Episode Length: 15 minutes

Hey y'all, hey friends, it's me Kristin back with a chilly winter day message for you. I'm so excited to tell you about today, because it's a topic that's really near and dear to my heart: radically alive systems.

For many of us, especially those of us like me approaching 70, sometimes I meet other women in their late 60s or early 70s, and I see this kind of dimness in their eyes. And I know that they're not having this experience of Radical Aliveness that I am having. So today, I'm here to talk about it.

Your life reflects the systems that you're running. So if there is a dimness in your eyes or a sagging or a heaviness or a gravity around you, it's because the systems that you're running are not working well for you. And you may not even realize that you're running systems, and you may not even realize that it's the systems that aren't working well.

See, a lot of times we start running systems when we're really small children. I know that I did. I grew up in a household where there was some dysfunction, and because of that dysfunction, the parenting wasn't optimal, to say the least. And so it began to program me with systems about how to do well in my family environment that weren't really very healthy.

These systems were not only unconscious, but very conscious. Like, for example, my dad used to tell me, "An accident is something you mean not to happen." So if I put a glass on the counter close to the edge, my dad would come and shake his finger at me and say, "When this glass gets knocked off the counter, it will not be an accident, because you did not make sure that you put the glass somewhere where it couldn't be knocked off."

This kind of system sets you up so that you're constantly looking into the future, identifying what you don't want to happen, and then living in a way that won't allow the thing you don't want to happen to happen. You're constantly focused on what you don't want.

Well, if you know how life actually works, what you focus on gets bigger and expands. So if you focus on what you don't want, what do you have a lot of in your life? A lot of what you don't want. And this is why so many people are depressed and anxious—because their focus is on what they don't want, and that is expanding and getting bigger every day.

And so the light goes out of their eyes, and their face gets heavy, and the gravity around them is weighing them down, and sometimes you get this kind of stooped posture. Well, those are all symptoms of bad systems. But you can change your systems at any time. It's a matter of getting conscious about them and deciding what you want to do about it.

One thing I realize is that despite the fact that trips around the sun have a biological impact—and I'm certainly not trying to say they don't—how much you age in those trips around the sun isn't so much about the trips as it is about these systems that I'm talking about. And one of the systems, for sure, without any doubt at all, is what I call the aging default.

The aging default is a system that is going to run unless you do something about it. It's this whole "hell to get old" belief. It's this "you're used up, washed up, burned out, burned up, exhausted, fatigued, old people are irrelevant" programming. All the things that when you were 20 years old made you think, "Oh gosh, I don't want to be an old person." My dad used to say getting old is hell.

Well, I'm here to disagree with that, and I say getting old is heaven. We all know people that are not going to get old because they're already gone. In my high school graduating class, it is scary how many people are not going to get old. And I feel the privilege of having more trips around the sun ahead of...