A Teaching, a Song, and a Poem - 4/3/21

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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 a really a combination of four different elements that sort of show up at once and we label them as one emotion. So I'm gonna 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, will 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 I might say, all right, and feeling and anger? Where am I feeling anger? In my body? Oh? I feel a real tightness in my throat and um, 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 and 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, etcetera, etcetera. 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 of 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 of 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, where the thoughts that I'm having, And we could go into a lot of compone and it's 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 tweez 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? Tell me what I'm gonna do. And so this is a storm, and we could think of it in the same way that if a thunderstorm rolled in, Right, the thunderstorm has 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 the storm, 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 what like when the emotional storm rolls in. It 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 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. 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 S O B. Right, So by deconstructing this, I turned the volume down just enough that I'm able to think more clearly. Okay, how do I want to respond 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. Onto our poem for this week, and our poem this week is by Denise Levertoff. I need to just only have poets like Joe Smith, Robert frost Uh, Denise Levertof. 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 presence, great suffering, great fear, withdrawal 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, and all 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 dew fall begin? When does night fold its arms over our hearts to cherish them? When is daybreak? That is of Being?

By Denise Levertoffen. There, boy, there so many beautiful lines in there. Was there some moment dividing song from no song? Not really? The 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 Ridder fan. I don't know how many Josh Ritter songs we have

played on this teaching song and 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 eighty episodes. Frankly, it's a pretty good ratio considering how often I listened to Josh Ritter. So now we're at five. This song is called Monster Ballads.

It's often 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 listened 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 to miles and minds, bringing only empty boons. Whatever faith and they had when they said, some pass the tug between the notes at all the desert and faith and loves the Bad wears a wire out the drums, Monster bellas, sound stations out of Crown sid just a little bit, sign, just a little bit. And I was thinking about Locad and now thinking about located the fairest daughter of fair Sun, dressed in golden pyramids around the desert now and feet and loves the Bonnehead.

Where's the wire out of the trunks? Monster Ballads and the stations of pro Sign just a little bit, sign, just a little bit. The ones on the zero's bleeding mace and noise. When you're empty, there's so much space for then you turn it off down still Small force comes in blazon from some past hugrounds