Why we're not happy yet - the power of presence - Episode 134

This is why I'm not happy yet, the power of presence. I was taught by a specific mentor that the secret of manifesting something into my life was to lead from the future and act in the now. It's kind of like where fake it till you make it lives. You know, I liked that. When I first heard that, I really liked the sound of it. It made sense because it helped me leverage my desired state by acting as if I already had it. To become act as if, that sort of thing. And I'm not discounting that today. I still like that. I've just noticed a couple of flaws in it that sometimes we fail to acknowledge. Have you noticed that the world that we live in has been doing most of the thinking for you? That your beliefs, perceptions, reactions, fears, and doubts have been shaped by unsolicited outside noise? How easy it's been for you to slip into that default sleep walking mode and label it as life and reality. Yeah, that ends here. Welcome to the Make Sense with Dr. JC podcast. This is your opportunity to start thinking for yourself, reclaim control, and step back into that role as the shock caller and dominant force of your own reality. It's when you change the way that you look at things that the things that you look at begin to change. So let's wake up, let's rise up, and let's make sense of why and how shift happens. Makes sense. Great morning world, great morning humans. This is your boy, Dr. JC Dornick, aka the Dragon. Welcome to 2026. Today's episode is called Why I'm Not Happy Yet, The Power of Presence. I can't say that I'm not happy, but I'm in observation of how that waxes and weans from time to time in myself, but also in all of the people that I work with. And I think it's a very, very valid thing for us to acknowledge and work on. So I love talking about it. I love talking about the only real thing that's actually happening. And that would be the present moment. And we're going to give you a different vantage point today. I've been really, really curiously wondering about the idea of wonder. So my hope is that this information today will arm you with what I call the weapon of awareness, meaning to identify something that is going on in your life and in mind. And you always get to choose whether or not you want to acknowledge it and act on it. I always wear this hat that says, hmm. And what that stands for is I haven't made up my mind yet about anything. So the stuff that I'm about to share with you doesn't make it right. It's just my observation at this time. Three of my favorite words to say at the end of sentences at this time, because what that means, I don't know what's going to happen next. I don't know what I'll think later. So I allow myself to not make up my mind and not need to know and not need to be right. And these rise ups that I do, and I want to give a shout out to the folks that are in the Make Sense Academy, that's our private school community, where we actually do this work. We don't just enjoy the jacuzzi experience of learning and knowing something. We actually put it into play and what I call, fraction, where we practice being in action. And the idea would be to create a habit of remaining open and curious in your life. Even though I don't, I don't know all of you. I just love and appreciate all of you. And what you'll see, there's a very distinct reason why I love and appreciate all of us. That's because we're a lot more alike than different, aren't we? And we've been raised to believe that that is not the case, that we're all special and separate and unique from one another. This is why I'm not happy yet, the power of presence. I was taught, now I was taught a lot of things, but I was taught by a specific mentor that the secret of manifesting something into my life was to lead from the future and act in the now. I liked that. When I first heard that, I really liked the sound of it. It made sense because it helped me leverage my desired state by acting as if I already had it, to become act as if, that sort of thing. I'm not discounting that today. I still like that. I've just noticed a couple of flaws in it that sometimes we fail to acknowledge. What it does is it kind of taps into the powerful laws of attraction, which everybody is so keen on, to attract that which you desire. I came to learn over time and with a lot of practice and a lot of failure that it kind of left one thing out. And that is the actual present moment, the idea of unwrapping the present moment. So just stop there for a second and recognize that if I'm leading from the future and acting in the now, what am I doing? I'm playing the role of something that hasn't happened and may never happen. And what am I forgetting about while I'm playing that role? I'm pretending to be something or someone else rather than who I actually am. So that's the flaw that I'm going to point out today. What it infers is that what is happening in this present moment, the gift, it's not enough. It's not good enough. And therefore we should alter or leverage it like some sort of future present moment that would be better. That's what it's saying. So we could we call this common strategy that everybody has, which sounds good as well. We could call it chasing better. Let's chase better. And there's a lot of stuff, a lot of content out there that says that's a good idea. So I get the idea of leveraging