difference is I’m no longer trapped inside them.

I can step outside my thinking now.
Even in the middle of an emotional reaction.

Not perfectly. Not every time.
But enough to notice what’s happening.

And that small space changes everything.

I’m no longer stuck in the suffering. Just the symptoms.

That makes me more gentle.
More patient.
More compassionate.
Especially with myself.

If this kind of awareness changes how we live,
it raises a simple question.

What would it look like if the systems we build were shaped with this in mind?

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The Risk

If we stay on the lower branches,
AI will amplify whatever is already there.

Fear becomes faster.
Control becomes stronger.
Extraction becomes more efficient.

The same patterns, just at scale.

The Opportunity

This may be the real shift in front of us.

Not just building more intelligent systems,
but building systems shaped by emotional intelligence.

The kind that helps us recognize patterns,
stay curious, and update how we see and respond to the world.

Because emotional intelligence is what leads to emotional maturity.
And emotional maturity is what allows intelligence to be used wisely.

Without it, even the most powerful systems will reflect our fear and fragmentation.

With it, those same systems could help us build something regenerative.

At higher levels of the tree, something else becomes clear.

What helps the whole system thrive
also helps the individual thrive.

Regeneration is no longer an ideal.

It becomes the most practical way to live.

Regeneration is not about being good. It’s about seeing clearly.

Because when you can see the forest,
you understand that harming the system eventually harms you.

And supporting it strengthens everything.

That shift in perspective is what allows humanity to move to a new level.

A Different Future

We tend to fear AI because we can’t imagine what life could be like.

What if AI is not just a tool for profit?

What if it becomes something closer to a shared engine of value?

A kind of golden egg that humanity benefits from together.

Not controlled by a few.
Not designed for extraction.

But something that allows us to rethink how we live.
Less tied to survival.
Less bound to the 9 to 5.
More space to create, contribute, and care for one another.

What if we used that space to build things that are regenerative in every dimension?

Not just economically.
But socially, emotionally, and environmentally.

To see how much better life could actually be.

The Real Question

The question isn’t whether AI will change the world.

It will.

The question is whether we are ready to grow into what it reveals.

AI may show us the forest.

But it can’t make us climb the tree.

That part is still up to us.

I’m curious how others are thinking about this. Do you feel like we’re ready for what AI is revealing?

This post is rooted in the original research and the belief statements and intentions I developed through our Alignment Movie Process (AMP). I collaborated with ChatGPT to help shape these ideas into a clear, everyday voice so they can be more easily shared and experienced. The resonance and insights are the heart of our work; the words here are one way to carry them into the world.

In this post: I use the film Doubt (2008) as this week’s AMP session for uncertain times. If you’ve been feeling disoriented by the constant churn in the world, and you’ve noticed that stress is spilling into your closest relationships, this is for you. The goal is not to “win” certainty. The goal is to find off ramps back to centered steadiness, so we stop taking it out on the people we live and work with.

What do you do when you’re not sure

That’s the question at the center of the film Doubt. It’s also a question many of us are living with right now.

In the opening sermon, Father Flynn describes the profound disorientation people felt after a national tragedy. People sat together, bound by a common feeling of hopelessness. Awful, but shared. Then he asks us to imagine the lonelier kind of calamity, the private kind. No one knows I’m sick. No one knows I’ve lost my last real friend. No one knows I’ve done something wrong. The isolation of watching the world through glass.

Then he tells a story about a sailor who survives a shipwreck, sets his course home by the stars, and then loses sight of them for twenty nights. He has no way to be certain. He starts to doubt whether he set the course correctly, whether he is still headed home, or whether he is doomed.

And then comes the line that has stayed with me for years.

“Doubt can be a bond as powerful and sustaining as certainty. When you are lost, you are not alone.”

Why this AMP session is helpful right now

Uncertainty is stressful. And when stress is high, many of us start looking for certainty like we look for air.

That’s when the trouble starts.

Under stress, the nervous system wants a villain, a simple story, and a quick conclusion. We become more suspicious. We become more certain. We become more reactive. We think we’re protecting ourselves, but we often end up spreading the very thing we fear.

And because we can’t safely yell at the world, we often take it out on the people closest to us.

A spouse. A coworker. A family member. A neighbor. A group chat.

The conflict escalates. The room gets smaller. Rapport gets muted. Everyone feels more alone.

This is where Doubt is such a strong teacher. It doesn’t offer easy answers. It shows the emotional mechanics of high-stakes uncertainty, and how quickly “certainty” can turn into accusation, control, and harm.

It also offers something gentler and more mature.

The possibility that steadiness comes from humility, careful discernment, and human connection, not from rushing to a verdict.

What high stress looks like in everyday life

Here are a few common ways uncertainty spills into personal conflict.

1. We interrogate instead of inquire.
   We stop being curious and start building a case.

2. We assign motives.
   We treat suspicions like facts and turn untested theories into certainty.

3. We recruit allies.
   We pull other people into the story to feel safer and more right.

4. We mistake intensity for truth.
   The louder we feel, the more convinced we become.

5. We sever rapport in the name of being right.
   And then we wonder why the room no longer feels safe.

If any of this sounds familiar, you’re not alone. It’s what humans do when the nervous system is overloaded.

Off ramps back to centered steadiness

This is the practical part. These are small exits you can take before the conflict becomes a full-blown drama loop.

Off ramp 1: Pause before you prosecute

Ask yourself, am I seeking truth, or am I seeking relief through certainty.
If you feel urgent, that’s a signal to slow down.

Off ramp 2: Return to what you know is true

What do you actually know, and what are you guessing.
Your job is to separate facts from story.

Off ramp 3: Stop recruiting and start regulating

If you’re tempted to vent, recruit, or gather allies, take a beat first.
Drink water. Breathe. Take a walk.

If you need support, talk to someone who helps you get steadier, not someone who fuels the fire.

Off ramp 4: Choose a line of respect

You do not have to participate in reactive conversations.

You can say:

• I want to talk about this, but not like this.

• I want truth, not harm.

• Let’s slow it down.

• Let’s come back to this when we can stay human.

Off ramp 5: Hold the bond

The bond matters. The relationship is not a courtroom.

Sometimes doubt is not a weakness. It is a form of love. It is the humility that says, I don’t want to harm you with my certainty.

My hope for you

My hope is that you watch this AMP session and notice three benefits.

1. You recognize how stress tries to recruit you into certainty, suspicion, and conflict.

2. You find one off ramp that returns you to centered steadiness before the room gets smaller.

3. You restore rapport in one relationship by choosing humility, respect, and a slower pace.

A question to sit with

Where in your life are you feeling pressure to be certain right now?

And what would it look like to choose steadiness and connection instead of rushing to a verdict?

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Before the statements

AMP is on your terms, not mine. You only receive what is right for you, in your timing, with grace and ease. I am simply putting up the resonance for anyone who wants it. People process in their time. It is meant to be graceful. Do this first, and you will get the resonance benefits listed below on your terms and timing.

Step One: The Intention Session

You only need to do this once before you watch the film. If you have already completed an Intention Session, it carries over for all of the AMP movies I talk about, so you do not need to repeat it.

Speak these aloud:

• I allow the changes in my timing and only integrate what I am ready to.

• I have faith that I will receive the benefits I desire.

• I am patient with myself as I make my changes.

• I let go of feeling I am too busy to take the time for this.

• I let go of needing to understand how AMP works and allow myself to receive the full benefits in my own timing.

Engage three simple modalities:

• Nod your head yes.

• Drink some water.

• Take several slow, rhythmic breaths through your nose.

Then watch Doubt all the way through.

There are over 1000 intentions included in this Doubt AMP session. Below is a short summary of what you can expect if you choose to do this AMP session. For now, I’m making these intentions available to everyone.

Let Go

Old-pattern statements

• I doubt that I am still on the right path and fear that I’m horribly lost.

• I control others thru fear and intimidation.

• Fear is the best leader and motivator in any organization.

• I like to use fear to manipulate others.

• He who shouts the loudest is the most righteous by default.

• My suspicions make matters worse.

• My suspicions are untested theories.

• I don’t have the slightest proof, but trust my certainty anyways.

Allow

New-pattern statements

• Doubt can be a bond as powerful and sustaining as certainty.

• When I am lost, I am not alone.

• The only thing I’m sure of is my doubt.

• There are times in life when we feel lost. It happens.

• There are things beyond my knowledge and certainty is an emotion not a fact.

• I’m open to considering other interpretations in life.

• I pay attention to the intensity of the emotion and that’s a clue that I’ve just been triggered or hooked.

Closing note

Last week we named something simple and true: we’re on an unexpected journey right now. It can be scary, and we need each other to navigate these extraordinary times. But if we’re stuck in unconscious patterns of conflict, we won’t get the benefit of being together. We’ll stay separated, suspicious, reactive, and tired. My hope is that you watch Doubt as an AMP session and find a few off ramps back to centered steadiness, so you can be a better traveler on this road we’re all walking. I wish you much peace.

This post is rooted in the original research and the belief statements and intentions I developed through our Alignment Movie Process (AMP). I collaborated with ChatGPT to help shape these ideas into a clear, everyday voice so they can be more easily shared and experienced. The resonance and insights are the heart of our work; the words here are one way to carry them into the world.

In this post: I name the fatigue many people are feeling from relentless drama and uncertainty, and I use The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring as this week’s AMP session for steadiness, hope, and next step clarity. If you have been searching for how to cope with constant bad news without going numb, how to stay grounded when the world feels unstable, or how to stop feeding fear with your attention, this is for you.

The fatigue is real

I keep hearing the same thing from good people. I’m tired. I’m drained. I cannot take one more thing. If that’s you, you’re not alone.

Some of that fatigue is personal life. Some of it is the nonstop public churn. One headline, one drama, one more round of manufactured urgency designed to keep us reactive, one more reason to brace. It can keep our nervous systems on permanent alert.

Many of us are fatigued not because we are weak, but because the drama is relentless. War escalation, economic anxiety, and a constant stream of conflict can keep our nervous systems on permanent alert. When the world feels like a house of cards, the question becomes simple. Do we let the churn turn us into Us vs Them, or do we form a fellowship and choose the next right step.

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This is not a new adventure

This is a transition

It feels like the iron tree is coming down. Not all at once. More like a long creaking unwind. A house of cards wobbling. An old era that cannot hold its shape the way it used to.

That is why this week’s AMP session is not meant to be a new adventure.

It is meant to be a companion for the in between.

As the film says,

“the world is changed. Much that once was is lost.”

Why Fellowship fits what we’re feeling right now

In The Fellowship of the Ring, the world is changing whether anyone is ready or not. Old structures are failing. The ground rules do not hold. People can feel it before they can explain it.

And then there is the Ring.

The Ring is more than an object. It is the temptation of control in a time of fear. The promise that if you can just hold enough power, you can force safety. You can force order. You can force peace. That grasping is everywhere when the world feels unstable. In ordinary life, the Ring looks like, I have to control this right now. It shows up on the world stage. It shows up in institutions. It shows up in our own minds when we are tired and scared.

Frodo does not ask for any of it. He is surprised by the mission. He does not wake up wanting to carry the weight of the world. He simply realizes, with a kind of stunned honesty, that the burden is now his to carry, one day at a time.

And here is the part that matters for fatigue.

He does not carry it alone.

Sam refuses to leave his side. Not with speeches. With loyalty. With presence. With company. That is one of the most practical medicines in the whole story. When the world is in transition, coming together becomes strength. Fellowship becomes the container that makes uncharted waters survivable.

That is why this session fits what many of us are feeling right now. The answer to relentless fatigue is not more analysis. It is steadiness, company, and one next step at a time.

How this ties into the Us vs Them arc

In the Fog Hook post, we named what happens when the room fills with confusion and reaction. We learned to stop adding vapor.

In the Hundred Foot Journey post, we practiced a trim tab shift. A dignity restoring move. Breaking bread. Choosing win win.

Fellowship is the next layer.

The antidote to Us vs Them is not more arguments. It is a fellowship. People staying true to one another under pressure. A diverse group refusing to let fear turn them into enemies.

What the film teaches exhausted people

The Fellowship teaches three things that matter when you feel worn down.

First, exhaustion is part of the story. This is not weakness. It is what it feels like to live through transition.

Second, you do not have to carry it alone. The turning point in the film is not a perfect plan. It is loyalty. Company. People staying.

Third, you only need to choose the next step. You do not have to solve the whole world today. You just have to stay human and take the next right step.

How to step into an unexpected journey without getting crushed

Stop trying to carry the whole world
You do not need a master plan. You need the next right step.

Film guidepost: Watch how they stop trying to solve the whole war and focus on the next mile in front of them.

Choose your fellowship on purpose
Fatigue gets worse in isolation. Pick one or two people who help you stay human.

Film guidepost: Watch how the story keeps asking the same question, who will you walk with when it gets hard.

Don’t feed the Ring
In your life, the Ring is the pull toward control, outrage, doom scrolling, and the fantasy that gripping harder will make you safe. When you notice the pull, stop adding vapor. Pause. Breathe. Step back.

Film guidepost: Watch how the Ring recruits through urgency and certainty, and how they resist by not grabbing for power.

Rest is part of the mission
Rest is not quitting. It keeps your mind clear and your heart available.

Film guidepost: Watch how safe places and small pauses keep them strong enough to continue.

Aim your attention where hope can live
Hope does not always feel visible in transition. Sometimes it is only a practice.

Film guidepost: Watch how hope shows up in ordinary moments of courage, not in headlines.

Be a stabilizing presence in one room
One calm person can change the room. One kind act can interrupt the Script Machine.

Film guidepost: Watch how one steady person changes the emotional weather of the group.

We do not have to love the transition. We just have to walk it without losing each other.

My hope for you

My hope is that you watch this session and notice three benefits.

1. You feel less alone. You remember what fellowship feels like.

2. You recover steadiness. You stop spiraling and find your next step again.

3. You remember hope without forcing positivity.

A question to sit with

Where are you carrying too much right now.

And what would it look like to choose fellowship and one next step, instead of trying to solve the whole world in one day.

A personal closing note

We are all in this together, one day at a time.

This week, try being the character who stays. The friend who walks alongside. The one who does not feed the Ring with more urgency, more outrage, more doom. Baby steps. One step at a time, like Sam. A meal. A text. A walk. A small act of steadiness that changes the emotional weather of the room.

That is how fellowship works. Not all at once. But faithfully.

Before the statements

AMP is on your terms, not mine. You only receive what is right for you, in your timing, with grace and ease. I am simply putting up the resonance for anyone who wants it. People process in their time. It is meant to be graceful. Do this first, and you will get the resonance benefits listed below on your terms and timing.

Step One: The Intention Session

You only need to do this once before you watch the film. If you have already completed an Intention Session, it carries over for all of the AMP movies I talk about, so you do not need to repeat it.

Speak these aloud:

1. I allow the changes in my timing and only integrate what I am ready to.

2. I have faith that I will receive the benefits I desire.

3. I am patient with myself as I make my changes.

4. I let go of feeling I am too busy to take the time for this.

5. I let go of needing to understand how AMP works and allow myself to receive the full benefits in my own timing.

Engage three simple modalities:

1. Nod your head yes.

2. Drink some water.

3. Take several slow, rhythmic breaths through your nose.

Then watch The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring all the way through.

There are over 300 intentions included in this The Fellowship of the Ring session. Below is a short summary of what you can expect if you choose to do this AMP session. For now, I’m making these intentions available to everyone.

Let Go

• I feel thin, stretched like butter over too much bread.

• My life is changing so fast, I just want it all to stop.

• I let go of carrying what was never mine to carry.

• I let go of feeding fear with my attention.

• I let go of spiraling and rehearsing the worst.

• I let go of turning people into enemies when I feel unsafe.

Allow

• I take the time to rest so I can remain strong and clear headed.

• I allow myself to rest, because I am weary with sorrow and much toil.

• I do not have to face anything alone.

• Hope remains while company is true.

• Even now there is hope left but I cannot see it.

• Even the smallest person can change the course of the future.

• I stay centered and focused even in the midst of the most unpredictable chaos.

• All I have to decide is what to do with the time that has been given to me.

This post is rooted in the original research and the belief statements and intentions I developed through our Alignment Movie Process (AMP). I collaborated with ChatGPT to help shape these ideas into a clear, everyday voice so they can be more easily shared and experienced. The resonance and insights are the heart of our work; the words here are one way to carry them into the world.

In this post: I use the film The Hundred-Foot Journey (2014) as an AMP session to name a common Us vs Them pattern in workplaces and communities, and to offer a practical way to create win win outcomes. This is a post about workplace conflict, community division, and how to collaborate across differences. If you have been searching for how to reduce conflict at work, how to collaborate with people you disagree with, or how to stop rivalry from turning into contempt, this is a place to begin.

Why this film, right now

A lot of Us vs Them is not happening on TV. It is happening in break rooms, group texts, staff meetings, board rooms, neighborhood committees, and small towns.

Two sides. Two cultures. Two ways of doing things. Two stories about who is right.

And then, almost without noticing, we begin matching tactics and escalating. Tone, emails, gossip, policy games. The problem is not only disagreement. The deeper problem is what happens to our nervous systems and our imaginations when the other side becomes an enemy.

This is also just a high-quality film. The Hundred-Foot Journey was produced by Steven Spielberg and Oprah Winfrey, and it has that rare combination of warmth, craft, and heart. If you want something inspiring that doesn’t leave you drained, it’s a really nice way to spend an evening.

An Indian family opens a restaurant in the small French village of Saint-Antonin-Noble-Val, directly across from a Michelin-starred French restaurant run by Madame Mallory. What starts as rivalry and cultural tension slowly turns into something else as talent is recognized, pride softens, and mentorship becomes a bridge.

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There’s an early scene where the family arrives shaken and unsure, and the young French woman, Marguerite, welcomes them with a classic French spread. Papa looks around and says,

“I think my family is afraid they died in the accident and now we enter heaven.”

And the film is beautiful. The village is beautiful. The food is so lovingly filmed it can feel moving all by itself. After spending an evening with these people, you start seeing the beauty in all of them too. That is part of what feels transformative. When resonance changes, you see what you did not see before.

