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.

Pretty much everyone you talk to these days has some emotions related to the country, gun control, global warming, or the war in Ukraine with an awareness of being overwhelmed. What isn't reliably there is the question, Do I want to care for this emotion and How can I navigate in the world with some positivity? Robert and Dave will continue their focus from last week with specific challenges unique to the anxiety, fear, anger, and terror many of us are experiencing in response to the dire problems facing the planet and the increased authoritarianism in the world today. If more people were committed to what their needs were and not committed to their emotions, it has the potential to start the stepping stones to stop war and start much needed contemplation. Instead of being dominated by our emotions, we would be dominated by our wisdom and our hearts.

Robert continues to use The Introspective Guides as a tool to navigate a path towards integrating what challenges us individually. Starting with caring for ourselves, and our loved ones and then exponentially moving our concern outward into our communities, country, and the world. It can feel easier to avoid and not to be aware of, what some people would call burdensome work, but it is through this journey our most fulfilled selves become accessible. Using the lists of 75 Needs and Emotions, found at AwarenessThatHeals.org, can help make what can seem like a grandiose task achievable while this process becomes familiar. Keep developing a courageous honesty with yourself, get ready to dive in, and together let's find a way to work toward greater peace.

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

Here we are, listening to the news and hearing about elections, global warming, the dangers of nuclear war, the invasion of Ukraine, and we are feeling freaked out. Wherever you are on the political spectrum you are bound to be dealing with some level of anxiety connected to the direction our world and country are going. Robert and Dave assure us this is perfectly normal, and in fact, a good sign you want to be engaged and paying attention. Using the Introspective Guides available at AwarenessThatHeals.org, Robert will use this episode to uniquely focus on integrating what challenges us individually with relating to the dangers we face in the U.S. and the world today.

It may seem easier, or simply an act of survival to avoid challenging feelings as they relate to our planet and politics. You may wonder, what difference could I possibly make? How can I transform feeling helpless into being helpful? This episode will delve into how we can face our feelings and defenses of helplessness, withdrawal, grief, overwhelm, and terror as we navigate the high stakes we find our world in today into something we can work with. We can respond to these feelings with wisdom and love. We are capable of both suffering and accessing a place inside us that can guide us, but it won't happen automatically. We need to learn how to ask ourselves the most crucial questions: how do I care for myself from my heart and wisdom, listen to it, and act on it, while still feeling challenged? Join Robert as he lays out a guide map to show us the way, for if we do not have a process to work with our emotions, they will define us. Working with the examples of helplessness, withdrawal, grief, overwhelm, and terror Robert talks us through how we can both care for ourselves and also not be paralyzed in the world one realistic step at a time.

Read the transcription and listen to this episode on The Global Bridge Foundation website.

Most of us view anger and resistant emotions as something that we want to avoid. The idea of being with our anger and having a relationship with it is not something we have normally been taught. Robert presents an alternative for caring for ourselves while we are challenged in this way. These steps are a guide to setting up the ideal conditions for us to be fulfilled in our individual lives and to contribute to the world by living in a proactive constructive way, rather than be weakened by being reactive. The podcast begins by outlining this seven-step process. The first step always starts with being aware that we are angry or resistant in whatever way is most frequent in our lives. If we do not have a witness or an observer that tells us we are feeling impatient, annoyed, or irritated, most of us will go on autopilot, which dooms us to have more extensive conflict in our lives and not be able to get in a direction that can serve us. There is dignity in acknowledging our anger instead of running away from it. To avoid anger is to avoid your needs. Acting out anger is also to thwart your needs. Wanting to care for yourself in these moments is an evolutionary step and will allow us to perceive what needs we are wanting to support rather than fighting with what we were against. 

