Embracing Emotions - A Guide to Personal Growth and Stress Management

Ever felt overwhelmed by your emotions, finding it hard to understand and express them? Welcome to Mindset Monday, where we journey together to understand and manage our emotions. In our latest episode, we dive into two books, Self-Care by Minda Zetlin and The Voice of Knowledge by Donnet Agelruis, for insights on how to navigate this tricky realm. We talk about acknowledging our emotions and discuss the pitfalls of suppressing them. Remember, your feelings are valid and they come from your personal perspective, not others’.

Do your kids get overwhelmed too? Discover innovative ways of using hand signals to communicate with them when they are feeling emotionally taxed. Additionally, we take you through grounding and breathing strategies, and their power in managing stress and anxiety. By just taking off your shoes and standing on the grass or taking deep breaths, you can find calm and focus. The episode concludes with a celebration of self-love and an invitation to share your personal journeys. We believe you're already cherished and accomplished. Join our community and let's grow together. So, pull up a chair, there's always room at our table for you.

Transcript

Charlie: 0:02

Good morning and welcome to the table.

Heather: 0:04

I'm Charlie and I'm Heather, and it's Monday.

Charlie: 0:09

Mindset Monday, where we come together and renew some points to ponder some personal things, to draw some tools, some not feeling alone.

Heather: 0:23

Not the journey can feel alone because we are perceiving the journey from inside of only us, and if we don't connect with the community, it feels very lonely. And that is how Charlie and I got together having this conversations. We're like oh, you read that too cool, what do you think about this? Oh, you read that too, what do you think about that? And so we were having these amazing conversations and we felt like, if we were both doing this, that we weren't alone, that there's more of you out there, and you could use some love and support and you know to come along on the journey with us, wherever you're joining us from the journey out.

Charlie: 1:12

Yes, so there's room at the table for you.

Heather: 1:15

Yes, so let's jump in today. If you did not take advantage of listening to Charlie read the chapters, you can go back and do that. They're always available for you. If you want to get caught up, you do some power listening. You could do that, or you just come along for the ride weekly, starting right now you. I hope you'll enjoy the journey.

Charlie: 1:38

So right now we are reading some very amazing books, which you can hear me read the chapter on Sundays through self-care by Minda Zetlin and the voice of knowledge by Donnet Agelruis.

Heather: 1:50

Yeah, and these are fabulous. We've really dived into the wisdom of Donnet Agelruis, and so we've read the four agreements, we've read the master of love, and now we're honored to the voice of knowledge. Yeah, we've actually read the four agreements, a couple of times. Yeah, well, I like it it's been such a life-changing journey. Yeah, taking into account and and this is really getting into that voice in our head right and this we like to call the itty-bitty students maybe right this week we're talking about how emotions are real.

Charlie: 2:33

Yeah, like no one can tell you that you didn't have an emotion what this brings me to is back when we were kids and we would get upset, we would have an emotional reaction, that and then we were immediately told that we weren't allowed to have that emotional reaction. I'll give you something to cry about. Right, stop crying. What are you crying about? But what are you laughing at? Oh, yeah, right right, joy-stealers, joy-stealers.

Heather: 3:08

I mean, it happened on both ends of emotions, right yeah, so you never knew what you were allowed to feel If you were laughing and dancing and escaping around.

Charlie: 3:17

You were.

Heather: 3:19

Being too loud, too noisy and Disruptive and being disruptive. Right, if you're crying, you're trying to get attention.

Charlie: 3:26

Right, that's not what we're talking about. We're talking about what is true, because none of that is true. Right, none of that was true. None of those things were true. What is true is that you are allowed to have feelings, you are allowed to have emotions and you are allowed to process those emotions. Because if you do not allow yourself to feel those emotions and you hold them in and you suck it up, you pull up your big girl panties and you keep moving on and you don't deal with it, you will have to suffer until you deal with it. Yeah.

Heather: 4:02

Right Dang it Start pulling me out.

Charlie: 4:05

It's so true.

Heather: 4:05

Yeah, it is so true and I like this. Let's jump right into the points to ponder. Every emotion that you feel is real. It is truth. It comes directly from the integrity of your spirit. You cannot fake what you feel. You can try to justify or repress your emotions, you can try to lie about what you feel, but you feel it authentic.

Charlie: 4:33

It's you. You feel it's emotions authentically. You don't have to feel the way somebody else tells you how to feel either.

