The One You Feed - How to Cultivate Emotional Sovereignty Emma Seppälä

Episode Date: April 23, 2024

In this episode, Emma Seppälä shares insightful perspectives on how to cultivate emotional sovereignty. Drawing from her professional knowledge and personal experiences, she emphasizes the importance of self-awareness, courage, and developing a positive internal dialogue in navigating life’s challenges. She introduces the concept of sovereignty as a means of reclaiming agency and resilience in the face of uncertainty and chaos. Through practical insights and strategies, Emma delves into the detrimental effects of self-criticism, the significance of meeting one’s basic needs, and the transformative potential of cultivating a supportive relationship with oneself. In this episode, you will be able to: Master techniques for emotional regulation to take control of your well-being Overcome addictions with powerful strategies for lasting change Discover the impact of self-criticism on mental health and how to break free from its grip Cultivate emotional sovereignty to reclaim agency in your life and relationships Unlock the benefits of contemplative practices for heightened self-awareness and personal growth To sign up for FREE Good Wolf Text Reminders, click here! To learn more, click here!  See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

You know, there's so much pulling our awareness outward, especially these days with all of the media coming at us constantly and our lives being at high speed, that it is very easy to live life on automatic, unaware, and reactive. Welcome to The One You Feed. Throughout time, great thinkers have recognized the importance of the thoughts we have. Quotes like, garbage in, garbage out, or you are what you think, ring true. And yet, for many of us, our thoughts don't strengthen or empower us. We tend toward negativity, self-pity, jealousy, or fear.

We see what we don't have instead of what we do. We think things that hold us back and dampen our spirit. But it's not just about thinking. Our actions matter. It takes conscious, consistent, and creative effort to make a life worth living. This podcast is about how other people keep themselves moving in the right direction, how they feed their good wolf. I'm Jason Alexander. And I'm Peter Tilden. And together, our mission on the Really No Really

podcast is to get the true answers to life's baffling questions like why the bathroom door 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. Thanks for joining us. Our guest on this episode is a returning guest, Emma Seppala. She's the science director of Stanford University's Center for Compassion and Altruism Research and Education. She's also co-director of the Yale College Emotional Intelligence Project at the Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence and a lecturer at Yale College, where she teaches the psychology of happiness. Today, Eric and Emma discuss her new book, Sovereign, Reclaim Your Freedom, Energy, and Power in a Time of Distraction, Uncertainty, and Chaos. Hi, Emma. Welcome to the show.

Thank you. It's great to be back. Yeah, I'm really excited to have you on again. We're going to be discussing your book, which is called Sovereign. Reclaim your freedom, energy, and power in a time of distraction, uncertainty, and chaos. And so we'll be getting into that in a second, but we'll start like we always do with the parable. And in the parable, there's a grandparent who's talking with their grandchild and they say, in life, there are two wolves inside of us that are always at battle. One is a good wolf, which represents things like kindness and bravery and love. And the other is a bad wolf, which represents things like greed and hatred and fear. And the grandchild stops. They think about it for a second. They look up at their grandparent. They say, well, which one wins? And the grandparent says, the one you feed.

So I'd like to start off by asking you what that parable means to you in your life and in the work that you do. I think this parable, you know, I've heard it before the last time that I came on the show. And in many ways, my new book, Sovereign, is about feeding the wolf that in turn will feed you, right? Because the wolf that is the anger and the fear and the destruction is also simultaneously depleting you. And the one that is the kindness, the ethics, the compassion, the wisdom, when you feed that wolf, it feeds you back and creates a life of greater

well-being, but also of sovereignty, of inspiration, of power. I love that. Yeah. So tell me about the term sovereign. Why is that a term you sort of picked as the title of the book? And what does it mean to you? Thank you, Eric. Yeah, you know, I've been in the field of psychology and specifically the psychology of happiness, of well-being, trauma reduction, anxiety reductions, things like that, that I've looked at in my research. And I felt that there was something beyond just the psychology of well-being, that there is something beyond just looking at what creates for mental health or what creates for thriving.

Because you can be doing all of the practices, you can be meditating and going out in nature and doing all the things. But if you are still buying into beliefs about yourself about your life, and you're also engaging in activities or addictive behaviors, or getting caught up in stuff like the many different options and addictive or getting caught up in stuff like the many different options and addictive substances or entertainment or media that's out there, you can still be living a life in which you live in fear or in anger or in, like I said, addiction without realizing it and still wondering, well, why am I still not feeling like I'm living the life that I want to live? And, you know, 70% of people on their deathbed feel that they didn't live the life they wanted to live. And sovereignty is reclaiming, reclaiming in this time of distraction, because we take in

over 60,000 gigabytes of information every day across our media channels, which is insane when you think about it. Yeah, and can crash a small computer in a week, right? And this is what we're doing to our mind every single day, but also a time of uncertainty on the global front and chaos. And it's so easy to go down the negative spiral of the fear, of the anger, of the many ways in which we can be trying to distract ourselves in ways that are destructive to us. And yet sovereignty is reclaiming your ability to live the life that you want as you wish. And that's what I break down, you know, chapter by chapter in the book. And I felt like it needed its own term, because I don't know a term in psychology that equates that.

What you were saying there really made me think of something, you know, in the fitness world, there's a phrase, you can't out train a bad diet, right? And when you're talking about these practices, meditation and going out into nature, those are the exercises. So it's the equivalent of being on a treadmill or on a bike, right? And they're really good. But if you're consuming 4,000 calories a day, that's not going to make a dent in it, right? And I think what you're saying here is something similar. These practices are really good and we need to be orienting towards the beliefs that are holding us back, the content that we're consuming that is holding us back, right? Absolutely. So for example, I teach executives. That's my job at Yale. And I teach these high level leaders that come in for a week

or two to get some more education and management and leadership and so forth. And they are talented, high performers. If they were chosen to come to this program, I mean, they're really amazing. And what I see stands the most in their way is their relationship with themselves. And whenever I ask them, are you self-critical, for example, 90 to 95% of them raise their hand. And when you look at it from a psychological perspective, self-criticism is self-loathing. Self-loathing. That's a pretty strong term.

