In this podcast episode, host John Oakes shares his personal experiences with trauma and his journey towards healing. He discusses:
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In this podcast episode, host John Oakes shares his personal experiences with trauma and his journey towards healing. He discusses:
Buy my book! 75 EASY: the ultimate challenge for personal growth
Amazon US
UK
CA
AU
Weight loss coaching - Join the Weight Loss Freedom Academy today
To inquire about 1 -1 Coaching with John - email John at john@oakesweightloss.com
Check out the EASY WAY OUT Blog/Newsletter site
Join the free "Lose Weight with John" community
Watch the Easy Way Out on Youtube
Speaker 1 (00:00:00) - Hello and welcome to another episode of The Easy Way Out. I'm your host, Jon Oakes, and if you just heard a sound, it's the wind sucking at the plastic sheeting I put up next to the air conditioner, which I should probably take down. I'm not sad that summer is over. I'm happy that falls here. I like full, but I'm already dreading winter I'm in pre winter dread. Yeah. I think in terms of winter I'm over it. Fall is just pre winter and you have winter and then there's spring which is post post winter. Yeah I'm just over it. But it's supposed to be a very mild winter in the Pacific Northwest so hopefully it'll be, it'll be all right. I keep thinking I'm going to get back into running. Watch me do that. Right as the streets turn to ice. I just got back from consultation at a neuro therapy clinic where they do something called Neurofeedback. If you don't know, I suffer from pretty crippling PTSD from childhood. And so much of what I have to teach people arose out of my own journey trying to get healthy.
Speaker 1 (00:01:05) - In 2018, my brain completely melted down. I entered a hell that I did not know existed in the human experience. And about nine months into therapy, Emdr, all that I learned with shock and surprise, shock and surprise that I'd already kind of exhausted the resources of the mental health world. Obviously, you could do things. There's different modalities. But as far as like, how do you heal from trauma? There isn't a whole lot for people. And I think that that's I think we're still in the early days of taking trauma seriously. You have a lot of people who still laugh at the idea and then you have other people who overused the term every time they have a bad day at work, they're talking about their trauma. It's like, that's not exactly what it is. Trauma isn't having a bad day, But I learned so much working my own way out of it, you know, just clawing one little inch at a time. And that's why I had to learn things that weren't really available because I wish that there was all this stuff had already been taught because I would have bought that book.
Speaker 1 (00:02:06) - I would have listen to that podcast. I would have absolutely jumped at the chance to have access to what I know now. I got to a pretty good place, like a really Zen place in 2020, right as the rest of the world was kind of going to hell in a handbasket. I was just getting ready to leave the house again. I learned a lot watching the collective trauma that the pandemic caused, seeing in real time how people enter into destructive cycles and what it's based in and how it how it expresses itself in real time. But then in 2021, I got more into coaching. As you know, the way this all got started, I got on TikTok eight days later. I had 100,000 followers. That was really overwhelming. I went from, okay, I've had one client, okay, maybe I'll share on the Internet. And then I have thousands of people begging me for help. And it was very overwhelming. And I think every step along the way, I mean, I knew I had to help, but every step along the way, I have encountered new triggers, new unhealed traumas and styles of trauma.
Speaker 1 (00:03:13) - You could say, for instance, like helping people or charging for my services. That's a huge, huge thing for me. And so I was so afraid to charge anything. And it's because I in childhood, like I don't I wouldn't take anything because in childhood I learned that you you give for free and you don't ask anything in return. And that's, that's a nice spiritual concept. But when it's the theme of how you're being parented, not so much so oddly, you know, the being in a more public setting, being, you know, doing tiktoks back in the day there were 3 or 4 stints where I would get on for a few months and really hammer away at those. Yeah, that was it was quite difficult. Luckily, people on TikTok were lovely and the way of TikTok functioned. It really was showing my videos to people who wanted to watch them, not people who were going to just, you know, trash me in the comments for dumb reasons. Looking at you Instagram. And I've worked with so many lovely people and seen so much amazing transformation, but my mental health issues continue to cause me a lot of physical, emotional pain, a lot of constant stress, just in a constant state of fight or flight.
