October 2, 2025 • 58 mins
On this episode of The Karen Kenney Show, I dive into the idea of how without awareness or tools, we can end up turning our feelings into felonies.
Maybe not literally - but if we’re not careful, the ways in which we react, lash out, or stew in negativity – can still be harmful.
I share about the importance of emotional regulation and how so many of us were never really taught as kids what the heck to do with our big feelings.
I talk about how easy it is to look at extreme acts of violence in the world and think, “That’s not me,” but the truth is, we all have moments where our emotions get the best of us.
Whether it’s snapping at someone, holding onto grudges, losing your shit in traffic, or letting our thoughts spiral, it’s all part of the same cycle.
The thing us, for most people growing up, nobody sat us down to teach us how to feel our feelings, or how to navigate those suckers in a healthy way.
Throughout the episode, I also share some of my favorite tools and strategies for getting a handle on those big emotions.
Things like slowing down, practicing self-awareness, and using healthy coping mechanisms like walking, breathing exercises, or even just getting outside in nature to shift your perspective.
I also talk about the power of community, whether it’s joining a group like The Nest or just finding people who support and uplift you.
My hope is that by sharing these stories and tools, you’ll feel a little less alone, and a little more empowered to pause, check in with yourself, and choose love over fear.
We can’t always control what happens around us, but we can choose how we respond.
So let’s practice being kinder to ourselves and each other, and remember: the real gig is to spread love - and not let our feelings run the show. ❤️
KK’S KEY TAKEAWAYS:
• Slowing down is the first key step to becoming more self-aware and emotionally regulated.
• Emotional regulation means learning to manage your feelings and responses in healthy ways.
• Unchecked emotions can lead to negative thoughts, actions, and even harm to yourself or others.
• Healthy coping mechanisms like walking, breathing exercises, and spending time in nature can help shift your emotional state.
• Self-awareness grows when you pause, reflect, and notice your patterns and triggers.
• It’s important to question your thoughts and not believe every story your mind tells you.
• Community support, whether through groups or trusted people, can make a big difference in emotional well-being.
• Practicing kindness, compassion, and love - toward yourself and others - can help break negative emotional cycles.
• You have the power to interrupt harmful patterns and consciously choose more helpful responses.
• The real goal is to spread more love and to leave the world better than you found it.
BIO:
Spiritual Mentor and writer Karen Kenney uses humor and dynamic storytelling to bring a down-to-earth, no-BS perspective to self-development.
Bringing together tools that coach the conscious and unconscious mind, Karen helps clients deepen their connections with Self, and discover their unique understandings of spirituality.
Her practice combines neuroscience, subconscious reprogramming, Integrative Hypnosis, somatic work, spiritual mentoring, and other holistic modalities to help regulate the nervous system, examine internal narratives, remove blocks, and reimagine what’s possible.
A passionate yoga teacher, long-time student of A Course in Miracles, and Gateless Writing instructor, Karen is a frequent speaker and retreat leader. Via...
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(00:01):
Hey you guys. Welcome to theKaren Kenney show. I hope he's
doing fantastic today. If you'rewatching this, you can see my
hair is still a little wet. Ijust got out of the shower
because I just got back from arun, and one of the things you
might be like me is that there'scertain activities or certain
things that you do that, kindof, for lack of a better word,
(00:24):
it's when ideas come to you orthoughts, right? So one of the
things we know about walking andrunning and stuff like that is
that a lot of people, whenthey're doing that, it's like
the mind goes like, when I'mjust kind of doing this, like
I'm opening up my arms, like themind opens up and I'm kind of
open for business. When I run orI walk, it's like, I'm just
(00:45):
like, okay, ideas, you know.Okay. Spiritual team, feel free
to upload whatever you want meto know, or whatever you know.
So I was out on my run, and ofcourse, before that, it feels
like every single day I'm just,first of all, hi. I'm just
diving right into this. But itjust seems like every single day
we're being bombarded with moreand more acts of violence and
(01:08):
atrocities and murder and mayhemand just people just losing
their damn minds. You know whatI mean? And while I was thinking
about this, you know? I mean, Ithink it was either, I think it
was this morning that somebodyin, I think it was Michigan, you
know, basically went into achurch, a Mormon church, and was
(01:28):
like an LDS church, or whatever,and was opening fire and then
set it on on, you know,literally, like shooting, you
know, of course, more gunviolence. Hello, America. And
then it was also set thebuilding on fire, and I was just
thinking to myself, so while Iwas running, all of a sudden, I
heard this phrase in my head,and I said, Man, I'm like,
(01:50):
fucking people are out hereturning their feelings into
felonies.
And that just kind of stuck withme right, turning their feelings
into felonies. And that's kindof what I want to talk a little
bit about today. And I want tomake a clear distinction, right?
I mean, pretty much I most ofus, okay, most of us are not out
(02:12):
there setting buildings on fireor shooting people with our guns
and murdering people and harmingother people and stuff like
that, right? Those are, like,the really, the extremes. So it
can be really easy todisassociate ourselves from that
stuff and say, Well, I wouldnever do that, or I don't do
that. Like I'm not murderingpeople or attacking people or
(02:33):
whatever. But in the Course inMiracles, we kind of talk about
it like this, like anytime we'renot really having, like, loving
thoughts about our fellowbrothers and sisters, our fellow
brethren, right? Our familymembers, your Sweeties, your
siblings, your co workers,whatever. Right people on the
left, people on the right, theothers, like all the shit that
we do to anybody who's outsideof you, basically right when
(02:56):
you're not having lovingthoughts about them, it's just
like having attack thoughts ormurderous thoughts like in your
head, right? Where we make themguilty, we make them bad, right?
We basically lose our own peaceof mind because we're attacking
others all the time and blamingthem, whether it's for our own
feelings or the state of theworld or whatever. And so I
(03:17):
started to think about this, howit can be really easy to see
these people who take extrememeasures and do heinous acts and
say like, oh my god, like, Idon't do that though. I'm not
turning KK, I'm not turning myfeelings into felonies. You
might not be turning them intofelonies, but we all do this
(03:37):
thing where we let our feelings,if we do not know how to
emotionally regulate ourselves,we let our feelings treat us
like little puppets. We let ourfeelings be these little
dictators that boss us aroundand quote, unquote, make us I'm
doing little air quotes, make usfeel things, or make us think
(03:59):
things, or make us do things,and then we're just like, Yeah,
I don't know what happened, youknow? So I want to talk a little
bit about this so that ourfeelings don't turn into
felonies, so that we learn howto kind of just like, become a
little more emotionallyregulated. And we can't do that
unless we kind of talk about,like, what, what is, what is
emotional regulation. And so I'mjust, you can Google it, but
(04:24):
I'll just save you the problem,because I've Googled it, you
know, a gazillion times over theyears, like whenever I'm trying
to learn something really well.And I'll just put it like this.
So emotional regulation is saidto be, it's a term that we use
to genuinely describe a person'sability to effectively, like
manage their emotions, or torespond to when they're having
(04:46):
an emotional experience. So forexample, something happens in
your life. Maybe it's somethingunexpected, maybe it's something
big, maybe it's somethingtraumatic, but maybe it's
something small, and what isyour ability to respond? Respond
and to effectively manage howyou're responding when you're
having an emotional experience,and we can think of it easily,
(05:08):
is like, when people talk about,like, Oh, I got triggered,
right? Oh, they pushed mybutton. I got triggered, right?
So you're having a responseright to an emotional
experience, and you're justlike, Oh my God. Like, I
snapped, or I just, like, lostmy patience, or whatever. So
when people are doing thesereally horrific things, a lot of
times it's because they'reruminating long term, and we'll
(05:30):
talk about that in a moment. Butwe also can hold on to our
gripes and our grievances andour grudges, and we can ruminate
on things too, but sometimeswe're just so woundly tight,
like, we're like, like, woundreally tight because we stay in
a space of chronic stress orchronic overwhelm, or we don't
(05:51):
really know how to feel ouremotions, right? We're not, not
everybody is super emotional,emotionally intelligence, not a
lot of people. And I ask thisall the time in the nest, and I
asked this with my clients andpeople that I know, like whoever
saw sat your ass down and waslike, Hey, this is what you do
when a big emotion comes up.This is how you feel your
(06:11):
feelings. I don't know aboutyou, but Gen X kids, nobody was
teaching us how to do that shit,right? We had to figure it out
the hard way. We had to go andread some books on our own. We
had to, we had to get our ass incrumble, to figure out, like, oh
yeah, maybe that wasn't a goodresponse to that. Maybe there
was a better way for me to kindof respond to whatever was going
(06:32):
on, what that person said, whatthat person did. Okay, so here's
the thing, can you affect,effectively manage and respond
to your own emotions, or anemotional experience or
something that is coming up,okay? And so there's healthy
coping mechanisms for when youhave, like some stress come up,
(06:54):
or a feeling come up, or a bigemotion come up. And I just
mentioned one of them, I said,Oh, I was out for a walk. I was
out for a run. Walking andrunning is so good, first of
all, for your brain. It's sogood for your nervous system and
just exercise in general. Butit's doing more than just
working out your muscles. It'sgiving you an opportunity to
shift your perspective, tobroaden out your perspective,
(07:17):
especially when you go out intolike nature, that very calming
and grounding energy, to getsome sunlight in your eyes, to
get some fresh air right, tomove your body, to calm your
brain, to calm your nervoussystem, and to, you know, be
able to shift out of just fovealvision of like, just staring,
like focusing on your screen oryour phone. And then, if you're
(07:38):
watching this, you can see, I'mbringing my hands in close to my
eyes. I'm like, limiting myperipheral vision, right? I'm
making it very focused. And thenwhen you go outside now, into
nature, out into the sun, or outinto the world, it's like, and
it just like, opens up. So weliterally get a shift and how
we're visualizing, a shift kindof in how we're feeling. And
(07:58):
most people, not only don't knowwhat they're feeling. They don't
know why they're reacting theway that they're reacting.
Right? They have a subconsciousthing going on. So one of the
biggest first things for me, Idon't, I can't say what the
therapist is going to say. Butone of the biggest first things
for me is I have to be aware,first and foremost, that I'm
(08:20):
having some sort of a responseor a reaction, right? If we're
not self aware enough, if wedon't slow down enough in our
life consistently to be able toget a grip and a handle, to be
able to see ourselves clearlyand how we respond to the world
and to the people around us intocertain situations, if we're not
(08:43):
self aware, because we're alwaysjust staying wicked busy and
distracting ourselves and nottrying to feel things or think
about things or go deep, ifwe're just like floating around
and not even floating around,maybe we're just like, just
always staying busy, or alwayslike fucking on our phones or
always distracting and Notwanting to feel things. How are
we ever going to know when we'rein it? Because if we don't, then
(09:05):
we just normalize it. We justnormalize our being cranky or
being short with people or beingpassive aggressive or being
whatever. And we said to tellourselves a story like, oh,
that's just how I am. No, no,no, no. So number one is we've I
should go back even more thanthan be self aware. You gotta
slow down that. That's how selfawareness is actually going to
(09:27):
happen. First and foremost. Youhear me talk about it all the
time, and it's one of the firstthings that I tell my clients,
is we gotta learn how to, like,dial things down a little bit.
We need to slow down. Slow downyour breathing, slow down your
thinking, slow down your body alittle bit. That doesn't mean
that you can't have times whenyou're moving fast and you're in
a groove and you're doing shit,but we have to step out of the
(09:50):
normal pace of the world thatjust drives so much fear and
separation and division andconsumption and competitiveness
and otherness. Yes, we gottaslow down and kind of step out
of that river of like, alwaysmoving, moving, moving, moving,
moving. You know what I mean?Even the tides, like, even the
ocean has tides where it rollsin and then it rolls out. You
(10:16):
know what I'm saying, there areshifts, and we need the shift.
We need to be able to down,shift and slow down, so we can
take a good Gander, so we cantake a look around, so that we
can sit with the feeling, so wecan recognize that we're having
a thought that is not going toend well if we insist on staying
with that train of thinking. Andif you're feeling what I'm
(10:37):
saying, like double A man hands,if you get it right, and if
you're somebody who who is likea shock, and you're like, Oh, if
I stop, I'm going to die, right?Like, no, no, if you don't stop,
you're going to die probablyfaster. So here's the thing
number one, we get to slow down.We got to be willing to take a
look at ourselves and recognize,you know, hey, I'm kind of a
little short with people lately.I'm feeling a little stressed
(10:59):
out of my mind. I'm findingmyself more anxious, I'm
whatever. So we gotta be selfaware. We gotta know yourself,
right? You got to know yourself,and you gotta understand what
kind of emotions often come upfor you to how can I recognize
when I'm feeling a particularthing so many people, and
(11:20):
whether it's due to trauma orthe pace of life, or they
weren't taught, or 1000 otherreasons, they don't even know
what they're thinking andfeeling half the time. I've seen
it time and time again as a yogateacher over 25 years, right?