And, you know, some people will think, oh, well, self-criticism, it leads to self-improvement. Isn't that a good thing? I'm differentiating between self-criticism and self-awareness. Self-awareness is, oh, hey, you know, my stats aren't that great. I need help with that. That self-awareness, self-criticism is those words that people use for themselves when they screw up or when they fail at something or when they make a mistake, when they do something embarrassing. The words people use are brutal. You know, you're such an idiot, you know, those kinds of things and much, much worse, right? That people say to themselves, that's also feeding the dark wolf. But your relationship with yourself is the only one that's guaranteed 24 seven for the rest of your life.

And if it's a toxic one, then you are depleting your energy. It's like you said, you could be on the exercise bike, but you're eating the trash. So something I'm going to be doing a little more often is ask you, the listener, to reflect on what you're hearing. We strongly believe that knowledge is power, but only if combined with action and integration. So before we move on, I'd like to ask you, what's coming up for you as you listen to this? Are there any things you're currently doing that are feeding your bad wolf that might make sense to remove or any things you could do to feed your good wolf that you're not currently doing? So if you have the headspace for it,

I'd love if you could just pause for a second and ask yourself, what's one thing I could do today or tonight to feed my good wolf? Whatever your thing is, a really useful strategy can be having something external, a prompt or a friend or a tool that regularly nudges you back towards awareness and intentionality. For the past year, I've been sending little good wolf reminders to some of my friends and community members. Just quick little SMS messages two times per week that give them a little bit of wisdom and remind them to pause for a second and come off autopilot. If you want, I can send them to you too. I do it totally for free and people seem to really love them. Just drop your information at oneufeed.net

slash SMS and I can send them to you. It's totally free and if you end up not liking the little reminders, you can easily opt out. That's oneufeed.net slash SMS. And now back to the episode. It's an interesting idea because those people have gotten to where they are, right? The, you know, top performers as executives, right? So there's something in their way of doing things that is working, and yet it tends to get in the way. And I often think of it as like there's that business book that came out, right? Like what got you here won't get you there. Meaning, yeah, whatever you were doing to get you to this level, right?

It's usually the jump into executive leadership, right? Everything you did up till then, yeah, it worked, but it's not going to get you to the next level. And that's what I've seen in my coaching practice working with people is, yeah, the self-criticism sort of, you know, maybe it did its thing for a while, but then it just stops working. And it tends to be the thing that sort of gets in the way. And I had an experience driving over here today. I was listening to you on James Doty's podcast. I know he's a mentor of yours. And I just had a memory and it was of my father and I playing golf. And I played golf with

him a lot as a kid. And I both loved it and hated it because he was very angry, very critical. But it occurred to me today that when he would make a bad shot or a putt, like the things that would come out of his mouth to himself were really awful. I was like, well, of course that's where I learned that. Like, again, just a memory to me of like sort of where some of this stuff starts to get formed. Thank you for sharing that. You know, when, if you don't want to do it for yourself, do it for your children or those around you, because we have such a toxic relationship with ourselves, such a brutal one.

When we are highly critical like that, then we're also going to be highly destructively critical with the people we love the most and want to hurt the least. And then we pass the programming on. And I always think the self-loathing is, I think of it as social conditioning or I think of it as a programming that you inherit from your parents, as you mentioned, or society at large, because it's very well accepted to have that kind of relationship with yourself. And it's so destructive. If a terrorist walks into the room fully armed, it's going to set off your fight or flight response, your sympathetic nervous system. But if the terrorist is living inside of you, then you are activating your stress response for yourself.

And that's what we're up to. It doesn't make any sense. It just doesn't make sense to have a destructive relationship with oneself. And yet, many people do have one like that. And one of the invitations I give in the first chapter of my book is to deprogram that. Because that is a fundamental basis of your existence, is how you relate to yourself. Yeah. I mean, one of the things you talk about with sovereignty, which will bring different aspects of your life to a new level, one of them, right, is your energy. And obviously,

what we know about motivational theory says that we do better and we're more motivated when we feel good about ourselves, and we become less motivated, less energetic, in a sense, when we feel good about ourselves and we become less motivated, less energetic in a sense when we feel bad about ourselves. Right, exactly. Are you relating to yourself in a way that's energizing, that's filling your tank or that's depleting you? Again, doesn't mean you're not aware of your shortcomings or if you're being lazy and you feel like, okay, I'm being lazy. You know, just like a parent is very loving to their child, but also make sure they brush their teeth, right? It doesn't mean going easy on yourself, but it means having the same kind of relationship you have with yourself, with your best friend, because I often will ask the audiences that I teach,

okay, so now that we've heard the words that you use to speak to yourself when you make a mistake, now tell me what words you use to speak to your best friend or your child who just made the same mistake. The words that come out of their mouth are, you've got this, you're okay, everybody makes mistakes, it's no big deal. Really compassionate, kind, friendly, supportive words. Why is it that we can't speak to ourselves like that? What's the difference between you and your best friend? The only difference is that you live in different bodies. That's it. Yep. You just mentioned that sort of distinction between self-criticism and self-awareness.

I was interviewing somebody yesterday and they quoted Dr. Spock, who was the pediatrician, right, that was so big back in the 60s and 70s. And he was saying when it comes to dealing with two-year-olds, you want to be firm but friendly, right? And I think that sort of speaks to how our interior life can be, right? Like, yes, we do want to hold ourselves accountable, right? We do want to live up to our values, and we can do that in a friendly way, but it's hard to do. Absolutely. You know, it is. And when I first heard about this theoretically, I thought, okay, that all sounds good in theory, but how do you break this down? And I'm very pragmatic. I want things to be clear and grounded. I want to understand what it

means. And I want the same for whoever I'm teaching or writing for. And so the way that I break it down is simply thinking about your needs and meeting them. Like if you have a child that you haven't fed in five hours, you know, that child's going to melt down any moment, right? But do we do the same for ourselves? You know, just the basic needs. Next time that you feel anxiety or feel down or don't feel well or feel like you just failed at something, instead of asking, you know, am I good enough, which is a question that 80% of millennials endorse for almost every aspect of their life, by the way, instead of am I good enough asking what's good for me right now?

