Battles Worth Fighting

and we are live hello hello hello I am Breyer Harvey this is the neurodiversity media network.com like sometime this week crossing my fingers oh lord it's been such an ordeal um what the hell was I saying I'm have Morgan yeah

that is like the best foot this this could possibly start on my friend yeah it is battle's worth fighting all right so Morgan is a game master who teaches

listen these shows what you've been sure teaches is the right word I don't even think teachers is the right word guides I mean Adventures that are very very fun and make you confront all your inner demons and icky bits

I'm proud of that face to face

you do get sworn at a lot usually about you but yeah I I um so I've been a member of Morgan's role-playing Adventures for what two years now yeah I think it has been two years since we started since you started beta testing this the whole thing it might even be three Wow since we were ready to go live with the proper one write one the first walk then hit and that was 2020. mm-hmm so no two and a half nearly three so

fundamentally it's a role-playing game ish and when you initially started testing it we were playing for business purposes I think it's kind of morphed into General life skills basically stopped caring about that part as much anymore right I think it's it always felt a little bit bolted on originally what used to happen was we had the game and we had like these checklist things that you were meant to do each week for your business skills you used we used the RPG to learn business skills it was all very it was a lot of fun but I think the actual growth and progress of the game was found in the soft skills that it teaches and I think that's true honestly for most RPGs like I read a really great I don't know probably came from Tumblr probably story about um a guy who was um game mastering for the Wizards of the Coast launch for the Star Wars RPG so this is this is this is back in the day right like 80s and a minute ago they had so they did it at a restaurant and people would come in and like it's a it's the Star Wars RPG so really the intro walk through you can win without Jedi but the whole point is really yeah right right and

he gets this very old English couple who had obviously been through World War II who come in and start commandeering the action and the other game players just started calling the guy Lieutenant right like and why wouldn't you and why wouldn't you at that point and they won based off of you know playing it the way that it's old-fashioned Battle Tactics right oh we know this it's it's it's ambushing and it's subterfuge and it's all of the things no Jedi required thank you very much yeah and I did for doing it properly and I tell that story to say that for you that's kind of what this has become it started as a business building tool I mean way way back in the day it was like okay this is the fun bit you get to do if you've done all your tours for the week it was because we played on Friday afternoon it was it was great fun okay so structurally the game has evolved from being an RPG about business to what exactly and to be fair was the RPG part ever actually about business oh but the skills related were I suppose that's true I think structurally now it's much much more about the role playing and you still do get the skills but there are more there to encourage you to think around things differently like you'll remember from the beta we used to assign certain amounts of uses for each skill per week uh theoretically based on what you've done and must admit it was more based on what I felt like giving you that week oh right it was it was Calvin ball points right there are no rules the points don't matter I'm just gonna give you whatever I feel like giving you yeah and then it was the player's job to figure out if any of it was useful and how they could use it and if they wanted to use any of them at all because you actually have to all of the time but it was fun no I I mean structurally it's very much a role-playing game and it just turns out to develop a set of soft character building skills they are the Elementals yep but true to farm were originally just stuff oh we can have pets excessive Little Things and then they casually took over the entirety of the game and came with all their own lore and baggage and stuff so now it's probably the most useful part let's be fair here it's been fun being involved in this and watching it evolve and I feel like as a tool it has the potential to be very helpful for the way people interact with their parts

and I've also noticed that as like a leadership training tool even it's pretty superb because what happens while you're playing is through the course of the game you encounter situations that aren't exactly like they are in your real life wherever you're doing business like whatever but there's enough similarities to all of it that you'll find yourself casually wandering along and then bumping smack straight into something that's gonna trigger you or make you really upset or whatever but the best part about that is you don't shy away from it before you're there so you have to confront what it is and then you can move past it and start to figure out your nonsense a bit better

so what we're going to be doing in this series is talking about the ways Elementals show up very specifically in terms of your nonsense and what function they serve in terms of helping you to have a dialogue

