Ep #70: Feeling the Experience

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Hey, guys, and welcome back to the show. So where are we right now? It’s like I kind of want to laugh. I’ve been in a whirlwind all week long with my own emotional processing, my emotional experience, I’m feeling all of the things. There’s a lot of stuff going on and, again, it’s collective, there is lots of things going on outside of us. There’s lots of emotions, it’s like tumbleweed just kind of like around us everywhere.

I was thinking of this today, I was doing a coach session. We were processing emotion and it was like I could envision this field of tumbleweeds, where the tumbleweeds were actually instead of being on the ground in the field, they were in the body. And they would move from one place to another place and they just kind of shift through, which is very much like the TMS that we talk about, the mind body syndrome. Which is our brain creates this distraction in our body so that we don’t focus on the emotions that are repressed, so we don’t experience what’s trying to come up.

And so it’s like our brain looks for these tutories, these things that they can go focus on so that we don’t actually have to be in the present moment, we don’t have to be in the experience. And then our mind is constantly trying to figure things out, our intellect wants to know and make meaning of everything, rather than be an experience. And we see this happening so much this year, it’s kind of insane.

So, today we’re going to talk all about feelings and allowing the experience. How can we stay in present? How can we stay right now and not go backwards, and not go into all of those stories of what happened and bring them forward into the experience? Because that’s typically what we do as humans, we stack stories, we do this in our relationships, we do this in our business, we do this with our friendships, and our clients, and just what the humans do.

The humans are always gathering evidence to make sure that we stay safe, that we stay protected, so that we’re always on guard, so it doesn’t happen again. And we live in that and don’t see it because we lack awareness. That is what I love about thought work.

And what I love about the model is really recognizing what part of it we are in. Is it fact? What is the circumstance? Is that just something someone said? Is that something that they experience? Is that their perception? Or is this an actual fact? And then what is our thought about that? And when we think that thought, how do we feel? And when we feel that way how do we respond or react and then what are the results that we get?

And so what we’re doing is just kind of like we keep these tumbleweeds going and these stories, and this illusion, this separation and it just persist. It’s like and the more we resist it, and the more we don’t want to feel it, and the more we don’t want to explore it, and the more unsafe we feel, that we can’t express as humans. We can’t be in our own experience because then there’s judgment and comparison, and control, and manipulation, and what we should be doing and shouldn’t be doing.

And what’s happening is everyone is stepping out of their own experience. I have seen this so many times this week with clients reaching out needing coaching, and feeling confused and conflicted. And it’s like I feel sad, and then I’m not, and then I’m outraged, and then I feel bullied, and then I feel sad, and then I feel compassion, and then I can’t hear.

It’s just like this constantly building and it’s like, hold on, what is the first step? Presence, can we drop back down in our body and have this experience even when it’s uncomfortable? That’s what is so hard for us, the intellect, logic; the mind wants to make a meaning of everything.

It’s one of the reasons I really love the four agreements. I always come back to, if I’m suffering, which of the agreements am I ignoring? Which of the agreements am I not paying attention to? What am I missing out on? Am I taking it personal? Am I making assumptions? That’s two of the biggest ones. And can we bring ourself back to our own experience?

Because when there is something big going on, it’s not just our personal experience, we’re feeling the collective. When it’s something that’s affecting the world, when it’s something that’s affecting your community, your people, your tribe, when it’s all over social media and the news, it’s not just your thoughts that are affecting you.

There is actually a collective energy, and we are all feeling it, so then you really have to know how to articulate and process so that you can separate what’s yours and what’s someone else’s, and you can’t do that through logic. And that’s where a lot of people are spinning.

And I just really want to talk about feeling all of it, and allowing the experience to be the experience. So I was coaching someone earlier today on this fear of being thrown out of the tribe. If you don’t agree with us or if you say something that’s out of line, like we’re throwing you out. That is the very thing we are most afraid of as humans, is to be separated, to be unsafe, to be alone, to be ridiculed or to be just cut off and made invisible.