What do I need right now? That's a radically different question and also allows you to come back to the here, the now, the practical. Okay, maybe I need a meal. Okay, maybe I need to just take a walk outside and take a breather. Maybe I need to step away from my computer for a second and just lie down on the floor for a minute and just calm down. Whatever it is, right?

The basic physiological needs are a great place to start, you know, to make it less theoretical. You say something in the early part of the book, which is that awareness plus courage equals sovereignty, right? So say more about those two aspects, why those are so critical to this process. Awareness is critical if you want to see where in your life you're bound. And so I differentiate between the bound state and sovereign state. So we've just been talking about the self, right? So a bound state is a toxic relationship with yourself because it leads to this downward spiral of less resilience, more anxiety, more depression, less ability to show up at your fullest potential. And yet having a sovereign relationship with yourself leads to

you being able to really move forward in your life in a way that does allow you to express your best self. And so sometimes that needs courage in the sense that it needs both awareness because you need to be aware of what you're doing, but also the courage to step out and do things differently. And that might be difficult for you, but it might also be surprising to other people around you who are used to you being a certain way. So how many people will sacrifice their own desires or their own beliefs in order to fit in somewhere? And then they pay the price. They're aware of what they're doing and they're deciding, no, I'm not doing that anymore. I'm not sacrificing myself anymore, then that does require courage. But you can't really have sovereignty without courage, because sovereignty inevitably will lead you to

being aligned with yourself, which is not necessarily always something you're used to, or that other people expect, right? Especially people who've seen you always do things a different way. So that's in that first chapter where I talk about relationship with ourselves. But in another chapter, for example, when I talk about the sovereign mind, and I talk about the bound state, the bound state in terms of our sovereign mind is when we allow our mind to be completely imprinted by everything that's coming our way without awareness. So for example, I had a colleague who had insomnia and I asked him what his bedtime routine was. And he said he watched 11 o'clock news. And so we know from research that

you're going to remember what you saw right before going to sleep, that you're going to remember it very well the next morning. That's just how our brain works. And so he's watching the sad and the scary right before sleep and wondering why his sleep is not good, but he's not even realizing that he's binding himself with what he's choosing to ingest, because you are what you eat is also true of your mind. It's whatever it is that we take in, right? But our mind can also be bound by things like trauma. So many of us have gone through traumatic experiences. And then when we engage in our daily life, let's say you were in a traumatic relationship, then in the next relationship you go into, you go in with fear and it doesn't allow you to be your sovereign self in that relationship because you're in the bound state.

Now the trauma is something inevitable that happens. And one of the first things is to be aware of that. And then secondly, is to be able to, of course, start to heal that, which does take courage. And then in order to have a sovereign mind, a mind in which you have awareness about what you are choosing or not choosing to nourish your mind with, to imprint your mind with, and are taking steps to make sure to heal those imprints, including the traumatic ones, and also thinking about very consciously about how you are choosing to interact with your world in order to cultivate your mind in the way that you wish to.

Yeah, you mentioned something there about the desire to belong. You talk about this in the book, and I thought it was really helpful because we do as humans have a desire to belong. We know how destructive loneliness can be, right? I mean, there's no shortage of writings about that, enough to terrify you if you're ever by yourself for 10 minutes. I know that's not really what it's intended to say. So there is this need for others. And yet you're also saying there's a need to sort of not go along to get along, right?

It makes me think of Dr. Gabor Mate, who wrote about this in the way that was really compelling to me, which was sacrificing authenticity for attachment, right? And that those two things are always in some kind of balance, right? Like if you're like 100% authentic, you might drive everybody away, right? How do you think about balancing those two needs, to be sovereign, to be ourselves, and to be in healthy relationship with other people, because we know how important that is to our growth and development also. Absolutely. It is a balance. You know, I often think, you know, what pain is worse, the pain of not being who you are in order to fit in or the pain of not fitting in and choosing to

be who you are. That is a balance. And, you know, if you think about it, even the society's quote unquote rebels do so much to fit in. I'm thinking about like the motorcycle gangs, right? They have this sort of rebellious lifestyle and yet they're wearing a uniform. They're wearing the same clothes. They have strict hierarchies in their clubs. They are definitely doing what they are doing to fit in. But you don't want to adapt your behavior to the point of it sacrificing you. And I mean that in the real term of sacrificing, because I knew someone who had a disease which could have been helped with a change of diet, who chose not to do the change of diet so she could continue to look quote-unquote normal. Is there a more heartbreaking example that we would prefer to potentially die rather than not fit in? And so that's again where courage does need to come into play. I'm Jason Alexander. And I'm Peter Tilden.

And together on the Really No Really podcast, our mission is to get the true answers to life's baffling questions like why they refuse to make the bathroom door go all the way to the floor. We got the answer. Will space junk block your cell signal? The astronaut who almost drowned during a spacewalk gives us the answer. We talk with the scientist who figured out if your dog truly loves you, and the one bringing back the woolly mammoth.

Plus, does Tom Cruise really do his own stunts? His stunt man reveals the answer. And you never know who's going to drop by. Mr. Bryan Cranston is with us today. How are you, too? Hello, my friend. Wayne Knight about Jurassic Park. Wayne Knight, welcome to Really, No Really, sir. Bless you all.

Hello, Newman. And you never know when Howie Mandel might just stop by to talk about judging. Really? That's the opening? Really, No Really. Yeah, really. No really. Go to reallynoreally.com. And register to win $500, a guest spot on our podcast, or a limited edition signed Jason bobblehead.

It's called Really, No Really, and you can find it on the iHeartRadio app, on Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Some of those, I'll just call it go-along-to-get-along habits, right, are at the level that I have to really think a lot about. Like, what am I doing and why? Because they become sort of habit routines that I don't even notice. You know, an example I often give is that back to my father again, I would get on these like, all right, I'm going to have a better relationship with my father kicks, right? I would be like, all right, that's what I'm going to do. And we're going to go out and we're going to, we're going to be together. And I'm just going to bring up like, you know, I'm just going to take the conversation deeper than it normally goes. I'm just going to do that. Right. And I would get there and then the desire would just disappear.

