Way of the Emotional Warrior: Recent Episodes
Kai Ehnes
Welcome to The Way of the Emotional Warrior. This show is all about mastering one's emotions. There are negative emotions that create downward spirals in our life. Then there are neutral and positive emotions that allow us to truly figure out who we are, why we care about certain people, ideas, and things. We will learn how to master and harness the energy of our e-motions to regain our power, vitality, confidence and quality of life.
My promise to you! My show will explore how we can master our emotions. I will bring you not only opinions but peer reviewed science as support for what we are investigating.
I will post new episodes weekly and aim to deliver quality content. This field is a true passion of mine. I truly look forward to connecting with you.
www.kaiehnes.com Instagram: @way_of_the_emotional_warrior
www.kaiehnes.com This week we have a deep dive into how to gain insight into yourself and how suppressed childhood trauma and events can affect us as adults. I interview Ann Hince who has graciously shared her experiences and insights on how to heal ourselves from the Inside. Her website is: www.annhince.com Support this podcast
Ep74 Kai & Dr Heather Noone - Discussion on Neuroscience and Vulnerability Want to Learn How to Increase Your Longevity? Download your Free ebook @ www.kaiehnes.com Hello and Welcome to the Way of the Emotional Warrior Podcast. My name is Kai Ehnes and today we have a discussion with DR Heather Noone. She is a neuroscientist and psychiatrist. Our discussion takes us on the road of vulnerability. Support this podcast
Ep73 How Do You Speak to Yourself Want to Learn How to Increase Your Longevity? Download your Free ebook @ www.kaiehnes.com
Hello and Welcome to the Way of the Emotional Warrior Podcast. My name is Kai Ehnes and today we will be answering the question of: How nice and supportive are you to yourself with your selftalk? Support this podcast
Ep72 Why Don’t You Just Listen Want to Learn How to Increase Your Longevity? Download your Free ebook @ www.kaiehnes.com Hello and Welcome to the Way of the Emotional Warrior Podcast. My name is Kai Ehnes and today we will be answering the question of: Is there a better way to actually listen to people? This episode looks deeper into conscious listening. Want to be a better partner or simply a better human being? Well, listen up! Good luck.
~Peace
End: I hope you enjoyed this episode and I will see you next time around…take care. Support this podcast
Ep71 Its Ok to Be Okay Want to Learn How to Increase Your Longevity? Download your Free ebook @ www.kaiehnes.com
Hello and Welcome to the Way of the Emotional Warrior Podcast. My name is Kai Ehnes and today we will be answering the question of:
If its really okay to be okay then why do we have such a hard time with accomplishing it? Good luck.
~Peace Support this podcast
Want to Learn How to Increase Your Longevity? Download your Free ebook @ www.kaiehnes.com Hello and Welcome to the Way of the Emotional Warrior Podcast. My name is Kai Ehnes and today we will be answering the question of: How can a big, really large WHY elevate my life? This episode expands on last week’s topic of the importance and purpose of your WHY. Developing a strong WHY is super important. Imagine that every day when you wake up it is immediately clear why you do what is on the agenda for the day. Sound interesting? Support this podcast
Ep69 How Your Why Sets Up Your Life Purpose Want to Learn How to Increase Your Longevity? Download your Free ebook @ www.kaiehnes.com
Hello and Welcome to the Way of the Emotional Warrior Podcast. My name is Kai Ehnes and today we will be answering the question of:
How Does Your Why Sets Up Your Life Purpose.
Good luck.
~Peace
End: I hope you enjoyed this episode and I will see you next time around…take care. Support this podcast
Ep68 Selfcare…Achieving Balance Want to Learn How to Increase Your Longevity? Download your Free ebook @ www.kaiehnes.com
Hello and Welcome to the Way of the Emotional Warrior Podcast. My name is Kai Ehnes and today we will be answering the question of: Selfcare…How can we achieve balance in our lives? Let’s take a closer look at how we can accomplish this.
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Want to Learn How to Increase Your Longevity? Download your Free ebook @ www.kaiehnes.com Support this podcast
Ep66 Stages of Love to…Somewhere Want to Learn How to Increase Your Longevity? Download your Free ebook @ www.kaiehnes.com Hello and Welcome to the Way of the Emotional Warrior Podcast. My name is Kai Ehnes and today we will be answering the question of: What are the stages of love? At the time of this writing, the current divorce rate in the U.S. is 44.6%. So, just under 1 out of every 2 marriages end in divorce. Hm…Do those lucky ones who fell in love and then propose think about this statistic? Let’s assume that you want to be married for the duration of your lifetime. How can you find success in endeavor? It turns out that science has studied the nature of relationships. Its not necessarily about following any specific method of relationship success but rather knowing what’s actually supped to happen and how you can extract from all those methods what works in your own relationship. Again, I do want to point out that relationships require effort. Leave it unattended and weeds start to grow and take over. Ok. I don’t want to be part of the divorce rate statistic. What do I do?
It begins with knowing the stages of relationships. Stage one is Falling in love. Passion energy is strong. A baseline lust type of passion. Alongside that builds intimacy but it does so at a slower rate. Neuroscience has shown that cortisol is secreted in these stages. This helps people to overcome the fear of this new and possible relationship. Yes you want it but Oh my, I am also nervous about what that means. So think about it, this initial stage means that there is a frenzy plus the desire to bond. This is great right? Well…it last about 6 months. So for these 6 months the relationship is fairly easy. You have full neurochemical support and can’t make bigger decisions because of reduction of brain activity in higher cortexes. Let’s say you make it the 6 months. Now comes stage 2 which is passionate love. You transition into quite easily and you are seeking safety and harmony with your partner. Things become comfortable and this lasts for years. Neuroscience shows that oxytocin is active in this stage forming strong bonds. Next we get to companionate love. The passion starts to decrease while commitment and intimacy grows. The relationship becomes one of being Best friends. Commitment begets the reward of intimacy. Intimacy is about being close. This is crucial for the survival of the relationship. That bond with someone is amazing. In 2007 Robert Sternberg coined the term “triangular love theory.” He stated that couples go through these 3 stages. He shows that different combinations and intensities of these 3 stages play out with couples. He also found that people progress in predictable ways. The key to what he found for this episode is that successful long term relationships have a combination of multiple stages simultaneously. Meaning falling in love and passionate love develop together. Throw in a bit of companionate love and something else can slow down a bit. In the end, strong long term couples continually put effort into all 3 areas of love. Time to see how it applies to an Emotional Warrior: If you are someone looking for the One then that means you want a healthy long term relationship with that person. Sternberg calls this consummate love. This is the perfect couple. Their sex lives are good, they enjoy being together with the other person, they are gracious through their difficulties and both people truly love Being with the other one. In addition, emotional warriors know that this type of relationship is extremely special. That means effort is at the top of the list. Both people put forth the effort. When someone needs support, the other person is fully there to give it. When things are good they are easy, when it gets more difficult then more effort is required. When both people harness more of their positive emotional vibrations... Support this podcast
Ep65 Frustration…What a Challenge Want to Learn How to Increase Your Longevity? Download your Free ebook @ www.kaiehnes.com
Hello and Welcome to the Way of the Emotional Warrior Podcast. My name is Kai Ehnes and today we will be answering the question of :
What lesson or lessons can Frustration offer us?