so in this episode today we're gonna talk about the six types very basically and then we're gonna look at I think the ways that they can start to work together yep sort of what they are how they're going to mess with you that kind of thing okay wow take it from the time my friend all right so everyone knows the first four Elementals or they should because I can't think of many children's programs that don't touch on them at some point you've got earth air fire and water there's another two that I tend to add which are a little bit more complicated but light and dark so fairly straightforward and they all do different kinds of things they tend to complain about different sectors of your life and when they're in a good mood they tend to I suppose bless different parts of your life enhance it a little bit so it's maybe easiest if we just go through bit by bit briefly and then go from there really so Earth is basically your structural backbone forever you have set things out in an orderly fashion with planning and Frameworks in the beginning middle and end that's usually Earth doing its thing um so whenever things are particularly chaotic it usually means that your Earth is not working quite as intended or conversely if things have gotten to be a bit rigid in your thinking where you're not flexible or looking at things from multiple different views that's where you for one of a better word calcified your Earth a bit so that's how that one works air as its opposite is more to do with your ideas and your communication and how you're talking about the things you're doing and what you're well a little bit of what your dreams are that's more of a water one but the mesh um and if it's not quite working then [Music] too strong in there will blow all your structures over and cause the chaos I just talked about too little air nothing's moving you're not really speaking you don't really want to share much with the rest of the world you don't particularly want to step out and do things publicly is usually how that goes fire is honestly one of my favorites actually they tend to be your inner drive your motivation your passion when it is happy and things are growing at a steady rate that it can support then that's when you find yourself doing a lot of things and not burning out from it that's not happy if you've got too much of the fire going on you burn out a lot faster you don't have much of a sense of meaning to your work you're just going going going going going and going to little fire and you're not moving you might desperately want to move but you're not this is where burnout tends to live actually and you may even if you'd previously been going along quite happily you might smother Your Flames a little bit by giving it too much ammo then it collapses but we'll get more into that when we get to Fires Episode because it's quite a complicated little beast um water being the opposite of Fire is where you get a lot of your deeper meaning and your storytelling your oh this is what this means these are my feelings about this thing um it's slightly more flarity in terms of language as well but it works quite well with the others usually to just sort of bring that richness and fullness to your life really when it's got too much of the water everything is way too heavy it's like you're waterlogged every task you're trying to do has too much emotion attached to it so you can't even get started it's those days where you wake up and you just go I'm exhausted already because you've got your task weight and then you've got all the extra water weight on top so when there's too much of it too little as we just said with fire nothing much matters really and when every task has too much attached to it when there's so much that also contributes to burnout because everything's heavy your fire is not happy you're done and Elemental management for me so there's it's it's magical-ish

like structurally foundationally the four elements are present in a lot of systems

they are pretty easy to extrapolate out to personal life without a whole lot of intent really required it's they've lived around about in our lore and whatever for such a long time that we all have some idea of what their flavor is really [Music]

so where you diverge then from the more traditional Elemental structure is when we add in light and dark although I gotta be honest for me structurally these have been probably the most important additions to my inner dialogue so walk us through a little bit what and who they are okay I'm gonna have a quick drink first because I can cure myself becoming needy but then I'll do this

so

light and dark don't quite work the same way as the other Elementals they're just as present you can still kind of hear your voices for them and we'll get into that later but really what they do is influence the other Elementals Behavior to a greater or lesser degree so light I mean we'll start there is really more

your extrinsic motivations it's where you show up in the world where your Fame appears where your actual rewards quote unquote for doing the things you do show up in your life it's the visible tangible signs that we relate to success quite often um it tends to have the most effect on air and Fire which is pretty logical really if you consider air to be your communication your thoughts your ideas part and your fire to be your motivation your progress and your drive they tend to play quite happily um dark then is more to do with your inner motivations and your inner self the things that you can't quite see how true you feel you're being to who you are if you're doing the right sort of things if you have meaning in your life and you know your success is the matter to you but don't necessarily show up on the surface so it's a lot harder to point to and go look see that was your dark Elemental but it's as powerful as light than its own way and it tends to play most strongly with your Earth and your water Elementals so that's your structure and your feelings and meaning unsurprisingly but they also both light and dark play with all of them differently they're not choosy in that regard when things are going well for light things are going well on the surface of your life basically you're generally happy with how well you're being appreciated you can feel that praise on the surface by seeing the things you have it's not going well more often than not you're unknown you're not being particularly outgoing with your things um in business that shows up as you're not showing up and communicating you're not going out and looking for people Etc um for dark it's a little squiggly for business for dark for example it shows up as not feeling Worthy is the main one for almost everything you can extrapolate the rest out for there from that it's how you feel about what you're doing so whether you feel like your intrinsically deserve what you've done if you're okay with yourself if you know you're settled and feel like you can show up and be who you are instead of having to be a certain way to impress others is how that looks

