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Ep25 Broken Heart…not so much

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 your heart actually be broken?

Think of all the ways people experience a broken heart. Some causes of a broken heart can be:

A relationship breakup, people letting you down, people not stepping up for you, someone does not say Thank You when you do something for them, they don’t say I love you back, sadness, loss, rejection

It is a long list of possible culprits but in the end these shocks to the system cause a reaction in your system. Rightfully so. You feel it in your gut, maybe you can’t breathe, your throat tightens up, you want to scream but you can’t, you shake, feel nauseous, get depressed…on and on

This is actually all emotional pain but it certainly feels physical. According to Guy Winch PhD, fMRI studies have found that heartbreak activates the same mechanisms in the brain that get activated when addicts are withdrawing from substances like cocaine and opioids. These powerful withdrawal symptoms from the loss of love impact our ability to think, focus, and function in the broadest terms.

Neuroscience is showing the intensity of the emotional stress a broken heart can have on our system. Emotional pain sits deep in ourselves, hurts and tends to stay around for quite a while.

Our survival brain is wired to protect us so quite often emotional pain generates rumination. Thinking negative thoughts over and over. They keep us awake and offer no solution.

By no means do I want to make light of this issue. It is obviously a widespread experience amongst human beings.

However, lets look at this from the perspective of an emotional warrior. Is there opportunity within a broken heart? Can we do something about it that is healthy and productive for us?

What if a heart can’t really be broken? What I mean is this. Instead of the heart being broken, I mean consider the language, is it really broken? If so, why do we even bother trying to mend it? Broken is broken. Super glue or duct tape can’t fix what’s really broken.

What if its actually more along the lines of expansion. These are very sophisticated matters of the heart. Experiences we think break us are actually what move us out of the old into the new.

Let’s look at an example. You are in a relationship. You think everything is moving along nicely. One day I becomes clear one of you is no longer getting their needs met, specifically your emotional needs. So you or the other person look for ways to pacify those needs. Maybe you find it super easy to talk to a coworker or you create online relationships etc…

The result is the same. One of you has outgrown the relationship. In emotional language, your vibrational levels are no longer in harmony.

Then cones the drawn out attempts at reconciliation or simply hanging in there hoping it will get better. But it doesn’t.

What is happening? Your heart is trying to expand. You came here, or found yourself here…either way, it is pretty clear that we live best with a purpose. Purpose driven life baby!!! Having said that, relationships where both people work with each other, challenge each other, support each other, grow with each other…those are the ones that last.

Think of empowerment. An empowered heart cannot be a broken heart. Your heart is the seat of your life force. Why else do we say the things we say about the heart. Like: “Trust me, I love you from the bottom of my heart.” Or “I love you with all of my heart!”

This doesn’t sound like a fragile place in my world. The heart is your strongest place of truth and determination. When it expands, so does your consciousness. In the quantum world, your heart becomes your energy generator. Raising your own vibration impacts and lifts the vibration of others.

We learned somewhere along the way that someone leaving us breaks hearts. Of course its hurts. Own it. However, knowing...

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Ep24 Don’t I Already Know Myself

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 Don’t I Already Know Myself?

Most people think they already know themselves but in reality they don’t. What do you mean I don’t know myself? Of course I do. I live with myself 24/7. Hm…if only it were that easy…

So how do you recognize if you know yourself? You can start with an inventory. The typical inventories would look at sectors of your life like family, relationships, finances and the like, and these are actually good places to look. However, I want to dig deeper.

Let’ say that you actually have your categories fairly well in check. Life is actually moving along nicely for you. Of course there are hiccups and bumps but you generally bob and weave and adjust as needed. Yet there is a nagging voice, you know the voice I am talking about. It speaks to you and makes you question what you have going on.

In a way the voice is a nag and causes you imbalance in your life at times. On the other hand, the voice is your soul talking to and with you. The last few episodes have looked into that topic. The soul is a powerful part of your life. And a great way to connect with it and keep it active in your life is to breathe into and through your heart creating heart-mind coherence.

