So today we are talking about how to fully feel our emotions.
And this was inspired by a class I was in about three weeks ago and it was all about,
It's a very interesting class,
It's all based in David Bohm's work,
Who's my favorite quantum physicist as lots of you guys know,
And how our emotions actually allow us to feel the world around us,
Right?
That when we actually are able to feel our emotions completely,
We also are able to feel,
You know,
What he would have called the holoflux,
This world that is constantly sort of coming in and out of existence,
In and out of the quantum field,
Always changing around us.
And when we don't experience our emotions,
We feel kind of shut down.
And so we meet,
I meet with this group once a month and somebody presents something that kind of stirs you inside and allows you to kind of experience the world differently.
And a few weeks ago the man who presented was presenting his story about the grief he felt when his wife died.
And it was a really,
Really emotional thing.
And he talked about allowing the grief to really flow through him,
That he was allowed to wail,
That he was allowed to feel it all.
And it really struck me,
And he even talked about this one time that he was at home alone and he just fell to his knees and he just opened up his arms and he just felt the emotion,
He just felt the grief like flowing through him.
And it really,
Really,
Really touched me and it stays with me to this moment.
And I thought,
Wow,
I really want to talk about this more.
I want to go deeper into it.
Because emotions are such an interesting thing because on the one hand it's so healthy to feel emotions,
It's so healthy to allow that wave of emotion to flow through us,
But because emotions have been so repressed for so long,
We often don't have healthy expressions of emotions anymore.
So we either repress them and they come out sideways,
They come out the wrong way,
They come out in ways that are unhealthy for us and for everyone around us,
Or we repress them and they're used to be manipulative tools to affect other people,
Or we don't repress them and they completely take over our lives and we have no balance anymore and our whole life goes out of,
It goes amok and then we're terrified to feel our emotions because we can't go to work and we can't take care of the kids and we don't come out of it and we drop into a brutal depression or we feel so much anxiety we can't function.
So emotions are a really powerful thing and that we don't really know what to do with them anymore.
And then we blend in,
Well what if I'm an empath and I'm feeling everyone else's emotions and I have my own emotions and I need to honor them,
But I need to go to work and it's so confusing,
Right?
So what do we do instead?
We just sort of go,
You know what,
I'm just gonna bottle it up and I'm gonna just set it aside somewhere,
But that doesn't work either and we know that.
And so I think talking about how to really feel emotions,
How to identify what's a feeling,
What's an emotion,
What's a mood,
What's a prolonged depression,
What's anxiety,
What are these things and actually be able to,
And I'm gonna say this which sounds funny,
How to actually systematically understand them.
It'll really help us sort this out because,
And I feel this sounds so funny,
Because the idea of systematically understanding emotions seems like a paradox,
Like it seems counterintuitive.
It's like no no no,
We don't systematize emotions.
Emotions are the flowing feminine,
They are our true expression of self,
They are raw,
They are who we are.
You don't systematize them.
But as I was sitting this morning preparing our talk,
What came to me was the incredible balance of the masculine and feminine.
That at all times we are meant to be in balance,
In balance not in balance,
In balance.
We are meant to be this beautiful yin-yang symbol.
That half is this flowing feminine and half is this amazing masculine and in no way am I talking about gender here.
I'm talking about the masculine and feminine,
The two polarities that when they come together we experience oneness,
We experience centeredness,
We experience bliss,
Balance,
Joy and again even joy.
I don't mean happiness,
I mean this exalted state of being that a human being is capable of.
And in that oneness we experience the duality of this masculine feminine yin-yang,
However we want to understand it.
And this flow of the feminine,
We only are allowed to experience it when we have an equal masculine supporting it.
That's when it all works and that's why it's interesting to imagine a system of understanding the feminine because that's the masculine.
It's creating the philosophy,
The structure to allow for this incredible flow of the feminine.
That's when our life,
That's when we're allowed to actually experience the passion of this emotion.
Happy,
Sad,
Grief,
Trauma,
All of it,
Right?
