Big Leap EP#33 - Dealing with Pandemic Feelings

Foreign.

This is Gay Hendricks with the Big Leap podcast. On our episode today, we're going to take a deep dive into the different feelings that have come up during the whole pandemic year and what you can do to dive down into them so that you rebound with a whole new wave of creativity in your life. And we're going to break down the dynamics of just how to do that.

One of the things that I love about this episode is I asked Gay for some specific techniques, some processes you can go through that will allow you to let things go and get and stay into that creative space, but also some mental exercises. So we tap into a variety of strategies that you can use right now that will make you a clearer headed person and allow you to get through and past any pandemic, whether it is real or imagined.

Foreign.

Well, here we are at the Big Leap podcast. I'm here with Gay Hendrickson. We're talking today about pandemic feelings. It's grief anxiety as a springboard for creativity. So, Gay, super interested in your thoughts on this one. And I we were. It's a way to turn what some people perceive as a negative into a positive. There's a lot of people who've had incredible breakthroughs during the pandemic, but let's, let's go down this path.

Absolutely. Well, first of all, I'm not trying to put a positive spin on anybody's authentic feelings about it because I know I've had fears, I've had anxiety, I've had anger, I've had grief. People I know have died early on in this thing. And so I don't want to talk anybody out of their feelings. What I want to open up a possibility for is kind of having ourselves talk ourselves into our feelings in the sense of really acknowledging the depths of what everybody's been going through over the last year and maybe continuing to go through. I just got my second shot a couple of weeks ago, so I'm sort of over in a different category now. But I know a lot of people haven't and a lot of people are thinking about not doing it. And so it's obviously brought up a tremendous amount of stirred up feeling for everybody. And what I think the first step is obviously is to just acknowledge all of that and acknowledge the depth of grief you might be feeling, the depth of anxiety and fear, anger, all of those things. I think if we can open up to them and acknowledge and feel them, they are direct paths to creative solutions. Where I think a lot of people get stuck is they don't acknowledge the authenticity of their feelings. And so they kind of operate on top of a whole bunch of stuff that's unexamined and unexplored. And then whatever you create out of that is going to oftentimes bring up the very opposite of what you're trying to create. So one of my favorite quotations from Walt Whitman is, I am large and contain multitudes. And so I think all of us need to open up to the multitudes of grief, sadness, anger, excitement, joy, everything down in there. Because ideally, what we want to do, I think, is use this as an opportunity to. To grow into a new level of creativity. Just like, for example, the last time there was a huge pandemic in the late. Or in the 1918, 1920 area, where millions of people were dying. What was called the Spanish flu, the Spanish influenza was a huge thing. And I believe 18 to 23 million people worldwide died in that. Then what happened, though, is out of that, things took on a real positive direction in the sense of explosion of new ideas, the Roaring Twenties. And of course, on the other side of that, a lot of things went haywire, like the antecedents of what would become Nazi Germany. And all of that happened in the 1920s, too. But the point I'm getting at is oftentimes a deep depression, a deep dive inward is followed by an explosion of outward activity. And what I want our gang to do is to really make sure they're using this explosion as a positive energy that's going to be coming out of this pandemic year as an opportunity to enhance your best ideas and use those new ideas to make contributions to the world around you and. And also to increase your own presence in the world financially and every other way.

That's great. So let's go down and deconstruct some success stories, because I think that's there's some really great learning moments here. And some of it is just framing this into a knowing that, number one, this isn't going to last forever. Everything's temporary. The other one is something that I'm sure you've witnessed. I certainly have. I have a family member who I simply just quit communicating with altogether. Just because.

Nothing would happen without some barb about how stupid masks are or how everyone is a lemming. And it was just came from a place of anger and trauma. And the truth is, if it wasn't this, it was always something else. Anyway, this just reopened an already existing wound. And I heard someone say something not long ago. It went something like this, where anytime you get Activated. That's the sign of an open wound. And I think you said it last time in one of the episodes. But if you're unwilling to share something that hurts publicly, like shouted in a Coliseum filled with 50,000 people, it's still an open wound. And I'm paraphrasing badly what you said.

But.

That really gave me a lot of thought. And I think what happened with this pandemic is I see it as being a pressure cooker. If you had relationship problems, if you had anxiety, if you had anger, this was a multiplier, and there wasn't a place that you could really escape to. You're left with you. And I've said before, just imagine people who were married folks who had big.

Betrayals.

Going on in their marriages. How are they going to contain that? How are they going to manage their other relationship? I mean, this is like, it would expose so much of the dark underbelly. And you know what? What? Resist what you resist persists.

