Resonance – Episode 7
Verbatim Transcript
Speaker: Viktoria Levenberg
I thought it was normal to constantly be switched on, like I would overanalyse everything that happened during the day. I would fantasize about every single thing that could go wrong so that I was prepared for the worst-case scenario.
You are not your mind. You are not your thoughts. I told you this one was gonna get weird.
Alright, you definitely wanna stay with me for this episode. We dive all the way into awareness and your monkey brain—that inner roommate—and we talk about how you can start to cultivate awareness in your life so that you stop being controlled by your thoughts.
This is a real beautiful episode. It might stretch you outside of your comfort zone, so put your open-minded hat on and let's dive in.
Welcome to Resonance, a podcast for ambitious, heart-led humans craving more balance, depth, and aliveness in their lives. I'm your host, Vik—health coach, yoga teacher, facilitator, and fellow high achiever learning to live in tune with my nervous system, not against it.
And this space is here to remind you that you can have it all—the career, the success, the fulfilment—all aligned with your truth. Through honest conversations, expert insights, and practical tools, we'll explore how to work with your body, mind, emotions, and spirit, not against them.
And the best part—you don't have to stay stuck in survival mode to get there. Because true well-being is not about being perfect. It's about being in resonance. Let's dive in.
Welcome, welcome. Today we are going to explore something that's really near and dear to my heart, and I felt it was quite important to bring this in quite early on into Resonance, so that you can have an understanding of what I'm referring to when I kind of throw around words like awakening or waking up or awareness.
And that's effectively what it comes down to, is the word awareness. If you've worked with me before, you will likely often hear me say like, yes, awareness is the first step. Because as soon as we have awareness, there is a choice. And from that choice, we then move consciously through our life rather than just letting our monkey brain unconsciously run the show for us.
Alright, so what am I referring to exactly? Well, what are you thinking about right now? Like, you're listening to this podcast, cool, um, I highly doubt that your attention is solely on my voice. Perhaps you even dozed off for a moment and were like, okay, um, I've got to make sure I fold the laundry and then oh, we gotta get this on the grocery—yep, I'm gonna put that on the grocery list, and then damn it, I forgot to reply to that email. And we've got the tradie coming in tomorrow, I need to make sure I tell my partner that the tradie's coming tomorrow. Yeah, tradie's coming tomorrow, tradie.
Does that sound familiar? Hahaha. Because that's like a snippet of what goes on in my brain too, and in every other person's brain. I mean, I don't know, I can only speak from my lived experience, but based on what I have heard—especially if you are a high achiever—you're in the right place.
There is nothing wrong with you. This is completely normal. And today I'm going to challenge your thinking a little bit. So today's episode may be a little bit left field, like it may stretch you outside of your comfort zone. You may feel a little bit uncomfortable with some of the concepts and the topics that I dive into.
And so as always, the invitation here is simply to take what resonates and leave what doesn't, right? This is the whole ethos behind Resonance. It's just exploring what's there, taking what resonates, leaving what doesn't.
Okay. So what if I told you that you are not your mind? You are not your thoughts.
Well, of course I'm not my mind and my thoughts, I am Vik, and I am a health coach, and I do this, and I do that, and I'm from this country. Hmm. No, no. No. Rewind. You're also not just your name. You're also not just where you're from or what you do. You are also not just your physical body.
I told you this one was gonna get weird. Hahaha. Okay, so what am I saying? I'm saying that we live up here in the mind. We, like—even now, I mean if you're driving, don't do this, but if you can and it's safe, I would just love to invite you to gently close down through the eyes and just notice where you perceive yourself from.
Like most likely, ten out of ten, that you perceive yourself from the headspace, right? Like where the eyes are, the brain—kind of this little thinking machine that is a meaning-making machine of ours. And then, what if I asked you to bring your awareness all the way down to the tips of your toes.
Right, could you also feel your toes? And then perhaps what if you brought your awareness into your heart space, and just tuned into what life is like from your heart. And this might be a little bit much, I know I'm diving in quite quickly, so if this is a little bit uncomfortable, you know, just only do as much as feels right.
