Reside In Your Heart

Welcome to Shrink for the shy Guy. This is the show for you. If you are sick and tired of being held back by fear, self doubt, social anxiety, shyness, anything that's stopping you from you being you, I'm going to share the most powerful tools and resources that I've been discovering over the last 15 years on my journey to eradicate social anxiety and instill confidence first in myself second, and then in every single person that I meet on my journey. You're going to learn these tools and how to apply them in your life now so that you can become the most free, powerful, bold, authentic version of you. Hey, welcome to today's episode of the show. Today we're going to be talking about residing in your heart. What? What does that even mean? Well, we're gonna find out today. Maybe it makes a lot of sense to you. Maybe not. Maybe you're kind of scratching your head and wondering what I mean. But I'm gonna explain it all today as we talk, and I think it's gonna become clear not only what that means, but why you may want to consider moving towards that residing in your heart more. And it's something I've been working on a lot over the last couple years, but especially this year. And if you listen to my recent episode with Interview with Mindy, Nist came up maybe two, three weeks ago, there's a lot of really good stuff in there about the intelligence of our heart, the intelligence of our bodies. And so you can learn a lot if you haven't listened to that one. And, you know, the goal here, as always, is to steer us back to more confidence, less anxiety, less social anxiety, less fear, less negativity towards ourselves and maybe others. And really, how do we become our most powerful, free, confident, expressive selves? And a lot of the time, we can focus on some of the tactics or strategies. How do I need to stand? How do I need to look? What do I need to say? What's the right thing to do? And what we're forgetting is that we might actually know way more than we think. We might have a lot more figured out than you realize when you get out of your head. Have you ever noticed that? Have you ever been in a situation where you just somehow, maybe you intentionally did it, or maybe it was just Grace and you just got out of your head for a minute. There's just this moment. Maybe you're at a party, you're interacting with someone or at work or whatever, and you're just out of your head for a minute, and you're just in the interaction, you're just in the moment, you're having a conversation or you're caring about a task from your day and everything's just going well, just going smooth. And then we pop back into our head and we start analyzing, how did it go? Did I say the right thing? What about tomorrow? And then we've lost it. But there's those moments where we're out of our heads and where are we? Then you're in the moment. And this is something I have been thinking about a lot and focusing on a lot. In fact, at the beginning of this year, my first goal for the year was to reside in my heart. Might seem like an interesting goal, eh? I do this every year. As it gets closer to the end of the year, I start to think about what do I want the next year to be about. And as the end of 2017 was coming, I was thinking about what I want 2018 to be about. And you know, I have some specific targets, you know, measure, quote, measurable things. But the goals that juice me most at this point in my life are not like, earn a certain amount of money or achieve X and complete Y. I feel like I just kind of do that stuff. I'm just gonna, that's part of it, part of life, part of achieving or accomplishing things. But the higher level goals are what juice me most. And sometimes I'll have specific things like in health, you know, like, okay, I want to run a half marathon or something like that, or a marathon. And there's some excitement to that, some energy, but there's a lot more juice when I just tune into. I just want to be strong in my body, feel as strong as I can, or I want to live in my heart. And I know these goals are not smart goals, specific, measurable, whatever the rest of the acronym SMART stands for, timely. But to me, that's what juices me most. Gives me a ton of energy and focus and motivation because I think of the outcome of that and the benefit of that and what that's going to bring to my life. And so the first thing that came to my mind for this year was I want to reside in my heart. Because I realized that I still spent a lot of time in my head. Way less than when I was younger, but still a lot of time in my head. Thinking, planning, and usually time in our heads. For me, I don't know, just for you, but for me it's. I don't know, sometimes it's okay. And a lot of the time it's a little Tense. So it's either I'm planning, I'm a little stressed, I'm. I'm a little worried, or a lot worried. My thinking tends to veer towards worry. Some people tend to be a little more, I don't know, prone to depression or lethargy. That's not me. I'm more of, like an amped up, nervous creature. So my head's more prone to worry. We gotta take care of stuff, do stuff now, squirrel away nuts for the winter, or kind of obsessing about things, rethinking things, just thinking a lot. And I was like, I want to return to something else. I know this is not helpful. I know I tend to obsess about things. So then I realized towards the end of last year, I was like, well, where does my attention go when it's not in my head? Where can I put it? I didn't realize. Well, I can put it in this moment. Well, what does that even mean? You got to be focusing on something. And so I could focus on my senses. Touch, smell, sights, sounds. But I realized that the most powerful thing for me to focus on that really held me in this moment, grounded as much as possible, was actually my own body. And particularly imagining being in my heart, where my attention sort of resides in my heart, and then it goes out and interacts with someone or interacts with something and then comes back to