In this module: Feeling yourself as the creator of your own life experience. Moving beyond trying to feel good the hard way. Unlocking all the features that come with being human.
Guided Embodiment Exercise: The connection between your cognition (thinking) and your emotion (feeling).
Mentioned in this module: R3 Relationship Masterclass.
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Module one
Module two
Module three
Module four
Module five
Module six
Module seven
Full transcript for Module four:
I’m Justice Schanfarber, and this is module four of the gentle art of emotional mastery seven day audio course, where you learn to create preferred emotional states from the inside out, regardless of past history, current circumstances, or other people.
In our previous module we learned about the three operating systems: sensation, cognition, emotion. These are three different but related modes for engaging the world, and actually creating our world, both our physical outer world, and our subjective inner world of mind, including thought and feeling, imagination and inspiration.
Remember, everything that you do, and everything that you want is for the emotional experience, the emotional reward that you believe it will bring you. Whatever it is you want, and certainly you want many things, you want for the feeling you believe it will deliver. You want to feel proud. You want to feel safe. You want to feel powerful. You want to feel relaxed. Interested, excited, optimistic, peaceful, loved, purposeful, successful.
There is no end to the words you can use to describe how you would like to feel, and there are infinite shades of feeling good. That’s what all of life is about; becoming more and more nuanced in your desire, and experience of feeling good.
Most of us go about trying to feel good in extremely convoluted ways. We try to prove ourselves to others, to other people, real or imagined, so that we can feel the approval we desire. We accumulate objects in the hope that we will feel enriched, abundant and successful. We want money so that we can feel free and easy. Sometimes we work hard at a marriage or relationship with someone we don’t even really want, just so that we can feel love and belonging.
All of this is completely normal of course, but it’s also a really hard way to get the feeling you’re after. It’s the hard way because it’s conditional, and many of those conditions are not easily controlled. And it’s the hard way because it doesn’t really satisfy your most essential, most sacred, most authentic emerging desire, which is to feel yourself as the creator of your own life experience from the inside out.
This is the beauty of the gentle art of emotional mastery. It’s actually possible to give yourself the approval you seek from others, and I’ll tell you, it’s much more easy and much more satisfying. It’s possible to feel enriched, abundant, and successful before you have all the stuff you want. Feeling free and easy does not need to be contingent upon financial wealth. And love and belonging are your natural state, not something to try and negotiate with a partner.
Emotional mastery means becoming less conditional about feeling good. It means allowing yourself to feel approval, abundance, freedom, love, and belonging unconditionally. Regardless of conditions. Even for no discernible reason at all. It means fulfilling your purpose for being, which is to recognize and engage yourself as the creator of your life experience, from the inside out.
The truth is, you are worthy, abundant, free, lovable and all the rest already, you just might not have unlocked these aspects of yourself yet. You might still be believing that you need to see outward evidence in support of these things before you can let yourself embody and enjoy the truth of them.
New cars today often have seat-warmers, sound-systems, and all sorts of features built in to every model, but you have to pay to access them. They are there, right there, but can’t be used until you gain access.
Everything you want to feel is right there in you. And there’s no paywall. You just have to want it, to feel good about wanting it, and then to start letting yourself have it.
I’m talking about outer having and inner having, right?
Outer having is a loving and satisfying relationship with a partner. It’s wonderful of course, but it is conditional and so it has limits.
Inner having is a loving and satisfying relationship with yourself, as you are, and with life, as it is. This is unconditional having, and so it is without limit.
Outer having is the freedom of a big balance in your bank account. Wonderful, but conditional, and limited by changing circumstances.
Inner having is an innate sense of freedom as your essential nature. Unconditional, and unlimited because it is tied only to your perception, and not to outer circumstances.
I am not in any way trying to talk you out of outer wanting and outer having. I want you to have the relationship, the money, the healthy body, the beautiful home, all the things you want.
I also know, for certain, that these come more easily when you are enjoying their inner counterparts, when you are unconditionally allowing yourself the emotional reward that each of these outer things represents, whether they happen to be present in your material life in this moment, or not.
Everything you want is for the feeling you believe it will provide. The feeling you believe it will provide is already built in to you. It is who you are. If you want it, you are it. If you want it, the essence of it is already present and available to you. If you wake up to this, if you embrace this, and you start living this, you become an emotional match for the outer things you want.
When you learn to create your emotional experience from the inside, the outside will more easily meet and match you based on the inner world of feeling that you have established, which is really nice.
