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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 Are there just times when you Just Don’t Want To?

It’s a crazy feeling right? You had made all sorts of plans the night before but you wake up the next day and you feel like you are in an alternate reality. Yesterday you were in a great mood, today just about everything sucks. Even your body agrees. All you want to do is sleep but of course you can’t. you even go back to bed but to no avail. Your head and thoughts are just spinning around and around. So after a while you get up, feeling unrefreshed. Maybe you choose some caffeine drink. Maybe you go to the tv or internet and waste more time.

I am sure this is a familiar story. What causes this? I would like to offer one opinion on this. I am sure there are many more answers but let’s try this one. In a previous episode I talked about emotional stacking. Stacking is simply the piling on of more things to do and responsibilities.

For me, it was exactly this type of week. Work demands amplified, rain caused demands for our home to go up. Numbers of covid keep going up every day. Debates are now literal fights about whether to open up schools and businesses. It feels like things are out of balance everywhere. You kind of just want to find a corner and hole up in it. Oh, just before I started working on this episode there was a strange noise on what sounded like the entire roof made a crackling sound. Yes, that was an earthquake from about 80 miles away. How are you supposed to deal and cope with the emotional pile that sits on your shoulders?

Personally, I start by recentering myself. I drink some water. Have a small amount to eat. Go to my favorite places. One is inside the house and the other outside, in nature. I clear my head by starting outside. I stand or sit, close my eyes and just listen. No judgment, meaning no interpretation, like a bird calling out, oh I wonder what kind of bird is that? None of that just listen. Bird calling. Leaves rustling. Various insects doing their thing. In a little bit of time, more sounds appear. Normally I would just walk through all of this on my way to DO something. What I am actually doing is Being instead of doing.

Next, I go into the house, find my wife and invite her to our living room and apologize. I am sure I was a bit prickly in my stacking mode, so I apologize for being stuck, and tell her how grateful I am that she is my partner and confidante on this journey and how much I love her.

She is great at helping me move forward when I am stuck like that and lo and behold she will offer various suggestions which let me do something that moves my life in the right direction.

So now what? Have I solved anything? Let me continue…I throw of the entire stack from my shoulders. Technically I already did that when I cleared my mind, however, now comes the most important part about the rebuild.

I believe and practice a method called heart centered breathing. I learned and studies this technique at the Heartmath Institute. Amazing people, amazing research. It goes like this. There is a device Heartmath sells that clips to your earlobe and connects to a phone or tablet. When you are breathing correctly the app will fee back to you that it is happening. Next, what the method does is to bring your heart and mind into coherence. There is actual scientific evidence that show how the brain entrains or aligns with the rhythm of the heart. Let me say it again…the brain entrains to the heart, not the other way around. This means that the heart is the key.

This is bigger than just heartbeats and brain waves. Your system begins to align itself. This is called a state of coherence. Bottom line is, breathe in slowly counting to five, then breathe out slowly, counting to five. This may take a few seconds or minutes to feel right but just build up to it. Once you have that rhythm your system...