Identifying Your Ways of Being With Resistant Emotions & Responding from Wisdom - Episode 69

Awareness That Heals, Episode 69. The way our parents raised us, our siblings, our society, our movies, our sports, everything that affected us is an imprint. And most of us get confused and think we are the imprint. We are the one that can observe the imprint. We are the one that can respond to the imprint. We are the one that has the potential to be free if we can find our awareness.

The Awareness That Heals podcast helps its listeners learn to develop the capacity to have a more healing response to emotions and situations rather than becoming stuck. Your host, Robert J. Strock, has practiced psychotherapy for more than 45 years. He wrote the book Awareness That Heals: Bringing Heart and Wisdom to Life's Challenges. To help develop self-caring and the capacity to respond in an effective way to life's challenges, especially at times when we are most prone to be critical or to withdraw. Together, we will explore how to become aware of our challenging feelings and at the same time find alternative ways to live a more fulfilling and inspiring life.

A very warm welcome again to Awareness That Heals. It's a pleasure to have you be joining us on this final program of the book. And what we're going to be talking about today is again something that is so central to living a fulfilling life and breaking free from where we're trapped in conditioned reactions that each of us have. And when I say conditioned reactions, I want to be clear. I'm talking about the way our parents raised us, our siblings, our society, our movies, our sports. Everything that affected us is an imprint, and most of us get confused and think we are the imprint. We are the one that can observe the imprint. We are the one that can respond to the imprint. We are the one that has the potential to be free if we can find our awareness. And we all have loads of conditioning, or what might be called hypnosis. Actually, free associating— I had a very close friend that had the Institute for Dehypnotherapy, and his premise was he was trying to dehypnotize us from the way that we were trained to think that we were or who we were. Do you get this? Does this make sense to you? That you think you're a success or a failure, you think you're sexy or not sexy, you think you're young or not young, you think you're bald or you have hair, you think you're powerful or not powerful, you think you're smart or you're not smart. What about what you really care about in your own awareness? How much have you dipped into asking yourself, what is my aspiration in this life? So none of us are really liberated from having our own or creating our own direction in life. Where we're naturally following ourselves, where we'll have, or we would have, a selection of what we're exposed to that we choose to align with. Normally, it's just like a tornado, our conditioning moving us, and that we really need to develop our capacity to think ourselves and to question for ourselves and to listen to what the answers are and respond to what the answers are. That's a lot of steps. And the whole point is not to feel guilty or inadequate or ashamed. The whole point is, if you get this, it can be an inspiration to want to spend more time going inside and saying, What do I really care about? What are my values? And realistically, how can I move from here? Don't get grandiose. Look at little steps. What little steps can I take? Maybe I can be more welcoming in the morning. Maybe I can be nicer to the person in the supermarket. Maybe I can be nicer to myself. Maybe I can brush my teeth twice a day. Who knows? Today we're going to finalize both the chapter and the book with a summary of both and a little bit extra. And it applies— the book applies, chapter applies to various concrete examples that all of us have to deal with. Please, and I really ask you, please use your own examples as we share ours. Your examples are much more important than ours because they apply to you. This isn't designed to speak just to your head. This is designed to speak to your capacity to be yourself and see yourself. The whole point is to use it for you and those around you. So I'd like to start off introducing Dave, my dearest friend the last 50-plus years. Long time. We're aging ourselves, or actually age is aging us, and my partner at the Global Bridge Foundation. Dave, thanks again for going on this whole long ride with me. It's been a joy.

I don't even know what to say. I can't— I almost can't accept that we're at the end of this. Going through the book, the process of the book itself, the, I think, incredibly meaningful expressions of these podcasts and the way that the expressions are so practical and oriented to facilitate people. And of course, as I hear it myself as well, looking inside, seeing what's what, seeing where I'm committed, seeing where I'm not. And both are true. And there's always places to go. It never is ending. So I am grateful.