The only way we can actually dive into it is when we have this strong masculine self that understands the context of everything we're experiencing.
So this is the structure that I want to talk about emotions in today,
Is the balance of the masculine and the feminine.
So the first kind of emotion I want to talk about is a genuine response to life,
Genuine response.
For me right now the truth is yesterday I found out that a good friend of mine took her life and I'm actually really wrestling with that.
I'm wrestling with how I can't quite,
I can't swallow it.
It's really,
It's really,
Really upsetting and so I'm actually really wrestling with a lot of grief right now because she was a really good friend and she was really a wonderful person.
This is a really natural response to something happening in life.
This is a real thing,
You know?
There's no need to repress it,
There's no need to analyze it,
There's no need to decide how long it's gonna take to overcome it.
It's a natural response to life.
If something bad happens,
If someone does something to you and you get angry,
This is a natural response to life.
This is an important response to something that is human.
This means we're alive right now.
If something happens that is so glorious that it makes you so happy,
This is also a natural emotional response to life.
This is really,
Really important,
You know?
But the masculine side of this,
The masculine side of these emotions,
Even,
And I know that I sound like I may be being cold about my friend passing because trust me I'm not,
But there's also some part of a philosophy within me that holds me,
That holds me and says it's okay,
It's okay to grieve,
It's okay to be sad,
And it's also okay to come and share with your friends and talk about it.
And it's okay to talk about emotions,
Like it's okay and maybe there's,
And I don't want to say it like this,
It sounds weird,
But maybe it helps us have a more genuine conversation about emotions today,
Right?
This is real,
This is real life that we're all experiencing every day.
But that masculine structure within me that says it's okay,
I've got you,
No matter what,
I've got you.
And if I don't have you,
I have a masculine something inside of me that says then I'm gonna call a friend and I'm gonna give myself an opportunity to cry about it and I'm gonna give myself an opportunity to wail about it if I'm not strong enough.
But I trust my inner masculine to meet me in whatever way I need.
In the same way that if I'm angry about something,
Then I also trust my inner masculine is gonna step up and make change and it's gonna say that's enough,
This is not gonna happen.
That allows me when I know that I have my masculine side to really step up,
That's the masculine in all of us that steps up,
Right?
The step up,
I'm allowed to actually dive deeper into my anger and understand holy mackerel this is a pattern I've repeated a million times.
This is not just today,
This is something I've done a thousand times.
You know what?
I have to do this,
I have to make change.
This ends with me now.
This is the balance of the masculine feminine.
There's no point feeling the emotions if we don't have this masculine counterpart to support it,
Right?
And it's the same thing with happiness,
Like these are just the negative emotions,
But it's the same thing with happiness.
There are also things going on in my world right now that fill me with so much joy,
Like that just fill my heart in ways that I just can't even tell you.
I'm also allowed to feel that.
I'm,
You know,
It's the funny thing about emotions is I think we're meant to embrace the word and instead of or.
I can feel grief,
I can also feel so incredibly grateful and happy for so many things going on in the world right now.
I can feel hope,
I can feel sadness,
I can feel all the things.
It's all good.
We really are that multi-dimensional.
You know,
We are that big.
This is our capacity for living and feeling alive.
The other thing about that is that no matter what we're feeling,
We actually also,
The other piece of this strong masculine within us,
Is that it also means we can still go on.
It doesn't break us.
It's always so ironic that whenever I teach any kind of retreat or any kind of course about the feminine,
We inevitably start teaching about the masculine because it's that strong masculine inside that actually has been repressed.
It's been our freedom and our ability for all genders to be able to act on these feelings,
To actually do whatever it is we need to do in response to the world around us.
So it's our masculine that's actually been dropped.
So for example,
One of the things that really gave me a lot of insight about this repression of the emotions was,
You know,
I grew up in Toronto.
I married a dairy farmer many,
Many years ago.
And dairy farming is really interesting because we were organic,
So we grew all of our own food feed for the cattle and everything,
Which most farmers,
Most livestock farmers do.
But what was really interesting is in harvest time and in planting,
You're on a time scale,
Like you're on a timeline.