I truly had all good intentions of continuing my segment on love and The One for today’s episode. However, I am experiencing quite a bit of frustration over the past few days so I thought it might be of some value to dive into it a bit and see how being an emotional warrior helps in these times. Let’s start with what frustration means. It starts with the feeling or state of being frustrated. Ok circular logic only increases frustration. So what is frustration? Psychology defines it as an emotional response to opposition. What is this opposition? It has to do with our goals and our will not being fulfilled or met. The research says that the typical responses to either internal or external conflict are often anger, violence, or passive aggressive behavior. I often mention David Hawkins’ work on the levels of consciousness. He assigns number values to different emotions. 200 is the magic level that separates the lower, often damaging emotions from the higher level positive helpful expanding emotions. The definition of frustration shows that we easily get pulled or pushed into the lower emotional levels. Well, that’s just great. You make a plan, execute the necessary tasks, lets say you even do everything right and something externally blocks you. Let’s assume it’s a block that you can not break down. The only choices are to stay or back up, or get around. Let’s go through the options. First…you can stay put and keep running into the block. It will not give, only you get hurt. Second you can go backwards. The only way I read this option is that you end up hiding. Still the block remains. Blowing up the block is not an option. What’s left is to get around it. As an emotional warrior, you have some tools available to you. First, do something physical like a workout. Get your energy moving in a healthy constructive way. With that edge of raw energy brought down a bit try going to the other side. Practice heart-mind coherence. Find a place where you can be alone for a few moments. Sit comfortably, take your hand (either one) and touch your chest where your heart is, with your fingers. Now try to settle in and focus on the area you are touching while breathing. Try to do it for 5 minutes. More if you can do it. This should settle your system down so that you can take yourself from the red zone to a calmer place.
Now…can getting around this block bring something better? Sometimes the block may be showing you something that has been broken or in need of attention but you were not dealing with it. By problem solving from a heart-mind coherent place you can come up with more creative and beneficial solutions. Your mindset is what you have control over. Your responses are something you have control over. Maybe you can even get to the place, after you solve the block, where you can address larger questions and issues in your life. Yes we all get frustrated. Going to the Red Zone of the lower emotions like anger and violence are completely counter productive. We all have to deal with these situations. Remember that you are an emotional warrior. Leave yourself clues to that mindset so that when you get into crisis you can find yourself able to reach into your emotional toolkit and move into positive constructive thoughts and behaviors. When your heart-mind grid is in coherence, you get master your emotional turbulences.
Good luck.
~Peace Support this podcast
Want to Learn How to Increase Your Longevity? Download your Free ebook @ www.kaiehnes.com Hello and Welcome to the Way of the Emotional Warrior Podcast. My name is Kai Ehnes and today we will be answering the question of: How can you create the One? Oh I am sure this sounds absolutely crazy. What do you mean you can create someone. Well, first off this not so much about anything physical but much moreso along the emotional and interior life. So let’s get started. Last week we spoke about having to do some emotional and spiritual work within yourself so that you can meet the One. Think of it this way. Imagine that you are trying to find the right radio station. Back in the day, radios had a knob that you turned and this sort of wacky red or white needle would move left or right. Inside the radio this shifted the receiver to be able to pick up the various frequencies of different radio stations. There were 2 bands for the public. AM and FM. You gently turned the know until you found a station, then you had to turn the dial back and forth until had the best reception. Of course, if this was inside of a car you had to do it again shortly because you were moving which changed the reception. Good, if you did it right, you were rewarded with a great song and clear reception. In pother words you had to do some work (dial turning) the radio station did its job by sending signals. Connection established. Here is how it worked for me. In another time I was a singled dad of two boys. They kept me quite busy, so dating was sparse. What I found is what I think many people experience which is that dating was fun but like the radio example, didn’t have the right reception. You know when you are scrolling through various TV channels but simply can’t find anything that grabs your attention. Sometimes you even end up watching something you don’t even really care about but you simply don’t have the energy to ramp up for doing something else? That’s what dating was like. Very nice people but I already had a very busy and established life.
So I took some time off from it all and started to do the work. I had a large whiteboard and started to write on it what I wanted in someone else. I came up with a good list of traits. For a while the list simply sat there. Periodically I would add or remove something. I would alter the order of the traits. Then it started to take on a life of itself. What happened was life changing in numerous ways. One evening I was looking over the list and the universe sent me the idea that what I was asking goes in both directions. Was I actually living the characteristics of the list? I mean honestly, is it fair to ask anything of someone else if you don’t exhibit those traits yourself. Here is an example: Is it ok to demand that another person be loyal and not cheat but you would cross that line if you felt like it? So, I gave myself the task of doing an inventory of each trait. How solid was I an any and all of those traits that I thought The One should exhibit. There were some moments of honesty I had to look into. This is what I mean by doing the Work. In all of the different areas of your personality, where are you out of balance? Then you step in with honesty and integrity, look at your short comings or excesses and seek help to address them. This became a lot of fun. I had quite a bit of work to do. It has been ongoing every day. What became clear was this: If you want the One you first have to Be the One. That means you do the work which is like turning the radio dial. You adjust your self (the radio) by adjusting your frequency reception and suddenly the right station will appear. In this case the right person emerged. I knew the universe was conspiring for this to happen. The events of my meeting My One were pretty wild. That will be another story for another time. What about the kids you might ask. Well, one day when I... Support this podcast
Want to Learn How to Increase Your Longevity? Download your Free ebook @ www.kaiehnes.com Hello and Welcome to the Way of the Emotional Warrior Podcast. My name is Kai Ehnes and today we will be answering the question of:
Have You Found “The One?”