I'm not amazed anymore that each time I go through any parts of the book that I flash on last week, or I flash on today, or I flash on something that, oh, I can tweak this a little bit, or oh boy, was I spaced out there, I missed that moment, that there's something. And it's the good news, it's not the bad news. It's not like, oh shit, Sometimes it's, oh shit, but usually it's, oh shit, oh good, if it's that one, because it's, oh good, I have a chance of being aware now, the chance of actually being able to move toward healing. So I'm going to summarize this last chapter, and then I'm going to summarize the book very quickly. And I'm, again, as I do it, I'm asking you not to just hear it from your head, hear it from glimpses of your life experience. So the first one is identifying your ways, all of our ways, that you have been and are angry, or you have emotions that are like anger, that have resistance in them, that have tension in them, like impatience, intolerance, incredulousness, sarcasm, frustration. And look at them. And when you look at them and you're aware of them, see the awareness from the upside of the awareness. It's not like, oh shit, there I am again. It's like, oh good, I can see, my eyes are open. So awareness, a key part of the subtle part of awareness, step one, is that you're actually much more on the happy side to see it than you are on the downside of judging it. If you're judging the awareness, it's not real awareness. If you're really caught deeply in judging the awareness, then Awareness would say, oh, I'm aware of it and I'm actually the judge. So you want to be the awareness, not the judge of the awareness. So that's the first step. The second step, while you're in your frustration, aggravation, annoyance, impatience, intolerance, you actually become aware, you know what, this hasn't worked out very well for me in my life when I do this. Bing, bing, bing, red flags. Flashing. I want to find a way to make it work out better. I want to find a way to bring some degree of caring. Not that I'm sacrificing myself. I'm finding myself. We sometimes call this the intention to heal, the intention to care. That's the second step. When we're there, if we're in the middle of anger or frustration or intolerance, we see that that spontaneous expression virtually never is beneficial. And so it brings us to the third step, which is containment, which is a part of us that wants to stop from just dumping our anger. And we also do not want to suppress it. We want to experience the full feeling inside us. If we're caught in a situation where we can't get away, then we want to experience it inside us as fully as possible. And maybe if the person's right in front of us, we don't want to give it away in our face, facial expression. If we have the luxury of days, we might want to just say to ourselves, I'm not going to even deal with this now. I'm going to wait and go scream on the beach. I'm going to go scream outside so I can experience it fully. But I can find ways to be with the anger, to feel the juiciness of it, because it makes us more alive when we don't suppress our anger. But it makes us more dead if we spit it off like negative juice. And we experience it fully. Privately, or if we have the luxury, like I said, to go to another environment because we have a few days or a week before we have to express it, then that will invariably, if we look for it, help us find the more vulnerable emotions, which is the fourth step, finding our vulnerable emotions like fear, hurt, loss, aloneness, disappointment. Helplessness. And then we also will get flashes of the fifth step, which is discovering our needs. And this is something that almost none of us have been trained to discover our needs. So there's always the encouragement, go to awarenessthatheals.org and look on the top gray line and download the free list of the challenging emotions, 75 of them, and the essential needs, 75 of them, which will help you become literate when it comes to your emotions and your needs, which frequently most people don't even have separated. And then once you have a grasp of that, you circle the ones that are most common for you. You have a working model to be able to work with yourself. And then you drop down and let's say you get the main principle. Oh, I can see that rather than just being against and hating what I'm receiving or hating what I'm not receiving, I want to discover what it is that I need that I didn't get or that I did get. And I want to say, I would like you not to scream at me rather than I hate that you scream at me. "Or I would like you to be more gentle," rather than, "I don't like it when you're detached and you're looking in the other direction." We want to just come from the expression of our needs, not dominating, expressing what we don't like. And then we move to the 6th step. Once we discover our needs, we look for a way to express our needs that's more consistent with the qualities of our heart, which include qualities like gentleness, tenderness, strength, empathy, communication, and find ways to communicate as sensitively as we can when we think there's a chance that we have to communicate with a person we're with. Now, some of the times We're going to be with somebody who we know there's no chance we can communicate. If you've got a father or mother or a child or a boss or an acquaintance that you know there's no chance you can communicate, then we move from the 6th step, which is communicating as sensitively as possible at least 3 times, to the 7th step, which is we need to come to resolve this inside ourselves. So our needs turn inward. And we need to find a way to accept this and then figure out to discriminate. Does this mean that the violation of not being able to deal with our anger and frustration and tolerance is so important that we need to have this person not be in our life? Or does it mean that maybe it's only one quality or one attitude out of 10, and we actually— this is our partner, this is who we love. and that we might need to come to a mature acceptance as to where we need to resolve this inside ourselves. So we need to see the whole picture when we're looking inside ourselves and trying to resolve it as to whether or not we need to accept this or whether we need to actually individuate from this person. So that's really a nutshell version of the 7 steps. If you've been with us the whole time, Hopefully each time you hear it, you're applying it more and more to yourself. You're seeing the steps, how they play out. You can kind of get a glimpse of, I'm mostly in and out of 1, or I'm mostly in and out of 2, or 3, or 4. Or with this person, I'm in— I'm this person, I'm nowhere. With this person, I'm actually, I'm, I'm actually doing pretty well. So it's going to vary a lot from person to person.