Heather: 4:42

We all have our own experience Right, and so we have reactions inside of us that are our own, and there's nothing wrong with feeling the way you feel and the actual process of feeling it, the emotion, the emotion itself and feeling it. If you are able to just breathe through the process which I think is great how it goes with the other book this week right, you can get through the emotion of what you're feeling. And then it's that, after you've felt the emotion, instead of repressing it and holding it in your body and then having to get it out in a different way, you can actually process it in the moment, and that's such a gift to yourself.

Charlie: 5:39

How do you process that in the moment? To me it looks like curiosity, like I'm having an emotion right now. Or maybe let's say I'm angry or upset about something right, and anger is one of the hardest emotions to train, to breathe through, because it's was always taught as a reactive emotion, where angry, you react. So instead I take a few breaths and I ask myself why am I angry? And I'll go through the four agreements. Am I doing it personally? Am I doing my best? Am I being impeccable with my word? Am I upset because the other person's not being impeccable with their word? And I'll ask myself the questions out of curiosity to really figure myself out. What am I actually upset about? And go from there, because a lot of times it's not even about whatever happened. Right, it's about something that happened only in 107.

Heather: 6:53

You didn't know that they, yeah, I mean, don't be afraid of it. It's not like we're saying, hey, you got to go back and do this deep childhood work. That wasn't what I was trying to infer, but it's just so off the wall sometimes because whatever the other person is doing isn't about you, no they're seeing it through their own filter, right, right.

Heather: 7:21

So we've had interesting mornings where I'm running late and so that's triggered, Charlie. I'm triggered because I'm running late and then all of a sudden we're processing because we process pretty real time the two of us together.

Charlie: 7:36

We first really hard on it.

Heather: 7:38

And did we have a process that we kind of like, okay, we talk it out and we get curious? And then I realized something about me, she realizes something about her, and neither one of those things were about the other person but because it collided right, it could have been just glossed over, but it was such an opportunity to grow.

Charlie: 8:03

Yeah yeah, that was like a whole morning like cry theft. You guys and we're always working on ourselves, so we'll call each other out on stuff. We were baking cookies a couple of weeks ago right in the kitchen for an event no-transcript. This one was being like really weirdly critical for some reason and I was like, can you say that in a different way that's not quite so critical sounding please? And she's like, oh crap, I'm sorry.

Heather: 8:43

And then I took that and I went. Why am I so critical? Because it was like I got that feedback a couple of days in a row and I discovered it's how my anxiety comes out when I'm really anxious. That's how it sounds and that has nothing to do with you. Right, like that's all of me. I'm anxious and I'm being all snippety and I didn't even realize it. You know like, okay, I'm gonna take some extra breathing time, I'm gonna throw my ass down.

Charlie: 9:15

Right.

Heather: 9:15

I just didn't get that All right. Everything you perceive causes emotional reaction, right. You perceive not only your feelings, but your knowledge, your thoughts, judgment and beliefs. You perceive the voice in your head and you have the emotional reaction to the voice.

Charlie: 9:38

Oh, anybody ever get even more mad at yourself for being mad. Oh, I know.

Heather: 9:45

Or upset with yourself for being upset. I was mad at myself a couple of weeks ago, about the same time as things I need to. I was also mad at myself because I wasn't upset about something else. I was like, well, that's stupid. I was like, why? Because I was like judging myself for not being upset about something else, right, and I was like, wow, cool, how about?

Charlie: 10:15

we not, so these are the things you start to notice when you're, when you're working on this stuff is like you're upset with yourself because you're not having any reaction that you think you should Like. It's the judgments in our head, like while we're having the emotional reaction.

Heather: 10:31

Yeah, oh my God. And then how do you react to that emotional reaction? You're like unpacking it. How did I even get there? I don't know. Let's have a. No, how would I go? Take a break, let's do one more here. What do we got? Which one do you want to do? I like this.

Charlie: 11:01

Humans are possessed by knowledge by a distorted image of ourselves. That's why we are no longer free.

Heather: 11:08

I thought of Jackie when I read this Coach Jackie, coach Jackie, because she's a freedom mentor and she is totally helps people break this chain. Humans are possessed by knowledge, by a distorted image of ourselves.

Charlie: 11:29

Okay, I have an example of this.

Charlie: 11:34

I am putting it out there that I would like to go speak at conferences and things like that in front of groups. I would like to practice some more public speaking and things like that. About a month ago, when I started talking about this, I'm like this scares the crap out of me because I've never done this before and I might want to throw up Right. But then I started thinking about it and I realized that I have been preparing myself to be right here right now Exactly where I'm supposed to be, to be on those stages since I was in middle school, right. And that is because I've always kind of spoken in public without even knowing it, right, I've always spoken to public without even knowing it. So what does that look like?