How often have you heard about finding The One? You know, that one person out of all 7.8 something billion of us. Picture that for one moment. Here we are born into a certain family, in a certain town, in a certain country on this planet and somewhere along the line someone threw out into human consciousness that we have to find The One. Again, think about that…imagine being in a larger room with 200 people. Try finding someone in that crowd. Now magnify that to finding one person in 7.8 billion beings. How can you even know when it is that person? Maybe you have never traveled very far and you found someone you really like. How can you ever fully settle in? maybe someone is moreso The one than the one you are with? This can drive any sane person crazy. What to do? Well…enter prime time to being an emotional warrior. Neuroscience has various explanations of how the brain works and responds with its neurochemistry, evolutionary psychology has its own set of answers. Here are a few ideas.
A good amount of research points to the idea that in many species, the females make decisions about a partner. In reaction, males have created various traits and behaviors to try to make themselves be noticed and more attractive. While this seems a perfectly reasonable order of events, why is it so difficult to find the right person to be a good match? Neuroscience has shown that the chemistry rush that overtakes our brain when we are attracted to someone actually do us a disservice. The logical reasoning part of the brain can not compete with the chemicals of lust. This is kind of funny if you take a second. We invest so much into our thinking brain but in matters of the heart and relationships it has to take a back set in the initial critical stages. Typically, we are motivated and learn by way of our environment. Rewards and negative consequences plus social media, throw in a healthy dose of FOMO (the fear of missing out) and voila our lives are in a way being lived FOR us way more than being lived BY us. So where do we start? In and with one of our most obvious yet elusive places…namely ourselves. That’s right. Start with yourself. Do The Work. What work you ask? The work of developing and building yourself. We spend our entire life building the persona or side of our psersonality that we think we are supposed to be in society and the world. We figure out how to behave in groups, school, a job a family etc…we become really good at being what others want us to be and we ehtink they want us t be. This game start very early in childhood and continues on and on. Ony you can put on the brakes to this never ending frenzy and decide to investigate who you actually are? Wait…I know who I am. I am person X who does This and likes that etc…yes that’s true but is that really you?
How do you even know if you know yourself? From the point of view of an emotional warrior, you find inner peace and live authentically.
With enough work you begin to live honestly. You master your emotions and live intentionally. Joy and gratitude and appreciation become part of your day to day. You become enmeshed in this life on this planet at this point in time. Now, you stop making other people into having to be The One. You can stop searching for one in 7.8 billion. You become the One. You light shines so bright that anyone and everyone else can see its beauty. Now the right person who has done their share of their own work can find you and it can be love at first sight. It is a lot of emotional, spiritual, physical work. Many bumps in the road. Love is a precious thing. How many songs, books and poems have been written... Support this podcast
Want to Learn How to Increase Your Longevity? Download your Free ebook @ www.kaiehnes.com Today's guest is Jeremy Sherman Contact: www.jeremysherman.com
Join us for a provocative interview on the following topics: The origins of life, chemically and physically Humans are geared for symbols Effort for the being, by the being Human mind packs infinite possibilities into habits Doubt raises things to consciousness We want novelty We want freedom - to upscale yet avoid pitfall Freedom and Constraints What is love? Jeremy's book: What's up with A-holes: Advanced Psychoproctology for Beginners Language is confirmation Bias Support this podcast
Learn how to Live Longer @ www.kaiehnes.com Ep61 Huli Huli…Can Turning BBQ Over Help My Emotional Transformation
Hello and Welcome to the Way of the Emotional Warrior Podcast. My name is Kai Ehnes and today we will be answering the question of Huli Huli…how the flipping of BBQ can elevate our emotions game. When I heard this term, it instantly made me think about how it can help in terms of personal transformation. Why??
Lets start with what it means. Huli Huli is Hawaiian and means turn, turn. In 1955, Ernest Morgado, a Honolulu businessman, served a group of farmers grilled chicken that had been marinated in his mother’s teriyaki-style sauce. It was such a hit that he decided to market it with the name “huli huli.” Now you might be wondering how huli huli has anything to do with emotional transformation, right? Well, it means you can turn over parts of yourself that you might think don’t need investigating. Lets look at you relationship for a second. Assume that you think everything is going just fine. Huli huli would mean that you lovingly ask your partner a question or two that you take for granted but might be lacking in their world. I want to really stress that you have to be ok with the answers that come back. But hey, truth is the right path. So here is an example. You are watching a movie with your love and the characters are moving through their story line. One character tells the other that they often feel lonely in their marriage. Huli huli means you have to turn turn your assumption about your relationship. Ask your partner if they ever feel lonely in your relationship. Maybe they say yes. Now you have a great opportunity to investigate further and make the changes that will improve the relationship. On the other hand, maybe they say no. You might think that you are off the hook but huli huli would say that you turn turn that answer as well. Maybe you make more effort to offer comfort and support to your love. Either way you are improving the basis of your relationship. Huli huli is a win. Turn over parts of ourself, your relationships, community, life perspective…on and on
Maybe you are thinking why not let sleeping dogs lie. Well, complacency is the hobgoblin of little minds. As emotional warriors, it is our drive to leave no rock unturned and clean up our Stuff. Professor of Neuroscience, Michael Platt, shared the following in an interview with the HR Observer that:
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Neuroscience research shows that opposing brain circuits support routine and divergent thinking. Innovation thus requires unplugging from rote tasks like email or filling out spreadsheets.
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Neuroscience research suggests mindfulness meditation activates the brain’s “innovation network” thereby boosting creativity. Brief mindfulness exercises improve both creative problem-solving and protect against stress.
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Brain research shows that decisions can be either fast or accurate, but typically not both. There is a tradeoff between speed and accuracy. Generally, stepping back and slowing down improves decisions.