And you say to somebody, well,can you feel that? And they kind
of look at you, where can youfeel that? How does it feel like
when I ask these questions inclass, for some people, you can
(11:43):
see it's really hard for them,right, that interoception, that
like internal experience forthem to be able to report it
back, right? It doesn't comenaturally to everybody. And this
isn't making fun of anybody thatmight struggle with that or find
it hard, but it is an invitationto get curious about it, to
really kind of notice yourinternal experience, so that you
(12:05):
can notice the kinds of thingsor people or places or things
that like do evoke right, thatare evocative, that do evoke,
like big feelings of in you, orwhat like people or places or
smells or whatever that make youfeel, or that that happen, and
then you, you know you feelanxious or scared or worried or
(12:27):
overwhelmed, or some places inpeople, spaces might be happy
places, they might calm youright down. They might feel
really welcoming and inclusiveand grounding, and you feel seen
and loved and heard and all thatstuff, right? All that good
stuff.
But if we don't learn how todeal with our emotions, and if
(12:48):
we don't, first of all, we gottaslow down, then you gotta be
aware, and then you gotta bewilling, right? You gotta be
willing to feel some things andto take a look at some things,
because a lot of people areemotionally dysregulated, and
they don't know it. So ifemotional regulation is our
ability to effectively manageour emotions and to be able to
(13:10):
respond in what I would call ahealthy way or a sane way, to an
emotional experience, emotionaldysreg dysregulation is when we
have an inability to use like,good or healthy strategies or
responses, if we don't know howto diffuse like negative
(13:33):
emotions, like everyday things,moderate things, not even
extreme things, Right? If we'renot able to moderate everyday
emotions or diffuse them ordissolve them, as I like to say,
right? A lot of times peoplelike, oh, I have this problem
like I have to solve. And I'mlike, well, it's more about
dissolving it, right? It's moreabout like, dissolving it,
(13:56):
removing removing it so much asI need to fix it, right? So when
we have emotional dysregulation,we do not have the ability to
put healthy strategies intoplace. And instead, a lot of
times, we just go like, reallybig. You'll start to feel like
intense emotions or overwhelmingemotions or negative emotions,
(14:18):
and they just feel big andunmanageable, like literally
think about that and thesethings when you have a big
emotion consistently over timeand you have no support now, of
course, granted, sometimes thereis mental health issues at play.
We see it time and time again inmass shootings and people who
use guns for violence againstpeople and just walk into a
(14:40):
random place and just stopmurdering strangers, right? It's
fucking awful. It's horrifying.And these are people sometimes,
yes, that needed mental healthintervention. They needed mental
health care. But we also justhave a lot of people who don't
know how to manage theiremotions. They don't they
haven't gone to therapy. They'renot. Even aware that the way
(15:01):
that they think is is not likeright or healthy or good or
helpful to them or to obviouslyothers, right? And if we're not
able to use emotional regulationstrategies, if they're not
taught to us, or if we don'tself recognize, I have a
problem, right? I am woundreally tight. I'm very reactive.
(15:22):
I get angry really easy. I haveno patience. I am like, you
know, zero to 60. When they saythat I can go from zero to 60
really fast with anger orreaction, or whatever, this
defensiveness is attacking,right? It's not really helpful.
It's not really healthy. We allknow this, but what happens is,
(15:42):
and this is one of the things wedon't often talk about, is that
the experience of emotions isnot bad. It is simply human. We
are human being. We havereceptors in our bodies, right?
We have pain receptors. We canfeel temperature, whatever we
are sensory creatures, we cankind of clock our environment,
(16:04):
right? Like we feel things.Emotions are not per se bad
things. They're just part of thehuman experience. And sometimes
the emotion is going to be ajoyous emotion, a happy emotion,
a feel good, quote, unquote,feel good emotion, right? We
feel loved, we feel accepted, wefeel valuable, we feel seen, we
(16:27):
feel heard, we feel like wematter. We feel whatever,
patient, peaceful, calm,curious, compassionate, all
these things, right, beautiful,great. But sometimes we have
emotions and we labeled them aslike, bad, anger, fear, guilt,
shame, blame, attack, jealousy,envy, all the things right? And
(16:49):
sometimes, if we don't know howto regulate when those emotions
like show up in the body, showup in our mind, when we have a
visceral reaction in the body,and then we have this thought
system like going on in our headof fear, which, you know, just
makes everything feel bigger. Itexacerbates everything. So a lot
of times, what it is is it's notthe emotion itself, and it's not
(17:13):
even the thought itself. It'sthe interpretation that we give
to the emotion, even labeling itlike good or bad, I don't think
anger is a bad emotion. I thinkit's just part of the
kaleidoscope in the you know, ifyou look at like a color wheel,
you know, I just think like, ohyeah. Like, anger is on this
color wheel. It is available tome. It lives inside of me, and
(17:38):
some people see it as bad to me,anger isn't bad unless you start
inflicting your inability tocope or deal with or manage your
own anger onto others, human,animal, the planet, etc,
yourself, right? That's whereself harm and self injury comes
in. People get get all thesefeelings they don't know what to
do with them, and they don'twant to inflict them on other
(18:00):
people, but they inflict them onthemselves. And that's where we
see things like cutting and selfharm, and, you know, addiction
and abuse of alcohol and abuseof drugs, and like, 1000 other
ways that we can harm ourselves.You know what I mean. And so we
have these emotional cycles thathappen that aren't very loving
and aren't always very kind, andthey're sometimes called like a
(18:23):
vicious emotional cycle. And thething is, is like when we have
emotions that we don't know howto regulate, we start to have
thoughts about them. We start totell stories, right? We
interpret what we think theymean, and we start to tell these
stories, and we start to getthese beliefs, and we start to
have these thoughts we ruminateon, the thoughts, the language,
(18:43):
the words, the self speak, theway we talk to ourselves. And
it's those things that thencreate behavior. So sometimes we
get a feeling, or we get athought and then a feeling. And
if we ruminate on these things,if we have no way to break the
pattern of these thoughts, theseemotions and our response to
them, they can often lead tobehaviors where we act out. And
(19:06):
there's this little kind of likecycle wheel that I've seen
before. I'll just break it downfor you. How they they say that.
They say these things, kind oflike, go, go down. And in one
example that they give is like,let's say that, just to give you
set it in context. So let's sayyou have a friend. Let's call it
whether you're in high school orit's work. So just imagine, for
(19:28):
a younger kid, it could beschool, and for an adult, it
could be work, and you have afriend. And I saw this on
Cornell research. They kind ofbroke this down. That's where
I'm getting this particularthing from. So and they say,
okay, so you have a friend, andthey walk by you in the hallway
and they don't acknowledge you,and immediately what happens is
(19:48):
you start to have like a rapidfire set of thoughts and
feelings, and it might be likeyou feel confused, or you feel
disappointed, or you feel angry,like, why are they dissing me?
Like, why aren't they. Payingattention to me, like, what did
I do wrong? Or are they? Is she?Are they mad at me because of
this thing I did or didn't dofrom a few weeks ago? Right? I'm
sure it's nothing. I'm sure I'mjust being over sensitive. But
(20:11):
like, maybe she's in a hurry,but still, right? And all it
takes is one person just walkingpast you, and then all of a
sudden, we're off and running,right? The brain is off and
running. The emotions come up inthe body. Maybe we feel
embarrassed, we feel a littleashamed, like, what they didn't
see me, like, what's that about?We start to write a story, we
start to get pissed off, andthere's this initial kind of,
(20:33):
like flood of feelings, and it'slike one after another, like a
bizarre little parade, right? Ofcourse, miracles is that great
line, right? And if you can justsit back and watch it like a
parade, like not take itpersonally, just notice. And
this is where it goes back tostep one. Slow down. Step two,
(20:54):
self aware. Be aware. And ifyou're able to just pull back
and notice this bizarre littleparade of thoughts that, like,
floats on by and you don't gethooked by them. You don't get
triggered by them. You don'tfeel like you have to do
anything. You just notice, like,wow, look at my brain doing that
thing, right? Like, look at,look at my kooky monkey's brain.
Like, doing that thing andwriting all these stories when I
(21:15):
don't even know, because Ihaven't even talked to my
friend, I don't even know ifthey saw me. Why am I assuming
the worst, right? Why am Iassuming the worst of my friend?
What if something did go down?We'll just have a conversation
about it or whatever, right? Andwhat happens is, though, we
start to have these thoughts inthese feelings, and then we feel
like we got to do somethingabout them. Well, I'm going to
(21:37):
text them and I'm going
to be like, That was rude, orI'm going to like, da, da, da,
da, da, da, da.
Well, the action only comes fromthis place of feeling like that,
like again, you get thesethoughts. So again, your
feelings, your thoughts and yourbehaviors, your actions, they're
all connected. And if we don'thave ways of interrupting the
pattern when we're dysregulated,we might do some shit that we're
(22:01):
going to regret, and we can seehow. And again, I'm not inside
the minds of mass shooters andstuff like that, but most
people, that's not like a onething happens and they snap.
Usually it's something that hasbeen building up and building up
and building up. And whetherthat is a thought system of
hate, or whether that's anincident where they got like, I
(22:22):
think I go back to like, when,you know, people talk about,
quote, unquote, that phrase of,like, going postal. Because the
big thing like, when, when theguy shot did a mass shooting at,
like, you know, the at a postoffice or whatever, and that's
where that whole going postallike, came from, right? And it's
like, so who knows if it's justan incident that, like, Finally,
(22:45):
like snaps somebody, butusually, my understanding is
it's like something that hasbeen built up over time, and
whether that's an ideology, orsomebody got radicalized, or
somebody was bullied, orsomebody, again, has mental
illness issues, but but a piecein all of this is that there's
the inability to emotionallyregulate, right? So here's the
(23:05):
pattern that they talk about itlike this. So number one,
there's a situation, and this iswhere the trigger happens, and
whether it triggers a problem,like you're criticized at work
or again, somebody walks pastyou in the hallway and it snubs
you, or ignores you, orwhatever. The thing is, there's
a trigger and the situation,quote, unquote, the situation.
(23:25):
Slash the trigger. It then, nowgoes to your thoughts, okay? And
it's like, so what's goingthrough my head? What are the
words I'm using? What's thelanguage I'm using? What is the
the self talk? This is me kindof building off it, right? Like,
so what are the kind of thingsare you thinking to yourself,
and it might be, oh, thatperson's an asshole, but it
might also be, I must not begood enough, I'm not worthy, I'm
(23:48):
not lovable. There's somethingwrong with me. It's all my
fault. I'm bad, I'm wrong. I'mnot loved, etc, etc, right? And
then this, obviously, nowthey're in different schools of
thought. Some people will saythe body speaks first, the body
has the emotion, and then itsends a thought up. Other people
think it's from the top down.The thought goes first. And I'm
(24:10):
just telling you what this modelsays. So you have the situation,
the trigger, something happens,then you have a thought about
it, right? The self talk, thelanguage you use, whatever. And
then you have your emotions. Andthis is like, Well, how do I
feel? And then this is when Istart to go, Well, how do I
feel? Do I feel anxious? Do Ifeel scared? Am I angry? Am I
pissed? Do I feel worthless? DoI feel exhaust? Like, what's
(24:33):
going on? Like, how do I feel?And those feelings, how I feel,
and that's what this wholeepisode is about. Often will be,
how do I react? What am I goingto do about it? Am I going to
create a problem? Am I going toisolate myself? Am I going to
avoid contact with other people?Am I going to become aggressive?
(24:56):
Am I going to go pick up a gun?Am I going to if x, y and. Z
right? And this place betweenthe emotion right, being able to
like, have a feeling and notfeel like you need to do
anything about it. Can Iregulate my nervous system? Can
I sit with myself? Can I kind oftalk to myself and shift my
(25:18):
perspective, right? So then youhave the how do I react, my
behavior, what do I do? And thenwhat you do, the next step is
what I call they call it Mybody's physical reactions, like
after I do something about it.How do I feel? Do I feel tired?
Do I have a loss of appetite? Icall this step how that feels.
