Regardless of one’s perspective during the pandemic, most people felt some significantly intense emotions at some point throughout the last three years. Consider that.
How did they affect you?
Did your emotions disrupt your relationships?
Your work?
Your enjoyment of life?
Your healthy habits?
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They certainly got to me at times. In some areas, I was able to channel them and in others they were more disruptive, and detracted from my ability to put my best foot forward.
The pandemic is all but over for most of us, regardless of whether some people still cling to it as ongoing. However, the ramifications and ripples of the pandemic are not. Even if these ramifications and ripples do not significantly affect us, there will be more situations that challenge our ability to harness our emotions in helpful ways.
Perhaps the implementation of 15-minute cities will be more stressful for us than the pandemic. Perhaps centralized digital currency will bring on consequences that push us closer to our breaking point. Perhaps the proliferation of AI into our world will test our emotional stability.
Whatever comes our way, it would be wise to reflect on emotional stability and strength. It would be prudent to learn healthy ways of coping. If we already have these healthy ways, it might be very useful to double down and strengthen these practices so we can withstand even more grueling challenges in what might lay ahead.
The bottom line is we can never be entirely sure of what the future holds, but if we practice emotional regulation - when we have the luxury of time and relative safety - that can be transferred better in a time of crisis.
As someone who competed in outdoor adventure sports in an assortment of areas, I have found my ability to feel and deal with nervousness, anxiety, fear, excitement, and frustration, gives me an advantage in transferring these experiences to other circumstances. Being able to recognize these emotions in oneself and the often accompanying dialogue in one’s own head creates an awareness and an early detection system that can aid in keeping these things under control.
Emotions are powerful. Feeling them is nonnegotiable. This is a fundamental aspect of being human. This is why by no means am I saying that emotional strength has to do with subduing emotions, or being cold and unfeeling. In fact, I think it is vitally important to feel deeply. However, feeling emotions and allowing them to push one into a vicious cycle of paralysis or self sabotage or reactionary antisocial behavior erodes our strength, health, and productivity.
In order to survive, and certainly to thrive any major upheaval in the world or in our personal lives, the ability to manage emotions is going to be very important. Feeling these emotions is unavoidable. Some of us are just more sensitive than others. However, regulating our emotions, in the sense that we feel them and not let them dictate all our actions, is likely to serve us well. Intense emotions - like anger, grief, frustration, joy, and the likes - can override our capacity to reason and act from a place of calm deliberation. At times, this might be fine, but often it would serve us well to be centered when we choose our course of action. It would also usually be more beneficial to not be reactive, which is often what happens when intense emotions overtake our decision making process.
We touched upon physical strength, and mental strength. Now it is time to move to emotional strength. As I mentioned in my previous piece, emotional strength and mental strength have significant overlaps in certain areas. This is from my previous episode on that:
When discussing mental strength, it is hard to delineate between it and emotional strength. I suppose this is why mental health is a term used to describe the often emotionally turbulent clouding of rational thought. Touching upon the challenge of building mental strength will undoubtedly have overlap in the cultivation of emotional strength.
So, how do we become more emotionally strong?
Here are some ways I found that have worked for me and my clients:
Meditation
Affirmations
Gratitude
Time alone in nature
Exercise
Protecting sleep
Music
There are more but these hold fairly universal power to aid in emotional regulation. When I work one-on-one counselling clients, I have the benefit of getting to know that individual and customizing strategies for them.
Unfortunately, many people choose an alternative approach to dealing with powerful emotions. The following are some ways that people try to deal with their emotions but instead of strengthening themselves to handle emotional intensity, these usually result in numbing, distracting, evading, and then the resurfacing of those emotions in more destructive and intense ways.
Alcohol
Other numbing drugs.
Distractions, such as Netflix binging, social, media, compulsion, porn, and other forms of quick dopamine, release, or shutting off of the reflective aspect of our thoughts.
Avoiding alone time.
There’s more, but this should suffice for here and now. If you have others, feel free to put them in the comments.
Terence, McKenna – writer, philosopher, and psychonaut - encouraged people to take 5 dried grams of psilocybin mushrooms in the dark alone with no sound. For those who have dabbled with these psychedelic substances, this might seem like something they wish to avoid, especially if your experience has been casual and/or party oriented. For those who have gone deep, alone, and felt their existence shake beneath their feet, they might be more inclined to see this as valuable, but also have a deep respect for its incredible power.
