#27: Reality Shattering Insights: Craig Polsfuss on Instant Transformation
MARCH 13, 2025
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In this episode of Courage to Heal, Anna interviews Craig Polsfuss, author of "Reality Shattering Insights." Craig shares his powerful journey of personal awakening that completely transformed his life and professional approach.
Discover how Craig combines psychology, spirituality, and brain science to reveal the profound truth that everything we're seeking is already within us. Learn about:
How one simple insight can radically change your entire reality
The "outside-in" paradigm trap that keeps most people stuck
Why the mind was designed first as a receiver, not a thinker
The inspiring story of a welder whose life was transformed by a single realization
Practical steps to access your inner source of healing and transformation
Craig explains how his four-book series "The Vortex of Living Truth" guides readers toward experiencing what he calls "personal heaven on earth." If you've ever felt that something significant is missing from traditional approaches to personal growth, this episode offers a refreshing perspective on how complete transformation is possible in an instant.
[01:08] The Power of Personal Transformation
[03:56] Synchronicities and New Understandings
[08:25] The Role of Brain Science in Awakening
[10:29] Reality Shattering Insights: The Book Series
[17:09] Unlocking Inner Potential
[24:24] Practical Steps to Inner Peace
Episode Links:
Transcript
Anna: Hello friends and welcome to Courage to Heal. Today, I'm very excited to present a special guest for you. His name is Craig Polsfuss.
Craig is a pioneering psychologist and author of Reality Shattering Insights. He integrates psychology, spirituality, and brain science to help people achieve mental well-being, top performance, and spiritual insight. Through his groundbreaking work, combining psycho spiritual insights with brain science, Craig offers a unique perspective on how humans can achieve complete transformation in an instant.
Craig, welcome to Courage to Heal. It's a pleasure to have you here.
Craig: I'm so grateful to be here. Thank you for giving me this chance and a chance for your listeners. To hear, not only hear about this possibility, but really just be reminded. Maybe they don't know, but hopefully we'll remind people that, Oh yeah, I know that place in me where that transformation can come from.
Anna: Okay. Oh, how interesting. Well, I would like to get started by asking. You know, what does a complete personal transformation actually look like and is instant change truly possible?
Craig: Well, both of those are absolutely possible because it happened to me. I didn't just study this and then I'm passing along what I learned, although I have further studied.
As you were saying in the introduction, the mind, the brain, spirituality, and all that, but it really came alive for me when I had my own awakening at age 28. So, whatever you or your audience are hearing from me is first and foremost based in my own experience, and I'm the authority of that, and I'm not trying to get anybody to change their mind in the sense of believe something different.
As I kind of hinted at there at the beginning, what I realized is this, I'm going to use language that might sound strange or great depending on the listener, but everything we're looking for is on the inside of us. And I had an experience of that, that when you really experience the truth of that, you cannot, you know, there's the saying, you can't unsee what you've seen.
Well, that happened to me, I can't unsee that I don't want to, but then it's like, Oh my God, you know, not only is this wonderful and I want to live in this. And grow in it because it's an infinite thing as much as possible, but I want to get the good news out to others, especially those who are suffering.
And I was already, I was just licensed as a psychologist at that age. So I was new to the field, and I just wanted to get this, just even the possibility of it out there to people, let alone, well, okay, I'm open to the possibility, tell me more, you know? So, maybe I'll continue a little bit with my personal story.
So after that awakening, I'm going to say some outrageous things here and I'll just give it to you as, as I will, and then we'll let you and your audience respond as they, they will. You realize you're one with everything and that everything's connected and everything in a sense is you and it's, and life and, and the world, it's on your side, even though it doesn't necessarily appear or feel that way sometimes, and we can go into examples of that if you want, but realizing that leads to what my maybe Christians would call a life of miracles and blessings.
But, and I. I was raised Christian, so I love speaking in that context, but the word I tend to use is synchronicities. There are synchronicities all around us and we don't see them till we see them. And so when you wake up significantly, you see them. And one of the synchronicities was that there was a brand-new understanding in the field of psychology that was just emerging through.
An awakening that a welder had, not a psychologist, and his life completely changed. And as he began to, and I talk about him in my book, reality shattering insights, he's a living example of how he got a simple insight, which we can talk more about specifically if you want, and it completely changed his life.
And as he began to share what he understood, other people's lives changed, their depression went away, their anxiety went away, their marriages came together. And some psychologists heard about this guy and said, we should go check him out. And when they did, they got blown away. And that was the beginning of it coming into the field of psychology.