um the the elemental structure here as a framework for inner work has been truly very foundational for me in terms of helping me to find my inner landscape helping me to have conversations with parts and there is some similarities here to IFS and yet not similarities to IFS which we can maybe touch in a later episode of it what structurally has been the benefit here for me is a way to elementally define the inner landscape and troubleshoot what is working and what is not working so when you start doing Elemental work there become ways to have conversations with these parts of yourself these guides and they tend to be fairly self-diagnostic in nature and I think a lot of people will do this work and put God personifications here and there's some Merit there but I don't think gods are quite accurate these are all just Elemental parts of Who You Are at a very foundational level

yep I suppose that's a fair enough description for them they're not entirely separate to who you are so they're not like gods or beings or whatever no but they're also not you as in your core self person inhabiting the body doing the things because it's more like they're helpful Little voices on your shoulder that complain at you and or Praise You for various things and when we start out with anybody really there's questions I ask because all the Elementals have their own distinct patterns of speaking and voices and what have you and say voices I mean I can literally hear it in the words you choose to use to answer the questions it's awesome and normally one or two of them are much much lighter than the others because they're unhappy so you can go ahead and go okay if that's happening we can then infer that this is happening this is happening and this is happening because they show up in groups

and I think that the interaction is what allows us to shape and structure an inner landscape in a way that allows so for me and this manifests differently for all of your people I know but for me it's very much like I can see my Earth fields and I can see where things are growing and where things are not growing and there's this lovely little waterfall that once flooded my whole [ __ ] landscape for a while when I was dealing with a lot of trauma and grief while I was going through MDR not because you were going through the trauma in Greece but because I remember that you had a cottage specifically that was under the water but totally dry I remember I believe my cat was stuck your cat was he was a very impressive

and the the ability to create and Define an inner landscape is I think a magical tool that we do not talk about nearly enough I think especially when you are neurodivergent the real world has some harsh realities to it and being able to construct places in your mind where you know what the rules are where you have an ability to create structure and to determine how things work and this tool comes up a lot therapeutically it's used a lot in EMDR um I think mine Castle mine Palace yeah I think that comes up a lot even in pop culture right and and it's a it's it's the idea of creating a room where everything is safe and wonderful and I think that instinctively especially if you grow up with trauma many of us build these landscapes for ourselves I mean I would go so far as to say that everyone has one yeah I agree aware of it right there's always one there the um and and

you know I don't want to get too deep into the metaphysics of it but arguably everyone really does have one metaphysically your ability to access that plane then or Define it has real ramifications on This Plane here it's the ways in which we don't talk about or Define like 5D I caught I hate that phrase so much 5D interactions in the 3D World right and this is similar we're not spending enough time really developing the idea of internal landscape structure and I do think that that is in not I mean any modern teachings this is this is a not even that high level of skill and it's something that is frequently overlooked it exists and we kind of sort of talk about it but we're not really doing the work to develop the tools required the difficult thing about it is it's one of the most easily explained magical things there is and I think it's just imagination it can like codify it and Define it and all that stuff so you can almost be tricked into thinking it's a science but it's really not

and there's there is that pseudoscientific lore that does present itself uh man this and this one's hard because when we talk about Spiritual Development in particular there is there's a line where people are doing the work

right and where people are building Cults like and then and I want to acknowledge that this is a real tough space to navigate and be in and what helps I think always when it comes to learning and defining new teachings is to recognize your own autonomy within the space right