You are a hundred percent susceptible to the weather,
So if the hay is ready to go off and the sun is shining,
It doesn't matter what you feel like that day.
It doesn't matter if you have a migraine and I used to migraine out.
It doesn't matter how you feel.
You have to get out in the field.
It's not,
There is no room for anything.
You have to simply do it.
You know,
It's the same thing as if you have children and the children are teething.
You get up whether you're dying or not.
This is the way it is.
So there are times in our life that it is really important to be able to set aside however we're feeling and show up for whatever it is needs to be shown up for,
You know.
And this is a really healthy thing.
This is called survival and this is deeply ingrained within us that there are times in our lives that we simply show up regardless of how we're feeling.
But this is not all the time and this is one of the challenges that if in our life we're sort of living in this constant turmoil,
Constant fight-or-flight,
We think that we're not allowed to ever rest and feel our emotions.
On the farm there were only very specific times.
There was this one week that we had to get the hay off and as soon as that hay was off you could collapse,
Right?
This was,
This is important to allow for the cycles of life,
To allow for things to shift and come out and then we feel the emotions and then we,
This is why people,
You know,
They kind of drive and drive and drive and drive and drive and then all of a sudden they go on holidays and they get sick for a week because their body finally rested and just released everything that they've been repressing for the year.
It's so important to allow for rest,
To allow for that downtime and again for the masculine to step up and say,
You know what,
We're not supposed to live in fight-or-flight all the time.
We've got to make some changes right now.
Right?
The only way that we can ever feel that we're in a space that we can actually feel our emotions is when we have our own back and we actually start living.
We actually start enjoying life.
So another big thing I want to talk about in understanding these feelings.
David Bohm is one of my faves obviously and he used to,
He liked to play with language because he believed that our language tripped us up a lot and one of the things was this idea of feeling and thinking.
You know I might say I'm feeling really sad,
I'm feeling mad,
I'm feeling something and he'd always say are you really feeling it?
He said feeling assumes a present moment emotion.
He said but most people when they're feeling something they're actually not feeling something in this moment,
They're feeling something that happened ten years ago.
So there was something they felt ten years ago when this thing happened or five years ago or yesterday.
It was something they felt yesterday and for whatever reason they're choosing to continue to feel it today but they felt it yesterday.
He said so really they're not feeling it,
They're felt it and so he would use this language and he'd say well I'm felt this thing that happened ten years ago and there's something really interesting about that in our in our mind to understand to actually tell ourselves no this actually my natural emotional response to this was ten years ago or yesterday or five years ago right.
It isn't actually present anymore,
This thing isn't still happening,
I'm just felting something from my past and there's something that changes how our brain interprets this line of thinking that I'm felting this and it's really powerful.
It's really important,
It helps us discern something important in our emotions right.
Is this current?
How do I really feel today?
Very very important and he went also as far as to say the same thing about thinking.
He said oftentimes I we think that we're thinking but we're not thinking we're actually thoughting.
It's like we had a thought a year ago but what we're doing today is we're repeating the thought we're just thoughting we're not actually thinking.
Thinking assumes that I'm in the present moment and I'm actually pondering a thought from this moment you know I'm pondering an idea I'm growing I'm doing something in this moment I'm thinking.
Very seldom are we actually thinking and very seldom are we actually feeling.
Most of what we think is thinking we're thoughting and a lot of what we think we're feeling we're felting.
And this alone really clears the deck on a lot of how we interpret our emotions and when we come into this moment right now what am I really feeling and what am I really thinking?
This is often quite empty it's quite clear but we're in such a habit of thoughting and felting we think it's all present.
So it's just something to just be aware of about our emotions when we're talking about emotions what are we really what are we really thinking about or what are we really feeling or if we're feeling anything at all in this moment or are we felting?
So another kind of emotion I want to talk about is being in a mood because sometimes we're just I'm in a sad mood or I'm in an angry mood I woke up in a bad mood or I got home from work and now I'm in a and what we generally talk about bad moods.