And I was a couple of notches down from that. They knew somebody who knew somebody who told me about, well, you know, there's this new thing. Do you know about this new breakthrough? And on the one hand, I said, no, cause I didn't on the other hand, it was like, well, because, and I didn't say this to the person who asked me that, but I knew from my own awakening, the field needs a breakthrough.
I was considering leaving the field because this was like, this was like in the late seventies, early eighties. And even though we're, there were wonderful new things emerging, the main context. And it still is the main context of the conventional field of psychology and mental health. It's an outside-in paradigm and it was like, okay, so your past scarred you.
And the way to heal that is you have to go back into it, go back into your painful past and going through that will eventually heal it. Well, I knew that there's a grain of truth in that, but I knew that's not the truth. Right here, right now, there's this source of insight. Some people might call it higher consciousness.
That is available right now and to whatever degree we can open up to that possibility and put our interest there and glimpse it, we'll start to receive it. And so, and I say in my reality shattering insights book at one point, I did use this title to kind of be dramatic and Sid's story and my story in a way were dramatic, but this changing in an instant.
In a way it can be the result of a long journey of awakening more and more and more. And then you come to a threshold, and you wake up, you wake up in a significant way that you cannot go back and you'd, and like I said, and it's wonderful. So that led me to connect with this emergence of this new understanding in the field.
I became one of the probably first 25 psychologists in the world to join in that. Cause once I saw it, what this man understood, it was so. Not totally, but almost totally in alignment with what I experienced that I knew instantly, Oh, I'm staying in the field and I'll be, I have some peers now, I'm not alone.
And we can begin bringing this to the world which we have, it's spread all over the world. Now it's not in the mainstream yet, which is interesting decades later, it's gone all over. It's produced amazing results, which I can tell you more about in specifics like mental health and relationships and addictions.
All kinds of stuff. And it also applies in not just for healing, but for growth. So it's been used in the business world and in education to help businesses and people perform better and, you know, more optimal peak performance and that kind of thing. And I ended up getting published in a couple of professional journals, applying it to leadership and high performance.
So that awakening in me readied me to see this opportunity that I didn't even know at first. It was just like, Hey, have you heard about this guy? Oh yeah, that sounds interesting. And I, and then boom and another big, and there's one other kind of major synchronicity along those lines that I'll share with you.
And there are many, many smaller ones as we go. Like, Oh, when I need a client, Oh, client shows up when I'm really like, now I'm really ready to write a book. Oh, boom, boom, boom. And these opportunities show up and it just feels right. If there's a right feeling to it, that's part of the key. So one of these other synchronicities was I happened to meet with a doctor who had developed a breakthrough brain science program for personal transformation.
And we just clicked. I became. In short order, a part of his top team, and he was just developing this, and for a decade, I worked with him and in that and became a national spokesperson for that program and. And what that program did for me is it helped me understand the mind, body, physiological side of awakening and that people can completely awaken as, as this welder did by just hearing some truth at a level he hadn't expected.
And that began to just explode his mind, so to speak, and clarify something that was so obvious, but he hadn't seen it. And once it became obvious. His whole painful past and everything had to drop away. But now I understood the mind, body, and specifically the neuroscience, brain science side of the equation and how that can be utilized to expedite awakening.
And it explained how I had my awakening, which I won't get into the details right now, but had that kind of a component to it, it wasn't just, Oh, I had an awakening cause I heard some truth at a deeper level. I was hearing truth at a deeper level. And then part of that was, and if, and if you'd like to connect to the deepest part of you very specifically.
You can be shown how to, in a very practical way and the messenger was like, you don't have to believe me, but if you're interested, I'll show you, and then you experience it for yourself and you decide for yourself. And I thought, well, and it was free, and I thought, well, that's fair. And I experienced it for myself and boom, it was more than I hoped for.
So I've been on fire about that ever since. And things have evolved, you know, and, and, and now I'm to the point where I've written this book. The full title of the book is “Reality Shattering Insights: Begin Life's Journey.” And then there's a little tagline under it on the front that says exploring the human ability to completely transform in an instant, and I'm a living example.
This man I talk about in the, in that this welder I talk about in the book as well. And then there's other examples from history. But so what I do, that's kind of unique, I think, and it's effective cause I'm getting feedback about it in the first book in the book, it's the first of four, I'll tell you about that in a moment.