my heart. And so that's what I decided at the end of last year. It's like, I want to reside in my heart now. I don't know if you've done this, where you set a goal and then you're like, okay, how do I do that now? Okay, what, did it happen yet? It's been a day. Have I done it? And that's when I realized, like, oh, it's the journey. There's a part of me that's just setting this goal because I want to explore where it's going to take me. And it's been quite a journey here, more than halfway through the year, and I'm in a very different place, and it's awesome. And I want to share more about that because I want to inspire you to make your own move. To reside somewhere outside of your head doesn't have to be your heart. Maybe you want to reside in your. If you're a man, you want to reside in your balls, down in your plums. If you're a woman, you want to reside in your. In your ovaries. I don't know. It's where your source of power is right. I don't know, maybe it's somewhere else. Maybe it's just in your physical body. Like when I say reside in my heart, it also to me means my body. Like I feel my legs, I feel my hands, I feel my breath in my stomach. So sometimes it's not just my heart, it's also like down below in my core, in my belly, right around and below my navel. What some meditation teachers would call your hara. Oh, yes, I'm versed in all kinds of things. Brilliant. So much information in my head. That's why I hang out in there too much. So wherever it is for you, maybe it'll inspire you some way to go there. But so for me, one of the first things that I did, and a lot of this is sort of unintentional. Like I set the intention of I want to reside in my heart and then I just kind of do stuff. I don't overthink it as part of living in my heart. And I just see where is my heart drawn and pretty early in the beginning of this year, it was wintertime, January here in Portland. It was frozen cold. We had some snowstorms too. And I was really into Wim Hof and his method. In fact, I recorded a podcast about it, if you listen to that one. But if you're not familiar with him, Wim Hof is a Dutch athlete who is really into teaching. People had influenced their nervous system, their autonomic nervous system gained more control of their immune system, of their breathing, of their body temperature. And he primarily does that through breath work and cold exposure techniques. So winter is a perfect time for that. And I was doing a lot of that every morning. This breath work and this cold exposure and cold showers, 10 minute, 10 minute cold showers, those crazy, crazy way back then, seven months ago. And then of course, when a snowstorm hit, I'm like walking around in the snow, my bare feet, my underwear, testing out all that. And that's, you know, in retrospect, looking at that, I was like, oh, that was actually me getting into my body in a really powerful way. So I'm wondering, as you're listening to this, maybe you're thinking about how do you get into your body? Do you get into your body in some way with your attention, with your awareness? And does it spend any amount of time there? You know, for a lot of us, we don't hang out in our bodies because there's discomfort. For me, I had years of chronic pain and I would avoid being in my body because it would hurt. To be in there with my attention. And I avoided my emotions because they didn't feel good. So I really wanted to get out of my head. I wanted to just pull my focus out as hard as I could into anything. Stimulus. Tv, video games, food, pot, alcohol, whatever, just to keep myself distracted. But what brings you into your body? Maybe when you're at physical. Usually some sort of physical activity can do it. But you also have to be careful with this one because we can be kind of mindless with this, right? We can put our headphones in and be on a treadmill and watching TV and all. Almost trying to get out of our body there too. Like, ah, this is uncomfortable. I don't want to feel this. So another thing I loved about the WIM HOF is it's intentional discomfort tolerance building as well, right? Because a lot of this habit of getting out of our bodies, getting out of our feeling, getting out of our senses, really getting out of our only sense of grounding and safety, which is in our bodies. That pattern comes from not being willing or able to feel discomfort in our bodies. And so this WIM HOF thing was very powerful for helping me do that. So I did that for a number of months, was really into it. And then I kind of let it slide a little bit. Somewhere in there, I got kind of crazy and was doing polyphasic, which means like very little sleep, polyphasic sleep. I think I was sleeping a total of maybe four or five hours a day for a couple months. That was hardcore. Maybe that was part of being in my body, I'm not sure. But then I noticed maybe three months ago, May, June, July, August. Wow. Yeah, three months ago. Three to four months ago, I started doing walking in the morning. Every morning I started walking. Started I was visiting my parents in Las Vegas and I'd get up before everyone was awake. And I just had this loop around their neighborhood about four miles. I just walked it one morning. I was like, that felt good. I did it again the next morning. That felt great. And I enjoyed it so much that when I got home, I started just continuing that in Portland. I started walking to the gym that I go to in the morning four days a week. It's about five miles away. And I was like, why don't I just walk there? So I'd get up earlier, start walking there. And in that time, that walking time, I started to use that to intentionally go more into my body. And I was listening to an audio training by a guy named Reggie Ray. Reginald Ray. It's called Awakening The Heart. You can get it on audible. I found it extremely helpful in helping me get into my heart. And the. The impetus to get it actually came from. I was doing a sweat lodge, which I do not as often as I would like. I'm part of a community that we do