my goals and dreams. But how will I ever learn to enjoy achieving the things that I say that I want if I don't learn to enjoy and embrace and acknowledge the present moment right here, right now? This episode is going to give color to the idea of that living in the present moment isn't achieved through effort and control and strategies. It's achieved through awareness. That's my favorite word, awareness. What can I do today to increase the odds of embracing and enjoying the experience of this day? It all has to do with working on and this is my body of work in the Make Sense Academy, my book that's coming out in February. It's all about arming ourselves with the weapon of awareness. And when you do that, you'll notice that it quiets things down like urgency, fear, and all of the mental noise. One of the reasons I do these episodes in the morning and when you get into the Make Sense Academy, what it is is it's about teaching people and arming people with clarity before action. So one of our tenants is that it's who you are that determines how well what you do works. What that's saying is, is that if you're in this process of doing, doing, doing, doing, and you're in action, which pretty much everybody says we should do, but you're not getting anywhere, then you're focusing too much on the do, not as much as the who. We talked about our frequencies. I shared with you last week about our resonance frequency and all of that stuff. So that's what we're all about. We're all about establishing clarity before the action. And what I think about you is that you're actually capable. You're highly capable. In fact, you were blessed and gifted when you were born and you still are this day with potential and opportunity, but you're scattered. And the reason why you're scattered, it's not your fault, is because you've been taught to look at the world a certain way, the way everybody else does, but we're going to learn how to look at the world from your vantage point today. It's about remembering that you miraculously, this is a gratitude positioning to be present, you miraculously belong to something that is vast and alive and presence stops being a practice when you get good at this. And it becomes the only thing that actually makes sense to live in the present moment. So I'm a big fan of habits. I'm a transformation coach. I've helped hundreds of thousands of people lose weight and reclaim their health. If that's something that seems like the natural action step for you, reach out to me. But think about that for a second. Are you the right person for the job? And in order to even figure that out, you'd have to know who you are. And the only place that you can assess that is today, not yesterday or not tomorrow. So I'm going to start by posing a question to you. It's just the fact that existence itself, like the idea of existing itself is a strange situation, isn't it? Have you ever stopped to think about that? I think we spend so much time trying to create a brighter future that we don't take time to be like, I exist. I'm here. I love to say the words, I am here now and allow my brain to say, what does that mean? So I often wonder whether I came into this world or whether or not I came from it. So if you think about this world and the planet and all of these miraculous things that we very often forget, I mean, when's the last time you walked in the grass with your bare feet? So if you really look at that, did we come to this world? Like, think about all the stories that you've learned about from religion and all of the laws of the universe and all of that stuff. Did we like arrive here on this planet? Or did we potentially, we're just going to entertain the idea that we came from it. So am I some sort of unique, separate entity from you and everything else on this planet? Or maybe we come from the same place you and I, and you know this and you know this, but it doesn't always suit your needs in the moment because we're kind of trained to just always drive forward and create something better and not really acknowledge that everything that we desire is actually happening already. We spend most of our time in what I call the not now. Think about where that sits with you. I love the idea to look at a lot of the stuff that's happening on the planet, like flowers, right? If I look at a flower, what does a flower do? It flowers and where does it flower from? It flowers from the soil. Now look at an orange, right? What does an orange do? It oranges and where does it orange from? If oranges from a tree. So let's look at you and I right now and what we're doing right now is we're focusing on something that is. So remember the topic here. Why am I not happy yet? Maybe you are happy. Maybe you've just been looking in the wrong place. So if we look at the flowers that are flowering and the oranges that are orangeing, what are humans doing? What are people doing? Well, in this light, I can see that people are peopeling. And where are people peopeling from? The sky or the planet? How are you different from an orange or a flower? I mean, let's forget about all the narratives and stories for a second and let's just look at what probably is. Let's try to detach from that stuff. The funny thing about that is, is that in the midst of a thought like that, if you allow yourself to be open and curious and just say, hmm, I know what I typically think, but just