and that's where this lives when you can accurately Define your inner landscape you are much more willing to bring your outer landscape into alignment with your inner landscape and are therefore more willing I think to do the work that is required [Music] to set the boundaries and it's not always their conscious either true because a lot of the time what's going on for us impacts that inner landscape we don't physically go in and decide to flood the entire plane that was not a conscious Choice me going in and flooding the whole [ __ ] place so that's like your day-to-day life impacting there when you make changes there the impacts on your day-to-day life as well because how could it not it's as much you as being out in a bed it's not always a conscious thing although certainly it can be I mean there's been times where we've looked at it for you and gone okay well this is what's happening over here to fix that go and do this physical thing over here and vice versa

and that is I think the structure of the work and you get people there often through the game Kicking and Screaming but through the game uh the game is fun because for that it's sort of a shared landscape thing isn't strictly your own one so then you get everybody's different Elementals and stuff playing into it's all up

so let's talk about how

for using the structure of our inner landscape to impact the outer

hmm

okay well a lot of the time it's diagnostic when you're looking at the landscape it becomes very very easy to see which Elemental is not pleased with you because like and I have seen some things I've had places where it's just eternally stormy going on and you go okay well this is where we need to go discuss then cool and I've had other ones where there's volcanoes I've had ice ages pattern sometimes for lack of fire that's always a good one because the Temptation then is to go in and start burning stuff but that's not what you need to do and we'll get into that another time I'm sure but primarily it's diagnostic the next thing is sometimes you just need to go in and fix the problem your landscape is having for it to then start to unravel in the real world and I say unravel in a good way because usually that's sticking points and blocks and things you just can't get past and often we'll fix one thing leave it a week or so and then something else will need fixed know that that has been sorted and it's this evolving thing where I suppose what you're really doing is you're going progressively deeper into forever actual issue it is or a collection of issues because it can be more than one and you're slowly finding ways to come to terms with that to accommodate for that to change the structure out and about in the real world to make that less horrible as well and it can be even minor tweaks can make a big difference to how that actually goes and feels internal foreign

ly while I encourage you to go to battlesworth fighting and find out more about how there's available games that are coming this spring the purpose of this series is to walk you through self-diagnostic techniques because while the game makes it easier to learn the whole [ __ ] point here is that your internal landscape can't be gate caps no one gets to say this is what that should look like or how it should work or even better no you cannot talk to your Elementals without me don't be so right right so structurally what I want to provide folks is the ability to actually dig into that work themselves and I think then we spend the remainder of this episode really talking about how you go about finding your inner landscape and how to trust what is happening there it's that second part that's usually a bit more entertaining for people please [Music] right it it does help a blast next time I think anyway so finding your landscape is both simple and not easy because pretty sure but I said to most of you okay think of a place that you feel at home where you're happy and peaceful you can normally picture it in your head or at least have some concept of feeling around Net I have been made aware over the last few years that some people do not actually visually see things within their brains when they're thinking about stuff this still can work it will just you'll take on so right I've troubleshooted this with a couple of folks and I think how it actually works is that you can think of it as words a place a story it's a story that you tell yourself you may not be able to visualize it but you it's like writing the novel of you it's not so very different to how you would look at a memory if you remember things visually like I do I'm quite visual um then yeah probably you will see it if you sort of remember things as a collection of feelings and thoughts and a jumbled thing which is also fun um it can be a lot like that as well you're just crafting it sort of it's essay crafting it's more like discovering where it is to be entirely Fair here um that will be different for everyone mine if I ever do get lost and go oh no I can't find it again is actually in a tower in the middle of a forest and there's mountains over there that's my immediate place for it and then there's the entire rest of it but there'll be one specific point that it's always easy to go back into and I think in EMDR your safe room which is for me certainly one of the access points not the only one but one of the access points to my inner landscape is very much a library it's very uh like think Beauty and the Beast and the curtains and the colors are a little bit different and it's a little bit darker but there it's very much there's this whole

is great right it's it's it's pretty and for me the library came into existence as a child and then it's just been remodeled over the years and I again suspect that most of you while not having consciously explored these places in yourself know where they are and know how to get there yeah it's much like that one day where I sat and asked you for each emotion lived in your body which is not technically related but often asking the right question means oh it's sort of like