And again, you used a really great word for this title, gay, which was about grief and anger and anxiety, but then using it as a springboard for creativity. So if you were going to provide a recipe for taking all these negative emotions or observations, if you convert them into something where you have control over them.

How can we create a big leap moment right now and create a transformation simultaneously? What's your prescription of your recipe?

The prescription is based on what I've seen people do to change their lives over the years, number one, being to feel and love what's real instead of trying to change it or pretend it isn't there to actually just be with it and learn to love it as it is. Could be learning to love your anger, learning to love your fear, learning to love your grief. But whatever it is, it's letting down the barriers to simply feeling and appreciating and loving it as it is. Because that's your side door to the universe. That's the way into the creative flow in the universe, is simply letting go of control of all the stuff you don't have any control over, especially feelings. Just letting go of trying to control them and simply being with them and letting them.

Be in their own state for as long as they need to be there. A lot of times what happens when we're growing up is we learn some faulty ways of trying to control our feelings. Either by screwing down the lid on them and pretending they aren't there, or by blasting them out and acting them out in dramatic ways instead of simply being with them. Appreciating them and communicating about them in straightforward ways. So the same thing that needs to happen, I think, in individual change needs to happen as a worldwide thing, which is simply people need to come down out of their heads and experience what's real in their bodies, what's real in their hearts, instead of trying to solve problems from their heads, only to make that gigantic 12 inch journey down from your head to your heart so that you can feel what's right for the environment, you can feel what's right for women's rights. You know, it's not something you have to think about, it's something you can actually feel because you're a member of humanity and you're entitled to the same feelings that everybody else has. And when I go around the world, the real poverty I see is poverty of creativity that people, you know, certainly there's a problem with getting stuff to eat and getting shelter and everything, but I feel my heart aching more when I travel around the world of the unexpressed creative potential that's there in people. And when I see it, boy. Katie and I support a number of what you might call alternative capitalism, things like a women's collective in Pakistan that's kind of cornering the market on a particular industry over there. We support that and it makes micro loans to women all over Asia. And we also just adopted two gorillas and an elderly.

Gorilla and a baby gorilla. And so we're supporting now two gorillas in the world have become part of our family. So I think we need to.

Do the things that we can feel are right to do. You know, just life is full of contradictions. And everything, once you approach things at the mental level, everything's divided into twos. That's binary. That's the way our brains are. But down here is a place of unity where you can really feel your connection to the children of the world and feel your connection to the women of the world and other people who are going through struggles. So I think that's the coming down out of the binary functions of the mind, down into the unifying functions of the heart is the way I would put it.

Okay, so I'm going to get a little prescriptive here because.

When I really analyze the way my brain works, and I'm going to guess that a lot of people relate to this.

I was born a feeling avoider, or I was bred into being a feeling avoider. In other words, there were things that going around in my childhood that I couldn't control. So I just didn't feel anything, you know, I would be like, I just avoid it. And to this day, like when I really try to relax, or in the times when I've had a psychedelic journey, for example, just fully letting go and just disappearing, having what would be considered like an egoic death and letting go, it's sort of like, but what if, you know, the but what if shows up. And I think that would be.

A.

Fear of the future that hasn't even shown up yet is a deeply ingrained operating system function. And so.

I know how to love my feelings. I know how to become a non judgmental observer and also say, I see you there, I hear you, I feel you, and I choose to observe you and appreciate you, and you don't have control over me any longer. I'm good at that. But it's like that first step of just fully letting go to the attachment, the ego or the fear of what if, that is really deeply encoded. So what's your advice or prescription for that?

Well, first of all, to acknowledge that the future.

Is absolutely out of your control. And what you do with something that's out of your control is first of all, let go of trying to control it. So whatever you can do in the cells of your body to back off from the control of the future, to step back from it, to loosen your grip on it. Here, when I'm teaching people this process that we're talking about, let me show you something that I use. I just sent a pair of these, two of these to all the people that I'm mentoring this year. It's a ball that you can squeeze and then you can drop it. And it doesn't drop to the ground. And so what I would invite you to do is pick up something right now and give it a squeeze. Just squeeze it. Okay, just give it a good squeeze. Is that something that you can drop?

Yes, I do have something. This is the ball of a microphone. The other thing I had was a camera lens. Sorry.

Okay, so just give it a good squeeze. And if you're watching or listening to this, pick up something and give it a good squeeze. The best way to learn how to let go of something is to let go of something. So give it a good squeeze and then.

Just let it go. Drop it. Okay, so imagine that's the future.

