Awareness That Heals

During times of intense emotions, it is frequently not easy to change our feelings, but with dedication, we can learn to identify them and respond with empathy and wisdom.

By acknowledging and clearly seeing our emotions—without allowing them to take control—we can develop greater self-compassion. Our feelings are just one part of ourselves, and there is another inner voice that is often referred to as inner guidance, friendly mind, or wisdom. We can realize our potential when we access this inner voice during emotional challenges, rather than reacting with a sense of dread, failure, or fear. This is the beginning of learning how to follow our wisdom.

As a psychotherapist with over 45 years of experience, Robert has observed that many of us have become addicted to our emotions. To help lessen this habituation, he will be guiding you through a meditation that focuses on the challenging emotions that are most present for you right now. By acknowledging these emotions and seeking out our most lucid and compassionate thoughts that are rooted in wisdom, we can learn to care for ourselves and open our hearts and minds to others. This is not a traditional therapeutic approach, but rather a strategy for finding the part of ourselves that naturally cares deeply. Whether it is fear, anxiety, anger, frustration, or impatience, any difficult emotion can serve as a starting point for directing our guidance toward self-care and greater compassion toward others.

• The Introspective Guides: download your copy here.

• Watch the video of this episode: on our YouTube channel.

• Read the transcription & listen to this episode: at Awareness That Heals.

In this episode, Robert and Dave discuss how to trust wise thoughts when you're suffering. They emphasize the importance of not distancing or judging our feelings but rather accessing our inner wisdom to guide us. This involves being able to operate at two levels simultaneously: respecting our challenging feelings while finding a place inside of us that wants to care. By doing this, we can stay open to our feelings and allow them to guide us toward our most supportive thoughts.

The guided meditation that follows allows you to go inward and be your own example of facing challenging feelings and finding your inner supportive voice. Through this process, you can cultivate the conditions in which you trust your most wise and supportive thoughts.

• The Introspective Guides: download your copy here.

• Watch the video of this episode: on our YouTube channel.

• Read the transcription & listen to this episode: at Awareness That Heals.

In continuation of our guided meditation series, Robert offers a practice on self-compassion, which is the missing ingredient to lasting change. This guided meditation also includes a discussion surrounding its purpose and how it can be directly helpful to you, no matter what challenge you might be facing right now. Intellectual awareness of our emotions is crucial, but even that is not enough to make substantial change. Accessing the desire to care for ourselves is often the final and missing ingredient to finding and nurturing our thoughts, and integrating our heart and mind during these challenging times. Without an organic longing to care for ourselves, we cannot move in a healing direction in a sustainable and persistent way.

Inspire your path to healing, rather than getting sidetracked by suppressing, judging, misunderstanding, or misinterpreting what challenges you emotionally. Although through time your challenges will change, the process of identifying, finding a place that wants to care, and then actually being able to care for yourself is the combination that leads to the real goldmine. Guided meditation is for many people the best way to gain benefits in response to personal challenges. As you invest in bringing your own experience to this guided meditation, you will give yourself the best chance to change long-standing patterns from suffering towards a state of well-being, peace, and healing. Find a comfortable, quiet space, and let Robert's voice guide you.

• The Introspective Guides: download your copy here.

• Watch the video of this episode: on our YouTube channel.

• Read the transcription & listen to this episode: at Awareness That Heals.

Robert continues with the second installment of the Guided Meditation series where he emphasizes the importance of becoming aware of difficult emotions. This episode takes this awareness and clarifies how to integrate it with our heart and self-caring. Robert and Dave invite listeners to focus on practice. This immersive next step puts us in a position to start moving toward well-being and not getting sidetracked by suppressing, judging, misunderstanding, or misrepresenting our challenging feelings.

The personal application of these Guided Meditations is essential if we want to integrate the principles in the book Awareness That Heals—wisdom that all of us need to deal with life's challenges—and suggestions from the prior podcasts to gain tangible results. Robert encourages you to get comfortable and allow yourself to go where his guidance leads you into your own unique experience. Become the observer of your inner world. Use the Introspective Guides list if needed. Repetition of these Guided Meditations is key until you feel real movement. It is not inherent in us to appreciate feelings we don't like. Whether it's anger, anxiety, grief, or emptiness—whatever this appreciation of awareness reveals—it is a major step toward personally evolving, which will allow us to learn to honor and guide what we feel inside and let that spread out into the world.