So the feminine side of a mood right is a vulnerability to feel whatever we're actually feeling right because something's going on right something a mood is a stuck state I'm stuck and that we're as humans we naturally cycle right whether we imagine it like a sine wave up and down and up and down or a circular you know however we imagine it we're meant to flow right we're not we're not living in a time-space continuum just to sit in the same spot right for some reason we're meant to experience the world in motion so if we're stuck in a mood something's a muck so the key here is we're gonna have to go inside and be vulnerable to whatever whatever emotion it is that we're kind of hiding from ourselves or something we're afraid to feel there's something going on so the feminine part of a mood is to be open to that the masculine side kind of observes this little soul that's having this mood having this experience and the masculine self says is this mine is this my feeling I'm having this is where we start asking ourselves you know are we empaths am I picking up on something from someone else is this emotion even mine and but this is our masculine self right this is the structure around the chaos that says hmm what's going on here and the feminine self responds and says yes it is mine or no it's not mine hmm right but these are this is the dance of the masculine feminine the masculine asks a question the feminine is vulnerable enough to respond the masculine then says well if it's not ours is there something we're meant to do and maybe the feminine says no we're meant to let it go the masculine says then we're gonna let it go or the feminine says yes there's something we're supposed to do and the masculine says what are we supposed to do it says oh I'm supposed to call my mother okay I'm gonna call my mother right there's a dance there's a reason there's a point to life there's a point to every emotion that we have even if it feels like a crappy mood then we have to ask ourselves if we have prolonged moods right if we have something that doesn't go away for whatever reason then again our masculine self comes in like a good friend not like a taskmaster but like a good friend and kind of hold some space for us and says what's going on here because a prolonged mood a prolonged depression a prolonged whatever like whenever we often interpret this as an emotional state right but emotion emotion it like literally it has the word motion in it it's meant to do be doing this if we're stuck what's going on because this is no longer an emotion this is something else so one of the weird things about our brain right we have all of these really functional parts of our brains you know that handle voice and hearing and movement and all these things in touch and feeling and all this but then we have this interesting prefrontal cortex up here this develops when we're about eight nine years old and this allows us to have abstract thought this is why you can say to an eight-year-old child or a ten-year-old child okay in four hours we're gonna have dinner and the child can go off four hours and it can kind of create a map in its mind of oh okay we can do this and this and this whereas if you say that to a six-year-old they're like ah you know you can't the six-year-old doesn't have this part of the brain yet it can't create this ability of imagining space and time in a different way something funny that happens in our prefrontal cortex that when we have an experience or we have an issue we have something happen that we can't solve a weird thought loop forms up here a story is created a memory is is is harvested something and in that thought loop there are feelings attached so these would be the thoughtings and the feltings but this story starts to loop in our brain it starts to loop in this prefrontal cortex and all of a sudden we are experiencing something over and over and over again in a loop that's not present it's just this loop and these thoughts create the structure of a whole different reality and there's all these emotions attached to those thoughts and this is where it's really interesting and again this is where that masculine that structure comes out and we look at ourselves in kindness and we say what's the loop what's going on what's what's the story I'm telling myself over and over again what's the story I'm telling everyone else over and over again what's going on what's the loop because this is no longer an emotion this is a circular state that's all living up here right and that's interesting to discern that from an actual emotion because if it's just an emotion they just have to get it out but this is something that we actually have to kind of hack into the hack and say no you're not gonna loop me anymore you're not going to just keep because if if we have this intellectual loop going our bodies don't know the difference and it keeps responding to this thing it's kind of like you know you know in the land of I wish I'd never watched the movie Jaws right I watched Jaws when I was about I think it came out when I was 10 years old 9 years old and I watched it in a drive-in theater I don't know whether it was being played while my prefrontal cortex was learning about fantasy and imagining terrible things and all these kind of things but I take one step into the ocean and that movie starts to play in my mind there's nothing going on the chance of me being attacked by a shark is pretty minimal but it doesn't matter because that story is so deeply ingrained in my brain it