them, and I go maybe once every three months or so, maybe even less. But I was in a sweat lodge and I had this sense of like, oh, I need to take this time in the morning to go inward, to not listen to whatever YouTube videos or audiobooks, just go, go inward. And his name, Reggie Ray, came to me in that sweat lodge, like, oh, study with him. And so I looked him up. I knew of some of his other programs, but that was the one I found. And I was like, ooh, awakening the heart. That sounds perfect for me. And so I would listen to that because that's very much like guided meditations versus just head information. And so I would do that and I would walk and I would feel in my heart and I would walk. And man, you know what I found as I did that just took the time every day to feel and go inwards in my heart and walk. I found a lot of pain and discomfort. A lot like just times seemingly endless. You know, the walk is probably about an hour and a half, but I. I committed to say, okay, an hour of that. I'm going to do this kind of inward practice. And then after that I can listen to whatever, but after that I can just eat seven bags of Doritos and smoke two joints and try to numb myself back. But for the first hour, try to be present here. And, man, sometimes it just felt like for the whole hour, it was just like pain in my heart, what's happening. And it was really helpful to have Reggie Ray kind of guiding me because he's sort of like, go into. Is this really deep voice. He's like. And he talks really slow. Now go in deeper into the sensations in your heart. Feeling the armoring around your heart. It's like, okay, Reggie, Jesus, so uncomfortable. But it's helpful to have a guide, right? And, you know, hopefully in some small way at times, maybe I can be that guide for you or have been around confidence and overcoming anxiety and whatever else. That's what I aspire to do. And it's helpful to be with that person and have them kind of walk you through it. Be like, yeah, yeah, this is part of. This is the terrain. And I find it rare. I find it extremely rare in any sort of personal development anything in the coaching world. Even most Clinical therapies and stuff that I studied. Definitely devoid in the mainstream culture of any discussion of our body sensations, of our heart, of being able to be with what's going on in there. So it was cool to find someone that really spoke to it directly. So feel I did. And I did that for maybe a month straight. And interesting stuff began to happen. I started to feel a lot more, period. I started to feel a lot more. I realized how much I still was avoidant of feeling the level, you know, and if you'd ask me, like, do you avoid your feelings all the time? I probably would have said, no, no. But as I studied it more, I realized that I did. I would have limitations on how much I would feel good and bad, possible positive and negative feelings, pleasurable and unpleasurable. So I would try to limit pain in life. And then I would also kind of squeeze or close up around love and the depth of love I might feel with my wife or children or just people. And the more I was willing to go into my heart and feel whatever without needing to change it, without needing to run away from it with sort of like this fierce willingness, this courage, really, I was like, wow, this feels like it takes way more courage than just, I don't know, stuff in the outer world. Being assertive, speaking up, being in front of groups, whatever. This takes way more. And so I just continued to do it more and more and more. And I realized, I started to get a sense that when I would go for these walks or later, I started doing a lot more running this year. I would sometimes have this, like, I have to listen to something. I know I can't be with myself. And sometimes I would indulge that. And then I would think, wow, that's really interesting. Isn't that interesting that we can't be with ourselves? Do you experience that? Like you're driving somewhere or walking somewhere or running somewhere or biking or just working out or just in motion somewhere, and there's a sense of, like, I have to listen to something. And so I tested that and I was like, well, what happens if I don't. Just don't bring the phone, don't bring the headphones, whatever. And invariably it would be uncomfortable at first, and then there'd just be stuff to feel. And that's when I realized, like, oh, wow. The path to awaken the heart, a path to reside in the heart, involves retraining something. It's like the heart muscle, my heart muscle was underdeveloped in a way, and still is. I'm still Strengthening it. And it makes sense because the culture that I grew up in, that many of us grew up in, the family that I grew up in, we were not training in this. And in fact, I was having this conversation with my wife, Candice, recently. Just sort of the insanity of our culture, where the most essential, fundamental things that a human needs to live and thrive, we don't teach things like how to be in your body and feel your emotions and work with those emotions. Almost very few people get that. Any sort of training or learning or discussion around that when we're young. I certainly didn't. Then there's other core things, like, here's how you eat and prepare real food yourself. Here's what real food is, not processed stuff, not fast food, but here's real food. It's very rare. And what health really is, and vitality and aliveness and alkalizing foods and vegetables and fruits and all that stuff. Most people don't have exposure to that growing up. There's other things, too, I can get into that I think are essential for us to learn, but those are some big ones. And I certainly didn't have the one about emotional understanding. And if anything, there's a lot of the opposite, like, put those emotions away and don't feel them. Come on, just do the thing or get to the thing or go to school or do the homework or play the sports or whatever, but don't feel so much. And then I would say I spent, I mean, definitely