www.kaiehnes.com

Ep8 Can Spinach Really Change My Emotional State

Hello and Welcome to the Way of the Emotional Warrior Podcast. My name is Kai Ehnes and today we will be answering the question of

Can Spinach Really Change My Emotional State?

Today is part 2 of a 3 part interview with Dr. Andy Rosenfarb. He is a naturopath and acupuncturist. His specialty is working with people’s vision. In this segment, we dive into how we can discipline ourselves to prepare or precondition ourselves with emotional awareness and readiness, the same way Popey had a can of spinach before he had to save the day. Andy gives some great techniques on how to arm yourself to be trained and to be a ready to go - Emotional Warrior. Here we go…

K: One of the dimensions of the work we are researching now is that yes, certainly the large shock waves are fairly obvious in that way, the way you describe it, you lose a spouse, or an accident, but what we are finding also and this probably chisels away harder, are the small things. So I tried really hard last night to get this technology working and I found out that a camera wasn’t working. Then you go over here and the light is not right. I thought I had it all worked out last night and then today I thought let me check it out and something else doesn’t work, I mean, it should be obvious, open up a laptop, turn on the camera, but it didn’t look right and I didn’t want that for posterity’s sake on Youtube looking like you came through a cheese grader. What I’d like to ask you, see what your input on this is: how do we arm ourselves and take that spinach can for all of these little events. Let me give you an example: you have a situation where somebody’s life is continually spiraling down. There are these dominoes that have a downward spiral in their life. You are doing fine on a Monday and a tire blows out. You didn’t have enough money for the tire so you charge it on a credit card but you also need something else three weeks later and now at the end of the month you don’t have enough to pay the bills and it just continues. You have to borrow and then borrow more. You have to pay interest and you have to pay back more than what it was worth. Then comes the next month and it just keeps on going. How do we put the brakes into that? There might be one or two tools, to stop that at that moment, power up to play that out. Down the road we should be inoculated. If somebody has been doing this for a while, they eat spinach all day. In little doses, every 20 minutes they have a spinach hit, so they don’t get hit so hard. This is quite common.

R: I know quite a few people who do quite well with dealing with big traumas, big situations, big shocks but they have a very hard time dealing with the little stuff. What happens is that its little microtraumas that simply keep on accumulating, tearing away at us. This is where practicing daily self care, radical self care, comes into play. By working out, meditating, eating right, prayer, whatever it is that fills up our tanks. That is going to be our insurance policy against this stuff. Trying to respond when our tanks are empty…good luck. The worst case scenario is when you are already down, add insult to injury and its like are you kidding me, it keeps coming. So what happens is you have to use a daily practice of decompression and tuning back in, that will give us that clarity. At least for me what I find is that when I go days without exercising, meditating, or spending time with my family. Basically doing things that I like for me. Its also about mindfulness, checking in with our emotions. Its sort of a chromosomal defect for those of us carrying a Y chromosome, ie: dudes, we are not really good with checking in with our feelings. We have 2 emotions while women have a much greater access to a spectrum of emotions. Its easier for them to dive into. For guys its harder. To answer your question, to check in periodically with my feelings, our frequency, our...