But it's likely that there's some kind of emotion in the heart. You see, the heart doesn't speak in thought as the mind. The heart speaks in emotion and feeling. And then maybe what if you dropped down your awareness into your belly, into your gut. You see, the gut also speaks to us. You may have heard of this idea of the gut feeling.
What's your gut saying right now? Maybe it's saying that it's hungry, or that it regrets whatever you overindulged in last night. No judgment. I indulged last night. I loved it. It was delightful.
Okay, you can open your eyes if you had them closed now. This is just a little exercise to start to stimulate your thinking—yes, we're back into the thinking mind, because that's what helps us contextualize things—and just yeah, really start to get you thinking about the fact that there can be other points of view of your lived experience in this life.
And why does that matter when it comes to awareness? Okay. You see, most of us in this day and age move through our life pretty much unconsciously. And we don't realize it, because we are just listening to whatever that chitter-chatter of the mind is talking about, right? So it's just going on and on.
And I love how Eckhart Tolle puts it. He calls it the Inner Roommate in his book The Power of Now, which I'll make sure to link up in the show notes. It was, um, yeah, quite an eye-opener for me. So highly recommend it.
And so your brain, your mind, is like this inner roommate. So it's living in your headspace rent free. And most of the time, we're not paying attention to what it's saying, and it just never stops. And it just goes on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on, right?
I'm sure many of you have had this experience. And where the difference is between consciously and unconsciously living is knowing the difference between you and the chitter-chatter of the mind. You are not your thoughts. You are not whatever that inner roommate is saying.
And as soon as you start to distance yourself from that noise, from that conversation, you start to realize that there is more to you. There is more of you. You realize that you are awareness itself.
You are aware of the thought. You are not the thought. You are aware that you are thinking about being stressed. You are not stress itself.
So why awareness? Why? What does it matter, right? Like cool, I know, yeah, sure, I know I should be eating better. I have awareness of that. I'm not doing anything about it. Okay. And yet, it's a starting point.
And as you explore that awareness, you dig a little bit deeper. You start to ask yourself questions. You are not your thoughts. You are not that voice in your head that is constantly commenting, planning, judging, analysing the past, or projecting into the future.
And unfortunately, most of us get stuck in that way of being, in that way of thinking. Most of us identify with the mind. And I have been there. I have been way deep down in Monkey Mind Central, okay? I was like the vice president of Monkey Town. And I thought it was normal.
I thought it was normal to constantly be switched on. Like I would overanalyse everything that happened during the day. Like I would stay up at night just thinking about what was going on. And I thought this was a skill of mine. Like I thought, I used to think this was a strength of mine.
Um, whenever anything kind of important was coming up, or I was feeling nervous about something, I would fantasize about every single thing that could go wrong so that I was prepared for the worst-case scenario. And I genuinely—I kid you not—I thought that was like a superpower of mine.
Because then it means that I would never be disappointed, and I would be well protected, because well, I've already lived through the worst-case scenario. So nothing can happen, right? Oh, cute. So naïve.
Yeah, I used to be so in the monkey mind. And look, most of us are. And I love using the little metaphor of back when I just first got into yoga. Um, this is so sad because I loved yoga as a—like as a kid, as an adolescent—and I really always felt drawn to the practice. And I just wouldn't give myself permission to do it, because it felt too indulgent.
Like, look, I know right now I may seem like I have come a long way, which I have, but only a few years ago, like self-care was non-existent in my vocabulary. I was the meanest person to myself that you can imagine.
The things I used to say—like, well, not I, but the thing my mind used to say to me—I just, oh my gosh, you would like… it's like Class A abuse, you know? And it's just so, so sad to notice that most of us are living in this way. And we live in the illusion of being controlled by our thoughts.