Is I don't just talk about it. I, right up front in the book, I say, I'm going to talk about this and give you some living examples, but I'm actually going to try to facilitate some of this. For you as the reader through this book. And so I kind of set the stage for that. And I'm just so touched by the reviews before I finished the manuscript, I had run it by other people just to get feedback as I was developing it.
And the feedback I'm getting is that for those who are open-minded and especially sincere, open hearted and ready, it can spark who knows what. This book is the first of four books. It's a four-book series that I'm entitling the Vortex of Living Truth.
And the first book, “Reality Shattering Insights,” was just meant to put out that possibility that, you know, one thought could change your life. One insight. And I think if anybody who's ready would reflect on that, that would resonate. Because even on a more, a smaller level, they might go, “Well, yeah, I know, I used to think this about something and then I got an insight and my view totally changed and it helped.”
You know, like I've gotten insights that have made various degrees of impact on me. There must be insights at the level of so fundamental that it could give me a whole view of new view and experience of who I am and what life really is and how it works. So I was just meaning in that book to put out that possibility.
Then for those who respond to that, the second book is called Your Universal Powers. Life backs you up. I go more in depth into this new breakthrough in the field of psychology. The three core principles of understanding, which if we have time, I can go into a little bit of that too, that as people start to look into that, it's not a matter of, here's how it works.
You better believe it. And then you, you know, then you'll have a good life. It's like, what do you think of this? This is what we've discovered. We know whether you recognize it or not. We know you already know this, this is already in you. And if you listen and consider, you're going to start to feel a resonance in you and recognize, Oh my God, yes, that's true.
Like, and we can get examples of that, but. But so that second book tells that welder story more in depth, how his insights led to this new understanding in the field, the three core principles of that field, because it's called “The Three Principles.” Mind consciousness and thought in a new depth of understanding of what those are and how we are those, and they create our experience and so that's what book two is about.
So it's kind of like you can have an insight that can take you way more into the truth of you and all things and from a much higher view. Here's an understanding describing that truth and let's see if it resonates with you.
And then the third book is like, because that process in the second book, I introduced the term partial inversion as we listen and reflect, so it's like that possibility of transforming, not just to transform, but deep down, each of us knows we were created for something and not just to be a good mom or a good psychologist or that too, but for something on a deeper level that until it's recognized and fulfilled, something won't feel right in us.
And this speaks to that. So book two is about, Hey, look at it, look at this. And as you do and reflect and listen deeper, you partially invert your consciousness or as the words have been go within, you start to just reflect and listen and go deeper inside yourself and your own depth of understanding.
And you might feel like it's touching your soul too, like you're going within to your heart or something. So then book three is called “Know Source in Your Heart.”
Life originates inside, so know source in your heart. So it's not just, Oh, I'm understanding and I'm realizing more and more and more, which parallels my experience that was happening. But then when I had my personal awakening, it was like I was shown how to fully invert my consciousness. And it's, this is just for those who that makes sense in there.
It resonates and they want, so it's like, I'd like to experience that, see what that is. So I was shown how to not just listen deeper and deeper and get more and more insight and get my life, get better and better, which was wonderful. But there was a feeling of, I needed to arrive in or experience something in me that I hadn't yet.
I was getting closer and closer, but I hadn't yet. And if it's possible that I can be shown how to connect directly to that, I'm open to it. So that's what I talk about in book three. And that's kind of completes the cycle. Book four is called “Invitation to the Infinite.” And it's basically like, where do we go from here now, if you've gone through this with me, not just in my books, but then to the resources outside of my books that I point to through those books, and you've been on this journey, here we are together, we're literally, if you can see it, and most, I'm, I'm certain everyone at that point would be, they might not describe it the way I'm about to describe it, but it would be like, I'm moving into my personal heaven on earth and we're all those of us who are waking up to this can collectively joined together.
And collectively do that individually, as well as together and help for a full global transformation in the human species. So it's kind of that big picture. Where do we go from here?
Anna: I love this idea that everything we need is within us. So then I, I'm curious, what are the first steps to begin this journey towards this awakening?
Craig: Well, to look within us, right? And it's like, well, or come at this way. Well, if it's within us, why don't I experience that? Well, then if that, what I said, it's within us is true. Well, then it must be, I must be innocently looking in the wrong direction. Well, what does that mean? And this gets really clarified in book two.
So I lay out 14 reality shattering insights in the book, and this is one of them, or I might hit on a couple of them. Cause they're all connected.