The first point of the brain circuits divergent thinking supports expanding your emotional awareness. An emotional warrior can easily use huli huli to turn over their routines and assumptions gaining creative insight on how to uplevel their lives. Emotional mastery is complex. First there has to be awareness. Think of the old adage: If it ain’t broke don’t fix it but that was improved years ago into the statement if it ain’t broke, fix it anyway. That’s what this work is all about. Making yourself better and transforming your life is what its all about.
Good luck on your journey😊
~Peace
End: I hope you enjoyed this episode and I will see you next time around…take care. Support this podcast
In invite you to Free copy of My ebook @ www.kaiehnes.com Ep60 Playfulness and Curiosity Hello and Welcome to the Way of the Emotional Warrior Podcast. My name is Kai Ehnes and today we will be answering the question How can you be more playful in your life?
Playfulness just sounds wonderful doesn’t it? Kids do this so naturally. Adults frown upon it because it is a thing of childhood and immaturity. A grown person can not indulge in something so silly. Seriousness is the name of the game. If it isn’t serious then it simply is not worthwhile. What if we were to look at this little bit differently. Why does play have to reserved only for little children. Modern society frowns even upon teenagers being playful.
To me there is a healthy balance when being playful as an adult. I am not advocating shirking all responsibility and simply running off into the wild blue yonder. However, it is very possible to simply shift your outlook a bit to seeing the world as a place for us to play. In my world, my soul has come to this planet to play. The work has to be done no matter what, that is part of being alive but the way you approach the work will allow you to simply live with more joy. Let’s say you something breaks on your vehicle. Let’s say you have enough for a 200 dollar repair but the amount for the repair is triple that. A typical adult will panic and immediately embrace fear, invoking scarcity thinking and thus not be able to find a way to pay for the repair without having to sacrifice something else that is needed. How can you be more playful with these “serious” adult problems?
Enter curiosity. Let’s try this. Instead of telling yourself and the universe how this repair bill is excessive and asking for ways to panic and not be able to afford the amount, try breathing and slowing your roll. Next, ask some curiosity questions. Like: I wonder how this bill can be paid?
Wouldn’t it be great to have several options of how to pay this bill easily and smoothly?
Or…try shifting to gratitude…
I am grateful that this repair bill is easily taken care of. I appreciate having a safe vehicle for my family, myself, and other drivers.
Maybe play a bit by having the questions come from the vehicle instead. Like:
The vehicle says, thank you for fixing me now because otherwise the damage would have been much greater.
Or…
I am so happy to see my mechanic friend again. Thank you.
While all this may sound crazy on one hand, perception and thinking are the name of the game. The rules of the game are engineered to work in your favor when you adhere to them. Money opportunities will come your way if you think, feel and emote from a spiritually lawful place. Maybe you will think of something that you can sell that is never used and taking up space in a closet or a room. Maybe you will be offered a bonus. It all works this way. Part of the process is letting go of control over everything. This is a gripping energy that is not part of spiritual law. I want to point out that none of this about not caring or being dismissive. Quite the contrary, this about moving your own intention in a direction that will allow you to prosper. The neuroscience is quite interesting for the idea of curiosity. Researchers like Schulz and Bonawitz in 2007 and 2011, Piaget 1945, Loewenstein 1994 independently found that people like to solve information gaps and are intrigued by novel and unfamiliar items and settings. This means that we love to learn, explore and figure things out.
For an emotional warrior this is very helpful. Mastering emotions is really about emotional freedom. This in turn is what allows our souls to play. An emotional warrior can incorporate playfulness and curiosity into their lives and live freely and peacefully instead of being hijacked by fear and their amygdala.
Good luck.
~Peace Support this podcast
www.kaiehnes.com Guest: Geralyn Gendreau Book: Jungle Jean: The Biography of The Explorer Who Transformed Modern Parenting with The Continuum Concept www.junglejean.com www.geralyngendreau.com Emotional Mastery Mistake to fear emotions Feelings - short term Identify with it - thinking its you instead of something that happened to you moods - can linger for a longer time syndrome - identify with it so much that it can become a diagnosis train yourself to not have to slide into the negative emotions so far Self reflect, Self Correct observe the consequences of your behavior Some people release emotions and get over it others are heavily impacted by other people's emotions Genuine apology is about the remorse (digestive enzyme) it allows the person to feel the apology deeply, then forgiveness comes naturally Emotional Ecosystem Dan Siegel - Interpersonal Neurobiology impact each others' nervous systems with our emotions triggers do not have to be personal try saying "pass" you know your system will regulate you don't need to hold on to unnecessary suffering Story from Geralyn's book, read by author what we are trained as being awful that moment in time when you have a choice to not go down the painful route and instead take the other route you can remain in your center, in your heart, in your joy
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www.kaiehnes.com Ep58 Interview with Dr. Debi Silber on Post Betrayal Transformation
Dr. Debi Silber is the founder of the Post Betrayal Transformation Institute and is a holistic psychologist, a health, mindset and personal development expert, the author of the #1 bestselling book: The Unshakable Woman: 4 Steps to Rebuilding Your Body, Mind and Life After a Life Crisis and her newest book: Trust Again: Overcoming Betrayal and Regaining Health, Confidence and Happiness. Her recent PhD study on how we experience betrayal made 3 groundbreaking discoveries that changes how long it takes to heal. In addition to being on FOX, CBS, The Dr. Oz Show, TEDx (twice) and more, she’s an award winning speaker, coach and author dedicated to helping people move past their betrayals as well as any other blocks preventing them from the health, work, relationships, confidence and happiness they want most. Founder: The PBT (Post Betrayal Transformation) Institute https://thepbtinstitute.com/ (https://thepbtinstitute.com)
Show Notes PBT Instititute Psychology of transformation and human potential Betrayal - what holds us back - 3 groundbreaking discoveries Gender applications Women struggle with emotional betrayal, men with physical betrayal Shame - is it me? Did I do something wrong? Early Childhood betrayal Tools 4 step trust rebuilding Full healing means moving through 5 predictable stages the setup stage 4 legs of table - physical, mental, spiritual, emotional the shock breakdown of body. mind, worldview - vulnerable to disease, illness and stress Survival instincts emerge you grab onto anything that works, it feels better plant deep roots even though its not the right place low level emotions call in circumstances and relationships that confirm this you resign yourself - food, TV, alcohol, drugs - in order to numb the situation it becomes a habit, then lifestyle Finding and adjusting to a new normal not necessarily normal but you stopped the massive damage of stages 2+3 you leave your outgrown friends Healing, rebirth, new world view new experiences solidly grounded because you focus on the 4 parts TedX - transformation something terrible happens - worst thing ever - you can mourn it as long as you like if you choose to rebuild it, why would you rebuild it the same way The Gift - trauma is the setup for transformation you create a new identity take with you what you like, leave behind what does not work Victim mindset - stuck in stage 3 Support this podcast