It just, I suddenly would be like, well, why would I even want to do that? And it was because at some deeper level, at a really deep level, I didn't think it could happen. And so I talked myself out of even wanting it, but it took me years to see that, to actually see that this unconscious program was running. And I think that's the awareness is we often don't know. You know, I always find it really difficult as a person who's really kind and thinks that's a really good value and a person who's generous. I mean, that sounds unhumble, but those tend to be traits that most people who know me would say those are traits of mine.

I also then have to go, but when is that becoming my greatest weakness? You know, when am I okay with the way things are? Cause I'm kind of laid back. And when am I unconsciously repressing that I feel differently? I just think this one's very difficult to sort out sometimes. Yes. And that is why in order to cultivate awareness, contemplative practices are essential. You know, there's so much pulling our awareness outward, especially these days with all of the media coming at us constantly and our lives being at high speed, that it is very easy to live life on automatic, unaware, and reactive. Even workplaces are cultivating that, you know, you have to be on Slack all the time and answering messages constantly. I mean, you're putting people on

autopilot with very little awareness, ability to even handle things with emotional intelligence, because there's no discernment. So most of the time, you know, the attention networks in our brain are deployed outward, listening, hearing, touching, smelling, tasting, we're constantly outward. And yet there's a part of our brain that's focused just on paying attention on the inside, our self-awareness. And for many people, they don't cultivate it at all. And you can tell, you can tell when you interact with them. Wow, that person has no awareness of what they're doing or saying. They're so lost in the outside world. And it's so critical to cultivate awareness and discernment through things like meditation or contemplative practice of choice, because then you start to be aware. But I mean, look,

you are already aware. You're like, wow, look, I'm with my dad. And I'm like falling right into the good boy role, because that's where I'm going right now. That's awareness. You know, that is awareness. That awareness allows you to make a choice. You're making the choice. You know, I'm going to stay here right now. This is what is going to feel right for him and for me today. So this is who I am. But you're aware. But I think a lot of people don't have that self-awareness that you have. And it is so critical because without awareness, like you said, you can't make a change and you don't have a choice. You're choiceless. You are on automatic.

And sovereignty is not being on automatic. Sovereignty is living eyes wide open. Even if you choose to still continue having a superficial relationship with someone like your dad, it's your choice. It's a sovereign choice. What's not sovereign is being on autopilot and wondering why life feels so overwhelming and why you're not happy. And to be clear, that awareness took me a long time to get. There were years of me having no idea what was actually going on there, right? Eyes were not wide enough open. Or know, or to say it differently,

you know, when we talk about traumatic experiences or difficult experiences, right? We revert to previous conditioning and almost don't even know it, right? And so awareness is critical. You talk about contemplative practices, you mentioned meditation, but you've also talked about how for a lot of people, seated meditation in the way that we normally do it isn't really the thing. You talk about you being in New York City after 9-11 and to sit down and close your eyes was really made you much more anxious. So what are some contemplative practices that are not seated meditation, but that can also help sort of train this muscle of self-awareness? Absolutely. You know, especially in these times where anxiety is so high, sitting and meditating can feel really overwhelming and

more anxiety producing. I was in New York during 9-11. And after that, I would shake every morning with anxiety. And sitting and meditating was not an option. I tried. I gave it a good go, but it was just making me more anxious to try and be mindful of my crazy anxious mind. And it wasn't until I walked into a breathing class, breathwork class called Art of Living, that I suddenly had a handle on my mind and my nervous system. And when I went to psychology in graduate school and then became a research scientist 10 years later, I was working with veterans with trauma and noticed similar pattern that, you know, people were trying to do mindfulness meditation with them, and they were all dropping out. And I thought, you know, breathing worked for me, let's try for them.

It's a breathing technique called sky breath meditation. And it involves actively changing your breath in different rhythms, different patterns. And we found that after one week, their trauma had normalized and their anxiety remained normalized a month and a year later, suggesting sort of this reprogramming of the nervous system. And that's why when I talk about gaining sovereignty over our trauma, so it no longer governs us, that there are ways that we can do that. And it's extraordinary, because I saw some of these veterans going from being bunkered up in their basement, self-medicating with alcohol and weed, to moving on, getting married, going to school, graduating, becoming successful professionals, and moving on like nothing happened. We have the ability to regain sovereignty over our nervous system and you know i think the research

is still not yet quite so known yet we've replicated that study with the palo alto va and it showed that it was akin to the gold standard therapy for trauma it was at least as good if not better and it was actually better than the gold standard therapy for trauma which is cognitive processing therapy for emotion regulation at the level of the brain. So yes, there are other techniques. I mean, I'm a big fan of the breathing simply because we've done research on it and I've practiced it every day for 20 years now because it has helped me so much. And in fact, this morning I had the incredible fortune of sharing it with someone, a really amazing person who grew up working in sweatshops, a really amazing person who grew up working in sweatshops, extreme trauma, no childhood,

and a lot of abuse, and just witnessed how she, after learning the breathing, is able to just, she hasn't slept more than three hours in her whole life. She slept seven hours for two nights in a row now. And it's just extraordinary. We can regain sovereignty over our nervous system. Other practices that I think bring people into that mindset of contemplation is A, putting away your phone and going out into nature, taking walks on your own, but going by the beach or wherever a natural environment is and spending time there and doing it on a regular consistent basis, not just once a month, but regularly training your nervous system and your mind to go into a place of receptivity, But regularly training your nervous system and your mind to go into a place of receptivity, of quiet, of coming back into the here, the now, present moment.

