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Why we compare ourselves to others

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 we Compare ourselves to others?

One of the basic tenets of the way of the emotional warrior is self awareness. That being said, one of the more self contradictory rituals we do to ourselves is comparing ourselves to others. The fastest place we do this is when we scroll through social media and see what friends, even family, post stories about their successes. Even ads that pop up try to convince us that the golden life is just ahead of us if we do things their way. But we also do it in the analog world. We compare ourselves to other people when we are in public or simply watching tv.

Of course it is important to see something other than yourself. Other people can easily show us inspiration in their journey. They obviously have made something out of themselves. Great people can be emulated in their perseverance and quite often leave a trail of steps of how they achieved their success. So there is a good reason to compare yourself. They are at a certain stage or success and give you the hope and motivation to move yourself forward.

However, how often has the following happened. Someone posts that they have achieved something. You see that they are about your age and it instantly becomes clear that they have done something you have not. You look at this as a weakness on your part. A failure of sorts. The proverbial race, where you did not come in first. That is not motivational. It may make you feel less than. Not good enough.

If you want to resolve this dilemma, you have to make a decision as to where you are actually coming from. What I mean by this is where your sense of reality sits. What is your base level of being, where you feel is ground zero for you. This is psychologically and emotionally your resting place, your departure point. It is on this foundation that you build everything onto. This is analogous to the ground that you build a home on. The ground has to be leveled and packed, let’s call it the pad. It has to be prepped and leveled for a house to be built upon. This is the space where it all begins. It is your true birth place of your Self.

It takes courage to go there. This is how deep you have to look. It might seem scary but once you find this place inside of yourself you can decide what gets added to it as you build and expand who you are and want to be.

The reason I am talking about this is that comparing yourself to others can cloud or even negate this sense of who you are. We can easily layer in lies to keep up with others. There is room for all sorts of intrusive interferences that cloud who we really are.

So, what does the neuroscience tell us. It turns out that when we compare ourselves to others and the perceived difference between where you perceive yourself to be and where you place the other person, if the need for you to be like them is extremely high, you become very prone to take high risks. This is known as Risk-Sensitivity theory, originally founded in studies of evolutionary biology and animal foraging, states that “risk-aversion [shifts] to risk-preference in situations of high need, where need describes disparity between an individual’s present state and goal (or desired state). In a study conducted by Keith Payne, a professor of psychology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel, he found that riskier gambling decisions were much higher under the high inequality conditions, revealing that people feel the need to risk more when they are aware of others already having more than they do.

Again, this is a double edged sword. You are told to take more risks on one hand but on the other, taking extreme risks can be very detrimental.

So here we are. You have done the work and found that truly vulnerable space inside of you that is your most authentic place. In this place resides the Real

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Ep14 What…me stressed? Where is my oxygen mask?

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…me stressed?

Stress overload.

There are certainly times where the stress simply piles up and creates such an incredible pressure that you simply want to lose it. There simply don't seem to be enough hours to get the demands of those above you, met. They make decisions without any regard as to whether you can complete them or even have any ability to do the task. To be fair, sometimes those directly above you are getting slammed with a healthy dose of crazytown from a level higher than themselves. Trickle-down worked so well in the ‘80s, let’s just keep on using itJ

How can you be held accountable for something that you can not do because the internet meeting you are supposed to have at 10 does not happen because Zoom crashes or your internet is down. Yet, you were supposed to have it done. That is all before lunch and then come the next demands. You give 10 to 12 hours 7 days a week to a job that pays you for 37.5 hours.

So it is for many of us. You can't quit because you have built a life based on your salary and other jobs or careers are not easy substitutes. There must be something in your toolkit that you can use, right?