While that is a great way to be present is there a way to connect the voice, your heart, and your soul? Of course there is. It is the path of the Emotional Warrior. Emotional balance and fruitful expression is the way of the warrior.

An interesting piece of research made its way across my feed today. A study published in the Journal of Clinical Psychiatry, senior author Dilip V. Jeste states that “those people with meaning and purpose in their lives are happier and healthier than those without.” Further in the study they found the age where meaning in life is found…

Drum roll please…the magic age is 60. Over 1000 people ranging from 21 to over 100 participated. The results show that up to 60 a person is on the side of searching for meaning while at 60 the presence of meaning is at its highest. Since life expectancy goes well beyond that it gets interesting after 60 because the search component starts all over again.

Mental well-being was positively associated with aging and Presence but negatively with Search. The study’s conclusion is that finding meaning in one’s life constitutes a sound strategy for thriving in later years — in part because it supports the preservation of a person’s physical and mental well-being.

Let’s organize all of this.

1. You truly benefit from actually knowing yourself.

2. A great place to look at this is by age. 20 to late 50’s and searching for meaning in life is normal. This search creates careers, friendships, community engagement etc..

3. Most things have settled down at this point and by the age of 60 you are at the peak of presence of meaning. You have arrived so to speak.

4. However, past 60 sets you up for the next chapter in your life. New things matter in your life. The chase for certain worldly affairs have subsided.

5. New goals come into your life.

This sets up the need to have your emotions online in a balanced and harmonious fashion. This balance allows you enter the 3rd chapter of your life with passion, caring and compassion allowing you to experience more growth and fulfilment.

Can you see how this all falls into the awareness of knowing yourself? Doing so allows you to expand how you live and experience who you want to be. Living an authentic life with your inner world in coherence allowing you to create the external life that reflects your inner awesomeness.

This is the life journey of an emotional warrior.

Peace.

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Ep23 You can see things for what they CAN be.

Hello and Welcome to the Way of the Emotional Warrior Podcast. My name is Kai Ehnes and today we will be looking into the power of your ability to see things for what they CAN be

I am creating today’s podcast on the eve of the 2020 U.S. Presidential election. I am not quite sure really where to begin. My goal is to give all of you one tool to help you get through whatever turbulence you may be experiencing. My personal research has taken me to the following place.

I think that we are in and heading into a new normal or way of being and existing. Most of the systems we have been living in are outdated and stretched to a brink. Why? Because we are ready for a new expanded life. The turbulent times are what is actually a great awakening of the souls of people.

Last week I spoke about living with an awakened soul. Many of you have that going on in your lives. You have an awakened soul and you see things for what they are and especially for what they CAN be. I want to stress that…you can see things for what they CAN be.

But try to see how many people live with their souls asleep. Their souls are patiently waiting to awaken from a dream state. However, the body and mind of their host are doing repetitive things, so much so, that we repeat about 90% of the same thoughts every day. Consider that for a second. Every day we repeat the same 90% of our thoughts.

That just makes me cringe at myself, that my precious and wonderful gift of life is spent daily repeating the same thoughts over and over. I mean honestly, who cares what a co-worker said or thinks about you. Do you think it matters what anyone else thinks about your shoes? Or what car you drive? Or what you believe about anything?

So, let’s look at where we are. If you are listening to this podcast right now, then that is who you are at the moment. You are a caring person who thought that you would get value from a name that said Way of the Emotional Warrior. You believe at your core that this is you. That you are an emotional warrior. You resonated with my call and are willing to give me the gift of listening to some of my thoughts. I hope and pray each week that I can offer you some value in terms of your emotional warrior journey. If nothing else, just know that you nor I are ever alone. There are plenty of emotional warriors and we are all trying to navigate through this thing called life.

Are there any tools that can help along the way? I would love to share what I have found with you. I have mentioned this before and am super thankful to learning about the Heartmath Institute and heart-mind coherence from Gregg Braden. The tool is the practice of aligning your mind to your heart.

