A structured, 8-part mini-course introducing the principles behind Innate Health, curated for Daily Reminders members.
01 FOUNDATIONS
1. A reminder of the one thing we all forget
2. What if there was nothing you had to do?
02 MECHANICS
3. The surprising truth behind how we experience the world
4. The know-it-all mind that keeps us from happiness
03 IMPLICATIONS
5. Anxiety is just a mind doing its job
6. How to move on from the past
7. A better experience of ever-changing moods
04 TRUE NATURE
8. Who we are before the mind has its say
01 FOUNDATIONS
To start with, welcome – I could not be happier to see you here!
👋🏻
This course page contains a treasure trove of carefully selected resources, all designed to give you a solid grounding in the Innate Health (‘3 Principles’ or ‘Inside-Out’) understanding, so you can see for yourself that happiness and contentment are much less work than you'd imagined.
This website's promise is:
…and if you slow down with these materials, you'll be well on the way.
Over the course of eight short lessons, we'll start to look in a different direction (FOUNDATIONS), get clear about how our psychological system works to deliver our moment-to-moment experience (MECHANICS), explore some IMPLICATIONS of living from this fresh perspective, and consider the identity of the one who's having this experience (TRUE NATURE).
That might sound like a lot to cover, and this course page is therefore designed for you to keep it as light, or to dive in as deep, as you'd like.
Each lesson includes some text and a short video (most are just 2-3 mins long), then for those who want to delve deeper on that lesson, there are tons of related additional materials beneath each one (Explore more 🧩 ▽) – just tap the down arrow toggle you'll see to the right, to open up all the extra resources.
Each of the 8 lessons builds on the previous, so it's worth tackling them in order, and there are no prizes for finishing quickly – it's not school and there's no test at the end!
If you're a read-the-instructions kind of person and want to get the most out of these resources, click the little down arrow toggle (▽) below, to read how:
Some practicalities, to get the most out of this ⤵️
- Every ‘card’ you see on this page is clickable and will take you to a specific Daily Reminder, elsewhere on the site
- The same goes for any linked text – it will take you to a Daily Reminder that will tell you more about that particular topic
- For that reason, you might like to Bookmark this page, so you can always find your way back here (the Daily Reminders can be a bit of a rabbit hole, if you follow your curiosity from one to the next)!
- Quick tip: It also shows up in the Explore → Premium 🔖 Content page, that groups together all the additional materials on the site
- For your information, the URL for this page you're on now is: https://www.gilespcroft.com/courses-intro
- I've presented the lessons in this course to you in a very specific order, so don't be tempted to jump ahead… try and work your way through, bit by bit.
- That said, this isn't school and there are no prizes (and no certificate) for ‘completing’ everything. In fact, if you approach these resources looking for information to understand, remember and apply, nothing will actually change for you (more on that below). Take your time and be led by your curiosity. More is not better.
- After each lesson, there's a little drop down for you to ‘Explore more 🧩’ – this comprises a bunch of linked out Daily Reminders that go deeper into the themes explored in that particular lesson, or tackle some of the most common ‘Yeah but…’s and ‘What if…’s that can arise at that point. (Although it's not actually a puzzle, the mind often turns this stuff into one, and these additional materials will help the pieces of the jigsaw fall into place for you, acting as a salve for the mind's naturally questioning nature.)
- Be mindful of the overall aim: Think less, live more. If you're experiencing the opposite—becoming agitated or more worrisome—take a break for a bit.
⚠️ Most importantly
- When something lands for you (i.e. you have a little insight: a moment where you find yourself saying “Oh yeah, I'd never thought of it like that before” 😳) stop what you're doing and step away. In other words, allow each insight room to breathe. Don't be too hasty to rush onward to the next insight. Change will happen in the background as a result of insights – if we give them the chance to bed in.
Lesson 1: A reminder of the one thing we all forget
We start at the beginning, as we should, by looking at where most of us are at with things like satisfaction, happiness and wellbeing – certainly where I was at, before I came across the Innate Health understanding.
You see we've been schooled—by our upbringing, our teachers, our parents and society in general—to believe that life works a particular way, and this first part calls all of that into question.
It's a bit of a scene-setting piece and the video also contains the central premise of the inside-out understanding, where I detail the ‘Two brain facts that change everything’, so it's essential viewing.
It's also a bit longer than the following parts, so make yourself a cuppa and relax into the story and the video:
Giles P Croft
Click to visit Lesson #1
Go Deeper on Lesson 1
Explore more 🧩
This lesson was quite wide-ranging, so there are lots of aspects to explore in more depth.
If you're curious about the nature of the transition that I experienced—the one that led to the creation of this entire website—then there's a series of posts that I wrote, giving you a blow by blow account of that ‘waking up’ process. It's here, and the observant among you will notice that it follows the same 4-steps we're working through in this course:
This really is a case of looking in a different direction from the usual model of understand something → remember it → apply it, so there are a few Daily Reminders that go out of their way to show you how the kind of change we're talking about on this course can come about:
- What this water bottle taught me about the process of change (A silly story that gives you a barn-door demonstration of instant, permanent change, through insight)
- Are you trying to figure it out? (Where the mind usually goes with this stuff, why that's not going to help, and what will)
- Unknown unknowns (How the big changes we're looking for—almost by definition—have to come from somewhere that's completely unfamiliar to us, or to the mind, at least)
- And I know I've mentioned it before, but The Journey is especially good at laying out the landscape, especially Part 01: FOUNDATIONS.
In the video from Lesson 1, I mention the ‘inside-out’ nature of our experience (with diagrams!) and this is the central misunderstanding that's keeping us all stuck. It's technically straying into MECHANICS territory here, but to whet your appetite, here are some pieces that look in more detail at that:
- It's time to update your map version (Unpicks that diagram you saw, a little more)
- 17 Days: Thought realisation (One of the longer posts from the Insight Series mentioned above – specifically what happened when I saw through this amazing trick of the mind… in the most mundane of everyday situations)
- Your reality is a perception of the mind (A super-impactful short video where I explain this curious fact, using three easy-to-understand metaphors.)
Finally, I know what minds are like: they baulk at the notion of simplicity, writing off everything that's not massively complicated as superficial flim-flam or, even worse, snake oil.
If yours is doing this, then I see you 👀 and I embrace your skepticism. (Like I say, don't believe a damn word I tell you! 😆) Just have a read of this, and head that troubled mind of yours off at the pass…
Right… that's enough for now, let's crack on 🚀