I'd like to ask you given that this is the last podcast of the book, if you would also just briefly run through, as you did for this chapter, but for the book itself, so that we're left with the context of not only this chapter but all the chapters and how they integrate and support each other.

Thanks for that. I, I think it will be helpful as a as a summary. So when I speak of awareness of anger, the first chapter is 4 levels of awareness. And the first level of awareness is we need to be aware that we're unaware. All of us are unaware. All of us have an unconscious. Most scientists and psychologists would say we're 99% unaware. So starting with that allows for humility where we can start to wake up. And then the second stage of awareness, the second level of awareness is fleeting awareness, where we start to see things clearly, but we can only handle it for a moment or two because if we saw it stably, it would disrupt our life. If we see that we're angry and we continue to be angry, it would drive us crazy. So we can only say, oh Jesus, you're really an asshole. We can only see it for a few seconds. Then the third level of awareness is a stable intellectual awareness. We can see our moods, we can see where we are, and it's stable, but there's not any heart in it. We just simply see it. That's a dangerous state of awareness because we think we're aware, but actually we don't have the heart, we don't have the intention to care, to really do something with our awareness, which implies what the fourth level of awareness is, which is we're aware of where we are and we want to care. We wanna bring our heart to it. That brings us to healing awareness. That's the awareness that heals. And that is very similar. And I'm gonna start backwards for a second. The 7th chapter, the chapter before this, is basically the same as anger, except it starts with whatever challenging feelings we have and we go directly to whatever the needs are that will help us with that feeling. So we might be hurt, Or we might be sad. So we ask ourselves, what is the need, or what are the needs that will help us with this sadness or this hurt? But going back to the beginning of the book, the second chapter, which is really for when we're in really deep, deep shit, when we're in the hardest times of our life. It might be that we're terminally ill, we're dealing with a serious illness, we're in chronic pain, We're in divorce, we're in bankruptcy, we're in very, very serious problems, and we can't feel better no matter what we do. Our feelings are not gonna feel better. Then it's learning how to develop a friendly mind, which means I can't feel better, but at least I can feel a mind that is sane, that has some wisdom, and I can follow my mind rather than my feelings. That's a very profound chapter that if you haven't heard it, when you're really in trouble, you need to dedicate yourself. Like, you're chronically depressed, you're chronically anxious, you can find a place inside you that can ask, from my wisdom, how would I respond today? Do I need to take a rest? Do I need to exercise? You know, do I need to see this client or go to work or not go to work? The questions would be asked, how can I best take care of myself from my wisdom? That's what friendly mind is. It's a mind that guides you rather than being run with your feelings. In the '60s, there used to be the expression, follow your feelings. Friendly minds teaches you, don't follow your feelings when you're feeling horrible. Follow your wisdom and your friendly mind. And then you have the third chapter, which is looking at self-rejection, which is the most subtle form of self-rejection, a subtle form of pain, which is that when you're feeling angry, you actually don't really like yourself, even though you don't know it. Because nobody really likes themselves when they're an asshole. They think they do, but down deep, we all know we want to be a caring person. So self-rejection, you can discover it most when you ask yourself the question, Do I really like myself when I express X? Well, the answer is no. That's a form of self-rejection. When, when you don't like yourself because you're jealous, you're competitive, you're angry, you're envious, you're inadequate— when you're rejecting yourself, you have the inadequacy and you're rejecting yourself because you're inadequate. So then you need to work on the rejection. That's a very, very important chapter to work on. And then, then we deal with tone of voice. Tone of voice is very, very critical that we see both our internal tone of voice and our external tone of voice, because if we're going to be able to improve our quality of life, we need to have access to see what our own tone of voice is and to develop it to move from our challenging emotions toward our essential needs and make that transition in our tone of voice. And then we move to the next chapter, which is really seeing that we need to ask questions from our heart. That is such a guiding way to live. It's called inquiry from the heart, where we're asking ourselves questions that are not questions that are there to criticize us, like, what's wrong with you? We're asking ourselves, what's right with you? Well, how can I use my day in the best way possible? How can I interact with this person, with my lover, in a way that's going to create the most intimacy? Only questions that are there to support you in your life. That will lead you to the next chapter, which is wisdom. The answers that you get is your wisdom. When you're asking these questions that are beckoning you to find your best self. That's going to lead you to your wisdom, and your wisdom is going to help guide you. Wisdom guidance is that next chapter. And when you find your wisdom, you have another method to be able to guide yourself no matter how bad you feel. It's very similar to friendly mind. Friendly mind and wisdom are kissing cousins. Friendly mind, we differentiate as only to be used when you're really so screwed you can't feel good at all. Whereas wisdom, sometimes when you're not really feeling terrible, you can both be wise and bring the qualities of your heart, the essential qualities with you. Whereas friendly mind is only when you're really down deep. So with your wisdom, you can bring both your wisest thoughts and your best qualities together to guide your life. So that's the short summary of the whole book. I don't expect anybody to understand it if this is the first time you've listened to it to be able to track this. But if you've listened to the whole book, this will probably make good sense to you. I don't wanna leave out the 7th chapter, which I