Please hear the order of what I am saying. Its about aligning your mind to your heart, not the other way around. All of the great research comes from the Heartmath Institute. Their studies have pioneered and have been peer reviewed in the field of studying the power of the heart. With its own set of brain cells called sensory neurites, the heart actually thinks on its own and it is super fast. It yields unfiltered thoughts instead of all the thoughts that have been edited through emotional stacking and experience.

Any time you experience turbulence and chaos and moreso daily external pressures and find yourself overwhelmed, the tool I use daily is the practice of heart-mind coherence.

How do you do it? Its all about breathing. Sit, stand. Lie down, it does not matter. You do need to be still. Breath in deep and out slowly. Do this a few times to get yourself centered. Next, using either hand, tough the area of your chest right by your heart. I use my right hand and take the middle 3 fingers and tough my sternum. Now, you are focusing your awareness on your heart. Breathe in counting to 5 and breathe out counting to 5. Just gently pay attention to breathing. You can try counting the number of seconds. 5 sec in, 5 sec...

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Ep22 Hey You…Wake Up – Life is Calling

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 Hey You…Wake Up – Life is calling

You know those moments where things click into place. Everything feels right, smells and sounds and sights are just amazing. You are awake – everything is alive. Most of us can only sustain these experiences for a few moments and then they simply stop. That leaves you wanting those moments, you yearn for them but they are simply gone until the next little glimpse.

What we learn and internalize is that we can only have those moments of being awake a few times in our lives and we resign ourselves to believing just that. It continues that we actually start to have ominous feelings that living awake begets something negative, maybe something awful. Thoughts like: You better not like it too much, you better not think life can be that good. It is so strange that we have been conditioned that living well and happy and abundantly means you are out of balance and that normal is struggling and being entangled to lower emotions. Haven’t you heard: The same old same old or “The struggle is real.”

Enter living the good life. I say we have every right to live right, joyful and abundantly. We have to declare and intentionalize that we want and will to live that way.

Let’s call it living with passion!

Why? Because passion awakes the soul…your soul

The definition of passion is any powerful or compelling emotion or feeling, like love or sexual attraction but it also means hatred and anger. I find it highly curious that a passion can be positive, upward or light like love or attraction but it can also aim don on the vibrational scale like hate and anger.

So how do you choose or will to aim your passion toward love, fulfillment and growth?

You start with the feeling you experience in these moments of being alive that I mentioned earlier.

Build on that feeling, leave the therapy and fears on pause. Know that freedom of your soul when you are fully present. That feeling is you and your soul being alive and in harmony. Your soul is awake and you feel more than just happy. You feel soulful joy, true authentic joy of being alive.

This is the foundation of being an emotional warrior. An emotional warrior dares to be alive with passion. A passion for love, compassion, tolerance and abundance.

Peace

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EP21 – Our Dark Side…uggghhh

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…I thought I was a really good Person, why did I do that horrible deed?

Have you ever thought the following while you were at your job: Its just a post-it note pack, they will never miss it. Or hey I could use a stapler at home, they charge enough money its ok. How about speeding on roads where you know the police don’t patrol. These types of minor acts are still crimes…yes you are stealing from your employer. One thing is for certain, if they shorted your paycheck by even a single dollar you would be all over payroll to fix it. Why the ambiguity in morality?

Quite often when we feel like we are being taken advantage of or we simply feel under, there is a small voice that that tells us we can even the playing field by things like taking a longer lunch, looking up stuff that’s for personal use on company time, or simply slowing down our productivity. I mean seriously, who doesn’t enjoy sticking it to the man!

For our purposes, I would like to investigate what type of people are more prone to do these acts or worse. Numerous researchers in the field of psychology have studied the idea of why seemingly good citizens can do atrocious acts. Rabbi Harold Kushner wrote the book, When Bad things happened to good people. Various stories in the bible, like the story of Job, to Viktor Frankl and his book Man’s search for meaning. These are just some of the examples of why seemingly normal and good people have to endure tragedy and suffering. Would these people be justified if they acted out atrocious acts on others, animals or the planet? If you look at their stories, they transformed their pain and suffering into successful and helpful lessons and theories.

