Category: The Gentle Art of Emotional Mastery

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Joy is the New Vulnerability & It Breathes Fresh Life into Intimate Relationships

“I like when they feel sad or hurting because that’s when they open up.”

This kind of candid, unambiguous statement is not uncommon in my work, and I have felt similarly in my own life.

Many of the relationship coaching and marriage counseling clients I’ve helped over the past two decades have shared stories with me about the closeness they feel with their partner through episodes of sadness, grief, doubt, or hurt.

For some couples, it’s only through these “breakdowns” that the protective armor cracks and a deeper emotional connection can finally be reached.

Vulnerability and emotional intimacy

When this association between hurt and openness is established, “vulnerability” comes to be seen as the doorway through which the pleasures of emotional intimacy are accessed.

Vulnerability comes from the Latin word for “wound,” vulnus. Vulnerability is the state of being open to injury, or appearing as if you are.

This attentiveness (and attunement) to the wound, and a willingness to be “open to injury”, defines emotional intimacy for many people.

Vulnerability-based intimacy is promoted and normalized through books, social media, and conventional counseling and therapy.

I’ve been actively immersed in the ever-evolving theories and practices of emotional intimacy for over twenty years as a professional in the field, and through this intimate experience with intimacy I’ve discovered something ironic: the vulnerability-based openness that is presented as emotional intimacy is, itself, a product of hyper-rational living and emotional suppression.

It works like this:

Someone who has adopted pure rationality as their ideal suppresses or denies their emotional experience. This creates an inner tension between the thinking self (rational) and the feeling self (emotional).

It’s only when emotions get the best of them, and their rational armor cracks, that feelings come spilling out, sometimes to the hungry approval and enthusiasm of an intimacy-craving partner.

But there’s a kind of emotional experience way over at the other end of the spectrum that can also provide doorways into intimacy.

Joy-based emotional intimacy

This other end of the emotional spectrum includes joy, humor, inspiration, excitement, playfulness, exuberance, optimism, contentment, clarity, appreciation, celebration, and fun.

These kinds of emotions are not associated with vulnerability, and they form the basis for something I call “joy-based intimacy.”

To transition from the achy, bittersweet intimacy of meeting each other in vulnerability to the pure, sweet intimacy of meeting each other in joy, it’s helpful to disentangle some popular misunderstandings and to acquaint yourself with the deeper nature of emotion.

“Getting emotional”

Clients often use the words “getting emotional” when they tell me a story of emotional upset or volatility in themselves or in another person.

To “get emotional” is, by this definition, to lose control of a rational grip on reality, and to slip into the clutches of an irrational chaos.

This reflexive negative bias toward emotion is mostly unexamined, and is the product of cultural inheritance rather than any kind of conscious personal view. I know this from my many inquiries of clients who use this language in our sessions.

It’s common to believe that rationality is the backbone of personal and collective progress, and that it is the superior mode for the advancement of things good. From this point of view, emotionality is seen as a disruption of an established and desirable order. But this reveals a misunderstanding of the deeper nature of emotion.

It’s true that emotion is non-rational; indeed, emotion operates differently and distinctly from the cognitive/rational mind.

Emotion is an older way of engaging the world, and an older mode of consciousness than the more recently developed cognitive/rational mind, and so it is assumed to be somewhat outdated, an old-brain relic of a human past fraught with danger and threat.

From this perspective, emotion is a reflex or “trigger”, a product of the primordial brain, and an obstacle to the serious endeavors of serious people who have succeeded in boxing emotion up and meeting life reasonably. This attitude is perhaps best exemplified by Victorian-era Europe, known for its emotional mistrust and suppression, and also for its role in founding modern psychology just a few generations ago.

But “getting emotional” does not just mean upset and irrationality. “Getting emotional” also means getting inspired. Inspiration is emotion in one of its purest forms.

“Getting emotional” means getting confident and optimistic and joyful and loving.

For some people, “getting emotional” just means getting messy. But this misses the deeper truth of what emotion is and what it can be.

The deeper nature of emotion

The deeper nature of emotion is not chaotic, uncontrollable, and messy. It is peaceful, stable, clear, and strong.

A well-developed emotionality is characterized by qualities of clarity, guidance, and satisfaction unlike anything that the rational/cognitive system can comprehend or deliver.

And although emotion is older than reason, it is not frozen in time.

Emotion continues to evolve in human beings, and people who engage consciously in the development of their own emotionality can make remarkable advances in their pragmatic and fruitful use of it.

Engaging consciously in the development of your own emotionality does not mean trying to control it through force. It also does not mean indiscriminate expression, as we’ll see in a moment.

Part of the appeal of vulnerability-based intimacy is that it welcomes and accepts the full range of human emotional experience. It offers an expansive view beyond pure rationalism. It brings warmth to the cold.

Joy-based intimacy takes this a step further, recognizing that beyond passively accepting the full range of human emotion, there is the possibility of actually creating your own emotional experience.

The people practicing, enjoying, and benefiting from joy-based intimacy recognize their power as creators of their emotional life, not just willing observers.