www.kaiehnes.com Kai & Robert Riopel - Success Leaves a Clue Hello and Welcome to the Way of the Emotional Warrior Podcast. My name is Kai Ehnes and today we will be having a great discussion with Robert Riopel. Robert is a successful entrepreneur, coach, trainer, mentor…the list goes on. This is truly a fun interview. Robert makes it easy to believe in oneself that we can transform ourselves into an authentic life. Robert Riopel links: Free ebook: http://www.slac.rocks/book (www.slac.rocks/book) http://www.RobertRiopel.com (www.RobertRiopel.com) Facebook Show notes Entrepreneur, necessity Failure vs Feedback franchisee spent more money than earned personal development financially independent Transition to teaching financial freedom Overdoing my passion Negative non supportive habits Learning to take care of yourself Trains people Emotional freedom is possible Lost personal compass How do you treat yourself Be gentle Ask for help – vulnerability Vulnerability is a strength Growth minded person Willing to have tough conversation Bouncing back from shockwave of Covid shutdown Building training center Programming of low self esteem Find a mentor to model They have achieved what you want They will be the belief in you until you believe it yourself What is your gift? What brings you pleasure People forget what they want to do and do what they have to Truth is the greatest fear for doubt Work from 9-5, create your life from 5 to 9 Difference between being busy and being productive Block out Focus time Emotionally draining if you don’t take care of yourself Self centered vs centered in self Find someone in alignment with your beliefs Start with knowing who you are Being you lets you help people who love you for being who you are Releases emotional weight Good luck. ~Peace Support this podcast
www.kaiehnes.com Links to Rich Lewis To receive my free centering prayer ebook: https://silenceteaches.com/ (https://silenceteaches.com/) To learn more about my new book, Sitting with God: A Journey to Your True Self Through Centering Prayer: https://silenceteaches.com/about-the-books/ (https://silenceteaches.com/about-the-books/) One on one coaching: https://silenceteaches.com/centering-prayer-one-one-coaching/ (https://silenceteaches.com/centering-prayer-one-one-coaching/) Show Notes Ep56 Kai & Rich Lewis – Centered Praying -Silence Teaches Us http://www.silenceteaches.com (www.silenceteaches.com) Centering Prayer Meditation Relationship with God Helps you become who you really are Remove inner competing voices that are not real Authentic life for emotional warriors How is silence a teacher? Centering prayer 4 guidelines Benefits to outside centering prayer time Sacred word – deeper explanation Not a mantra Word should not be the focal point Sacred method Internal image Breath Stare at a spot in order to avoid falling asleep You can’t fail if you “show up” Reset button Reconnect Increase personal productivity
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www.kaiehnes.com Christian de la Huerta Contact info: With 30 years of experience, Christian de la Huerta is a sought-after spiritual teacher, personal transformation coach and leading voice in the breathwork community. He has traveled the world offering inspiring and transformational retreats combining psychological and spiritual teachings with lasting and life-changing effects. An award-winning, critically acclaimed author, he has spoken at numerous universities and conferences and on the TEDx stage. His new book, Awakening the Soul of Power, was described by multiple Grammy Award–winner Gloria Estefan as “a balm for the soul of anyone searching for truth and answers to life’s difficult questions.” To find out more about his work and receive a free guided meditation, power practices and a chapter from the book, visit: https://soulfulpower.com/ (https://soulfulpower.com/). Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/christian.delahuerta.1 (https://www.facebook.com/christian.delahuerta.1) Insta: https://www.instagram.com/christiandlh/ (https://www.instagram.com/christiandlh/) LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/christiandelahuerta/ (https://www.linkedin.com/in/christiandelahuerta/) Goodreads: https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/391544.Christian_de_la_Huerta (https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/391544.Christian_de_la_Huerta) Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/Christian-De-la-Huerta/e/B001KINR1K (https://www.amazon.com/Christian-De-la-Huerta/e/B001KINR1K) Newsletter: https://kb987.infusionsoft.app/app/form/unleashings-the-soul-of-power-email-list (https://kb987.infusionsoft.app/app/form/unleashings-the-soul-of-power-email-list) YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC4hOzeGdhkTcRxOHkV9tfbQ (https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC4hOzeGdhkTcRxOHkV9tfbQ) Website: https://soulfulpower.com/ (https://soulfulpower.com/) Website Author Page: https://soulfulpower.com/Awakening-The-Soul-Of-Power-Book/ (https://soulfulpower.com/Awakening-The-Soul-Of-Power-Book/) AllAuthor: https://allauthor.com/author/christiandlh/ (https://allauthor.com/author/christiandlh/) Facebook Group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/290440885360555/ (https://www.facebook.com/groups/290440885360555/)
Show Notes: Notes from interview: How to bounce back from emotional shock Ego perception a. Ego reality b. Victim mode i. Baseball center of stadium – we are the stadium c. choices made from this context 3. Why someone else can get to us – push our buttons 4. 3 brains 5. Amygdala hijack a. Shuts off communication with thinking brain b. lasts 8-10 seconds
Offset – count to 10, take a breath
Slow down breath
Heart has to slow down
Begin to relax
Buy some time
Activate thinking brain
Tools
We have to own our part
Get honest
Don’t take things personally
Filtered with past experiences
Be the eye of the storm – choose how to engage
Respond rather than react
Focus on the breath
Others trigger us because: We don’t feel seen
We don’t feel respected
Flatten the button so that no one can press it
Reacting does not mean we are bad people, we are hard wired to react
Blaming others or situations means we are giving... Support this podcast
www.kaiehnes.com Ep54 Kai & Dan Shockley on his Journey of Being a Hereditary Colon Cancer Warrior Today's show is an interview with Dan Shockley. He is a Colon Cancer Survivor who shares his resilience, overall super attitude and positive mindset in the face of an overwhelming diagnosis. I invite you to hear the story of a great story of dealing with adversity. Dan offers numerous tools for all of us to increase the quality of our life. Here are the links to his organizations. https://coloncancerpreventionproject.org/ (https://coloncancerpreventionproject.org/) https://www.ostomy.org/ (https://www.ostomy.org/) He also offers his contact info if you would like to contact him. dandrydockshockley@gmail.com ~Peace
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www.kaiehnes.com Ep53 What…Bacteria Affects my Mood? Hello and Welcome to the Way of the Emotional Warrior Podcast. My name is Kai Ehnes and today we will be answering the question… Can bacteria really affect my mood?