Kushner wrote the book, on his take on God’s role in life and the tragedy of his son’s illness, to create a platform for how to deal with tragedy and loss. How many people have learned from the story of Job…countless and Viktor Frankl, I remember when I read his book in college. The fact that he physically survived the concentration camps is absolutely remarkable but then to create a new discipline in psychology called logotherapy whereby through a search for meaning and purpose in life people can develop ways to deal with tragedy and hardship, well I believe that qualifies him and the others as Emotional Warriors.

So what does this have to do with our dark side. The classic experiment was carried out by Stanley Milgram in 1963 whereby he studied Obedience to authority. It aimed to test the level of naive subjects’ obedience to authority. The subjects were told that the experiment tested the potency of punishment in improving learning capabilities, and were asked to administer electrical shocks to a “learner” (an accomplice of the experimenter). The subject did not know the shocks were false; measures were taken to convince the subject that the shocks were real. The “learner” was given some pairs of words. Then he was told one word from one of the pairs, and four more words. The “learner” had to choose the word that came in a pair with the first word, and press a respective button, which turned on a respective light that the participant could see. The subject did not see or hear the learner. If the answer was wrong, the subject was to apply an electric shock to the “learner” and continue.

Each time the subject had to increase the voltage of the shock by 15 V. The voltage of electric shocks ranged from 15 V to 450 V, and there were 30 switches. When the participant paused or stopped, four standardized phrases were used to tell them to go on. If, after being told all the phrases, the subject refused to administer more shocks, they were considered as one who defied the experiment. The others, who carried on and administered the highest shock (450 V), were considered obedient.

Importantly, when the...

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Ep20 Use-ism - Use Your Stuff

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 Do I actually use all my stuff?

This week I watched a show on minimalism. It was interesting to see people talk about their lives and how they earned 6 figure incomes in corporate jobs where their main goal was to climb the ladder in order to earn more money. Why do people do this? Because one of the main mantras of our society is that more money equals more ability to buy things. So, we have to assume that behind this ping pong game of trading time for money is something meaningful right? I mean it would have to be. We get up at crazy early hours, work late giving up other activities and so on… It must mean that the payoff is tremendous.

There is a lot to be said about our obsession with shiny objects. Growing up, it was always made clear to me that more money meant more things so more things equal success. You get a nice used car and instantly see someone else with a newer car or a nicer looking one. When does it ever happen that you actually have the best of something? Is it even possible? It always becomes clear that someone else has a shinier object than you. What to do?

Enter minimalism. In the show, people were scaling down to the point of one case where a guy had all his worldly belongings in 2 bags. I think less is more is a great philosophy. There is something very elegant about streamlining and efficiency.

However, an Emotional Warrior knows to approach things with balance and harmony. Extreme minimalism will of course work for some people. The human condition works according to zeros and ones, called polarity, so the bookends of minimalism are good to know. I have experienced both of these extremes in my own life. From having very little to having to cull excess is a strong dichotomy.

In one of my prior episodes I talked about comparing yourself to others. In doing that research I came across Wallace Wattles and he wrote that part of the human condition is to immerse in the world of the material. That is how we experience and grow. Again, moderation grasshopper…moderation.

So what perspective can I offer here?

Well, let me think on that a bit. Now it is 2 days later and here is what came to me. I will call it Use-ism. What is use-ism you ask?

Its all about using your stuff. If you have things then just sequentially go through them and see if you actually use them. They will transform from being shiny objects to helping you live a better and fuller life.

Clothes etc are always a good place to start. Wear what you have, something every day. If you don’t love it, send it on. Gotta love that dress shirt and sweatpants combo for ZOOMJ

You will find that some stuff you have will be pretty useless. Other stuff is actually quality stuff but you just don’t use it. Why keep it then?

Is there any neuroscience on this topic?

In a study Led by Flinders University Professor Mike Kyrios, it was found that Hoarding Disorder assigns great significance to the emotional attachment that individuals place on possessions as a way of compensating for a lack of emotional warmth experienced in their early years.