allow myself, I'll permit myself to entertain the idea that maybe we didn't come to the planet. We came from the planet. But it's funny how in the midst of thinking like that, you'll notice and maybe you noticed it already that there's no space left in that space, in that moment for even your goals and your dreams or your worries and your concerns. When you're thinking about that, we don't have any worries and concerns and it feels kind of nice. So if you're looking to feel kind of nice today, this is a fun thought. I see so many people talking to one another. Community is so crucial, isn't it? I love Substack. I love YouTube. I love all the channels, but the part about it that I love most is not the shiny, happy people, artificial, real. I love the interactions. I love the people making distinctions and somebody saying something and somebody else going, oh, I like that. Sometimes you'll notice on my Substack that I put a lot of quotes and I ask questions about those quotes and a lot of people will respond and say, amen and things like that. But sometimes what you'll do and you know who you are, you'll take that idea and write about it and tag me on it. So you'll take the idea from the jacuzzi experience of learning and knowing, which by the way, in the absence of action is just a distraction, but you'll take that information and you'll write about it and you'll dump your creative thoughts about it. I see that going on in that chat right now and I just love that. Let's look at Alan Watts. Alan Watts once remarked that human beings are essentially little germs living on a giant rotating rock that's floating through space among an infinite number of other rock balls. And lately that observation has been landing differently for me. Have you ever noticed how an observation of something can land differently than it typically does? Well, if you learn to be open and curious, you'll notice that. So lately it's been landing differently. So I find myself genuinely amazed, not just at what Alan Watts said, and this is from a place of gratitude. I find myself amazed that I, for whatever reason, as you were, were chosen to be one of those germs standing and living and existing. There's that word again on that rock while it rotates and orbits around a massive spherical fireball. Right? So when you're thinking about like, you're one of the germs that Alan Watts refers to on this spinning rock that's also rotating amongst all these other spinning rocks, infinite amount, and they're big. And we're rotating around this huge spherical fireball. When you're thinking about that, when you pause long enough to notice that, and I'm not talking about intellectually, like book-wise, but experientially, whoa, like sometimes when I'm on a plane, I don't just think about where I'm going or where I'm coming from or when I'm going to get there. Sometimes I just grab onto my seat and say, holy shit, I am flying through the air to another destination on the spinning rock at hundreds of miles per hour. Oh my god, experientially. And when you do that, it's hard not to feel a little humbled, but also bewildered about this strange situation, that internal wow that you express outside from that experience. So it's a pretty wild situation. With me right now, does that make sense? Pretty wild situation when you think about it. Now, why would I take you on that journey right now to acknowledge this wild situation? Because it's existing in the moment and you are getting a little bit of a break from chasing better or worrying about the past or trying to rewrite the past. So that moment of wonder, that subtle pause, interesting. He's a little crazy that guy, but interesting where the mind stops racing forwards and backwards just for even a second. Well, that's the doorway to what people mean when they talk about living in the present moment. So because the experience of wonder doesn't happen in the past, does it? And it doesn't happen in the future. It only happens in one place. So maybe today, you'll allow yourself, permit yourself to experience wonderment. So that experience of wonder doesn't happen in the past or the future. It happens only in the place of the now. We're the only place that something's happening. So maybe living in the present moment isn't something that we actually do. We're always trying to live in the present moment. Maybe it's not something we do. Perhaps it's something that naturally happens when you become aware of how strange and miraculous this whole deal really is. Allow yourself to recognize how crazy this deal is. Turn the news off for a second. And the pending doom of the world ending, which doesn't serve you now. When people have near-death experiences, that's when they wake up and they go, I'm going to live my life. But when there's pending doom, we spend our whole entire day pending. Is your life pending right now? So maybe living in the present moment is not something we do. It's something that naturally happens when we realize the deal. So a human being who never experiences the wonder and awe for their own existence, which is what we're doing today, isn't broken or ungrateful, by the way. So don't shame yourself. Don't beat yourself up if you're not good at this. They're just simply sleepwalking, like most everybody else, and reacting to the conditioning. They're simply sleepwalking and on this spinning rock, by the way, while