Guys, that’s such a big deal, and I’m seeing so much of it, and I’m getting feedback from so many clients on this. And I’m like, “Listen, let’s get into presence and let’s process the emotions, let’s separate them.”

And then step into this emotional maturity, the ability to be able to handle your own emotions.  To be able to come back into the actual experience of right now without fleeing, without hiding underneath the covers or in the cave, or without wanting it to go away. It seems like the rational thing to do, let me just not pay attention to it, maybe it’ll just leave, maybe I won’t have to deal with it, maybe I can get by or whatever it is that’s going through your head.

If you have the emotional intelligence, and if you can articulate what is yours, what is coming from your thoughts? And what are the thoughts that’s driving that, that action of wanting to go and hide, wanting to run away, wanting to eject? What is the thought that’s creating that fear or that dread? What’s coming up for you? Are you able to stay present and do your own work, do your own processing?

This emotional intelligence, it’s the capacity to be aware, to be in control, to be able to express, and to be able to handle this personally with empathy, with compassion, with understanding even for yourself.

The thing I kept returning to was grace, am I willing to be in compassion for myself and what I am feeling? And will I receive the grace to experience it fully? I did not want to escape. I wanted to experience fully all of it. I wanted to understand, but without buying a story, without my mind trying to make some sort of – I don’t know – happy, joyful, peaceful meaning of it, because it wasn’t. It was actually an experience of pain, an experience of dread and grief, so much grief, so much misunderstanding, and anger, and outrage, and injustice, and just so many things just coming in like in flashes.

And I would go back to these stories and then I would go forward to this hope and then I was like, “No, no, no, come back to right now and feel this all the way through.” And thank God for the coaching community. Thank God that I’m smart enough to have coaches and just amazing people in my life who are willing to help me stay present, who don’t want to rationalize it or excuse it, or make it go away, or seem less important. But yet, be in it as a whole.

We are seeing all of the systems fall away, the politics, the social conditioning, and patterns, and a lot of that stuff is being tossed away. And we’re really having to learn to commit to our own power, and to make decisions for what we believe in. And to really trust our own truth, because, guys, truth is just perception. It’s our understanding of what we see to be true today.

Truth is like active, it’s like being in truth is being in the awareness of the experience that you’re having as you are having it. You yourself, it’s different for us at different stages in our life, and it’s different for different people, it depends on their experience. There’s some people who just believe all men are assholes, they just are because their experience has been that. And because they believe that they created more of it, and so then they stacked evidence and now it has become like the almighty truth, it’s just how it is, that’s just how they are.

And some people will never ever question that; they will take it to their grave. That seems a little insane, but it will happen, it’s just what is. We have a huge array of differences amongst us, that is part of the human conditioning. It’s part of the human experience. It’s what we’re here to evolve and to move and shift some of that, and to experience some of that. Maybe it’s not meant to be changed. Crap, that’s hard to say, it’s hard to swallow.

I have been living with this wanting my community to be different for as long as I can remember. And do you know what, guys, I can continue to argue with is and I can continue to have manuals for every person. Or I can just allow them to be who they are, and allow myself to be in the experience even though it rubs against everything that I want, everything that I dream about.

I can choose to remain in the resistance, and to constantly fight against wanting it to be different. Or I can allow others to have the experience that they are having and me be in the experience that I am having, and it often sucks. And I have been in grief about it. I have been in sadness, and I didn’t want to give it up, but I didn’t want to stay in the resistance anymore, it’s so painful, it’s this constant fight.

If you have anyone in your life who is – I don’t know – maybe an alcoholic or maybe someone who’s just not looking out for themselves and their best interests. And they continue to do these behaviors, these habits, these things that are not good for them and they continue to suffer. And it’s so hard to be part of that experience. We want them to be different so that we can feel better, because we can’t allow them to be who they are because we can’t be with ourself and what we feel about that.

And there is an invitation for that right here, right now. There is an invitation to feel it all, feel the fear, feel the disconnect, feel the disappointment. Feel the outrage, and the hurt, and the pain, and just be with it. And to not indulge in it, but experience it, not be in the hopelessness of it, and not be in the resistance of it, but just in what is. Because when we argue with reality we always lose. We suffer when we judge and compare.