And this is the perfect example here. So I'm gonna bring it back to that yoga class, right? Like a few years ago, when I kind of started to get back into yoga, or like go to any workout classes, whatever. I used to be really self-conscious, and I would think that like, oh my God, everyone's looking at me. People are thinking I was like, oh shit, I messed this up, oh no I'm off beat, I'm out of tempo, I did this wrong, my goodness, oh no, now I'm not keeping up, now the teacher thinks I'm a loser, and now this person's probably thinking that I'm like incompetent, and oh no, I bet you that my outfit looks like crap, and they think that blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah, right?
All in here, in the mind. And I can guarantee you that at least eight out of ten people in that room are having some kind of similar experience.
And so if we are all stuck in our monkey mind, projecting onto others what we think they're thinking about us, like none of us are actually present to experience and witness what's happening in the moment, outside of the stories that we tell ourselves.
And this is why I always come back to the fact that awareness is key. Because as soon as you are aware of the difference between the chitter-chatter of the mind—which I'm just gonna kind of be upfront with you and say that that's not going away. You can be the most Zen Buddhist meditation master in the history of the world, you are still going to witness the monkey mind.
And I love, love, love how Emily Fletcher from Ziva Meditation puts it. Um, so this is her metaphor, I do want to give her credit—She says that our brain, our mind, is designed for thinking just as much as our heart is designed for beating.
And so if we cannot force our heart to stop beating, how do we think that we can make the mind stop thinking? Like, it just doesn't happen.
And whatever your yoga teacher or your mindfulness teacher or whoever may tell you about letting go of your thoughts and stilling the mind and all this stuff, please just know that what they're asking of you is something that even like the most intense monks still consciously need to choose in their practice, okay?
And we're not monks. Like, we're day-to-day high achievers, boss lady, boss person, whatever. Like we obviously want to be successful and have a great career and thrive in life and be well and be in resonance and be healthy, right?
So how are we gonna still the mind? Like pretty unlikely. So what I want you to focus on is stopping to identify with the mind and instead just start to notice what's going on in there. Because as soon as you detach yourself from all those thoughts, from that chitter-chatter, and you just start to observe and witness, it's a whole different game.
Everything changes, and awareness is the first step. The journey may be a few months, maybe a few years, maybe a lifetime—we don't know. It really depends on the individual, the situation at hand, etcetera. But what we do know is that it cannot change, there is no transformation possible without awareness first.
And so, like, you may be wondering, how do I cultivate awareness? I get it, like, I get that I'm not the thoughts in the mind, but like, how? How do I? Is there like a number, awareness0800.com? No.
Look, there are many different ways, and I'll just share kind of a few that come off the top of my head, just as ideas to start to brainstorm what may be possible for you. But the very, very first one, like the one that's been most successful in my personal experience, is asking yourself questions.
Anthony Robbins says that the quality of your life is determined by the quality of the questions that you ask yourself.
So, if there is something in your life where you feel like you need something to change—whether it's your stress, your nutrition, your work-life balance, or anything else—as soon as you've identified the thing, just start getting curious.
Okay, what about this thing is out of resonance for me right now? What about this makes me unhappy? What would I like it to look like instead? How am I contributing to this thing or this situation in my life? What am I doing right now? Who am I being?
These are just a few examples, and you can probably even just hear that from these questions like, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. And it might be a little bit much, so I do just want to highlight the fact that we just take it one little step at a time. Just titrate with tiny little doable steps, okay? Just whatever feels achievable.
And you could just do this in your mind, you could journal about it, you could record a voice memo or a video to yourself about it as well. There are lots of different ways—just play, play with it.
A few other things that have been really helpful for me: one is mindfulness. And I know you may be like, oh, I've tried it before, it doesn't work, not for me. Like the amount of times I've tried that. And then I've had clients with whom, if we work together, you'll know that we start every session with a brief kind of grounding exercise—so a little bit of mindfulness to re-centre ourselves.
And every single person, it's like they come out a whole different human from sometimes even just 30 to 60 seconds of mindfulness.
And this is what I'm saying: go small. Like little doable steps. I personally started my mindfulness journey with, I think it was a minute a day. That's all I could do, because my monkey brain just couldn't cope with any more. I couldn't be that still for that long. Now I do 15 minutes twice a day, plus a few other practices. And again, that's kind of enough content for another episode.