(25:41):
It's the reaction to myreaction. So I went and did this
thing, and now I feel guilty,and now I feel bad, and now I'm
in this victim lube of like, Ohmy God. Now this is gonna
happen. And I start to getanxious, I start to get scared,
I start to beat myself up. Idouble down and make them twice
as wrong. See what you made medo, quote, unquote, nobody makes
(26:01):
you feel or do anything. If morepeople knew this, we'd be in a
totally different world. Butthen we start to blame the other
people, right? And then we go toright back around to how I
continue to think about thissituation, that other person and
myself. So that loop comes rightback to my thoughts about it.
And then, if you don't have away to do something about this
(26:24):
little circle of hell thatyou're kind of putting yourself
in, we've got to be able topause. We've got to be I'm doing
a little time out with my hands.We've got to be able to hit time
out. We got to be able to, likewhen Viktor Frankl right man,
search for meaning. When ViktorFrankl talks about, in between
the stimulus and response.There's a space. There's this
moment, right? And if you don'tknow how to hit pause and take a
(26:50):
deep breath or to slow down yourthinking or pump the brakes,
this is how we end up doing shitthat we regret. This is how we
end up doing shit and sayingthings we can't take back. This
is how people end up in prisonbecause they have no emotional
regulation, and they turn theirfeelings into felonies. Well,
(27:12):
I'll show you. I'll get you.I'll do this. Just you wait, and
this becomes really deeplypatterned over time. And unless
something changes to shift thecycle, it's like you just keep
getting into this cycle. And itsays here, it's easy to see how
even a small event can cascadeinto something hugely, hugely
(27:34):
triggering. So then, if you takea person, right, if you take a
person who has experienced a lotof trauma as a child, a lot of
drama, just basically cruised onin life, and I don't mean cruise
like it was easy, but just kindof operated in the world all on
(27:55):
trauma responses, like,literally just surviving,
holding on. I'm like, whiteknuckling it right now. Like,
just think of a guy like doingsome think about the people who,
like climb. This is what I kindof think about emotionally,
that, you know, the climb is whoclimb without clipping in,
without ropes, and they're onthese really fucking, like steep
cliffs, and they just have, theyfind the tiniest little edge to
(28:18):
hold on to, the tiniest littlegrip with their fingers. I'm
kind of doing this thing with myhands right now, like they're
gripping this wall of granite.And the slightest little thing
can be disaster. It can end indisaster. Well, if we've been
white knuckling in our wholetime and just holding on by
those fingertips, it does nottake much to knock us off. And
(28:39):
at some point, those oldstrategies that kept us alive
and kept us safe, those old waysof being, those patterns, those
conditioning, the things, thehabits, the things that you
know, again, were put in placeto protect us and to allow us to
survive, sometimes somehellscapes, some really terrible
(29:00):
things. They stop working atsome point. And I always say,
like, I don't beat up my youngerself anymore. You know, I used
to look back and be like, Whatthe fuck was I thinking? Like,
what was that all about? Youknow, I used to really be unkind
(29:21):
to the younger version ofmyself, and now I have, like, a
really deep appreciation thatthose younger parts of me, man,
they were really doing the bestthey could with what they had,
you know. And God bless Vicki,with 2k from Lawrence, she was a
little bit of a knucklehead, butI'm also really, really proud of
the fact that she held on, youknow, she didn't give up, and
(29:43):
she might have not always madegreat choices, but here we are.
You know what I mean, and ittook all that to get me here, so
I I'm grateful for it, but it'sreally important that we learn
to understand. You. Um, and workwith our own relationship to our
thoughts, our feelings and ourbehavior. And this is why, like
(30:06):
a lot of people end up going totherapy right to talk some
things out. But CBT cognitivebehavioral therapy, it's it
doesn't work for everybody. Somepeople need to do more than
talk, and some people just gettired of talking about the same
thing again and again and again.Some people need more somatic
(30:26):
work. They need to kind of getinto their body. Some people
need more kind of, like viscerallike, you know, like techniques
and tools that help them tointerrupt their brain and their
pattern when the brain starts togo down that pattern highway,
right? When the brain starts todo its little dance that it's
done 1000 times. And people whoare like, for example, I've
(30:48):
talked about this before, peoplewho are quick to anger, right?
When people say, Oh, he goesfrom zero to 60, that's a person
that's practiced being angry.
People who are anxious. You'vespent a lot of time practicing
being anxious. I'm not sayingyou're doing it consciously.
Hello, me too. Double A man,hands like I get it right?
(31:10):
People who are nervous, peoplewho overthink, people fill in
the blank, whatever yourparticular pattern is, right? We
all have our patterns and ourconditioning, and we all can now
find ways and have access totools that help us to break that
pattern. And we need to, firstof all, again, really take a
(31:34):
look at the way that we'reresponding to the people to the
whether it's the news or socialmedia or the internet, or your
family or your partner, yoursweetie, your friends, your
siblings, whatever the worldthat you have created. There's
the external world that we'reall kind of moving around in,
and then we have this internalworld. And it's the internal
(31:56):
world that you actually can dosomething about. We can't often
change what's happening outthere, but in here, the
emotional response network, as Ilike to call it, sometimes,
like, how am I going to respondto this? And we have to, first
of all, we gotta, we gotta, wegotta know ourselves. We gotta
talk to ourselves. We gotta askourselves some kinds of
(32:18):
questions, right? And we gottaknow like, what, like things
like, what emotions are reallyhard for me to navigate right?
What feelings really trigger me?What behaviors do I do to
usually calm down big feelingsright? Like, we gotta get to
know ourselves and ask ourselvesthese things, right? What are
(32:40):
the, what are the some of thestrategies I use short term to,
just like boom, patterninterrupt. And there are things
that are literally calledpattern interrupts, right, like
certain breath, breathingtechniques, EFT, Emotional
Freedom Technique, right,tapping. It's sometimes called
self hugs, right? Peter Levine'swork, bilateral stimulation, so
(33:03):
many tools, right? NLP, tools,and tools to kind of like, you
know, bust up anxiety and stufflike that. We also have to
question, right, theperspectives that we have, the
perceptions that we have, thethe the lens at which we look at
the world, and those are thethings too. It's like we have
(33:26):
certain beliefs, right? We haveevents that have happened. We
have our interpretation of thoseevents, where we assign meaning
to them and to ourselves. Westart to create beliefs that
become these stories that becomeour identities. And a lot of
times, when we're gettingtriggered, it's because some
part of us feels threatened. Ouridentity is getting threatened.
The way we view ourselves isgetting threatened. Our view of
(33:48):
the world is getting threatened.Your politics or your religion
feels threatened, which is abelief structure, right? It's
just your thoughts, youropinions, your beliefs, and when
those things feel threatened,some people don't know what to
do with that. So it's like, ifyou disagree with me, you're
bad, you're wrong. And this ishow you see people. That's where
there's why there's politicalviolence. Is that really
(34:10):
dysregulated people who have noability to let go? Like, okay,
well, how is this? How ismurdering somebody else going to
solve this problem? Mm, yeah,and you see it all. I mean, talk
about a world, right? Becausethere's a all, all a country is,
(34:31):
is a bunch of individuals. Justlike all a government is, it's a
bunch of individuals. And whenyou talk about people who have
no emotional regulation, and youthink about some of the greats,
some of the greats that havebeen murdered. When you look at
Gandhi and you look at MartinLuther King, Jr, and you look at
Bobby Kennedy and you look atJFK, they kill these people.
(34:52):
They murdered these peoplebecause they're a threat to
somebody else's ideology orsomebody else's belief system,
or they get threatened.Threatened, right? Like, what do
you mean? Why? Why is he? Why ishe working on behalf of civil
rights? Why? Why are theytalking about, like, oh, like,
the real reality of theConstitution that all men are
created equal. Oh, we'reexpected to actually act that
(35:14):
way. All the white people getthreatened, right? All the
people get scared. Like, wait,what you know. So what do they
do? Panic and we get to assertour authority and not control
them. We can't have thingschanged. Let's just like murder
people. I don't believe inviolence. I do not believe in
violence. I can't stand it. Iabhor it. Of course, that's not
(35:38):
surprising the kid of a murderedmother, right? We can talk about
that another day, but I see somuch that goes on in the world
when you just even think, what'sreally big right now online is a
bunch of people doing whatreaction videos, and even if
those videos are quote, unquotehappy or healthier. Like, oh my
(36:02):
God, listen to this person sing,or, Oh my God. Like, we love to
react, and the media loves toget you to react. You got to be
paying attention, because that'sone of the things. When you
start to slow down and checkyourself, check yourself before
you wreck yourself. When youstart to slow down and pay
(36:23):
attention to you and how you'rereacting in the world and how
you're showing up and how youthink and how kooky your own
brain is, you start to see itaround you. What a dis regulated
nervous system America fuckingis. I wish some more people
would like to do some yoga, takesome deep breaths and and find
(36:44):
some pattern interrupts thatwork for them, and do some
hypnosis and calm their freakingoveractive amygdala is, you know
what I mean? Because we justhave, we have too much going on,
and there's not enough gapbetween the emotions and the
thoughts and the behaviors.There's not enough space to
contemplate the consequences ofthe action. Do I want to be the
(37:08):
kind of person who can'texperience negative emotions? So
if I'm going to feel a negativeemotion, what? Then I have to
yell or scream or hit you orpush you down or bully you or do
something extreme. We need tolearn how to sit in the
uncomfort, you know, thediscomfort, and that's the
thing. A lot of us don't like tofeel uncomfortable. A lot of us
(37:28):
don't like to be in theuncertainty of things. We go
into the what ifs and theworries and the worst case
scenarios, right? We go allthose W's, and we don't know how
to be with ourselves and eachother and our differences. And
what's really, reallyfascinating is, is that when you
(37:53):
actually talk to people, youfind that we do actually have a
lot of things in common. And Iknow get like I get it right
now, and I've said it before,the world feels so divisive
right now. It feels so insane.It feels so divided, left and
(38:14):
right, and you know, Republicansand Democrats, the liberals and
the conservatives and all thisstuff. There is so much hate
speech. There is so I'm all forfree speech. You know, I think
that you got to be crazy tothink that you can have like I
believe 100% as a writer, as aspeaker, I believe in free
(38:35):
speech. It's one of the things Ido love about this country. I
just wish more people would notuse their free speech to do hate
speech. And a lot of people dosome hate speech and call it
something else. And it's a veryconfusing time to see a person
say hateful things, and you haveone group of people that's like,
(38:58):
oh yeah, that's just being agood conservative. That's a man
of God, and everybody else islike, what the fuck are you
talking about? This is hatespeech, right? This is what I'm
talking about. The world feelslike overwhelming and crazy. So
those of us who are like payingattention and understand that
(39:18):
there's a lot out there we can'tchange, but do understand
there's a lot that we can changein here, and if we change enough
in here and enough people changein here, I'm pointing at the
self, that's how change outthere. Ultimately happens is if
we can learn what to do with ouremotions and how to navigate
(39:38):
these suckers without reactingand then feeling the need to go
out and cause harm to others.You know, we would have, we
would have a different world,and there's so much fear. And
really, for me, it comes down toall of this. There's a reason
why I love A Course in Miraclesand why it has helped me to make
a lot of sense of the world.Yeah. And when you come down to
(40:01):
those basic tenants, you havebut two emotions, two thought
systems, love and fear. That'sit. And so much of this world
operates on fear. And then wewonder why people have such
jacked up nervous systems,right? Have just dysregulated
nervous systems and haveemotional dysregulation. And so
(40:21):
we want to be able to
help ourselves, and by helpingourselves, and also, if you're a
parent, of course, or a teacher,an educator, or whatever,
somebody works with, kids, beingable to have tools in your
toolbox that also help childrento do emotional regulation is
like, so fantastic and soimportant as well. Okay, so one
(40:44):
of the things that happens,though, is, if we don't have the
ability to regulate ouremotions, we go into what I
would call like, overstimulation or obsessive
thinking, or sometimes we callit rumination, right? So this is
just like, think of it like aloop, an obsessive thought,
(41:04):
where you just keep it's like asnake that, they say, a snake
chasing its own tail, and youjust keep thinking about a thing
and thinking about a thing andthinking about a thing, and it's
really, it's really a precarioussituation. You know? It's just
like people ruminate on it andthey keep replaying. Like, let's
say somebody at work saidsomething unkind to you or mean
(41:26):
to you. You see it like you seeit at like, it like, if you're
driving in a car with somebody,I'll go back to the work
example. But let's say you'redriving in a car with somebody,
and somebody cuts you off, andyou might have that initial
reaction, like, Jesus, right?Like, like, they almost hit you,
or they made you slam on yourbreak, or they weren't using
their blanket, or whatever'shappening, and you're just and
let's just say there's somebodyelse in the car, and you might
(41:48):
have an emotional reaction like,Oh my God. But then it passes,
it's like, okay, my hat washammering there for a second
now. I'm calmed down, orwhatever. But the other person
would be like, just keep talkingabout it and talking about like,
how dare they. Who do they thinkthey are? Don't they see this?