Before we can go there though there is plenty of time to stress out more. So we do it another day, maybe have a drink every evening, try to go to sleep and then find yourself not being able to get any rejuvenation. Next morning, coffee starts your day, your phone is blowing up, already stacked with new demands. At least you feel vindicated that your new office is your dining room table, couch, or even your bed. You put on your remote work uniform which is a nice shirt and sweat pants. Everyone does it and knows it but no one sees it on our new ZOOM screen frame of reality. That is your victory. Then the emails crank up. The ding sound followed by "you will." Quick, run for your third round of coffee. Damn did the dog get to go out?

Certainly this will lighten up tomorrow, is your mantra. In a moment of pause you ponder…Of course THEY don't want us this stressed. They don't want us to feel this way. They surely want us to be happy and fulfilled at the workplace.

But it just keeps going, day after day.

So what do you do? You have to look and dig deep inside.

For what you ask? Your humanity, your soul.

For me, I had to simply put everything on hold and spend some time with family. Realizing their honest and loving support allowed me to get out of my own way and get centered. I went outside and just practiced being present.

Next, Prioritizing became the next step.

Using the analogy of an oxygen mask on an airplane and that you would have to use it first in order to be able to help someone else, I realized it was time to grab my own oxygen mask. For me I practice coherence. I talked about this in the last episode. Heart-mind coherence is easy and fast. You breathe in 5 seconds and out 5 seconds. While you breathe you immerse yourself in the words: Gratitude, compassion, thanks, and Love. I word for each 10 second round. You quickly get your heart and mind to sync up.

Next comes the prioritizing piece. What actually is important. I use kaizen principles which means taking small steps towards a goal. Through continuous improvement which is what kaizen means, you make overall progress towards the larger goal one small step at a time.

Maybe things will work out in your job. Maybe they don't and you have to make some hard decisions. They key is to put yourself first. Of course there are family considerations and being a good person. You do have to put that oxygen mask on first though. If you don't you really can't be any good to anyone else.

Stress is part of your alert system. Reach out to others for help. If you never say anything and just bottle it up then no one can help. Also, be...

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Ep13 Why Do I Care?

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 care?

Great question. Periodically I check in with this notion. I mean really, does it matter? What does caring get you?

Should you stop caring if you don't get the validation you want from the outside world?

What if it's closer than that and your friends don't acknowledge you enough?

What if it's closer than that and your family does not meet your emotional needs?

Where are you supposed to get emotional comfort from to care?

How do you fulfill that yearning for belonging that eludes us so easily? It does make it easier on one hand not to care.

Does caring come from outside oneself?

Much of our life is spent interacting w the outside world. It makes sense that one would begin to look for answers there. Religion and institutional belief structures fall into that external category. There is even talk about a personal relationship w God but even that is external.

There is nothing wrong with seeking the answers outside of yourself but there is a block to fully experiencing what all these external relationships actually have to offer. What is that block? The block is that experiencing from the outside blocks your emotions. Im sure you have hear of being “emotionally available.” There you go. You are not available when you live in the external.

Hm…now what.

It is actually obvious but oh so hard to do. It starts inside of you. The real work is within you. The real battles even wars are within yourself. All the stacking of emotions and experiences create a veil that stops us from seeing that it all starts from within us.

It appears that to some degree we have the ability to choose. If that is so where do you mentally go to base your choices on? Some people love science, others love logic. Some just let things happen on a whim. Yet there are those who simply follow what the mainstream says to do. So how do you choose? Pro and con lists? Do you search online but unknowingly get results of Confirmation bias? Trial and error?

Is it possible that we have an internal guidance system? Is there a space inside each of us that knows truth? Most everything I have mentioned here comes from thought and the brain. Is there a better place to look?

My journey has taken me to the heart. It has been studied by the Heartmath institute extensively. Their studies show how integral the heart is in our lives. The heart has “brain cells” that live in an unbiased world. They propose something called heart-mind coherence which is to settle into your heart space and then to let the brain entrain itself to the heart’s rhythm. What emerges with this daily practice is a more relaxed human rhythm that allows for emotional availability and a fuller life experience.

The veil of doubt or right vs wrong, does not exist in the heart. The illusion does not reside there. The constant back and forth by the brain does not happen there.

