The One You Feed - A Teaching, a Song, and a Poem - 4/3/21

Episode Date: April 3, 2021

Teaching: Deconstructing Emotions Song: Monster Ballad by Josh Ritter Poem: Of Being by Denise Levertov Photo by Alexas_Fotos on UnsplashSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

I'm Jason Alexander. And I'm Peter Tilden. And together, our mission on the Really Know Really podcast is to get the true answers to life's baffling questions like why the bathroom door doesn't go all the way to the floor, what's in the museum of failure, and does your dog truly love you? We have the answer. Go to reallyknowreally.com

and register to win $500, a guest spot on our podcast, or a limited edition signed Jason bobblehead. The Really Know Really podcast. Follow us on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. For those of you who aren't aware of the benefits of being a member of the One You Feed Patreon community, I'd like to let you in on a little secret. Every week, Eric sends out a short segment we like to call the TSP. That stands for a teaching, a song, and a poem. What you're about to hear is one of our favorites from this month. These short episodes are one of my favorite things

about The One You Feed, and they bring together three things that we love. A practical teaching about feeding your good wolf, music, and poems that are relevant to the weekly topic. When you become a member of our Patreon community, you get ad-free episodes, exclusive post-show conversations, and one of these TSP episodes every week. We really do need your support because, as an independent podcast, we're competing with some huge studios with huge budgets. So every bit that you give helps us to keep doing what we do. Joining our Patreon community helps not only yourself, but thousands of people whose lives are touched by the content but can't afford to give. So join our community at oneufeed.net slash join. Hello friends, welcome again to another episode of A Teaching Song and a Poem,

and a poem, the internet's premier resource for bullshit. No, hopefully, hopefully it's not the premier resource for it, but it's certainly one of them. But but maybe there's some others that are more highly ranked in that regard. Regardless, thank you so much for being here. Thank you for listening. And most of all, thank you for your very generous, kind support for the show. It means a lot to us and it's really important that we have you as part of what we do here. So thank you. So what I want to talk about this week is the process of dividing what we would typically call an emotion like anger up into some of its sub-components. Now, you could probably continue to divide any of these sub-components on and on, but I think that purposes of being useful, the ones I'm about to divide them into are useful. And so I'm just going to jump into

how to divide these and make some analogies as we go. So what we would normally describe as an emotion, anger, fear, sadness, I feel like are really a combination of four different elements that sort of show up at once and we label them as one emotion. So I'm going to use anger for the purposes of this just to make it simple. So we might say I'm angry, but if we investigate this a little further, we'll notice perhaps four things. The first is an emotional state, which is what we're using the word anger for, or fear, or sadness. But it's an emotional state. You can sort of feel it. I don't even know how to describe where we feel it. It's a very interesting question. Where does the emotion happen?

But we can identify it. Then comes the bodily sensation that goes with it. So's a very interesting question. Where does the emotion happen? But we can identify it. Then comes the bodily sensation that goes with it. So I might say, all right, I'm feeling anger. Where am I feeling anger in my body? Oh, I feel a real tightness in my throat and, you know, hotness in my chest or a tightness in my throat and a lot of pulsing energy in my shoulder muscles, right? Whatever it is, there's a bodily sensation. Then there's usually a series of thoughts that go along with it. He's such a jerk. I can't believe he did that. What's the matter if he had just done this and why would he do that? There's thoughts. And then there's usually something that we might describe as an urge or a behavior that we are

being sort of pushed towards. I'm going to call him up and tell him what a jerk he is. Or if we take sadness, we might say, well, I'm feeling sad. Where am I feeling that? Oh, I've kind of got an ache, a pit in my stomach. And what are the thoughts? I'm thinking I'm no good. I'm thinking I'll never amount to anything, et cetera, et cetera. And then what's the urge? The urge might be, I just want to get in bed and go to sleep, or I want to eat a cupcake or whatever. So again, we get these four things that show up to us, and we just describe it as one emotion. But if we can start to deconstruct it into its individual pieces, it's less powerful. There's a couple different analogies we could use for this. One is to think

of it as a storm. And I like the storm one a lot. When a strong emotion shows up, we could think of it almost as an emotional storm. All right, the anger storm is here. And what are the components of the anger storm? Oh, there's the emotion. There is the bodily sensations. There's the thoughts. And then there's the urge or the desire. And if I break each of those out, I can work with them. All right, what's the emotion? What am I feeling? Okay, I'm feeling angry. Okay, can I be with that? What's that like? Let me investigate that. And oh, where am I feeling in my body? Oh, I'm feeling it in my tightness in my throat and in my shoulders. Okay, let me investigate that. What's that like? Can I be with that? Then there's the thoughts. What are the thoughts that I'm having? And we could go into a lot of components

around thoughts. We sent out an email just several days ago that had a flow chart for sort of working with intrusive thoughts. So with thoughts, there's lots of directions we can go. But first is to get clear on what are the thoughts, you know, sort of tweeze them apart from each other and understand what they are. And then again, what's the urge? What's the behavior? And can I resist doing that? Or is that in my best interest? Or what should I do instead? What are my values telling me what I'm going to do? And so this is a storm, and we could think of it in the same way that if a thunderstorm rolled in, right? A thunderstorm's got thunder, it's got lightning, it's got wind, it's got rain. And if you had a scared child with you, you could describe to the child, okay, it's a thunderstorm, but really, again, there's a rain, you know what rain is,