Speaker 1 (00:04:28) - And there's only so much I can do, you know, through mindfulness practice, through meditation, through going to therapy, reading books, continuing to evolve, taking all the drugs, getting better at being constantly accepting and non judgmental of circumstances in life. Come I've come miles and miles. I've come so far leagues, as they might say in the old days. But there's still. Yeah. Like right now my left foot really hurts. My stomach hurts for no reason. It just hurts all the time. And I get stressed out over simple things so, so easily. And I can relax and reset. But then it's like the baseline is just being stressed out all the time. So I've been on a wait list for ten months to do this neurofeedback stuff. And what they do is they put electrodes on your noggin and they do an electroencephalogram EEG and they can see where your brain is active and they can see at what frequency it's working at, so to speak. And there are these different brain waves that relate to different states of being.
Speaker 1 (00:05:41) - So like Delta is like when you're sleeping, theta is like falling asleep or being spacey, spaced out. Alpha is like a sense of peace and beta is kind of alertness. And then there's high beta. So like where I'm at most of the time. And so not only can you can they look and say, okay, you have a lot of activity in certain portions of your brain and that's associated with these mental health disorders and the quote unquote normal people in the reference range. They tend to have more activity over in this area. And by using like a display showing you what's happening in your brain in real time, you basically teach the brain how to function. And it really it gives the brain a way of seeing itself that you're not going to access any other way. And you know how big I am on awareness. I think awareness is the basis of all change. So I see this as an opportunity to give my brain a level of awareness that it could not have any other way. So yeah, just got back from my first consultation and it was so cool.
Speaker 1 (00:06:44) - Like I'm so excited to start. I was like, I'm not leaving. Like, we're going to start tonight. I feel bad for any mental health professional, you know, the first time they meet me because I'm six four, I'm big, I'm intimidating, physical presence, and I got bad RBF, you know, and but I'm often like just having a panic attack. Like, I'm not I'm not angry at anybody. And I'm in there. I was explaining how I walk around in a general state of anxiety, the anxiety I walk around with. Most of the time people would consider a panic attack if they experienced it. And he goes, Well, I got to stop you there because, yeah, you're not exhibiting any of the signs of having a panic attack. And I was like, Yeah, because I've had to deal with this so much that to become at all functional in the world, I have to just be able to operate, even though even though I'm having a panic attack And I explained to him, I was like, my my heart's racing, my muscles are cramping muscles and my feet and stomach are cramping.
Speaker 1 (00:07:40) - I've got a knot in my stomach that's tightening that I mentioned the heart pounding. I held up my hand and showed him how shaky it was and I told him, I can tell that my voice is shaky, too. And maybe, maybe I can walk around at this because to me, it's two out of ten. I know how bad it can be. So going through history and I'm just like, I wonder how long it's going to take for him to get it. What do I mean by that? Well, when people meet me, they often get a very wrong impression of me. A lot of people are scared of me, even though, hey, you know me, I'm a nice guy. A lot of people see me and they think maybe the way I dress or whatever they think Jock, they think guy who was popular in high school on the football team. It's like, No, man, I was captain of the knowledge team. I was a dork. I wouldn't go play football.
Speaker 1 (00:08:26) - I wouldn't go spend my time willingly with all the people who are bullying me the rest of the day. Are you kidding? And giving them a permission to hit me as hard as they want. No, we're not doing that. Yeah, he's like, So is there anything I need to know? I was like, If you ever think that I'm angry at you, I'm not. I'm just. I'm just a little bit intense when my wheels are turning. And I got bad RBF to boot when my wheels get turned and it's just I can my face can be making, like, angry shapes. And I'm not angry. I'm definitely not angry at you. And he's like, well, looking at all your all your history, I, I can't imagine you are angry. And I was like, oh yeah, I'm angry. Let me get this straight. I'm not angry at you. I hate myself. We had a good laugh over that. I don't know. I got angry. I got.
Speaker 1 (00:09:09) - I've got anger. Don't worry, bro. I get it. I think that that's a really interesting topic because he he was right to point that out because so many people, I'm sure, come to him and they're like, I'm not an angry person, but they don't realize that they're carrying around an ocean of anger inside of them. A lot of times when you've been abused or neglected as a child, if you stand up for yourself, you just get hurt harder, right? An abuser will just ramp up because they're always willing to go to that next level and they're always willing to go to that level where they'll hurt you, but you're not willing to do that to them. And so you end up giving up your reality for the reality that's being forced on you. And this is hugely damaging to the psyche. And this is why child abuse is so, so disgusting. To do that to a child is just you're robbing them of their own experience of life. Looks like I'm going to do the neurofeedback.