Through Roberts's 40 years of counseling, using The Introspective Guides has been the simplest way for his clients to organize and understand how they can move forward when they are in an emotional state. Anger is the most volatile emotion that we have. Robert will use a case study to highlight how this all works. However, the most important person in this story is you.  Use your own situation where you have anger or other resistant emotions like frustration, impatience, agitation, or righteousness to begin to track these seven steps on your journey moving toward your needs, rather than resist what you don’t like.

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

This week Robert concludes the telling of his journey through the hardest 10 years of his life as he navigated finding balance both emotionally and chemically after his kidney transplant. For many years he could not feel the joys of life. He had to dig deep to further develop his capacity to use inquiry, will, and focus on the intention to find what thoughts would be possible and helpful. Hopefully, as you are listening, Robert’s story enables you to see your most challenging emotions, whether it be anxiety, depression, fear, or beyond. As members of Western society, we simply have not been supported to address these emotions, both inwardly and outwardly. Robert begins the episode with a brief recap of what they have gone over in the previous episodes of this series.  We strongly encourage you to go back and listen to the four episodes beginning this section and utilize The Introspective Guides at AwarenessThatHeals.org.

This series of episodes are exclusively dealing with the very most difficult feelings you have ever had and offers tools for how to take care of yourself moment to moment, the next hour, and the next day. Cultivating awareness means seeing it, accepting it, staying with it, and learning how to care for something we usually reject. This is a very viable practice that with determination can help transform our most challenging feelings into wisdom. The key is that wisdom develops as an ally the more you practice it.

Read the transcription and listen to this episode on The Global Bridge Foundation website.

Robert continues with his story from last week about facing the biggest challenge of his life. He spent 10 years experimenting with medicine to find equilibrium after a kidney transplant. Join him and Dave as he shares the stories and the lessons he has learned with the hope that his journey will help you, the listener, navigate from your challenges into being a true ally for yourself and not compound the suffering with self-rejection. These difficulties are universal, whether they are recognized or not. The Introspective Guides are the simplest way to start the path toward integrating what is challenging and can be found at AwarenessThatHeals.org. 

For 10 long years, Robert suffered from exhaustion, depression, fear, anxiety, anger, and beyond. He could no longer feel joy, happiness, or any of the qualities central to his life. However, on another level, he became acutely aware of wanting to care for himself through all of it. If he could not do it through his heart, he had to find a way to transform his experience through his mind. With the strong wish to care for himself and the intention to heal, he channeled his thoughts to find the most important questions and received guidance that would support him through the day. This enabled him to continue his practice as a psychotherapist, and make decisions that were most beneficial to live his life’s potential even though he didn’t feel well. It is possible to develop guidance from inside ourselves with friendly wise thoughts that lead us to what is possible and not let our challenging feelings rule.  A wiser mind can be cultivated while we don’t feel well. Join us to see how much you can learn to support yourself when you are most challenged.

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

Robert shares his journey, with Dave by his side, as he learned to coexist with the deep discomfort, pain, and imbalance of his kidney transplant medication. Feeling good was inaccessible for 10 years. Through this path, he developed a deepening of his practice inquiry by asking questions of what was truly possible given his state of exhaustion from sleep deprivation, which was due to an unusual reaction to the transplant medication. Following the inquiry, he received guidance that led him to focus on what was truly possible. 

You are encouraged as always to see your own challenges in Robert's story and begin to cultivate your own inquiry and wisdom. This can lead to best thoughts, actions, and more time spent caring for yourself with the intention to move toward well-being and keeping your mind as an ally even in the most challenging of times.

Our best selves include not only compassion, love, trust, strength, wealth, and success, but also acceptance of fear, anxiety, anger, impatience, and intolerance. Being aware of that and at the same time not letting it control us is really our best self. A best self that is one-dimensional is not reliable. Continue to cultivate these awareness tools with Robert and The Introspective Guides, which can be found at awarenessthatheals.org.