And I think nature, you know, there's a lot of research on nature's benefits for well-being, for cognitive function, all sorts of things, even for pro-social behavior. You're going to be kinder when you spend time in nature. But I think one thing that it does, especially in our lives that are so virtual in so many ways, is it brings you back to the concrete, like here, now, there's a tree, like this is reality. Much of what we do is simply in a cloud that doesn't even exist, you know, a virtual cloud. Is the idea with the sky breathing that you are turning your nervous system, in essence, down enough that you are then able

to actually be aware of what's happening. Because if your nervous system is turned up too high, you don't really have awareness so much as you have some sort of hypervigilance. Well, two things. So if you were to do a simple breathing exercise, and I can just give a quick example so people can try this on their own. Let's say you take five minutes, close your eyes, and you breathe in for a count of four and you breathe out for a count of eight. As you do that, you're going to calm your heart rate. In five minutes, your heart rate will be down. You're going to feel calmer and clearer, guaranteed. I've done this with many people and this is a physiological process of down-regulating your heart rate and activating your parasympathetic nervous system. And that's great. And you should

use it and you could use it anytime between meetings as you transition from work to home, anytime before a difficult phone call, whatever, it's going to help. But the sky breath protocol is a 20 minute practice. And in the, when you do the class, it's longer than that during the class. And that is, I think a much more profound sort of reconditioning of the nervous system. And a lot of the veterans that we worked with, and if anyone's interested to learn this, you can look up a nonprofit called Project Welcome Home Troops. They teach veterans, military, their families at no cost. It's really lovely. But when you're doing the sky breath meditation, what the participants report is that they may sometimes have traumatic memories or

smells or emotions that occur. But usually when you have a traumatic memory, it is accompanied by a nervous system that is highly activated and in sympathetic fight or flight mode. So you remember what happened, your heart rate's racing, and you're activated. And what happens with the sky breath meditation is, we believe, from a scientific perspective, it puts you in a deep parasympathetic mode. And so the memory may be coming up, but you are reprogramming your relationship to the memory. You're decoupling the anxious physiology from the anxious memory. And so what participants report after going through the program is that,

oh, I remember what happened, but it's no longer right here in front of my face, stopping me from walking into the mall because the mall is a crowded place where there could be a bomb. Do you see that? So we know that memory is malleable. And you know, if you see a scary movie, it's scary in the moment. And then later you're like, yeah, that was a scary movie, but you're not thinking about it right now. When you have trauma, it's like you saw the scary movie and you're in the scary movie constantly. And what's happening here is you're like, yeah, that was a scary movie, but you're not thinking about it right now. When you have trauma, it's like you saw the scary movie and you're in the scary movie constantly. And what's happening here is you're reprogramming the nervous system to decouple itself from the scary movie so it can come back to a place of normalcy. So listener, consider this your halfway through the episode integration reminder.

Remember, knowledge is power, but only if combined with action and integration. knowledge is power, but only if combined with action and integration. It can be transformative to take a minute to synthesize information rather than just ingesting it in a detached way. So let's collectively take a moment to pause and reflect. What's your one big insight so far, and how can you put it into practice in your life? Seriously, just take a second, pause the audio, and reflect. It can be so powerful to have these reminders to stop and be present, can't it? If you want to keep this momentum going that you built with this little exercise, I'd encourage you to get on our Good Wolf Reminders SMS list. I'll shoot you two texts a week with insightful little prompts and wisdom from podcast guests. They're a nice little nudge

to stop and be present in your life. And they're a helpful way to not get lost in the busyness and forget what is important. You can join at one you feed.net slash SMS. And if you don't like them, you can get off the list really easily. So far, there are over 1172 others from the one you feed community on the list, and we'd love to welcome you as well. So head on over to one you feed.net slash SMS, and let's feed our good wolves together. There's that idea that every time we retrieve a memory, when we sort of, you know, put it away or restore it, right, we've altered it in some way, right? And so what you're saying is by bringing it up and then the nervous system reaction being lower during that time is that then we've subtly changed that memory in such a way.

Or I think you said it best. We've decoupled it right from the nervous system reaction. Yes. And that is how you regain sovereignty. It's so powerful. I think it's quite revolutionary. It's so powerful. I think it's quite revolutionary. And these are practices that come out of India, out of ancient traditions that have been around for decades and are so helpful. In the chapter about sovereign emotions, you tell a story about in your adolescence in college that you struggled with emotional eating. Will you tell us that story? Yes. So, you know, when it comes to emotions,

no matter how many PhDs, MDs, or black belts someone has, chances are they have as much formal education about what to do with their big, bad, negative emotions as a five-year-old, which is none. And most of us don't know what to do with our emotion. And so most audiences that I've spoken to, and most people, what they learn from society is to suppress their emotion, just suck it up buttercup, like push it down, you know, pretend it's not there. And of course, that's what leads to all sorts of problems like blowing up inappropriately at some point or passive aggression or migraine, stomach aches, you know, it doesn't go away because emotion is energy and motion. I mean, if you're not going to feel it, it's going to stay with you. And that's what research shows. It actually makes the emotion stronger at the level of the brain. And you know, a child is angry for five minutes, two minutes,

maybe an adult can be angry for the rest of their lives because a child lets the emotion move through them. Right. So let me go back to the story because it relates to this point. I did not know what to do with my big, bad, negative emotions. When I was in college, I'd learned suppression just like everybody else. And so I got into this addictive cycle of binging whenever I would feel down. So using food. And then at the end of the binge, I would have inevitably cry. And you know, you could think of it for yourself. I mean, how many people when they feel bad and they just watch a ton of entertainment or overwork or drink or whatever drug of choice, at the end of that, you're still feeling bad, but you're feeling worse because you're beat up by your drug of choice. I don't care if it looks holy, you know, like I volunteer 55 hours a week, you know, whatever it is that you're doing to escape how you're feeling is a drug and it's beating you up and it's still there. So that's

a problem. So anyways, I would notice that I would binge and then I would cry and this was a cycle. And one day I attended a meditation session and meditation was considered very weird at the time. I was one of three undergraduates who meditated. The only reason I went was because I had a crush on another undergraduate and I wanted to meet this person. And so I went to this weird thing where we had to sit for an hour and stare at the carpet. It was Korean Zen meditation, very strict, don't move, look at the carpet, no instruction. And it was the most painful and uncomfortable experience of my life. I just wanted to run out of there. I really didn't like it. And I thought