The move from vulnerability-based intimacy to joy-based intimacy is a process of personal emotional development, and this development proceeds through three predictable stages.

Three stages of emotional development

The three stages of emotional development are explained in detail in my article Growing Beyond Therapy Culture and Learning to Thrive, in my R3 Relationship Masterclass and in Module Six of my Free 7-Day Audio Course: The Gentle Art of Emotional Mastery. Understanding these stages is immensely beneficial for improving a relationship and for enriching a life overall.

Briefly, they are:

  1. Emotional Suppression. At this stage there is little emotional intimacy in a relationship because there is little emotion being expressed.
  2. Emotional Expression. At this stage emotion has been fully embraced. Emotional intimacy at this stage is associated with vulnerability, and tends to be fraught with chaos, volatility, dilemma, discomfort, struggle, or pain. “I like when they feel sad or hurting because that’s when they open up.”
  3. Emotional Discretion. At this stage emotion is engaged and activated discerningly, with conscious intention and a growing amount of creative control. Superficial emotionality (chaos) has given way to the deeper nature of emotion (clarity, satisfaction). Vulnerability-based intimacy is still available and enjoyed sparingly, but joy-based intimacy becomes the new standard.

There’s an elegant balance and alignment to be found within our rationality, within our emotionality, and between the two. Only when this elegant balance and alignment is established through our individual developmental journey through the three stages do we gain full access to joy-based intimacy.

Joy-based intimacy is a result of moving past the first stage of idealized rationality and emotional suppression, and past the second stage of indiscriminate emotional glorification and expression.

Re-calibrating for joy-based emotional intimacy

If you, like so many people today, have conditioned yourself to seek vulnerability-based intimacy and closeness, and you are now waking up to the possibility of joy-based intimacy, you can begin by adjusting your emotional attunement and focus. This means re-calibrating your nervous system, your imagination, and even how you experience sensation in your body.

Rather than looking for feelings of connection in sadness, grief, doubt, or hurt, start looking for connection in joy, humor, playfulness, and ease. When you find resonance in these kinds of higher-vibing emotions, go deeper. Nurture the part of the experience that feels intimate, like you’re used to doing with grief or sadness.

Look for the deeper connection in playfulness and joy, in clarity and well-being, and then deepen it even more. Don’t try to deepen it through becoming earnest, solemn, or reverent. Deepen it through light-heartedness, cheerfulness, certainty, clarity, and enjoyment. Notice how different this feels. It’s a different vibration. It’s different energy. It isn’t achy or cathartic like the old vulnerability-based intimacy, but it’s every bit as deep and satisfying once you get attuned to it.

Going deep into joy

I used to believe that “going deep” meant delving into the bottomless murk of hurt or conflict, trauma or grief. Now when I go deep, it’s into joy and delight. It turns out there is depth in both, and I have found my preference.

If you think you might prefer joy-based intimacy and depth over vulnerability-based intimacy and depth, start practicing what I’ve described here. And check out some of my other resources like my P2 Power Couple Coaching Program, where you can take advantage of my twenty years in the field with one-on-one coaching. Or my R3 Relationship Masterclass, a distillation of all my experience into a deeply nourishing 3-hour download of audio teachings.

Some of my free offerings will help too:

The Gentle Art of Emotional Mastery 7-Day Audio Course covers just about everything you need to know about making the shift from vulnerability-based intimacy to joy-based intimacy. I recommend starting at module one, but you can also jump right to module three to learn about aligning rationality with emotion.

If you’ve been following me for a while, you’ve certainly heard me talk about the three human operating systems: cognition, emotion, and sensation. Intentionally engaging and aligning these three energy channels is an important foundation of The Schanfarber Method, and has endless practical benefits. You can read more about the three operating systems in my description of the method here.

There’s nothing wrong with vulnerability-based intimacy. It has its benefits, and its place on the developmental journey. But there is something even better, something even more satisfying waiting for you.

Joy-based intimacy is still a leading-edge idea. Few people are actively practicing it and fewer still are openly discussing it or teaching it. If you’re experimenting with a shift from vulnerability-based intimacy into joy-based intimacy, or if you are well along on this journey, I’d love to hear about your experiences. Please share your insights in the comments below.

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Things that feel good are good for us

It sure feels good to be outside on a day like this, and it’s good for you!

Things that feel good are good for us, and what is good for us is to feel good!

It’s a perfect design, and it’s the result of millions of years of evolution. It only gets tricky or confusing when we are disconnected from our inner guidance.

Our inner guidance is the built-in sensitivity that lets us discern between what truly feels good and satisfying, and what feels other-than-good, plain-old-bad, uncertain, or “pseudo-satisfying”.

There are just three requirements for making proper use of our inner guidance. They aren’t complicated requirements, but they’re also not optional:

  1. You have to actually want to feel good.
  2. You have to be sensitive enough to discern between things that feel good and things that feel other-than-good.
  3. You have to take some kind of action to move yourself toward feeling good once you have this clarity.