Charlie: 12:39

In middle school and high school, I played in the orchestra and I was a band nerd, so I was always on stage performing, right, right. So I'm already there. I have 12 years of experience performing on stage in that manner. And then when I was in high school and I worked fast food, I was always working the drives through, taking orders and stuff. So I'm talking to people all day long with my headset and a microphone, right, you don't think about these things as preparing skills, preparing you right through the thing.

Charlie: 13:18

When I was in the military I was a boss mate and I was always boss mate of the watch. So so much so that people, everybody on the aircraft carrier which there's a lot of people on an aircraft carrier knew me by my voice because I was on watch literally all the time. And so they knew me by my voice because I was always the one on the intercom or the one MC calling all the different things, whether it was evolutions or whatever, just give me announcements and all the announcements over the over the and I did that for eight years.

Charlie: 13:57

Yeah.

Heather: 13:58

So you had a captive audience that knew your voice.

Charlie: 14:01

Yep, and now we've been hosting a podcast for two years, right?

Heather: 14:06

I have a similar story because since that I was looking because we've been talking about being our own proof and like and looking at that and I was like, wow. So when I was in elementary school, I was the Wicked Witch in the play Like the wizard of us. That's still my favorite. And then I think then I was in drama class and then I took part in medieval reenactment, where we did dancing, we were, we hosted events, we did all kinds of things where there was like talking to people and organizing and getting people to do things and and that kind of thing. Something happened in there, though to were actually speaking in front of people and not doing something that was my own. I couldn't do so when I was in massage school. I wanted to improve my public speaking skills, so I actually saw out an open mic that was like in the middle of the night where I could read my own poetry, but there was really no judgment in the audience.

Charlie: 15:22

So they were either drunk or yeah, it was an after hours, no shit.

Heather: 15:26

Yeah. So it was like a safe place to go practice. And you know, then I was in P, I was PTA. I've done big events and things. When I was in PTA, the first event I helped put on, the gal that was running the event looked at me as they set up the P A and told me she doesn't do public speaking and I MC the night Like I can do it. But that's that barrier in our heads, right, that anybody shitty committee that like no, so interesting yeah.

Charlie: 16:03

So look at the proof in your own life of the things that you want to do that you've already have experience doing. Yeah, because am I still a little scared to do public speaking on stage in front of people? Sure, because it's a little bit different than what I have already done. But I know that if, as long as I go prepared, I'm going to knock it out of the park. It's gonna be awesome. Yeah, yeah. So what happens?

Heather: 16:32

Even even the speech we did for our 100th episode celebration. Oh, that was really, really a lot and emotion for us. So I think part of the nervousness was we were being so authentic in that speech, but it landed amazingly with our audience.

Charlie: 16:55

So yeah, there were tears or it was awesome, we were all crying.

Heather: 17:01

It was really great. So keep keep pushing yourself towards the things they want and check out what the anybody shitty committees you get to choose.

Charlie: 17:10

Okay, couple more things to cover before we wrap up today. Hear yourself care by Minda Zetlin. Her exercises to try this week is number one use breathing to hack your nervous system If you practice breathing in like a pranayama, and you can. Google it right, you can pull up some YouTube videos to kind of walk you through your pranayama breathing. But you breathe in for a count of, say, four beats, then you breathe out for a count of, say, six beats, making that exhalation breath a little bit longer than the inhalation breath.

Charlie: 17:47

It actually stimulates your parasympathetic nervous system and helps you come to a calm place. So whenever I am starting to feel my anxiety go up or my frustration or any of those stronger emotions where, if I get too pulled into it, I will react badly, because we all do that I take a few deep breaths.

Heather: 18:15

And when you breathe in, and there was specifically making the exhale longer so that actually calms the parasympathetic nervous system. So, if you breathe in the same, you maintain what's going on. If you breathe out shorter, you actually stimulate it and you'll make yourself feel more anxious.

Charlie: 18:34

Right. So if you want to get yourself amped up, that's the way to do it.

Heather: 18:41

But if you keep, yourself nice and calm.

Charlie: 18:44

Take a few deep breaths.