so the question you're starting with is where am I

what matters to me or even more simply where's Home yeah and what does home feel like what does it smell like tastes like touch like I have comfy chairs and soft blankets and my cats because they're cats will absolutely show up and make noise at me I have lots of books and it's got that old library smell to it I mean and I can close my eyes and be there that's what we're looking at cultivating here where is home and how do you find it readily because that is where the internal self-exploration starts and size doesn't actually matter here it could be no it's like a tardis it's always bigger on the inside yeah like whatever you're working with initially is not the entirety of it and quite often once we've found your entry point and you can go you can take a walk and go see other things and do other stuff build more things it'll just expand to whatever you need it to be really I think another good allegory here is the never-ending story that movie that scarred so many of us as children but I just made mine watch it the other day oh man voluntarily traumatizing your children what the hell not as bad as I remembered and yet also one yet also right and so there's the imaginary landscape that is that place right and the nothing is eating it and what allows it to be rebuilt is the memory of it and wishes and the wishes were very important wishes of course and that's kind of what you're looking to do here is wish your way into your internal landscape what does it look like what does it feel like and y'all I encourage you to have fun there's Whimsy here there's things that maybe you remember from childhood that you can build in and incorporate into your world the whole point of creating an internal landscape is so let's talk about that why what benefits do we gain from having access well you're asking me so my first impulse here is to say what benefits do you get from breathing but that's a little bit tongue-in-cheek and because I've basically always known about these and interacted with them and all of that it's where else are you going to play how else are you gonna like visualize your ideas and see if they're gonna be fun even or anything you like or don't how are you gonna know yourself if you don't have somewhere to go play and practice and I say this as someone again that has always had that there so frankly I'm not sure how the rest of you do it without that

feel like it's the laboratory and a very real sense it's where you go to run the experiments shoe test things out to

experiment with ideas and structures conversations to an extent but there are no people in my inner landscape that all right it's just on tricked that I interact with

no I do not okay

generally speaking they're not people from The Real World people no no and I mean they're more again Elemental creatures than anything else because we're we're touching that that metaphysical boundary here yeah and

to keep it accessible for people who don't know about that magic [ __ ] y'all what I want you to take away from this is that if you were writing a movie script or writing a novel what would you build that world out to look like and that's that's where we start I think is determining the landscape of our inner landscape yeah that's probably safe enough

so structurally [Music] it's it's it's it's the place of imagination and physically

how do you encourage people to access it through meditation through dishes what what what actually works in terms of this kind of inner development okay I mean meditation is traditional but if you cannot stomach sitting and doing the meditation and not everyone can um those moments before you fall asleep are actually really really good for this because you're a Sami on your way to Dreamland anyway which is not necessarily the same place but it's close enough right um if you're able to kinda zone out while you're doing a task it can work there too but that's probably not quite as easy as just before you fall asleep or just when you wake up in the morning if you're not like getting up to an alarm and running around immediately you can do it then certainly that was a lot easier before I have my child so you know your mileage may vary but um unfortunately is the good one okay and then if you're out in nature if that's your thing too it's actually quite a bit easier there as well or if you're looking up at the sky I used to go actually when I was in the back seat of the car and we were driving around for any length of time I would sit look at the window up at the sky or at the landscape or whatever and just go and I was gone well not gone gone but I'd be over there doing forever and it gets a lot easier over time as well once you've gone in a handful of paints I actually highly recommend being a passenger in a car driving through the middle of nowhere at night full moon

for it obviously not when you're driving that's no not with him no be a passenger you gotta go be a passenger but I'm fighting to say because UK okay either