Once you decide that you actually want to feel good (be honest with yourself, many people are committed to trying to find satisfaction in feeling bad), then the next step is to establish a strong connection with the sensitivity that informs your inner guidance.

Re-establishing sensitivity and inner guidance

The connection to our sensitivity and inner guidance often gets broken, blocked, or distorted by the time we reach adulthood, not because we mean to do it, but as a consequence of adapting to life.

Years later (decades for some of us), once we recognize that this connection to our own sensitivity has been compromised, we get to embark upon the incredibly satisfying journey of re-discovering and re-establishing it. Some people call this a healing journey, or becoming whole, or self-realization, or integration, or befriending yourself, or self-love.

Before we re-establish this connection to our sensitive self, we often rely on experts to tell us the most basic and obvious facts about our own health and well-being:

Drinking water, apparently, is good for you. Anyone who has been thirsty and has successfully quenched their thirst with fresh water knows this. But some people missed the memo. If you were brought up drinking pop or juice or flavored beverages, you might have never developed a taste for drinking water, or have experienced the good feeling of a thirst properly quenched.

Sleeping until we feel rested is good for us too, and it feels good. But many people have little or no experience of this, and remain disconnected from this very basic example of our in-born clarity about the connection between what feels good and what is good.

When you fall asleep in front of a screen that is telling a story of human drama or suffering, and then “alarm” yourself out of sleep each morning, and then shock your nervous system with bright light and stimulants so that you can gain temporary functionality so that you can force yourself to go to a place that does not feel good to be, and do something that does not feel good to do, you are not going to be sensitive to your own inner guidance.

In fact, if you were sensitive, it would feel like torture. And so we shut it off. We shut down the sensitivity that is our guide in order to fulfill an abstract idea of success, or to fit in, or do what is expected, or sometimes just to survive.

I’m being a little hyperbolical for effect, but the fact remains: if you are falling asleep in front of a screen and then waking up to an alarm before your natural sleep cycle is complete, you can not have any real embodied knowledge of what feels truly good in regards to sleep and restfulness, which is a basic cornerstone of human well-being.

You might know better conceptually, but that doesn’t help. You might know everything there is to know about the benefits of sleep (and there is a LOT to know), but if you are not applying this knowledge through actual practice, it’s worth very little.

This is precisely the reason that people have become mistrustful of using feeling, and feeling good, as a guide. When ideas and concepts become proxies for actual felt experience, then confusion, disconnection, and mistrust is the result. Hence my playful but one hundred percent correct refrain: “There is nothing more practical than feeling good.”

You cannot thrive on just ideas

You can survive on ideas to a point, but you cannot thrive. To thrive is to feel good, and to feel good means engaging directly and enthusiastically with your feeling apparatus.

These feeling apparatus are sensation and emotion, and they represent two of the three human operating systems, which we’ll explore in detail shortly.

First, another example of something that feels good and that is good for you:

Engaging physically, through all your senses, with material, three dimensional phenomena like sunlight, unconditioned air, waterways, plants, animals, and natural ecosystems feels good and is good for you.

Experts can give you truckloads of scientific evidence and dazzling neurobiological explanations for this, which is fun and gratifying. But reading about it or listening to a podcast about it or having ChatGPT tell you about it is not a substitute for the actual first-hand physical experience of doing it.

Playing with a happy child feels good and is good for you.

Helping someone accomplish something that matters to them feels good and is good for you.

Combining mindful movement with intentional breathing feels good and is good for you.

Discerning between satisfaction and pseudo-satisfaction

Things that feel good are satisfying. Much that is offered in the culture today promises satisfaction, but delivers only pseudo-satisfaction. This is so widespread, and has been going on for so long, that many people can no longer feel the difference.

Do you know the difference? There’s only one way to tell them apart: by how they feel.

You don’t need an expert to tell you that aligning your circadian rhythm with natural environmental cues like sunlight and darkness is better for you than bathing yourself in blue light from your laptop until 2am.

Binging on screen-time is a pseudo-satisfaction, not a real satisfaction. You can tell by how it feels, but you have to develop enough sensitivity to make this distinction.

You don’t need an expert to tell you that eating fresh, wholesome food is better for you than eating cheese puffs and cola. Eating junk is a pseudo-satisfaction, even if you initially like how it tastes. You can tell by how it feels, but you have to develop enough sensitivity to make this distinction.

You don’t need an expert to tell you that a peaceful and loving relationship is better for you than a tumultuous and painful relationship. You can tell by how it feels, but you have to develop enough sensitivity to make this distinction.

You can always tell what is best by how you feel. But you need a clear channel to your inner guidance in order to receive the message clearly.

Pseudo-satisfactions don’t genuinely satisfy, and they come with a downside. True satisfaction has no downside. It feels good, and it is good for you.