Speaker 1 (00:10:01) - I have to wait a week to, like, go weekly. I was like, Oh, I thought I was going to get to go every day. Like, No, we don't do it that way. We go a little bit slower. But I'm so thankful. And gosh, what this could mean for me personally and what it could mean for my ability to teach more. Right and more do find better systems so I can get my content out so I can be teaching for free for everybody. Like I'm operating under such great constraints. Man, What would it be like if I could wake up in the morning and like, actually feel good and and not be riddled with pain, physical and emotional all day and just getting super trigger stressed out over, you know, stuff that I know logically isn't that big of a deal. Just getting that, getting that, that circuitry kind of reordered because the brain just knows one way to react to everything. And it's just it's just a well-worn, rutted path at this point.
Speaker 1 (00:10:58) - So yeah, I'm hugely stoked. I think we should talk about anger because if you're listening to this podcast, you're probably not the kind of person who's going to get cut off in traffic and then road rage the person and beat them up by the side of the highway. I mean, we all have our moments, but a lot of people I work with, they're not angry people. They're not outwardly angry very much. Most people who I work with, most people in my audience, they tend to be helpers. They tend to be people pleasers, if anything. And I recorded a whole episode on people pleasing, but I didn't like the audio, so maybe I should read rerecord that next time. But when you've been badly treated for your whole life and and the stakes are so high for trivial things like for instance, for other people, getting an A on an assignment is like, great. But for you it's like, if this is your soul means of of staying safe and being loved, obviously there's there's greater intensity around more mundane things.
Speaker 1 (00:11:58) - And we are meaning making machines. And so we will just ramp ourselves up and turn our world into a maze of obligation and shame and failure. And that's frustrating. Like, it's frustrating to fail. It's frustrating to promise yourself that this time that you're going to change and then to fall on your face again. It's not just disappointing. It's not just it's not just hurting your sense of self and your ability to trust yourself. It's not just deepening compulsive behaviors and and stealing motivation is pissing you off. And I think that a lot of people, if they could get in touch with their anger and find some assertive ways of expressing it, it would it would do wonders for them. I think that anger is in the same way functionally, that the opposite of awareness is not lack of awareness. The functional opposite of awareness in this work is shame, because shame is what's going to actually prevent you from getting on the inside to be able to take an inventory of your inner world. And in that same functional sense, the opposite of anger is not peace or happiness or being super chill.
Speaker 1 (00:13:13) - The opposite of anger is vulnerability, because ultimately when you're storing anger, that's a result of a life characterized by working way harder than other people to do basic things, and then still feeling that anger is going to be mainly aimed at yourself and it's going to be right there next to shame. And every time we fail, we're angry about it. We're frustrated because so much is riding on our success. But then also that shame can say, Yeah, yeah, you're not ready to be seen yet, and shame will bounce us out of our inner world and get us focused on exterior circumstances. Get you focused on your next extreme plan to lose weight or finally do the thing. And this is how we end up stuck in these cycles of shame and failure. But it's easy to miss the anger and how much of it is aimed at you. And it goes back to childhood because like, let's take take the case of an abused child. An abused child has a fairly egoic mind. The parts of the brain that do abstract thinking that can really like understand that other people have a whole experience to their own.
Speaker 1 (00:14:21) - And that we need to respect that and how all that stuff. That's part of childhood psychological development. It takes time. So it's highly likely that if you were an abused child, you were abused at a time when you and your experience was really your only frame of reference. So if things were happening in your world, it was pretty easy for you to go, Well, the common denominator here is me, so I must be to blame for this. And you know, something I was teaching about in the Weight Loss Freedom Academy this last Saturday is that children are used to accepting blame before they understand what they did wrong. And this is how we really get stuck in this this blame trap of blaming ourselves for abuse and neglect. That was absolutely not our fault. Because, you know, you do something, you're playing along and all of a sudden your parents like, hey, go to timeout. If you have kids, you've seen a four year old. Not not quite accepting that they've done something wrong.