But I just wanted to highlight: meet yourself where you are. But questions, reflection, journaling, mindfulness, any kind of practice that helps you come into your body as well—so maybe going for a run, or yoga, or, you know, something getting your body moving, going for a walk outside in nature. Just something that helps you get out of your head can also help you cultivate awareness.
And like tuning into how you're feeling in the moment and what sensations you're experiencing, and maybe playing with that idea of, okay, well, what would it be like if I, for these next 30 seconds, lived from the heart?
And something that I love cueing in my body scans is: if your heart had a voice, what would it say? And that holds a lot of wisdom inside.
So I share this with you because I firstly wanted to distil any myths about what you may hear about awakenings and whatever. It's a term that's thrown around quite a lot, especially in the personal development industry. And so I wanted to clarify that when I speak of being awake, aware, conscious, it is awareness. It is that disidentification from the mind, from which then comes choice.
Because as soon as you have cultivated that awareness, you can then have a choice. You make a conscious choice.
Okay, let's say you identified that you want better work-life balance, like that was my experience, right? It's like, okay, this isn't working for me. And I played with that awareness. It was a long process of identifying what was working, what wasn't, what I wanted it to look like. And then came a choice.
There were multiple choices, actually. There was a choice when there was a potential opening for a role in Canada, and I stepped back from being a mobile, promotable high achiever.
There was another choice when someone in the corporate business that I worked for left, and that person's role was my obvious next step on my career map. I knew that was the moment I had to make a conscious choice. I either say yes, apply for it, and perpetuate this never-ending cycle, or I do the hard thing and stay in my integrity and my truth and move towards the reality that I want to cultivate.
So this is what this work is about. It's about cultivating awareness so then you can make a conscious choice. And sometimes that conscious choice may be in opposition to what you want, but it is conscious. So you know the consequences thereof.
Yeah. And that's how you live a life of awareness, of consciousness, of being this incredible awake human that you are. Because honestly, if you are listening to this, you are already aware. Like the awareness is there. This work tends to repel people who are not aware, because it's a little bit too confronting for the monkey mind to hold on its own.
So this feels complete for today. I would just love to invite you to choose any practice that you feel like could help you cultivate a little bit more awareness of yourself.
And if you think, like, actually I'm already super aware, I have everything up my sleeve, I'm smashing it out of the ballpark—great. In that case, contemplate on the question: what in your life are you tolerating right now? Just tolerating. What are you tolerating?
Goodness, it's already stirring up a lot of stuff for me, so I might reflect and journal on that one in my own time.
In the meantime, thank you so much for sticking around. I hope you have a beautiful day, and I look forward to seeing you in the next episode. Bye for now.
If the word mindfulness has ever felt vague, overwhelming, or just a little out of reach, I created something just for you. Live in Presence: 8 Days of Mindfulness is my free online course that gently walks you through everything I wish I had known when I first heard the word mindfulness.
It is a soft, spacious introduction to presence. There's no jargon, no overwhelm, and no pressure to do it “right.” So over 8 days, you'll receive short, grounded lessons and simple practices that you can weave into your real life—even if you are busy, tired, or feeling totally out of sync.
The link is in the show notes below or through the link in my bios at Living Health. Because presence isn't something you have to earn. It's something you get to return to.
The views and opinions expressed by guests on Resonance are their own, and do not necessarily reflect the views of me, Viktoria Levenberg, LVNHealth, or anyone working within the LVNHealth brand. This space welcomes a diversity of ideas, experiences, and stories. Part of Resonance is learning to take what aligns, and gently leaving the rest.
Also, while I am a National Board Certified Health and Wellness Coach and deeply passionate about well-being, this podcast is intended for educational and inspirational purposes only. Resonance does not substitute personalized medical, psychological, or therapeutic advice. Always seek guidance from qualified professionals for any physical, emotional, or mental health concerns.