“As a consequence, by not having a strong sense of emotional belonging, the people who hoard cling to personal belongings, to mimic a heightened sense of security and control.

“The strong attachment to possessions compensates for their feelings of uncertainty or being threatened.

“In addition, a need to keep possessions in view compensates for poor confidence in their memory. They deal with fears about decision making by holding on to possessions even when the resulting clutter is detrimental to their quality of life.”

I realize that hoarding is an extreme version of having stuff but the emotions are most likely the same. Stuff attachment has to do less with the stuff itself and much more with the emotions attached to them....

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Ep19 Does Your Conscience Bother You?

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 ___.

Does Your Conscience Bother You?

Ever get that feeling, you know, the one that speaks to you to say: “Hey, You…you probably shouldn’t have done that!”

Your conscience is what’s speaking to you, its actually nagging at you because its letting you know something is wrong. Who knows what you did, however it was just not right. What does that mean?

A wise woman said, “Your conscience is the mirror of your heart. It follows you like a shadow, your entire life.” So, your conscience is an indicator of how in tune or aligned your thoughts and actions are with your heart. Call it intuition, call it instinct, gut feeling – all roads lead to the idea that your heart has neurons and thinks with a baseline purity to it. So what am I saying? Your conscience constantly guides you to navigate your life by aligning it to your heart-mind.

If your conscience is your mirror of your heart then we can use the analogy of having a clean mirror to mean that you live a clean life. Think of it as an internal guidance system. At all times you know if what you are doing is rightly aligned with the direction of your heart. Since the heart space is pure, then it seems like a pretty good source to look towards. You can constantly gauge the quality of your life, specific to you based on how your conscience has you feeling.

This is not about morality. It is more about the way a clean mirror allows you to experience and master your emotions. Its not about comparison to others. Its not about guilt and shame. It is about you and your life.

Think about how many times throughout your life you had an internal dialogue going back and forth about doing something or not doing something and in all honesty not being able to decide.

I know that I have experienced that too many times to count in my own life. What if you did not have to play the guessing game or go endlessly back and forth so that in the end you choose based on a coin toss.

Consider the emotional empowerment you gain from this. Can’t you feel how palpable the energy is just talking about this? As you go through your day and those many long nights, you find comfort in having a clear conscience. Your heart vibrates to the frequency of love. So now what happens is that your decisions slowly become more rooted in love and compassion. This means that your life becomes more rooted in love and compassion.

This is what is known as living your life in coherence. It means that your heart and mind are in sync or entrained. The neurons in your heart interact faster and without all the filters or emotional stacking experience. You don’t have to stress so hard about your decisions any more. There is a true guidance system that you can access any time you want. Now you become resilient, you become an emotional warrior.

Emotions tell us about our immediate situations. So, in order to make good decisions, we have to use emotions because they set our context. Much of psychology teaches us strategies based on the mind being in charge but heart based decision making means that you are A) not suppressing your emotions and therefore an integral part of yourself, but B) stop ongoing indecision. You act because you are rooted and in the present. Ignoring your emotions can cause you to get stuck in zero and one thinking or worse, you end up inert, frozen and incapable of choosing.

This leads you to a much wanted state, namely, self awareness and confidence. With these characteristics in hand you slowly begin to build your decision making power. You gather momentum and gain control in different parts of your life. You start to make an impact because your decisions are solid, rooted in heart based resilience and love. People begin to notice what is happening in your world and in turn begin to come to you for guidance....

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Ep18 What is Your Path

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 ___.

What is your Path?

Here is the story. A mother explains to her teenage child: “In order to truly be at home, you must choose your path. One path is to choose what others want you to do and be. The other path is to choose what you really want to do with your life.” As life typically unfolds for any of us, the child begins to find herself in all sorts of situations. These situations are classic life challenges that offer an individual the opportunity to decide who they really are and who they want to be.

Time to see how this applies to an Emotional Warrior.

