My top 20 points:

1. We are all bound by our habits to an astonishing degree. Research suggests that up to 95% of our daily activities (routines like driving and eating but also harmful behaviors like overeating, complaining, worrying, judging, blaming etc.) are simply habits driven by the subconscious and based on past experiences. We are only conscious for 5% of the time.

2. This is why it’s so hard to change. The conscious mind may be in the present but the subconscious body-mind is living in the past

3. In order to change you must access the subconscious mind where all your unwanted habits and behaviors reside to make the real and permanent changes.

4. To access that you must stop the sensory overload, the continuous flow of information, that keeps the brain distracted especially the pre frontal cortex that is in charge of conscious thought like planning and analyzing.

5. In daily life we are bound by the Big 3- our body, our environment and our time. The moments when you transcend the Big 3 are when you are in “flow”.

6. Your environment influences your mind so that your habitat becomes your habit. Nerve cells that wire together fire together and it becomes easier to repeat behaviors.

7. You feel the way you think and eventually start thinking the way you feel and the body starts controlling the mind and you run on automatic.

8. When you meditate you:
   • stop being controlled by the Big 3,
   • go from being a doer to being a thinker/observer,
   • move beyond your analytical mind as awareness exists outside of analysis,
   • reassert control over your life that has so far been driven by the subconscious mind,
   • go from cause and effect (waiting for something outside of you to change something inside you) to causing effect (changing something inside you to produce an effect outside you) and
   • You go from thinking to being (without doing i.e. taking any physical action)

9. We have an ability to change the mind and body through thought alone.

10. If you want a new outcome, you have to break the habit of being yourself and reinvent a new self. The gift of neuroplasticity (the brain’s ability to rewire) is that we can create a new mind.

11. When you think about an experience, you create the same emotions in your body and brain as though if the event was occurring all over again.

12. Our personality traits then are based on our past emotions. Most of the time, personality is anchored in the past. So, to change our personalities we have to change the emotion that we memorize. We have to move out of the past.

13. We are always living in survival mode, focusing on the Big 3 & grow to be “materialists”, consumed by thoughts in the external environment. Hence, we ignore 99.99999% of reality.

14. Whatever we place our awareness on is our reality.

15. Over time, your feeling becomes a mood becomes a temperament becomes a personality trait.

16. You are a master when no person, no thing and no experience can disrupt you internally. You have progressed from knowledge to experience to wisdom.

17. Closing the gap between who we are and who we present to the world is the greatest challenge we all face in life.

18. To break the habit of being yourself, select one trait and focus on changing that.

19. By the time we’re in our mid-30s, our identity or personality will be completely formed. For those over 35, we have memorized a select set of behaviors, attitudes, beliefs, emotional reactions, habits, skills, associative memories, conditioned responses, and perceptions that are now subconsciously programmed within us. Those programs are running us.

20. We are addicted to the problems and conditions of our lives that produce stress. No matter whether we’re in a bad job or a bad relationship, we hold our troubles close to us because they help reinforce who we are as a somebody.