Heather: 18:46

Stimulate your parasympathetic nervous system and it'll be great, and Charlie and I have taken this class called PQ and it uses like four different, so it's intelligence. Four different sciences put together, but breathing is part of it, and that breathing and breathing into and really being present in the moment. So, yeah, it's a really cool tool to use, just train yourself.

Charlie: 19:14

Number two take a walk in nature. There is numerous, numerous, numerous studies about the benefits of nature and grounding. Take your shoes off and stand in the grass. So we are all energetic beings. How do you ground energy? You stick it in the dirt, Okay.

Heather: 19:37

Right and it neutralizes it.

Charlie: 19:39

So put your bare feet on the ground, sometimes in the dirt. Your body, will thank you. Your body will thank you. Take a walk in nature Right, touch the trees.

Heather: 19:56

I've actually been instructed by a couple of energy healers to go touch a tree, like, what is wrong with you? Go touch a tree, yeah. You need to calm your ass down. Go touch the tree. Go give it a hug, yeah.

Charlie: 20:11

And then her third example. She calls find your own crows, and the idea behind this is she likes crows right, crows are like one of her favorite or she's intrigued by them. So every time she sees a crow in public, it reminds her to reset, take a deep breath and ground herself in that moment. When I first started this practice, it was like every time I came to a stop sign or a red light I would take a deep breath and I would breathe and tie when again which actually helped me with my traffic Right and anxiety and video sets Other drivers having a reaction to other drivers.

Heather: 21:00

that has something to do with you, right?

Charlie: 21:03

So it's just these little tweaks and things that you can make in your life.

Heather: 21:13

It's such a tool, it's you for yourself, drawing in life force letting yourself have that oxygen and the chemistry of it right and then breathe it out.

Heather: 21:28

Breathe out all that yet and then breathe in more life force and then breathe out what's not serving and you calm. I mean, my kids are sick of my kid, my kiddo is sick of me saying take a deep breath, how about another one? Let's go One more Breathe, because you know the brain, the front part of our brain, actually can't function unless we are taking deep breaths. If we are taking shallow breaths and we're in a fear or panic induced, we're only using the back part of our brain With a fight or flight and keep us safe. I said it's a logical, emotional, calm, logical part of our brain. So we call it flipping our lid and so we need to get that lid back down. And that's how you get the lid down by breathing.

Charlie: 22:25

I love that. When you first started this practice with Andy, you guys had like a hamstring. Yeah, we put the thumb in the middle like a, B for sign language, and then you fold your fingers over the top to make like a, a.

Heather: 22:39

I think it is an A? I'm not sure yeah. But the so this is like your brain, the part of your brain that's. You know that this is the only part of your brain you'll use, unless your lid is down. So we would actually be like I need a minute.

Heather: 22:55

I'm flipping my lid. I have flipped my lid and this works great, because this is when mom needs a timeout too. If my lid is flipped, how am I being as a parent, right? And then, if his lid is flipped, he's in protective mode, right. He can't process what's happening Like. He needs to calm and recenter, and it's so hard sometimes for our special needs kids to tell us that.

Charlie: 23:22

So, having a way for him to visually tell us that he's feeling overwhelmed and his lid is flipped Right. Yeah, and I love that, because then you could just focus on yourself and your deep breaths and just let know with your hand I flipped my lid. I need a minute Because we, that's one new way.

Heather: 23:42

Save the things we don't meet, right, and when we have from, I mean from trauma, I don't want to create more trauma, right, and so that is when we say. Things we don't mean is when our lids are flipped, right.

Charlie: 24:00

And I know for me so many other things that I know was said in frustration or whatever. As a child I took on as an agreement to myself.

Heather: 24:13

Right, and I'm saying those things to myself and I don't want that to be the voice that they're saying Right, because we're retraining ourselves to love ourselves and we're training ourselves on what is true for us. So that is a lot, but if your lid is flipped, find your own pros.

Charlie: 24:34

Take a beauty breath and remember that you are loved. You are already loved and you are an author.

Heather: 24:45

You are your own proof. Thank you so much for joining us today on today's journey. I know this got a little heavy but, that's how we roll. Sorry, it happened sometimes. No, sorry. So just being real and authentic and sharing the tools that we're doing and learning ourselves. If you would like to be part of this journey, let us know what you're doing too, but stay tuned for our pause of the quarter coming up. Next, we got the black cat ball coming up in October, so you should check that out and thank you so much.

Heather: 25:20

Stay, stay, stay, stay, stay, stay, stay, stay, stay, stay, stay, stay, stay, stay, stay, stay, stay.