A person who chooses their own path sets a life into motion for themselves that creates a story of intention, resilience, free will, empowerment, emotional strength…personal liberty. You build yourself a solid foundation of emotional understanding and reality. You start to gain spiritual and psychic strength.

Picture this life. You live between the lines. You intuitively have a feel for doing the right thing. You know when to stand up for something that is wrong. You know when you may have to give up something for the greater good. You operate from a baseline of heart and love. You spend more time in light than darkness.

The famous scripture line “Whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also reap” starts to become one of the main tenets of how your life structure is held together. One by one you have life experiences. Initially they alternate in extremes in terms of how you react and deal with them. Over time a sort of middle path or average starts to emerge showing the direction of your internal compass.

The line I mentioned means the following: the way you behave in life will affect the treatment you will receive from others. While this is certainly important for how we interact with others, I have found that it is the core of how we interact with all of life. Living in the middle ground would mean that you are not doing things with the intention of manipulating what you get in return. It means you do the proverbial right thing because by doing so you act and you put forth energy that when it comes back to you helps not only to elevate you but others as well.

How does this relate to choosing your path? Well, lets look at the other side of the scenario first. If you choose to do what others tell you to, implied or directly said to you, it means you really have no idea of what to do from one situation to another. You not only second guess yourself every time you face a decision but you literally have to consult someone to give you advice or confirm what you believe before you can act. You are good in your day to day but any higher vibrational experience that requires a decision to act gets you flustered because you need validation from outside yourself to act. This happens to someone when they are raised in a very authoritarian household. One’s own ability to choose an action is always deferred to the authority figure. Once grown up that simply transfers to adult decision making. If the authority figure is not around, the individual seeks someone else to validate their perspective and influence their decision making.

An emotional warrior prefers a life of intention and choice. This type of empowerment means that you have to be able to trust yourself and the decisions you make. How can YOU begin to trust your decisions?

It starts with how you act and behave. As we saw earlier, what you sow so you shall reap. Here are some examples:

You want to make more money.

You want to have an amazing close relationship.

You want to be truly healthy.

You want to live right on and with this planet.

You want to know how to relate to other life on this earth.

You want to live your life in peace.

These are just some of the examples of life experiences.

How could you ever find your true...

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Ep17 So that's Creativity...Who Knew

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 What actually is Creativity?

What is creativity?

Imagine the following: At a certain point there is pretty much nothing but then out of the blue there is an onslaught of ideas. According to Richard Foster, lecturer in management at Yale, that moment is creative insight. But what he found more important are the traits, the knowledge and ways of thinking that lead up to this moment. He says creativity is about making something new, rather than merely applying or discovering something new. Creative solutions are insightful, they’re novel, they’re simple, they’re elegant, and they’re generative. A

key to being creative, says Foster, is the ability to find associations

between different fields of knowledge. This process requires people with curiosity, energy, and the openness to see connections where others cannot.

Next comes some answers to what creativity is, by Robert Franken in

his book Human Motivation. Creativity is the tendency to

generate or recognize ideas, alternatives, or possibilities.

Tests of creativity measure not only the number of alternatives that

people can generate but the uniqueness of those alternatives. the

ability to generate alternatives or to see things uniquely does not occur

by change; it is linked to other, more fundamental qualities of thinking,

such as flexibility, tolerance of ambiguity or unpredictability, and the

enjoyment of things unknown.

One of my personal favorites, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, in his work: Creativity - Flow and the Psychology of Discovery and Invention.

He describes creative people in the following ways:

1. Persons who express unusual thoughts, who are interesting

and stimulating - in short, people who appear to be

unusually bright.

2. People who experience the world in novel and original ways.

These are (personally creative) individuals whose

perceptions are fresh, whose judgements are insightful, who

may make important discoveries that only they know about.

3. Individuals who have changed our culture in some important

way.

He continues with Characteristics of the creative personality:

1. Creative individuals have a great deal of energy, but they are

also often quiet and at rest.

2. Creative individuals tend to be smart, yet also naive at the

same time.