through most of my twenties, despite all the personal growth I'd done, kind of replicating that mentality towards myself of, don't feel so much. Aziz, come on. And then at 30, I had my first son and was just continuing to help more and more people and continue my own growth work. And I realized I think I have to feel more. And then discovering that chronic pain for me was related to not feeling. And for most people, pain and injuries are related to repressed emotion. I was like, well, I guess I got to do that. So I'm 35 now. I spent the last five years in a crash course feeling. I don't know if it's because I'm a Scorpio or what, but if I do something, I got to go all the way. So I've just been really immersing myself, and it's a journey. And I would say that this year, though, the last seven, eight months has been an even higher ramping up of willingness to go in. And the level of physical power that has been unlocked has been incredible. Like being in My body and being more aware of my feelings and feeling feelings. It's uncomfortable. It's kind of like a workout a lot of the time. But at the end of that, I am strong, I am more grounded, my body's more relaxed and I am strong and healthy. And I can do. I mean, I'm in the strongest, best shape of my life physically right now. Can run a marathon if I want to that distance. I have a little goal of seeing if I can travel 50 miles in a day. It's gonna be a combo of walking and running, working towards that. I'm not sure when I'm gonna hit it, but just that's like a fun target and lifting weights and just feeling really strong. And that to me, that's directly related to being willing to feel. Because I think if we're not willing to feel and reside in our bodies and be very aware of our bodies, we're going to get injured. Quote injured. Usually that's just an accumulation of repressed emotion that we don't intention. So the benefits have been incredible. As well as a greater capacity to love, a greater capacity to self compassion for myself, more patience and presence with my kids. Because I discovered this one really interesting thing, that when I would focus on my heart, there was a part of me, a young part of me, I called him Young Aziz or I call him Young Aziz that just needed so much, needs so much still. He's still in there. Just needs a ton. And it's like this backlog of stuff that he didn't get for decades for whatever his whole upbringing. And I'm not gonna. My parents did the best they could, right. And there's nothing they can offer now. But I need to parent that part of myself. I need to treat that part of myself with love and compassion. And so I do that a lot in my morning. In fact, that's such a valuable thing and it is so valuable for overcoming anxiety and building confidence and helping be more of a badass in the world that the next episode is going to be all about the little version of you. Young you. Little you. How like literally nuts and bolts how to work with it. Because whether you struggle with self criticism or anxiety or hesitation or just all kinds of stuff, a lot of the issues that we feel can come back to how we relate to ourselves. Not just, but specifically like a young version of you. And I'll explain more what I mean in the next episode. So I want to. That's such a good topic. I'm going to go into that in a lot more Depth. But I would just spend hours with this young version of me. And I discovered the more I was patient and loving with the emotionality and the feelings of this young part of me, the more spacious and loving and allowing I was with my own kids emotions. They're two and a half and four and a half. So they're just balls of energy and chaos right now. And the less willing I was to feel the young part of me and the emotions in me, the less willing I was to allow them to feel whatever. And I would subtly try to reign their feelings in or control their feelings. So, so much good stuff here. This episode has been quite rambly and good though I think you'll. There's something in there for everyone, something you can draw out of this that will serve you to reside more in your heart, to reside more in your body, to bring you back to presence, to bring you to have a courage to slow down and face and feel. And it's one of those things where if you do it, if you take the time and commit to it, even if it's not an hour a day, I just found for me, I don't always want to do that, but it's like it's what's required to operate at the highest level. It's like, okay, got to be willing to clear out the sludge every day. So maybe it's less for you. In fact, let's take a moment to see how you're going to apply this for yourself. And that brings us to our action step. Time for action, action, action. Your action step for today is what are you going to do with this? What is coming back to your body or your heart look like for you? How are you going to find your way there? Maybe you're going to go listen to Reggie Ray's awakening the heart. Maybe you are going to take some time in the morning to be with your feelings. Maybe you're going to start relating to a younger version of you differently. Maybe you're just going to get into your body more with your awareness. But you know, you'll decide what is it for you. Don't just leave the episode as an interesting intellectual or entertainment. Decide what am I gonna do with this? How am I gonna apply this now once you've done so, go forth, do it. Thank you for being with me today. I look forward to seeing you in the next episode. We're gonna be talking about little you. So until then, may you have the courage to be who you are and to know on a deep level that you're awesome. We'll talk to you soon. Thanks for listening to Shrink for the shy guy with Dr. Aziz. If you know anyone who can benefit from what you've just heard, please let them know and send them a link to shrinkforthshyguy.com for free blogs, ebooks and training videos related to overcoming shyness and increasing confidence, go to socialconfidencecenter.com. Sa.