I have a whole podcast on that early on. I’m not sure what episode it is. But the two reasons that we suffer as a human species is when we judge and compare, when we want it to be different than it was or different than it is, and we compare it to what we think it should be like. We judge and compare everything, people, finances, illness, communities, tribes, history, everything. And that is why we suffer. Can we be in the experience without the defense? That’s a tall order, guys.

I was in resistance, defense, I wanted it just to go away, I wanted all of this to end, I literally made the decision this week and told my trainer, “We’re not going to open the fitness center, and not right now for sure, not right now, while we’re still in these phases.” And I’m not going to give up my right of how I dress, what I wear, if I’m going to put a mask on or not. I’m not going to give that freedom up, I want to choose.

And in order for me to follow the rules I have to comply against something that I don’t believe in, something that I don’t want, something that I’m being forced and emotionally manipulated into, being bullied into. And I just want to take a stand for something, and I felt like I was losing my voice. I felt like I was losing my power because it was coming from everywhere is what we should do, how should we act, how should we respond. And no matter what you do and say there’s somebody that’s outraged, and it’s painful to be in that.

I put up a Facebook post that I was curious about my thoughts, what I was thinking about, what was happening with the coronavirus. And something I was not understanding how thousands of people could go into one store and five people couldn’t come into one place.

I just was questioning, and I was hammered and lost friends, and had so much stuff over a curious explorative question. And this was by some highly intelligent people who believe in thought work, and yet could not receive that I was thinking out loud and saw me as a threat and chose to judge me according to that, and unfriend. It is not a safe place to express. And when we lose that, we lose part of our humanity. That causes grief.

We are here to explore, and experience, and express, and create, and evolve, and grow, and connect. And when we lose the ability to express what we feel and what we’re experiencing, we lose part of our humanity. And this emotional manipulation and immaturity and people bullying us, and I’m not just talking about what’s happening in 2020.

I’m talking about what’s happening in the homes of people who are in relationships. Who their significant others or their children will not talk to them if they don’t do what they say they should do, or if they don’t believe in the way they think they should believe. Guys, this is just a piece of the problem that’s coming up, that’s bringing all of the stuff up to the surface for us to explore. And when we are fighting about it and when we’re in resistance, and when we are defending, we cannot hear and we cannot experience.

This is what it feels like right here, right now, it feels choked up in my throat and it feels painful in my heart. And I feel pressure in my back, I feel it all the way through my body, it’s burning in my arms, this is emotion. This is emotion being processed in physical form, coming from an experience that I am having in life right now. And it’s part personal, and it’s part collective, and it’s all welcome, it’s all welcome. Because if we don’t feel it and we don’t express it, and we don’t participate, we lose out on living the human experience.

And then we try to hide it, and we try to control, we try to avoid, we eat our feelings, instead of express them. We don’t feel safe to share them, so we shut them down and then we suffer physically, physical pain, illness, disease in our body. Because we are not in our experience, because we are not feeling safe to be part of the experience, and it is painful, and it is exhausting to try to push all of that energy down and not feel. And it’s going to leak out somewhere as we can only contain so much resistance.

And that’s really all I want to talk about in this episode, is are you willing to feel it and to be in it and to allow the experience, whatever that looks like, the fear, the outrage, the injustice, the, whatever it is to you? I never want to think I know what someone else is experiencing because it would be unfair, and it would take it away from them.

I just know that when we don’t feel safe to express, and to be in our own power, and to be in our own experience. And we’re being shut up and told how we should or shouldn’t think, or shouldn’t feel, or because of our color or because of our choice of if we want to put on a mask or not. Or because of if we have the choice to go to work or not, all of this, it’s all of it, it’s everywhere right now, it’s just tumbleweeds just floating around. Let’s just get ugly, let’s just get nasty. Let’s just be in the mess of it.