the rock is spinning, you're completely unaware of it. And you're reacting to your programmed and conditioned mind. This is what we do in the Makesense Academy. This is what my podcast is about. That's what my sub-stack stuff is about. That's what my book is about. It's about waking up and just acknowledging what is. All of this stuff is overlooking the miracle that makes any of this stuff even possible in the first place. And we're going to talk about that. And we've become very comfortable and efficient at sleepwalking. Anybody here, like a third degree black belt in sleepwalking, I sure have spent most of my life like that, but no more. I still catch myself sleepwalking. I call that catching my drift, but I catch it and that lays the foundation for what? Shift. It's called drifting and shifting. That's from my book. So we've trained ourselves to keep looking elsewhere for meaning in the not now. We look for answers and experience too. So that would be a moment for you to go, what if, God, what are the most powerful things you can do in your life is not feel so drawn to know everything and be right and just say, what else might be true? What if we've been looking in the wrong direction? What if the intelligence behind all of this? Because I know what you were taught about that intelligence. What if the intelligence behind all of this, the growing, the healing, the orangeing, the flowering, the peopleing was never situated where we were taught? Now, where will we taught all of the powers that be or situated somewhere up there? Right? And it's cool, right? Heaven, God, and all of that stuff. We were taught to keep projecting upwards. I like turning over stones, looking under things. What if we, just for a second, instead of looking up all the time for answers, for our prayers and all of that stuff, what if we looked down? What if we looked down? And I know in religion, you're not taught to find answers down below, right? But what if we were to look at the miracle of nature for a second today? There's the wonder and awe. We're going to look at nature today. Because remember, we're entertaining the idea we didn't come here, we came from here. When I look at nature all over the place, I notice that roots, they don't hesitate. Seeds don't doubt. They don't need to be right. Trees don't need to like watch a YouTube video to learn how to bear fruit. And rivers don't contemplate about which way to flow. We're the ones that contemplate, not the rivers. And when a rock comes up in a river, it goes around it, over it, sometimes under it. And when's the last time your cells in your own body like had to create some sort of a fascinating prompt and ask chat GPT how to heal? So you're no different than nature. You've got all that stuff going on in your body right now. So none of it requires belief, instruction, willpower, rules or commandments. It just is. Nature doesn't behave like some sort of separate resource, does it? It behaves like intelligence. And so do you. If you allow it, there's an intelligence going on. But the greatest intelligence anywhere is nature. What springs me to another observation that's been really hard to unsee once I've seen it. We've been persuaded to believe that we are separate from the rock, the spinning rock, the planet. Don't you see that? Don't you feel like you're living on planet Earth, which means that you're not part of planet Earth? Isn't that fascinating? Whose idea was that? And the idea is that we live on Earth rather than of it or from it. Nature is a place that we inhabit. Like we've found this place. We're like, this is a good place to live, right? As opposed to somewhere else, right? Did you used to live somewhere else? If you do your ancestry.coms, did you like have ancestors that live somewhere else? No, we didn't find this place. Like we might have found America, but we didn't find this place. Nature is not a place that we inhabit, right? It's not some sort of a backdrop to our human existence. Rather than acknowledging that it may be the very system that gave us life. Of course it is. And continues to sustain us with every breath that we take. So we talk about using the planet, extracting from it, managing it, protecting it when necessary. But we rarely stop to acknowledge that without it, there is no us. So yeah, we got to take care of the planet because without the planet, there is no us. Without nature, we're done. Look at all the things that we're worried about right now. It's all about advancement and moving into the future. We are all living in the future and acting in the now rather than acknowledging the now. So we like the idea that everything is connected. Do you guys like that? Does anybody here believe like we're all connected? Everything's connected. Everything happens for a reason. We like that idea, but often we only do that in some sort of a poetic or energetic sense. But what if it's time to take note of the invisible yet unmistakable umbilical cord that connects all of us to each other and nature and not symbolically, you know, like back in the old days, I'm dating myself. I'm 54. Our phones used to have wires, but now our phones are wireless. We're wireless too, if you entertain this. Have you ever really paused to notice how much of the natural world exists by the way, above soil? Anybody here digging underground to look for nature? Now you go outside right now, you'll