is now playing out as if it's happening and we do this with all kinds of things in life we replay well there was that moment when this person did this thing and and now we just cycle and all the emotions keep us there so it's just really important to note that that's a different thing than an emotion as a response to something that's actually happening in this moment you know it's just a again I'm just it's just part of my system of understanding our various emotional responses to things another really important piece of emotional response is our emotions are also how we know our truth our emotions are so important so back in 1999 when I was sick and for anyone who's new I had breast lumps and a teacher appeared in my life my mama just died of breast cancer and it's a big long story but a teacher appeared in my life and he said Katrina you have got to start telling the truth and I'm like I always tell the truth I said I never lie to anybody and he goes you're not telling the truth to you you're not lying to anyone else because you're telling everyone the truth that you're telling yourself which isn't true and I'm like I have no idea what you're talking about no idea what you're talking about and he said okay whenever anyone asks you a question I want you to listen to your heart and if at whatever the response is to their question is if your heart rises it's a yes and if your heart falls it's a no and I was like what you know anyway sure enough you know someone my mother-in-law would call and say oh well do you guys want to come up for dinner and sometimes the answer was like my answer was no right but then of course whatever I needed to be the perfect daughter-in-law the perfect mother the perfect you know mother of her grandchildren blah blah blah blah blah and so I would say sure can I bring anything it you can feel this like this huge separation between my truth and the reality I was living or it could be something completely different where a friend calls and she's like oh my god you want to go away for the weekend and I'm like oh yes but I can't cuz this and this is happening so I can't right and this was my life I almost never was actually in line with my heart's truth my soul's truth I was living according to a persona that I was trying to live up to that I wanted everyone else to think that I wanted to think about me you know but I wasn't being honest myself and this emotional response this is an emotional response this yes no has also been repressed in this it's the same function as why do we have why have we been taught to repress anger why have we been repressed to why have we been taught to repress sadness why have we been told to repress even happiness if someone else is sad you know we've been taught to repress this but by repressing all these other emotions we're also repressing this very basic happy sad response which means we are repressing our own truth and therefore we don't know what our own genuine path is because we're so disconnected from our emotions so very often the the idea of following this mat this this positive negative happy sad yes no you know answer this binary decision-making ability we have inside this is really really really important but again the only way for this to do that for us to do this is to have this interesting masculine framework so in order to be able to do this yes no thing inside of me I had to back up and look at the philosophy that was living in my mind and I had to ask myself well what's the philosophy that's holding me in this pattern right so then my brain has to go away and it has to go ah you believe that you can't disappoint anyone that if you disappoint someone there's something wrong with you that people won't like you that you will be disappointed that you will be that their disappointment somehow defines you in some way hmm that's interesting well how could we turn that around like you can feel how kind of masculine structural logic pattern looking this is right so different than that emotional response and so then looking at all the patterns it's like ah yes I've seen this in my family before ah yes this is actually connected to the breast cancer and the women in my feel ah yes this is very important I should shift this hmm right but I'm shifting it in my masculine side I'm shifting it in my philosophy of the world side and I'm realizing that you know what the best thing that I can offer anyone is my genuine self who I really am this is what's really important right what is who is Katrina actually really the soul Katrina not the persona Katrina and not the person everyone you know makes it that makes their life easier Katrina but actually the genuine fire inside the genuine passion and love inside who's that and the philosophy became that's who I meant to share that's actually the best way if even if I go into the who am I meant to serve and all that kind of thing that's actually the best way to serve ah nice right so now I have this beautiful philosophy this beautiful container that when the phone here's me right this is how old this is in 1999 before we had cell phones and even the phone rings and someone says Katrina do you want to do this this beautiful masculine container gives me the strength to say no this doesn't seem right today well how come I don't know just doesn't seem right today and I hang up the phone and I go on with my day right so it's so beautiful this this balance of the masculine feminine to say no yes no these are important emotional responses the other interesting thing about