Have you ever wondered why your mood can shift instantly? I mean here you are, moving right along in your day to day and out of nowhere your mood shifts. Often, it is a bad mood vs a good one. So why does this happen? One possible cause apparently is bacteria. Specifically, your gut bacteria. Your gut is a biome and usually is healthy and diverse with good and bad bacteria. Somehow, these little passengers can affect various parts of our system, including our moods. Science is showing that they impact neurodegenerative disease, depression, among others. Have you ever had a gut feeling or that you felt punched in the gut by something someone said? The gut has neurons, cells similar to those in our brain. These neurons are why the gut is often called the little brain. Interestingly, it “thinks” acts/reacts faster than the brain in between our ears. A study conducted at Kyushu University in Japan, investigated “psychobiotics” or mood microbes to see if they could alter, more likely improve mental health. Reserachers use mice and the ones who were “germ free” produced two times the amount of stress hormones when under stress than normal mice. Let’s put this into perspective. Science has shown that a healthy gut biome allows us to deal not only better with stress but that altering the gut biome can help with the treatment of mental health. This obviously has numerous parts for people. Think about the impact of diet, nutrition, exercise, feelings and emotions we push into our gut by nor processing them correctly. Think about it, whether food or feelings they have to be processed somewhere. If not, they get stored. The research suggests that the vagus nereve, an information superhighway connecting the brain and gut gets impacted. Fiber is not properly broken down. Even the immune system can get impacted as well as mRNA which impacts how your DNA functions. Why is any of this important? Emotional Warriors can control their moods. Of course mood shifts, even swings, but emotional mastery leads one to understand how to deal with it in order to not get pulled out of balance to varying extremes. If one of the culprits of our mood imbalance is the gut biome then it makes sense to take the necessary steps to maintain a healthy gut environment. Part of the issue is that we have become afraid of germs and therefore do what we can to minimize them but it turns out that we need germs to maintain a healthy gut biome. According to Professor Ted Dinan at Cork University Hoispital. Diets low in fiber can have a negative impact on gut health. I think that is amazing that more complex mental issues and simple mood swings can be affected by the state of our gut. Scientists are finding that patients with diseases such as Parkinson’s and depression have unique biomes that are out of balance. They even transplanted samples of these biomes to mice and found that the behavior transferred right with it. Part of the life of emotional mastery is to know what impacts our emotions. It certainly makes sense that if our gut biome is that important to our well being, we owe it to ourselves to take a look. Do some research to what foods and supplements help to maintain a healthy gut biome. Not only you but those around you will thank you. Eat your fiber😊
Good luck. ~Peace Support this podcast
www.kaiehnes.com Hello and Welcome to the Way of the Emotional Warrior Podcast. My name is Kai Ehnes and today I would like to celebrate with all of you my 1 year podcast anniversary. Woop woop😊)))))))))))
It is hard to believe that we have created 52 episodes. I realize that there are people that do that within a few weeks but one thing that has become abundantly clear for me over the past few years is that you have to believe in yourself. This podcast concept has been the fruit of intention and love. My goal was to share some ideas that I thought would be helpful to other people. The original intention was to talk about insights that would be backed up by neuroscience, philosophy and psychology resulting in an ever expanding set of tools for people to be able to uplevel their lives. As with anything, one has to be ready for changes, some resulting from opportunities and others simple resulting from personal shifts. What has happened in 1 year of podcasting for me is the following: 1. I kept a promise I made with myself and my wife that I would put together a show every single week and that I would do so for the period of 1 year. a. Done…I am so happy about that. There were weeks where the publishing deadline was encroaching so fast and I could barely get it done in time. Only once did I push it literally until 1 hour prior to publication. Eventually, it all became part of my life and Monday – Tuesday have become podcast days. 2. The different topics I write about have simply been an amazing topic for myself. Having to create an episode means to sift through what’s out there, let truth, science, and common sense pave the way. So, each discussion topic is an area that I have worked with in my own life. a. Done 3. Reciprocity – My main social media hub in Facebook. Today we achieved a milestone of 6000 followers for the Way of The Emotional Warrior. Some weeks have had more social interaction than others and the lean times certainly made me question if I should continue. However, over the past week, I have begun to set up interviews for the podcast. I am starting to meet amazing people with amazing stories of emotional perseverance and authenticity. I am super excited to see what these interviews will yield. a. Btw…if any of you feel so inclined, if you have good story about your emotional resilience, send me an email at kai_ehnes@kaiehnes.com 4. Thank you – I am truly grateful to you for listening to my episodes. a. My career as a teacher and professor always had people assigned to me. There was always an immediate audience. This is quite different. I had questions if anybody would listen. How would they find me? Are they getting any value from what I am doing? Let’s face it, there is a lot of content online. Why this podcast? Why this man’s ideas? b. So, Thank you for participating. Due to the internet, this podcast has a global reach. When I look at the metrics, people are joining in from all over the world. That is simply amazing. 5. Promise continued – I will continue creating weekly shows for the next year. With new people jumping in with interviews, the scope of the ideas will get wider and deeper. I am honored and humbled to be able to put forth the Way of the Emotional Warrior. 6. I truly believe that people can live more and more amazing lives with more purpose and more fulfilment. Quality is the name of the game in an authentic life. I hope you have enjoyed the past year and I look forward to what the next 12 months will bring.
