Me: Your feelings are based on beliefs, how you interpret reality, and if your beliefs don’t serve you, aka they’re “wrong” which of course can’t be since there is not right or wrong, you’ll have misguided feelings. Then someone tries to help you. You misunderstand them and cut them off. You feel like they’re a threat but the real threat is your own ignorance. So then trusting your feelings isn’t even enough unless your feelings are supposed to lead you to the mistakes that teach you.
Okay. My mind just exploded.
Erik: Yeah, that’s true. It leads you to the mistakes. It pretty much, uh, I take that question as, “How can you trust what you’re really feeling?” And that really takes you back to the question before: Are you mentally clear?
Me: Yeah.
Erik: Be able to define what you’re feeling, because if it’s a miscommunication, and you have that anxiety feeling, you know something’s feeling wrong but you’re going to let it go because you don’t want the confrontation or you feel like you don’t have a way to work out that conversation to where both parties understand or you feel misunderstood and you choose to walk away, well that’s your fucking fault.
Jamie (chuckling): He’s pointing his finger. “Your fucking fault.”
Erik: It’s because you gave up, and of course if you give up, dude, what are you expecting? You don’t have to go in with gloves on and start boxing people down. You come in and you go, “Listen, I don’t think you understand me, and I’d like to stand here and figure out why.” You gotta learn how to communicate better, how to identify how, if you’re making a sacrifice for the right reasons—like a lot of people will say, “But I’m a good person and I’m not going to do this because it’s going to hurt their feelings and I’ll take the hit and I’ll walk away.” Really, you’re not being a good person at all! You’re being a dick to yourself and you totally surrendered and you didn’t make it clear to anyone in the situation what was happening. So it pisses off the whole.
Me: Yeah. Hmm!
Erik: We know those people, right Mom?
Me: Yeah, some of them.
And I think I’m one of them. Maybe he was doing the whole “wink, wink” thing here.
Me: So you’re saying we should trust our feelings basically or be emotionally honest with ourselves.
Erik: Yeah. You CAN trust your feelings. They’re really not gonna steer you wrong. You just gotta be able to identify them better. If you think trusting your feelings is fucking you up then you’re not mentally clear on how to define what you’re feeling. You’re mislabeling.
Me: How do you become mentally clear? Is that where emotional honesty comes in, the internal reflection, “Am I really being true to myself”?
Erik: Yes, and emotional clarity will come from you being able to identify how you’re feeling. You gotta go through that trip. Is it anxiety or is it joy? Am I really having a good time or am I freaking out. Emotions get mislabeled all the fucking time.
Me: Oh, yeah!
Erik: So you gotta go through that. Redefine if you’ve got it backwards, and then you wanna get into the work of getting your head still where it’s not trying to tell you how you’re feeling. You want to tap in to the emotions. You don’t want to tap into the head to define how you’re feeling, because then you’re going through a third party. You have this other roommate in your head so you can go through this third party to identify how you feel. You can do that with meditation techniques. You can do that through counseling, therapy. You just have to figure out how you tick. Invest time in yourself and really learn what your patterns are and what your head, your logic is signing up for. So I promise you the only true experience that you’re having in this entire life is your emotions. Your head does NOT affect how you feel. It doesn’t. You feel first, you know, the physical reaction, then you fucking think. And if you are putting your head first, then you’re deciding that whatever your head is telling you is the ultimate truth, and it can define shit wrong all the time. Skip that, address how you feel, look at the physical body, and then talk to the damn head.
Me: Mm hm. Well a lot of people define their own emotions and feelings from external sources like one person doesn’t approve of me so I should feel bad about myself. TV, marketing, so many people define themselves through external sources.
Erik: That is so true.
Jamie (laughing): He’s giving an example of people in marketing. Marketing says that, you know, if you’re not a size zero or flat abs for men, then you’re just not sexy.
Erik: It’s just such a bogus concept, because you can be—
Jamie: Oh my god. I’m just going to say what he just said.
Me (bracing myself: Go ahead.
Jamie: He’s talking about full-figured African American women.
Erik: You know, they got the bang in the front and the booty in the back.
We wail in laughter. God I’m going to be so busted.
Erik: Damn, if they believe they’re sexy, they are so fucking sexy, cuz it’s the way they walk and how they carry themselves, how they dress themselves. They’re fucking awesome. But if they walk around and they’re disappointed with the bang in the front and their booty in the back—
Jamie can hardly speak at this point.
Erik: Then you can see, when you look at them, you get disappointed for them because that’s what they’re showing you.
Me: Aw.
Erik: Who are those fucking marketing people telling us how to look and feel and act? Fucking retarded. Go get ‘em Deepak.
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Be sure to listen live to my interview for Answers4Families hosted by Allen Cardoza on LA Talk Radio at 1:00 P.M. CST today! (www.latalkradio.com.)