already made reference to when I said it was very similar to Transforming Anger and Resistant Emotions. But basically the chapter is called Feelings to Needs, and it's every other feeling other than your aggressive feelings. It's all your vulnerable feelings and how you can guide yourself from your vulnerable feelings towards your needs. So like I mentioned, if you are feeling sad or hurt or frightened, frightened, you can be led to courage. Sadness can be leading you to how do you find peace. If you're feeling abandoned, how do you feel connected? If you're feeling withdrawn, how do you engage? It's like it leads you towards the opposite of the vulnerability. What are the needs that can lead you to the opposite, toward the opposite? It doesn't have any illusion that it's black and white and going to lead you just to the home run land. We're trying to hit singles and doubles. Along the way. And after we've hit enough singles and doubles, then triples and home runs will come on their own. So as you review yourself, and want to really end with the summary of the whole effort that we've been on, it's really time for you to do an inventory of how often are you aware of your feeling state? It's not just anger, it's, it's all your feelings. How often are you able to find your intention to want to care for yourself and heal no matter what you're feeling? But especially while we're in this chapter of anger, we're going to focus mostly on how often are you able to feel that when you're angry. And look at the people that you can do it with, and look at the people you can't do it, will you just forget? And when you forget, see if you can Bring that tone of caring and say, oh good, it's not that I forgot, it's that I finally remembered and now I have a chance to remember and applying the remembering. This at first, when you're beginning, really is like a lobotomy because you're being taught to look deeply enough to find yourself, find your wisdom, find your heart, and want to live more from that place. Where are you with that? It's a time for honesty. The most important thing isn't to appear developed. The most important thing is to authentically be right where you are in your development. If you say real quickly, oh yeah, I can find my intention to heal, don't be quite so confident. I know I lose it still. I've been doing this for 50 years. I, I lose it. And, you know, you may be better than me. Yeah, maybe you can get it in 20 years and never make any mistakes, but all of us are vulnerable until we die. This is a lifelong process. It is not a quick fix. And then the question is, how much are you able to move towards your vulnerability when you're angry? How much are you able to go through that process. I'm aware that I'm angry, I want to care, I've contained, and I'm able to be vulnerable. How often are you more able to be vulnerable? Now, that's not a hit on being able to be cleanly angry. There are times, especially if you ask your partner for permission, where the best thing to do is to actually express your anger. Vulnerability is not better than anger. But it's more communicable. It's more able to be communicated. Feeling your anger is one of the most enlivening things you can possibly do when you're not acting it out or you're not acting it in. So it's very, very important that the key is that you value being vulnerable, but you also value your anger. And when you really value your anger, it will morph more and more into natural strength and courage of conviction. Transforming anger and resistant emotions that we frequently call TARE as an acronym for transforming anger and resistant emotions. It is an evolutionary step that most of us haven't made in our lives. And even if we have, we're at various levels of it. It's something that is not meant to arrive. It's meant to be an arrow where you're moving in that direction for the rest of our lives. The world certainly hasn't made it very often, as our history shows all too well. Think about war. Think about the epitome of war and how nations not only haven't been able to be aware of their anger, but they've been taking it so far, we've been taking it so far that we're ready to kill because we're so convinced that our own anger and distrust was caused by you. So if you look at both the inside of yourself and the outside world, you realize what a transformation it feels to actually be able to own your own anger, distrust, even your own vulnerability as being you and being able to express your needs and be interested not only in your partner's needs, which is also extraordinary to say, how can we take care of both of us? What do we both need? Not only what do I need, but what do we both need? That's the ultimate epitome of care. Is when we come into a place of what do we all need, not only what do we both need, but what do we all need. And if we all were in a position where we are able to say, I'm in an emotional state and damned if I'm going to let this lead into murder, homicide, suicide, killing other countries, genocide, we see the stakes are very, very high. We need to be able to start with this deep awareness of where we are. It is actually, from my vantage point, actually spiritual. It's deeply religious to be aware of where we are and to want to bring caring to us and to bring that more and more to those closest to us and to an ever-increasing circle of people. So it's so important that we forego the long stories we tell ourselves about how we believe that somebody else caused our feelings, and that we go underneath to see ourselves, find our vulnerability, find our clean anger, and find our needs, find others' needs, find the world's needs. We all need the same thing. That's not to say that there aren't occasional people that are Hitlers or Putins or Genghis Khans that are out there. And that's also not to say that way, way, way underneath, that they're not the same as us. But it's so far underneath that we're not going to have a communication with them. But it's important for us to do our part to bring ourselves to that inquiry of who do I aspire to be? Who am I? How do I move myself in an endlessly moving process toward the best parts of me? How do I move to be for something rather than being against something? How do I move toward my needs rather than against what I don't like, as has been the history of the world. This creates an incredible optimism about the world, about love, about friendships. This is what would allow us to care for ourselves at the maximum level. This is not passivity in any way, as it releases a passion, a humor, a kindness, and a trust as we go more and more inside ourselves.