I would never meditate again. And when I left, I felt a little more peaceful, you know, but I was like, I'm never doing that again. And then the next day I walked into my dorm room and I was feeling down. This was often the case at that time. And I spotted a leftover pizza that looked gross and like something I wouldn't want. And I thought, perfect, my chance to binge, like it didn't matter what it looked like because I was going to go into that addictive, impulsive behavior again. And in that moment, was going to go into that addictive, impulsive behavior again. And in that moment, and I attribute this very much to the meditation, because we know meditation, even one session increases your awareness and self-awareness. I had this insight, an insight I had never had before, which was, you always cry after you binge. Why don't you just switch it around and cry first

and binge later? And I thought, okay, fine. I'll give this a try. No problem. And I went on my bed and I cried. And when I was done crying, I sat up and the impulse to binge was gone. I never binged again. That moment of awareness had completely shifted my understanding of emotion and I'd gained sovereignty over that addiction. And it was really fascinating. And as I went into the field of the psychology of emotion in graduate school, which was the labs that I was in, were all specialized in emotion research, understanding that emotion is energy and motion. And that's why a child is angry for only two minutes or three minutes, a small child, because they're completely feeling the emotion and then they're allowing it to move through them. Whereas an adult is going to try and

push it down, push it away, eat it away, drink it away, play it away, whatever it is they're going to do. And it stays stuck inside of you. Not that you should have a tantrum, you know, in the middle of your office because you're upset at your boss, but feeling it, allowing yourself to feel it, you know, the expression, feel it to heal it, allowing yourself to be with it. And we don't like that. We don't want to feel pain. We don't want to feel bad ever. No, we don't. And that's why we do all these other behaviors to try and stop that. But in the process, we're actually holding on tight to the pain. We're binding ourselves to it. So sovereign emotions, one of the steps that sovereign emotions is having the

courage, the awareness and the courage to be with the pain and the emotions that come up as they come up. And that's how you become free from them. Let's dive a little deeper on this one, because that idea of feel your emotions is pretty common wisdom in the contemplative world or whatever world we want to call it, the psychological world, right? It can't speak to how prevalent it is outside of that. It sounds like maybe not a whole lot. However, as an adult, I have found that I will feel an emotion, but that's not the end of the story necessarily, right? Meaning that I'm not like a three-year-old. I mean, maybe if it's like a very small thing that

happens and I get upset about it and it kind of passes through, but take something big that happens, right? The end of a relationship as an example, right? You can feel that emotion, at least in my experience, you know, it just kind of comes back for like a long time. And I think people get discouraged in the midst of that because I think a lot of us here feel your emotion as the shortcut our brain takes is feel that emotion and then it will be gone, right? And so it's just a different strategy of trying not to feel something, right? It's just a different approach. So what is it like for adults in complex systems where you give yourself over to it, maybe you allow yourself that good cry, and two hours later, you're kind of feeling back into

that? What does that process look like for a more complex emotional situation? You know, like take grief. It's not going to go away overnight. And just knowing that, feel it, be with it, wait it out. You know, that's where the courage piece comes in. It's like labor. You're delivering it. And if it's grief for someone you've loved your whole life, it's not going to go away overnight. It's just not. But drinking your way through it is going to make it last possibly your whole life, you know.

And that's where the courage piece comes in. Because if we're really honest with ourselves, almost everyone's an addict, Eric. Almost everyone. Whether they're addicted to their phone, or they're addicted to their fame, or they're addicted to money, or they're addicted to food or sweets, or you name it. This world has a multitude of things. And if we're really aware and really look, yeah, you need courage for that. But it is going to go by faster than if you were not to feel it,

if you were to mask it, if you were to do all the things. And you know, the truth is, we're not used to feeling pain, and we don't want to feel pain. And even in the US in particular, in the pursuit of happiness, in other countries, like China, India, even Germany, there's an understanding that suffering is part of life. And when you can really take that in, then it's a different approach. I think here, in particular, in the US, there's this idea of just, oh, I'm down. Therefore, there's something wrong with me. No, not always. Sometimes you're just going through life and life has its ups and downs. That is just the truth of it. And in that chapter, I'm sure you saw, I mean, I put in a ton of tools. It's not that you can't have tools, you know? Tools like breathing, like meditation, like creative expression, like movement.

You know, there's so many ways that you can help the energy process through your system, and you should, but not by blocking your awareness. You're doing it with awareness. Thank you. I'm Jason Alexander. And I'm Peter Tilden. And together on the Really No Really podcast, our mission is to get the true answers to life's baffling questions like why they refuse to make the bathroom door go all the way to the floor. We got the answer. Will space junk block your cell signal? questions like why they refuse to make the bathroom door go all the way to the floor we

got the answer will space junk block your cell signal the astronaut who almost drowned during a spacewalk gives us the answer we talk with the scientist who figured out if your dog truly loves you and the one bringing back the woolly mammoth plus does tom cruise really do his own stunts his stuntman reveals the answer and you never know who's going to drop by. Mr. Brian Cranston is with us today. How are you, too? Hello, my friend. Wayne Knight about Jurassic Park. Wayne Knight, welcome to Really, No Really, sir.

Bless you all. Hello, Newman. And you never know when Howie Mandel might just stop by to talk about judging. Really? That's the opening? Really, No Really. Yeah, Really, No Really. Go to reallynoreally.com. And register to win $500, a guest spot on our podcast, or a limited edition signed Jason bobblehead. It's called Really No Really, and you can find it on the iHeartRadio app, on Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