see that most of nature exists above soil. And I'm talking trees, animals, and the entire ecosystem is all in plain sight. There's more to it, but it's all in plain sight. And then all of a sudden, because you're on this episode with me today, you consider where all of it is actually coming from. We don't do that. You know that it's coming from the ground, from the soil, but you don't think that you're coming from the ground in the soil. Now I'm not crazy. I'm not telling you that the first human sprouted as something because we don't know where the first human, we know stories. I'm curious about that. Do we live in an environment or are we part of that environment? And that's setting aside all these stories that you've learned, especially in your formative years. By the way, a lot of you have different stories and it has to do with those first seven years and your life experience and what's happened and you have free will. Some of you have changed your mind about your stories, but you all have some sort of a story. Some of you have a story that I would resonate with. Some of you have a story that would make me think that you're crazy and vice versa, but we all carry stories about this. Do we live in an environment or are we part of that environment? Do you allow that? Setting aside the stories, right? We've become comfortable with all of those. Did we find this planet or did we come from it? Put that in your pipe and smoke it for a second. And if you can't put that in your pipe and smoke it, it's okay. You're just attached to your story. And the reason why we get attached to our stories is because we're afraid that they won't be right because of our stories aren't right and we'll sit in this space where we don't know something. That's kind of perceived as a bad thing. I love not knowing. One of my favorite answers when somebody asked me a question, I coach a lot of people, a lot of clients, a lot of coaches, and I also have the Make Sense Academy. I don't need to be right about stuff. I love to just listen. Let's have a look under the hood today. I love to entertain what might be. So beneath the surface of all of this nature is a vast living, there's that word vast again, living network. And that's of roots, systems, fungi, and they all, and you know this, that anybody is into the movie Avatar. Avatar really hits this well. I love that. That there's this inner network under the soil. And the tree that you see outside of your window right now is communicating directly via wires with a tree on the other side of the planet, hard wire. And then there's the soil that offers a home to that interconnected planetary nervous system. Everything above and below is in full communication, but we're different. We're different. We're separate from that. Just pause for a second. What the hell am I talking about? I'm just assessing the deal. And where is that assessment happening? The wonder and awe of the deal and that place where we all say, I don't friggin know, right? It's happening in the present moment. And remember, this is called, why am I not happy yet? And I'm challenging you to recognize. I think you are happy. You just forgot all hardwired and dependent on everything else. Nothing exists without anything. So there's no doubt that nature is all interconnected and it can't live without one another. Okay. And then we're there. Here we are walking upright on the surface. I love to look at human beings as mobile, wireless and self-aware versions of all of this, yet still utterly resistant to acknowledge that we are completely reliant on the same system. So how am I different than an orange tree or than an apple tree? That's why I say oranges on orange tree are oring and people are peopling, but they're coming from the same source. Maybe we're all breathing air processed by plants, consuming food grown from the soil, warmed by that spherical fireball. And we're all drinking water that's coming from where mountains and filtered through layers of stone. Sometimes no different. You're not different. I'm not different. We're all the same. And that acknowledgement is happening now. I love to look at human beings as some sort of Bluetooth form of nature. Now, do you have anything against being considered part of nature? I don't. I think it's cool. So this raises a fascination and slightly unsettling question. What if humans aren't separate from nature at all, but an interface of it? I'm writing a fictional book right now on this and I think it's super cool. And it's only fictional because it's not what everybody else thinks, but it might be nature is doing what it has always done, experimenting, adapting, expressing itself, which is probably what we all need to do more of for our own growth needs. But we're some sort of an advanced form of it. I think that we've come from nature and we're an advanced form of it because we're wireless, just like our phones became. If this is the case that humans are some sort of wireless Bluetooth form of it, then wonder and awe aren't optional emotions that we strive for. They're the recognition and remembering, which is I think all we need to do is remember something that already is now that the recognition and remembering of something that we once knew. I believe we once knew all of this stuff before we learned to think for ourselves as separate and develop all these stories. I entertain the idea that all