And if they went on and on likethis, let's say for like,
another half an hour, 45minutes, and you'd be like,
Jesus Christ. Like that was asplit second incident. It ended
(42:12):
for, you know, 10 miles ago,like you you're insisting on,
like, driving this thingforward. There were just certain
kinds of people like theythey're like, Velcro to a
negative thought, right? Theycan't let it go. They just keep
attaching it and attaching itand holding on to it and holding
on to it, like, dude, like, nothelpful, right? So that's like
an instant, kind of likerumination. But we're talking
(42:33):
there are people who will replaya snub in their mind, or replay
a thing in their mind where theyfelt disrespected or they felt
offended, or they felt like thisis like you are not you're going
against my religion, mywhatever, my whatever right. And
they ruminate on it, and theyobsess on it, and they play it
over and over and over again,and that kind of compulsive
(42:56):
thinking where you cannotinterrupt that pattern of
thought. First of all, they'renot trying to because they're
getting something from that.They're getting something from
feeling victimized, notconsciously, right? They don't
often know that they're doingit. I'm not saying it's an
excuse, but we often think abouta time when you became obsessed
(43:20):
about an ex or a situation orsomething didn't go your way,
and you just replay it andreplay it, you know. And we see
it like, I tell my clients allthe time. It's like, you know,
and it's scientifically, quote,unquote, proven. The science
says that there's a chemicalemotional wash that happens in
your brain, into your body, solike, for anger, for example,
(43:42):
Joe Dispenza talks about this.So do a lot of other
neuroscientists that it reallyonly takes about 90 seconds. And
I'm always generous and say twominutes. I'll give people like,
two minutes for a biochemicalreaction of an emotion like
anger to flush through yoursystem so you have the feeling.
You feel it. You're like, right?Like you have the emotion you
(44:04):
like, it comes up in your body,and whether it's in your gut or
your heart or your throat oryour shoulders get tense, or
whatever, your face, whereveryou hold your anger and your
rage, or how it self expressesand biochemically, it flushes
through you. And then it's done,and we see it sometimes with
crying too, right? If you ever,like, you know, you're upset
(44:26):
about something, and I'm nottalking like your loved one just
died. I'm not talking about thatlike, kind of an extreme thing,
but most everyday, kind of likethings, right? You get pissed,
you get mad, or you're crying,and you cry, and you're like,
Huh? You know, big sobs, uglycry, whatever. And then there's
that moment when you go, and youtake that breath and you go,
(44:47):
when you let it out, yournervous system starts to
regulate,
and then in your brain you go,but then they do and you just
start playing it all
over again, like I can probablymake myself cry if I make myself
think about some. Somethingreally sad, like about an
animal, or, like, whatever,right? And it's like, if we
ruminate on it, it's just likewe restart, we restart the
(45:08):
biochemical watch, we restartthe thing again and again and
again. And if we don't recognizethat we're doing it a lot of
times, this is how we end up ina victim loop, because we're not
choosing to think somethingdifferently. We're not choosing
to actively feel somethingdifferently. We're not choosing
to change our story or changeour mind, change our or shift
(45:28):
our perspective out of fear tolove. We sometimes don't
actually want to feel better.We're getting something out of
staying in that emotionaldysregulation. Again, it's not
always conscious, you know, sowe end up kind of in that loop.
So there's a bunch of differentthings that you can do. I mean,
(45:50):
even just the basics, the basicsis, first of all, is like in,
and I think it's in 12 stepprograms. They say, you know,
are you angry? I mean, are youhungry? Are you tired? Are you
lonely? Are you? You know,thirsty, like these things they
ask, like the basics of likeyour physical comfort, right?
Take care of your physicalneeds, like getting good sleep,
(46:13):
the quality of food. We knowthat the gut, the belly,
literally sends so muchinformation up to the brain. So
if you're eating nothing butshit food, right? And like, even
they say your gut biome, likeyour belly is like, where so
much serotonin is produced. Soif the belly is off, if you're
not taking care of yourself, ifyou're not staying hydrated,
you're not getting good rest,you're not moving your body,
(46:35):
you're not eating well, ifyou're not exercising, that
right there, that right there,just tips us in the wrong
direction. So getting out, goingfor a walk, getting out in
nature, getting some sun on yourface or in your eyeballs or
whatever. Right, breathe someair. Move your body. Go to
better to read all these thingswe can do again, staying off of
(46:55):
social media as much as you can,right, stay connected to the
people who love you. These arejust like the basics, things you
know, and then also, like,engage in activities that give
you a sense of purpose, thatgive you a sense of achievement,
like where you feel connected,these positive things where you
feel connected, you feelcommitted, like you again, these
things that bring you joy. Andwhether that's finding your
(47:18):
people, finding a group, findingan activity, starting a hobby,
walking your dog, spending timewith your pets. Like pets
totally release so much oxytocinin us, right? That love
chemical. It also gets producedin them when we're kind and we
give them belly rubs and we petthem and we snuggle with them
and we spend time with them. Youknow? I mean, animals are like a
(47:39):
saving grace for us in so manyways, and it's easier, right?
It's often easier to change ourthoughts than it is to change
our feelings, because a lot oftimes we're like, I just this is
how I feel. It's just how Ifeel. But we can start to
question our feelings. We canquestion our thoughts, and that
doesn't mean get rid of them,don't allow them, whatever, but
really learning how to be withyour feelings without feeling
(48:02):
like you have to do somethingabout it. We don't have to
believe every thought we think.We don't have to go in all in on
crazy. We don't have toruminate. We don't have to
whatever. But if you don't knowhow to pattern, interrupt
yourself, and one of the fastestways to do it. So you practice
Rick Hansen says this, Dr RickHanson, we practice an emotional
(48:23):
state until it becomes a neuraltrait, like in your brain, it
becomes unconscious,subconscious. You do it enough
times, like tying your shoes,brushing your teeth, driving
your car, you practice it athing, enough times it becomes
automated. So many of us areautomated for anxiety, for
depression, for meanness, foranger, for short temper for lack
(48:47):
of patience, right? We aredeeply conditioned and wired to
be particular ways. And what I'msaying is we can use that same
thing practice an emotionalstate until it becomes a neural
trait. We can practice kindness,we can practice compassion. We
can practice tolerance, mercy,forgiveness, goodness, right? We
(49:09):
can practice love, the state oflove. We can practice being who
we want to be, less reactive,more patient, better listeners.
Practice an emotional stateuntil it becomes a neural trait.
But again, we gotta start withslowing down. One of the fastest
ways that we can help ournervous system, one of the
(49:30):
fastest ways we can shift ourstate, is with a breath. And
whether you practice simplybreathing in through your nose,
fully and deeply and thenexhaling twice as long out
through your mouth with a littlebit of sound. And you probably
can't hear this, because my micwill dampen it, but just imagine
like I'm making like a like I'mwhispering, you know, when you
(49:53):
go tell somebody to quiet down,right? And just like you. You're
breathing through a straw, likenice long exhale. It's one of
the fastest ways. Thephysiological sigh is another
good breath when you breathe inthrough your nose, nice full
inhale, and then you take asecond little sip of air in, on
(50:16):
top of that, also through yournose. So it's like a double
inhale, full inhale, and then alittle fill up on top of that,
and then twice as long exhaleout through your mouth. It's one
of the fastest ways to downregulate your nervous system, of
course, is all those othertools, right? Tapping bilateral
stimulation, self hugs, likegetting yourself out of a
(50:37):
pattern of thought, move yourbody. Sometimes I'll just get
up. I'll just get up out of mychair and do some jumping jacks.
I'll get on the floor and dosome sit ups. It sounds silly,
but when I'm trying to change anemotional state dance, listen to
music, take a whiff, right? I'mnot a wicked big like, I'm not
picking on people. Meanwhile,some people are, like, really
(50:59):
into essential oils. And theywhat you know, and they like
make mixtures, and they do allthis up. I'm not one of those
people, but there are certainscents that I can like sense,
like smells that I can smellthat can really shift how I
feel. And for some people, it'slike calming lavender. For some
of us, it's like smellingpeppermint to liven yourself up,
or lemon, or whatever. The thingis, like, you gotta figure out
(51:21):
your own scent, right? Thingsthat ground you or calm you, but
really, it's just breaking thatpattern of emotion, thought,
action, reaction, right? It'slike, no, no, no. Can I find a
little space here? How can Islow down? Why do I feel like I
need to attack, defend or proveright? Why do I immediately go
into that reaction state a lotof times again? Because it's
(51:43):
patterned and conditioned. Andif we don't know our own
patterns and conditions, and youdo not know yourself, and that's
where I think so much of theproblems in the world come from.
And this is why, and I stand byit. I think the work that I do
with people in the world, andit's not about me and making me
special. It's like there are1000s of people who do the kind
(52:06):
of work that I do all around allacross the world, helping people
to know themselves and to findmore freedom, and whether that's
freedom from suffering, freedomfrom their anxiety, freedom from
their patterns, freedom fromtheir old stories, so much of
it, the way that we think, theway that we interpret, the way
(52:26):
that like, the prisons that wecreate for ourselves. And of
course, in miracles, is a linethat I love, and I'll maybe talk
about this another time. And I'mparaphrasing, but it basically
says, your chains have beenloosened. The prison door is
open. You can, like, get up andleave at any time, but we don't
even know that we've putourselves in a prison. We don't
know that we're in these mentalprisons of our thoughts and our
(52:47):
stories and our beliefs and arevery limited. That's what a
prison is. It's a small fuckingcage that we are in, and we
don't even know that the door isopen. We don't even realize how
much freedom is available to us,and the only people who go
around feeling like they need toharm or maim or be uncut, like
mean or murder people is peoplewho have created prisons of
(53:11):
hate. And the thing is, is whenyou have a prison inside of your
own mind, you are also you'reyou're not like, yeah, you're
holding the key because youthink that you're the jailer,
because everybody else is wrongand you're right, or whatever
story you're telling yourself.But if you create a prison in
your own head, you also have to,not only are you now in the
prison, you're walking aroundwith the keys, because you're
(53:33):
the prison God. Now you got toGod this story. You got to keep
this story alive, or your prisonfalls apart. You're also the
warden. You don't go home atnight, you're in the prison,
but you hold the key, and partof it is this emotional
regulation, and so many peopledon't know what to do with their
big feelings. We see it all oversocial media, where people are
(53:54):
just in the comments with theirverbal diarrhea of negativity
and attack and slander andmaking fun of other people and
attacking personally attackingpeople's looks and their body
shapes and and like people arelike out of their minds. And
yeah, maybe some of it is bots,but mostly it's people who,
(54:17):
under anonymity, anonymity, justtry to be so hateful, there's so
much fear. And I don't knowabout you guys, but one of the
reasons why I do this show isit's one of the cheapest and
it's the freest way right, toget a little love, to get a
little dose of where I'm comingfrom, using spirituality and
(54:37):
storytelling and stuff like thatto spread spiritual principles,
to spread a little more love inthe world, but really, so much
of what I do is to help peopleto have more freedom, freedom
from suffering, freedom fromshifting out of these old
stories, these old patterns thatkeep us stuck, keep us stuck in
our old ways of being, keep usseparate, keep us guilty, keep
us in fear. And it's a. Block.That's what fear is. Fear is a
(55:01):
block to love. We build theseblocks and barriers to our own
awareness of love's presence.This is what A Course in
Miracles tells us, right? So somuch of this is about dissolving
it's not so much about solvingall the it's about dissolving
them. So I hope that this hasbeen helpful to you in some way,
you know. And if this kind ofwork appeals to you and you want
(55:26):
to work one to one, I call itthe quest. That's my four month
one to one mentoring program. Ilove to work with people one to
one. And if that's not, youknow, available to you, it's not
in your budget or a time orwhatever. We also have the nest,
which is my spiritual group,mentoring program and community,
which is fantastic and amazing.It's 50 bucks a month, you know,
and you come in and you get anincredible community and an
(55:50):
opportunity to receive coaching,support, mentoring, to be seen,
to be heard, when you'renavigating this whole being
human experience, you know, andall of it, all parts of you are
welcome there, all parts of youand locally, I teach yoga and do
workshops and other stuff likethat, right? Thai Yoga, massage,
whatever. So you can find it allat Karen kenney.com if you want
(56:11):
these podcasts delivered rightto your inbox every Thursday
morning, just sign up. Go toKaren kenney.com/sign up, and
you'll get those suckersdelivered. And that's what I
have for you today. Let's notturn our feelings into felonies,
you guys. Let's get a grip.Let's get an understanding of
what's going on inside of us sothat we can make conscious
choices that represent who wetruly are, which is love. That's
(56:34):
who we are, love, and our onlygig is to spread that love, to
get better at giving andreceiving love. That's the gig,
to be the love that you are, andwhen we're reacting all over the
place and going into murder andmayhem, obviously, and it's not
just like it's those are theextreme things, but again, to
reiterate, we all in our ownlittle ways each day, murder and
(56:56):
attack and go after and causechaos in our own minds. Right?