Speaker 1 (00:15:19) - And so they go to timeout or whatever their consequences so that they have some time to to focus solely on what happened, not get distracted because we have our nose in a corner and it's a time to really kind of reflect and slow down and go, okay, what just happened? Even if they're not talking to themselves like this, but one way or another, our brain does the math and go, Yeah, we can't do that thing that way anymore. And sometimes it's because the child realizes that like, yeah, that doesn't life doesn't work that way. That's not we do need to share because like, I want people to share with me. So like, all right, I get that another times. They're just like, I hate this. I think this is dumb, but I'm going to keep getting punished if I keep doing it. So I'm going to go ahead and shift my behavior. Sometimes there's the love of growth and sometimes there's just the fear of reprisal. You know, human beings can can change either way.
Speaker 1 (00:16:12) - The child's shift in awareness comes after the punishment, not before. And so for a child who's being abused, it's very easy for them to see Children are the center of their own universe. Right. Just part of being a kid. But they end up blaming themselves for the bad things that happen to them and the bad things that are done to them and the things that they lack. So they start to find ways to attain the things that they lack and to prevent harm. These are the seeds of our survival mechanisms. But all along, every time we attempt to, let's say, earn love by getting good grades at school, if you fail at that, the failure is going to be more significant than other kinds of failure. It's common for people to get frustrated when they're learning something and they're having a hard time getting the pieces to click together, especially when they look around and see other people doing it right. So you're putting all this pressure on yourself to get good grades more than is helpful. If you do get it, you're really just you've now attained something that other people have anyways and you had to work super hard for it.
Speaker 1 (00:17:20) - You're probably not going to have it for very long and you're going to be on to the next thing, on to the next way to earn love, safety, being seen worth. And this is how we stay stuck in this fixing mode, always trying to get levels back to tolerable. And this is how we end up, you know, in compulsive behaviors where we're hurting ourselves, trying to feel good. And on the other side of it, when you're when you're stuck in that, it makes perfect sense. When you get out of it, you look back and you're like, Oh my gosh, what was I doing? I was just hurting myself. I wasn't fixing anything. I was just kicking the can down the road a little bit. Point is, it's hard to go through that much failure in shame and then also to blame yourself and then not feel a metric ton of anger. And you could be the sweetest person to to deal with in life, but you might be absolutely vicious to you.
Speaker 1 (00:18:10) - So what do we do about anger? Well, I think first, we need to understand what it is. Anger is an emotion, like all emotions. It's there to prepare your body and mind to meet certain situations, people, events with the characteristics associated with confrontation. Right. So your blood pressure goes up, your fists clench, your jaw clenches, your face contorts to make you look meaner and more intimidating. Your shoulders puff up doing the same thing. These are physiological and psychological adaptations meant to meet a problem. But if we don't express that anger, or if we don't find an assertive way to deal with the thing that's making us angry, that anger is going to sit in the body, these physiological changes like an open loop. And over time this adds up. And this is what people develop autoimmune disorders, people develop fibromyalgia. A lot of the pain that I experience in my body is this kind of thing. And, you know, it's really easy for people like us to miss anger.
Speaker 1 (00:19:13) - So the anger we feel is not so much like I'm angry right now, but it's almost like a. Does it do? That has built up inside of you after after decades of filling up with anger and then bottling it up and not knowing what to do with it, it's just going to leave this film or like a calcified sedimentary layer or something like that. I don't know, pick whatever visual metaphor works for you. Or it's like adding another angry little bee to the beehive. And so to clear that anger out of our bodies, we need to deal with the things that trigger our anger. And we need to learn to honor the anger, the anger that's coming up afresh for situations that that we mean and the anger that has always been there. Certain themes of events, the things that trigger us, right. And so if we can experience our triggers in this light, we go, Oh, this is perfect because I need I need to be triggered because being triggered is just me being angry and my mind is trying to show me what I'm angry at.