If you’re used to settling for pseudo-satisfactions – junk food, news cycles, hype and distraction, mood regulation through chemical substances, status seeking, superficial or manipulative interactions with other people – you start to believe that satisfaction comes with a downside. You start to mistrust feeling good because you know it won’t last, or that it will likely betray you. You might even become more desperate and cynical in your yearning for satisfaction, reaching for more and more intense pseudo-satisfactions until they become addiction.

Every bit of this applies to how you engage your inner world too, not just how you engage the outer world.

Feeling good from the inside-out

There are better-feeling and worse-feeling ways of engaging your own mind, your own thoughts. Thinking thoughts that feel good is better for you than thinking thoughts that feel bad. Obvious? Maybe. Are you using this knowledge for your benefit one hundred percent of the time? Fifty percent of the time? Ever?

Are you using your mind with purpose and intention, or does it seem to be using you? What do you think the purpose of your mind is? I think it’s to help you feel good.

The thinking mind is just one of three distinct, interconnected human operating systems, and if you’re not engaging the other two, and bringing all three into alignment, the mind will become agitated, delivering a distorted view of reality, and keeping you at arm’s reach from satisfying your true desires.

The three human operating systems are always guiding us, and are also the source of all satisfaction and dissatisfaction in our lives.

They are:

  1. Cognition
  2. Sensation
  3. Emotion

[The three human operating systems are described in the description page for The Schanfarber Method and are explained in even more detail in my R3 Relationship Masterclass. Descriptions can also be heard in Module Three of my Free 7-Day Audio Course: The Gentle Art of Emotional Mastery.]

Using cognition to feel good is good for you

Cognition is thinking. It’s our mental, rational, conceptual self. When we use this operating system in ways that feel good, it’s good for us. Using our cognitive system in ways that feel good means choosing thought patterns that feel good.

It means using imagination in ways that feel good, using memory in ways that feel good, and creating narratives, stories, and beliefs that feel good.

Using our cognitive system in ways that feel good also means talking about things that feel good. Language is part of the cognitive system.

Using your cognition operating system, your mind, in all these ways feels good, and is good for you.

Using sensation to feel good is good for you

Sensation is how we feel in our body. It’s the messages that our body gives us. When we use our bodies in ways that feel good, it’s good for us. This includes all five senses, and also our intuition or “gut feeling”. It includes how we feel moving our bodies in our physical environment, and how we feel inhabiting our bodies in each moment.

When we look at things that feel good to look at, it’s good for us. When we touch things that feel good, it’s good for us. When we move our bodies in ways that feel good, it’s good for us. When we rest our bodies in ways that feel good, it’s good for us. When we eat foods that make us feel good, it’s good for us. When we breathe in ways that feel good, it’s good for us.

Sensation includes the feelings in our body that result from our interactions with outer experiences, and also with inner experiences.

For example, it might feel good in your body to swim in the lake (outer experience). It might also feel good in your body to remember that time you enjoyed swimming in the lake (inner experience).

Your body, through the sensation operating system, offers infinite ways of feeling genuinely good, and every single one is good for you.

Using emotion to feel good is good for you

Emotion is the third human operating system, and it is special. Emotion is the totality of our subjective inner state of being. Associated with our heart, it is at the center of our life experience. It’s our temperament, our disposition, our mood. When we speak of well-being, we speak primarily of emotional well-being. When we talk about mental health, we often mean emotional health.

Emotion is the meeting place or the synthesis of the other two operating systems, cognition and sensation.

We can learn to influence our emotional state through cognition, which is sometimes called a “top-down” approach, and we can learn to influence our emotional state through sensation, sometimes called a “bottom-up” approach.

Some of us can also shape our emotional state directly, through applied intention. This emergent ability represents a leading edge of evolutionary development in human beings. It’s something I am very excited about, and helping people develop this ability has become a cornerstone of my work. I see this as my most valuable contribution to the field of psychology and human thriving to date.

Using your emotional operating system to feel good, through any of these means, is good for you.

Applied knowledge: turning ideas into reality

Is any of what you’re reading here brand new to you? Probably not, although perhaps I’m offering some nuance or clarification that feels fresh.

Are you in agreement with what I’m saying? You probably are. It would be hard to make a convincing argument otherwise.

Are you applying the truth of what you are reading here in tangible, real ways most of the time in your life?

Be honest. If you are… isn’t it awesome?!

If you are, please write to me and share your experience. Better yet, leave a comment to inspire other people too.

A quick report from my personal experience

I’ve been intentionally engaging and developing my sensitivity and alignment within and throughout my three operating systems every day for five years now, and the results are enriching my life beyond description.

My discernment between what feels good and what feels bad, and between real satisfaction and pseudo-satisfaction keeps getting sharper and sharper in clarity, and with this clarity my confidence and ability in creating my own life through the choices I make improves by leaps and bounds.

Relationships have improved, or peacefully dissolved. My physical health is better than it has ever been. Emotionally and mentally I am thriving. My enjoyment of nature has blossomed. My outlook and my experience of life have become far more positive and fulfilling in every way.

My discernment and sense of choice about what I want to engage and manifest in my life and what I do not want to engage and manifest in my life has clarified by a factor of at least ten. In all of these ways and more, I’ve discovered what self-empowerment actually means.