This isn’t supernatural or mystical or metaphysics. It isn’t magic. It’s the way life works, and I encourage you to put it to the test. What do you have to lose?
What do you have to lose by giving yourself the emotional rewards you want before they are evidenced in your outer experience? What do you have to lose by recognizing, embracing, and enjoying your true essence, which is already the love, abundance, success, peace, and delight that you want to get from this or from that person, place, or thing?
Why wouldn’t you unlock all the features that are built in to the model if there’s no cost to you?
I can think of two reasons, and I’ve actually experienced them both personally.
The first reason that you might deny yourself the ease and satisfaction of knowing your true essence and the infinite, unconditional joy that is you, is that you don’t believe it. That is, you don’t experience yourself in this way, so it’s hard to relate to what I’m describing.
“I don’t feel abundant. I don’t feel loved. I don’t feel unconditional joy. How can I be these things?”
If you don’t feel yourself as abundance, joy, love, purpose and all the rest of it, it’s simply because you’ve been practicing feeling otherwise. Some people begin practicing feeling otherwise very early on in their life, always for reasons that make sense at the time. It’s not a deficiency or failure. It’s really normal. But it’s not your essence, it’s not your destiny, and you can change it, you can learn to get into alignment with your nature.
That’s what the gentle art of emotional mastery is, changing this habit of feeling yourself as anything other than the joy, peace, enthusiasm, love, and purposeful brilliance that is your true nature, your essence, who you really are.
That’s why I told you right at the beginning that being really, really nice to yourself and gentle with yourself always is the key.
When you’re really, really nice to yourself and gentle with yourself always, you start to reconnect with the essence of who you really are, to come into alignment with your nature. The powerful signal of joy, delight, peace, contentment, confidence, purpose that is your essence can start to penetrate the wall of untruth that you’ve built in yourself, about yourself.
This wall of untruth is built on beliefs like “I must earn my value. I must prove my worth. I’m not sure if I deserve love. I must find my purpose. I must heal before I can be whole. Things are going wrong. Humanity has taken a wrong turn. Something isn’t right and needs to be fixed.”
The hard way to proceed is to try to dismantle this wall of untruth. To try to trace it back to its origins. To connect all the dots between then and now. It’s possible to do this, but difficult, often painful, and very time-consuming, because in order to tease this all apart, to understand it, to process it, you will be repeatedly activating it.
I don’t want to say anything more about the hard way. That’s not what the gentle art of emotional mastery is, and I’ve written about the hard way elsewhere.
The good news is that all of that is unnecessary. You don’t need to dismantle the wall. It will crumble quickly if you stop reinforcing it and simply decide that you will be really, really nice to yourself and gentle with yourself always. This is how you rediscover your essence and connect to who you really are.
We’re going to talk about what it actually means, in practice, to be really, really nice to yourself and gentle with yourself always, but first, the second reason that some people might feel uncertain or wary of unlocking their true essence, their own unconditional emotional well-being, or as I put it earlier, “all the features that are built in to the model.”
When we’ve practiced making our emotional well-being conditional upon outer circumstances, we get attached to seeing those circumstances through. We decide that our emotional reward must come from this person or that event.
I was focused on getting my love from a woman, from adolescence right into mid-life. That focus, and the frustrations that came with it, were a big part of what prompted me to enter the field of counselling and therapy in the first place, and were also what made me good at it. I describe this journey in detail in my R3 Relationship Masterclass, and I won’t get into all of that here.
Suffice to say, I was determined to have it my way for a long time. I did not want to settle for “loving myself”; I wanted the intense devotion and love of a woman, damn it. I ended up getting both, of course – that’s how it works – but first I had to be willing to, as psychologists sometimes say, “retrieve my projections” and attend to my own self.
Attending to my own self meant answering the desire that was growing in me, for years, decades, to feel my intrinsic wholeness, my unconditional goodness, to feel loved and loving without being gripped by the need for all of this to take the particular form that I had become so attached to.
A tension grew in me between wanting what I wanted in the way that I wanted it and had always wanted it, and wanting to be free. A desire was growing in me to be free from my limited vision of where my joy and satisfaction and belonging must come from. The tension didn’t actually last very long before I aligned with the desire to be free from my self-imposed limits and to finally allow myself the immense, immeasurable benefit of recognizing my true essence as love, belonging, goodness, beauty and so on.
There’s an adjustment to make when you decide that your desire to feel good unconditionally will take priority over your desire to feel good conditionally. At first it can feel like giving up on your goals. Like disillusionment. Like failure.