As you talk about letting go of the stories, and I envision being born into, and earlier in so many episodes, but in the last couple of them, the conditioning and the conditioning that's been generational, the conditioning that's been countries, geography, alliances, any place you look. As you speak about this letting go, there's an identification, I feel, with all of it, that we're all in the same boat and we've always all been in the same boat. And it is letting go of those stories. At the same time, it's recognizing that we're born into a story without awareness of it, and we grow up hopefully becoming more aware.

Absolutely. It's so important that we include what is normal and what we're really dealing with. And it is so normal to believe our story. It is so normal to be in a political party. It is so normal to be proud of our country. God bless America. It is so normal to believe that we are superior. It is so normal to project our emotions onto other— onto others. It's crucial that we realize what we're talking about is very close to a psychological lobotomy that can be brought into stages. It's not a lobotomy in the moment. In the moment, it's just little small changes. That are so crucial. Every one is to be celebrated. But it's also important that we recognize and not be naive that we're in a world today that is on the verge of killing itself. We're in a world today that is suffering from global warming. We're in a world today that's being intimidated by Putin that, that he'll use nuclear weapons. We're in a world today that has nuclear weapons all over the place. The point is not to be idealistic. The point is to have as many of us as possible do our own work that can admit that we're human. We haven't arrived. Even if we've worked on ourselves our whole lives, we are still vulnerable to losing it. And so the best that's possible is to recognize that our world is endangered, that we can feel the suffering of the world, we can see our own dangers inside ourselves, and we can want to have a certain kind of interruption into that myth of being these feelings, that we are our feelings. You know, we all are living in a myth of being a separate self that's not interconnected with each other. But when we find a place inside that cares, that automatically unites us. I'm not talking about some abstract spirituality. I'm talking about in a very tangible way, caring unites us in all the different ways. And I'm using caring in the broadest sense. I could use 50 other words besides caring. And so for all of us, my hope is that we leave recognizing that we're imperiled, that we, we are insecure, that it's healthy that we're insecure, it's healthy that we're unsure of ourselves in the absolute sense, that we're aware that we're unaware, and that we recognize that we have a deep and deepening aspiration or intention to care for ourselves, to care for those that we love, and to care for the world And that of all times, we're at a time that it could very well be a matter of life and death for everyone if there's enough people that join each other. And, and the other side of our lives, of Days in My Life right now with the foundation, we're doing what we can in our small way to reach out, to be caring to those that are in the worst situations in life. And there are thousands, tens of thousands of people that are finding each other. There's a wave of positivity that, that is uniting with each other. We're living in a world that has this not advertised. Unfortunately, it's not in our media yet in a major way that there are so many tens of thousands of people that are really wanting to care for the environment, care for some kind of unity. And so each of us has a chance, as the Moody Blues say, being a small part of a hope of a love that exists. And my wish and my prayer is that all of us end with that theme, that we are a small part of this love and that we have the tools to keep deepening this. and I thank you from the bottom of my heart for joining Dave and I through this whole series. And it will continue because we have endless articles that will be an extension of Awareness That Heals that will be, let's say, going into more and more subtlety, both of how we can care for ourselves and the world. And we'll be bringing the world more into this as well. So thank you again. So much for joining us.

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