Most of humanity lives in a psychological paradigm that I would describe as outside in. And that is, basically, whatever's on the outside creates my experience. The sunny day makes me smile. The traffic makes me stressed. My money problems worry me. I'm a victim. Whatever life throws at me, I guess I'm a victim and, oh, I really don't have much power.
And so we feel worse and worse and worse because we're, look, we've got, we don't understand some, I've called it Maya, the illusion, the great illusion. Well, what's that, that we are not our experience.
Well, then what is our experience? Our experience is the result of what our mind does. Of what our mind does. Let's just finish it there. So I'm in traffic and my mind makes it into a stressful situation. Or for a moment, I notice, wait a minute, I'm in traffic and I'm not stressed. Or, I'm actually happy that this is delaying me so I don't have to go to that meeting I didn't want to go to.
Same situation, different perception, different experience, usually we're just not conscious that we're making it up as we go all the time. And this understanding is not tell yourself that and try to make yourself remember that. No, no, that's too hard. That's too, that's still looking to the outside. I don't want to say looking out is the wrong direction.
It's just not, if you want your inner peace and fulfillment and power and potential. It's not in the world, it's in you and what you bring to your world. So I'm not saying there's not a world out there, but I'm saying your experience of it is just a mirror. It's just reflecting what you're doing with it, with that, that welder.
Here's the insight shattered his old suffering world. He was 42 years old. He was adopted when he was a kid. He grew up in Scotland for a few years and then was adopted by people in Vancouver, the Vancouver area of Canada and moved there.
He felt his own parents gave him up. So he grew up feeling that way and had to drop out of school before everybody else because he had to go to work for make money for his family because they were so poor. So he had this low self-image, low self-feeling. And because of that, he thought he was not well educated. He could not speak very well.
He was not well-read. And he had so much in self-consciousness and anxiety about that. That he said when he got around people with education, he could barely speak or not speak, depending if they were doctors, he could not speak in front of them because he thought he'd sound miserable. So he and a friend who had known him for a long time, and he wasn't, this guy wasn't spiritual or religious, and he didn't particularly take to therapy or anything.
You're like, it wasn't attracted to that, but he heard that this famous American psychologist was coming to town to talk. And his friend, somehow his friend brought it up and said, well, let's go. And so we went with his friend and the psychologist was talking about insecurity and how it affects us and the welder's thinking, man, that really fits.
I'm so insecure. So afterwards, he and his friend are walking along the ocean on the beach, talking to each other, and he's going on and on to his friend about how insecure he is. And his friend has known him for a long time. And he says to him, “Wait a minute, you're, I've known you for what, 13 years, you're not insecure, you just think you are.”
Now when he heard that, he said, I heard my first spiritual fact. He said, I didn't just hear, you're not insecure, you just think you are. He said, I heard, you know, everything you've ever experienced, you've made up in your mind. And it resonated so true with him that it stunned him.
And it was like, Oh my God. That's right. And he went into this deep reflection that went deeper and deeper and deeper. And he said it took three days and three nights for him just to be in this process of reflection and awakening. And he said, I didn't sleep because I went, if I slept, it felt like 15 minutes and it felt so good.
I didn't want to sleep. And I kept getting, and he said, I felt like university courses were coming into my head. You know, through other models in the world, they've called that karmic release and there's other names for that. So, it happens in human history to particular individuals, but can we, not being so special, just being an ordinary person, access that?
Absolutely. It's available now, especially with through internet and stuff, we can tell people that it's available, how it's available, how they can make use of it. So. When he was, there's a much longer story, but when he was through this three days and three nights, he was in a completely different place.
Things were healed and released. Like the thought came up in his mind, well, I've, I've felt unlovable cause I was, I'm, I was adopted and my own parents gave me up and in the past he would agree with that and it would stay there. And he'd just feel that now that he's in this open possibility of seeing something new.
What the thought that immediately came after that was, and then my adoptive parents took me in and loved me as their own, and he felt absolute love and gratitude now, and it replaced that feeling of being unlovable. So we have things like that just happening to him. And then he turned around and start sharing his experience.
And one thing he says is what we're looking for is right in front of us. And that we're one thought away from our mental health or our awakening. So it is right here. And it's not a matter of believing it. It's a mattering matter of having a sense that me that is true, or maybe it's true. And I'm going to look into that and you do it.
