It’s a Wednesday in early October. The temperature’s hit 33 by lunchtime. There’s a smell on the air that isn’t smoke yet but isn’t not-smoke either. You walked from the carpark to your office and noticed it. You didn’t say anything. You went inside.
By midweek the BoM is forecasting 37 for Friday. The wind is meant to come up. Someone in the office mentions the words “fire season” in a slightly different tone of voice than they would have used three months ago. The conversation doesn’t dwell. The afternoon moves on.
That evening, you check the Fires Near Me app for no particular reason. You haven’t checked it since last March. You don’t tell anyone.
This pattern is real and it has a name nobody quite uses out loud. The body, in much of Australia, has learned what October means. It’s been learning since well before the 2019-2020 fires, but those fires sharpened the learning. The body now starts paying attention several weeks before fire season has officially begun, and once it starts paying attention, it doesn’t quite stop until autumn.
You’re not in danger. There’s no fire near you. Nothing has happened yet.
The body’s still on. That’s the topic of this article.
What the Body Learned
A particular Australian body - the one that lived through the Black Summer, or that lost a property in the 2009 fires, or that drove through smoke on a holiday in 2003, or that watched the news from a regional town a generation ago - carries a learning that the conscious mind doesn’t always have access to. The learning is that fire is not an abstraction here. It comes for people. The body has filed that, and the body remembers.
Even Australians who haven’t personally been near a fire have absorbed the learning culturally. The footage in 2019-2020 was inescapable. The orange skies in Sydney and Melbourne. The smoke that travelled to New Zealand. The koala vision that ran on every news bulletin for months. The dollar amounts of donations. The footage of fire trucks in towns most of us couldn’t have found on a map a year earlier.
That footage didn’t go away when the fires did. It got filed in the body of a generation of Australians who now know, somatically, what the worst version of a hot windy day in October can produce.
So the body pays attention. The wind, the smell, the dryness, the temperature crossing a threshold three weeks earlier than it used to - the body is reading all of it, running a small ongoing assessment from late September until autumn. The assessment runs whether or not the conscious mind has signed off on it.
That’s not anxiety in the diagnostic sense. It’s a body that’s done the learning and isn’t going to forget.
Where the Watchfulness Actually Lives
You’ll have noticed the pattern by now. The October hyper-vigilance. The reflexive Fires Near Me checking. The slight tightness in your chest when the wind comes up. The way you read the weather differently than friends in the UK or Canada or wherever do. You’ve probably tried to talk yourself out of it. “There’s no fire. I’m overreacting. The forecast’s fine.”
The talking-yourself-out-of-it doesn’t quite work. That’s because the talking is happening at the conscious level - about five per cent of what’s running in you at any given moment - and the watchfulness is happening at a different level. The other ninety-five per cent. The subconscious. The body’s own running risk assessment, which doesn’t speak the language of reassurance.
For a lot of Australians, that subconscious script runs something like: Watch the wind. Watch the smell. Watch the temperature. The body knows what these things can mean. Stay ready.
It doesn’t run as language. It runs as the small grip in your chest on a hot windy day in October. The reflex to check the app. The way you don’t quite settle into a Sunday in mid-November the way you’d settle into one in May.
The conscious-level reassurance doesn’t reach the watchfulness. The watchfulness operates at a layer below it.
What the Method Reaches
What needs updating is not the conscious assessment of fire risk. The conscious assessment is fine. What needs updating is the body’s anticipatory bracing, which has been running on a different track from the conscious assessment and doesn’t take its orders from the data.
The bracing was installed by experience, by the seasons that mattered and the seasons that almost did. It got filed at a layer that doesn’t read statistical preparedness pages. Reaching that layer requires writing to it directly, in a form it will receive as an instruction rather than as more cognitive activity arriving from the floor above.
That form is a specifically worded request, signalled by a trigger phrase whose oddness flags it as different from regular mental traffic. The phrase is “Purple Cow.” One statement. Said once. No repetition.
Try It For Yourself
Read each statement below slowly - out loud if you can. Say it once, then stop. Let a moment of quiet follow before the next one.
“Subconscious, when I say Purple Cow, you will get rid of the constant low-grade watchfulness I’ve been running through fire season every year, the held tension every hot windy day from October to autumn, and the way my body can’t quite settle when the wind comes up, and keep me free from that from now on, and do this in a way that is natural, easy, instant and graceful. Purple Cow.”
Say it once. Then pause and notice.
“Subconscious, when I say Purple Cow, you will get rid of the belief that being on alert is what keeps me and the people I care about safe, that letting my body settle would be reckless, that the watchfulness is the same thing as being prepared, and the conviction that the cost of carrying this is just what living in this country requires, and keep me free from that from now on, and do this in a way that is natural, easy, instant and graceful. Purple Cow.”
Say it once. Take a breath. Let it settle.
“Subconscious, when I say Purple Cow, you will make it easy for me to take fire season seriously without running the constant low-grade alarm in my body, to be appropriately aware without being held in tension, and to let the body settle on days when nothing is happening, and keep me free from that from now on, and do this in a way that is natural, easy, instant and graceful. Purple Cow.”
Say it once. Then simply rest for a moment.
What Just Eased
You may have felt something small. A breath that went somewhere it hadn’t been reaching. A slight unclenching in the chest, where the fire-season watchfulness has been sitting. A faint sense, even small, that the small ongoing alarm has stepped back a notch. Whatever happened, the subconscious received the signal at the layer where the watchfulness has been running.
This kind of shift doesn’t arrive with drama. It tends to arrive as less of something - less of the held tension, a slightly quieter version of the running assessment.
What you just did is the entry-level move of Inner Influencing. There are deeper layers underneath - the original learnings about fire your body did, the cultural inheritance of 2019-2020 and every fire season since, the long Australian history of living with this particular kind of risk. The free Inner Influencing Discovery Kit takes you further into this work and explains why it reaches what other methods don’t.
A lot of Australians have been on alert for so many Octobers they’ve stopped distinguishing alertness from baseline.
There’s a baseline underneath the alertness. The subconscious can find it again.
The subconscious doesn’t need an argument. It needs the right signal at the right level. You’ve just sent one.