You know, another thing that I see when you mentioned, like, adults, you know, can be angry for the rest of their lives. A child's angry for five minutes. I thought a little bit about that, and it made me think, you know, can be angry for the rest of their lives. A child's angry for five minutes. I thought a little bit about that and it made me think, you know, I know adults who have been angry for, you know, 40 years. They're still angry at their divorce at 25, right? And yet on some level, they're not repressing that because they talk about it all the time. So what dot is not being connected there, right? Because they're aware of it and they will tell you all about it and yet it's not passing or healing. So what's getting missed there? The blame game. If you blame your pain on someone else, you're also binding yourself. You're not taking responsibility. That person may have done

something shitty, but it's up to you to heal your own emotion around it. Because otherwise, you're their victim for the rest of your life, and you've signed up for it. And this is hard for people to hear. They don't like to hear that, and I understand. But when I say, like, don't be a victim of it, it's out of compassion. Because even if you, you know, were in a very traumatic situation or abusive situation, if you continue to constantly identify as the victim of that person, you're victimizing yourself. You're shackling yourself. Again, this is hard to hear. And I'm saying it with full compassion, because it is very hard to be sovereign if you're constantly identifying as

someone who has been abused by someone else. And I have to tell you, I was in abusive relationships. And if I constantly identify as a victim, I am keeping myself there. I am no longer in those relationships. I choose no longer to be in those relationships. But I'm claiming my sovereignty by not identifying as someone who's a victim. Do you see that difference? Yep. And it sounds like there's an essence here of, it's an advice I think I first read in a Emmett Chodron book like 30 years ago, right? Which is like, feel the feelings, drop the storyline, right? Like you own the feeling, right, of what you're feeling and you know that you're

responsible for that and you try and let go of necessarily the whole story around it because that story can change in the effect that you can reappraise it. But what actually happened is what actually happened. Yes. And so often when we're triggered, sometimes it has nothing to do with the person, but it has 100% to do with our own triggers due to our own past traumas or challenges. So let's say you were a child that grew up feeling not respected and you become an adult and that's your big button and anyone could push it. And I don't even mean to push it, but it's very easy to push it because it's sticking out big and fat from your chest. And no matter what someone says, you suddenly go into this deep shame or anger that you're not

being respected. A child could do it. Is it the child? And so that's where awareness comes in. It's like, what are my buttons? What am I letting run my life? Am I going to take back the reins? Or am I going to let my own buttons, my own triggers run the show and upset my relationships? Again, I'm not making excuses for people who are abusive. Absolutely not. But I am inviting us to think about where we get triggered and why, and then owning that, owning that and healing that. Yeah. As you were talking, I was thinking about, you were talking about addiction. So I of course reflect on my own addictions. At 24, I was a,

I was a homeless heroin addict. Right. And so I played that game pretty hard. Talk about freedom from addiction, right? It's sovereignty, right? And what I've said many, many times is that like the key turning point to me is that I know that I can face whatever feelings come up without running back to that thing. And that's where the freedom is, right? It's the sovereignty to say, okay, you know what, whatever this is that I'm feeling, okay, I can live with this without turning back to that. Now, again, we can have a hierarchy of addictive tendencies, right? You see this all the time in people. You give up heroin and you take up, you know, cigarettes or you give up alcohol and you now eat two bites of ice cream

a day. I'm not calling anyone out, Christopher. Sorry, editor Chris. He's five years sober at this point. Congratulations, Chris. But we can all sort of, you know, keep turning these things different directions, right? But there is a fundamental element of, okay, no matter what, I don't have to do that. And I think that's kind of what you're speaking about when you talk about sovereignty of emotion. Absolutely, Eric. And thank you for sharing your story. And I'm so grateful that you claimed your sovereignty because that means you got to live, you know? And it means you realize I'm bigger than the pain. That's one thing that we sometimes forget when emotions are really hard. They feel like they're bigger than us and that they claim us, but they don't. We're bigger than our emotions. They're just energy moving through us and we can help it move and we can move with

it and we are bigger than them. I share this analogy in the book, how the first time I gave birth without meds both times because my mom had done that with four kids and I wanted to experience that and also just preferred that for many reasons. And the first time I was just feeling so sorry for myself going through the labor, I was screaming and I was cursing like a sailor and feeling so sorry for myself the whole time. And then the second time I gave birth, I actually had done a hypnosis program that helped me fully accept everything. program that helped me fully accept everything. And that birth was so calm that my midwife decided to take a nap with her helper right before the baby came out because they were telling my husband, oh, she won't come till tomorrow, given how calm she is. And now that was such a difference. What

happened? Like that hypnosis program, I had trained myself to be in full on acceptance and welcoming of the pain okay so this is physical pain we're talking about emotion but it's the same you realize wow this is a sensation an emotion is a sensation and when you're giving labor you're like this is a massive sensation where i feel my body is splitting open it's it's a very dramatic experience and an emotion is the same you can observe it as a sensation and it's extremely freeing because you're like wow this is a sensation that's it how do we balance that right because on hand, you're observing the emotion and, you know, there's the whole idea of like bypassing, right? So spiritual bypassing, which would be like, I am just the sky, right? And you are. Right, right. And, right, but you also have to feel the emotion, right? There's some nuance or subtlety here of I'm allowing the emotion to be here and I'm feeling it. And I'm also at the same

time recognizing I'm not drowning in it. To me, that feels like it's an interesting dance to be able to pull off. I love what you're saying, Eric, because it's really easy when you're feeling unwell to want to jump out of your experience, jump out of your body, just like a leaf, right? And that is what addiction is, but you could do it in multiple ways, the bypassing you're talking about. And that's not going to work. What's going to work is staying with your body, staying with your experience. But like I said, you can move it. So I give examples like, you know, I had times when I struggled with extreme feelings of loneliness. And as a writer, I remember the day I walked into my office and I was feeling so much painful loneliness.

And I sat down and I decided to write and I wrote an article on what to do when you're feeling terribly lonely. And I channeled that energy into that article. And years later to this day, I get people telling me, thanks for writing that article. It really helped me today. I had no idea that it was going to help people like this, but I channeled the emotion through my writing, which is what I do now. Everybody has different things that they do, creative outlets, you know, but there's so many ways we can help midwife

the feeling, you know, it's not that you escape the pain, you stay in it, you stay grounded. You don't feed it. You don't blame others feeding it. You don't blame yourself because that's all feeding it. You let it happen. Also, you get, like I said earlier, you also give it time. And sometimes what you need is a nap, or you need to eat some food, or you need to go to yoga class, or you need to sit in a bath or whatever it is, you know, a physical nourishing thing that you would do for your child who's going through the same thing and that you don't know how to help, but you know how to make them a good meal. That's really helpful. Let's turn to sovereign mind. You mentioned it a little bit before, but I want to talk about a core idea