~Peace Support this podcast
www.kaiehnes.com Ep51 Groovy Grooves Hello and Welcome to the Way of the Emotional Warrior Podcast. My name is Kai Ehnes and today we will be answering the question of: Are grooves good for us? Here we go. I heard the following statement: Grooves eventually build walls. These walls will box us in. Let’s dive into this a little deeper. Grooves happen when we develop patterns. At first the patterns serve us because they create a repetitive set of actions and behaviors that allow us to gain control over our environment. Let’s say that you do the same 10 things every morning before you go to work. Not only do you do the same 10 things but you do them in the same order. Again, it helps us to organize. This way we don’t leave our home forgetting phone, wallet or keys. Oh wait…gotta make sure have our coffee mug filled with its great elixir😊 This may work for a while in terms of repetition giving us the idea that we have control over our environment but eventually you probably feel the following. First, you don’t really want the coffee mug every day or maybe for a day you want to just leave your phone behind. But then this little voice jumps in that says you better not change anything because without saying it, it means that you might lose some of that coveted control. This is how superstitions come into play in our lives. Here comes the problem…we live in a reality where change is the one constant that is ever present. So, creating a system of repetition that does not take into account change is an inappropriate fit. Of course, every person starts with seeking out constancy but novelty or change have to have room to exist otherwise that incompatibility will create issues with one’s mind. So back to the grooves quote. If we make those grooves bigger and better then they will create walls. Those walls box us in and we get stunted and live unfulfilled lives.
We have between 60 to 70 thousand thoughts per day and over 90% of those thoughts are repeated every day. This repetition serves us for a while but we can’t grow. Let’s use the analogy of a staircase. Let’s say there are 20 steps then there is a landing, then it takes a turn and there are 20 more steps yielding another landing. For our situation, the landings are where we are making and expanding our grooves. The stairs are our growth and development. Can you see that there are more stairs than landings and therefore we should spend mor time expanding with novelties and less time on the landings creating grooves that eventually blind us to looking for the next set of ascending steps? When I was younger I firmly believed in the creation of grooves in my life. Repetition let me become ok with overwhelming environments. For a while I believed that was the pinnacle of it all. The perfectly executed set of tasks in a week made for an amazing week. But as with everything in life, I found myself bored. I would wake up and know what I had to do. It was all planned out and made sense. Heck it was my own plan. Why would I be bored with my own plan? Answer, I had no clue how the ways and laws of the universe actually operated. I had studied people who knew how to create and execute amazing plans. I got really good at executing those successful plans. But something was missing. I felt ridiculous about how that played out. I was fortunate to have the plans in place how dare I be bored at some level? I realized on some plane that life could blow up all my plans rather easily and if did not want things to blow up and disintegrate then I had to make forward moving plans. So, I embraced the fact that there is change. It was quite difficult. However, with time allowing for change and embracing it gave me new insight into the process. I learned that I could steer some of the change instead of waiting for things to get crazy. This little bit of steering change is lawful and has allowed me to climb some new steps on the never ending staircase.... Support this podcast
www.kaiehnes.com Ep50 What’s Your State? Hello and Welcome to the Way of the Emotional Warrior Podcast. My name is Kai Ehnes and today we will be answering the question of: What’s exactly is your state? What am I talking about when I say state? It is your current state of consciousness. What are you thinking, what are you feeling, what are you experiencing? All of these make up your state of consciousness. Let’s set the context, as I have said in previous episodes, our brain is hard wired for our survival. It has a large portion of its centers dedicated to noticing and sending awareness signals of changes in the environment that could cause us harm. Having said that, it means that our brain can quite often determine our state of consciousness by focusing on a narrow sector of information. This causes a massive reaction in our system to respond to that danger signal. We respond with fear, anxiety, concern, confusion etc… A perfect example of this was the book/movie War of the Worlds. A perceived attack by invaders from Mars caused a mass panic reaction by people who believed the radio program. It turns out that it was a made up story but that was only after people had heard about it and responded to it. Those who reacted thought it was probably their last day to live and made their perceptions into reactions. Come to find out the next day that it was all a hoax. Point of this is that people lost their grip. Panic and mayhem ensued. The environment took over peoples’ minds and reactions. When it comes to our own state of consciousness, you can see that it can get hijacked rather quickly with fear and anxiety based on the events in our environment. So what can we do about it? How can we be emotional warriors? Let’s look at the 3 parts of our consciousness. There is a subconscious, conscious, and superconscious. Each has its own purpose, yet all 3 happen at the same time inside or of our being. The subconscious is like an engine. Think of your car, the engine runs and performs but without any direction. Then we have the conscious mind. Its job is to see the present. Of course that is usually problem based. Poverty, war, disease, economic issues etc… This means that if the subconscious needs direction, you probably don’t want those orders coming from the conscious mind. Then from where should they come? Well, there is the superconscious mind. It is your own internal higher intelligence. It can be called divine intelligence, connection to source etc…point is, you have access to it. This is the place from where you are a creator. Imagine for a second that your state of consciousness becomes one of creation and those become the directives for that massive subconscious engine. It becomes a bypass of the craziness we see every day. Of course you will still monitor the present so that you can function but you are pulled out of the same old same old routine that minimizes our life experience into one of creation and excitement. So let’s look at this state mentioned earlier. How do you access it when we so entangled in the news of the day? Picture the following: you are in your usual state of mind and your phone rings. You are told that you won a million dollars. You are instantly excited, nervous, start to do the happy dance etc.. Amazing right? Can you see how altered your state of consciousness in an instant? Yes, there was a change in the environment but you did the changing internally. That is how you change your state. You can practice this through visualizations, meditation, mind practice anything that let’s you fully experience a shift in your state. You have to be in that state. So in reality it becomes a state of being. It is in this state that you get to create. You get to practice being in a state that is actually something you desire. Let’s say you want to lose 5 lbs. You have to become that weight in your mind. If and only if every negative thought that is an interference is removed will you actually... Support this podcast