It doesn't even mean you have totake action on it, but you're
thinking things in your own headabout yourself and others that's
not very loving. It's not veryhelpful. It's not good for your
health. It's not good for thecollective consciousness of the
world, you know? So if we canlearn how to step out of our
(57:17):
rumination and step out of thatself talk and step out of we
find that gap right between thethought, the emotion, and the
action, we can change the world.So I hope this has been helpful.
I appreciate you. Thank you somuch for listening and wherever
you go, wherever you go, pleaseleave yourself in the animals
(57:37):
and the planet and the otherpeople and the environments that
you find yourself in better thanhow you found it. Wherever you
go, may you and your energy,your presence, your love, your
emotional regulation, may it bea blessing. Bye.
Hey you guys. Welcome to theKaren Kenney show. I hope he's
doing fantastic today. If you'rewatching this, you can see my
hair is still a little wet. Ijust got out of the shower
because I just got back from arun, and one of the things you
might be like me is that there'scertain activities or certain
things that you do that, kindof, for lack of a better word,
(00:24):
it's when ideas come to you orthoughts, right? So one of the
things we know about walking andrunning and stuff like that is
that a lot of people, whenthey're doing that, it's like
the mind goes like, when I'mjust kind of doing this, like
I'm opening up my arms, like themind opens up and I'm kind of
open for business. When I run orI walk, it's like, I'm just
(00:45):
like, okay, ideas, you know.Okay. Spiritual team, feel free
to upload whatever you want meto know, or whatever you know.
So I was out on my run, and ofcourse, before that, it feels
like every single day I'm just,first of all, hi. I'm just
diving right into this. But itjust seems like every single day
we're being bombarded with moreand more acts of violence and
(01:08):
atrocities and murder and mayhemand just people just losing
their damn minds. You know whatI mean? And while I was thinking
about this, you know? I mean, Ithink it was either, I think it
was this morning that somebodyin, I think it was Michigan, you
know, basically went into achurch, a Mormon church, and was
(01:28):
like an LDS church, or whatever,and was opening fire and then
set it on on, you know,literally, like shooting, you
know, of course, more gunviolence. Hello, America. And
then it was also set thebuilding on fire, and I was just
thinking to myself, so while Iwas running, all of a sudden, I
heard this phrase in my head,and I said, Man, I'm like,
(01:50):
fucking people are out hereturning their feelings into
felonies.
And that just kind of stuck withme right, turning their feelings
into felonies. And that's kindof what I want to talk a little
bit about today. And I want tomake a clear distinction, right?
I mean, pretty much I most ofus, okay, most of us are not out
(02:12):
there setting buildings on fireor shooting people with our guns
and murdering people and harmingother people and stuff like
that, right? Those are, like,the really, the extremes. So it
can be really easy todisassociate ourselves from that
stuff and say, Well, I wouldnever do that, or I don't do
that. Like I'm not murderingpeople or attacking people or
(02:33):
whatever. But in the Course inMiracles, we kind of talk about
it like this, like anytime we'renot really having, like, loving
thoughts about our fellowbrothers and sisters, our fellow
brethren, right? Our familymembers, your Sweeties, your
siblings, your co workers,whatever. Right people on the
left, people on the right, theothers, like all the shit that
we do to anybody who's outsideof you, basically right when
(02:56):
you're not having lovingthoughts about them, it's just
like having attack thoughts ormurderous thoughts like in your
head, right? Where we make themguilty, we make them bad, right?
We basically lose our own peaceof mind because we're attacking
others all the time and blamingthem, whether it's for our own
feelings or the state of theworld or whatever. And so I
(03:17):
started to think about this, howit can be really easy to see
these people who take extrememeasures and do heinous acts and
say like, oh my god, like, Idon't do that though. I'm not
turning KK, I'm not turning myfeelings into felonies. You
might not be turning them intofelonies, but we all do this
(03:37):
thing where we let our feelings,if we do not know how to
emotionally regulate ourselves,we let our feelings treat us
like little puppets. We let ourfeelings be these little
dictators that boss us aroundand quote, unquote, make us I'm
doing little air quotes, make usfeel things, or make us think
(03:59):
things, or make us do things,and then we're just like, Yeah,
I don't know what happened, youknow? So I want to talk a little
bit about this so that ourfeelings don't turn into
felonies, so that we learn howto kind of just like, become a
little more emotionallyregulated. And we can't do that
unless we kind of talk about,like, what, what is, what is
emotional regulation. And so I'mjust, you can Google it, but
(04:24):
I'll just save you the problem,because I've Googled it, you
know, a gazillion times over theyears, like whenever I'm trying
to learn something really well.And I'll just put it like this.
So emotional regulation is saidto be, it's a term that we use
to genuinely describe a person'sability to effectively, like
manage their emotions, or torespond to when they're having
(04:46):
an emotional experience. So forexample, something happens in
your life. Maybe it's somethingunexpected, maybe it's something
big, maybe it's somethingtraumatic, but maybe it's
something small, and what isyour ability to respond? Respond
and to effectively manage howyou're responding when you're
having an emotional experience,and we can think of it easily,
(05:08):
is like, when people talk about,like, Oh, I got triggered,
right? Oh, they pushed mybutton. I got triggered, right?
So you're having a responseright to an emotional
experience, and you're justlike, Oh my God. Like, I
snapped, or I just, like, lostmy patience, or whatever. So
when people are doing thesereally horrific things, a lot of
times it's because they'reruminating long term, and we'll
(05:30):
talk about that in a moment. Butwe also can hold on to our
gripes and our grievances andour grudges, and we can ruminate
on things too, but sometimeswe're just so woundly tight,
like, we're like, like, woundreally tight because we stay in
a space of chronic stress orchronic overwhelm, or we don't
(05:51):
really know how to feel ouremotions, right? We're not, not
everybody is super emotional,emotionally intelligence, not a
lot of people. And I ask thisall the time in the nest, and I
asked this with my clients andpeople that I know, like whoever
saw sat your ass down and waslike, Hey, this is what you do
when a big emotion comes up.This is how you feel your
(06:11):
feelings. I don't know aboutyou, but Gen X kids, nobody was
teaching us how to do that shit,right? We had to figure it out
the hard way. We had to go andread some books on our own. We
had to, we had to get our ass incrumble, to figure out, like, oh
yeah, maybe that wasn't a goodresponse to that. Maybe there
was a better way for me to kindof respond to whatever was going
(06:32):
on, what that person said, whatthat person did. Okay, so here's
the thing, can you affect,effectively manage and respond
to your own emotions, or anemotional experience or
something that is coming up,okay? And so there's healthy
coping mechanisms for when youhave, like some stress come up,
(06:54):
or a feeling come up, or a bigemotion come up. And I just
mentioned one of them, I said,Oh, I was out for a walk. I was
out for a run. Walking andrunning is so good, first of
all, for your brain. It's sogood for your nervous system and
just exercise in general. Butit's doing more than just
working out your muscles. It'sgiving you an opportunity to
shift your perspective, tobroaden out your perspective,
(07:17):
especially when you go out intolike nature, that very calming
and grounding energy, to getsome sunlight in your eyes, to
get some fresh air right, tomove your body, to calm your
brain, to calm your nervoussystem, and to, you know, be
able to shift out of just fovealvision of like, just staring,
like focusing on your screen oryour phone. And then, if you're
(07:38):
watching this, you can see, I'mbringing my hands in close to my
eyes. I'm like, limiting myperipheral vision, right? I'm
making it very focused. And thenwhen you go outside now, into
nature, out into the sun, or outinto the world, it's like, and
it just like, opens up. So weliterally get a shift and how
we're visualizing, a shift kindof in how we're feeling. And
(07:58):
most people, not only don't knowwhat they're feeling. They don't
know why they're reacting theway that they're reacting.
Right? They have a subconsciousthing going on. So one of the
biggest first things for me, Idon't, I can't say what the
therapist is going to say. Butone of the biggest first things
for me is I have to be aware,first and foremost, that I'm
(08:20):
having some sort of a responseor a reaction, right? If we're
not self aware enough, if wedon't slow down enough in our
life consistently to be able toget a grip and a handle, to be
able to see ourselves clearlyand how we respond to the world
and to the people around us intocertain situations, if we're not
(08:43):
self aware, because we're alwaysjust staying wicked busy and
distracting ourselves and nottrying to feel things or think
about things or go deep, ifwe're just like floating around
and not even floating around,maybe we're just like, just
always staying busy, or alwayslike fucking on our phones or
always distracting and Notwanting to feel things. How are
we ever going to know when we'rein it? Because if we don't, then
(09:05):
we just normalize it. We justnormalize our being cranky or
being short with people or beingpassive aggressive or being
whatever. And we said to tellourselves a story like, oh,
that's just how I am. No, no,no, no. So number one is we've I
should go back even more thanthan be self aware. You gotta
slow down that. That's how selfawareness is actually going to
(09:27):
happen. First and foremost. Youhear me talk about it all the
time, and it's one of the firstthings that I tell my clients,
is we gotta learn how to, like,dial things down a little bit.
We need to slow down. Slow downyour breathing, slow down your
thinking, slow down your body alittle bit. That doesn't mean
that you can't have times whenyou're moving fast and you're in
a groove and you're doing shit,but we have to step out of the
(09:50):
normal pace of the world thatjust drives so much fear and
separation and division andconsumption and competitiveness
and otherness. Yes, we gottaslow down and kind of step out
of that river of like, alwaysmoving, moving, moving, moving,
moving. You know what I mean?Even the tides, like, even the
ocean has tides where it rollsin and then it rolls out. You
(10:16):
know what I'm saying, there areshifts, and we need the shift.
We need to be able to down,shift and slow down, so we can
take a good Gander, so we cantake a look around, so that we
can sit with the feeling, so wecan recognize that we're having
a thought that is not going toend well if we insist on staying
with that train of thinking. Andif you're feeling what I'm
(10:37):
saying, like double A man hands,if you get it right, and if
you're somebody who who is likea shock, and you're like, Oh, if
I stop, I'm going to die, right?Like, no, no, if you don't stop,
you're going to die probablyfaster. So here's the thing
number one, we get to slow down.We got to be willing to take a
look at ourselves and recognize,you know, hey, I'm kind of a
little short with people lately.I'm feeling a little stressed
(10:59):
out of my mind. I'm findingmyself more anxious, I'm
whatever. So we gotta be selfaware. We gotta know yourself,
right? You got to know yourself,and you gotta understand what
kind of emotions often come upfor you to how can I recognize
when I'm feeling a particularthing so many people, and
(11:20):
whether it's due to trauma orthe pace of life, or they
weren't taught, or 1000 otherreasons, they don't even know
what they're thinking andfeeling half the time. I've seen
it time and time again as a yogateacher over 25 years, right?
And you say to somebody, well,can you feel that? And they kind
of look at you, where can youfeel that? How does it feel like
when I ask these questions inclass, for some people, you can
(11:43):
see it's really hard for them,right, that interoception, that
like internal experience forthem to be able to report it
back, right? It doesn't comenaturally to everybody. And this
isn't making fun of anybody thatmight struggle with that or find
it hard, but it is an invitationto get curious about it, to
really kind of notice yourinternal experience, so that you
(12:05):
can notice the kinds of thingsor people or places or things
that like do evoke right, thatare evocative, that do evoke,
like big feelings of in you, orwhat like people or places or
smells or whatever that make youfeel, or that that happen, and
then you, you know you feelanxious or scared or worried or
(12:27):
overwhelmed, or some places inpeople, spaces might be happy
places, they might calm youright down. They might feel
really welcoming and inclusiveand grounding, and you feel seen
and loved and heard and all thatstuff, right? All that good
stuff.