of these stories that we tell, these narratives, I understand why we came up with them. This is natural selection. We all felt like we needed to know. So we had to make it up. We had to make it up. Now, if that ruffles your feathers, that would have been me even years ago. It ruffled my feathers because it was not what I had decided on, but that's not open and curious. That's going around with your right protect switch, like on an SD card on the closed to new information. Remember, if you want to record on an SD disk, you're going to need to undo that switch on the side. By the way, this is not avoidance. This is just perspective. Remember, we're arming you with awareness. It's just perspective. Somebody that doesn't understand that statement right there will just say this guy's office rocker and you might watch and listen to my show because of that. I'm not off my rocker. I just like to entertain everything because I understand that we don't know and I don't need to know. So I just like to get open and curious. And that perspective has a way of restoring clarity about where we came from. It also rearranges how you experience time when you think like this, when you live in the present moment. Look at time. Time is all about moving into the future. If you look at life like an hourglass, we're living in the middle where the sands are passing through. Do focus on how much sand is left and how much sand has transpired, but where things are actually happening is in the middle. I was writing this morning the daily signal I write every day. That's a bunch of you that take advantage of that. And they're just short insights like this that help you reclaim control of your mind before the noise gets loud in the world. But I was talking about the idea of connecting all the dots. Steve Jobs spoke about this one time, the idea that we're always trying to connect the dots. The only place you can connect the dot is in the past because there's no dots yet in the future. There's just predictions. So what the present moment is, is just a dot. What are you doing with this dot? What are you doing with this dot? Because it's what's going to prompt future dots than now. So it rearranges our perspective and it changes how we evaluate time. And the reason why is it truly recognizes that this ride from birth to the crematorium isn't some sort of rehearsal. Procrastination begins to lose its power when you do that. You can't procrastinate in the present moment. Procrastination requires an evaluation of the future. You can't procrastinate in the present moment. Presence becomes a valuable asset and boy is it, I call it the generous present moment. And relationships feel more precious and life starts to look less like something to improve and optimize rather than something to experience fully. This explains why people who come close to dying often return with a different orientation to life, a near-death experience. There's not a lot of plant medicine work as well, which is similar to that. Those people don't come back with like better systems or stronger beliefs and strategies. They come back with gratitude, wonder, and awe for the present moment and where life is taking place. What about you? Do you need to almost die before you acknowledge that? You might. I went through a lot of almost deaths in my life to acknowledge this. You know, when you read my book, you'll see just like you, I was on the edge of despair in life and it was should or get off the pot. I'm still here. So perhaps the first step in this process isn't to innovate or escape from something, but maybe today we're just going to arm ourselves with the weapon of awareness and remember. And what are we going to remember? We're going to try to remember, and we have to entertain this, the story before the stories. What's the story before the story? When somebody shares their story and have an exclamation point at the end as if it's, you know, fact, I say, what about before that? Nobody can ever answer that question. So we always just give that up to the higher power. What if higher was lower and maybe living in the present moment isn't about calming or controlling the mind, but about finally noticing where you already are and the wonder and awe of that noticing. That's what we've just done today. Standing on a spinning rock, alive, aware, and inclusive. Do you know how I feel right now? I feel like all of you are extensions of me and I'm an extension of all of you. And that's why lovers, haters, unhealthy, healthy, crazy, not crazy. I love all of us because we're all collectively creating this moment that I just love so much. What are my aspirations and goals for 2026? Probably similar to you, but one that might be different is to enjoy the generous, gracious, abundant, more than I ever asked for present moment. So that's why we say to unwrap the present moment. That's it for today. To support the Make Sense with Dr. JC podcast, be sure to subscribe, like, and share, as well as follow the Make Sense sub stack for free daily quotes, live streams, and blogs. And remember, learning without action is just another form of distraction. If something hit home and you learn something today, give it away. That's the only way it's going to stay. See you next time. If you liked the show, please take a moment to rate, review, and subscribe. It really does help the show to grow. Thank you for listening.