there's wind, you know what wind is, there's some thunder, here's what thunder is. Look, that's lightning. And the child might be less afraid. I wish I could do this for our dog Lola, who is terrified of thunderstorms, but despite me trying to explain this to her, she's yet to get the concept as near as I can tell. She just sits there and shakes under a storm. So that's one analogy. The other I often like is to think of a fist, right? And when you get hit with a fist, it really hurts. This is like when the emotional storm rolls in, it's very heavy. It just, bam, hits us. But if we pull off one finger and we go, oh, this is the emotion.

And we pull off another finger and we go, oh, this is where I feel it in my body. And another finger, this is what my thoughts are. And then finally, this is what the urge or behavior is. Right now, if I hit myself with any of those fingers, they hurt way less. is. Right now, if I hit myself with any of those fingers, they hurt way less. So a very good way of working with these emotional storms is to simply just deconstruct them into those four things. What are the four things that are happening? And you can do this in your mind. Another way to do it is to write it down. Writing is really, really good. And the main reason it's so good for stuff like this is it slows everything down. And what's happening inside of us is often very fast,

very fluid, very dynamic. We can't quite get a handle on it. Whereas on the other hand, if we write it down, we sort of slow the process down and we can get more clear and more granular in investigating each of those things. So that's the teaching for this week. It's about deconstructing these quote-unquote emotions or emotional storms into their constituent parts. Now, this doesn't make them go away. You're perfectly capable of doing this and still feeling very strong emotions, but it tends to turn the volume down enough that we can work with them more skillfully. And the goal being emotional regulation, which is a concept we use all the time. The definition I use of it is working with our thoughts and emotions skillfully enough

that we can act according to our values. So let's take anger again. We may have a value that says, I don't call people up on the phone and tell them that they're an SOB, right? So by deconstructing this, I turn the volume down just enough that I'm able to think more clearly. Okay, how do I want to respond to this situation instead of react? Or to use my sad situation, I might be saying, hey, I want to spend less time. I don't want to be emotionally eating. So if I can deconstruct and slow this process down, I can see the craving being one of those components, the urge, the behavior, and I can see the other ones around it. And now that I've deconstructed it, I can act according to my values, which is in this case, not to eat emotionally. So hopefully that's helpful. On to our poem for this week. And our poem this week is by Denise Levertov. I need to just only have poets

like Joe Smith, Robert Frost, Denise Levertov. I've had her on recently. We read a poem of hers recently. We have not had her as a guest, but I bought this poem book of hers. And so I've been kind of reading through it and I found another one that I thought would be a nice poem. This one is called Of Being. I know this happiness is provisional. The looming presences, great suffering, great fear, withdraw only into peripheral vision. But ineluctable this shimmering of wind in the blue leaves, this flood of stillness widening the lake of sky, this need to dance, this need to kneel, this mystery, an awe so quiet I don't know when it began. A gratitude had begun to sing in me. Was there some moment dividing song from no song? When does dewfall begin? When does night fold its arms over our hearts to cherish them? When is daybreak? That is Of Being by Denise Levertov. And there are

so many beautiful lines in there. Was there some moment dividing song from no song? Not really. If you look, you'll see there's not really, or that that moment could keep dividing and keep dividing. This flood of stillness widening the lake of sky. Beautiful, beautiful poem. Okay, and our song this week is called Monster Ballads by Josh Ritter. Now, I am a huge Josh Ritter fan. I don't know how many Josh Ritter songs we have played on this teaching song in a poem before. I guess I could look that up and see. I actually have a handy spreadsheet, believe it or not, so I don't keep playing the same things. It looks like we've done, all right, four Josh Ritter songs out of, I don't know, maybe 80 episodes.

Frankly, that's a pretty good ratio considering how often I listen to Josh Ritter. So now we're at five. This song is called Monster Ballads. It's off an old record of his called Girl in the War. And I think it's a beautiful and perfect song in so many ways. The lyrics are outstanding. And as everything with him, I think the melodies are amazing. So this is Monster Ballads by Josh Ritter. and I could not recommend his music more. I am such a huge fan. I listen to him probably more than anybody else. So thank you for listening this week.

Thank you for supporting the show. And this is Monster Ballads by Josh Ritter. Radio waves are coming miles and miles Bringing home the empty boats Whatever failing they had when they sailed Somehow slip down between the nose Not all the desert now The bonnet wears a wire out with troughs Monster better than the stations

Sign just a little bit Sighing just a little bit And I was thinking about what Katie done Thinking about what Katie did Fairest daughter of the Pharaoh's son Dressed in gold-leaf pyramids Out on the desert now in feeling lost The bonnet wears a wire out of the troughs

Monster ballads in the stations of the cross Sighing just a little bit Sighing just a little bit The ones and zeros bleed and make some noise And when you're empty there's so much space for them You turn it off, hold down a still small voice Comes in blazing from some vast horizon.