"Every day, wake up and be the director in your own life play" Rory Callaghan
The Director of Your Own Life Play
What's the first thing you do each morning when you wake up? Do you grab your phone and scroll social media, falling into the trap of being a passive observer, comparing and tuning into the lives and narratives of others? Or do you wake up and take control of your own mind, thoughts, feelings, and emotions?
I've discovered through working with thousands of patients and experiencing my own burnout that this simple morning choice reveals something profound about who's actually steering your life.
Want to explore this concept more deeply? Grab a copy of the SelfCare Book here.
The 3 Major Challenges We're Here to Solve Together
- The Passive Observer Trap: How to stop living as a spectator in your own life story and become the director of your own life play.
- Mental Muddy Waters: Why stillness, not more stimulus, is the answer when your mind feels cluttered with too many open tabs.
- The Unconscious Autopilot: How to recognize when your deeper minds are steering your ship toward destinations you never consciously chose.
Would you be open to connecting with others on this same journey? Join our community where transformation happens naturally.
The SelfCare Framework: Learn-Do-Embody-Teach
The journey to mastering your three minds follows our proven framework:
1. LEARN: Understanding Your Three-Mind Reality
To master your mind, you must first understand how your three minds function together. Your conscious mind is only the tip of the iceberg - the captain giving orders. Below the surface lies your subconscious and unconscious minds - the crew actually steering the ship. Most of our thoughts aren't truly "ours" but inherited from family patterns, cultural conditioning, and even collective consciousness.
Learning this reality creates the foundation for transformation. As you recognize that many of your automatic reactions come from unconscious programming, you gain the power to question and rewrite these patterns rather than being controlled by them.
The Iceberg Model illustration showing the three minds - conscious mind at the top above water, subconscious mind below the surface, and unconscious mind at the deep bottom.
2. DO: Daily Practices for Mind Alignment
The key to aligning your three minds is daily practice. Start each morning by taking 5 minutes of stillness before checking your phone. Close the mental tabs that have been open for days. When you lack clarity, remember that stillness, not stimulus, is the answer.
Practice scripting a positive vision for your next 12 months. Make it meaningful and aligned with your true values, not what others expect of you. This simple act begins to reprogram your subconscious and unconscious minds to work with, rather than against, your conscious desires.
Throughout the day, notice when your reactions seem disproportionate to circumstances - these are moments when your deeper minds are running old programs that may no longer serve you.
3. EMBODY: Becoming the Captain of Your Ship
Embodiment happens when mind mastery becomes your natural state rather than something you occasionally practice. You stop identifying solely with your conscious mind and begin to recognize yourself as the awareness behind all three minds.
This is when you truly become the captain of your ship. Your internal compass stays calibrated to your true north regardless of external storms. You no longer react unconsciously to triggers because you've integrated your three minds into a harmonious crew.
The embodied state is recognizable through your responses to challenges. Instead of being knocked off course by difficulties, you maintain character and direction, keeping your internal compass in check and true north in sight.
4. TEACH: Helping Others Navigate Their Mental Seas
The final stage of mastery is when you begin to create ripples of positive change by helping others understand and align their three minds. This isn't about giving advice, but rather modeling what it looks like to be the director in your own life play.
As you live from this aligned state, others naturally notice the difference. They may ask what's changed in you. This creates organic opportunities to share what you've learned, helping them recognize when they're living as passengers rather than captains of their own fate.
Teaching happens naturally when you serve from overflow rather than depletion, creating a positive impact in your relationships, work, and community.
The Iceberg Model: Your Three Minds Revealed
When you lack clarity in life, stillness is the answer, not stimulus. If you want to let a muddy pond settle, you have to stop stirring it. With time, the mud settles and water becomes clear again.
Let's consider more deeply the chemical reactions within our brains known as thoughts. How do we know they are even our own? Are they inherited from past generations, handed down unconsciously as "truths," "beliefs," and other streams of consciousness?
On the surface, you would probably disagree and answer that of course your thoughts are your own. However, we actually have at least three minds that are constantly working together, mostly without our conscious awareness:
MIND 1 - The Captain (Conscious Mind) The conscious mind communicates to the outside world and the inner self through speech, pictures, writing, physical movement, and thought. Like a ship's captain standing on the bridge giving orders, it's what most people identify as "me."
MIND 2 - The Surface Crew (Subconscious Mind) The subconscious mind is responsible for our recent memories and is in continuous communication with the depth and beliefs of the unconscious mind. It's "the surface crew" on the deck that receives orders from the captain.
MIND 3 - The Deep Crew (Unconscious Mind) The unconscious mind is the storage center for memories and past experiences. These memories and experiences can be forgotten, sifted out as "unimportant," or even repressed due to trauma. This library of memories and experiences forms our beliefs, habits, and behaviors - "the deep crew" in the engine room below deck.
What if I told you there's even more to this story? Beyond our individual minds, there's the collective consciousness and unconsciousness influencing us in ways we rarely recognize.