I struggled with that, without fully recognizing exactly what was going on, for a number of years, but when the change came it came fast and strong, with great clarity. I actually prepared for myself a brief ritual to mark the transition from my conditional life to my unconditional life, from my conditional pursuit of well-being to my unconditional having of well-being. It involved a bit of catharsis, solitude, introspection. There was some intensity and even drama. I wouldn’t do it like that now, but it served its purpose, and the next day I came to absolute clarity: from now on I would be really, really nice to myself and gentle with myself always.
We’ll talk more explicitly about what this means in the next module.
Let’s do a guided embodiment exercise, as promised, on the connection between your cognition or thoughts and your emotion or feeling. It’ll be fun.
Turn off your phone so you won’t be disturbed.
Take a moment and get comfortable in a seated position. You want to be alert, not sleepy, but relaxed and open.
Close your eyes now if that feels OK, and as you close your eyes, let that mark a shift in your attention. Feel your attention move from the outer world to your inner world.
Start to notice the natural rhythm of your breath, and as you notice the quality of your breathing, make adjustments based on your desire to feel good. Maybe a slower breath would feel better. Maybe breathing a little more deeply into your belly or chest would feel better.
Start making whatever adjustments feel good in relation to how you are breathing.
As you make those adjustments, however big or small, notice the improvement in how you feel physically. Notice the improvement in how you feel mentally. And notice the improvement in how you feel emotionally. You can also just notice the improvement in how you feel very generally. Or even the growing desire in you to feel an improvement.
Keep going with this for a few moments. Let your desire to feel good guide you as you improve and adjust the way you are using your breath. There’s no limit to the refinements you can make.
As you improve and refine your breathing to feel better and better, let yourself feel the satisfaction and enjoyment of actually improving your life experience in this very moment. Now and now and now.
Now that you’ve established some connection between your moment to moment focus and the experience in your body, start to become aware of what you are doing with your mind. What kind of thoughts, ideas, fantasies or images are you activating, intentionally or unintentionally right now?
I’m actually going to encourage you not to look at your mental activity in a lot of detail, but just enough to assess how it feels. Is your mental or cognitive activity aligned with how you want to feel? Can you make an improvement right now in this regard?
Try relaxing your mind in the same way that you relax your body. Ungrip. Soften. Release.
There is real value in any kind of formal or informal meditation practice where you relax and quiet your mind. A quiet mind, and a practice of quieting the mind, allows for a kind of reset. Thoughts that had gained momentum without your intention can just sort of run out of steam and settle down.
I do recommend some kind of simple meditation practice for anyone practicing the gentle art of emotional mastery.
That’s not exactly what we’re doing here, but there’s some similarity in terms of mindful awareness.
Right now, gently observe the feeling quality of your mental activity. That is, is your mental activity feeling good or less than good?
What would be a better feeling way to use your cognitive operating system in this moment? Experiment with answering that question in real time right now.
Can you gently nudge your thoughts or your general mental activity in the direction of more emotional satisfaction?
Would it feel best to simply relax your mind and try to quiet your thoughts? Whatever you try, let it be an allowing. Allow yourself to bring your mind into greater alignment with how you want to feel.
Notice the connection between the quality of your mental activity and the quality of your emotional state right now. See if you can feel that connection. Just being able to feel that connection builds a bridge and is a valuable accomplishment.
If that’s not happening, then use this moment to practice being really, really nice to yourself. Tell yourself something nice, out loud, using your name.
“Justice, I really appreciate your desire to feel good, and the attention you are placing upon the ways that you can learn to allow yourself to feel better. Well done.”
Using words out loud to deliver a supportive message to yourself, and addressing yourself by name, is a powerful way to engage your cognitive operating system and shape your emotional state.
Now play around with shuttling between a focus on your mental activity or cognition, the sensation in your body, and how you feel emotionally. This practice allows you to become more nimble as you inhabit a dynamic range of these three aspects of your experience.
This is pretty advanced stuff. Be easy about it. If it’s flowing, keep going. If it’s stuck, find a way to relax and to find some kind of small sense of satisfaction in yourself, no matter how small. Small just means subtle, and becoming attuned to subtle satisfactions is a huge benefit on the this path of the gentle art of emotional mastery.
No satisfaction is too small, no enjoyment too subtle to be of value.
This completes the guided embodiment exercise, and module four. In module five we’ll look at what it means to be really, really nice to yourself and gentle with yourself always from the perspective of the three human operating systems.
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