Pick that thing up again and just give it a squeeze. You've got a grip on the future now. You've got a grip on the future that's coming out of fear. You're afraid of letting the future happen by itself. So you kind of keep A squeeze on it to make sure it happens the way you want it to happen. Although of course, that doesn't work very well. The future just says fuck you and goes about its business. But give it a good squeeze, like really trying to control the future, and then.

Just let it go. Give your hand a good shakeout, shake it and shiver it out and just feel the kind of life that feels. That flows through you when you're not trying to control something. Got it? Yeah. That's the way to go about it. Okay.

And then I can put the future.

On my nose, maybe like a red clown nose.

Yeah.

That's what you want to do?

Yeah.

You know, if I were redesigning the elementary school curriculum, we'd spend an hour a day doing things like learning how to let go of stuff that you don't need to hold on to, or learning how to tell the truth.

Learning how to tell an uncomfortable truth. Or here's one I would do in the first grade, how to solve a problem without making anybody wrong. That would be what we would spend an hour a day doing. And because, you know, like I remember in, in elementary school spending hours and hours learning the state capitals and, you know, learning that South Dakota was Pierre, South Dakota, and North Dakota was Fargo or whatever. And. But nobody's ever come up and asked me that. But yet I've been asked a thousand times to help people solve problems. Yeah. You know, it's. Nobody ever goes to jail for bad grammar. It's always unability to solve a problem.

Well, as far as they know anyway, you go into stupid jail. Yeah, exactly. The rejection of a. A proposal. But yes, I get it. So. Well, that was, that was really good. So simple. And I can see, you know, as, you know, this is what. When people, when I talk to people right now.

Because very frequently I get associated with having cancer, recovering from cancer. It comes up in a lot of conversations. And of course it's in my bio, so it becomes a little metaphoric conversation. And there were a lot of lessons that I learned during that journey. And when people ask for my health advice these days, my number one thing is.

Anytime you feel like you're stuck inside your head, you got to get inside your body and sweat. You know, you detoxify your body, you're going to detoxify your brain. They are actually coupled. And if you don't exercise and push it hard enough, your brain, your soul will react. You know, it's sort of. And then the other one, my latest. And we kind of started this conversation.

Gay.

I've still got to send you some information about it, but I started taking peptides not long ago and using them regularly. And I genuinely feel like I've aged in reverse for sure. 15 years, maybe 20 years in terms of how I feel right now, both mental cognition, physicality and pain relief as well.

And I think one thing that going back to the pandemic, grief and anger and anxiety is the more time you spend in there, the more your physical pains are exacerbated and all your emotional pains and just a simple exercise like this is a powerful tool. So thanks for that.

You're welcome. And.

Since you're an expert in the area of cancer now, by virtue of the fact of being where you are, if you are going to give two or three pieces of advice to people in the world who might someday find themselves struggling, that what's your big. I've got something I want to appreciate about you, the way you did it. But I'd like to hear from you first about what you did or what do you think the keys are?

Well, I think the first one that everyone I've given this advice to is alive. And those who didn't listen are dead. Okay. And that is what you do is you take massive action immediately and there's no time for woo woo, meaning listen to your real doctors because they're not there to kill you. And I would recommend taking massive action, which is in order. Surgery, chemo, radiation. It might be out of order because.

If you allow it to grow, it'll take you take over and there won't be time for the alternative and the integrative therapies. Now, I highly recommend doing integrative functional therapies and modalities. I'm a huge believer in that. And I know people who are like, well, first I'm going to do green juice diet and coffee enemas, and then they're dead. Okay. Simple as that. I think it's just like, might as well just tattoo stupid to your forehead or ignorant because there are really powerful tools that help extricate the disease quickly. The part two, though, is I happen to be a believer that cancer is a.

Can be an emotional disease, in other words. Yep. You might have a genetic predisposition to it. There could be environmental concerns, could be diet and everything else. And I was told that Louise Hay has this guide of how disease manifests and she had this whole grid that correlated how emotions show up as different diseases. And for colorectal cancer, which is what I had, is suppressed rage and anger. And there's no doubt about it. I was really angry and I put a big old happy smiley face when I was just. I mean, I was murderous. I was so mad at things and trying to be in control. And.

So I think the third piece of advice then.

Which I put in my book, because I wrote a book called Cancerpreneur and it's really my rule set that I've given to lots of folks is get as many second opinions as you can from traditional doctors. And I had a five questions I'd ask and the primary one was what would you do if I were your child? What recommendation? What would you do if I were your spouse? What would you do if it were. If it were you? And then the other one is, let's pretend two people just met each other, one had no connection, would never see that other person again, but had your knowledge and wisdom and experience. And this other person has what I have. What would that experienced person say to the other one? Knowing that there's no consequence for providing.