Are you willing to be in the mess in order to be in the experience and growing in maturity, and growing in intelligence, and really being part of your own life, whatever that looks like? This timeframe that you came here to be in this material world, all of this comes with it. And I don’t want to miss out, I don’t want to hide it, I don’t want to cover it up. I don’t want to go underneath the covers and go back to sleep, and go live in a cave. And I don’t want to do that, although there’s parts of me that are crying out for that, just make it go away. Just make it go away, just turn it off.

But I did that for years, and I took medication to not feel as many of you are prescribed to not feel. And when we subscribe to that, we disconnect from ourself. And then we feel disconnected from society, we feel disconnected from our people, from our divine creator, we feel disconnected from our purpose, from who and what we truly are. And we have the choice always to be, to stay, to choose presence. And this week this is what presence feels like.

I’m spending my time on step two, I am unraveling. I am unveiling. I am dismantling and tearing things apart and just looking inside the ugly. I’m willing to let it all fall apart, it’s not my first time, it’s not as scary as it used to be, just letting it all fall apart, just kind of dangling around, being in the messy. The worst thing that can happen is I can feel sensation in my body. And if I resist then I will possibly also feel pain, and illness, and disease.

And if I try to avoid and buffer by eating and hanging out on social media, and buying into distractions, none of that’s going to work. None of that’s going to work long term. What’s going to work is if we say, “Yes, I’m all in, sign me up.” I’m here for everything that life does through me, not to me, not even for me, through me. I experience life through me.

And I just want to open the invitation and opportunity for you, are you willing not to run, not to avoid, not to hide, not to go off into the cave, or not want to be in the discomfort, and try to pacify it? If we can experience the change within ourself, if we can experience presence, then we can heal the world one mind at a time. Just recognizing that it is the human condition for us to feel defensive, for us to feel afraid and to put up the guard, and when we put up the guard we can’t hear.

That’s what our brain is supposed to do. It doesn’t know if it’s real or not, just knows the sensation is happening. Doesn’t know if you are looking at it and watching it happen, if it’s a play, or if it’s a move, or it’s actually happening. So notice when your mind wants to create this big story, and instead of even feeding the intellect, are you willing to drop back into the body and out of logic? Come into the emotion, come into the feelings, come into that part of you, it’s a huge part of our power.

The ability to regulate our emotions, the ability to manage our mind in order to regulate our emotions, it is everything. It’s so much more than mindset though, it’s so much more than changing a thought, it’s about changing our life. It’s about changing our perception, our personal reality. It’s about changing our unconscious and rewriting that old familiar pattern, story and becoming the new identity, the new perception, the new personality, the new way of being.

Let the shit crumble, let it fall apart, it wasn’t working anyway. And are you willing to also do that in your personal life, not just in the exterior? But are you willing to stay present as it unpacks and unravels so that we can understand it more clearly, so that we can navigate around what we used to do and start doing things more consciously? So that we can create better, so that we can become better humans, so that we become more compassionate, more loving, grace is always there, are you willing to trust it?

It’s a matter of making the decision, we can create it consciously, are you in, are you willing to feel it, are you willing to be with it? Are you willing to dance the ugly dance? It’s the being in the darkness, like by leaning into it, rather than cowarding away from it. The way to be free of the suffering is to surrender to it.

Lean into the darkness, into that murky old messy and as you lean into the darkness we stay there until we can see in it. And once you can see in it then you can embrace the light and the darkness, recognizing that that is our humanity, the full experience of human being. Being the human, all of it, all of us, we are all one, we have disconnected ourselves. We’ve been running from these feelings, we’ve been hiding from these emotions, we’ve been dodging it, and they’re just getting stronger and more powerful and louder. That’s the invitation, are you willing to dance in the darkness?

That’s what I have for you this week, big love and hugs to you all. I have been coaching a lot in the More Than Mindset Facebook group, I’ve been teaching. I’ve been doing masterclasses for health and wellness practitioners who want to help their clients really take this transformation even deeper, to learn a new way to self-heal.

I’m there supporting you, we’re processing emotion; you have the opportunity to be coached, to be taught. We’re doing meditation, I’m teaching a very simple practical approach to meditation and mindfulness. I hope to see you there. Until next week.

Thanks for listening to this episode of More than Mindset.