It’s been so powerful that I had to develop a new method for working with clients if I wanted to keep my professional practice up to speed with what I was discovering and applying in my own life. I simply couldn’t work in the old therapy paradigms any longer.

When someone comes for help because they feel anxious or because their marriage is falling apart, I can’t in good conscience offer any treatment that isn’t rooted in what I am describing on this page. It would be like withholding food from someone who is starving. I’ve learned that not everyone is ready for this kind of empowerment, but for those who are, transformation and relief come quickly.

Your inner world shapes your outer world

Developing sensitivity and alignment throughout the three operating systems – cognition, sensation, and emotion – leads to an embodied clarity about what feels genuinely good and what feels other-than-good. Letting that clarity guide you, and putting that inner guidance into real, practical action through the choices you make is when the results come to life and the benefits gain visible momentum.

When I talk about “choices” I mean outer behaviors and how we skillfully engage with the physical world (job, home, spouse, kids), but I also mean inner behaviors and how we skillfully engage with our self through thought, sensation, and emotion.

“Things that feel good are good for you” becomes dependably true only when we become sensitive and receptive to what feels genuinely good. Only then can we use the guidance that is our biological inheritance.

Without this, we are bumbling around with disembodied notions of good and bad, creating elaborate arguments and justifications for absurd behaviors, and missing the point entirely, which is to live with ever-increasing optimism, clarity, joy, and satisfaction.

Establishing a stable and balanced connection (right relationship) with all three of our human operating systems is the only way to make full use of our inner guidance, and is also the only way to receive the full nourishment and satisfaction that life offers. There might be nothing more pragmatic.

Learn as you go, let it be fun

Don’t worry if you don’t know precisely what feels good to you all the time. It’s OK, you’ll learn quickly, and it never ends. Let yourself enjoy the journey of discovering the difference between real satisfaction and pseudo-satisfaction.

Don’t worry too much about why you got disconnected from your own guidance in the first place. Disconnection happens to the best of us, for lots of reasons that all make sense. Search out answers if that feels satisfying, but don’t get too hung up on figuring out the past. Life moves forward. Move with it.

Your growing dissatisfaction with pseudo-satisfactions is working to your advantage. It’s leading you to discover the genuine article, the real deal. But don’t explore those feelings of dissatisfaction for too long. The purpose of dissatisfaction is to provide you with valuable clarity about what you want next. Pivot your attention quickly and completely in the direction of that clarity. There’s an energetic shift, a pulse, that comes with this pivot of attention, and it will propel you. Catch the wave.

By the way, no one else has to understand what feels good for you. No one else has to understand or agree with any of this. It will work anyway. If it feels good to walk barefoot in the sand or to be naked on your private deck, do it. If cold plunges or saunas feel good, do it. If eating one thing and not another thing feels good, do it, even if everyone you know is doing the opposite.

Especially if believing something different from what everyone else seems to believe feels good, do it.

Let what feels good shape your thinking and your use of your mind. Don’t focus so much on what is true if what is true is unwanted. Don’t reject or deny it, just leave it alone and find another truth that feels better. There is no end to truths to choose from!

If being really, really nice to yourself and gentle with yourself feels good, do it. Do it even if everyone else around you is torturing themselves with worry, criticism, and doubt, and expects you to do the same.

Trusting yourself means trusting what feels good. And it’s all going to change along the way. Did I mention that it will change? It will change. Let it change.

Drinking fancy wine felt good to me until it didn’t. Today I don’t drink alcohol. What I enjoyed yesterday felt good yesterday. What I enjoy today feels good today. I’m looking forward to discovering what will feel good tomorrow.

I don’t have to justify changing. I just have to keep up. I don’t have to explain why I want what I want now. I just have to keep up. Keeping up with what feels good now is synonymous with fulfilling my potential, living with purpose, and being my best self.

A relationship or a job might feel good, and then it doesn’t. Accept that you will continue to want different things, new things, more. Today it might be acquiring things that feels good and is good for you. Tomorrow it might be getting rid of things that feels good and is good for you. Be flexible. Around our house we call this “nimbleosity.”

Quit trying to figure it all out in your head once and for all. Your head can’t tell you what feels good, but it can confuse you with ideas about what should and shouldn’t. Use your mind, but use it appropriately and to your benefit. Cognition is not the answer to everything, and it can never deliver all the satisfaction that it promises. It’s OK, we forgive it. It’s the nature of the cognition system to over-promise, to take itself too seriously, and also to ignore or deny the existence and value of the other two human operating systems.

Quit trying to make a plan and quit trying to stick to it. Quit holding yourself accountable and quit making commitments to yourself. Stop trying to force outcomes and stop hitching your well-being to those outcomes. Be less conditional in your joy and well-being. Joy and well-being are your essence, like emotional DNA, not something to prove or earn. Enjoy clarity as it comes, with all its twists and turns. It’s supposed to be an adventure. It’s supposed to be fun. Trust yourself. Trust that what feels good is good for you. It’s so much easier this way.