Recommendations or suggestions whatsoever. And that provided incredible truth.

And so what I basically did is I crowdsourced really good data and then I just looked at it and there were a couple of times when a doctor told me something they couldn't tell me, but then they talked out of the other side of their mouth and said, this is what you really need to hear, kid. It was that kind of a thing. So.

I think distrusting the system that's come as far as it has is the primary mistake. So I probably way over answered your question, but.

Well, you did touch on the main thing though, because I remember, I can't remember how many years ago was that when you sent out that thing saying what you had and what you wanted people to do and everything. What year was that?

That would have been probably.

Well, if this is 2021, I'm going to say around. Somewhere between. It was around 2012. Okay.

Okay. So. Yeah, okay. So the thing that just amazed me about that is I got that email from you and you made it really clear that you'd done your own research on that and you specifically asked people not to bombard you with their favorite cancer cure. I thought that was a pretty radical move that set it apart from any other communication of that nature I'd ever gotten.

Yeah, no, that I had forgotten about that. And to this day I got to see if I can find my original email somewhere. There's a variation of it that made its way into my book, but I don't know, I'll have to see if someone I know actually has it yet. But for anyone who doesn't know this, I wrote a pretty detailed email saying, here's what I have. Here's how you can best support me, and here's a way to not support me. So I basically said, if you have an MLM multilevel marketing pill cure or some crystals, feathers, or funny fuzzy bunnies, I have zero interest in it, okay? And secondly, if you do have something that is backed by science and research, here's my physical address. Print it out and mail it. I don't want to see any emails. And I basically said, and that's because it's too easy to send some email with a bunch of links. I said, I need you to think it through and present it as though you're presenting some information of use. I don't have the energy or time to sift through because I started getting people who'd send me literally 20 links in an email with no explanation of what they are. And I was like, delete. No, I'm like, I have an hour of conscious waking strength a day. I am on the verge of dying. Right? It's like, I don't have anything to give to somebody. And it was quackery. It was just absurd quackery. And someone did a Google search and thinking they're doing me a favor, right? It's like, give me some context, give me a pitch, show the research, and if you mail it and package it, I'll pay attention.

Yeah, I really like the way you did that, though, because you set the boundaries in a very clear way. And I remember being really amazed by that. I hope I never get that sick, but if I get that sick, I'm going to do something very similar.

Yeah, yeah. Like, and I wasn't a jerk about it, you know, I was very kind and nice. You know, I'm kind of being Kurt now. But it's, it's. It wasn't intended to make anyone feel bad. It was just like, you know, I did my best without it being a poor me. This is what life is like in this state. And you can't imagine just how weak you are and also how frail and, and how, you know, you're. You're literally. Your animal body's afraid. That's what's going on. It doesn't have anything to do with your. Your brain. You know, your brain can be okay, but after, when you're in a diseased or broken body, your brain believes that it's always been that way. And dealing with grief and sadness and anxiety.

Is, Is just.

You Know it is really tied to that physical body for sure. Until you really learn to love it, observe it.

Unconditionally, and say, that's a container. It's just a container. It isn't who I am.

Yeah, well, that's probably a good place for us to wrap things up here. So we're talking about feelings and how you can use these feelings that are going on now, whatever they are, as a springboard to your creativity. And the way to do that is down through with your awareness, going all the way down and acknowledging how you actually feel about those things. And that gives you that side door to the universe in the sense that you step through into a whole different world once you're willing to open up and be with whatever is there.

And I want to thank you and acknowledge you for this episode, Gay, because a. The just the little release exercise, as simple as it is, is super powerful. I just have to remember to do that because habitually I have a control instinct. You know, it's like put everything and make sure everything's just so systemized. Systemize, systemize.

And one of the things I appreciate most about you is you appear to effortlessly create and just stay in your happy place all the time. But it's a deliberate behavior and discipline that you practice all the time. And I really appreciate that wisdom that you carry and your mentorship as well as a great example.

Thank you. I appreciate that. It's my honor and my privilege.

All right, so for you watching, listening right now, make sure you subscribe Rate Review we read these reviews, love them, and share this episode with someone you know who could use it. Maybe it's a family member who's been dealing with that grief, the anger, the anxiety, and you want to help them find a way to get into a beautiful creative space and live their full potential, even during a crazy pandemic, whether it's a real or imagined one.

Yeah. All right, great being with you guys again. Until we talk next time, Gay Hendricks. And here's to many big leaps on your part that benefit you and all of us at the same time.

See ya.