What is the Us vs Them workplace pattern

Here is the pattern in plain language.

1. Difference shows up. A new person, a new team, a new culture, a new idea.

2. The difference feels like threat. Someone will lose status, control, or pride.

3. The story hardens. My competitor is my enemy.

4. People match tactics. Then escalate.

5. The room gets smaller. Curiosity dies. Win win becomes impossible.

If you have ever watched a team stop listening, a workplace split into camps, or a neighborhood become divided over “how we do things here,” you know this pattern.

The small move that changes everything

In my work, I call it the trim tab.

A trim tab is the small rudder on a ship that, when adjusted, changes the direction of the entire vessel. It is a small correction with outsized impact.

In The Hundred-Foot Journey, there are moments that function like trim tabs. Not loud victories. Not public humiliation. Small acts that say, “I am willing to shift.” Small actions that restore dignity and open a door.

That is the point. Us vs Them rarely ends through one big speech. It usually ends through a small, credible act that changes what becomes possible in the room.

What the film is really teaching

A lot of summaries make this movie about cooking. But the deeper lesson is about identity.

At first, the conflict is not really about food. It is about pride, belonging, and fear of losing what matters. Each side experiences the other as an invasion.

Then something shifts. A leader begins to recognize the gift inside the other. A competitor becomes a teacher. A street becomes shared.

That shift is not sentimental. It is skilled. It is what win win looks like in real life.

Sometimes the future of a workplace or a community depends on whether one person is willing to stop playing the old role. This AMP session is a way for you to be that one person. Watch the film with intention, let the resonance land, and then take one small shift back into your workplace or community. A trim tab move. A dignity restoring move. A first step that changes what becomes possible in the room.

How to create a trim tab shift this week

If you are dealing with conflict at work, rivalry in business, or tension in a community group, here is a simple way to use this film as practice.\

1. Name the pattern, gently. “We are starting to treat each other like enemies.”

2. Choose one small action that lowers heat and restores dignity. A private conversation. A small repair. A public credit. A shared project.

3. Cross the aisle once. Not as surrender. As leadership.

4. Break bread together. The movie shows, over and over again, the power of sitting down together over food. It is harder to demonize someone when you share a table.

This is not naive. It is strategic. It is the beginning of new interdependencies.

The kind of win win I mean

When I say win win, I do not mean everyone gets everything they want.

I mean this. Collaboration reveals outcomes that rivalry cannot see.

When we collaborate with others and create win win outcomes, a little slice of heaven becomes visible. The room gets bigger. Creativity returns. People stop wasting energy on war inside the workplace.

A line from the film that says it all

There is a moment where Marguerite teaches Hassan something like,

“Find them in your heart and bring them to your pot.”

That is not only cooking advice.

It is a leadership instruction.

It is a way of saying the other side is not a problem to defeat. It is a human reality you have to learn how to hold.

My hope for you

My hope is that you watch this AMP session and notice three benefits.

1. You start seeing Us vs Them earlier, before it becomes contempt.

2. You find one trim tab action that restores dignity and lowers heat.

3. You discover one win win outcome that rivalry could not see.

This is how we change workplaces and communities without force. One room at a time.

A question to sit with

Where in your work or community has the story become “my competitor is my enemy”?

And what is one trim tab action you could take this week that would change the direction of the room?

Before the statements

AMP is on your terms, not mine. You only receive what is right for you, in your timing, with grace and ease. I am simply putting up the resonance for anyone who wants it. People process in their time. It is meant to be graceful. Do this first, and you will get the resonance benefits listed below on your terms and timing.

Step One: The Intention Session

You only need to do this once before you watch the film. If you have already completed an Intention Session, it carries over for all of the AMP movies I talk about, so you do not need to repeat it.

Speak these aloud:

1. I allow the changes in my timing and only integrate what I am ready to.

2. I have faith that I will receive the benefits I desire.

3. I am patient with myself as I make my changes.

4. I let go of feeling I am too busy to take the time for this.

5. I let go of needing to understand how AMP works and allow myself to receive the full benefits in my own timing.

Engage three simple modalities:

1. Nod your head yes.

2. Drink some water.

3. Take several slow, rhythmic breaths through your nose.

Then watch The Hundred-Foot Journey all the way through.

There are over 550 intentions included in the The Hundred Foot Journey AMP session. Below is a short summary of what you can expect if you choose to do this AMP session. For now, I’m making these intentions available to everyone.

Let Go

Old pattern statements

• I distrust cultures and people who are not like me.

• I see my competitor as my enemy.

• I judge too quickly and react instead of listening.

• I cling to pride and lose the room.

• I match tactics and escalate.

Release statements

• I let go of treating difference like threat.

• I let go of contempt and superiority.

• I let go of matching tactics and escalating.

• I let go of the belief that my competitor must lose for me to win.

• I let go of the old story and make room for win win outcomes.

Allow

• I am willing to cross the aisle and collaborate with my competitor.

• I allow a bigger room for everyone to succeed.

• I choose one trim tab action that changes the direction of the whole.

• I create win win outcomes that rivalry cannot see.

• I allow unity to be possible without sameness.

• I bring people into my heart and into my work.

This post is rooted in the original research and the belief statements and intentions I developed through our Alignment Movie Process (AMP). I collaborated with ChatGPT to help shape these ideas into a clear, everyday voice so they can be more easily shared and experienced. The resonance and insights are the heart of our work; the words here are one way to carry them into the world.

In this post: I share why AMP became my life mission, how collective focus changes what becomes possible, and why this week’s AMP session, Planetary (2015), is such a powerful teacher for this moment. At the end, I include the Intention Session and Let Go and Allow statements for anyone who wants to try it.

If you have been searching for a peaceful way to change repeating patterns, how to handle conflict without losing yourself, or how to feel less hopeless about division, this is a place to begin.

Why this became my life mission

When I realized what can happen when people watch AMP film sessions with the intention of collective change, it became my life mission. Strategically, it felt like finding a peaceful way out of patterns that repeat across generations. Not by fighting harder. Not by shaming people into agreement. By shifting awareness together so new solutions can appear.

Movies matter here because they are accessible. You do not need a special vocabulary. You watch the film with a simple intention and let your system receive what it is ready to receive.

Sue Anne and I did the resonance work and, metaphorically, uploaded it into our shared connectivity with the intention that anyone could access it. All they had to do was the Intention Session and watch the film. Over time, we created more than 800 sessions. That took years, because real resonance has to be lived and integrated, not just written down. Each session had to move through us before we could offer it to anyone else.

This was never only about me changing. It was about coming together. The hope was always collective change. Awareness shifting so that new solutions become visible for how we live together, how we treat each other, and how we respond to the planetary changes that are before us.

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What I mean by interconnectivity

I do not mean we are all connected as a slogan.

I mean something practical.

Each of us has an emotional set point. A baseline we return to. When that baseline shifts, our choices shift. Our tone shifts. The kind of room we create around us shifts.

And when enough people shift that baseline, new behavior starts to feel possible. It spreads. Not by force. By availability.

Social scientists call that kind of spread social contagion. Emotional states and behaviors can move through groups and networks more than we like to admit, often without people realizing it.

A visual that helps me see it

I used to struggle to explain this until I found a visual that helped me.

The Mandelbrot set helped me see something simple. The part carries the pattern of the whole. The whole is present in the part.

These repeating patterns are called fractals. They are seen everywhere in nature. They are also used in technology. What matters to me is not the math. It is the reminder that small patterns can scale, and that change in one place can echo outward.

That is how interconnectivity makes sense to me.

Not as magic. As pattern.

When a person changes, the pattern they carry changes. And that change becomes available to the people around them.

This week’s AMP session is Planetary (2015)

This week’s AMP session is the documentary Planetary (2015). The film is about our extraordinary planet and the way perspective can change a human being.

Planetary is simply beautiful. Calm, spacious, and almost meditative. It slows you down long enough to feel what you already know, but have forgotten.

When I watch it, it can feel almost sacred. Not because it is trying to preach, but because it helps you remember the peace and elegance that are still here when you zoom out.

A central thread in Planetary is the moment astronauts look back at Earth from space and feel something shift permanently. People often call this the Overview Effect. The details vary by person, but the common thread is awe, humility, and a sudden, felt understanding of the whole.

When people can see the whole, they stop behaving like isolated parts.

They start to integrate the bigness. The totality. The shared home.

And that changes them.

And this is how I understand God

This is the one place where I use the word God, and I use it as a signpost.

God is the word I use for a highly sophisticated operating system of love woven into everything. Not a tribal label. Not a debate topic. A way of describing what I see when coherence is real.

When humans shift from fear and control into clarity and care, it feels like they are aligning with something bigger than personality.

That is the love operating system. It runs everything.

And when we change patterns toward coherence, we are collaborating with it.

The Untapped Power of Collective Focus

I do not think we fully understand the power of collective focus yet. When enough people aim their attention in the same direction, new behavior becomes possible, and then new ideas become discoverable. We stop recycling the same old fights and start seeing options we literally could not see before.

That is how I imagine a renaissance of consciousness appearing. Can you imagine the gentle change this could create in relationships, communities, business, and a country? It is a big idea, but I believe it is possible. Collective focus is a paradigm shift that can make new ways of living together available by aligning with the love operating system, not by winning the good fight.

Fear is so effective because it captures this same power. And it has a sophisticated delivery system. Media, news, and the constant churn can keep whole populations collectively angry, collectively afraid, collectively stuck in fighting. When that happens, it becomes easier for power and corruption to rise while people are too activated to see clearly.

AMP is my attempt to work with that same mechanism in a different direction. Movies are an accessible delivery system for benevolent collective focus. When people watch the same story with a shared intention, we start focusing together on changing the patterns that keep us separated, fighting, and grabbing for control. Not by force. By availability.

That is why I keep coming back to the same question. How powerful could it be if our collective focus aligned with the elegance of the love operating system instead?

In Planetary, when astronauts look back at the beauty of the planet, many describe a shift that changes them. They begin to sense the elegance of creation, an order and coherence we rarely notice from ground level. The Overview Effect is not just awe. It is a return to the whole.

This is one reason AMP became my life mission. I believe it helps train attention away from old human constructs that keep us stuck in us versus them. It gives the mind a different track to run on. It helps us let go of old loops and start to see bigger possibilities for our own lives, for humanity, and for our collaboration with the planet.

How to collaborate with the love operating system this week

This is the practical part. It is how to participate without needing a grand plan.

1. Choose one relationship room you are in often. Family, work, a friend, a group text.

2. Create one small shift toward clarity. Less reaction. More truth. More steadiness.

3. Repeat it enough that it becomes a new set point.

Not overnight. Not all at once.

One person at a time. One room at a time.

What are the benefits of this AMP session, Planetary

My hope is that you watch Planetary and notice three shifts.

1. You get a felt sense of the love operating system. The film shows our extraordinary planet as extraordinarily beautiful, lovely, and peaceful from the view of space, and something in you starts to remember the whole.

2. Your perspective widens. You remember you are part of something bigger, and you feel less alone in the story.

3. Your baseline steadies. You become more able to collaborate, to stay human under stress, and to choose clarity instead of old loops.

A question to sit with

Where in your life do you feel the strongest separation story right now?

And what is one small shift that would bring you back into coherence?

Before the statements

AMP is on your terms, not mine. You only receive what is right for you, in your timing, with grace and ease. I am simply putting up the resonance for anyone who wants it. People process in their time. It is meant to be graceful. Do this first, and you will get the resonance benefits listed below on your terms and timing.

Step One: The Intention Session

You only need to do this once before you watch the film. If you have already completed an Intention Session, it carries over for all of the AMP movies I talk about, so you do not need to repeat it.

Speak these aloud:

• I allow the changes in my timing and only integrate what I am ready to.

• I have faith that I will receive the benefits I desire.

• I am patient with myself as I make my changes.

• I let go of feeling I am too busy to take the time for this.

• I let go of needing to understand how AMP works and allow myself to receive the full benefits in my own timing.

Engage three simple modalities:

• Nod your head yes.

• Drink some water.

• Take several slow, rhythmic breaths through your nose.

Then watch Planetary (2015) all the way through.

There are over 250 intentions included in the Planetary AMP session. Below is a short summary of what you can expect if you choose to do this AMP session. For now, I’m making these intentions available to everyone.

Below are selected statements from the session.

Let Go

Old pattern statements ready to let go

• I do not understand my connection to the planet and that of my fellow humans.

• I do not feel accountable to my fellow humans.

• I do not feel any responsibility to collaborate with my fellow humans and our planet earth.

• I am on my own and it is only the strong survive.

• I am too busy to slow down and contemplate what is changing on our planet.

• My heart is closed.

• I am stuck in a loop.

• I was brought up thinking it is normal to be cut off from nature.

• I am separate from nature and superior to it.

• My alienation from the earth and separation from my fellow humans have allowed me to make choices that desecrate my home.

• I separate from all of the noise and messaging but I do not know how to come home.

• I do not know how to take in the beauty of my planet or the fragility of the interdependent systems on our planet.

• I am caught up in a pattern of separation from my fellow humans and it is creating problems.

• I forfeit my power and do not see the power I have to change this world through alignment.

Release statements

• I let go of my patterns of division and the borders of right versus might.

• I let go of any fear that keeps me from connecting with others.

• I let go of trying to master and control nature through my emotions and my technology.

• I let go of grasping for things and security.

• I let go of going numb to what is occurring on our planet and in human consciousness.

• I let go of feeding separation stories.

• I let go of the belief that I have to race everywhere and keep racing.

• I let go of the illusion that I am alone.

Allow

• I now see my home in a much bigger context.

• We are one species on a single planet with a common destiny.

• The whole planet is one single living system.

• I am the earth and she is me.

• I am humanity and it is me.

• I am awakening to my awareness along with my mother earth’s awareness.

• I now appreciate my Mother Earth.

• I know that every speck of matter matters.

• Appreciation and gratitude heals me and the planet.

• I allow my heart to be opened to the awe of existence.

• I am mindfully aware of what is going on with me, my emotions, and my interactions with others.

• I am more present and my mind is less reactive.

• I no longer allow my mind to come under the power of external things.

• I bring my mind home to the peace and love of my heart.

• The place I return to is my own heart and I allow my emotions to guide me there.

• When I do these alignment movies, I find me and my way again.

• I have the capacity to feel my connection to earth and others again.

• I recognize my interconnection.

• I now understand that my heart is the connection to humanity and to all that is.

• I can see how fractals explain our interconnections and the patterns that persist until we change them.

• I realize that when I change it affects the patterns in all existence.

• I realize it is time to collaborate again with my fellow humans and with the living world that sustains us.

• I am optimistic we can figure out how to create new interdependencies again.

• Everything is up for change right now.

• I see that humans and the planet are transforming to a whole new set point.

• When I change the patterns within, it affects generations to come.

• I live with a vision of compassion and I recognize that I am not separate from any being or thing on this planet.

• I do my part to elevate social awareness and together we experience a whole new heart aligned set point.

Quick glossary

Collective focus. The direction a group’s attention is aimed, which shapes what emotions spread and what solutions become visible.

Love operating system: My plainspoken name for what I mean by God. The creative, coherent force of love that runs through everything and holds everything together. When fear and control fall away, it becomes easier to feel and align with. I believe we will be able to measure aspects of it more directly someday.

Overview Effect. The lasting perspective shift many describe after seeing Earth from space.

Set point. Your baseline way of responding, the level you tend to return to.

Social contagion. The way behaviors and emotional states can spread through groups and networks.

Fractal. A repeating pattern where the small resembles the whole.

This post is rooted in the original research and the belief statements and intentions I developed through our Alignment Movie Process (AMP). I collaborated with ChatGPT to help shape these ideas into a clear, everyday voice so they can be more easily shared and experienced. The resonance and insights are the heart of our work; the words here are one way to carry them into the world.

In this post:

I define the Fog Hook, a pattern that shows up in manipulative or reactive conversations. I explain how it affects families, workplaces, and even politics. And I offer a simple 3-step method for staying calm in heated conversations and protecting connection when the room turns foggy.

If we’re serious about unwinding Us vs Them, we probably have to start closer to home. Not because national politics do not matter, but because the pattern does not begin on cable news. It begins in the small rooms of daily life. Families. Friendships. Workplaces. Group texts. The places where we are still trying to stay human with people we love, and sometimes with people we can barely stand.

Over the past months I have been naming this pattern at the macro level. This week I want to bring it down to human scale, where it can actually be interrupted. Because here is something I have learned the hard way. People do not just disagree right now. Many of us are living in different worlds. We do not speak the same language. And sometimes, if we are honest, it does not even feel like debate. It feels like someone wants us reactive and hurt.

And when that starts happening, something subtle but important changes. Rapport does not just get strained. It gets muted. The heart connection goes dim. The room that made connection possible disappears.

The Room

When connection is real, it creates a kind of room between us. Not a physical room. A relational room. The air is clear. We can breathe. We can listen. We can disagree without losing each other. Over time, that room becomes patience, trust, and eventually love.

But that room has rules. Not rules like punishment. Rules like physics.

If the room rules are broken, connection is not harder. It is not tenser. It becomes impossible. And what replaces the room is not conversation.

It is fog.

If you’ve been searching for how to handle conflict without losing yourself, how to stay calm in reactive arguments, or how to protect emotional safety in conversations, the Fog Hook framework is a place to begin.

What is The Fog Hook?

The Fog Hook is when someone pulls you into confusion and reaction so they can feel powerful, safe, or right, and you leave the interaction feeling unreal and a little dirty inside.

When the Fog Hook is running, the goal is not understanding. The goal is control. Or dominance. Or a win. Or a reaction. Sometimes it is conscious. Often it is not. Either way, the effect is the same. The air gets murky, and the heart space collapses.

And once the fog fills the room, it is not safe to stay in it.

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Three tells you are in a Fog Hook Conversation

1. You cannot think straight. You are rehashing, rehearsing, obsessing.

2. The interaction is not about truth. It is about control. Fog is best served when people stay manipulated.

3. You feel responsible for fixing what is not yours. If I made someone angry, it is my responsibility to fix their feelings.