Be easier-going about feeling good. Feeling good is not supposed to be hard. Feeling good is who you are when you’re not cut off, shut down, confused, or throwing obstacles in your own way. Feeling good (and benefiting from feeling good) is something you allow, not something you force, figure out, or solve. Let yourself feel good, and follow that feeling where it takes you. That’s inner guidance. That’s clarity. That’s purpose. It feels good, and it’s good for you.

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Practical advice for allowing life to nourish you.

If you want nice things to flow easily to you, you must become an allower.

By nice things I mean clarity, inspiration, joy. I mean money, relationships, insight. I mean art, objects, health, relief, rest, success… basically anything you can want or imagine wanting.

There is so much available, on its way, waiting for you to allow.

As I write this on a clear January morning I pause for a full minute, closing my eyes, and allowing the sunlight spilling through the window to penetrate my eyelids. I allow myself to bask in the subtle warmth, and to appreciate the dazzling orange and yellow and red swimming before me.

I allow myself to feel the elevating effect on my mood, and I allow myself to enjoy that elevation without any reservation or doubt, or any hurry.

Then I allow myself to feel myself at the leading edge of a hundred thousand years of human beings finding satisfaction in the precise way I am allowing myself to find satisfaction in this very moment. Through my allowing, the feeling grows into a sense of belonging, coherence, and deep well-being.

All of this a product of my gentle allowing. None of this a product of force, hard work, problem solving, or sacrifice.

There’s so much richness and abundance hovering at the margins of my reality until the precise moment I decide to become a receiver of it and allow it to flow into my experience.

The job of allowing is easy and joyous. It’s so easy that some of the clients who seek me out are initially skeptical. Shouldn’t it be harder? Shouldn’t there be struggle first, and then reward? Is it even moral to receive so much without earning it?

My bio-hacker friends like explaining to me how our mitochondria have evolved to harness the sun’s energy and feed it to us, and I like hearing about these marvelous discoveries. I reflect on this perfect intelligence of evolution as I soak in the rays.

A minute later, I am back at work, writing this for you.

Every so often, at least once a day, I ask myself the same question; a prompt to help me get my vibe right, tune myself to the energy of receiving, and make myself an emotional match for the enjoyment, nourishment, satisfaction, and abundance that is my heart’s deepest desire.

This question, the prompt, is my invitation to myself to become more of an allower, right then and there.

Here’s the question I ask:

“If I suddenly accomplished all my goals, acquired everything that I want, and became successful in each of the ways that matter most to me, how would I spend the next minute?”

It’s an evocative question, and I respond earnestly and playfully. If I have fully satisfied all my goals, if all of my desires have been fulfilled… what now? Who will I be? How will I inhabit this moment?

The clarity comes, and it is the same every time. I already know the answer in my head, but I wait for the feeling of it to arise in my body.

I want to enjoy myself.

No, even better, I want to enjoy My Self. “Enjoying myself” can slip into an abstract concept, one step removed from my actual felt experience in the now. Enjoying “My Self” makes it real and present. Me enjoying Me.

My Self is the vehicle of the experience I am having, and I want to enjoy not only the experience, but the vehicle allowing the experience too. My Self.

I have a Self that wants to be enjoyed, and it wants to be enjoyed by Me, and I want to feel My Self as the Me enjoying the Self that wants to be enjoyed.

Self enjoying Self. The gap between the one who wants and the one who has, between giver and receiver is finally bridged. I am the bridge, and I feel it, and it feels good. It feels really good.

I want to feel good. If I had accomplished all my goals, and become successful in each of the ways that matter most to me, I would want to take a minute and feel really good. Satisfied. Nourished. Triumphant. Proud. Excited. Relaxed. Successful. Full. Abundant.

If I had accomplished all my goals, and become successful in each of the ways that matter most to me, I would bask in the subtle sensations of Me-ness in this very moment, and I would take in as much satisfaction as I possibly could.

And so that’s what I do each time I ask myself this question. And each time it becomes even better. Even more.

It’s become a bit like drinking from a firehose, in the best possible sense. There’s no way I could become a channel for all of the joy and wonder and delight and satisfaction that wants to flow in me, but it’s fun to try. And as I repeat this process I feel my capacity for embodying all that good stuff expand.

Through many years of doing counseling and coaching work, I’ve discovered that each of us has a limit on how much exuberance and joy and satisfaction we can handle at one time. At a certain point it becomes too much, like a circuit breaker switching off, and some people reach that threshold quickly.

But that limit can be expanded, that capacity can be increased through desire and intention and practice and repetition, and I know of nothing that feels better than feeling that capacity grow over time, and knowing that I did that for myself because I love My Self that much and I want to enjoy My Self as much as I can in this blessed life, in this blessed body.

That’s how I felt a few moments ago when I closed my eyes and allowed the feeling of the sun to delight me and connect me to the richness of my life. And that’s how I feel now as I continue to write this for you.