3. Creative individuals have a combination of playfulness and

discipline, or responsibility and irresponsibility.

4. Creative individuals alternate between imagination and

fantasy ant one end, and rooted sense of reality at the

other.

5. Creative people seem to harbor opposite tendencies on the

continuum between extroversion and introversion.

6. Creative individuals are also remarkable humble and proud

at the same time.

7. Creative individuals to a certain extent escape rigid gender

role stereotyping and have a tendency toward androgyny.

8. Generally, creative people are thought to be rebellious and

independent.

9. Most creative persons are very passionate about their work,

yet they can be extremely objective about it as well.

10. The openness and sensitivity of creative individuals

often exposes them to suffering pain yet also a great deal of

enjoyment.

When Does Creativity Happen?

The late Maya Angelou also suggested that thinking creativity helps

foster even greater creativity: Creativity or talent, like electricity, is something I don’t understand but something I’m able to harness and use. While electricity remains a mystery, I know I can plug into it and light up a cathedral or a synagogue or an operating room and use it to help save a life. Or I can use it to electrocute someone. Like electricity, creativity makes no judgment. I can use it productively or destructively. The important thing is to use it. You can’t use up creativity. The more you use it, the more you have....

Ep16 oh…that’s why I love creativity

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...Why do I truly enjoy being creative?

This week I wanted to take a look at an idea proposed by Wallace Wattles, in his book, "The Science of Getting Rich." He proposed that an individual has a two fold option of how and where to live their lives. There is the plane of competition which is where most people operate. Here we do exactly what the name states. We try to further ourselves and better ourselves through competition. This means that we have to beat someone else or many others to achieve the proverbial win. The victory moment of beating someone else and thus be the winner.

The other side he proposes is the plane of creativity. This is where a person achieves a sustainable life. This is a mindset that does not depend on beating someone else. There is no need to compare yourself to someone else. There are no regrets based on someone else doing something with a higher value in the eyes of society. Instead it is derived from an internal space. Creativity means you Express yourself. You bring forth your own ideas. Of course, balance is the key. It is not healthy to pull off to anything extreme. But there is a way to Express your soulful self.

There is harmonious life where you feel good. You live in a state of balance. When you take on your day or projects you easily enter into the state of flow brought forth by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. In this state your power of creativity is fully turned on. Time disappears because you become part of the process of whatever you are doing.

What state of mind should you be in as you do all this? The answer is a state of gratitude. You know as well as I do that we can quickly find what's wrong with a situation. We easily judge others to prop ourselves up. But in that state of gratitude you can easily live within the rails, meaning sustainable. So in gratitude you enter a vibrational state whereby you appreciate everything around you, value your own place in the world. You connect to life. You attune to the rhythms that are present.

When you are in this state your creative energies are free to play. By staying in the state of creativity you avoid falling into competition. The games other people play in their competitive minds simply do not affect you. Competition means that for you to win or be superior someone else needs to be inferior. If you fall into those energies more and more does inferiority and winning take over your thoughts and time.

You have a choice in how you want to live your life, perceptually. Since you get to choose this, you have to ask yourself, Is this how I really want to live my life?

Wattles talks about how the creative power makes us into the image of that which we give our attention. The grateful mind is constantly fixed upon the best, therefore it tends to become the best, it takes the form or character of the best, and will receive the best.

It is your desires and passions that are the driving forces of your creativity. The balanced way to approach these forces is not only practice gratitude but also be open to opportunities and open doors that come your way. You have to be vigilant and aware to these gifts being brought to you. Then you have to act. Leave no rock unturned is what a friend told me 30 years ago. It has been solid advice for sure. Keep your mind clear and focused. Then you can recognize the opportunities in front of you and live in a state of gratitude.

Watch your mood and emotions. See how you live balanced. The crazy town around you is still there but does not affect you the way it does when you are out of balance.

Your business transactions become simpler. The struggle becomes less and less. And life becomes fun to live. You live in the now which is what it means to live in the flow.

Lets say you want to improve your station in life. He says, hold the vision...