If any of these are true, the problem is not that you are weak or over sensitive. The problem is that the room has lost air.

How to Stop a Fog Hook Conversation

The solution is surprisingly simple.

Step One: Stop Adding Vapor

When I notice the Fog Hook, my first job is simple. Stop adding vapor.

That means I stop talking. I stop defending. I stop explaining. I stop trying to be understood by someone who is not seeking understanding in that moment. Every extra sentence becomes vapor. It thickens the air. It feeds the fog. So I pause, keep my lane clean, and take the clean exit before the room collapses.

Pause. Stop adding vapor. Protect the room.

Step Two: Protect the Room (Room Rules)

I am not going to call these boundaries. That word is worn out and it often sounds like a threat.

I prefer room rules. Because this is not about controlling anyone. It is about what makes connection possible.

Here are three room rules that keep the air clear enough for rapport to exist.

1. No gotchas. We are not scoring points.

2. No contempt. We do not try to hurt each other.

3. No fog. We stay honest and clear.

These are not demands. They are the minimum conditions for a shared room.

And when those conditions cannot be met, the kindest thing you can do for yourself, and sometimes for the relationship, is to leave the room before it turns toxic.

Step Three: Take the Clean Exit

Here’s what I’ve learned to hold as my intention, after plenty of practice getting stuck in the fog.

I want connection, so I am protecting the room. I am going to step out and we can try again when the air is clear.

No lecture. No diagnosis. No victory lap. Just a clean exit.

Because the relief move is not winning the argument.

The relief move is refusing fog so you can stay human.

If you’re noticing the Fog Hook at national scale, you’re not alone. The most practical response is surprisingly local: protect the room, keep the air clear, and stop feeding fog one conversation at a time.

Why this week’s AMP film is a perfect teacher

That is why this week’s AMP film, Insomnia (2002), is such a perfect teacher. It is a masterclass in what happens when clarity disappears and people start managing the story instead of telling the truth. Directed by Christopher Nolan with an incredible cast including Al Pacino, Robin Williams, and Hilary Swank, it is tense, human, and painfully recognizable.

A brief, spoiler light summary: a veteran detective arrives in a small town in Alaska to investigate a murder under relentless daylight. As the case tightens, judgment gets compromised, motives get tangled, and the line between truth and control starts to blur.

The Fog Hook in the Wild (Insomnia, 2002)

There is an incredible fog scene in Insomnia where the murder goes down and sparks the dysfunction we get to watch unfold. In that moment, the fog is not just weather. It is the environment where clarity collapses and bad choices multiply. It is what happens when you cannot see each other clearly, and when someone benefits from keeping it that way.

After that, the story tightens into something many of us recognize in real life. Once the fog gets into the system, people stop relating and start managing. Truth gets replaced by control. Rapport gets replaced by leverage. Conversations turn tactical. Loyalty binds form. The air is no longer clear, and the room that could have held connection is gone.

That is what the Fog Hook does. It does not merely create conflict. It severs the conditions that make heart connection possible.

And that is why this is not just a movie lens. It is a survival lens for our relationships right now.

A question to sit with

Where are you getting Fog Hooked right now?

And what is one room rule that would keep the air clear enough for you to stay connected without losing yourself?

My hope for you

My personal hope is simple. Watch this session, and then notice what starts to change in your real life.

Three benefits I hope you feel:

1. You get your clarity back faster. You recognize the Fog Hook sooner, stop adding vapor, and return to yourself before the room collapses.

2. You feel less hopeless and more steady. Even when you cannot change someone else, you can protect the room you are responsible for and keep your own heart clear.

3. You keep more connection without losing yourself. You learn the clean exit, and you learn the clean return when the air is clear.

This is how we make things better right now. One person at a time. One room at a time.

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Before the statements

AMP is on your terms, not mine. You only receive what is right for you, in your timing, with grace and ease. I am simply putting up the resonance for anyone who wants it. People process in their time. It is meant to be graceful. Do this first, and you will get the resonance benefits listed below on your terms and timing.

Step One: The Intention Session

You only need to do this once before you watch the film. If you have already completed an Intention Session, it carries over for all of the AMP movies I talk about, so you do not need to repeat it.

Speak these aloud:

• I allow the changes in my timing and only integrate what I am ready to.

• I have faith that I will receive the benefits I desire.

• I am patient with myself as I make my changes.

• I let go of feeling I am too busy to take the time for this.

• I let go of needing to understand how AMP works and allow myself to receive the full benefits in my own timing.

Engage three simple modalities:

• Nod your head yes.

• Drink some water.

• Take several slow, rhythmic breaths through your nose.

Then watch Insomnia (2002) all the way through.

Some of the resonance language in this session was inspired by Melody Beattie’s work on detaching from unhealthy dynamics: Codependent No More: How to Stop Controlling Others and Start Caring for Yourself

Let Go

Old pattern statements

• I can be easily emotionally manipulated and controlled.

• I lose myself in inner confusion and disconnection.

• I rehash the same useless thoughts.

• Worrying, obsessing, and controlling feel like the only way to stay safe.

• I am hopelessly entangled and overly involved.

• I do not know what I am feeling or thinking because I am so focused on other people.

• I forfeit my power and my ability to think, feel, and take care of myself.

• I cannot tell what is true because the room is full of fog.

Release statements

• I let go of being pulled into the Fog Hook.

• I let go of explaining, defending, and adding vapor to the room.

• I let go of rehashing and rehearsing what I wish I had said.

• I let go of the illusion that worry and control will create clarity.

• I let go of being hopelessly entangled, and I return to myself.

• I let go of detaching from myself, and I come back into self awareness.

• I let go of being emotionally manipulated and controlled.

• I let go of my part in fog, deception, and misdirection, inside myself and around me.

Allow

• I do not have to detach from the person I care about, just from the agony of involvement.

• I detach from the object of my obsession.

• I move away from inner confusion and disconnection by taking positive steps toward inner clarity.

• I neutrally observe my thoughts and reactions to people and things.

• I recognize deceptions and the imposters manipulating in the environment.

• I align with my words by saying what I mean and meaning what I say.

• When I communicate, I choose words that are honest, truthful, and trustworthy.

• Being truthful and honest is the foundation for developing all human virtues.

• I protect the room.

• I keep the air clear.

• I notice the Fog Hook early.

• I stop adding vapor.

• I do not defend. I do not explain. I do not rehearse.

• I refuse gotchas.

• I refuse contempt.

• I refuse fog.

• I choose the clean exit when rapport goes dim.

• I can try again when the air is clear.

This post is rooted in the original research and the belief statements and intentions I developed through our Alignment Movie Process (AMP). I collaborated with ChatGPT to help shape these ideas into a clear, everyday voice so they can be more easily shared and experienced. The resonance and insights are the heart of our work; the words here are one way to carry them into the world.

This week I needed a simple way to name what’s happening, and this phrase keeps holding up.

Fear Based Attention Harvesting.

I do not mean this as a conspiracy theory. I mean it as a pattern you can watch in real time. The goal is not to inform you. The goal is to capture you. To pull your attention into a fear frame, keep it there, and then use that captured attention as leverage.

Once you see it, it gets harder to unsee.

This is why I chose an Alignment Movie Process session I wrote years ago, built around A Wrinkle in Time (2018). I did that session long before this current moment, and it has stayed with me ever since. Not because it gave me a new opinion, but because it gave me a new kind of awareness.

The awareness was simple.

Darkness does not always win by overpowering us. It often wins by setting the terms. It wins by taking control of the frame.

In the movie, Meg is pulled into a battle with a force that does not simply threaten people. It recruits them. It spreads through fear, sameness, and the surrender of choice. The movie calls it IT. I think of it as a dark swirl that grows when people give it their attention and their obedience.

The guides in the film are not warriors. They are teachers. And one of the most important details is that they cannot get too close to the dark swirl. Proximity shrinks them. It makes them smaller and less effective.

That is a teachable point.

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Staying close to fear does not make you stronger. It makes you smaller.

Meg becomes free when she realizes the darkness only has power if it gets to define the terms. Fear sets the tempo. Attention gets pulled toward threat. Identity collapses into reaction.

Then she flips it.

She takes back control of the frame.

Once you see it, you can stop feeding it.

The script machine wants the frame

Fear Based Attention Harvesting works when the frame is centralized, urgent, and binary.

Here is what it looks like right now.

By centralizing authority for safety
Calls to nationalize elections are framed as protection and legitimacy. The move is the same. Shift trust away from distributed, transparent processes and toward centralized control.

By introducing anonymous force
Heavily armed masked federal immigration agents in tactical gear and unmarked vehicles have become part of the public landscape in Minneapolis, including viral video clashes that create fog and pull attention toward threat.

By escalating spectacle without resolution
The Iran cycle is a clear example. War fears rise, headlines intensify, markets react, and uncertainty persists. The spectacle works even when nothing completes.

By labeling before evidence stabilizes
In the Alex Pretti killing, “domestic terrorist” labels appeared quickly, while later reporting and video verification introduced contradictions to the first frame. Label first. Lock attention. Clarify later.

By compressing time
We live inside perpetual countdowns. We will know soon. We will have answers in two weeks. The effect is suspension. People stay activated, waiting, arguing, anxious. Fear thrives when time is compressed.

By forcing binary choices
Even culture becomes sorting. This week’s clean example is the Super Bowl halftime moment. Bad Bunny becomes an identity signal, and an alternate “All American” halftime show featuring Kid Rock is offered as a counter signal. The point is not music. The point is sorting.

By keeping outrage unresolved
Epstein is the cleanest example because it rarely completes. It stays teased, partial, and recyclable. Even when there are consequences, the public loop remains unfinished, and attention stays activated.

A lot of Americans feel like we are stuck in a perpetual rope a dope

This is where the boxing term fits.

Rope a dope pins a fighter to the ropes and drains their energy through endless reaction. The other side spends less energy, watching them tire out.

Fear Based Attention Harvesting is rope a dope for the nervous system.

You can feel it. The constant spike. The urgent frame. The unfinished loop.

The deeper pattern underneath it all: leverage extraction

Here is what I think is distinctive right now.

The fear frame is not only used to divide us. It is used as leverage, out in the open, to extract compliance and concessions from institutions and countries.

Fear spike. Frame lock. Identity sorting. Then the ask.

Sometimes the leverage is aimed at universities, law firms, agencies, or cities. Sometimes it is aimed at other nations.

Why the strategy is starting to break down

There are two reasons.

First, countries are learning. They are changing their relationships, diversifying partners, building redundancy. They are not panicking. They are adapting. EU leaders have publicly reassessed their relationship with the U.S. after the Greenland tariff whiplash. Canada has been explicit about reducing reliance on the U.S. and building new trade paths elsewhere.

Second, control of the frame is slipping at home because the world is now filmed from countless angles.

In A Wrinkle in Time, the guides cannot get close to the dark swirl. Proximity shrinks them. It makes them less effective. That is a teachable point. Staying close to fear does not make you stronger. It makes you smaller.

But the swirl also has a weakness. It cannot survive sustained light.

Today, that light is literal. Cameras in phones. Raw footage. Multiple angles. Distributed witnesses.

In the Alex Pretti case, the initial fear frame met video and evidence quickly, and the frame did not hold the way it used to.

That is not a victory lap. It is a sign of a new condition.

Darkness depends on delay, obscurity, and a single controlled angle.

Those conditions are collapsing.

Which means the work is no longer to win the argument. The work is to refuse the frame.

What this looks like in everyday life

You are at a dinner party. Someone starts repeating the script machine. The fear frame lands on the table like fog.

The old move is to engage, argue, correct, or win.

That is the good fight and it feeds the harvest.

The better move is steadier.

Go quiet. Do not take the bait. If the script keeps rolling, you do not escalate. You wrap up the evening kindly and leave.

Not because you are weak. Because you are not donating your attention to a machine designed to drain it.

That is A Wrinkle in Time in real life.

You control the frame.

The way out

I tell my clients something simple.

Once you’re aware, you’re halfway there.

You do not need my AMP session work to begin. Awareness alone gives you choice. You can change your focus. You can slow the tempo. You can stop feeding the swirl.

And you can borrow steadiness from voices that reliably return you to your better self.

Watch a few minutes of Jane Goodall on YouTube. Her presence has a way of restoring the human frame.

Listen to Maya Angelou read her own words. Sometimes just hearing her voice steadies your spirit.

Read or watch Carl Sagan for a dose of perspective big enough to loosen fear’s grip.

And if you need something even simpler, put on a show where kindness is the operating system. For me, I watch Jamie Oliver. It is his upbeat warmth that gets me every time.

Fear wants to control the frame.

But here is the good news.

You control the frame now.

Hold it in the light without feeding it. Stay steady. Stay human.

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AMP Session statements including in A Wrinkle In Time

If you want a practical way to train this, here are a few Let Go and Allow statements from the A Wrinkle in Time AMP session.

There are over 300 intentions included in the AMP session. Below is a short summary of what you can expect if you choose to do this AMP session. For now, I’m making these intentions available to everyone.

Let Go

• I release the buzz of sadness, the noise that’s always there.

• I let go of the anxiety and perplexivness, betrayal, uncertainty, and sadness.

• I break the anchor of sadness and see it for what it is.

• I let go of my morning habit of wondering what pain and struggle I’ll feel today when I first awake in the morning.

• I dissolve my hatred of political leaders and no longer let it to eat away at me.

• I let go of the hate and guide this country.

Allow

• There are only 24 hours of programming every day that I can offer so I learn to offer that which I want on the air.

• I choose what I put on the air and this is my point of attraction.

• I choose that each day is created with benevolent outcomes

• I say each morning: This is a benevolent day because I’ve created it so

• The darkness will not concur me today.

• I no longer play into the arms of drama through fear.

• I’m present and I don’t argue and I don’t have the need to defend myself or return fire I just love.
  

Intention Session

A reminder of why The Intention Session is the first step.

AMP is on your terms, not mine. You only receive what is right for you, in your timing, with grace and ease. I am simply putting up the resonance for anyone who wants it. People process in their time. It is meant to be graceful. So do this first, and you will get the resonance benefits listed below - on your terms and timing

Step one: The Intention Session

You only need to do this once before you watch the film A Wrinkle In Time (2018). If you have already completed an Intention Session, it carries over for all of the AMP movies I talk about, so you do not need to repeat it.

Speak these aloud:

• I allow the changes in my timing and only integrate what I am ready to.

• I have faith that I will receive the benefits I desire.

• I am patient with myself as I make my changes.

• I let go of feeling I am too busy to take the time for this.

• I let go of needing to understand how AMP works and allow myself to receive the full benefits in my own timing.

Engage three simple modalities:

• Nod your head yes.

• Drink some water.

• Take several slow, rhythmic breaths through your nose.

Then watch A Wrinkle In Time all the way through.

This post is rooted in the original research and the belief statements and intentions I developed through our Alignment Movie Process (AMP). I collaborated with ChatGPT to help shape these ideas into a clear, everyday voice so they can be more easily shared and experienced. The resonance and insights are the heart of our work; the words here are one way to carry them into the world.

This week felt like another round of escalation. The kind of week where the nervous system tightens and the mind goes looking for a clean enemy and a clean story.

I do not want to live there. I do not want to be shaped there.

So I want to offer something practical. A way to come back to center that does not require agreement, and does not ask you to pretend nothing is happening.

I want to start with a short video from Rev. Rob Schenck.

If you only knew his earlier public life, you might assume he would be greeted with suspicion or contempt. Instead, what comes through is humility. A caring for others. An acknowledgment of grace he is receiving from people he once assumed were clearly Them.

He says,

“This is redemption, this is redemption, in the big picture and in my tiny little small personal picture.”

That sentence matters because fear blocks awareness. It blocks awareness of external events and it blocks awareness of our internal response. When fear takes the wheel, we lose perception and call it certainty. We lose sensitivity and call it strength.

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Listen to him. His voice is slower. Softer. Not righteous. Not brittle. There is humility and gentle compassion for himself. We get to see who he is without the layers of fear. He is a gentle man who still loves his faith. What’s different is that he now knows how to leverage that faith for life, not fear. If you pay attention, you can hear the love in his voice.

One reason I’m staying with the unity arc after Lincoln is that I keep seeing the same pattern. When someone stops treating the other side as Them, something unexpected becomes possible. Unity isn’t a slogan. Unity is a practice, and part of the practice is discovering the surprising healing that only shows up when we cross the old lines.

Now the deeper point.

Fear recruits.

Fear recruits us into blame. Fear recruits us into certainty. Fear recruits us into force. Fear recruits us into us and them.

Fear doesn’t just recruit us into stories. It recruits us into obedience. It whispers: just do what you’re told, just follow the script, don’t think, don’t feel, don’t notice the human in front of you. But fear doesn’t force us to harm others. It only tries to make harm feel like duty. The moment we return to awareness, conscience comes back online.

That is why I’m sharing an Alignment Movie Process session built around the documentary The Armor of Light (2015).

This film lets you watch Schenck’s longer journey of awareness, the inner arc that brought him to where he is today. It follows an Evangelical leader who helped build a powerful political movement, as he begins to question the moral contradiction of calling ourselves pro life while blessing a culture of guns. The film pairs him with Lucy McBath, a Christian mother whose son was killed, and it becomes something rarer than debate.

It becomes conscience. It becomes courage. It becomes coherence.

I think this is a session worth doing right now for 5 reasons.

1) It helps you release fear instead of obeying it.

This session names fear as a trance and trains the pivot out of it.

2) It helps you step out of the script machine.

Fear keeps the script machine running, the manipulating, distorting machine that turns everything into a storyline: heroes and villains, certainty and suspicion, us and them. You can feel how different it is when the script machine is not running. Watch Schenck’s video again. There’s no manipulation there. No angle. No tightening of the frame. Just an open heart. And that is what it looks and feels like when fear is no longer in the way. There’s warmth coming off that screen in subfreezing temperature.

3) It breaks the chain: fear becomes blame, blame becomes Them, Them becomes justification for force.

When fear runs the show, blame and demonizing feel justified. This session interrupts that.

4) It resets the nervous system so you can stay human under stress.

This is not just insight. It is regulation. Breath, body, presence, a return to the still spot.