in that chapter, which is we are constantly accumulating imprints in our minds. And then you go on to talk about deprogramming imprints. So what do you mean by imprints? And then let's maybe share a strategy or two for starting to deprogram some of them. So, well, we talked a little bit about trauma already, and trauma is a very significant imprint. So imprint is a thought, memory, behavioral pattern that you have along the way of your life learned. And it has created an imprint in your mind in the sense that you've integrated it as a belief system. So for example, a trauma would be something that, you know, I give the example of walking with a veteran who we were

going to a restaurant with a group of friends. And I look up and one of the veterans in the group is sweating profusely from his forehead. And I said, what's going on? And he said, oh, I just, I can't go over bridges. So he had had an experience on a bridge and he just seeing a bridge in the middle of Wisconsin in a safe neighborhood was enough to trigger that, that imprint. So trauma is a very deep imprint, right? And I've talked about ways that we can deprogram that. But other imprints are ones that we pick up along the way. For example, I had an executive who, she's an African-American woman who had real big dreams and aspirations for her life and who was staying

in a job that she considered safe because she said as a black woman, she had learned that it was important to stay in a safe place and not overreach because of the repercussions that could ensue. So those are some things that she had learned, that she had learned in her community, that she had lived by. And she was working as this lawyer, a very brilliant woman, but working as a lawyer for the government in a position where she wasn't very happy and she knew she wanted more for herself. I would meet her often, you know, during the breaks on our program and she'd be sitting there by herself, like thinking about things. And I was like, you know, we got into conversation and she would say, she was basically staring that imprint in the face

and like, is this going to control me for the rest of my life? This belief that's keeping me so small. And after our program, a couple months later, I get a text message from her and she said, you know, I'm doing interviews and she's not just anywhere at this very large, you know, Fortune 500 company. And they not only gave her offer to one position, they offered her three positions, one of which was going to be in the legal field, keeping her in her comfort zone. And one of which was going to be not in the legal field. So not only did she take the leap to go from government to this big corporation, but she then chose the job that was not the legal job to further stretch her boundaries and further stretch into discomfort, but towards growth and opportunity and so forth. And she's excelling. But how many of us have such imprints, such beliefs,

behavior patterns that are keeping us so much smaller than we want to be, if we're really honest with ourselves, that we need to be, you know? And that's just an example. Other imprints, where do we get them from? We can get them from our societies and communities. We get them from our religious or philosophical or societal or cultural norms. And oftentimes, you don't know them, because they're just what's normal. You know, everybody thinks this or does this. So I guess it's normal. And it's not until you enter a different context, cultural context that you realize, oh, like the whole world doesn't do this, maybe I have a choice. Or, you know, you realize it through your own awareness. And give us one strategy for deprogramming an imprint. We're nearly out of time, but I would love to hear just like one approach people could take away with them.

That would be one way of thinking about starting to deprogram some of those imprints. In what areas of your life are you driven by fear? Do you feel contained in a cage smaller than the one you want to be in? Then you feel constrained. Look at that. Look at that as a source for your imprints in your relationships. They are great mirrors for your imprints. For example, I mentioned that person who feels that they're not respected. They could be in a relationship with a child and experience that same thing. Your relationships are mirrors for your buttons, for your imprints that are ruling your life, that are sitting on the throne of your life.

Those are some examples. And I just want to end with one quick story that I interviewed a colonel in the military for this chapter. And this person's job was to control the mind of the enemy. So, in other words, create information that was brainwashed, condition the minds of the Taliban. And I said, oh, wow, so how do you go about consuming information that comes at you? And he said, oh, well, I always look for intent because that's his job, right? He creates intentional material.

And then he told me about how he raises his child and they'll be in the supermarket and the child will want some unhealthy sugary cereal. And he'll say, okay, so why do you want that cereal? And the child will say, well, cause it's so colorful and it's like fun. It's got these cute animals. And the dad will say, okay, so why do you think that it has that? Oh, because it makes you happy when you look at it and you just want to keep looking at it. Okay, so why do you think they did that? Oh, because kids love it. It's so nice.

You know, and I'm like, okay, so why do you think that they want kids to love it? You know, and go on down the list. I was like, wow, nothing like getting lessons on how to decondition yourself from someone whose job it is to brainwash others. So listener, in thinking about all that and the other great wisdom from today's episode, if you were going to isolate just one top insight that you're taking away, what would it be? Not your top 10, not the top five, just one. What is it? Think about it. Got it? Now I ask you, what's one tiny, tiny, tiny, tiny little thing you can do today to put it in practice? Or maybe just take a baby step towards it. Remember, little by little, a little becomes a lot.

Profound change happens as a result of aggregated tiny actions, not massive heroic effort. If you're not already on our Good Wolf Reminder SMS list, I'd highly recommend it as a tool you can leverage to remind you to take those vital baby steps forward. You can get on there at oneyoufeed.net slash SMS. It's totally free, and once you're on there, I'll send you a couple text messages a week with little reminders and nudges. Here's one I recently shared to give you an idea of the type of stuff I send. Keep practicing, even if it seems hopeless. Don't strive for perfection, aim for consistency, and no matter what, keep showing up for yourself. That was a great gem from recent guest Light Watkins. And if you're on the fence about joining, remember it's totally

free and easy to unsubscribe. If you want to get in, I'd love to have you there. Just go to oneufeed.net slash SMS. All right, back to it. Emma, thank you so much for joining us. It's always such a pleasure to have you on. I really enjoyed the new book, Sovereign, and I love spending some time with you. Thanks, Eric. The pleasure is mine. If what you just heard was helpful to you, please consider making a monthly donation to support the One You Feed podcast. When you join our membership community with this monthly pledge, you get lots of exclusive members-only benefits. It's our way of saying thank you for your support. Now, we are so grateful for the members of our community. We wouldn't be able to do what we do without their support, and we don't take a single dollar for granted. To learn more, make a donation at any level, and become a member of the One You

Feed community, go to oneufeed.net slash join. The One You Feed podcast would like to sincerely thank our sponsors for supporting the show. I'm Jason Alexander. And I'm Peter Tilden. And together, our mission on the Really No 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 reallynoreally.com and register to win $500, a guest spot on our podcast,

or a limited edition signed Jason bobblehead. The Really No Really podcast. Follow us on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.