Welcome To Slowdown Sunday

Hey there, sweet spotters. You did it. You got to slow down Sunday with me here on The Sweet Spot. I'm Dr. Derek Sweet. I'm your host of The Sweet Spot. We've been having a wonderful series here on The Sweet Spot speaking about the Inner Edge, and we find ourselves in our very last episode here. It's uh amazing how fast the week goes, isn't it? Oh wow, we're here. The Inner Edge final episode. You were built like the stars here on Slowdown Sunday. So yeah, come sit with me for a sec. As you know, I'm a board certified psychiatrist. I work in elite performance, but more than that, I enjoy being your teammate here in the game of life. Before we go into anything, let me gather this week in a way that we have not said it. We always circled the week, but I felt like I would just put it differently to you. You know, all week we've been circling one truth from different angles. You're not overwhelmed because you're weak, you're strained because you're powerful, powerful beyond measure, and carrying all this weight on you that you've had to carry every single day. And so pressure has not been the villain. It's really you unmanaged pressure that's the villain. Pressure is always there, and you've always been really good about handling it. We've talked about the wiring, about how your nervous system learns patterns under stress and how it repeats certain patterns under stress, and we've talked about how you change those patterns. We've talked about your recovery speed shaping how long something is gonna last. And we talked about finishing strong, not as intensity, but as alignment. So if you haven't heard these episodes this week at your leisure, please go back. I want you to know that we took inner edge and we synthesized it into this. Inner edge being the capacity to generate stability from within. While the outside world is applying all this force, throwing everything at us. We, as sweet spotters here, we as the folks who have studied the inner edge, we protect our inner edge, not with hype or or personality or tricks, we just stand firm, we stand strong. It is our trained ability now to regulate, recover, and remain oriented to who we are, our identity, while the world is throwing everything at us. Right? We we are guarding our inner edge. Absolutely. So this is our last conversation this week on the inner edge, but it will not go away. It won't go away. So look, as you know, on Sunday we always talk about astrophysics, we talk about the universe, not to be spooky or anything, we just love weaving in something about the stars as a bit of a mirror to ourselves. You see, as a star shines because it has internal energy, something powerful is happening inside. Deep inside every star, fusion is happening. Atoms are pressing together, generating heat, generating light, generating an outward force that holds the star open against the force of gravity pressing in on the star from every direction. Gravity never stops, it's always there, always compressing. That's just how the universe works. The star generates enough energy from within itself to stay open, to stay bright, to stay whole. That's the inner edge of that star. And you know exactly where I'm going. Your life has gravity too. Deadlines, expectation, fatigue, injuries, illness, responsibilities. So much is happening. People who need you, that's a kind of gravity. Problems that don't solve themselves, that's a kind of gravity. Well, look, the inner edge is generating enough internal energy inside of you, enough clarity, enough rest, enough meaning and trust, so that you can stay open like the stars under all of it, so that you can keep shining while all this weight on you is so real. And here's what gets kind of beautiful, right? The universe has a law called entropy. Left alone, everything drifts towards disorder. That's what entropy is. Stars burn through fuel, systems wind down, things fall apart, because that's kind of like the default mode. Things will just go buck wild and crazy in all directions. That's what entropy is. Your inner world and my inner world kind of follows the same law without tending to our thoughts. If we don't guard our thoughts, don't you find that sometimes your mind is all over the place, like your thoughts are just scattered? Then I can end that's kind of an entropy. When your patience runs thin, you get tired, fatigued, and you're just all over the map. That's entropy in motion. That's a universal law in action. But the universe also teaches us something else. Stars are born inside chaos. The galaxies organize themselves out of dust. Yeah, there's this thing about order arising whenever energy is deliberately invested in it. And that's what today is. You're deliberately investing energy back into your inner system when you slow down. This is like anti-entrop entropy. I don't know if that's a term, but I just made it up. Okay, that's uh, you know, it's it's it's yeah, it's it's a it's sort of like the wound is the place where the light enters you. Rumi said that. I want you to sit with that. The wound is the place where the light enters. So that ultimately, wherever you find yourself sort of feeling all over the map and things are going crazy, that's the place to begin. And all week long we've been exploring pressure, compression, what that means when life is pressing in. Well, that's where the opening is. The places you've been squeezed, stretched, tested, where entropy is just going left and right, those are the places that your edge has to become visible. You're not a drop in the ocean, you're the entire ocean in a drop. See, you gotta flip things because the stars are in us just as much as we are in the stars. We both have capacity for light, the same ability to generate energy from within, to shine, same architecture, same carbons and hydrogens, and all the elements. You were built like the stars. Absolutely. So, today is slowdown Sunday. We use the universe to remind us that we're connected to this universe. We remind ourselves that the sun rises and it sets, that rain can fall and the clouds can form, that the grass is growing quietly, that life is occurring out there. Give yourself 10 minutes of silence. Let your thoughts settle like the water. Step outside, look at the sky for a minute. Remind your nervous system that you're a part of something vast and unhurried. You're a part of a huge universe. I heard a beautiful quote from a friend of mine that, you know, it's tough to see yourself in the picture because you're in the picture. And I didn't understand what he was saying until I grasped that, yeah, it's hard to actually see the picture if the picture is being taken of you while you're in it. You have to step outside of the picture to look at the picture. It's so kind of crazy. I think a better way for me to understand it is you can't see the frame if you're in the picture, or it's hard to see the frame when you're in the picture. So a lot of times it's about stepping outside of ourselves, being an anti-entropy to restore our fusion. That's inner edge going deep. You are built like the stars, and the only thing that requires, that requires is that you keep your inner fire tended, that you're actually taking care of your inner fire, that you're slowing down, that you're taking time to find stillness, to find silence, to find surrender. Yeah. To find some solitude. All the S's. So that you can recover, be refreshed, recalibrate, re-energize, all the R's. That's it for today. It's Slow Down Sunday. We took it easy today on you. There was no lesson. Just go tend to your fire. The universe is rooting for you. For science, for soul, and for success. This is the sweet spot. I'll see you Monday to make that move.