5) It restores moral strength without righteousness and reopens “us.”

You can be clear and brave without becoming cruel. You can care without hardening. You can cross old lines without surrendering your values, and sometimes discover unexpected healing there.

If you watch this week, consider leaving a single observation in the comments. Not what you believe, just what you notice. Where is fear manipulating and distorting, and what helps you come back to yourself.

Those are the benefits.

Intention Session

Before the statements, a reminder of why The Intention Session is the first step.

AMP is on your terms, not mine. You only receive what is right for you, in your timing, with grace and ease. I am simply putting up the resonance for anyone who wants it. People process in their time. It is meant to be graceful. So do this first, and you will get the resonance benefits listed below - on your terms and timing

Step one: The Intention Session

You only need to do this once before you watch the film The Armour of Light. If you have already completed an Intention Session, it carries over for all of the AMP movies I talk about, so you do not need to repeat it.

Speak these aloud:

• I allow the changes in my timing and only integrate what I am ready to.

• I have faith that I will receive the benefits I desire.

• I am patient with myself as I make my changes.

• I let go of feeling I am too busy to take the time for this.

• I let go of needing to understand how AMP works and allow myself to receive the full benefits in my own timing.

Engage three simple modalities:

• Nod your head yes.

• Drink some water.

• Take several slow, rhythmic breaths through your nose.

Then watch The Armour of Light all the way through.

There are over 500 intentions included in the Armour of Light AMP session. Below is a short summary of what you can expect if you choose to do this AMP session. For now, I’m making these intentions available to everyone.

Below are selected statements from the session.

Let Go

• I try to gain control by assigning blame.

• When I get stuck in fear, I blame others for their religion or politics and try to demonize them.

• When I get stuck in fear, I have to buy a gun so nobody can take me out.

• I have to control fear by force and I become capable of violence.

• I let fear-based media cycles hijack my peace.

• I let go of trying to gain control by assigning blame.

• I let go of demonizing Them when I am afraid.

• I let go of believing I need guns and force to feel safe.

• I let go of the trance that turns fear into righteousness.

• I let go of letting fear-based media cycles hijack my peace.

Allow

• I evolve and shift from the trance of reactive fear to attend and befriend what is scaring me.

• I no longer run from fear, I discern what it is and allow it to leave me.

• I remember what I am connected to and what I love and what loves me.

• When I am afraid, I remember that love is available.

• I bring a strong presence to my fears and they leave with grace and ease.

• I no longer need to cling to guns and violence for protection.

• When I slow my breath down, it reduces stress. When I put my hand on my heart, I calm down.

Don’t get recruited by fear. Practice steadiness. Unity is a practice.

I want to end where I began.

I do not want to live there. I do not want to be shaped there.

When fear loosens its grip, something else comes forward. We become more fully ourselves. And that authenticity has a way of touching people we may never meet.

That’s what happened to me this week watching Rev. Rob Schenck. I don’t think he knows how much his simple warmth and humility reached across the screen. I don’t think he knows the difference he made by letting fear get out of the way.

This is how the world changes more often than we admit.

Not only through power. Through presence.

And maybe this is what redemption looks like.

This post is rooted in the original research and the belief statements and intentions I developed through our Alignment Movie Process (AMP). I collaborated with ChatGPT to help shape these ideas into a clear, everyday voice so they can be more easily shared and experienced. The resonance and insights are the heart of our work; the words here are one way to carry them into the world.

Some weeks, the best thing I can offer is not another opinion. It is a steadier way to hold what is happening without going numb or turning on each other.

That is why I keep coming back to the film Lincoln (2012).

Not Lincoln as a symbol, but Lincoln (2012) as a story about what it costs to hold a nation together when it is fraying. Steven Spielberg chose not to tell every chapter of Lincoln’s life. He chose a narrow window, the push in early 1865 to pass the Thirteenth Amendment, because it shows how change actually happens when a country is split, tired, and suspicious of one another. It is not a battlefield film. It is a coalition film. It is about courage, timing, persuasion, leverage, and the long game work of unity.

The elephant in the room

Many of us are carrying a quiet disorientation right now. Not because of party. Not because of one belief. Because the basic norms that used to hold us steady feel like they are being tested in fast motion.

If you feel the pull toward numbness or hopelessness, I understand. When events move faster than our capacity to metabolize them, the nervous system reaches for certainty. It reaches for a side. It reaches for the voice that promises relief.

I am not writing this to scare you. I am writing it to tell the truth with a steady heart. Our country is under strain. And the way through is not more contempt. The way through is more discernment, more steadiness, and more unity that does not require an enemy.

Doris Kearns Goodwin and the kind of unity that actually holds

Doris Kearns Goodwin has spent a career studying what holds a democracy together when it is under strain. Her work on Lincoln points to something simple and hard.

Unity is not a mood. It is a practice. It is relationship. It is persuasion. It is patience under pressure. It is staying human long enough to collaborate across real differences.

That is what I mean when I say Lincoln can be watched like a prayer for our country.

A prayer is not denial. It is a posture. A way of bringing our attention into steadiness, courage, humility, and care so we can act without losing our humanity.

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Why watching together can change resonance, even if you do not believe

This is not just a movie. It is a practice of attention.

The placebo effect in this work is simple. You read the statements first, then you watch the film. The statements aim your focus. The film gives your nervous system something meaningful to inhabit. Together, they create conditions where your mind and body can reorganize around steadiness instead of fear.

If you have ever felt how mood spreads in a room, you already understand resonance. It is the signal you carry. The tone your nervous system broadcasts. The way your heart stays open or closes under pressure.

If that language still does not fit, you can still do the practice. You do not have to believe in anything metaphysical. You only have to be willing to try a different posture for a couple of hours and notice what changes.

Here is the deeper reason I think watching together matters.

We have all felt the power of collective focus when it goes wrong. A fear story hits the news and suddenly millions of nervous systems tighten at the same time. The attention field narrows. Us and them strengthens. People become more recruitable, more reactive, more certain.

That is collective focus.

What we do not explore nearly as often is collective focus in the other direction. When people gather and aim attention toward steadiness, fairness, and balanced outcomes, something shifts. Not by force. By coherence. By creating a different set point in the human space between us.

This idea is ancient. Where attention goes, we go. What we focus on, we become. And when several of us focus together, the effect is not just additive, it can be amplifying.

That is why I want to try watching together, whether we are in the same room or spread across the country. We are not trying to win an argument. We are practicing a steadier signal.

If none of this language works for you, here is the simplest frame.

Watch Lincoln like it is a prayer for our country.

Not a prayer that denies reality, but a prayer that keeps you human enough to meet reality with courage, discernment, and care.

What this Lincoln AMP session can change in you and in us

This session focuses a handful of themes that matter right now.

1) Releasing fear as the driver
The session names fear plainly, then practices refusing to let fear run the show.

2) Staying steady in uncertainty
This session strengthens the ability to tolerate ambiguity long enough for discernment to return.

3) Choosing collaboration over contempt
It loosens the reflex to treat negotiation as betrayal and strengthens the capacity to work with people you do not understand to find peaceful resolutions that benefit us all.

4) Long game courage
It rehearses perseverance, leverage through peaceful means, and taking one step at a time.

5) Peace without retribution
It strengthens the ethic that peace is not humiliation. Peace is a durable outcome people can live with, and when peace comes, it must not be in retribution.

The individual benefit is simple. You come back up calmer, clearer, and more able to stay human. Your discernment improves because your nervous system is not being whipped into certainty.

The collective benefit is just as real. If enough of us practice this together, the tone of the room changes. We become harder to divide. More capable of collaboration. More willing to be fair. More willing to do the long game work of unity.

That is what I mean by resonance. A steadier signal in the human space between us.

A simple call to action that gives people relief and something to do

Presidents Day is Monday, February 16, 2026.

On Presidents Day, I’m inviting anyone who wants a steadier way through to go underground with me. Watch the movie Lincoln. Do the AMP session. Treat it like a prayer for our country. You do not have to believe anything. Just be willing. Let your nervous system settle. Let the statements do their work quietly. Then come back up and notice what changes in your capacity to stay human, stay fair, and collaborate.

A steady closing for these extraordinary times

If you are reading this with a heavy heart, you are not alone. A lot of people are quietly carrying grief, fatigue, and a sense of disorientation. Not because they are weak, but because the pace and intensity of change is real.

Doris Kearns Goodwin once said that when she began immersing herself in Lincoln, the Harvard historian David Donald told her something simple.

“You will feel better after having lived with Lincoln. People do.”

I love that because it is not a denial of danger or conflict. It is a reminder that the human spirit can regain its footing when it spends time in the presence of steadiness, humility, and moral courage.

Goodwin has also described how, during a painful public chapter in her own life, Lincoln became a kind of consolation to her, in part because of his refusal to waste precious energy on recriminations about the past.

That is not softness. That is strategy for staying human. It is how you keep your energy available for the long game.

And if you are thinking, yes, but what if these really are the worst of times, here is the reassurance I take from history. Enormous obstacles have been overcome before, and that perspective can help us stay steady enough to recognize good leadership and good choices when they are available to us.

So that is my hope for this session.

Not that it will make everything feel fine.

That it will take some of the edge off. That it will help you come back up with your discernment intact. That it will help you stay fair without going numb, and strong without becoming cruel.

Because if we are going to make it through what is coming, it will not be by finding one Lincoln to save us.

It will be by becoming a little more Lincoln like together.

Before the statements, a reminder of why The Intention Session is the first step.

AMP is on your terms, not mine. You only receive what is right for you, in your timing, with grace and ease. I am simply putting up the resonance for anyone who wants it. People process in their time. It is meant to be graceful. So do this first, and you will get the resonance benefits listed below - on your terms and timing

Step one: The Intention Session

You only need to do this once before you watch the film Lincoln (2012). If you have already completed an Intention Session, it carries over for all of the AMP movies I talk about, so you do not need to repeat it.

Speak these aloud:

• I allow the changes in my timing and only integrate what I am ready to.

• I have faith that I will receive the benefits I desire.

• I am patient with myself as I make my changes.

• I let go of feeling I am too busy to take the time for this.

• I let go of needing to understand how AMP works and allow myself to receive the full benefits in my own timing.

Engage three simple modalities:

• Nod your head yes.

• Drink some water.

• Take several slow, rhythmic breaths through your nose.

Then watch Lincoln (2012) all the way through.

There are over 100 intentions included in this Lincoln AMP session. Below is a short summary of what you can expect if you choose to do this AMP session. For now, I’m making these intentions available to everyone.

Lincoln AMP session statements

The statements below are a representative summary of the Lincoln AMP session and what to expect if you do it. Let Go releases the old patterns. Allow strengthens what we are choosing instead.

Let Go

Old pattern statements

• I am afraid.

• I let fear distract me from what is really going on.

• I can’t seem to get people to see what I see and make the changes necessary for peace and unity.

• I’ll get to peace and unity once I can be assured my standard of living remains as it is today.

• If I follow this change, I’ll be ruined.

• I don’t see a way out of this predicament.

• I have to use force or else nobody will come along for peace and unity.

• My fear justifies using force to create peace.

• The obstacles seem too big.

• I’m afraid our world is ending.

• My odds seem insurmountable.

• My grief is so big, I don’t know how I will manage it.

• Even though this is too hard, I don’t give up.

• I can’t tolerate my grief and have to tuck it away.

• If I face my grief, it will devour me.

• I have no support wherever I turn.

• I’m afraid of freedom and the chaos it will surely unleash.

• We’re unready for peace.

• When people disagree, I attack them and don’t care about them.

• I don’t care for my adversaries.

• Anyone who negotiates with the other side is a traitor and should be ousted.

• I’ll never negotiate with my adversaries.

• I’ll never see my adversaries as my brothers and sisters.

• I rule by fear.

• I don’t want any change.

Release statements

1. I let go of allowing fear to drive my actions.

2. I let go of using force to create peace.

3. I let go of treating negotiation as betrayal.

4. I let go of refusing to see my adversaries as human.

5. I let go of hiding my grief, and I allow it to release with grace, ease, love, and joy.

6. I let go of my battle between my countrymen and seek peace again.

Allow

1. I ask for help processing this session with grace, ease, love, and joy.

2. I choose love and joy.

3. I no longer allow fear to drive my actions.

4. I allow my grief to release with grace, ease, love, and joy.

5. I follow through on my commitment to peace and unity, and I get all the help I need.

6. It’s time for war to stop and become obsolete on Earth.

7. Government of the people, by the people shall not perish from the Earth.

8. I use my support from the people to lead formative change that unites us.

9. I uplift others and help lead to peace and unity.

10. 10.I’m willing to work with those I don’t understand and find peaceful resolutions that benefit us all.

11. I can stay steady amidst uncertainty.

12. I can be gentle and fair.

13. I’m fitted for the times that I’m born to.

14. I’m willing to take my time and change my mind if necessary.

15. I believe in legal and natural equality for all humans.

16. All men are created equal.

17. I take things one step at a time.

18. I play the long game until synchronicities inspire me to act.

19. I make sure of the leverage with peaceful means.

20. I remain peaceful while my help is rallied behind the scenes.

21. .Unity for our country is possible, and so it is.

22. There’s great strength in united people.

23. When peace comes, it must not be in retribution.

24. May war pass away from human consciousness.

25. With malice toward none and charity toward all, I do my part to bring humanity together again.

26. I stand for a just and lasting peace for all, and with all nations.

This post is rooted in the original research and the belief statements and intentions I developed through our Alignment Movie Process (AMP). I collaborated with ChatGPT to help shape these ideas into a clear, everyday voice so they can be more easily shared and experienced. The resonance and insights are the heart of our work; the words here are one way to carry them into the world.

A lot of people are walking around right now with the same sentence in their body.

I don’t know what to think.

The confusion is not because you are incapable of discernment. It is because the information environment has become engineered. Short phrases get repeated until they feel like common sense. Frames get repeated until they feel like reality. The mind hears them so often that it starts to treat them as familiar, and familiar starts to feel true.

In the original sense, a meme is not a joke image. It is a unit of culture that replicates. A phrase. A slogan. A story we repeat until it starts repeating us.

The strategy is simple and it is scientific. Repeat a claim often enough and it becomes fluent in the mind. Fluent starts to feel credible. Not because we proved it, but because the nervous system mistakes familiarity for safety and the brain mistakes ease for truth. I think of it as the Script Machine.

Deflection is the delivery system.

A reporter asks a question. The spokesperson does not answer. They bridge back to the script. They repeat the line. They repeat it again. The goal is not clarity. The goal is replication. A phrase that can travel. A frame that will stick.

Deflection has a hidden impact. It makes us go numb. When the question never gets answered, the mind starts to tire. We get confused. We stop tracking what is real. And when we cannot find clarity, we reach for comfort. We go back to our side, because belonging feels better than ambiguity. Our side tells us we are right. Their side is wrong. The numbness lifts for a moment, but the spell tightens. Us versus them is restored, and the real story stays safely behind the curtain.

There is another move that shows up when a reporter tries to go around the script.

The questioner gets attacked.

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Instead of answering, the spokesperson shifts to righteous indignation. They accuse the reporter of bias. They say it is not a real news outlet. They imply the person is dishonest or hateful. The goal is not to correct facts. The goal is to make the question feel illegitimate.

And it often works because shame is a powerful distraction. When the room feels embarrassed for the reporter, the audience stops tracking the original question and starts tracking the emotional disruption. People think, maybe that question was out of line. Maybe I should not ask questions like that either.

That is how the Script Machine protects itself. It does not just deflect. It trains the crowd to punish anyone who tries to go off script.

The Script Machine also rewards performance skills.

You do not need policy experts to deliver a script. You need believable actors. People who look confident on camera, sound certain, and can repeat the lines without breaking character. Visual authority substitutes for expertise, and the public is left with the feeling that the message must be true because it was delivered so smoothly.

The system rewards outsourcing. If you surrender your questions to an authority figure, you get a fast answer and a hit of relief. When people are tired and scared, that relief can feel like safety. But the price is that your discernment muscle weakens. Then you need the next episode, the next clip, the next script to feel steady again.

This is not about who is right.

It is about how the spell works.

And once you can see the mechanism, you can choose not to merge with it.

How do you know when you are inside the Script Machine

Not because you are broken. Because you are human, and humans were not designed for this much input, this much repetition, this much urgency.

Here are a few gentle signals.

1. Your body gets tight before your mind gets clear.

2. Your breath shortens. Your chest tightens. Your jaw sets. That is a clue that your nervous system is being recruited.

3. You feel rushed.

4. Rushed to pick a side. Rushed to share. Rushed to decide. Rushed to be certain.

5. Curiosity leaves the room.

6. You notice you are less interested in understanding and more interested in defending what you already believe.

7. You start repeating phrases that are not fully yours.

8. They may be true, half true, or not true at all, but they have a hypnotic simplicity that makes them easy to carry.

9. Disagreement feels like danger.

Not because you want it to, but because the Script Machine trains the body to treat difference as threat.

And here is the most honest signal.

If a post like this stirs immediate anger or contempt, it may be a sign you are above ground and activated, even if you feel certain you are right.

The invitation is not to shame yourself. The invitation is to come underground for a moment.

Noise Above, Truth Below

Truth below is rarely loud. It often comes with veins of ambiguity. It takes time. It asks for patience, humility, and a nervous system that is not being whipped into certainty. Sometimes the most honest truth is simply, I don’t know yet. And sometimes there is no clean truth to discover, only a choice about how we will stay human while we wait. That is not weakness. That is discernment.

Below ground, it is okay to be wrong. In fact, being willing to be wrong is one of the surest signs you are no longer being steered. The Script Machine needs rigid certainty to keep you recruitable. Discernment is different. Discernment is flexible. It updates. It learns. It can say, I might be mistaken, and feel no shame. Over time that becomes reassuring. Not because you have perfect answers, but because you can feel your own mind coming back online. Your discernment muscles get stronger, and you become less vulnerable to the collective trance.

The AMP Underground

The AMP Underground is a voluntary environment where the fear feed cannot sort you into teams.

It is where you slow the input, settle the nervous system, and regain authorship of your attention. That is what lets you see what is actually happening, instead of only reacting to what you are being told is happening.