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

This week Robert and Dave continue to look at how we can care for ourselves at crucial times and how we can practically utilize new tools for us to be resourceful in our lives when it matters the most. Robert and Dave will be using the Introspective Guides, which can be found at AwarenessThat Heals.org as a simple way to start on the path toward integrating what is challenging. The hope is, that through the examples offered, you can use the situations presented as guidance as to how to use these tools in your own life. It could be rooted in facing illness, bankruptcy, fear of death, anxiety, depression, or terror but the goal is the same, which is allowing ourselves to stably face our instinctual tendencies of challenging emotional reactions, and at the same time be resourceful and resilient to care for ourselves in whatever way is possible. It sounds simple, but is a profound partnership between vulnerability and accessing thoughts, qualities and actions that support well-being.

In many of these circumstances, it is not rooted in trying to feel better, which can be a hard concept to understand. Sometimes the best we can do is find our wisdom and follow it and the actions of what is possible rather than what we want. You are encouraged on the show as you are listening, to reflect on, what is, or has been, so far in life, your most challenging emotion. Once you have it in your mind, stay with it and not fall prey to judging yourself and focus on what would be most the most caring and grounded thoughts, actions and attitudes to support yourself. The awareness of your experience and your acceptance of it allows you to be so much more resourceful than ever before. Join Robert and Dave as they focus on various strategies and examples that can be used to help move from your challenges toward genuine well-being.

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

Robert has never seen a time when fear and anxiety were more prevalent in the world. How we deal with our fear and anxiety is not only important in our relationship with ourselves, our love life, friendships, and family members that have opposite politics, but also in our relationship to our very survival, the survival of our planet, and democracy. It is possible to give yourself space to just feel it and not blend it in with the rest of your life. Give it a solitary sanctuary. Breathe into it so you can notice it more overtly to the point where you can have a dialogue with anxiety and find and speak in a voice that lets your wisdom guide you how you can best take care of yourself. Give anxiety the dignity that it deserves because nobody is being anxious on purpose. It is not a matter of being able to get over it. It is a matter of developing an autonomous capacity to guide yourself while the fear is going on. The origin of fear and anxiety is not negative. It is a longing to be safe. This episode will help you learn how to guide yourself and not get lost in self-judgment.

Connect with Robert as he continues working with The Introspective Guides, which can be found at AwarenessThatHeals.org to identify our most challenging emotion that is happening at any time of the day or night. Also, develop skills in how to find ways to respond to that challenging emotion by identifying essential core needs that can help us within any situation. It is understandable why we would want to run from our challenging feelings if we do not have a sense of where to go with them.

At times it is difficult to barely tolerate our experience when we are in situations or emotions that are challenging, which can trigger us to go into fight or flight mode. Join Robert and Dave as they explore common real-life situations that can be difficult and how to take better care of ourselves in the moment or close to it. Money or personal insecurity, anxiety about the state of the world, or health issues are all topics covered in the podcast. Robert helps us navigate back to the trail of internal caring to reach our best selves and not be frozen or blindly reactive inside when challenging feelings bubble up. We can all too often get stuck in our emotions and not realize that the next hour is important and the next day is important to find ways to be resilient. If we are repeatedly stewing or caught in an emotion, we do not get to the next simple needs, thoughts, actions or qualities that will support us.

When you are facing a terrible situation or even a frustrating inconvenience, how many times are you looking for how to best take care of yourself? How many times does that even come into your awareness or your thoughts? Robert offers an accessible framework to meet difficult situations in the most caring and realistic way possible. What this takes is not only being aware of what we feel but what we need.  For anyone new to the show, we invite you to go to AwarenessThatHeals.org and look at The Introspective Guides to help begin to identify your most challenging feelings and beneficial needs. The key is to become more literate to identify your internal experience both what is difficult and what helps. This is an invitation to be exactly as you are in your depths and to be rooting for yourself even though we have been trained to be emotional reactors based on our conditioning in the world.  It is such a benefit to realize you can always guide yourself when you remember to ask, "How can I best take care of myself?" This episode will give you guidance to do just that and more.

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