But if we don't learn how todeal with our emotions, and if
(12:48):
we don't, first of all, we gottaslow down, then you gotta be
aware, and then you gotta bewilling, right? You gotta be
willing to feel some things andto take a look at some things,
because a lot of people areemotionally dysregulated, and
they don't know it. So ifemotional regulation is our
ability to effectively manageour emotions and to be able to
(13:10):
respond in what I would call ahealthy way or a sane way, to an
emotional experience, emotionaldysreg dysregulation is when we
have an inability to use like,good or healthy strategies or
responses, if we don't know howto diffuse like negative
(13:33):
emotions, like everyday things,moderate things, not even
extreme things, Right? If we'renot able to moderate everyday
emotions or diffuse them ordissolve them, as I like to say,
right? A lot of times peoplelike, oh, I have this problem
like I have to solve. And I'mlike, well, it's more about
dissolving it, right? It's moreabout like, dissolving it,
(13:56):
removing removing it so much asI need to fix it, right? So when
we have emotional dysregulation,we do not have the ability to
put healthy strategies intoplace. And instead, a lot of
times, we just go like, reallybig. You'll start to feel like
intense emotions or overwhelmingemotions or negative emotions,
(14:18):
and they just feel big andunmanageable, like literally
think about that and thesethings when you have a big
emotion consistently over timeand you have no support now, of
course, granted, sometimes thereis mental health issues at play.
We see it time and time again inmass shootings and people who
use guns for violence againstpeople and just walk into a
(14:40):
random place and just stopmurdering strangers, right? It's
fucking awful. It's horrifying.And these are people sometimes,
yes, that needed mental healthintervention. They needed mental
health care. But we also justhave a lot of people who don't
know how to manage theiremotions. They don't they
haven't gone to therapy. They'renot. Even aware that the way
(15:01):
that they think is is not likeright or healthy or good or
helpful to them or to obviouslyothers, right? And if we're not
able to use emotional regulationstrategies, if they're not
taught to us, or if we don'tself recognize, I have a
problem, right? I am woundreally tight. I'm very reactive.
(15:22):
I get angry really easy. I haveno patience. I am like, you
know, zero to 60. When they saythat I can go from zero to 60
really fast with anger orreaction, or whatever, this
defensiveness is attacking,right? It's not really helpful.
It's not really healthy. We allknow this, but what happens is,
(15:42):
and this is one of the things wedon't often talk about, is that
the experience of emotions isnot bad. It is simply human. We
are human being. We havereceptors in our bodies, right?
We have pain receptors. We canfeel temperature, whatever we
are sensory creatures, we cankind of clock our environment,
(16:04):
right? Like we feel things.Emotions are not per se bad
things. They're just part of thehuman experience. And sometimes
the emotion is going to be ajoyous emotion, a happy emotion,
a feel good, quote, unquote,feel good emotion, right? We
feel loved, we feel accepted, wefeel valuable, we feel seen, we
(16:27):
feel heard, we feel like wematter. We feel whatever,
patient, peaceful, calm,curious, compassionate, all
these things, right, beautiful,great. But sometimes we have
emotions and we labeled them aslike, bad, anger, fear, guilt,
shame, blame, attack, jealousy,envy, all the things right? And
(16:49):
sometimes, if we don't know howto regulate when those emotions
like show up in the body, showup in our mind, when we have a
visceral reaction in the body,and then we have this thought
system like going on in our headof fear, which, you know, just
makes everything feel bigger. Itexacerbates everything. So a lot
of times, what it is is it's notthe emotion itself, and it's not
(17:13):
even the thought itself. It'sthe interpretation that we give
to the emotion, even labeling itlike good or bad, I don't think
anger is a bad emotion. I thinkit's just part of the
kaleidoscope in the you know, ifyou look at like a color wheel,
you know, I just think like, ohyeah. Like, anger is on this
color wheel. It is available tome. It lives inside of me, and
(17:38):
some people see it as bad to me,anger isn't bad unless you start
inflicting your inability tocope or deal with or manage your
own anger onto others, human,animal, the planet, etc,
yourself, right? That's whereself harm and self injury comes
in. People get get all thesefeelings they don't know what to
do with them, and they don'twant to inflict them on other
(18:00):
people, but they inflict them onthemselves. And that's where we
see things like cutting and selfharm, and, you know, addiction
and abuse of alcohol and abuseof drugs, and like, 1000 other
ways that we can harm ourselves.You know what I mean. And so we
have these emotional cycles thathappen that aren't very loving
and aren't always very kind, andthey're sometimes called like a
(18:23):
vicious emotional cycle. And thething is, is like when we have
emotions that we don't know howto regulate, we start to have
thoughts about them. We start totell stories, right? We
interpret what we think theymean, and we start to tell these
stories, and we start to getthese beliefs, and we start to
have these thoughts we ruminateon, the thoughts, the language,
(18:43):
the words, the self speak, theway we talk to ourselves. And
it's those things that thencreate behavior. So sometimes we
get a feeling, or we get athought and then a feeling. And
if we ruminate on these things,if we have no way to break the
pattern of these thoughts, theseemotions and our response to
them, they can often lead tobehaviors where we act out. And
(19:06):
there's this little kind of likecycle wheel that I've seen
before. I'll just break it downfor you. How they they say that.
They say these things, kind oflike, go, go down. And in one
example that they give is like,let's say that, just to give you
set it in context. So let's sayyou have a friend. Let's call it
whether you're in high school orit's work. So just imagine, for
(19:28):
a younger kid, it could beschool, and for an adult, it
could be work, and you have afriend. And I saw this on
Cornell research. They kind ofbroke this down. That's where
I'm getting this particularthing from. So and they say,
okay, so you have a friend, andthey walk by you in the hallway
and they don't acknowledge you,and immediately what happens is
(19:48):
you start to have like a rapidfire set of thoughts and
feelings, and it might be likeyou feel confused, or you feel
disappointed, or you feel angry,like, why are they dissing me?
Like, why aren't they. Payingattention to me, like, what did
I do wrong? Or are they? Is she?Are they mad at me because of
this thing I did or didn't dofrom a few weeks ago? Right? I'm
sure it's nothing. I'm sure I'mjust being over sensitive. But
(20:11):
like, maybe she's in a hurry,but still, right? And all it
takes is one person just walkingpast you, and then all of a
sudden, we're off and running,right? The brain is off and
running. The emotions come up inthe body. Maybe we feel
embarrassed, we feel a littleashamed, like, what they didn't
see me, like, what's that about?We start to write a story, we
start to get pissed off, andthere's this initial kind of,
(20:33):
like flood of feelings, and it'slike one after another, like a
bizarre little parade, right? Ofcourse, miracles is that great
line, right? And if you can justsit back and watch it like a
parade, like not take itpersonally, just notice. And
this is where it goes back tostep one. Slow down. Step two,
(20:54):
self aware. Be aware. And ifyou're able to just pull back
and notice this bizarre littleparade of thoughts that, like,
floats on by and you don't gethooked by them. You don't get
triggered by them. You don'tfeel like you have to do
anything. You just notice, like,wow, look at my brain doing that
thing, right? Like, look at,look at my kooky monkey's brain.
Like, doing that thing andwriting all these stories when I
(21:15):
don't even know, because Ihaven't even talked to my
friend, I don't even know ifthey saw me. Why am I assuming
the worst, right? Why am Iassuming the worst of my friend?
What if something did go down?We'll just have a conversation
about it or whatever, right? Andwhat happens is, though, we
start to have these thoughts inthese feelings, and then we feel
like we got to do somethingabout them. Well, I'm going to
(21:37):
text them and I'm going
to be like, That was rude, orI'm going to like, da, da, da,
da, da, da, da.
Well, the action only comes fromthis place of feeling like that,
like again, you get thesethoughts. So again, your
feelings, your thoughts and yourbehaviors, your actions, they're
all connected. And if we don'thave ways of interrupting the
pattern when we're dysregulated,we might do some shit that we're
(22:01):
going to regret, and we can seehow. And again, I'm not inside
the minds of mass shooters andstuff like that, but most
people, that's not like a onething happens and they snap.
Usually it's something that hasbeen building up and building up
and building up. And whetherthat is a thought system of
hate, or whether that's anincident where they got like, I
(22:22):
think I go back to like, when,you know, people talk about,
quote, unquote, that phrase of,like, going postal. Because the
big thing like, when, when theguy shot did a mass shooting at,
like, you know, the at a postoffice or whatever, and that's
where that whole going postallike, came from, right? And it's
like, so who knows if it's justan incident that, like, Finally,
(22:45):
like snaps somebody, butusually, my understanding is
it's like something that hasbeen built up over time, and
whether that's an ideology, orsomebody got radicalized, or
somebody was bullied, orsomebody, again, has mental
illness issues, but but a piecein all of this is that there's
the inability to emotionallyregulate, right? So here's the
(23:05):
pattern that they talk about itlike this. So number one,
there's a situation, and this iswhere the trigger happens, and
whether it triggers a problem,like you're criticized at work
or again, somebody walks pastyou in the hallway and it snubs
you, or ignores you, orwhatever. The thing is, there's
a trigger and the situation,quote, unquote, the situation.
(23:25):
Slash the trigger. It then, nowgoes to your thoughts, okay? And
it's like, so what's goingthrough my head? What are the
words I'm using? What's thelanguage I'm using? What is the
the self talk? This is me kindof building off it, right? Like,
so what are the kind of thingsare you thinking to yourself,
and it might be, oh, thatperson's an asshole, but it
might also be, I must not begood enough, I'm not worthy, I'm
(23:48):
not lovable. There's somethingwrong with me. It's all my
fault. I'm bad, I'm wrong. I'mnot loved, etc, etc, right? And
then this, obviously, nowthey're in different schools of
thought. Some people will saythe body speaks first, the body
has the emotion, and then itsends a thought up. Other people
think it's from the top down.The thought goes first. And I'm
(24:10):
just telling you what this modelsays. So you have the situation,
the trigger, something happens,then you have a thought about
it, right? The self talk, thelanguage you use, whatever. And
then you have your emotions. Andthis is like, Well, how do I
feel? And then this is when Istart to go, Well, how do I
feel? Do I feel anxious? Do Ifeel scared? Am I angry? Am I
pissed? Do I feel worthless? DoI feel exhaust? Like, what's
(24:33):
going on? Like, how do I feel?And those feelings, how I feel,
and that's what this wholeepisode is about. Often will be,
how do I react? What am I goingto do about it? Am I going to
create a problem? Am I going toisolate myself? Am I going to
avoid contact with other people?Am I going to become aggressive?
(24:56):
Am I going to go pick up a gun?Am I going to if x, y and. Z
right? And this place betweenthe emotion right, being able to
like, have a feeling and notfeel like you need to do
anything about it. Can Iregulate my nervous system? Can
I sit with myself? Can I kind oftalk to myself and shift my
(25:18):
perspective, right? So then youhave the how do I react, my
behavior, what do I do? And thenwhat you do, the next step is
what I call they call it Mybody's physical reactions, like
after I do something about it.How do I feel? Do I feel tired?
Do I have a loss of appetite? Icall this step how that feels.
(25:41):
It's the reaction to myreaction. So I went and did this
thing, and now I feel guilty,and now I feel bad, and now I'm
in this victim lube of like, Ohmy God. Now this is gonna
happen. And I start to getanxious, I start to get scared,
I start to beat myself up. Idouble down and make them twice
as wrong. See what you made medo, quote, unquote, nobody makes
(26:01):
you feel or do anything. If morepeople knew this, we'd be in a
totally different world. Butthen we start to blame the other
people, right? And then we go toright back around to how I
continue to think about thissituation, that other person and
myself. So that loop comes rightback to my thoughts about it.