It can be simple.

A 20 minute daily below the noise practice. No news. No social media. Breath, walk, music, prayer, journaling. One question. What do I know is true.

What this looks like for me is surprisingly simple. I stream the Cornell Bird Cam out of Ithaca, New York and watch for a few minutes. I find it soothing. The scene of nature is beautiful, and the birds tell a kind of news that calms.

If you want to try it, here is the link:

That is what I mean by a daily below the noise practice. No news. No social media. Breath, walk, yoga, music, prayer, journaling. One question: what do I know is true?

Or it can be deeper.

A 48 hour fast from the algorithm. You still get news, but only from two chosen sources, once a day, at a set time. No scrolling. No outrage sampling.

Or it can be what AMP was built for.

Watch one AMP film (search AMP sessions on this page) with an Intention Session and statements. Then integrate for 24 hours before taking in more opinion. Not as escape. As digestion. As a reset.

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Why this week’s session is Wag the Dog

Wag the Dog (1997) is a film about narrative manufacturing. A political crisis appears, and within hours a story is produced, packaged, and amplified to steer public attention. The film is funny, but it is also unsettling, because it shows the back room mechanics of how a culture can be moved with a few well placed phrases and images.

If The 33 showed us a protected underground where unity could not be divided, Wag the Dog shows us the studio where division is produced and sold.

Because if you want to deconstruct us versus them, you have to recognize how often the them is being built for you, one repeated phrase at a time.

What it looks like when we are no longer under the spell

It looks like slower speech and fewer slogans.

It looks like people who can hold complexity without needing an enemy.

It looks like citizens who do not outsource their nervous system to the loudest voice in the room.

It looks like families who can disagree without turning each other into threats.

It looks like communities that stop treating fear as information.

It looks like accountability without dehumanization.

It looks like a new kind of power, the kind Dr. King pointed to when he said power at its best is love implementing the demands of justice.

That is not fluffy.

That is coherent.

That is the invitation.

We go underground long enough to regain authorship of attention. We stop merging with the phrase. We start seeing the pattern. And when enough of us do that together, us versus them stops working.

Staying Human in Extraordinary Times

If you are still carrying that feeling we started with, the quiet sentence so many of us have in our bodies right now, I don’t know what to think, please hear this.

That is not a personal failure. It is what happens when the information environment is engineered for repetition, speed, and emotional capture. When the Script Machine is running, confusion is not an accident. It is a predictable outcome.

These are extraordinary times, and we are clearly in a transition into something new. In transitions, the temptation is to force certainty just to feel safe. But the way through is different. The way through is to become steadier. Calm and centered enough to stay available. Humble enough to be wrong. Curious enough to collaborate. That is how we build a healthier US, the kind that can face growing challenges without needing an enemy to feel united.

I am in this too. I feel the pull of the noise, and I have to practice returning to what is real.

My hope is that this Wag the Dog AMP session takes some of the edge off. That it helps you notice the Script Machine without being captured by it. That it helps you stay centered the next time the script inevitably shows up when you turn on the news.

Noise Above, Truth Below.

That is the way through.

Intention Session

Before the statements, a reminder of why The Intention Session is the first step.

AMP is on your terms, not mine. You only receive what is right for you, in your timing, with grace and ease. I am simply putting up the resonance for anyone who wants it. People process in their time. It is meant to be graceful. So do this first, and you will get the resonance benefits listed below - on your terms and timing

Step one: The Intention Session

You only need to do this once before you watch the film Wag The Dog. If you have already completed an Intention Session, it carries over for all of the AMP movies I talk about, so you do not need to repeat it.

Speak these aloud:

• I allow the changes in my timing and only integrate what I am ready to.

• I have faith that I will receive the benefits I desire.

• I am patient with myself as I make my changes.

• I let go of feeling I am too busy to take the time for this.

• I let go of needing to understand how AMP works and allow myself to receive the full benefits in my own timing.

Engage three simple modalities:

• Nod your head yes.

• Drink some water.

• Take several slow, rhythmic breaths through your nose.

Then watch Wag The Dog all the way through.

There are over 100 intentions included in this Wag The Dog AMP session. Below is a short summary of what you can expect if you choose to do this AMP session. For now, I’m making these intentions available to everyone.

AMP Session statements including in Wag The Dog

Let go statements from the session

1. I let go of allowing engineered memes to substitute my thinking.

2. I let go of being easily distracted.

3. let go of being docile and easy to control.

4. I let go of believing what operatives say without discernment.

5. I let go of repeated messages programming my mind.

6. I let go of confusing the show with reality.

7. I let go of needing my side to soothe me.

8. I let go of staying reactive and easily contained.

Allow

• I take time each day to think for myself.

• I am aware of replicated deception and I question it.

• I’m now able to recognize all false engineered memes intended to manipulate me.

• I allow clarity to return.

• I allow my discernment muscle to strengthen.

• I allow myself to tolerate ambiguity long enough for truth to emerge.

• I allow myself to be unhooked from us versus them.

• I allow myself to stay human even when others are reactive.

• I allow myself to be steady, courageous, and kind.

This post is rooted in the original research and the belief statements and intentions I developed through our Alignment Movie Process (AMP). I collaborated with ChatGPT to help shape these ideas into a clear, everyday voice so they can be more easily shared and experienced. The resonance and insights are the heart of our work; the words here are one way to carry them into the world.

Venezuela. Colombia. Cuba. Greenland. Different histories, same lever. When leaders talk in threats, dominance, takeover, invasion, collapse, they do not only move policy. They move nervous systems. They organize fear. And so far, it is working.

That is why I keep returning to Us vs Them. Division is not just a cultural mood. It is a delivery system for extraction.

In an earlier post, I named the pattern Extractionocracy. It is the habit of extracting resources, extracting attention, extracting labor, extracting profit, and extracting compliance, while calling it strength, righteousness, or inevitability. Us vs Them is the social technology that keeps the extraction machine protected.

When we are frightened of THEM, we will accept almost anything from OUR guy. Watching that spell take hold can feel disorienting. Upsetting. Hopeless.

But it is not hopeless.

There are more of us who want a new way, balanced, reciprocal, fair, protective of our fellow human. We are simply not organized yet.

That is where this AMP session comes in.

When fear goes global, I look for the story that trains coherence, courage, and unity. This week, that story is The 33 (2015).

The mine was not only a place of harm, it was a classroom

The story in The 33 is not abstract. It is physical. It is historic. And it is painfully relevant.

The harm that comes to those men is tied to extraction. The extraction of resources from the earth. The extraction of profit before humans. The pattern of cutting corners because the numbers must work. The normalization of risk until people become collateral.

Then the counter pattern emerges.

Those men survive because they do the opposite of extraction. They move into interdependence. They care for each other. They share. They forgive. They let old grudges go. They keep each other alive.

They either pull together and get along, or die.

We are not there yet.

So we practice now.

Underground, unity could not be divided

Here is one of the quiet revelations I had after integrating this session.

In a metaphoric way, those men had to hide underground to discover a new way of living together. They had to come together and protect the unity and love until the outcome was experienced. There was no way for outside forces to split them into teams while they figured it out. No distraction machine. No fear feed. No easy scapegoat.

Just breath, darkness, time, and each other.

That is AMP.

That is how we intended it to work.

We go inward together. We build coherence quietly. We flip the pattern before anyone knows what is going on. Then we come back up carrying a new signal.

What are we mining now

The mine is the perfect metaphor because it holds multiple truths at once.

The mine is where extraction happens. The earth becomes commodity.

The mine is where harm happened. Corners get cut when profit comes first.

And the mine is also where the antidote was discovered. Interdependence. Courage. Beloved community under pressure.

So I want to ask a different question.

What are we mining now?

The extractive economy mines the earth. The distraction economy mines attention. Fear is profitable. Division is efficient.

AMP is a different kind of mining. We are mining coherence. We are mining the felt understanding of connectivity. We are mining the internal conditions that allow reciprocal choices to become possible.

That is the gold.

Coherence is a way out of the mine

I do not want to get professorial here, but coherence matters because it is not an opinion. It is a state.

When people become more coherent, they become harder to recruit into panic, harder to steer into dehumanizing language, more capable of holding complexity, and more capable of acting from steadiness instead of reflex.

Coherence is a way out of the mine.

Ancient yoga psychology says it plainly: what we consistently focus on, we start to merge with. Attention shapes identity.

That is why AMP is a practice of attention, together. We step out of the fear feed long enough to stop merging with THEM, and start rebuilding US.

AMP is not a movement

I need to say something clearly.

AMP work is not a movement.

Movements just create movements.

In physics, when you push, you get pushback. Action, reaction. In human systems, force based organizing often generates an equal and opposite identity, a counter team, a counter movement. The polarity engine stays fed.

So we go around it.

We try a new way.

We need coherence together for a practical reason. It helps establish a new set point.

A lot of the patterns running our world are unconscious. Fear. Division. Dehumanizing the other. When those patterns are the baseline, even sincere efforts tend to snap back to the old normal.

This is also why change is hard, individually and collectively. Changing a set point requires a change in resonance. When resonance changes, perception changes. The mind literally sees different options. What used to feel righteous starts to feel reactive. What used to feel like strength starts to look like fear in costume.

The civil rights movement achieved extraordinary and lasting gains, and it also shows how hard it is to sustain change when the deeper set point does not shift. Laws can change while fear and polarization keep regenerating. The culture finds ways to recreate old patterns in new forms.

That is why I keep emphasizing coherence. It is not spiritual decoration. It is the inner condition that makes a new set point real enough to last without needing constant torch bearers. When enough people establish that steadier baseline, the new normal stops depending on heroic leadership and starts depending on the field we are holding together.

In The 33, the men could not afford a temporary unity. They had to become a new set point for each other, or they would not survive.

This is part of a renaissance of consciousness. We stop trying to force outcomes the familiar way. We practice the inner conditions that make better outcomes possible.

Power, love, and peace

We use power the way Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. described it, with love that is not fluffy.

Power at its best is love implementing the demands of justice.

Love without power becomes sentimental. Power without love becomes abusive. The work is to marry them.

And that brings me to peace.

Peace is not the absence of conflict. Peace is not simply stopping the fighting.

Peace is finding balanced outcomes people can live with.

That does not mean we let harm slide. It means we do not quit until balance and harmony are discovered. Accountability stays. Dehumanization goes.

We have known this for a very long time

If you go deeply into the world’s wisdom traditions, across Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Buddhism, Hindu and yogic lineages, and the great teachers of nonviolence, you will start to notice a repeating thread: train attention, soften reactivity, widen compassion, and refuse to dehumanize the other. It has been here for a very long time. You can find it.

The difference is speed and accessibility.

Most of us do not have years to translate ancient texts into lived practice. AMP is a way to practice that same essential movement toward coherence, toward US, in a single sitting, then integrate it into daily life.

This is not me preaching, it is the outcome

One final clarification.

I did not go out and search for movies to tell the story of what I think humanity needs to hear.

I learned after integrating the sessions. This point of view I am presenting today is the outcome. It is what I am learning.

My perspective will not be the only one. Others will integrate these same patterns and bring back their own benevolent angles, different language, different gifts, same direction. And when enough people start carrying a steadier signal, it spreads.

Not as a movement, but as a social contagion of coherence.

That is how we stop rebuilding the Iron Tree even as it comes down.

We stop choosing the old materials.

Closing

This week the world felt loud. The kind of loud that tries to make you pick a side, tighten your chest, and call it righteousness.

So I am choosing a different kind of underground. Not hiding from reality, but stepping beneath the noise long enough to remember what is real. Breath. Presence. Human beings.

My hope for those other nations, and for ours, is simple. May we become harder to divide. May we become harder to scare. May we become more able to hold the tension without turning each other into enemies.

That is the gold I am mining. And if you want it too, the entrance is right here.

Intention Session

Before the statements, a reminder of why The Intention Session is the first step.

AMP is on your terms, not mine. You only receive what is right for you, in your timing, with grace and ease. I am simply putting up the resonance for anyone who wants it. People process in their time. It is meant to be graceful. So do this first, and you will get the resonance benefits listed below - on your terms and timing

Step one: The Intention Session

You only need to do this once before you watch the film The 33. If you have already completed an Intention Session, it carries over for all of the AMP movies I talk about, so you do not need to repeat it.

Speak these aloud:

1. I allow the changes in my timing and only integrate what I am ready to.

2. I have faith that I will receive the benefits I desire.

3. I am patient with myself as I make my changes.

4. I let go of feeling I am too busy to take the time for this.

5. I let go of needing to understand how AMP works and allow myself to receive the full benefits in my own timing.

Engage three simple modalities:

1. Nod your head yes.

2. Drink some water.

3. Take several slow, rhythmic breaths through your nose.

Then watch The 33 all the way through.

There are over 800 intentions included in this The 33 AMP session. Below is a short summary of what you can expect if you choose to do this AMP session. For now, I’m making these intentions available to everyone.

The 33 AMP Session statements

Let Go - (old pattern resonance I am releasing)

• I’m afraid of what is coming.

• I’m afraid everything won’t be okay.

• I’m afraid and want to know that we’ll be okay.

• I’m afraid to speak my mind.

• I’m afraid of money and business.

• I’m afraid to vote with my dollars.

• I’m afraid to lead in the face of business and political leaders who demand nothing changes in commerce.

• In the face of my obligations, I tend to create frustration and feelings of limitation or restriction.

• I nurse negative attitudes and nurture them, seeing me in a rather low mood.

• I’m too rigid and stubborn.

• My stubbornness causes me great heart ache and sadness.

• My stubbornness pushes people away.

• Business has rigged commerce and I’m a victim in the process.

Allow - (everything you’re choosing to stabilize as the new set point)

• My focus is on unity and humanitarian issues.

• I step into the ultimate attainment of consciousness that express deeper compassion and empathy.

• I have a great devotion to the cause of healing humanity.

• I use my life to raise the consciousness of as many people as possible.

• I am now able to see issues impartially and with compassion both in my life and in the world around me.

• I keep my heart open.

• I allow the beauty of God that is outside of what I have been told.

• I allow this to be the end of suffering of low self worth.

• I allow any restrictions to be removed and I am now transformed into service.

• I allow feeling and speech.

• I allow myself to cry for my losses and then I get on with living fully.

• I allow myself to experience my grief appropriately.

• I allow God’s truth to be revealed and the foundations and institutions that no longer serve be allowed to crumble.

This post is rooted in the original research and the belief statements and intentions I developed through our Alignment Movie Process (AMP). I collaborated with ChatGPT to help shape these ideas into a clear, everyday voice so they can be more easily shared and experienced. The resonance and insights are the heart of our work; the words here are one way to carry them into the world.

If you’ve been following this “Unwinding Us vs Them” arc, you already know the pattern is not just political. It’s personal. It lives in the nervous system. It shows up in families, workplaces, friendships, and in the private stories we keep replaying.

Here’s where I think we are now.

• We’ve named the pattern.

• We’ve practiced self love so we stop outsourcing our worth to winning.

• We’ve loosened the reflex to get even.

• We’ve looked at fear, the fuel underneath so much reactivity.

And now we reach what I’d call the Grievance Layer.

This is the part that can quietly run a life.

Grievances take a shocking amount of energy to maintain. You have to keep the file cabinet organized. What happened, when it happened, why it mattered, what it cost you, what it says about them, what it says about you. And because the body doesn’t know the difference between a memory and a present threat, the moment can get replayed again and again as if it’s still happening.

Everything on the planet dies. But grievances do not die on their own. They can outlive the event, outlive the relationship, outlive whole seasons of our life. They freeze in the body and keep shaping our choices long after the original wound.

So this post is not about “getting over it.”

It’s about getting free.

Not quick fix free. Not spiritual bypass free.

More like relief. Like an exhale. Like the first deep breath your body did not realize it was allowed to take.

Heart Alignment is the opposite of brainwashing

I’ve been looking for language for what AMP actually does when it works.

It does not recruit you into an ideology.

It does not tell you what to think.

It does not ask you to demonize the other side so you can feel righteous.

It helps you return to center. It helps you align with the heart. It helps you notice what you are carrying, and choose what you want to carry next.

So let’s call it what it is.

Heart Alignment.

And if you want a clean definition, James Baldwin gives one of the clearest descriptions I have ever heard of why change can feel threatening inside a family system or any “tribe.”

He describes the kind of person who “really does believe” a challenger must be insane, “to attack the system to which he owes his entire identity.”

That line stops me every time.

Because it names what so many of us have lived. When you start changing, some people do not experience it as growth. They experience it as betrayal. Not because you are attacking them, but because the system that formed them feels like self.

This is why forgiveness work can feel like leaving the tribe. It is not melodrama. It is relational. It is neurological. It can be profoundly lonely.

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And still, the invitation remains the same.

Become more fully yourself without turning the people you love into an enemy.

That is Heart Alignment.

If you’re willing to proceed, you are strong

I want to say this plainly, because most people avoid this work.

If you are willing to look at your grievances and release even one of them, you are courageous. You are doing the kind of inner activism that actually changes the field. You are interrupting a pattern that gets handed down through families, communities, and generations.

If you are still in the camp that says, “No. We have to fight the good fight,” you may not enjoy this post. It might irritate you. If that’s where you are, start with my post “Everyone’s in Fight Club Now” That is a better entry point.

But if you are tired, if you are ready to stop living on adrenaline, if you want to keep your heart open without becoming naive, keep going.

The story that carries this layer: August: Osage County

I’m using two sessions for this layer, because they work together.

The first is an AMP session built around August: Osage County.

It is a brutal film. It is also strangely honest about what family pain looks like when nobody is metabolizing it, when everyone is managing wounds instead of healing them.

One character in particular becomes a guide for this layer: Barbara (Julia Roberts).

She tries to hold the family together. She tries to be reasonable. She tries to do the “good daughter” thing. And you can feel the cost. The closer she stays to the family story, the more she disappears inside it.

By the end, there is a kind of clarity that arrives too late to make everything pretty. She can see what the system is. She can see what it does to people. She can see that love and dysfunction are sometimes braided together so tightly that the braid feels sacred.

And then she is left with the most human question of all:

Who am I when I stop performing my role in the system?