My allowing of that previous moment has flowed into this moment, and will flow into the next moment. I continue to feel joyous, wondrous, enriched, and energized, and I expect it will continue because that’s how it works. I know this now first-hand.

Because I take a moment now and then to play this little game with myself, I have built some momentum with the feeling it creates. It doesn’t take much to get that momentum going again whenever I want, and once it’s going it wants to keep going because it feels good. My job is simply to allow it, and to enjoy it.

The enjoyment step is most important. Don’t skip the enjoyment. Skipping the enjoyment strips the whole project of value. Your enjoyment is the point. Everyone who is connected to themselves in any substantial way knows this. Your enjoyment of Your Self is the cleanest burning, cheapest, most sustainable fuel for animating your life.

  1. Allow.
  2. Enjoy.
  3. Repeat.

Sometimes when I talk about allowing, people confuse it with a kind of tolerating. Allowing is not tolerating. Tolerating is a word we use to justify letting something unwanted into our experience. That’s not the only meaning of tolerate, but it’s the one I want to address here.

The person who goes to work in a hostile workplace learns to tolerate. The person who grew up with neglectful or abusive parents learns to tolerate. The person in a stale, loveless relationship learns to tolerate.

People who become good at tolerating unwanted experiences tend to lose connection to their easy relationship to wanting, and to constrict their allowing of nice things to come to them. The energy of tolerating is very different from the energy of allowing.

The problem with too much tolerating is that it necessarily comes with a lot of self-protection. People who are in tolerating mode must protect themselves from the unwanted feelings that come with enduring the unwanted experience. This is done through desensitizing: numbing and hardening the senses, including emotional sensitivity. The very substance of your inner guidance and your life purpose becomes deadened and denuded.

This emotional self-protection is like armor, and it keeps out the wanted along with the unwanted. The strategy might seem like it is working for a time, but eventually the downside catches up.

It doesn’t have to be this way.

Even if you find yourself in an unwanted situation that you must tolerate (we all will sometimes), you can decide to allow nourishment and satisfaction to reach you in some form. You can remain connected to the most lively part of yourself. You can re-start your emotional apparatus and regain access to feeling. You can learn the art of emotional discernment so that it doesn’t have to be all-or-nothing.

How to do this?

Consider my story of sunlight from just a few minutes ago. The world (including your inner world of thought and feeling and sensation and imagination) is full of wondrous and satisfying phenomena, poised, waiting to stream into your life experience in every moment.

Look for the simplest example of this available to you right now. You’ll need to let feeling be your guide, which means letting down your guard. For me, it was noticing the brightness of the January sun. It could also be the feeling of sitting up straight or breathing more deeply or feeling your love for something or someone. It might be appreciating the texture of bark on a tree that you walk past every day.

Once you get the hang of it you’ll realize it’s the simplest thing you’ve ever done for yourself, and you’ll probably want to share it with everyone you care about.

Allowing nice things to flow easily to you starts with allowing good feelings to become active in you, and you can learn to do this in all sorts of circumstances or conditions if you are willing to find satisfaction and enjoyment in your inner experience in the moment, without insisting that your outer circumstances change immediately.

Rest assured that your outer circumstances will change over time if you decide to allow for inner enjoyment and satisfaction first. It just takes a little time for all the physical, outer parts of your experience – the people, places, things – to catch up and begin to reflect the changes you’ve made inwardly at the level of emotion or feeling. All that physical matter tends to operate more slowly than the lightweight, nimble energy within.

Please understand that the kind of allowing I am talking about must be felt as physical sensation if it is to deliver real enjoyment and satisfaction.

You might like the ideas I am offering here, and the ideas are very good, but they are symbols of the experience, not the experience itself. At some point you must evolve the good ideas into actual felt experience if you are to answer the call of your heart’s desire and fulfill your deeper purpose, which is not to find satisfaction only in ideas, but to apply them in practice and receive the benefit physically.

To use my earlier example, if I take a minute to close my eyes and notice the heat of the sun on my face and the colors swimming behind my eyelids, but I allow myself to feel nothing, then there is not much value.

There’s not much value because there’s not much satisfaction. Not much enjoyment. Not much feeling. The value is all in the feeling of satisfaction and enjoyment, not in the idea of it. Many people are unsure of the difference. Find the difference for yourself.

Many of the hundreds of clients I’ve had the privilege of knowing force themselves to meditate or journal or exercise or do yoga, but they take no enjoyment in it. They do it because it’s supposed to be a good or healthy or helpful thing to do, and they hope that one day it delivers some benefit.

I had a daily meditation practice for years that I did not particularly enjoy, but that did provide some benefit. It helped me relax. Helped me clear my mind. Helped me feel some inner peace and connection. But once I decided to allow My Self to enjoy that time sitting quietly with My Self, it became electric. I could feel the actual pleasure in it and the benefits became pronounced and real.

Pleasure. That’s a word I haven’t used yet in this story, but it’s a good word to include. Enjoyment is pleasure. Satisfaction is pleasure. Clarity is pleasure. Flow, inspiration, love, connection, ease… all synonymous with pleasure, and all related to the body.