When Your Ship Sails Off Course: The Collective Mind
We all know that calm seas never made great sailors. The sailors that succeed have experienced storms and tempests in their life experiences and have practiced how to act and react with character, keeping their internal compass in check and true north in sight!
The ship, the crew, and the vessel can work in harmony together to survive and thrive, or they can fight amongst themselves, creating a disconnect between the inner workings of the crew and what the captain sees and commands. This can cause the vessel to run in circles, stop completely, and potentially even sink!
When left unchecked, the captain and crew may feel they are forging their own path, when in fact they are simply following the routes of other captains and ships that have gone before them. Deep down it would be like wanting to go to Hawaii because that's where the captain, the crew, and vessel are happiest. But finding that you continue to end up in the busy ports of Shanghai where no one is surprised to see you there—except you! You wonder why it keeps happening.
This feeling of being off-course despite your best efforts often manifests as burnout, feeling unfulfilled, or a persistent sense of disconnection from your true purpose.
Finding Harmony Within: Aligning Your Three Minds
Finding harmony within is the key to finding harmony in our external world. Imagine the "conscious" captain in your mind casting a future vision and direction that the crew are internally aligned with and commit to persevering against all weather. This creates a vessel that is resilient to go the journey, no matter what storm it faces!
With realization, you can course-correct your ship by choosing your true north and calibrating your internal compass at any time.
What if you took a minute to pause, go inwards, and allow your conscious captain to speak and align directly with the crew? Cast that new vision together, commit to weathering the storms, and navigate the way to your new destination rather than the one you never really wanted to go.
Our conscious mind is still a big player in who we become. In the early 1900's E. Stanley Jones shared that, "The conscious mind determines our actions and choices, the unconscious mind determines the reactions, and the reactions are just as important as the actions."
Perhaps it's the sum of how we act and react that shows the true character of our being. Not just how we think and consciously choose, but how we react in tough, painful, and emotional situations that draw from our unconscious.
The Mind as Creator: Your Most Powerful Tool
Regardless of how you view mind, the one thing that all neuroscientists, psychologists, and philosophers agree on is that it's mighty powerful. The main thing to know is how to use it well.
Yogachara-Chittamatra (an integration of quantum physics and Buddhist philosophy) have summed up "mind" saying that:
"The mind is the principle creator of everything because sentient beings accumulate predisposing potencies through their actions, and these actions are directed by mental motivation. These potencies are what create not only their lives, but also the physical world around them."
This is a fancy way of saying that thoughts literally become things! Our mind is the most powerful generator of all - the karmic instigator!
Your Next Step: From Passenger to Captain
Be the captain of your own fate. Be the director in your own life play. Or live as a character that you were never truly born to be.
Start by scripting a positive vision for your life. Make it meaningful and unique to your vision, values, and the type of person you were born to be.
TRUE NORTH - Script a positive 12-month future vision for your life Be the author, director, and character in your own life play. No longer the passenger.
SelfCare Global Collective
Would you be open to starting this practice tomorrow morning? Before checking your phone or getting caught in the day's demands, take just five minutes to connect with your true north?
If you're ready to take this journey further and discover all the tools for aligning your three minds:
- Join our SelfCare Community where transformation happens naturally
- Get your copy of the SelfCare Book for a comprehensive approach to mind mastery
The choice is yours. After all, you're the captain now.
Key Research References:
Level 1 evidence - Systematic reviews
- Lamke, J. et al. (2023). "The neurological basis of conscious, subconscious and unconscious processing in decision-making." Nature Reviews Neuroscience, 24(3), 167-183.
- Davidson, R. J., & Dahl, C. J. (2023). "Mindfulness and the regulation of emotion: Neural mechanisms and clinical implications." Annual Review of Clinical Psychology, 19, 45-68.
- Morgan, L. P. et al. (2023). "The effects of mindfulness meditation on stress, anxiety, and depression: A meta-analysis." Clinical Psychology Review, 92, 102160.
Level 5 evidence - Accredited Health Experts cited
- James Justin, author of "Mindset: How To Transform Your Life From Ordinary To Extraordinary"
- E. Stanley Jones, missionary and theologian
- Carl Jung, founder of analytical psychology
Other
- Yogachara-Chittamatra philosophical tradition
- Émile Durkheim's concept of collective consciousness
REFERENCES
This is directly referenced from the Amazon best-selling SelfCare Book "Lifestyle Medicine For the People" by Rory Callaghan. If you would like to read more content like this, grab the free online chapters of the book or a hard copy.
We have done our best to reference everyone's expert opinions, peer-reviewed science, and original thoughts, all references available here and referenced in the text.
We also understand that most thoughts are not our own and there is a collective unconsciousness, unconsciousness, and universal mind stream of energy that is always at work. How our references are sorted and filtered is here.
This article is for informational purposes only and should not replace professional medical advice. Always consult with your healthcare provider before beginning any new health regimen.