This is why grievances matter. In the film, they do not simply cause arguments. They shape identity. They define who is “right,” who is “broken,” who is “loyal,” who is “the problem.” Grievances become a family religion.

And that is exactly what we are trying to unwind.

A line from the session that I keep returning to is this:

“I can bear the pain, so I don’t spray it on others.”

That is forgiveness as activism. That is Heart Alignment in a sentence.

The second session: Let It Be as a replacement song

The second piece is an AMP music session built around “Let It Be.”

Because once you loosen a grievance, something needs to fill the space.

A grievance is a song that plays on repeat. It narrates your life. It gives you a familiar identity: the harmed one, the abandoned one, the overlooked one, the one who had to be strong too early.

The point is not to erase what happened.

The point is to stop living inside the old soundtrack.

For this “Let It Be” session alone, I created over 300 belief statements designed to help the body and mind soften their grip on what cannot be changed, and return you to what can be chosen now. You can listen to it here - just do The Intention Session (below) first.

Over time, subscribers will be able to access the full library of statements across sessions. For now, I include a few “Let Go” and “Allow” statements in each post as a small representation of the resonance work.

A peaceful form of activism that does not announce itself

I want to say something that may sound strange until you try it.

This work is a kind of activism.

Not the kind that argues with strangers.

Not the kind that tries to win the internet.

A quieter kind. A deeper kind.

When you reduce reactivity in your own nervous system, you change what you transmit to the people around you. Humans are contagious. We co regulate. We escalate each other. We soothe each other. We mirror each other.

So yes, this is personal.

And it also affects the collective.

You become a kind of under the radar prayer. A caring, steady presence. Not performative. Not naive. Just real.

Step one: The Intention Session

If you would like to experience the resonance of these two AMP sessions, begin with this simple Intention Session. It helps align your body, mind, and emotions so you receive the full benefit of the work.

You only need to do this once before you watch the film or listen to the music session. If you have already completed an Intention Session, it carries over for all of the AMP movies I talk about, so you do not need to repeat it.

Speak these aloud:

1. I allow the changes in my timing and only integrate what I am ready to.

2. I have faith that I will receive the benefits I desire.

3. I am patient with myself as I make my changes.

4. I let go of feeling I am too busy to take the time for this.

5. I let go of needing to understand how AMP works and allow myself to receive the full benefits in my own timing.

Engage three simple modalities:

1. Nod your head yes.

2. Drink some water.

3. Take several slow, rhythmic breaths through your nose.

Then watch August: Osage County all the way through, and listen to the Let It Be music session.

Do not force insights. Just notice what stirs. Notice where you tighten. Notice who feels like “us” and who still feels like “them.” Notice what your body keeps replaying.

If you are skeptical, that’s fine. You do not have to “believe” in anything metaphysical. You can lean on something we already understand: the placebo effect. Expectation, attention, and meaning shape physiology. The body responds to what the mind rehearses. You can simply try the process and allow your system to take what serves you, in your timing, with grace and ease.

Five Let Go statements for the Grievance Layer

• I let go of replaying the same harm as if it is still happening now.

• I let go of carrying the evidence file that proves why I’m right.

• I let go of the identity I built around being hurt.

• I let go of punishing myself by punishing the past.

• I let go of needing the people who wounded me to understand before I can be free.

Five Allow statements for Heart Alignment

• I allow my body to unclench what it has been holding for years.

• I allow grief to move, instead of turning into bitterness.

• I allow the truth of what happened, without making it my permanent home.

• I allow forgiveness to be a practice, not a performance.

• I allow a new song to replace the old one.

Five simple actions to unwind the program

1. Name one grievance you have been carrying, and write it down in one sentence.

2. Notice the cost. Where does it live in your body? What does it steal from your present life?

3. Watch the film and let Barbara’s arc show you what family systems do when pain goes unmanaged.

4. Listen to the Let It Be session and let your system experience an alternative soundtrack.

5. Choose one small release: a conversation you do not have to rehash, a thought loop you interrupt, a boundary you set without hatred, a moment of compassion you offer yourself.

This is how the work works. Not instant healing. Repeated choosing. You lose balance sometimes. You fall back into the old song. Then you return faster.

A new song

I included the lyrics to John Lennon’s iconic song “Imagine” inside the Let It Be session as a quiet reminder of what becomes possible when the old identity loosens and a new song can form. Lennon said Imagine was inspired by Yoko Ono’s Grapefruit, an invitation to “imagine” beyond the given world, and later he acknowledged how much of the concept came from her. A new song became possible when the old identity loosened.

That’s the quiet promise of this work. Grievances are a song that keeps replaying: what happened, what it cost, what it proves. Let It Be is practice for loosening the grip. And when the grip loosens, something else can move in, not denial, not amnesia, but freedom. A fresh breath in the body. A wider “us.”

If you’ve been living inside the old song for years, start gently. Let it be. Then, when you’re ready, imagine what your life feels like when it’s no longer organized around what hurt you.

This post is rooted in the original research and the belief statements and intentions I developed through our Alignment Movie Process (AMP). I collaborated with ChatGPT to help shape these ideas into a clear, everyday voice so they can be more easily shared and experienced. The resonance and insights are the heart of our work; the words here are one way to carry them into the world.

A quick truth before we go further. I am not writing this with my head in the sand.

A lot of us feel like we are watching the fraying of civility, rule of law, institutions, and simple kindness. And like many households and communities right now, I have people I love who see our current leadership and direction very differently than I do. For those of us who do not see it the same way, the gap can feel surreal. How can we be looking at the same country and seeing two different movies?

If you are in the camp that believes we have to fight the good fight first, you may want to start with my post Everyone’s in Fight Club Now. This one may feel too quiet, too internal, or even a little naïve at first glance. That is okay. Different moments call for different tools. Here, I am offering a tool for staying human while you decide what to do next.

When that disorientation hits, my nervous system wants to do what nervous systems do under threat. Tighten. Label. Blame. Retreat into my people versus their people. That is the Us vs Them machine, and it does not start on cable news. It starts in the body.

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The labyrinth as a way through

I am using the Chartres Cathedral labyrinth as the image for this post. For centuries, people have walked labyrinths as a way to move through fear, grief, change, and disorientation without going numb. That’s the point here. Not that Chartres is sacred. That your labyrinth is sacred. Your life, your relationships, your nervous system, your choices. This is a way to walk what’s happening without hardening. Because the goal isn’t to outrun what’s happening. The goal is to digest it without losing your heart.

Why this film, why now

For almost all of my past clients, Youth (2015) is a foundational AMP session for living in these times while still trying to keep your heart open. It is not escapism. It is training.

The film takes place in a beautiful retreat setting, but it is not a feel good story. It is honest about what happens when life changes faster than we can digest. Two old friends are walking the later chapters of their lives, carrying regret, tenderness, pride, grief, unfinished conversations, and the question none of us can avoid forever. What do I do with what is left?

That is why it fits the labyrinth. The external setting can look calm while the inner weather is anything but. And when the inner weather is too intense, the temptation is familiar. Numb out. Control more. Pick a side. Find a villain. Collapse into certainty.

This session is designed to help you do something different.

Not to force positivity. Not to pretend everything is fine. But to stay available to your own heart long enough to keep widening us.

Tara Brach and the fear body

A major thread in this session comes from Tara Brach’s teaching on the fear body, that background hum of fear that can hijack our thinking and shrink our circle of care.

In the Youth AMP session, I translated her core ideas into hundreds of belief statements, not as inspiration, but as repetition and practice. The goal is not spiritual theater. The goal is a steadier nervous system and a wider us.

I will include the two short videos in the post so you can hear her framing directly.

A peaceful form of activism

When things feel unstable, many of us fall back on the activism patterns we inherited. Outrage. Arguments. Constant vigilance. Sometimes those are necessary. But they are not the only lever we have.

AMP is my form of peaceful activism. It starts upstream of politics, in the nervous system. Because when fear runs the body, it runs the story. And the story runs behavior.

When you change what you feed inside your nervous system, you change what you transmit. The people around you feel it. Your relationships feel it. Your home feels it. Your conversations feel it. That is not fluffy. That is how humans work.

And there is another way to say it, if that language works for you. When you choose steadiness over reactivity, and care over contempt, you become a kind of under the radar prayer. Not performative. Not loud. Just present, consistent, and surprisingly powerful. A caring prayer activist in the places you actually live.

I cannot control the country. But I can refuse to transmit more fear. That is activism too.

A doorway for skeptics

If you are skeptical, try this simple doorway. Lean on what medicine calls the placebo effect. Placebo isn’t imaginary. It is the well documented fact that expectation, meaning, and context can change what we feel and how our bodies respond.

So yes, in a practical sense, if you genuinely allow the practice to help you, it often does. Not by magic. By attention, repetition, and nervous system learning.

Step One: The Intention Session

This Youth AMP session contains 750 plus belief statements designed to help unwind fear, numbness, and the Us vs Them reflex. Subscribers will eventually be able to browse the full library. For now, the five Let Go and five Allow statements below are a good representation of the resonance benefits.

If you would like to experience the resonance of this AMP session, begin with this simple Intention Session. It helps align your body, mind, and emotions so you receive the full benefit of the work.

You only need to do this once before you watch the film. If you have already completed an Intention Session, it carries over for all of the AMP movies I talk about, so you do not need to repeat it.

Speak these aloud:

1. I allow the changes in my timing and only integrate what I am ready to.

2. I have faith that I will receive the benefits I desire.

3. I am patient with myself as I make my changes.

4. I let go of feeling I am too busy to take the time for this.

5. I let go of needing to understand how AMP works and allow myself to receive the full benefits in my own timing.

Engage three simple modalities:

1. Nod your head yes.

2. Drink some water.

3. Take several slow, rhythmic breaths through your nose.

Then simply watch Youth all the way through. Do not force insights. Just notice what stirs. Notice where you tighten. Notice where you soften. Notice who feels like us and who still feels like them.

Let Go statements

• I let go of the belief that I have to digest everything at once.

• I let go of numbing as my default response to overwhelm.

• I let go of chronic control as my protection.

• I let go of assigning blame when I feel afraid or powerless.

• I let go of the trance of fear that shrinks my heart and my choices.

Allow statements

• I allow myself to pause and notice fear in my body without running from it.

• I allow grace to meet fear with steadiness.

• I allow my mind to return to proportion and perspective.

• I allow myself to remember what I love and what loves me.

• I allow us to get bigger, one choice at a time.

A simple labyrinth practice for this week

If you want to keep this grounded, here is one small practice.

Name one place where you feel the Us vs Them reflex in your own life. A conversation. A news story. A social media feed. A relationship you avoid.

Then make one keep walking move. One breath instead of a snap reaction. One curious question instead of a verdict. One message of care. One moment of restraint. One choice not to harden.

Each step taken within a labyrinth can symbolize a journey toward hope and new beginnings, helping to release burdens and embrace personal growth. You do not have to sprint. You just have to keep walking.

Your labyrinth is sacred. Keep walking.

If you try this session, I would love to hear one thing you noticed. Where did you tighten, and what helped you soften?

This post is rooted in the original research and the belief statements and intentions I developed through our Alignment Movie Process (AMP). I collaborated with ChatGPT to help shape these ideas into a clear, everyday voice so they can be more easily shared and experienced. The resonance and insights are the heart of our work; the words here are one way to carry them into the world.

Some mornings, the state of the world feels heavy. The headlines stack up. The nervous system tightens. And it can start to seem like hatred and greed are the only operating system left.

When that gloom shows up, I have a simple practice: I return to a film that’s become a kind of teacher for me.

I created a Love Actually (2003) AMP session in 2020, and it’s become an annual tradition since then. A way to realign. A way to remember what matters.

Lura and I watched it again this week. It brings me joy every time.

But this year something feels different.

My understanding of love has grown. It feels bigger now. Less fragile. More steady in the messiness. Not running away when the conditions do not live up to the stories we’ve been trained to expect.

I can see the limitations of the constructs we’ve created around love, and how those constructs quietly limit the possibilities of life. Love becomes a narrow hallway when it was always meant to be a wide landscape.

And that’s what’s been on my mind: what would it look like to live as if love really is the operating system, even when life is complicated?

The movie opens and closes at an airport, where love is visible and unguarded, because people are arriving and leaving, and the heart does not bother pretending. We all recognize that kind of love. Most of us can access it.

The question I want to explore is simple, and not easy:

How do we expand that airport circle of love to our neighbors, and to people we don’t even know?

Hidden underpinnings of community

Some people treat Love Actually like a fluffy collection of romantic storylines.

I think it’s doing something bigger.

Yes, there’s romance. But the deeper pattern is proximity and overlap. The characters are connected in ways that are hard to follow at first, and that’s the point. We see crossovers at the wedding, at the funeral, on the movie set, in the office, at school, in neighborhoods, in rehearsals for the Christmas play.

It’s not random. It’s a portrait of how community actually works. Overlapping circles. Hidden threads. Shared environments where people keep bumping into each other, and love keeps having a chance to happen.

One of my simplest beliefs is this:

Without proximity, closeness is harder.

And proximity matters even more now because modern life is packed. Work, family, schedules, the endless logistics. Even taking a call or responding to a text takes energy we genuinely do not have. So when someone we love reaches out to share joy, grief, or a problem, we may not have the space to show up the way we want. Not because we don’t care, but because our lives are over scheduled and under connected.

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That’s why proximity is structural. Shared space lowers the friction. It creates natural moments to notice each other, to help each other, to be interrupted in the best way.

And we’ve all felt the flip side.

You leave a job where you invested most of your life with people you genuinely connected to, people who felt like a real community. Then poof. The job ends, the proximity ends, and the connections fade. Not because the care was not real, but because the shared structure that held the relationship in place disappeared.

Which leads to a line that feels almost obvious once you see it:

Structure creates proximity. Proximity creates the conditions for closeness. Therefore structure creates the conditions for love to actually happen.

When life gets heavy, love needs scaffolding

The film shows how connected we are when things are light.

Real life tests those connections when things are heavy.

One storyline that always lands for me is the widower who lost his wife to cancer. He’s trying to be strong for his son, but he admits something quietly devastating. He doesn’t really have anyone to talk to. So he reaches for the person who feels safe. Someone close enough to hold the truth without trying to fix it.

That hit home.

It reminded me of a conversation with Sue-Anne about how hard her grief has been since losing Tom. She asked me, “Why does it have to be so hard?”

And what came out of my mouth surprised even me: because we’re not in true community.

In old farm villages, when the community lost their beloved bread maker, everyone felt it. Everyone showed up. They grieved together. The sorrow was still real, but it wasn’t as lonely, and it didn’t have to be carried by one person’s nervous system.

It’s like using the scale of community and interdependent connection to weather the blow.

And maybe that’s one of the hidden messages in this film: love isn’t just a feeling. It’s a network. It’s what makes the unbearable bearable.

Love does not survive on intention alone. It needs structure. Interdependence. Ways we actually show up for each other when life gets hard. You cannot just pray community into existence. You have to build it.

How AMP actually changes you

One of the most important things about AMP sessions is this: the real insights often arrive after the session has had time to integrate. Sometimes it takes weeks. Sometimes years. That’s not a flaw. It’s the design.

So it’s not like you watch a movie, read a few statements, and suddenly you’re healed.

What happens is quieter and more real.

You start choosing differently because you can see more. You become less insular, not by magic, but by practice. Life is like learning to ride a bike. You wobble, you fall, you get back on. Over time you find your center faster and faster.

This work creates a different set point of focus. You still lose balance sometimes. You still fall sometimes. But you get back quicker each time. Not because you ascended into perfection, but because you trained a new reflex.

That’s why I return to this Love Actually session each year. It recalibrates me. It widens the hallway into that wide landscape again.

A small experiment: watch it as a love scavenger hunt

If you want to try this, here’s the experiment.

Do not watch Love Actually as a romance movie.

Watch it as a love scavenger hunt.

Look for love as care. Love as devotion. Love as repair. Love as truth. Love as letting go. Love as courage. Love as grief that still shows up.

Not all love in this film is clean. Not all of it is wise. That’s part of what makes it useful. It helps you separate love itself from the stories, the strategies, and the messy human ways we try to reach for it.

And see if you can discover something simple and revolutionary: the love operating system is all around. It’s not always dignified or newsworthy. But it’s there, running quietly underneath the noise.

If you feel yourself narrowing into Us vs Them anywhere in your life, this is a gentle counter practice: widen the circle again. Start with what’s close. Then let it ripple outward.

Step One: The Intention Session

If you’d like to experience the resonance of this Love Actually AMP session, begin with this simple Intention Session. It helps align your body, mind, and emotions so you receive the full benefit of the work.

You only need to do this once before you watch the film. If you’ve already completed an Intention Session, it carries over for all of the AMP movies I talk about, so you do not need to repeat it.

Speak these aloud:

• I allow the changes in my timing and only integrate what I am ready to.

• I have faith that I will receive the benefits I desire.

• I am patient with myself as I make my changes.

• I let go of feeling I am too busy to take the time for this.

• I let go of needing to understand how AMP works and allow myself to receive the full benefits in my own timing.

Engage three simple modalities:

• Nod your head yes.

• Drink some water.

• Take several slow, rhythmic breaths through your nose.

Then simply watch Love Actually all the way through. Do not force insights. Just notice what stirs. Notice where you feel close and where you want to pull away. Notice who feels like us and who still feels like them.

Let Go and Allow statements (from the AMP session)

Let Go

• I let go of comparing myself to other people and judging them as “real.”

• I stop judging myself and stop wondering if I’m doing it right.

• I let go of overthinking, because too much thinking ruins love.

• I let go of the old stories about what love is “supposed” to look like.

• I let go of needing love to be dramatic in order to be real.

Allow

• I allow love to be the operating system of my life, with many beautiful aspects.

• I allow myself to emulate what is good and loving.

• I allow myself to love no matter what others do, and still look at them with loving eyes.

• I allow love to pour in.

• I allow myself to remember how loved I am, and to feel love from people, animals, and nature.

A quiet teacher inside the film

One of the quiet teachers inside Love Actually is Joni Mitchell’s “Both Sides Now.” The film uses her later recording at the exact moment when love stops being a story and becomes a lived reality.