You know when you almost instantly know something but then wait a bit and find yourself thinking about it and now questioning everything so much so that you can not take action or second guess everything you do? That is you living in the brain. This agitation is the nature of the brain because there are 3 levels of the brain functioning simultaneously to give you input.

Peace and calm is found in the heart. It is the place where that primal intuitive truth comes from. It is where you can have real relationships. It is the portal where love can enter but more so emanates from. That yearning for completion is settled there. It is birthplace of an Emotional Warrior.

When you come from the heart space you care. First you care about yourself. Not the ego version of YOU but the true human you. The care you give and show yourself is simply the nurturing of that treasure house called your heart. Once that fills up with energy...

Ep12 Fear Keeps Us Small

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 How can Fear keep us small?

Fear has been around since, basically the mammalian part of the brain came into being and it is something that ultimately keeps us away from danger. So when there is danger being sensed the amygdala fires up and fear comes into protective mode to get you the being to safety. Now I have heard it said that fear is an illusion and a case can certainly be made for that however, how are we supposed to grow as human beings when fear keeps us stuck in a tiny space and we are never able to expand our own horizons and never develop and become creative.

Fear keeps us small and at some point we are going to have to make a leap of faith and jump into the future so that we can expand and live fulfilled lives. Thinking is one of our most powerful tools. We set goals and then we go through the steps to achieve them. So in order not have fear come in and block us we have to focus, we have to intentionalize, we have to strategize all the time so that we can recalibrate in order to achieve our goal.

So lets look at 3 points of contention around fear.

The first point is the fear of not being loved. This is around us and it consumes us. We like to be loved. It is one of the basic human needs where we want to experience love and belonging. In order to get around this anxiety you have to become okay with yourself and that’s not really that simple however it’s the task at hand. So how do you become okay with yourself. The answer is you have to become okay with your imperfections. They are what they are so be okay with that. Secondly, start to look at what your actual strengths are so that you can build on those. The concept of weaknesses shouldn’t even come into play at this point.

The second contention is not being good enough. This one haunts a lot of people. It creates as an antidote all by itself, if it is not thought through, perfectionism. Anyone who is like this, you know very well this eventually fails. You can never be totally perfect all the time. So again, you have to be okay with where you are in your journey.

Let’s review. The first was the fear of not being loved. The next one is the fear of not being good enough.

The third one is the fear of not belonging. The fear of belonging is a human need. We are social animals. We like to be around other people. We like to be validated by other people, which of course implies that we should validate them. We like to be supported. We like to feel loved. The difference between I want to be loved and I want to belong is that I want to be loved for who I am. I want to belong is a need to socialize. So one is more about other people loving you while belonging is you belonging to the group.

These three are the major contentions around fear. These are the basic fears that we build layers upon. The older we get the more dysfunction around this we have. You need to be able to get to the core issues at hand in order to address that fear.

We are going to kaizen this fear based business right out of here. So remember, kaizen is about small incremental steps. If you find that the first step is too big and it kind of makes you go eek then make that first step smaller. Take your time it’s about continuous improvement. Small steps and whatever the time is that it takes.

First of all you instinctively and intuitively know when you really need to be afraid of something. So that pops out and that’s ok. That’s not what we are talking about. So that’s time to act. You have to get out of the way of danger. However if you want to try some steps of how to overcome the fears that are not really dangerous but you perceive them as so then this is where you want to try the Be-Do-Have model.

In terms of kaizen, what’ so important about small steps? They don’t invoke fear and more importantly they allow for...

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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...

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Ep10 Do You Have to be Right or Do You Want Peace

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 You Have to be Right or Do You Want Peace?

Many of us were raised in a culture where being right was rewarded and being wrong was…well let’s say…admonished, laughed at, reinforced with psychological and emotional pain. So then…we quickly figured out how to protect ourselves from this pain.