Speaker 1 (00:20:19) - And if you can admit that you're angry, especially when it's happening, when you feel it ramping up and you go, Oh, I'm angry, now you have the opportunity to harness your awareness. And that's a big part of honoring your emotions and closing the emotional loop is seeing it, acknowledging it, and you don't fix an emotion, you complete an emotion. So you get anger rises. You deal with your situation. Anger goes away, loop closed. You can receive a suggestion like, Hey, let's go punch that person and you can say, No, thanks. Thanks for the advice, but I think I'm going to take this other form of assertive action. I'm going to deal with this in a different way. And the mind is like bogey. It just wants to know that there's somebody at the wheel. It's like a lawyer leaning over in a negotiation to a CEO and whispering their opinion in the CEO thinks about it and goes, okay, I'm going to do something different than what you suggested.
Speaker 1 (00:21:14) - But I take I take that on advisement and the employees sitting around the table or like, yeah, that's fine. Like you're the boss. And the other thing that anger is going to hold in it is information about the thing that's making you angry because the emotion is trying to resolve a threat, some sort of imbalance. Let's say, you know, if we're using our 20,000 years ago on the plains of Central Asia, we're running around in bands of 120 people, and Dale starts eating too many berries. Well, we get angry, be like, Dude, slow down. You're eating more than your fair share of berries. And that's a threat to the group if you do that. So we're going to get angry at you until you realize, Oh, I need to stop this. And then we all start eating the appropriate ration of berries and we continue surviving. So in this case, it's not just saying, Hey, go punch Dale, it's telling you it's because he's taking too many berries. And once you see what your subconscious or very conscious mind is alerting you to, you've seen the emotion and acknowledged it, and then you've seen and acknowledged the threat.
Speaker 1 (00:22:22) - Now, now your subconscious mind and your your basal ganglia, your fear centers, your emotional centers can kind of let it go and say, all right, you got it from here. And as long as you take assertive action, as long as you deal with it, make make the threat go away somehow, then there's no reason to have anger. And that anger will subside. And we will reset for the next emotional signal to help us deal with whatever is coming our way. So it might be a little bit different if you're dealing with a fresh anger, a new, a new anger, or if you're dealing with sort of a historical anger that's trapped inside your body and mind. But generally speaking, you want to start with those two things, see it, feel it and acknowledge it without necessarily trying to fix it or change it or resist it. And then also let it teach you what it's angry at. A lot of people associate feeling their feelings with being overwhelmed by their feelings because that's their only frame of reference for interacting with their feelings.
Speaker 1 (00:23:26) - And so I think a really a great place to start is if feeling your feelings is not something that makes sense to you, try listening to them. Because when you listen to a feeling, what you're doing is allowing it to convey information to you. By definition, if you're listening to someone, you're acknowledging their presence without taking action to fix them, you're taking a passive role. Now, there's a few different ways to do this. Obviously, if you experience certain pains or certain tightness in your body, when you're when you're angry, you'll start to notice those patterns and you can go to those places in your body and ask the places where you're storing a lot of that anger, even if it's it might not be a muscle like something you would use for angry things. It might be your stomach, it might be a headache, it might be in your knee, I don't know. But when you start to feel that pain flaring up in that place, you can go, okay, this is I'm.
Speaker 1 (00:24:20) - I'm going to check real quick. Are we angry about something? Are we stressed out about something? Right. And you can identify different places in your body where you tend to feel certain emotions. And these are probably where they're going to be stored up and accumulate over time. So by learning these things about where your emotions like to hang out in your body, you can now focus your energy on the part of you that's hurting, the part of you that's mad about something. And you can listen and you can ask a questions. And in one way or another it can speak to you. Obviously, that sounds a little bit spacey, but it's really not. It's just the basics of how all emotions work. They're always trying to speak to us. People who are really good at allowing their emotions tend to they seem smarter, right? We call that emotional intelligence. I think this is the basis of emotional intelligence. There's an emotional intelligence also that's not just being good at emotions. There's an emotional intelligence where you actually get smarter because you're in touch with your emotions.