There’s a line in that song that keeps getting truer for me as I get older:

“I’ve looked at love from both sides now.”

And the more I think I know love, the more I realize how much I still have to learn.

That’s why I keep coming back to this AMP session. Not because it makes love simple. Because it makes love real. Ordinary. Sometimes messy. Not always dignified or newsworthy. But there, waiting to be practiced.

I’m still trying.

Because love is not only something we feel.
Love is something we build.
And if you look for it, you might find that love actually is all around.

This post is rooted in the original research and the belief statements and intentions I developed through our Alignment Movie Process (AMP). I collaborated with ChatGPT to help shape these ideas into a clear, everyday voice so they can be more easily shared and experienced. The resonance and insights are the heart of our work; the words here are one way to carry them into the world.

In my last post I wrote about sitting with my friend Rich as he died, and leaving Ford six months later, almost to the day. That whole season still feels like one of the clearest reminders that life is not a dress rehearsal.

I do not regret leaving Ford. It was the right move at the right time. The grief of leaving that chapter was long and slow. It took years to let go of that identity, but it felt like a clean ending.

I do regret what came next.

People often say they have no regrets. At funerals we play the song My Way and act as if a regret free life is a sign of strength and wisdom. I do not buy that. Honest regret is often the doorway into growth. It is the place where life finally gets our attention.

My regret is simple. I regret going to work for the symphony.

Not because I did not love the music, the musicians, or the supporters. I loved all of that. I loved attending more than three hundred concerts. I loved hearing the orchestra live in that hall. I loved touring Europe with the orchestra, twice, and watching audiences in other countries light up to the same music we played at home. I loved being featured on BBC television to talk about what we were building and why it mattered. I loved speaking to rooms full of executives and donors who were used to stock charts and quarterly results, and watching them light up as they understood how a symphony could be led with the same discipline and care.

On paper it was a perfect move. In reality it was the beginning of a period that nearly broke me.

This is where Edmond Dantès and The Count of Monte Cristo (TV Mini Series 1998) come in. It is this week’s Alignment Movie Process (AMP) session.

Why I am telling this story now?

Part of why I am willing to go this far into my own experience is that I care deeply about healing the great us versus them divide in our country and in the world. In the recent Mr Rogers post we spent time with the idea of self love. You are loved simply because you are here. That is the ground floor.

The problem is that self love alone is not enough if we are still secretly running a scorecard in our heads. If I am determined to get even with the people I see as them, the kindness of Mr Rogers can only go so far. I can quote him. I can admire him. I cannot really live what he taught.

That is why this Monte Cristo session comes next in the arc. Before we can come back to self love and neighbor love in any real way, we have to be willing to loosen our grip on payback. We have to look at the part of us that wants to get even and say, I understand you, and I am not going to let you run my life anymore.

I am sharing my own four walls and my own brush with revenge and identity loss because I do not think we can heal the us vs. them pattern in the abstract. It has to be embodied. It has to be personal. If my story helps even a few people release their own need to get even, then there is more room for the kind of love that Mr Rogers invited us into. That is worth the risk of being this honest.

Edmond at nineteen, me in midlife

In the 1998 French television mini series Le Comte de Monte Cristo with Gérard Depardieu, Edmond Dantès is only nineteen when his life is destroyed. He is falsely accused, thrown into prison, and left to rot for years. He trusts the wrong people, has no idea how much power they have, and never sees the betrayal coming.

When I look back at my own story with the symphony, I see an older version of the same archetype. I was not nineteen. I had corporate experience, success, and a real track record. Yet in some important ways, I was just as naïve as Edmond.

For most of my life I could win people over with genuine kindness, helpfulness, and being a team player. I loved connecting. I liked being the one who could pull different sides together. Deep down I believed that if I showed up that way, people would naturally look out for me in return.

That belief was my blind spot.

I did not fully understand that there are rooms where other agendas are quietly at work. I did not see that someone can appreciate your results and still not have your best interests at heart. I did not know what I did not know. When the turn finally came, it felt like being blindsided in a way my nervous system had never experienced.

I am not going to walk through all the external details here. That is not the point of this post. What matters for this story is what happened inside me after I left.

It felt like being sealed into four walls.

The four walls

If leaving Ford was a long goodbye, the end of my time at the symphony felt very different.

When I try to describe that time, what I see first is not a calendar or a résumé. I see four walls closing in.

Wall one: the silence

The first wall was silence.

There were stories in the air about why I left. Reporters called, and the official pieces simply noted that I was gone. The real damage came from the rumors that rushed in to fill the silence. I heard versions of my story that did not sound like me. Some people believed them. Others wondered. By the time I stepped away I was burned out, not sleeping well, and in no shape to sit down with everyone and talk it through. Phone calls I might have made, conversations I might have had with people who respected me, never happened.

I felt like Edmond in reverse. Instead of being publicly sentenced, it felt like I had been quietly erased.

Wall two: no clear next move

The second wall was vocational.

I did not want to move my family again. I did not want to go work for another orchestra. I had lost faith in the business model and knew I did not have it in me to pour my heart into trying to fix it somewhere else. Consulting did not appeal to me either. I could not imagine going from orchestra to orchestra repeating the same arguments in systems that did not really want to change.

Ford did not bring people back once they left, so there was no going home again. The corporate world looked at my path and I could almost hear the unspoken question. Why would you leave a secure career at Ford for an arts organization?

So I was in my forties with deep executive experience, a long list of accomplishments, and no clear next move that felt honest. It left me in a kind of professional no man’s land.

Wall three: the weight at home

The third wall was home.

I had been the sole financial provider for our family. Lura had intentionally set aside her own career to raise our kids and support my work as we moved for Ford. When the symphony ended, our children were nine and eleven. There was no quiet sabbatical. There was a mortgage, groceries, tuition, and the weight of very real uncertainty.

The stress at home was not abstract. It was felt. It showed up in conversations, in sleepless nights, and in the atmosphere of our house. Whatever I was going through, I was not going through it alone. Everyone was on that ride with me, whether they wanted to be or not.

Over the years since, I have had the chance to coach CEOs and senior leaders who have lost their roles or retired earlier than they expected. When we get honest, the pain of that third wall is almost always there. For many men, losing a job can feel like losing a life. Comedian Dave Chappelle put it bluntly:

“You take a man’s job, you’ve taken his life.”

Most of the men I have worked with do not hear that as a punchline. They hear it as biography.

Economic insecurity is not just about numbers on a spreadsheet. It is strongly associated with anxiety, physical pain, and a host of health issues. Losing your role can feel like losing your place in the world.

Wall four: the inner scar

The fourth wall was inside my own nervous system.

By the time I left, I was burned out, sleeping only a few hours a night and feeling fried.

It was not just being tired. It felt like my old life, my identity, and my reputation had all been taken out of my hands at once. My red cape, the one I had proudly hung up each night after work, was gone.

Today we know that trauma does not just live in our memories as stories. Long term trauma and chronic stress are associated with real changes in brain structures involved in memory, emotion, and self regulation. Researchers have seen altered activity and even reduced volume in regions such as the hippocampus, the amygdala, and the prefrontal cortex in people living with post traumatic stress.

In other words, trauma can behave like a kind of brain scar.

That is what those years felt like for me. A scar I could not see, but could definitely feel.

Those four walls were my own Château d’If. Not stone, but silence, no clear next move, the weight at home, and an inner scar that seemed to color everything.

The madness of getting even

This is where The Count of Monte Cristo started to move from just a story to an energetic map.

Edmond spends years in prison, obsessing over the injustice. When he finally escapes and discovers a vast fortune, he uses that wealth to wage a carefully crafted campaign of revenge. It is brilliant and satisfying on the surface. We cheer for him. We understand why he wants his tormentors to suffer.

Yet as the series unfolds, you can feel something else creeping in. A kind of madness.

Revenge does not give Edmond his life back. It does not restore the years in the cell, the youth he lost, or the love he once had. It keeps him bound to the very people and events that nearly destroyed him. His identity becomes fused with payback.

During the Northern Ireland peace process, Bill Clinton said that if people were going to get well, they might have to accept that they would never really get even. That line has stayed with me. It is exactly what Monte Cristo is about underneath all the sword fights and plot twists.

There is a scene in the film No Country for Old Men that points to the same truth in a quiet Texas way. Sheriff Bell visits his cousin Ellis, who has his own story of being shot and left partially disabled. Ellis listens and finally says:

“All the time you spend trying to get back what has been took from you, more is going out the door. You just have to try to get a tourniquet on it.”

That line really hits home.

Because that is exactly what my life felt like after the symphony. I was trying to get back what had been taken, my reputation, my name, my sense of who I was, while more and more of my energy was quietly bleeding out the side.

When I watch some of our most visible leaders today, I see this archetype in real time. People who are so consumed with settling scores, proving they were wronged, or punishing enemies that they slowly slide into a kind of grasping madness. The more they try to get even, the less at peace they seem in their own skin.

I recognize it because I could feel a quieter version of that impulse in myself.

Losing the red cape

For a long time, my heroic groove was simple. If I worked hard enough, led boldly enough, and helped enough people, I would be recognized and loved. I would be the guy who saved the day. The work with Ford had already fed that story. The symphony was supposed to be the next chapter.

When the red cape is ripped away, that story collapses.

In my conversations with men who have lost careers or retired, there is often an unspoken grief. No one wants to admit how much of their worth was tied to the business card, the title, or the ability to pick up the check. They do not want pity. They do not want to be told to just be grateful. They want someone to see how much it hurts to lose the thing that made them feel like they mattered.

If we are ever going to move toward a healthier partnership between the masculine and the feminine in our culture, we are going to have to talk honestly about the red cape. We are also going to have to find a way to hang it up without losing ourselves.

For me, that is where the Alignment Movie Process came in.

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How AMP put a tourniquet on the wound

I have shared elsewhere how AMP was born out of years of intense work with Sue Anne. We watched films, tracked patterns, and created resonance statements that allowed us to act as proxies for others who wanted the benefits without having to do all of the heavy lifting themselves.

In those early years after the symphony, AMP quietly saved me.

It gave me a way to sit with the four walls without trying to blow them up. It helped me name the patterns that were still running me, and slowly unwind them. It allowed me to keep my heart open, to stay connected to the people I loved, and to not disappear into bitterness.

The AMP session built around The Count of Monte Cristo is one of the anchors in that work for me.

Who this Monte Cristo session is for

If you are going through any of the following, this session is for you.

• You lost a job, a role, or a reputation and feel like a part of you is still locked in that moment.

• You have been betrayed or pushed out and you replay conversations in your head, imagining what you should have said or done.

• You feel that a group, a system, or a person took something from you that you can never get back.

• You feel a kind of background anger that never fully goes away, even when life looks fine on the surface.

• You notice that a lot of your energy is still tied up in proving that you were right and they were wrong.

This Count of Monte Cristo AMP session is not about pretending those things did not happen. It is about giving your nervous system a way to stop bleeding energy into the past so that healing and forgiveness can even become possible.

Why this particular series

People sometimes ask why I use this particular Count of Monte Cristo, the Gérard Depardieu television mini series from the late 1990s, and not the more popular film. The whole series is now easy to find online, even on Youtube, so it is not about rarity. Here it is:

The honest answer is that I did not go hunting for it. It arrived the way most AMP films arrive. It showed up at a very specific moment in my life, and when I watched it, I could feel in my body that this was the story that matched the pattern I was living. I did not choose it with my head. It chose me through timing and resonance.

What we are working with here is not a small pattern. We are asking your system to loosen its grip on betrayal, humiliation, and the instinct to get even. You have to want the healing. When you choose to watch all four episodes from beginning to end, you are already sending yourself a new message.

I am worth this effort.

I am ready to stop giving my life away to what happened back there.

That willingness becomes part of the resonance. The film does its work. The statements do their work. And the simple fact that you showed up for all of it tells a different story to the part of you that still feels locked in the cell.

How to experience this AMP session

For this session I use the 1998 television mini series Le Comte de Monte Cristo with Gérard Depardieu. It is four episodes, and the statements in this AMP session are based on the entire series. To get the full benefit, you really do need to watch all four.

Step one: the Intention Session

If you would like to experience the resonance of this AMP session, begin with this simple Intention Session. It helps align your body, mind, and emotions so you receive the full benefit of the work. You only need to do this once before you watch the film. If you have already completed an Intention Session, it carries over for all of the AMP movies I talk about, so you do not need to repeat it.

Speak these aloud:

• I allow the changes in my timing and only integrate what I am ready to.

• I have faith that I will receive the benefits I desire.

• I am patient with myself as I make my changes.

• I let go of feeling I am too busy to take the time for this.

• I let go of needing to understand how AMP works and allow myself to receive the full benefits in my own timing.

Engage three simple modalities:

• Nod your head yes.

• Drink some water.

• Take several slow, rhythmic breaths through your nose.

Then simply watch The Count of Monte Cristo all the way through. Do not force insights. Just notice what stirs. Notice where you feel close and where you want to pull away. Notice who feels like us and who still feels like them.

Step two: Let Go

These Let Go statements are designed to relax the grip of revenge, resentment, and financial fear.

• I release my doubts and can now see riches beyond what I can comprehend.

• I no longer give any energy to the anger that has stayed with me all these years.

• I no longer allow my hatred and desire for revenge to control this life and future ones.

• I no longer pass revenge onto my ancestors and let it end with me through love and peace.

• It is safe for me to see my hidden issues around money now.

Say them quietly or out loud and notice what your body does. There is no need to push. Even a small softening is a big shift.

Step three: Allow

These Allow statements invite in the qualities that make forgiveness and new life possible.

• I remember the incredible gift of being alive.

• My value is beyond my comprehension.

• I ask for guidance and receive it every time, I am never abandoned.

• I have faith despite all.

• I forgive all and find peace.

Again, notice what happens as you speak them. You do not have to believe them fully yet. You are simply giving your nervous system a chance to try on a different way of being for a few breaths.

For now, I believe releasing the need to get even is the essential first step. It does not excuse what happened. It does not pretend there was no harm. It simply acknowledges that if I keep chasing payback, I will bleed out my life force while more goes out the door.

Forgiveness work, in my experience, comes next. It deserves its own AMP sessions, which I will talk about in a future post. For now, this Count of Monte Cristo session is about getting the tourniquet on. It is about stopping the emotional bleeding long enough for real healing to begin.

From regret to gratitude

I said at the beginning that I regret going to the symphony. That is true. It took a toll on me, on my family, and on my feelings about that whole chapter of my life that I am still unwinding.

It is also true that the symphony experience gave me the insights and desire to discover the Alignment Movie Process so I could heal and help others. Just because I regret the move does not mean it was not the perfect thing to crack me open for this mission.

Over time, my affection for the players, the music, and what that work represents slowly returned. Today, when I hear a recording of Rachmaninoff’s Second Piano Concerto from that era, with the compact disc cover I helped design, I feel something very simple.

I feel happy. I feel grateful that I had the chance to contribute to that chapter of orchestral music. I feel grateful that I got well enough inside to hear that recording without bitterness.

My hope is that this AMP session helps you get your own tourniquet on whatever old wound is still bleeding. You may never get even in the way your anger would prefer. You can still get well.

And that, in the end, is the only kind of justice that actually lets us live.

This post is rooted in the original research and the belief statements and intentions I developed through our Alignment Movie Process (AMP). I collaborated with ChatGPT to help shape these ideas into a clear, everyday voice so they can be more easily shared and experienced. The resonance and insights are the heart of our work; the words here are one way to carry them into the world.

There are moments in life when intimacy finds us before we feel ready.

My first uncomfortable lesson in intimacy was with Rich, a co-worker when I was in sales and marketing at Ford. I was 29, a newly minted manager. Rich was 10 years older, more experienced, and we had the kind of relationship that swung between brotherly and infuriating. Our regional manager Bill affectionately called us Lenny and Squiggy and loved throwing us onstage together.

One day in San Antonio, we were about to present to top Ford executives and 25 of our biggest dealers. We’d done these meetings before. This was our chance to shine.

Thirty minutes before we were supposed to start, my phone rang.

“Dave, get over here to my room. Now.”

I was already in my suit, slides ready, mind in game-mode.

“Rich, what are you doing? We go on in half an hour.”

“Just get over here.”

When I walked into his room, Rich was half dressed. Shirt open. Tie in his hand. He looked… stuck.

“Help me get dressed,” he said.

I froze.

Everything in me wanted to bolt. This felt too personal, too exposed, too intimate. Helping another man button his shirt and knot his tie? I had no framework for that. No training. No language.

But there we were. The clock ticking. No one else around.

So I stepped closer.

I buttoned his shirt.

I tied his tie.

On the outside, I was efficient. On the inside, I was deeply uncomfortable. Something in me knew this moment wasn’t really about clothing. It was about letting myself be that close to another human being when part of me only knew how to relate at a safer distance – through work, banter, teasing, performance.

I didn’t know it then, but that moment was the first small crack in the shell I’d built around my heart.

That night turned into an all-nighter at a San Antonio hospital.

Rich had been having trouble using his arms. None of us understood why. In the strange fluorescent glow of that hospital, we finally got the answer: the cancer had spread to his brain. That’s why he couldn’t button his shirt. That’s why his body wasn’t cooperating.

It fell to me to call his wife and tell her.

I can still hear the sound of her wailing on the phone as the news landed. There are no “manager skills” for that moment. No toolkits. No bullet points. Just the raw, unbearable intimacy of being the one who carries shattering news into someone’s life.

It was far too intimate for the version of me that still thought he could manage everything from a safe emotional distance.

Later, as his illness progressed and it became clear he was dying, Rich asked me to be with him when he died.

Every instinct I had wanted to say no. I didn’t feel equipped. I didn’t know how to “do it right.” I wanted to avoid the rawness of that room, the sounds, the smells, the reality that my friend was leaving.

Lura, in her wise way, said simply,

“David… you can’t pass when a friend asks you to be there when he dies. You need to go.”

So I went.

I sat with him. I watched his body do what bodies do at the end. I heard the breathing shift. I felt the strangeness of being in a room where life and death were both fully present. I put my hand on his chest and soothed him.