It could have happened at home, in school, or with a group of friends. You were little and saw true possibilities and wonder in the world. With a great positive momentum you decide to share your wisdom with someone and they look at you like you were the strangest person in the world. How could you think something so ridiculous…or…you are so full of it, what do you know. On and on…this type of embarrassment triggers our survival impulses in the survival brain and we react. Either we engage in conflict or hide ourselves away. So what begins to happen is that you are molded into a person who is supposed to be like everyone else.

Family, friends, and teachers accept you when you are like them, see things the same way they do and agree with them. Putting the right answers on paper gets rewarded while thinking differently earns you failing grades. So we study and answer the way they want us to more and more because we are told and subsequently believe that this is the ticket to success.

We raise our hands only when we know the right answers, we push ourselves to answer the schools’ tests and believe that we have learned things and go off into the world. Imagine for a second, a system where asking the strange questions and letting your imaginations fly would be accepted and reinforced. According to Psychology Today, Mel Schwartz states:

“Getting the right answer becomes the primary purpose of our education. Isn't it regrettable that this may be inconsistent with actually learning?

Can you imagine the generative and exciting learning environment that would result from a class that rewarded asking the best questions? If you think about it, the most intriguing questions are those that don't offer simple answers. Even more, they drive our thinking into greater complexity and curiosity. This experience would look much different than the rote memorizing and spewing back of information—rooted in right or wrong answers. Raising your hand to gain the reward of getting the correct answer is pointless. It doesn't teach you anything; you already knew the answer. It simply massages your ego, but it doesn't inspire a genuine learning experience.”

Let’s look at this closer for a second. Schools and by extension, families, create a system of reinforcement and rewards for being Right!! So, since we were little kids we have been conditioned to be right.

Scroll forward: You are in a great relationship. The honeymoon period is over and you are settled in for the long term. Periodically you squabble with your partner. Maybe its about some event in the past or maybe its about a line from a movie. Mostly benign events in the bigger picture of it all. You get into it…tit for tat, you pull out all the punches and lo and behold…you win. The victory is yours, you are triumphant. You are RIGHT!!

Let’s see what type of personality you are. Do you keep arguing over that miniscule piece of mental/ego territory saying and displaying all sorts of mean or derogatory things? Or do you find a gentle way to raise your point, if it is absolutely necessary. Maybe you even Let it go…

So thin about that for a second…which one of these types are you?

Scroll forward again: You find yourself at a job/career. You worked hard to get there. Learned all the newest theory. You bring excitement to the game, only to be met with entrenchment, fierce competition, gross incompetence, and a very long and bring future. Just like when you were little you have a choice to...

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EP9 What's the Secret Sauce to Happiness?

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’s The Secret Sauce for Happiness?

Greetings and Welcome to part 3 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 take a look at how gratitude and appreciation are the fast track to happiness. It’s the secret sauce to happiness. 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 things I try to practice daily is gratitude and I notice that it might sound fluffy but I find that this proactive work does let me have that moment where I can… I do this first thing in the morning and right before I go to sleep. I find that I wake up in a pretty good state and since I am already reaffirming it the moment I wake up before anything hits me. To go through the day, that moment where you say you have to take that inventory and seek that state shift, I find that to be a lot easier when you have been practicing something. In my case I like gratitude because it’s a humbling attribute. We go through the day and build up kudos and accolades, we try to make ourselves better. We look at success rates. There is this constant build up of the ego but I feel gratitude is this equalizer where you are just a bag of bones and some water and at the end the day are you really that important? Don’t put yourself down but with gratitude if that state shift is required I find it’s a whole lot easier.