Speaker 1 (00:25:20) - Why? Because you're getting access to all this free information that your subconscious and very conscious mind are giving to you, You know more than other people. You perceive more than other people. You see more than other people. And that gives you a huge advantage wherever you go. And this is part of the easy way out, is not having to play defense with our emotions all the time and being able to actually start to see them guiding us, teaching us, making it sharper, which in turn allows us to experience more abundance and success, which gives you more and more influence over your circumstances. And we all know how much we like that, kind of obsessed with it. A lot of people might be shocked to hear this, but of all the things you could do to try to say make $1 million. Absolutely. Most important one you could you could do is do something like what I'm talking about. Get in touch with the emotions that have been locked up inside of you and not haven't been able to close the loop, haven't been able to be expressed because you're too afraid to.
Speaker 1 (00:26:19) - You were taught as a child that that's going to be punished. You're just going to get hurt even more. If you express your anger, you honor the feelings. Once you find them, you honor them when they arise, you give them your attention. It doesn't mean you have to take whatever reaction they're suggesting. More than likely, it's the person who the person who's hauling off and punching somebody. They're an act of resistance to their emotion because they're so uncomfortable with it that they're going to act impulsively just to close the loop. Why? Because they're so uncomfortable with their anger. But somebody who's actually comfortable with their anger, they can get that urge to punch somebody and go, no, they're not doing that because they can sit with the emotion. And here's the thing. You're afraid of feeling your emotions, but you're feeling them all the time. The emotions that you most need to honor, they're the ones you feel the most. And if you're not good at being in touch with them mentally or emotionally, you're feeling it physically.
Speaker 1 (00:27:12) - You're seeing it erupt through other emotional pathways. Anger. It's a great example. We squash that down and it will still try to get our attention. Why? Because it's not based in preference. It's based in survival. So we have a survival level instinct to get these messages through. So we start to experience heightened hunger, heightened sexual arousal, heightened greed, other forms of desire attainment. But when you do those things, you're not actually taking care of what's causing the anger to begin with. So when we allow emotions to start hopping on the wrong bus, stowing away in other emotions like hunger, we're getting the note to do something. But because of the confusion over what we're being asked to do, we end up doing something that we don't need to do, like eating, while also functionally neglecting the emotion like anger. And so once you start to do this, you are going to be smarter than you've ever been. You are going to be sharper than you've ever been. Your mind is going to be open to more possibilities and it's going to be aware of more opportunities because you're going to be more present, grounded and willing to interact with life in a free and open way.
Speaker 1 (00:28:26) - And this applies for every emotion. But today's topic is anger. So sit down with yourself. Maybe as I've been talking, you started to feel anger poking up outside going, Hey, are you talking about me? And maybe you're feeling emotional. Maybe if you if you admit to yourself how angry you are, you might feel instead of feeling angry, you might feel a sense of catharsis. A soothing feeling that's hard to explain. That's. That's the healing of reality. That's you admitting. What is your accepting your anger? Acceptance does not create it. We're just honoring what is and when we can honor our emotions and the reality of them, We start to take back our sense of reality that was stolen from us in childhood memory. I said how an abuser will impose their. Reality on you, often inflicting great pain to do so so that they can continue to live in their delusional reality where they're always right and you're always wrong and they get to take, take, take. And imagine that they're they're making it a two way street when they're absolutely not.
Speaker 1 (00:29:37) - So this is how emotional processing can free up pains in your body, make you smarter and allow you to take back your sense of your own reality that was taken from you in childhood. What you have then is autonomy. You are freaking bulletproof because there's no emotion that can ruin your day. You see your emotions as good things. You see them as messengers carrying signals. You're not letting your bills pile up on the counter, wreaking all sorts of havoc. You're opening your mail and you're attending to it because it takes moments in real time. It can just be at five seconds of honoring an emotion and you can work through all the reactivity that all the things you do that you don't know why you do them, why you hurt yourself even though you kind of love yourself deep down, but you find yourself hurting yourself and feeling like you deserve it. All of a sudden that goes away. These physical pains that you've been wracked with, that you've been attributing it to old age. Sorry, it's not old age.
Speaker 1 (00:30:39) - You see people you see, especially guys, they get into their 30s, they start developing back problems and everyone's like, Oh, we're getting old. No, you're all refusing to feel your feelings. And so you're storing your emotions in your body and you're starting to have all these mobility issues and it can create injuries out of whole cloth, or they can take a real injury and inflame it to make it worse. Why? Because we pay attention to pain. And this is why we need to listen to pain as well. Pain is just another emotion that's trying to get your attention to convey something to you. And that something is, Hey, there's something broken and you need to attend to it, or it's going to be a real problem. Your pain is your best friend and a teacher and pain will direct you to where the emotions are that you need to to feel and reconnect with. Pain is like. It's like Lassie, What is it, girl? What? Tammy fell down the well again, and it doesn't speak English, but like a dog, it can run up to us and bark and we go, What's going on? We can tell something's wrong.