For those who have no experience with these substances, this kind of experience essentially dissolves the ego to a point where thoughts that you might be dying become very real. Any buried emotions, unprocessed issues, regrets, and self-criticisms will likely erupt to the surface like volcanic lava, burning their resurgence deep into your mind and heart. You’ll be left with no choice but to assimilate them or suffer the trauma of continuing to ignore them as your psychedelically-released unconscious attempts to give you an opportunity for healing.
This might be the way that some people need to go. But I cannot recommend it for a variety of reasons. I believe emotional regulation, healing, and the consequent strength can come from more gentle methods - an extended solo trip into the backcountry can offer similar introspection, increased self-awareness, and catharsis to McKenna’s prescription, but is likely not to come with as much potential for leaving one in psychic tatters.
When next the megalomaniacal petty tyrants and globalists push forward with their new iteration of expanding authoritarian control, it will come - as it always has - with more fear mongering and priming our brains into that fight, flight or freeze state that leaves one more susceptible to manipulation.
What will you do the next time you are told by“the experts” that you must follow their “science” and for the good of everyone, you must sacrifice your health, your well-being, your livelihood, your relationships and your freedom?
Will you believe that the next villain and/or threat is coming for you and your only port of safety is as a compliant serf in the hands of the authorities?
Will you question how real this threat is?
Will you be able to question how real this threat is?
You know their strategy is to rob you of reason and critical thinking so the invisible enemy cannot be deconstructed by a sharp mind. It’s always an invisible enemy - the War on Drugs, the War on Terror, the War on a Virus, the War on Climate Change, etc.. Always a war but never a tangible one that we can actually get a gauge of the battles effectiveness. With a clouded emotionally dysregulated mind, their contradictions, double standards, and irrational strategies, cannot be detected and seen for what they are.
Here’s the goal as I see it:
Feeling but not allowing action to lack rationality.
Thinking but not allowing analysis to be devoid of emotional considerations.
Empathy + Thoughtfulness = Super Power
The three strengths that I have discussed in the last few episodes have been physical, mental, and now, emotional. They all work synergistically. As one weakens, the others might be coaxed away from their point of fortitude. But instead of being lured away from, for example, practices that increase your physical strength because your emotions are swirling and imbalanced, this is the time to double down on your physical practice of strength. When your physical strength practice is in hibernation, this is the time to make sure your mental strength is being honed even more. And when you’re lacking focus and your mental strength is not at its best, this is when reigning in your emotions to a center point makes more sense than ever before.
The rest of the strengths I will touch on are about engaging your external environment in the broader sense of the word.
Social Strength
Environmental Strength
Adaptive Strength
Spiritual Strength
Stay tuned…
RANT: On Excuses
There’s always an excuse. One superpower humans seem to have, which is actually a super weakness, is the ability to rationalize anything. This leads to us often lying to ourselves by creating excuses or taking semi-reasonable excuses and making them impenetrable.
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There’s a saying that has stuck with me for most of my life.
There are people who make excuses, and there are people that get things done.
It merely takes a little looking around to see that there are people who have enormous challenges and minimal resources and yet they still manage to get things done in extraordinary fashion with great success. This should be enough to tell most of us that we can do it too.
I believe we’ve all made excuses. I certainly have. But I often recognize that I making excuses that didn’t necessarily need to stop me from achieving what I said I was going to achieve. The more I am honest with myself and present with this, the more I recognize this behavior before it becomes an outwardly expressed excuse. At the end of the day, and certainly at the end of one’s life, do we want to look back and see a trail of excuses that stopped us from reaching our goals?
Do we want to admit defeat in completing the book we wished to write or the trip we hope to take or the relationship we wanted to mend or the level of fitness we wish to achieve… because of whatever excuse you can think of?
There’s always seemingly good reasons to not do it, but they’re rarely as good as the reason to do it. I guess a good litmus test for the true weight any excuse has is asking yourself the following question in all honesty: Do I really want to achieve this thing that my excuses are blocking me from accomplishing?
In other words, if this is a goal of yours, is it really your goal?
Does this goal really mean as much to you as say and think it does?
It requires radically honesty, especially if we’ve allowed multiple excuses to block the way.
Is the desire to succeed in this endeavour greater than the lure of comfort, convenience, and staying the same?
In complete self honesty, we need to reflect if the goals that we are choosing for ourselves are truly important enough to knock any excuse down on the way to achieving them. We need to be ready to face the fire and walk upon the coals to achieve our real goals.
Excuses are clues. They tell us that we are either too emotionally dysregulated to handle the pressure of challenge and success or that where we are aiming is not where our true self wants to really go.
Perhaps they tell us other things as well. What do you think?
Strangely the Covid time activated me in many ways. Each week I made a new CD of original music. I had my first three visual art shows. And I started running and doing yoga with my wife who I married during Covid.