R: I couldn’t agree more. Gratitude and appreciation, from my perspective and experience, there is no faster track to happiness. Because that which we appreciate appreciates, magnifies, we give more energy to that. So if we are not appreciating something then going to the opposite side which is condemnation, hating it, cursing it, if we are not appreciating it then condemning it is what makes life a living hell. On the other side, if we magnify showing gratitude through appreciation, when we take time to train ourselves or create the habit of appreciating, everything that we could possibly appreciate, including the hard stuff, is not hard stuff anymore. If you show up to a difficult situation and you have appreciation for it, doesn’t it cease to be difficult? Its no longer difficult, it takes the bite out of it. I got this, I can handle this, let me see what I can do here. The appreciation process starts with appreciating ourselves. I appreciate present time, the situation for what it is. I appreciate that I might not see the lesson right now but I could see it. I may get a lesson, an upgrade, a value, an evolution as a result of this experience. Victim comes from not knowing…Oh this is horrible for me. I’m being this, I’m being that, this is happening to me. We may not know that there is a higher power or something or something that’s injected into our lives for our own growth and evolution and our expansion that we are just not aware of. We are just infusing appreciation and gratitude into everything and anything just makes life better. It is a secret sauce to happiness and effectiveness.

K: do you teach any of this to your patients?

R: yes, we have eye patient lessons where they have a slant towards eye health. More and more have I had patients and acupuncturists who are interested in training to learn this stuff. I have struggling forever, for 4 decades life was tough, it was a struggle, that was just my frame and at some point I just got tired of it. Does life have to be a struggle? Is there a better way? I had good days, there’s some fun stuff but in terms of production, in terms of relationships there is a lot of struggle, more struggle than I could have believed to be possible. In the last 5 years I have done a lot of study in this field and what I have...

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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...

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Ep7 Kai with Dr. Andy Rosenfarb on Emotional Resilience

Greetings…Welcome to the Way of the Emotional Warrior Podcast. My name is Kai Ehnes.

Today my guest is Dr. Andy Rosenfarb. We will explore emotional resilience.

K: Welcome Dr. Andy Rosenfarb. To our way of the emotional warrior. My name is Kai Ehnes and I thought that we could chat today about emotional resilience.

R: Its such a great topic and thanks so much for inviting me to this conversation. Resilience is a very important faculty for success, business, family, taking care of our children, taking care of ourselves, its definitely a keystone.

K: I’d like to set a little bit of backdrop without exposing too much of how we actually met which is quite interesting. By trade you are a?

R: I’m a naturopath and acupuncturist.

L: We had quite a journey to his office, across the street from his office a great bagel shop, lovely office staff. Its not my story to tell. The outcome has been pretty miraculous. We are very very pleased. Thank you very much for stepping into our lives. Prior to that it was not looking real good. You are an amazing healer and I wish more people would know more about you and what you do. Its quick, easy (in relative terms) Maybe people will step into the newer vibration and that maybe there is a better way to live and that people don’t have to suffer.

R: Its true. The glorification of suffering, this old school thinking that everything has to be a struggle and you have to grind your way through life. Sometimes we kinda have to but it doesn’t have to always be like that.

K: The way that he and I got to connect is that I sat in on the process. You work specifically with eyes, right?

R: Yes the nature of my practice is to ideally focus on people’s vision, help their vision with neurologic conditions like macular degeneration, glaucoma, eye strokes, retinal detachments.

K: So, people come to you having seen the doctor that gives out glasses, people have gone to see the doctor who says that you need surgery.

R: Yes, there are a lot of neurological conditions, vascular conditions. A lot of these people have gone to their conventional eye doctors and are told that there is no conventional biomedical treatment, meaning there is no drugs and no surgery for what they have going on. Fortunately, our methods supplement that lack of current conventional treatment.

K: I was sitting alongside of all this and we got into chatting. My prior work was with something called Kai-Zen Consciousness which is about continuous improvement. Taking small steps instead of large ones that might be too difficult to make. In this small step philosophy you start to inch your way forward and hopefully build a new life. Personally I like to believe that we are constantly evolving. I am constantly striving, daily, if not hourly, to become a better person. To find a better way of being on this planet, how to relate better to things. Hopefully, along the way, be healthier. I’m sort of at that point in my life where I am like a vehicle at a hundred thousand mile tune up. I would like to heal back into a healthy way of living. That’s where he and I met, he was very kind. His clientele has to deal with resilience. Someone comes in with macular degeneration and they are basically blocked from seeing a full visual field. Even glaucoma, can lead to total loss of vision. Finding that out has got to push some buttons. So, what do you do when you find out something really shocking to your system.