And then, if you don't have away to do something about this
(26:24):
little circle of hell thatyou're kind of putting yourself
in, we've got to be able topause. We've got to be I'm doing
a little time out with my hands.We've got to be able to hit time
out. We got to be able to, likewhen Viktor Frankl right man,
search for meaning. When ViktorFrankl talks about, in between
the stimulus and response.There's a space. There's this
moment, right? And if you don'tknow how to hit pause and take a
(26:50):
deep breath or to slow down yourthinking or pump the brakes,
this is how we end up doing shitthat we regret. This is how we
end up doing shit and sayingthings we can't take back. This
is how people end up in prisonbecause they have no emotional
regulation, and they turn theirfeelings into felonies. Well,
(27:12):
I'll show you. I'll get you.I'll do this. Just you wait, and
this becomes really deeplypatterned over time. And unless
something changes to shift thecycle, it's like you just keep
getting into this cycle. And itsays here, it's easy to see how
even a small event can cascadeinto something hugely, hugely
(27:34):
triggering. So then, if you takea person, right, if you take a
person who has experienced a lotof trauma as a child, a lot of
drama, just basically cruised onin life, and I don't mean cruise
like it was easy, but just kindof operated in the world all on
(27:55):
trauma responses, like,literally just surviving,
holding on. I'm like, whiteknuckling it right now. Like,
just think of a guy like doingsome think about the people who,
like climb. This is what I kindof think about emotionally,
that, you know, the climb is whoclimb without clipping in,
without ropes, and they're onthese really fucking, like steep
cliffs, and they just have, theyfind the tiniest little edge to
(28:18):
hold on to, the tiniest littlegrip with their fingers. I'm
kind of doing this thing with myhands right now, like they're
gripping this wall of granite.And the slightest little thing
can be disaster. It can end indisaster. Well, if we've been
white knuckling in our wholetime and just holding on by
those fingertips, it does nottake much to knock us off. And
(28:39):
at some point, those oldstrategies that kept us alive
and kept us safe, those old waysof being, those patterns, those
conditioning, the things, thehabits, the things that you
know, again, were put in placeto protect us and to allow us to
survive, sometimes somehellscapes, some really terrible
(29:00):
things. They stop working atsome point. And I always say,
like, I don't beat up my youngerself anymore. You know, I used
to look back and be like, Whatthe fuck was I thinking? Like,
what was that all about? Youknow, I used to really be unkind
(29:21):
to the younger version ofmyself, and now I have, like, a
really deep appreciation thatthose younger parts of me, man,
they were really doing the bestthey could with what they had,
you know. And God bless Vicki,with 2k from Lawrence, she was a
little bit of a knucklehead, butI'm also really, really proud of
the fact that she held on, youknow, she didn't give up, and
(29:43):
she might have not always madegreat choices, but here we are.
You know what I mean, and ittook all that to get me here, so
I I'm grateful for it, but it'sreally important that we learn
to understand. You. Um, and workwith our own relationship to our
thoughts, our feelings and ourbehavior. And this is why, like
(30:06):
a lot of people end up going totherapy right to talk some
things out. But CBT cognitivebehavioral therapy, it's it
doesn't work for everybody. Somepeople need to do more than
talk, and some people just gettired of talking about the same
thing again and again and again.Some people need more somatic
(30:26):
work. They need to kind of getinto their body. Some people
need more kind of, like viscerallike, you know, like techniques
and tools that help them tointerrupt their brain and their
pattern when the brain starts togo down that pattern highway,
right? When the brain starts todo its little dance that it's
done 1000 times. And people whoare like, for example, I've
(30:48):
talked about this before, peoplewho are quick to anger, right?
When people say, Oh, he goesfrom zero to 60, that's a person
that's practiced being angry.
People who are anxious. You'vespent a lot of time practicing
being anxious. I'm not sayingyou're doing it consciously.
Hello, me too. Double A man,hands like I get it right?
(31:10):
People who are nervous, peoplewho overthink, people fill in
the blank, whatever yourparticular pattern is, right? We
all have our patterns and ourconditioning, and we all can now
find ways and have access totools that help us to break that
pattern. And we need to, firstof all, again, really take a
(31:34):
look at the way that we'reresponding to the people to the
whether it's the news or socialmedia or the internet, or your
family or your partner, yoursweetie, your friends, your
siblings, whatever the worldthat you have created. There's
the external world that we'reall kind of moving around in,
and then we have this internalworld. And it's the internal
(31:56):
world that you actually can dosomething about. We can't often
change what's happening outthere, but in here, the
emotional response network, as Ilike to call it, sometimes,
like, how am I going to respondto this? And we have to, first
of all, we gotta, we gotta, wegotta know ourselves. We gotta
talk to ourselves. We gotta askourselves some kinds of
(32:18):
questions, right? And we gottaknow like, what, like things
like, what emotions are reallyhard for me to navigate right?
What feelings really trigger me?What behaviors do I do to
usually calm down big feelingsright? Like, we gotta get to
know ourselves and ask ourselvesthese things, right? What are
(32:40):
the, what are the some of thestrategies I use short term to,
just like boom, patterninterrupt. And there are things
that are literally calledpattern interrupts, right, like
certain breath, breathingtechniques, EFT, Emotional
Freedom Technique, right,tapping. It's sometimes called
self hugs, right? Peter Levine'swork, bilateral stimulation, so
(33:03):
many tools, right? NLP, tools,and tools to kind of like, you
know, bust up anxiety and stufflike that. We also have to
question, right, theperspectives that we have, the
perceptions that we have, thethe the lens at which we look at
the world, and those are thethings too. It's like we have
(33:26):
certain beliefs, right? We haveevents that have happened. We
have our interpretation of thoseevents, where we assign meaning
to them and to ourselves. Westart to create beliefs that
become these stories that becomeour identities. And a lot of
times, when we're gettingtriggered, it's because some
part of us feels threatened. Ouridentity is getting threatened.
The way we view ourselves isgetting threatened. Our view of
(33:48):
the world is getting threatened.Your politics or your religion
feels threatened, which is abelief structure, right? It's
just your thoughts, youropinions, your beliefs, and when
those things feel threatened,some people don't know what to
do with that. So it's like, ifyou disagree with me, you're
bad, you're wrong. And this ishow you see people. That's where
there's why there's politicalviolence. Is that really
(34:10):
dysregulated people who have noability to let go? Like, okay,
well, how is this? How ismurdering somebody else going to
solve this problem? Mm, yeah,and you see it all. I mean, talk
about a world, right? Becausethere's a all, all a country is,
(34:31):
is a bunch of individuals. Justlike all a government is, it's a
bunch of individuals. And whenyou talk about people who have
no emotional regulation, and youthink about some of the greats,
some of the greats that havebeen murdered. When you look at
Gandhi and you look at MartinLuther King, Jr, and you look at
Bobby Kennedy and you look atJFK, they kill these people.
(34:52):
They murdered these peoplebecause they're a threat to
somebody else's ideology orsomebody else's belief system,
or they get threatened.Threatened, right? Like, what do
you mean? Why? Why is he? Why ishe working on behalf of civil
rights? Why? Why are theytalking about, like, oh, like,
the real reality of theConstitution that all men are
created equal. Oh, we'reexpected to actually act that
(35:14):
way. All the white people getthreatened, right? All the
people get scared. Like, wait,what you know. So what do they
do? Panic and we get to assertour authority and not control
them. We can't have thingschanged. Let's just like murder
people. I don't believe inviolence. I do not believe in
violence. I can't stand it. Iabhor it. Of course, that's not
(35:38):
surprising the kid of a murderedmother, right? We can talk about
that another day, but I see somuch that goes on in the world
when you just even think, what'sreally big right now online is a
bunch of people doing whatreaction videos, and even if
those videos are quote, unquotehappy or healthier. Like, oh my
(36:02):
God, listen to this person sing,or, Oh my God. Like, we love to
react, and the media loves toget you to react. You got to be
paying attention, because that'sone of the things. When you
start to slow down and checkyourself, check yourself before
you wreck yourself. When youstart to slow down and pay
(36:23):
attention to you and how you'rereacting in the world and how
you're showing up and how youthink and how kooky your own
brain is, you start to see itaround you. What a dis regulated
nervous system America fuckingis. I wish some more people
would like to do some yoga, takesome deep breaths and and find
(36:44):
some pattern interrupts thatwork for them, and do some
hypnosis and calm their freakingoveractive amygdala is, you know
what I mean? Because we justhave, we have too much going on,
and there's not enough gapbetween the emotions and the
thoughts and the behaviors.There's not enough space to
contemplate the consequences ofthe action. Do I want to be the
(37:08):
kind of person who can'texperience negative emotions? So
if I'm going to feel a negativeemotion, what? Then I have to
yell or scream or hit you orpush you down or bully you or do
something extreme. We need tolearn how to sit in the
uncomfort, you know, thediscomfort, and that's the
thing. A lot of us don't like tofeel uncomfortable. A lot of us
(37:28):
don't like to be in theuncertainty of things. We go
into the what ifs and theworries and the worst case
scenarios, right? We go allthose W's, and we don't know how
to be with ourselves and eachother and our differences. And
what's really, reallyfascinating is, is that when you
(37:53):
actually talk to people, youfind that we do actually have a
lot of things in common. And Iknow get like I get it right
now, and I've said it before,the world feels so divisive
right now. It feels so insane.It feels so divided, left and
(38:14):
right, and you know, Republicansand Democrats, the liberals and
the conservatives and all thisstuff. There is so much hate
speech. There is so I'm all forfree speech. You know, I think
that you got to be crazy tothink that you can have like I
believe 100% as a writer, as aspeaker, I believe in free
(38:35):
speech. It's one of the things Ido love about this country. I
just wish more people would notuse their free speech to do hate
speech. And a lot of people dosome hate speech and call it
something else. And it's a veryconfusing time to see a person
say hateful things, and you haveone group of people that's like,
(38:58):
oh yeah, that's just being agood conservative. That's a man
of God, and everybody else islike, what the fuck are you
talking about? This is hatespeech, right? This is what I'm
talking about. The world feelslike overwhelming and crazy. So
those of us who are like payingattention and understand that
(39:18):
there's a lot out there we can'tchange, but do understand
there's a lot that we can changein here, and if we change enough
in here and enough people changein here, I'm pointing at the
self, that's how change outthere. Ultimately happens is if
we can learn what to do with ouremotions and how to navigate
(39:38):
these suckers without reactingand then feeling the need to go
out and cause harm to others.You know, we would have, we
would have a different world,and there's so much fear. And
really, for me, it comes down toall of this. There's a reason
why I love A Course in Miraclesand why it has helped me to make
a lot of sense of the world.Yeah. And when you come down to
(40:01):
those basic tenants, you havebut two emotions, two thought
systems, love and fear. That'sit. And so much of this world
operates on fear. And then wewonder why people have such
jacked up nervous systems,right? Have just dysregulated
nervous systems and haveemotional dysregulation. And so
(40:21):
we want to be able to
help ourselves, and by helpingourselves, and also, if you're a
parent, of course, or a teacher,an educator, or whatever,
somebody works with, kids, beingable to have tools in your
toolbox that also help childrento do emotional regulation is
like, so fantastic and soimportant as well. Okay, so one
(40:44):
of the things that happens,though, is, if we don't have the
ability to regulate ouremotions, we go into what I
would call like, overstimulation or obsessive
thinking, or sometimes we callit rumination, right? So this is
just like, think of it like aloop, an obsessive thought,
(41:04):
where you just keep it's like asnake that, they say, a snake
chasing its own tail, and youjust keep thinking about a thing
and thinking about a thing andthinking about a thing, and it's
really, it's really a precarioussituation. You know? It's just
like people ruminate on it andthey keep replaying. Like, let's
say somebody at work saidsomething unkind to you or mean
(41:26):
to you. You see it like you seeit at like, it like, if you're
driving in a car with somebody,I'll go back to the work
example. But let's say you'redriving in a car with somebody,
and somebody cuts you off, andyou might have that initial
reaction, like, Jesus, right?Like, like, they almost hit you,
or they made you slam on yourbreak, or they weren't using
their blanket, or whatever'shappening, and you're just and
let's just say there's somebodyelse in the car, and you might
(41:48):
have an emotional reaction like,Oh my God. But then it passes,
it's like, okay, my hat washammering there for a second
now. I'm calmed down, orwhatever. But the other person
would be like, just keep talkingabout it and talking about like,
how dare they. Who do they thinkthey are? Don't they see this?
And if they went on and on likethis, let's say for like,
another half an hour, 45minutes, and you'd be like,
Jesus Christ. Like that was asplit second incident. It ended
(42:12):
for, you know, 10 miles ago,like you you're insisting on,
like, driving this thingforward. There were just certain
kinds of people like theythey're like, Velcro to a
negative thought, right? Theycan't let it go. They just keep
attaching it and attaching itand holding on to it and holding
on to it, like, dude, like, nothelpful, right? So that's like
an instant, kind of likerumination. But we're talking
(42:33):
there are people who will replaya snub in their mind, or replay
a thing in their mind where theyfelt disrespected or they felt
offended, or they felt like thisis like you are not you're going
against my religion, mywhatever, my whatever right. And
they ruminate on it, and theyobsess on it, and they play it
over and over and over again,and that kind of compulsive
(42:56):
thinking where you cannotinterrupt that pattern of
thought. First of all, they'renot trying to because they're
getting something from that.They're getting something from
feeling victimized, notconsciously, right? They don't
often know that they're doingit. I'm not saying it's an
excuse, but we often think abouta time when you became obsessed
(43:20):
about an ex or a situation orsomething didn't go your way,
and you just replay it andreplay it, you know. And we see
it like, I tell my clients allthe time. It's like, you know,
and it's scientifically, quote,unquote, proven. The science
says that there's a chemicalemotional wash that happens in
your brain, into your body, solike, for anger, for example,
(43:42):
Joe Dispenza talks about this.So do a lot of other
neuroscientists that it reallyonly takes about 90 seconds. And
I'm always generous and say twominutes. I'll give people like,
two minutes for a biochemicalreaction of an emotion like
anger to flush through yoursystem so you have the feeling.