• The Introspective Guides: download your copy here.

• Watch the video of this episode: on our YouTube channel.

• Read the transcription & listen to this episode: at Awareness That Heals.

A warm welcome to season two of the Awareness That Heals podcast. During this season, Robert will offer a series of Guided Meditations that will work in conjunction with his book, Awareness That Heals. These short meditations are both personal and accessible in order to allow the listener to focus on themselves in a more intuitive way. Robert and Dave cultivate a safe space to feel and observe, without judgment, what is most challenging.

Practice and learn how to reframe the awareness of challenging feelings into a positive awareness that we can work with. By recognizing these challenges, we have the unique opportunity to see parts of ourselves that we tend to suppress or judge. It is a radical approach to experience the awareness of a difficulty as a positive. When we can accurately hear what is true about our internal difficulties we have clear clues as to what we need and an opportunity to move toward healing, deeper well-being, and an improvement in our quality of life.

• The Introspective Guides: download your copy here.

• Watch the video of this episode: on our YouTube channel.

• Read the transcription & listen to this episode: at Awareness That Heals.

Robert welcomes back Susan Hough, counselor, philanthropist, and life partner, to explore how each of us carries on the central feelings we had with our original family. These repeated behaviors are usually outside of our awareness and show up most strongly in our intimate relationships. Robert and Susan discuss why we need to heal childhood patterns while talking candidly about their past relationships as well as their current one. The audience can see a real and honest way in which this plays out. It is completely normal to have these patterns surface again and again. It is nothing to be embarrassed about, instead, we get to learn from it to become better partners and happier more intentional people.

Our childhood is a place we often do not permit ourselves to look deeply because there is so much caught up in it. However, if we don't, these unprocessed feelings seep into other relationships, often inappropriately and to our detriment. Robert offers tools to begin identifying, as specifically as possible, the challenging feelings. Emotions that were either directed at you or that you knew were there even if they were unspoken and your emotional reactions to them as a child. From this step of recognition, Robert introduces the next step, which is moving toward a place of caring for these feelings and yourself when these challenging emotions or defenses bubble up. This is a great place to implement the Introspective Guides to help identify your core needs, and welcome your partner into this process to create a dialogue about what their needs are in these challenging times and in general. This is a chance for you to become more resilient, to be more responsive, to open your heart to yourself, to be able to have a more intimate relationship with a significant other, and also have a more significant relationship with yourself.

Read the transcription and listen to this episode at Awareness That Heals.

This week Robert discusses core childhood relationships and how they can unconsciously affect us in our adult lives. He is joined by his life partner and fellow counselor, and philanthropist, Susan Hough. We are guided on how to use awareness of our feelings and needs by using the Introspective Guides, which can be found at AwarenessThatHeals.org, Robert talks through identifying each of your strongest childhood relationships and the feelings associated with them. It can be shocking what surfaces because our reactions often still reflect our childhood responses. Most of us are in the habit of either suppressing or criticizing those feelings because they frequently don't make sense in our current relationships. People in our original family and the people that we live with experience the most acute responses to our challenging reactions and emotions. The key is not to get rid of feelings, but to do our best to be aware of them, respect them, and foster a response that will support you when they arise. What feelings and sabotaging reactions play out today that are similar to what happened in your childhood?

Robert will guide you through a 4-step process of Self-Assessment, Intention to Heal, Inquiry, and Self-Communication. Join Robert and Susan as they share their own childhood experiences to illustrate how these have played out in their own lives. It is important not to compare yourself

Read the transcription and listen to this episode at Awareness That Heals.