R: it’s a great thing, our resilience. I was watching the movie Rocky, where it talks about this. Life can knock you down. We are all going to experience where your life takes a hit. We’re going to take financial hits, emotional hits, social hits, be embarrassed, have health issues. We are going to take blows from life and resilience is about your fortitude our ability to get up after getting knocked down. Taking an insult, hit, or shock to the system as you...

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Ep6 Its not Heavy…its just my Emotional Baggage

Greetings…Welcome to the Way of the Emotional Warrior Podcast. My name is Kai Ehnes.

Today I want to look at: Emotional Stacking

It is absolutely necessary to understand what it means to stack and how that sets up our entire outlook on life. Specifically how we make decisions, deal with our finances, experience our relationships and fundamentally, how we look at and deal with our selves.

So what is emotional stacking. Let’s start with the brain. First you have what I will call a primary experience, lets call it experience balloon 1.0. This is the first time and event takes place for a person. Let’s say your first experience of a loud bang is a balloon popping at your 1st birthday party. Nothing that sudden and loud has ever happened to you before. It scares you…a lot. Why? Because the brain’s fight or flight mechanism is designed to keep you safe. This is an unknown threat and you are hard wired to go for safety. You scream until you are safe in the arms of your mom or dad.

Next, the brain takes the event and frames it, like a frame for a picture, by adding the notions of fear, lack of safety, must flee to the balloon. So, now balloons are stored in the memory center of the brain, the hippocampus, as balloon 2.0. In other words, for you, balloon equals loud noise which is met by your survival instinct with flight because it is rooted in fear.

From now on, balloon 3.0, 4.0, 5.0 will contain the base experience of fear. So, when someone throws you a great surprise party and they all shout surprise you are okay but when the balloons come out, even though they don’t necessarily pop, you freak out.

What is rather disconcerting about who we are is that we don’t even realize that this is happening. This is what is meant by stacking.

Watch how this plays out. Balloon 1.0 is ok. 2.0 has the bang and now every balloon gets associated or triggered with fear. Then we compound it because our brain generalizes…meaning that parties are dangerous, that’s 3.0. Then it becomes groups of people that can become frightening which is 4.0 and so on. Down the road you won’t remember the earlier versions only the newer ones. That is stacking. Other real life examples are stacking on our parents divorce, the deat of a loved one, loss of a job, fear of getting sick, serious injury, food. The goal is to unstack your stories and create new ones rooted in positive and higher vibrational emotions. This will lead to a more fulfilled life.

Emotional stacking is a fascinating subject. We associate all sorts of things. However, the most impacting associations revolve around our need for survival and safety. To keep us safe, the brain takes each version of the experience and creates rules or algorithms that our mind uses to keep us safe. In other words, our brain stacks experiences to keep us safe. Ex: “Must avoid balloon aisle in grocery store…could be dangerous” every relationship is doomed to fail just like your parents when you were 7. You don’t know why you do this, it just feels safe to do so.

In a study published in the Annual Review of Neuroscience, in 2012 Squire and Wixted found that different medial temporal lobes affect how our memory is organized. They show that nondeclarative memory has a tremendous influence, albeit unconscious, on our behavior and mental life. It is here that dispositions, habits, and preferences arise. They may be inaccessible to conscious recollection but nevertheless are shaped by past events. I believe that our stacking takes place here.

The last two Episodes of the Way of the Emotional Warrior dealt with shame and guilt. Please go back and listen to them after you understand stacking. You will be amazed at how much those 2 emotions have embedded themselves into how you live your life.

Let’s apply this to emotional stacking. In itself, stacking is a natural process. The difficulty comes in that the foundation emotions that everything else is...