And the two ways that come to mind right now is just in your own mind. You're just kind of like. Oh, you're thinking about it and you're feeling about it. The other way is, well, out here in the world, how could you look into it? And what I'm trying to provide is a simple, easy way. Read my book. That'll help you and it will lead you further in the other books to these, these deeper understandings that step-by-step will open things.
Anna: So if we have this, I'm going to call this, I don't know if this is correct, but this kind of inner healer, this part of us, this higher consciousness that can heal. Anything and everything. Why do you think a lot of people out there fail to make significant life changes and fail to find this part?
Craig: Well, it's two sides there. And I kind of just addressed one. We're looking in the wrong direction. Everybody around us is agreeing with us. The outside. You know, the politics makes you crazy and what whatever it is in society and in our personal worlds and in our families, it gets reinforced that the, it's an outside in reality when in fact it's an inside out one.
And when we step back and go, oh, and start to consider that, then we start to see it, it becomes real and we can live in it. So the two sides are. Looking out and hearing me say something like this and that going, Oh yeah, that kind of fits the other side is we don't know how to look inside.
We've gotten so lost in what we believe is reality. Everything I've made up in my mind.
If you feel judged, you're doing that in your mind too. It's just like, Oh, I just took a perfectly good moment and made it better or made it worse with my thinking. Oh my gosh, this is an interesting power I have. I want to know it more. And so now this reflection of going inside happens. The truth of life will naturally pull us inside.
But it strikes people differently. A second grader hearing this message is going to hear one thing. A 10th grader’s going to hear another, a college students gonna hear the same message, get something different out of it. So we'll each get whatever we get, and then good, we can't unsee that. The truth will stick, it will be in us, and it will be helping us whether we're aware of it or not, and it really is cool when we start to become aware of it.
Anna: Craig, what's coming up for me right now, especially if we refer back to the beginning of this conversation, when you mentioned synchronicities is I'm sure there are some listeners who are listening to this now going, ah, that's not for me. But then there are some who are hearing this and something is catching their attention.
And to them, this is going to be one of those synchronicities that makes them look further into your book and just look into this insight, right? That all of this is within you.
So how would you say, can somebody unlock more of this inner potential? Is there anything that they can, you know, other than buying your book, obviously, which I would love to read, but is there anything that they can do?
Craig: Here's another reality shattering insight from my book that welder talked about too.
He said, do you realize your personal mind was not made first and foremost to think? What? Well, there it was and was made to think. And I learned to think and I learned to use it to do things in the world. Yeah. Yeah. It can do that. And it does do that. And in a sense, it is a tool, but what was it made first for?
It was made to be a receiver, a listener to what? There's a life intelligence in us. That we can know through a feeling, not through thinking. That's why if people are listening to this and they're getting a feeling of resonance or just a feeling about it, that's guiding them back, whether they know it or not, they're connecting back, they're using this talk to connect them back inside to that.
There's an attraction to it. And the more we get out of our head, we realize, Oh, wait a minute, I still do think. But I don't feel like I'm thinking, I just, I like right now, I know I'm thinking, but it's, it feels, I feel like I'm in flow.
I feel like there's no work to it. I feel authentic and I don't feel like, and I'm perfect. No, I know I can make mistakes and misread things, but there's that sense of freedom, relaxed flow and being authentically me doing my best with this moment.
So back to your question on a practical level, can you imagine living in the feeling of being on vacation while you're at work?
Well, that's a potential for you. And do you think you'd be more effective or less effective? And those who didn't fully understand would say, well, less effective because I wouldn't get anything done. And they were thinking, well, when you're in that relaxed state, you just sit there and you enjoy it. You don't do anything.
It's like, no. In this, you do, it wouldn't feel right after a while being at work and just sitting there. So there's a way to be in that perfect place of flow state clarity.
Anna: I think, if a person is open to it, to these ideas of synchronicities, to having this inside healer, to be able to have this awakening so that they can take this journey. I really want to thank you for joining me today and for giving all of these insights.
And I want to remind everybody that “Reality Shattering Insights” is a bestseller on Amazon. You can get it right now. Once again, Craig, thank you so much. This was a very enlightening interview. I'm looking forward to checking out these reality shattering insights.
Thank you for stopping by.
Craig: And thanks for your, for the opportunity and for your openness. And I'll bet your listeners are similar, that they're open people interested in new possibilities like this in life.
Anna: Right, right. And for all of you listening, I hope you leave feeling a little more empowered. Remember healing takes time and you're exactly where you need to be. Take care of yourselves. And until we meet again. Be kind to your heart.