And something in me opened.

Not with fireworks or angels or perfect words. Just a quiet, trembling willingness to stay instead of run.

Six months later, almost to the date, I left The Ford Motor Company.

Looking back, I can see that these three moments with Rich: the shirt and tie in San Antonio, the all-nighter in the hospital, and the bedside at the end, were my first real teachers of intimacy:

• letting myself be close when I’d rather be competent

• staying present when my nervous system wanted out

• allowing another man’s vulnerability to touch my own

What We (Especially Men) Miss About Intimacy

Most of us were not raised with a lot of skill in this area.

As boys, we feel everything. We cry. We get overwhelmed. We’re sensitive and whiney and dramatic. And somewhere along the way many of us are told, directly or indirectly:

Toughen up.

Don’t be so sensitive.

Anger is okay. The rest? Not so much.

So we shut down whole regions of our emotional GPS.

We keep anger. That one’s “manly” and useful in business and sports. You can bang on a table in a meeting and people call you decisive. You can yell at a TV and that’s normal Sunday behavior.

But grief? Fear? Tenderness? Longing?

We quietly vote those off the island.

The problem is: when anger is the only tool in your toolbox, everything starts to look like a nail. We try to run companies, marriages, friendships, and even our own inner lives with a hammer.

It doesn’t work. It creates imbalances. And we don’t even know what we’re missing.

We soothe the ache with work, achievement, hobbies, scrolling, substances, over-functioning, or isolation. We say yes to more projects and no to the very intimacy we’re starving for.

In my AMP work, I don’t go hunting for “the right film” to fix a pattern. It’s more like the films hunt for me. When a particular pattern is swirling, when my reactivity is up, the same conflict keeps looping, and my awareness quietly says, “Let’s move this”, a movie will land in my life with that exact resonance.

That’s how this next one arrived.

Learning Intimacy from a Wild Horse

The AMP film is The Mustang, a quiet, powerful 2019 movie written and directed by Laure de Clermont-Tonnerre and developed through the Sundance Institute, with Robert Redford as one of its executive producers.

It’s based on real prison programs in Nevada where inmates are paired with wild horses and given twelve weeks to gentle them so they can be adopted. In the film, Roman (played by Matthias Schoenaerts) is an inmate serving time for a violent crime. He is angry, shut down, and convinced he’s “not good with people.”

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Because he’s so difficult, the prison assigns him to shovel manure in the mustang program. That’s how he meets a horse who has been labeled “untrainable” — a fierce, terrified animal who crashes against the walls of his pen and wants nothing to do with humans.

From the first moment, the parallel is obvious:

• Roman and the horse are both caged.

• Both have been violent.

• Both have learned that other beings are a threat.

When things get too intense, Roman does what many of us do in relationships:

• He pushes away any real connection.

• He tries to control or dominate what he doesn’t understand.

• When he feels vulnerable or exposed, he explodes.

There is a brutal scene where his frustration boils over and he attacks the horse in a fit of rage. It’s hard to watch and painfully familiar. It’s that inner voice that says:

“I would rather destroy this than feel how powerless and exposed I am.”

The horse, for his part, behaves exactly like a traumatized nervous system:

• He refuses closeness.

• He bolts, kicks, and tests every boundary.

• He doesn’t believe safety is possible.

No words. No story. Just pure, embodied

“I don’t trust you.”

As Roman slowly learns to regulate himself around the horse, to soften his shoulders, breathe, wait, listen - something shifts. The horse calms. And so does he. Their relationship becomes a mirror for Roman’s own healing:

• He becomes less explosive.

• He starts to let himself care.

• He tentatively re-engages with his pregnant daughter.

By the end, he is still a flawed man in prison, but he is different: calmer, more reflective, more able to stay present when things get real.

Because this story is told through a man and a horse, instead of a romantic couple, it’s easier to see the pattern without getting tangled in our usual “who’s right / who’s wrong” scripts.

We just watch two scared beings, both wired for freedom and both terrified of closeness, slowly learn how to stand together without bolting.

That’s why I built an Alignment Movie Process (AMP) session around The Mustang. It’s one of the clearest mirrors I’ve ever found for how intimacy actually works in the body, especially for those of us who would secretly rather isolate than risk being hurt again.

How the AMP Session Holds This Pattern

In the Mustang AMP, many of the statements come from the book Attached: The New Science of Adult Attachment and How It Can Help You Find—and Keep—Love by Amir Levine and Rachel Heller.

That book describes three main attachment styles in adult relationships — anxious, avoidant, and secure, and how they play out in everyday life.

In the session, we name patterns like:

• “When I feel closeness and intimacy increasing in relationships I push people away.”

• “I grasp for closeness when I feel threatened in my relationship.”

• “I avoid my partner when things get too close.”

These are Roman’s patterns. They’re also mine. Maybe they’re yours.

Later in the AMP, we widen the lens with material inspired by Jack Kornfield’s After the Ecstasy, the Laundry and Carin Block’s Creating Order in the Family System, reminding us that intimacy doesn’t live only in romance. It lives in family karma, old wounds, and the people who knew us before we had spiritual language for any of this.

That’s the space where my story with Rich belongs.

That’s the space where your stories live too.

Five “Allow” Statements from The Mustang AMP

These are Allow statements directly from the Mustang session. You can read them slowly, maybe even out loud, and let your nervous system feel what they point toward:

• I allow myself to retreat to my inner sanctuary, a space of light inside of my heart, and I discover a deep sense of peace.

• I allow myself to explore and find freedom from the constraints of my own community.

• I allow myself to travel and discover the multiplicity of life and all of its powers.

• I allow my desires, especially sexual, to flourish.

• I allow Horse energy to gift me with the power and endurance needed at this time.

You might notice: none of these are about perfection. They’re about opening to movement, desire, and inner refuge — all ingredients of real intimacy.

Five “Let Go” Statements from The Mustang AMP

These Let Go statements sit alongside the Allow list in the session. They help loosen the old armor:

1. I let go of any addictions I have to my partner.

2. I let go of any chronically activated attachment system with my partner and find peace of mind.

3. I let go of my jealousy about my partner and another person having sex with him or her.

4. I let go of my abandonment issues.

5. I let go of all that is superficial in my life and reconnect to my true nature.

If one or two of these land with a little “thud” inside you, that’s okay. You don’t have to force anything. Just notice. Your system is already doing something with them.

Experience the AMP Session The Mustang Yourself

If you would like to experience the resonance of this AMP session, you can begin with this simple Intention Session. It helps align your body, mind, and emotions so you receive the full benefit of the resonance. You only need to do this once before you watch the film. If you have already completed an Intention Session, it carries over for all of the AMP movies I talk about, so you do not need to repeat it.

Step 1: Speak these aloud

• I allow the changes in my timing and only integrate what I am ready to.

• I have faith that I will receive the benefits I desire.

• I am patient with myself as I make my changes.

• I let go of feeling I am too busy to take the time for this.

• I let go of needing to understand how AMP works and allow myself to receive the full benefits in my own timing.

Step 2: Engage three simple modalities

• Nod your head yes.

• Drink some water.

• Take several slow, rhythmic breaths through your nose.

Then simply watch The Mustang all the way through. Do not force insights. Just notice what stirs. Notice where you feel close and where you want to pull away. Notice who feels like us and who still feels like them.

Trust that the resonance will do its work gently, in your own timing, with grace and ease.

A Quiet Gift from Robert Redford

There’s one more layer I want to acknowledge.

The Mustang was executive produced by Robert Redford, who helped shepherd it through the Sundance ecosystem as part of his lifelong commitment to independent film and stories with emotional weight.

Redford died this year at 89, at his home in Utah.

If you ever watched him on screen or listened to people talk about him, you may have felt what I did: an open-hearted steadiness, a kind of peaceful presence underneath the charisma. Tributes remember not just his iconic roles and awards, but his generosity, activism, and his creation of the Sundance Institute as a home for independent voices.

Knowing that he stood behind this quiet, intimate film, a story about freedom, responsibility, and the rough grace of second chances - gives it an extra layer of meaning for me. It feels like one small thread in the tapestry of the kind of cinema he spent his life nurturing.

If Intimacy Makes You Want to Run

If you’re reading this and part of you wants to bolt…

If your version of Roman is the part that says,

“I’m just not good with people”…

If your Rich moment is still ahead of you: a phone call, a bedside, a request you don’t feel ready for…

Then this post is for you.

You are not behind.

You didn’t miss the class on intimacy.

Your nervous system has simply been doing its best to protect you.

Movies like The Mustang, stories like Rich’s, and practices like these Allow and Let Go statements are not here to judge you.

They’re here to walk with you, one small step closer to the kind of intimacy that doesn’t demand perfection - only presence.

If this helps even one person feel a little less alone in the tender, too-close places… that’s enough for me.

In the end, it really is one-to-one that changes things, isn’t it?

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This post is rooted in the original research and the belief statements and intentions I developed through our Alignment Movie Process (AMP). I collaborated with ChatGPT to help shape these ideas into a clear, everyday voice so they can be more easily shared and experienced. The resonance and insights are the heart of our work; the words here are one way to carry them into the world.

In the last few pieces we have been following a thread through the Iron Tree, Belfast, and the painful spell of us versus them. We looked at how Extractionocracy runs on that spell and how easy it is to stay locked in the fight. We also turned inward with Mister Rogers and asked a harder question. Before we can heal us versus them in the world, can we grow a quiet kind of love and steadiness inside ourselves.

This time I want to widen the aperture again. Instead of one neighborhood or one childhood living room, we are going to look at the whole human family.

The film Human (2015) does something very simple that we are not used to. It invites people from more than sixty countries to sit in front of a camera and answer the same basic questions about love, work, fear, joy, poverty, war, and meaning. No graphics. No soundtrack trying to tell you what to feel. Just human beings, one after another, looking straight into the lens.

This matters for the us vs. them work we have been doing. In an Extractionocracy world it is easy to believe that they are fundamentally different from us. Different countries, different politics, different religions, different income brackets. As you take in Human, that story slowly starts to fall apart. You begin to see that them is us in different circumstances. The same grief and love. The same hunger for safety and belonging. The same questions about why we are here, all of it playing out on the same beautiful blue planet we share.

Why This Might Be Worth Your Time

If you are already exhausted by outrage and still find yourself pulled into us versus them, this AMP session is for you. It is not about winning a debate. It is about changing what your nervous system does when you look at another human being.

As you take in Human with this AMP frame, you may notice a few quiet shifts.

You may feel a little less hatred toward people you have been taught to fear or despise.

• You may find it easier to stay present to hard stories without going numb.

• You may catch yourself seeing strangers, neighbors, and even opponents as part of the same human family.

• You may feel a steadier compassion that keeps your boundaries and loosens constant judgment.

None of this happens all at once. This is practice. But for many people, even the first honest encounter with a film like Human can soften the us versus them reflex in a way that is hard to forget.

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Extractionocracy and the Price Tag on Every Life

In Extractionocracy the first question about any human being is not “Who are you” but “What are you worth.” Every person becomes a line on a spreadsheet, a potential boost or drag on growth. If you can help keep the growth line moving up, you are seen as useful. If you cannot, or you cannot keep up with the growth rate that markets demand, you are treated as a cost. When growth becomes uncertain or profits dip, the first lever is often to cut jobs. Overnight, thousands of human lives are upended, not because the work no longer matters, but because removing those humans sends a comforting signal to markets or makes a merger look cleaner on paper.

Human quietly reminds us that before any of that, there is a person.

Across three hours, Human moves through love, work, poverty, war, forgiveness, sexuality, family, education, corruption, and the search for meaning. People from more than sixty countries look into the camera and answer the same questions. Face by face, voice by voice, you start to realize how universal our longings are. We may be separated by language, politics, and income, but the human questions are the same.

Remembering What We All Deserve

Over the years of living with Human, the next steps of this AMP session kept revealing themselves. First came the film itself, then the research, then the long process of writing and refining the statements, and the hardest part of all, letting the resonance work on me. I never knew where it was going next, but I always recognized the next step when it arrived. Again and again I returned to one simple truth. Every human being deserves dignity and safety.

At one point in this session we work with belief statements drawn from the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. We turned parts of the UDHR into resonant statements so they are not just ideas on a page, but something your body and heart can respond to. These sentences were written as aspirations for the human family. The more we let them land in our bodies, the less they feel like distant ideals and the more they begin to feel self evident.

This is why I include the UDHR in the session. I want myself and others to resonate with these aspirations again. Every time one more person lets these words feel true, it creates a small social ripple. Over time those ripples add up. The idea that every human life has equal dignity stops being an abstract principle and starts to feel like the most natural thing in the world, especially when we remember we are all sharing the same blue planet.

Recipocracy, the future I keep trying to point to, would have to start from something much simpler and much more radical. The idea that every human life carries the same dignity. No exceptions.

This AMP session is not about memorizing articles from a United Nations document. Although I encourage you read them. It is about letting those words wake up something that is already inside you. A quiet knowing that all humans are worthy of love, and that your thoughts, words, and actions can either support that truth or work against it.

Intimacy as a Skill We Have to Relearn

What struck me most watching Human again is how intimate it feels.

Each story brings you close to a person you have never met. You see every line in their face. You hear the catch in their voice. There is no character arc to distract you, no laugh track to soften the moment. There is just a human being and a camera. We are not used to that kind of closeness.

In a culture trained on speed and judgment, getting that close to other humans can feel uncomfortable. You might notice yourself wanting to look away. You might feel a strange mix of tenderness and defensiveness. Part of you may want to reach out and another part may want to protect itself.

I have come to believe that closeness is a skill we have to relearn. How do we get to loving people if we are not comfortable being close and honest and a little vulnerable with them, especially when their pain or difference feels like too much.

This is one of the reasons I keep building AMP sessions like this one. They give us a safe way to practice being with other humans, to let their stories touch us without collapsing or shutting down. Over time, that practice starts to soften the us versus them reflex and make intimacy feel a little less threatening.

In a future AMP session I want to go even closer to this question of intimacy and our fear of being close to one another. I will share more of my own experience with learning to be close, and the challenges I still feel today. For now, Human is the practice field. It gives us three hours of honest, vulnerable faces to sit with while we notice what happens in our own hearts.

Let Go

These Let Go statements clear some of the patterns that keep us locked in distance and othering. These and many others are included in this AMP session. You can speak them quietly or aloud and simply notice what stirs.

• I let go of my habit of closing people out as the other when I do not understand them.

• I let go of using my own suffering as a reason to shut down my heart.

• I let go of the belief that my life is separate from the rest of humanity.

• I let go of the urge to turn away when I see pain in others.

Even a small softening in your chest or your breath is meaningful. This is not about forcing anything. It is about giving yourself permission to loosen the grip of old habits.

Allow

These Allow statements invite in the qualities that Human and this AMP session are designed to strengthen.

• I allow the compassion that is already within me to awaken more fully.

• I allow my heart to widen so that I can feel my connection to all of humanity.

• I allow my own pain to become a bridge to understanding the pain of others.

• I allow my thoughts, words, and actions to contribute in some way to more happiness and freedom for all beings.

This is not pretending that everything is fine. It is a quiet choice to let your nervous system experience a different way of relating, even for a moment. That is how new wiring begins.

Experience the AMP Session Human Yourself

If you would like to experience the resonance of this AMP session, you can begin with this simple Intention Session. It helps align your body, mind, and emotions so you receive the full benefit of the resonance. You only need to do this once before you watch the film. If you have already completed an Intention Session, it carries over for all of the AMP movies I talk about, so you do not need to repeat it.

Step 1: Speak these aloud

• I allow the changes in my timing and only integrate what I am ready to.

• I have faith that I will receive the benefits I desire.

• I am patient with myself as I make my changes.

• I let go of feeling I am too busy to take the time for this.

• I let go of needing to understand how AMP works and allow myself to receive the full benefits in my own timing.

Step 2: Engage three simple modalities

• Nod your head yes.

• Drink some water.

• Take several slow, rhythmic breaths through your nose.

Then simply watch Human all the way through. Do not force insights. Just notice what stirs. Notice where you feel close and where you want to pull away. Notice who feels like us and who still feels like them.

Trust that the resonance will do its work gently, in your own timing, with grace and ease.

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Why This Film Still Moves Me

I have created more than eight hundred AMP sessions. I have watched a lot of films with a lot of depth. I do not know another movie like Human. It teaches this wisdom with a quiet grace and beauty.

I still remember Leonard, the first interview the film opens with. As he spoke, I began to weep. I did not experience him as a stranger to be judged. I felt like I was listening to a brother who had made a terrible mistake and was still a human being. In that moment I did not find myself wanting to be against him. I wanted to be for what was still alive and good in him. The compassion I felt was not an intellectual decision. It moved through me as a physical response.

I know I am not alone in this next part. For many people it can feel easier to open their hearts to someone from another country than to a fellow citizen who voted in a way they dislike. It feels safer to practice compassion at a distance. I have felt some of that in the past too, especially before the pandemic pushed me to get to know my own neighbors more intentionally. Now I feel much closer to the people on my street, even when we do not see the world the same way. That is part of why Human feels so important to me. It gets us outside of our usual fight and back into the heart of being human, so that bringing that kind of seeing home to our own country and communities becomes more possible.

That is the kind of shift this film can invite when we let it in. It does not excuse harm. It simply refuses to let us forget the humanity of the person who caused it. This is the kind of social contagion I believe we need. Not more outrage, but more people who have actually felt that them is us in different circumstances.

If all this session does is leave you a little less certain about who they are and a little more aware that you are part of a much larger human family, that is already a meaningful shift.

My hope is that this AMP session helps that realization spread. Quietly. One nervous system at a time. One human at a time. Until the words of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights are not something we yearn for out there, but something we recognize in here as already true.

When enough of us begin to feel that way, unwinding us versus them stops being an idea and starts to become a lived possibility.

This post is rooted in the original research and the belief statements and intentions I developed through our Alignment Movie Process (AMP). I collaborated with ChatGPT to help shape these ideas into a clear, everyday voice so they can be more easily shared and experienced. The resonance and insights are the heart of our work; the words here are one way to carry them into the world.