Introduction to Innate Health Self-Study Course 🔖

• 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.
• The beauty of this course is that after each lesson, there's a little drop down for you to ‘Explore more 🧩’ – this comprises a carefully selected group 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 (and I do mean this)

• 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.

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:

• The Insight Series: 17 Days to Innate Health

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…

• The red flag of ‘one solution’

Right… that's enough for now, let's crack on 🚀

If there's one thing that minds don't like, it's the idea of not being in charge of everything. They really, really like to think they're doing stuff; that they're in control of your wellbeing… and this couldn't be further from the truth.

As far as your wellbeing and the mind is concerned, there really is nothing for it to do; nothing for it to apply. As a client of mine discovered for themselves:

• “Trying to apply what I've learned”

I also fell flat on my face into this trap from years of working really hard on my ‘personal development’ – specifically trying to take control of my thought processes:

• Why changing your thoughts isn't the smartest move

Trouble is, until we really see that there's nothing we have to do, to experience wellbeing, the mind comes up with a story that says something like:

📦🗣️ “But if I don't do anything, then I'll just be a useless blob. I need to be thinking and working (and maybe a bit stressed and under pressure), otherwise I'll never get anything done!”

…and that acts as a huge barrier to further exploration of the Innate Health understanding.

The good news is, that's absolute nonsense—more useless mind rubbish that can also be ignored—as these pieces spell out for you:

• An invitation to apathy (A look at what exactly it is that thinks it's doing something)
• Not answering your questions (A bit like the person who asked the question in the Lesson 2 video – you don't get answers that ego wants to hear; you get a solution to your problem)
• Practice! (which explores the tension between doing and not doing… and what constructive ‘doing’ looks like).

All of this ‘not doing’ is really pointing to the fact that the changes we want to see in life—the big, long-lasting ones that make a real difference—come to us via insight, not willpower. And if you'd like to learn more about change through insight, try these Daily Reminders:

• Insight, and the capacity for insight (Showing you that the odds really are stacked in your favour)
• “But if I ignore my thinking” (Another of the mind's greatest hits – a myth we knock firmly on the head in this one)
• 17 Days: Implications (How the occurrence of insight just changes how you see life… without you having to lift a finger! Contains a super-impactful 4 min audio clip on the topic from Chip Chipman)
• It's just going to go away (That thing you don't like? This is how it goes away. This one even includes some examples of ‘how’ to ‘do nothing’ 😁)

Finally, in case you were still labouring under the impression that this is all something you have to understand and take on board as a new ‘philosophy’ to live by… let's knock that one on the head too, before moving on:

• This is not a philosophy