Using the Introspective Guides, Robert and Dave pick up where they left off last week on the topic of Neurotic Responsibility. This imbalance in relationships is part of our conditioning and can be hard to recognize. It occurs when one person in the relationship feels the problems around them are much more their responsibility than they rationally are. It feels good to give and can last for a lifetime. It can most frequently be recognized when the "giver" has unusually strong needs arise like becoming sick or a deep financial loss and it becomes apparent that the one that is neurotically responsible has been doing a lot of giving and not nearly enough receiving. Robert and Dave, share their personal and professional experiences with this dynamic and offer examples and tools so you won't have to wait to find a deeper connection and more mutuality in your close relationships.

This episode gets at the nuanced ways in which both people in the relationship can be taken care of. From Robert's experience as a psychotherapist, he has observed that the finest love is that of great mutuality, humility, and co-responsibility. Again referring to the Introspective Guides, Robert and Dave clarify ways to locate traits such as guilt, excessive pleasing, enabling, and suppressing your own needs that indicate neurotic responsibility tendencies. This could reflect an entire relationship dynamic or just one aspect. From this moment of awareness and intention to care, Robert offers a sequence to break this pattern little by little to create more mutuality and intimacy. The Introspective Guides will help you articulate these new insights. Robert reminds you to open to growth with humor, courage, self-trust, and love.

Read the transcription and listen to this episode at Awareness That Heals.

Robert and Dave dive right into this week's episode with something Robert likes to call, Neurotic Responsibility. This term refers to someone who takes on the problems around them more than is rationally warranted. It occurs when your partner is upset and you focus mostly on what you might have done to cause it, even though you already have likely admitted it outwardly and inwardly feel guilty, inadequate, and critical of yourself. In these situations, the key is not seeing the other's contribution to the situation in a balanced way. Are you showing up immediately for them and not having the same standards of wanting them to be there for you? This is hard for most people who suffer from this to see because they usually feel like it is part of their love. In Robert's extensive work as a psychotherapist, he notes how incredibly common this is in relationships but the awareness of it is rare.

Neurotic Responsibility is not on the Introspective Guides chart that Robert so often refers to. If the Guides are new to you, you can go to awarenessthatheals.org and download them for free. Neurotic responsibility is experienced most frequently as guilt, inadequacy, and failure, which can be found on the chart. It feels so good to be loving towards others that it sometimes becomes difficult to recognize that what is also going on here is a form of self-abandonment. Join us as Robert and Dave share their personal stories about recognizing how they have disregarded their needs to make others happy or more comfortable. Robert provides tools and a process of caring for your needs and your partners in a balanced mutual way. This new awareness can awaken a deeper sense of love where it empowers the person that has been receiving to learn how to give and empowers the person that has been giving to learn how to receive.

Read the transcription and listen to this episode at Awareness That Heals.

Robert kicks off the episode with a guided meditation. Relax into his words as he grounds into the moment and melts defenses that may be blocking you from accessing your inner wisdom and heart space. Using the Introspective Guides, Robert delves into how we can face our challenging emotions with curiosity. Recognizing that part of us wants to care instead of rationalizing or blocking challenging emotions is a courageous step. Robert will talk you through the tools necessary to develop from the first step of awareness, an intention to care, and a growing self-acceptance toward bringing that heart guidance into the world.

Through his work as a psychotherapist, Robert has seen time and time again that deep down everyone can recognize that bringing their goodness out is fulfilling. Robert and Dave reminisce about their early days together when they ran a residential treatment center for teenage boys. The mantra that emerged was, we believe that beyond their defenses, all our boys have the intention to be and do good. This is a universal principle that has not been universally embraced, especially by the most powerful countries. Instead of may I be a force for good, it's been more like, may I be a force for wealth. Being raised toward power and wealth has led to political parties and a world that has brought us where we are and has led us to feel discouraged. There is a danger here of finding yourself fighting against what you don't like instead of focusing on the world you want to create. Developing a curiosity towards yourself and your inner world harkens back to the very beginning of the Awareness That Heals podcasts. Where am I unaware? What are the consequences of that? How can I best respond to these consequences? Continually asking these questions can change the quality of your life.

Read the transcription and listen to this episode at Awareness That Heals.