this yes no because sometimes we can have fears that rise up right it's like if I say yes to something and it's like I can't believe I just said yes to that like what am I thinking right like years ago I I was on Facebook and I a friend of mine posted that she was gonna do a Tough Mudder and a Tough Mudder if you don't know is a brutal race it's a it's an obstacle race but it's like 16 kilometers 25 obstacles that are really hard like jumping into ice water and crawling underground and jumping over fire and like it's scary and hard and requires incredible physical strength and you run up and down this ski hill six times which I didn't know before I did it anyway and I and athletics isn't really my thing but it was so weird she I read the thing that she was doing it she was putting together a team and my heart went huh like this and I'm literally my head's going are you kidding a Tough Mudder you can't even run 5k like what are you talking about doing a Tough Mudder I have the upper body strength of a t-rex like what are you talking about like this isn't possible anyway and I was kind of but I heard I heard my heart rise and I went what does this mean and then of course the next day my the same friend texted me and said hey Katrina I'd love for you to be on this team with us and I was like and of course but my little heart went you know what the answer is and I was like that would be awesome thanks for asking but the cool thing is I also had this belief system that said if the answer is yes there must be a good reason for it I trust this so I began training I began and it was the middle of winter and it was a really cold winter it was like one of these winters that it was like minus 30 minus 40 every day like two months but I just trained and I did the thing and I I did the Tough Mudder and I completed it uninjured that was my whole goal was just to complete it uninjured and I don't know all the reasons why I did it but I know for me personally I was it was just at the just as I was I was separated from my husband and there was a lot of emotions we were married for 20 years it was a you know it was a sad sad ending well and amicable but sad and I realized later that the Tough Mudder was so hard like it was so incredibly hard it was like I got rid of every emotional bit of baggage that I had accumulated in the 20 years on the farm like everything everything was left on that mountain and when I was finished I was quite a zombie there wasn't much left of me emotionally physically anything I was literally a zombie but I was different it was almost like some bizarre spirit quest and I really trust that and I said so I really trust my yeses and my no's I trust that in in always because I have this masculine self that knows to trust it so it almost becomes a fearless thing that it's okay to trust the mystery it's okay to trust the potential chaos because I so know that I'm held and all will be well in the end so it's a really interesting thing in order to really really really feel our emotions to really look at that beautiful masculine side of all of it that allows us to dive deep that allows us to honor the yes no that allows us to objectively and with love look at this the cycles and the moods we may fall into I think it's kind of ironic that it's actually a structural piece that helps us really feel feel our emotions and if you have any questions I would love to answer them is ambivalence real I think so I think ambivalence it's different like in in David Hawkins book power versus force he talks about the difference between apathy and neutrality and apathy is a apathy is a response of fear almost right it's something that you know I can't handle anything so I'm just gonna shut down all my emotions and feel nothing intentionally that's apathy that's that's that's I refuse to feel emotions at all which you kind of not living anymore and then as you kind of climb through the ranks through the power I did a whole pile of talks about this but all the different levels of consciousness and they're all here on insight timer there's one about apathy too and then there's one about neutrality and neutrality is true ambivalence when something happens and you go hmm but for me I feel ambivalence the most when whatever's going on actually isn't my story I'm not meant to respond to it even though it could be a super loaded story super sad super brutal story but for whatever reason I don't have a response because it isn't for me it's for someone else and that's okay is that why Kundalini can be so Kundalini yoga is so annoying it's a bizarre spirit quest and you're not the same afterwards that's exactly what Kundalini yoga is it's in our yoga teacher training someone asked you know why there's so many arms in it right why are our arms always up because it's annoying and it drives us crazy it doesn't hurt us but it stimulates anything that's locked up and stuck which of course is the point of Kundalini yoga is to heal our emotions and release the blocks and our chakras so the Kundalini can rise but sometimes we need to be pressured and so we're at what better place than to do it on the mat can I recommend simple steps for reacquainting our feminine and masculine sides re-engaging the connection after it's been shut down to me it begins with the feminine it begins with listening you know and I think that's why Jim who is my teacher said to listen to this very subtle yes no inside it's just this one thing and all of a sudden you go to work and someone says something and you feel this