Speaker 1 (00:31:45) - And then we follow the dog and they show us where the problem is. You know, it's man's best friend pain. All our emotions are our best friends. Anger, jealousy, rage. They're all here to serve a purpose. There's a time for everything under the sun. Life's going to throw some really different stuff at you. Which if your goal is to survive and pass on your genes to the next generation, every single emotion you have when it arises, it's just arising because your brain is sensing that there's a threat or there something that could be like a like a baby threat that, hey, let's deal with this now before it becomes an issue. This is how we have so much success watching people quit emotional eating and reconnecting to their motivation. Because part of the reason you're unmotivated is that you're not connected to any emotions. You're motivated. It's in there. You're just stomping it out. Same way you try to stomp out your anger, you repress it, and when you stop having to repress your adverse emotions, you start getting more access to other emotions, to joy, happiness, gratitude.
Speaker 1 (00:32:53) - You don't have to try to force yourself to practice gratitude. That's a whole other topic. It drives me nuts. You don't have to force yourself to to express discipline or self control. You don't have to force these things. They are not the path. They are the destination. What is the path? Everything I've just talked about establishing balance with reality, honoring reality, opening your mail, paying your bills, noticing the anger and saying I'm angry. Yeah, because Sheila's being a real jerk. Okay, what am I going to do about it? Well, probably nothing, because there's nothing I can do. Oh, okay. This is me. This is me doing the thing. Oh, I don't think I can do anything about Sheila being a jerk, because if I go to the boss, the boss won't. Won't believe me because Sheila is the boss's pet. But you work through it. You go, Okay, there's something I can do. And sometimes you do the thing, even though this might not work.
Speaker 1 (00:33:44) - But I'm doing this for me. I'm going to the boss to stand up for myself, for me, and for the younger versions of me stuck in my head who are psychologically inhibited from developing because of the way that they were treated and the way they were taught to not advocate for themselves in youth. So you want to get a six pack, you want to lose the weight, you want to make $1 million, feel your feelings. And if you can't feel them, listen to them. Because just as because the feeling isn't the point, it's dealing with reality. That's what it's all pointed at. And this is. Way to become the best version of yourself, to become the biggest ass kicker you could possibly be, to kick all the asses all the time, effortlessly. You don't need to try to become a very good ass kicker. You need to let go of all the things that you're doing instead. And then kicking ass will come very naturally to you. Why? Because you are success pressed down, shaken together and overflowing.
Speaker 1 (00:34:44) - You are the product of billions of years of evolution. And if one of those people had not succeeded in surviving and passing along their DNA, you would not be here. So I don't care if you're £600 laying on a couch, cutting yourself, watching bad reality television. I mean, just think. Think of the most think of the saddest situation you could possibly think of. That person is success, pure and simple. And everything else that's going on with them is simply a twisting of the fact that they are capable. It's a twisting, a perversion of the truth that that they are pure success. It's in their DNA, literally. So your genes are not the reason why you're overweight. Your genes are the reason why you're here. So if we're going to before we start pointing our fingers at genes as being the problem, let's realize that they are the whole story. I guess we'll end it there for today. I want to remind you that the easy weight loss club is up and running. There's a link for it in the show notes and I sent out an email about it.
Speaker 1 (00:35:45) - I'll probably be sending out more this week. This is going to be a really fun opportunity for us to get together in larger numbers and learn and grow together and start to kick ass together and use my vast library of knowledge when it comes to the techniques and strategies of creating sustainable weight loss, but also brings you a little bit closer to getting access to the mindset shifts that you need to go from living in a very disadvantageous, hard, difficult, pushing a boulder uphill type mental state to feeling like you're walking downhill and letting letting letting reality be. And realizing that being passive and not an active resistance to everything is actually going to make you more powerful than you ever thought you could be. That's all for now.