Some people are uncomfortable with the word pleasure. It activates resistance or sadness or even anger. I’ve seen lots of this in my counseling practice. There’s always a good explanation, always some negative association with the word, established from some unwanted experience in the past.

If you want to become an allower of nice things to flow into your experience, it will benefit you to befriend pleasure; the word, the idea, and the actual experience in its physical forms.

If you want to learn more about allowing, about becoming a channel for pleasure and nourishment and satisfaction, I can help.

I can explain it more fully, answer your questions, lead you through the embodied processes that make it real. I do this through a series of weekly scheduled calls. Email me to request a client package if you’re interested.

I’ve also put together a free audio course. The Gentle Art of Emotional Mastery is a series of audio recordings that describe the process of becoming an allower of all things satisfying and delightful. It includes guided embodiment exercises to help bridge the gap between the idea of allowing and the actual experience of it.

There are 30 one-minute meditations too. Use them daily to support your success, satisfaction, and well-being as you learn this life skill and begin putting it to practical use and enjoying what it provides.

There is nothing more practical than feeling good. Feeling good is the reward of a good life, and the inspiration for a good life. It is the foundation of well-being, and both the product and the engine of 14 billion years of evolution.

No matter your current circumstances, you can start to allow more of your evolutionary inheritance into your life experience with just the ideas proposed here, and a few simple practices.

If you’re ready, it will come quickly.

If you want help, reach out.

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All My Best,
Justice Schanfarber

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Current Articles The Gentle Art of Emotional Mastery The Schanfarber Method

Best life goal for the new year?

Here’s a life goal for the new year and beyond: Look for the next way you can be nice to yourself, then repeat. Do it again. Keep at it. Never stop.

If this became a way of life, your personal modus operandi, what do you think you would discover? What could you accomplish?

First you might discover that you are other-than-nice to yourself in many ways, and that you justify this in many ways. If you’re like virtually every other person around you, you would discover that you try to motivate yourself with other-than-nice thoughts and feelings about yourself, others, and the world.

You might see how you use fear to try and motivate yourself to do things you don’t really want to do. You might see through all the little games and stories you use to keep yourself going through the motions, laboring at tasks big and small that do not reflect your heart’s true desires.

If you took your new life goal seriously – look for the next way you can be nice to yourself, then repeat – you might become very indulgent with yourself for a time, binge watching shows, overeating in your pajamas, using AI for pointless distractions.

And you would probably quickly discover that none of these things are very satisfying. They are pseudo-satisfactions, flimsy fakes, insubstantial proxies for the real thing. You would start to ask –

“What actually feels good to me?”

“What do I actually want?”

“How do I want to be spending my time, using my energy, engaging this world, and living my life?”

And then you would set off on the path of discovering the answers to these essential questions. You would start to notice the difference between being genuinely nice to yourself (that is, giving yourself what you actually want most) and being other-than-nice to yourself (with-holding or distracting yourself from that which you actually want most).

Probably you would discover that being truly nice to yourself – allowing yourself to have what you want most – is a moving target, an ever-evolving game of hide and seek. You might notice that this game can either be really fun or really frustrating. If you’re very insightful, you might recognize that this choice – will it be fun or will it be frustrating – is your choice to make, and that you’ve been making it all along.

The decision to be always looking for the next way to be nice to yourself, and to enjoy this fun game, is a decision to be exquisitely present to yourself in each moment. This presence is required if you are going to move out of the default patterns of thought, feeling, and behavior that you developed before you knew what you were doing, and start creating new patterns of thought, feeling, and behavior based on intention – an intention to enjoy being nice to yourself in this moment, and this moment, and this, and this – until your life becomes a steady stream of delightful moments delivering deeply satisfying and genuinely pleasurable experiences one after another.

You can be nice to yourself through three main channels: doing, feeling, and thinking.

You can do things that are nice to yourself. Take a bath. Eat good food. Get rest. Smile at yourself in the mirror. Write yourself love letters.

Doing nice things for yourself is how most people initially conceive of this idea of being nice to yourself.

But at more subtle levels, it is how you feel about yourself and how you think about yourself that is most powerful. Start noticing your inner dialogues, and start telling yourself better feeling stories about yourself, others, and the world. Let being nice to yourself be as much about your thoughts and feelings as your actions.

When all three channels are aligned – what you do for yourself, how you think about yourself, how you feel about yourself – you will have maximum creative leverage. You will start to imagine… then anticipate… then experience a life that is a true reflection of the desires and wisdom of your heart, your body, and your mind.

But don’t take my word for it. Try it for yourself. Have some fun with it. Experiment. I can’t think of any downside (except that some people won’t know what to make of you).

If you decide today (or tomorrow, or the next day) to begin treating yourself in the way I am describing, I am certain that you can create more of what you want in the new year with less effort and more enjoyment than ever before. Even if I do not know you personally, I want this for you.

As always,

All My Best,
Justice Schanfarber

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