You feel it. You're like, right?Like you have the emotion you
(44:04):
like, it comes up in your body,and whether it's in your gut or
your heart or your throat oryour shoulders get tense, or
whatever, your face, whereveryou hold your anger and your
rage, or how it self expressesand biochemically, it flushes
through you. And then it's done,and we see it sometimes with
crying too, right? If you ever,like, you know, you're upset
(44:26):
about something, and I'm nottalking like your loved one just
died. I'm not talking about thatlike, kind of an extreme thing,
but most everyday, kind of likethings, right? You get pissed,
you get mad, or you're crying,and you cry, and you're like,
Huh? You know, big sobs, uglycry, whatever. And then there's
that moment when you go, and youtake that breath and you go,
(44:47):
when you let it out, yournervous system starts to
regulate,
and then in your brain you go,but then they do and you just
start playing it all
over again, like I can probablymake myself cry if I make myself
think about some. Somethingreally sad, like about an
animal, or, like, whatever,right? And it's like, if we
ruminate on it, it's just likewe restart, we restart the
(45:08):
biochemical watch, we restartthe thing again and again and
again. And if we don't recognizethat we're doing it a lot of
times, this is how we end up ina victim loop, because we're not
choosing to think somethingdifferently. We're not choosing
to actively feel somethingdifferently. We're not choosing
to change our story or changeour mind, change our or shift
(45:28):
our perspective out of fear tolove. We sometimes don't
actually want to feel better.We're getting something out of
staying in that emotionaldysregulation. Again, it's not
always conscious, you know, sowe end up kind of in that loop.
So there's a bunch of differentthings that you can do. I mean,
(45:50):
even just the basics, the basicsis, first of all, is like in,
and I think it's in 12 stepprograms. They say, you know,
are you angry? I mean, are youhungry? Are you tired? Are you
lonely? Are you? You know,thirsty, like these things they
ask, like the basics of likeyour physical comfort, right?
Take care of your physicalneeds, like getting good sleep,
(46:13):
the quality of food. We knowthat the gut, the belly,
literally sends so muchinformation up to the brain. So
if you're eating nothing butshit food, right? And like, even
they say your gut biome, likeyour belly is like, where so
much serotonin is produced. Soif the belly is off, if you're
not taking care of yourself, ifyou're not staying hydrated,
you're not getting good rest,you're not moving your body,
(46:35):
you're not eating well, ifyou're not exercising, that
right there, that right there,just tips us in the wrong
direction. So getting out, goingfor a walk, getting out in
nature, getting some sun on yourface or in your eyeballs or
whatever. Right, breathe someair. Move your body. Go to
better to read all these thingswe can do again, staying off of
(46:55):
social media as much as you can,right, stay connected to the
people who love you. These arejust like the basics, things you
know, and then also, like,engage in activities that give
you a sense of purpose, thatgive you a sense of achievement,
like where you feel connected,these positive things where you
feel connected, you feelcommitted, like you again, these
things that bring you joy. Andwhether that's finding your
(47:18):
people, finding a group, findingan activity, starting a hobby,
walking your dog, spending timewith your pets. Like pets
totally release so much oxytocinin us, right? That love
chemical. It also gets producedin them when we're kind and we
give them belly rubs and we petthem and we snuggle with them
and we spend time with them. Youknow? I mean, animals are like a
(47:39):
saving grace for us in so manyways, and it's easier, right?
It's often easier to change ourthoughts than it is to change
our feelings, because a lot oftimes we're like, I just this is
how I feel. It's just how Ifeel. But we can start to
question our feelings. We canquestion our thoughts, and that
doesn't mean get rid of them,don't allow them, whatever, but
really learning how to be withyour feelings without feeling
(48:02):
like you have to do somethingabout it. We don't have to
believe every thought we think.We don't have to go in all in on
crazy. We don't have toruminate. We don't have to
whatever. But if you don't knowhow to pattern, interrupt
yourself, and one of the fastestways to do it. So you practice
Rick Hansen says this, Dr RickHanson, we practice an emotional
(48:23):
state until it becomes a neuraltrait, like in your brain, it
becomes unconscious,subconscious. You do it enough
times, like tying your shoes,brushing your teeth, driving
your car, you practice it athing, enough times it becomes
automated. So many of us areautomated for anxiety, for
depression, for meanness, foranger, for short temper for lack
(48:47):
of patience, right? We aredeeply conditioned and wired to
be particular ways. And what I'msaying is we can use that same
thing practice an emotionalstate until it becomes a neural
trait. We can practice kindness,we can practice compassion. We
can practice tolerance, mercy,forgiveness, goodness, right? We
(49:09):
can practice love, the state oflove. We can practice being who
we want to be, less reactive,more patient, better listeners.
Practice an emotional stateuntil it becomes a neural trait.
But again, we gotta start withslowing down. One of the fastest
ways that we can help ournervous system, one of the
(49:30):
fastest ways we can shift ourstate, is with a breath. And
whether you practice simplybreathing in through your nose,
fully and deeply and thenexhaling twice as long out
through your mouth with a littlebit of sound. And you probably
can't hear this, because my micwill dampen it, but just imagine
like I'm making like a like I'mwhispering, you know, when you
(49:53):
go tell somebody to quiet down,right? And just like you. You're
breathing through a straw, likenice long exhale. It's one of
the fastest ways. Thephysiological sigh is another
good breath when you breathe inthrough your nose, nice full
inhale, and then you take asecond little sip of air in, on
(50:16):
top of that, also through yournose. So it's like a double
inhale, full inhale, and then alittle fill up on top of that,
and then twice as long exhaleout through your mouth. It's one
of the fastest ways to downregulate your nervous system, of
course, is all those othertools, right? Tapping bilateral
stimulation, self hugs, likegetting yourself out of a
(50:37):
pattern of thought, move yourbody. Sometimes I'll just get
up. I'll just get up out of mychair and do some jumping jacks.
I'll get on the floor and dosome sit ups. It sounds silly,
but when I'm trying to change anemotional state dance, listen to
music, take a whiff, right? I'mnot a wicked big like, I'm not
picking on people. Meanwhile,some people are, like, really
(50:59):
into essential oils. And theywhat you know, and they like
make mixtures, and they do allthis up. I'm not one of those
people, but there are certainscents that I can like sense,
like smells that I can smellthat can really shift how I
feel. And for some people, it'slike calming lavender. For some
of us, it's like smellingpeppermint to liven yourself up,
or lemon, or whatever. The thingis, like, you gotta figure out
(51:21):
your own scent, right? Thingsthat ground you or calm you, but
really, it's just breaking thatpattern of emotion, thought,
action, reaction, right? It'slike, no, no, no. Can I find a
little space here? How can Islow down? Why do I feel like I
need to attack, defend or proveright? Why do I immediately go
into that reaction state a lotof times again? Because it's
(51:43):
patterned and conditioned. Andif we don't know our own
patterns and conditions, and youdo not know yourself, and that's
where I think so much of theproblems in the world come from.
And this is why, and I stand byit. I think the work that I do
with people in the world, andit's not about me and making me
special. It's like there are1000s of people who do the kind
(52:06):
of work that I do all around allacross the world, helping people
to know themselves and to findmore freedom, and whether that's
freedom from suffering, freedomfrom their anxiety, freedom from
their patterns, freedom fromtheir old stories, so much of
it, the way that we think, theway that we interpret, the way
(52:26):
that like, the prisons that wecreate for ourselves. And of
course, in miracles, is a linethat I love, and I'll maybe talk
about this another time. And I'mparaphrasing, but it basically
says, your chains have beenloosened. The prison door is
open. You can, like, get up andleave at any time, but we don't
even know that we've putourselves in a prison. We don't
know that we're in these mentalprisons of our thoughts and our
(52:47):
stories and our beliefs and arevery limited. That's what a
prison is. It's a small fuckingcage that we are in, and we
don't even know that the door isopen. We don't even realize how
much freedom is available to us,and the only people who go
around feeling like they need toharm or maim or be uncut, like
mean or murder people is peoplewho have created prisons of
(53:11):
hate. And the thing is, is whenyou have a prison inside of your
own mind, you are also you'reyou're not like, yeah, you're
holding the key because youthink that you're the jailer,
because everybody else is wrongand you're right, or whatever
story you're telling yourself.But if you create a prison in
your own head, you also have to,not only are you now in the
prison, you're walking aroundwith the keys, because you're
(53:33):
the prison God. Now you got toGod this story. You got to keep
this story alive, or your prisonfalls apart. You're also the
warden. You don't go home atnight, you're in the prison,
but you hold the key, and partof it is this emotional
regulation, and so many peopledon't know what to do with their
big feelings. We see it all oversocial media, where people are
(53:54):
just in the comments with theirverbal diarrhea of negativity
and attack and slander andmaking fun of other people and
attacking personally attackingpeople's looks and their body
shapes and and like people arelike out of their minds. And
yeah, maybe some of it is bots,but mostly it's people who,
(54:17):
under anonymity, anonymity, justtry to be so hateful, there's so
much fear. And I don't knowabout you guys, but one of the
reasons why I do this show isit's one of the cheapest and
it's the freest way right, toget a little love, to get a
little dose of where I'm comingfrom, using spirituality and
(54:37):
storytelling and stuff like thatto spread spiritual principles,
to spread a little more love inthe world, but really, so much
of what I do is to help peopleto have more freedom, freedom
from suffering, freedom fromshifting out of these old
stories, these old patterns thatkeep us stuck, keep us stuck in
our old ways of being, keep usseparate, keep us guilty, keep
us in fear. And it's a. Block.That's what fear is. Fear is a
(55:01):
block to love. We build theseblocks and barriers to our own
awareness of love's presence.This is what A Course in
Miracles tells us, right? So somuch of this is about dissolving
it's not so much about solvingall the it's about dissolving
them. So I hope that this hasbeen helpful to you in some way,
you know. And if this kind ofwork appeals to you and you want
(55:26):
to work one to one, I call itthe quest. That's my four month
one to one mentoring program. Ilove to work with people one to
one. And if that's not, youknow, available to you, it's not
in your budget or a time orwhatever. We also have the nest,
which is my spiritual group,mentoring program and community,
which is fantastic and amazing.It's 50 bucks a month, you know,
and you come in and you get anincredible community and an
(55:50):
opportunity to receive coaching,support, mentoring, to be seen,
to be heard, when you'renavigating this whole being
human experience, you know, andall of it, all parts of you are
welcome there, all parts of youand locally, I teach yoga and do
workshops and other stuff likethat, right? Thai Yoga, massage,
whatever. So you can find it allat Karen kenney.com if you want
(56:11):
these podcasts delivered rightto your inbox every Thursday
morning, just sign up. Go toKaren kenney.com/sign up, and
you'll get those suckersdelivered. And that's what I
have for you today. Let's notturn our feelings into felonies,
you guys. Let's get a grip.Let's get an understanding of
what's going on inside of us sothat we can make conscious
choices that represent who wetruly are, which is love. That's
(56:34):
who we are, love, and our onlygig is to spread that love, to
get better at giving andreceiving love. That's the gig,
to be the love that you are, andwhen we're reacting all over the
place and going into murder andmayhem, obviously, and it's not
just like it's those are theextreme things, but again, to
reiterate, we all in our ownlittle ways each day, murder and
(56:56):
attack and go after and causechaos in our own minds. Right?
It doesn't even mean you have totake action on it, but you're
thinking things in your own headabout yourself and others that's
not very loving. It's not veryhelpful. It's not good for your
health. It's not good for thecollective consciousness of the
world, you know? So if we canlearn how to step out of our
(57:17):
rumination and step out of thatself talk and step out of we
find that gap right between thethought, the emotion, and the
action, we can change the world.So I hope this has been helpful.
I appreciate you. Thank you somuch for listening and wherever
you go, wherever you go, pleaseleave yourself in the animals
(57:37):
and the planet and the otherpeople and the environments that
you find yourself in better thanhow you found it. Wherever you
go, may you and your energy,your presence, your love, your
emotional regulation, may it bea blessing. Bye.
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