rise or fall and you that's the start point right and you go oh that's interesting and that's where you start to unfurl it right that's when you start to go okay wait a minute I'm gonna go against my truth now why is that and then we pop over to the masculine we say why is that hmm because again sometimes this masculine is an unhealthy masculine it's the unhealthy masculine because the masculine is is berating or it's controlling or it's criticism right so the feminine feels something that says oh for God's sake get over it put your big girl panties on ah that's not masculine that's criticism that's meanness that's something else so then all of a sudden we look at that and we go hey wait a minute I need to get a healthier masculine you're supposed to hold space for me you're not supposed to beat the crap out of me you know and that's the beginning but it always begins with the feminine and then we can build from there I feel like I'm tugged on in so many directions and can't even feel it in my body it's so disconnected takes a real concerted effort to tune in for sure you know the other beautiful thing if it's beautiful but when we get become really disconnected from our body if our body will often speak to us in pain this is where you know when we learn about the body-mind connection when we have specific ailments you know if we have specific diseases or we have pain in the body this is why you know Louise Hayes book you can heal your life became so popular because we are so disconnected we can't listen anymore so then our body has to yell at us and again not to like draw you know a great big wide brush about that but to be able to go okay you know what I'm so disconnected I'm gonna look for clues and then you say okay I have this pain in my body I have this illness in my body okay what can it mean what chakra is it related to what remotions are part of the chakras what you know what time of our life did that happen and that begins the journey of going inward and reconnecting with self can I talk about abuse confusing us and understanding our own body signs not knowing what I'm feeling tired of living like a zombie yeah abuse is interesting it's almost like we have to find a new center yesterday in the radiant sutras the rate of the sutra we read was all about remembering a memory a powerful joyful memory and so we did a meditation and the meditation turned out really lovely so I actually edited it and uploaded it to insight timer so in a couple of days it will be live on insight timer and I recommend things like that it's almost like sometimes when we've come out of abuse and we've come out of trauma it's hard to find our way out of that and so we have to find I mean there's places to kind of release certain things out of it release some emotional responses and all that kind of thing and heal some things but then in many ways we almost have to create a new fire inside of us it's like we have to rediscover our own soul and we do that through even through things like meditation finding that deep center reconnecting with our truth reconnecting with who we are and we've stoke this fire even though out here there might be this horrible thing in this response and trauma and all that but we also are building a new fire over here you know it's almost like imagine there's a there's a house that you've lived in and it's full of horrible memories and every time you walk down this hallway you flinch and you remember this thing and you know whether it's a physical house or it's just a place in our mind and then you decide one day you know what I'm gonna build a brand new little cabin just for me out in the woods and it's just a brand new cabin and you have a nice little candle in it you have your favorite rug and your favorite blanket and your favorite three books and you just go there on haul on on the weekends maybe on Sunday you go to your little cabin and you rest in this lovely space that's a hundred percent you and then bit by bit you go you know what I'm just gonna go to the cabin on Tuesday night as well just gonna you know escape you know go to the cabin and then bit by bit you start moving more of your belongings there and more of your belongings there and more of your belongings there and until eventually that's where you live and you genuinely live there you're not escaping you genuinely slowly have built that up to be a new home you know and it's a gentle process it's not a I'm just gonna go there you just do these tiny things so it might just be five minutes of meditation every day with a candle and a bit of incense and some quiet music that you say you know what for five minutes I'm gonna just be with me and you just slowly organically build self again yeah getting out of fight-or-flight is such an important thing and sometimes again it's even even mentally just depends on how you're wired to simply actually ask ourselves right now what is happening again it's sort of that felting feeling thawting thinking thing right what's happening right now always coming back into the moment there's like the whole study of mindfulness in Buddhism or this perpetual come back to the moment come back to the moment it's not just an idea to bring us to peaceful thoughts and things like that it's really really valuable healing work to come back into this moment be mindful of this moment just live here just live here just live here until we only live here right it is a discipline it is a it is a learning to stay here so thank you so much for being here and I'll see you soon
