The School of Greatness - 816 Plant Good Seeds

Episode Date: June 28, 2019

Harvest seeds of growth. Ending relationships is never easy. But it’s a part of life. Not all relationships last, but it’s how we end them that makes all the difference. You can use the opportunity to plant seeds that better your future, or you can plant bitter seeds that will bloom into hatred and rage. You make the decision. It is possible to consciously uncouple. For this Five Minute Friday, I revisited a conversation I had with Katherine Woodward where she explained the best way to end a relationship. Katherine Woodward Thomas, M.A., MFT is the author of the New York Times Bestseller Conscious Uncoupling: 5 Steps to Living Happily Even After, which was nominated for a Books for a Better Life Award, and the national bestseller, Calling in “The One:” 7 Weeks to Attract the Love of Your Life. She is also a licensed marriage and family therapist and teacher to thousands from all corners of the world in her virtual and in-person learning communities. Katherine teaches us to understand our feelings and gives us techniques to release them. In This Episode You Will Learn: About “affect labeling” or naming your feelings (2:00) The practice of Tonglen (3:55) How to harvest the seeds of growth that are underneath our emotions (4:30) About the concept of Karma (5:20)

This is 5-Minute Friday! Welcome everyone to this episode, a very special episode with a new friend of mine. Her name is Catherine Woodward-Thomas. And for those that don't know who she is, she's a life coach and licensed psychotherapist. One of three founding faculty of Evolving Wisdom, which was recently named by Inc. Magazine as the fastest growing online transformation educational company in America. Catherine has had the privilege of co-leading virtual learning communities that includes hundreds of thousands of students from all over the globe.

She also wrote a bestselling book called Calling in the One, Seven Weeks to Attract the Love of Your Life, which became a bestseller within four months of publication and has since gone on to sell over 200,000 copies. She also has a new book coming out right now that's called Conscious Uncoupling. that I offer people is a simple technique called affect labeling in the psychological world, which is basically the ability to put a name on each of your feelings. Okay. So give me an example. So an example is, first of all, there was a scientific study done where subjects were looking at a computer screen and they were seeing, you know, faces of horror, faces of rage, faces of hatred, and they were being monitored and all of their vitals. And they're kind of going off the charts, their blood pressure is rising and their heart rate is

going. And then they did another technique with this. They have the same pictures to a new group, but put a name, hatred, rage, despair, and the vitals did not go up in the same way. So what that shows is that when we have a name for the experience that we're having, we don't get as overwhelmed. So language serves kind of as a container. So how would we use that in a breakup? So I have a practice where I just, it's very simply advise people to ask yourself,

you know, Catherine, honey, what are you feeling right now? I'm feeling terrified. I can see that you're feeling terrified, honey. What else are you feeling?

I'm feeling so humiliated. Oh, I could see that you're feeling terrified honey what else are you feeling I'm feeling so humiliated oh I can see that you're so humiliated what else are you feeling I'm feeling really pissed okay okay I can see that you're feeling that what else are you feeling

I feel exhilarated because we have all these feelings going on at once they don't have to get on with each other, you know. So that process. And then sometimes if the feelings are overwhelming, I also give people an opportunity to do this process of Tunglen, which is a Buddhist process. I'm not Buddhist myself, but it's a beautiful practice that Pema Chodron actually made very popular. If you breathe a certain feeling into your heart, so I feel despair, I'm going to breathe despair in.

I'm not going to turn away from it. And on the out breath, I'm going to breathe out a blessing to everyone in the world who in this very moment is suffering with this very feeling, including myself. And it starts to be like you can start to hold the feeling more because you've made a bigger playing field and you see it as an impersonal experience and then you become you know a force of good ideally what happens is we want to

harvest the seeds of growth that are inside of each of our feelings so for instance the feeling of rage there's something underneath it like a violation has occurred and there's a part of us that's saying, I should be treated better. I deserve respect. I deserve that my feelings should matter to the people that love me and that I've opened my life up to and I deserve to have better. So that can actually become a stand then that you take. Yeah. You know, because we're going to move into self-responsibility. How is it giving my power away?

How is it okay? How is I, you know, treating people to disrespect me? All of that kind of thing. Sure. Right. So you want to harvest the seeds of growth. Gotcha. Because this is the thing.

There's also a teacher, Ken MacLeod, talks about karma. And he breaks karma down basically to to its uh original sanskrit meaning which means um uh the ability to uh to to plant seeds for the future it's it's action seed results interesting so every action we take every choice that we make in that moment when we're in a breakup is planting a seed for the future wow and a lot of people who end make in that moment when we're in a breakup is planting a seed for the future. And a lot of people who end up in that negative spiral where you're years later fighting and back in court and stuff is because at the very beginning, people planted bad seeds of hatred and rage.