and it's reversed anyways so I'm sure after I opened my mouth right okay

structurally when we talk about inner landscape what is

the what's the advantage to awareness

mainly so that you're not freaking out when things happen that you didn't deliberately fit there I'm gonna expand that a little bit because I suppose if you don't know it's there at all anyway you're not gonna just be like oh suddenly there's a lamp but you may have feelings you can't quite explain around certain things or you may be happily working away one day and then walk into a wall with your work that no matter how you try and logic yourself around you're just not doing it and there can be a lot of reasons for that but this one is one of the ways where you can sort of take a peek and go okay what's going wrong with this it's not Diagnostic in the way of it'll tell you if you're neurodivergent or any of that it will just say here this is what your Elementals are doing and I think if I had to name it this would be where trust is learned and developed in terms of in really getting to know your intuition knowing your inner landscape helps you define where those niggles of intuition come from yeah what's causing them and gut feelings and right oh no Vibes um those become a lot lot easier to Define and differentiate between once you're aware of your landscape because if you don't already know about your gut feelings and your intuition and what means what a lot of them can sound very similar and you can be in a situation where you're not sure if it's excitement or oh my God I'm in danger because they feel quite the same and when you can go and look at your landscape it becomes a lot easier to figure out what the flavor of gut reaction is rather than just oh something's happening

I think personally and I do not speak for all the artists here but I Have Become very no it's just facts right I I haven't become nothing towards facts that the the idea of what I can see test measure has always been structurally very important to me having a concept then of my own personal metaphysical doorway allows me to be more okay with the

unexplainable and I truly do believe magic is frequently just science that we haven't explained yet right many things that we take as scientific fact now were once things that we burned people at the stake for so as we learn and grow and progress we're building for ourselves our own set of barometer or measurement and knowing your inner landscape helps you define what those things are for the things that you can neither explain or understand because you are a mere human and have not been granted understanding of all of the things yeah I mean I remember hearing about thin slicing as explaining some of the gut feelings and okay fine that's basically it's a snapshot of every other time you've ever felt this particular way in this particular situation where having an inner landscape and being able to go look at it and touch your mentals or what have you comes in is you get more of an explanation for the thin slicing it's like you get the asterisk in the notes instead of just the oh no or whatever it may be

um ultimately this series is designed to help you figure out how to trust those impulses to figure out how to trust your instincts believe that you have them and that you are capable of doing this work unsupervised thank you very much

I mean the harder part of it when I initially said it was simple but not easy is actually believing that you're doing anything at all which if it feels effortful to begin with it's a lot easier to believe that you're actually doing something but after a while it feels very much like just playing protect because it's a very very sophisticated game of pretend that you absolutely should still be playing by the way and it doesn't make it any less real but it is playing and it's very easy especially in our current society and culture to just dismiss that is oh well that's not real then it doesn't care and I I cannot emphasize the number of times I've said this and will continue to say this but productivity is not how you should measure a single [ __ ] thing in your life as to whether or not it has value and one of my intentions here with the neurodiversity media network is to be able to explore these spiritual Landscapes that we have neglected deeply in our lives because capitalism says it's bad and non-productive and ironically serious to me though because the opposite in fact

and ironically we build that into Faith Traditions themselves right magical traditions in particular will give you a lot of [ __ ] for charging for Spiritual Services uh the pastor of a church until fairly recently lived on site in pretty modest surroundings and was not available

so we have structurally culturally devalued the inner spiritual work that is required to do some of the soul-searching to discern what matters to you essentially to grow up into a whole person um

and that's what we're about here so if you would like to know more about morrigan's game that's battlesworthfighting.com if you would like to support the work that we are doing here that is tomorrow next week neurodiversitymedianetwork.com but until then it's

neurodiversitymediannetwork.substack.com this week I am preparing the paid podcast slash video uh this week in and I'm going to walk you through all of the content that we cover on a weekly basis with short little Snippets plus I'm going to give you the this week in the news so that you know what's going on and what's worth paying attention to and can then allow the rest of that noise to just filter on out the point here is to get you your media and your news and your information in the format that is most digestible to you and to ensure that you can go out and do your work in the world because that's what we're here to support and if you would like to support our mission you can do that at we'll just say neurodiversitymediannetwork.com

all right y'all we'll be back with Morgan in two weeks we're gonna be talking about which Elemental that will be our first Earth okay one is traditional and two I mean structure right we we start with foundations around here my friends always so until next time we'll see you in two weeks and I will be back here again tomorrow with faith Clark for her first episode uh about um okay I gotta look it up it's because it's new still work culture design I got a couple in work podcasts coming that I am very excited about I'm very excited about this one so I will see y'all here tomorrow have an amazing day bye y'all