www.kaiehnes.com Ep49 Say It Isn’t So Hello and Welcome to the Way of the Emotional Warrior Podcast. My name is Kai Ehnes and today we will be answering the question of: Do most people really Not want to be Happy? When I first saw this, I thought I simply read too fast and made a mistake. After double checking, the statement really said People Do Not want to be happy…well time to take a deeper look. On a podcast episode by economist Tyler Cowen, he interviewed the 2002 Nobel Prize winner in economics, Cognitive Psychologist Daniel Kahneman. He contends that happiness and satisfaction are uniquely different. Happiness is a momentary experience that comes about impromptu and is temporary. Meanwhile, satisfaction lasts longer rooted in achieving goals and building the life you are proud of. Ok…I can see that. In either case these are feelings or emotions. If we pursue everyday, the feel-good or happy emotions then that will set a certain set of priorities into motion. Maybe you skip work and go and do some things that feel good in that moment. Maybe you simply go shopping online because it allows you to temporarily feel good because of mundane repetition in a job that pays the bills. In either case, what you find is that the happiness you thought was yours, disappears as fast as it came. Now you have to go back to your baseline. This means that you sort of live a drab non stimulating life unless you inject moments of happiness. Wow…was Kierkegaard right? According to Kahneman, “Altogether, I don’t think that people maximize happiness in that sense…this doesn’t seem to be what people want to do. They actually want to maximize their satisfaction with themselves and with their lives. And that leads in completely different directions than the maximization of happiness.” Instead, he argues that satisfaction is based mostly on comparisons. “Life satisfaction is connected to a large degree to social yardsticks–achieving goals, meeting expectations.” What about money? “He says it has a significant influence on life satisfaction, whereas happiness is affected by money only when funds are lacking. The lack creates suffering, but once you have above a certain income level that satisfies our basic needs, wealth doesn’t increase happiness. The graph is surprisingly flat” Kahneman adds that memory is important in this process. Happiness is elusive because a lot of it simply never gets registered in long term memory. Have you ever experienced a great moment and wish you could somehow preserve it? Maybe you run to get your camera but by the time you get it, the moment is over. Maybe it simply can not be captured by the camera the way your consciousness does. Satisfaction on the other hand is the ongoing story of our lives. We add pieces to the story ongoing. We tell our story to ourselves and others throughout our entire life. Of course we tell the story quite often to elicit some sort of response. How often do you tell about an event in order to get sympathy? Do you notice that you slightly tell the story a different way to get noticed? So when do we feel this elusive happiness? We feel happiness primarily in the company of others, Kahneman argues. So back to that wonderful moment you were experiencing. If no one else is around simply enjoy how special it is. Don’t do anything other than absorb it, soak it in, enjoy it. Then if you want, you can tell someone about it. Both moments will let you feel happy. Enough happy moments will let you build a life that works for you and now your life’s story adds experiences of satisfaction. You will become way more fun to be around which means better interactions with others which leads to more life satisfaction. Good luck with your journey. ~Peace Support this podcast
www.kaiehnes.com Ep48 Let Go My Ego Hello and Welcome to the Way of the Emotional Warrior Podcast. My name is Kai Ehnes and today we will be answering the question of: Are you doing things in your life because of Ego? Have you ever found yourself in a situation where you had a plan. You thought it through and it not only makes sense but is aligned for you in all areas of your life. You are fully ready to proceed. Maybe you even get started. Let’s assume for a second that you have already worked your way through the “doubts” phase where you had to truly muster all of your power to fight your way through the self doubt and external criticism from others. As if that wasn’t difficult enough you get something coming out of nowhere. Maybe its an offer or simply an opportunity that seems and sounds absolutely incredible. Its as if someone studied your personality and tailor fit an invitation for you. Now you are tempted or might I even say hooked. The new situation reels you in like a fish on a hook. You simply can’t help yourself, it seems oh so right and now all your energies get hijacked and you are off to doing something very different than th plan and track you were on just recently. So, you deep dive into the new adventure. Your ego or self feels so good. Maybe it’s a certain title that would make you feel like you are better than before. Maybe its more money or some sort of materialistic treasure. You can paint your own version of this. The problem is that your ego got the best of the entire you. Now you get dragged in all kinds of directions and said and done, you are back to where you were before you found yourself and made your own great plan. In the brain, the feel good centers get activated and you feel so good that you almost become entranced. The neuroscience on this is varied. Some claim there is a self that is not so much a thing but moreso a process. Others say that the entire idea of self is simply not real. For example: Jerome Kagan, Ph.D., professor emeritus of psychology at Harvard says, "Ego doesn't exist in the brain," What does exist, he explains, is a brain circuit that controls the intrusiveness of feelings of self-doubt and anxiety, which can modulate self-confidence.” Antonio Damasio, an eminent neuroscientist, says in his book, Self Comes to Mind: Constructing the Conscious Brain: “The answers are unequivocal. There is indeed a self, but it is a process, not a thing, and the process is present at all times when we are presumed to be conscious. We can consider the self process from two vantage points. One is the vantage point of an observer appreciating a dynamic object … The other vantage point is that of the self as knower” Time to be an Emotional Warrior. Was your original plan heart based and created by you? Let’s go with yes. Was your plan about happiness, growth and fulfillment? Yes. Did you work through the process of taking the ego out of the question which is why your plan was true and authentic for you? Yes. Were you happy doing what you were doing? Yes. The list probably goes on and on. So if there are all these yes answers, how did you get hijacked so easily by something that approached your ego? The ego, may not exist as a thing but it is linked to our survival brain. Time to transcend and live like a warrior that knows how to be present and move their energy forward becoming a creator of their own future. Until you get comfortable with the process, ask yourself a lot whether something is ego or authentically you. As time passes you will become stronger in your stance and become that heart based and resilient Emotional Warrior. Good luck.
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Tiffany Ehnes has written a wonderful book about the beauty of the "I AM" It is entitled: I am Soulshine https://www.etsy.com/listing/622510746/inspirational-book-with-motivational?ref=shop_home_active_12&pro=1 www.kaiehnes.com info@kaiehnes.com Ep47 Who Am I…I Am Hello and Welcome to the Way of the Emotional Warrior Podcast. My name is Kai Ehnes and today we will be answering the question of: How can I know who I am? There two states we find ourselves in. The doubting state is when we ask Who am I? It is a state of discovery, questioning, wanting to expand and explore. It is an expanding state of consciousness and being. It certainly makes sense that when we challenge ourselves that we have to get out of the circle and rhythm of what we know. So we stop, it may be out of boredom or actual curiosity but we stop and send out a beckoning to call to the universe, please tell me or help me figure out who I am. Of course now comes the issue of the answer that we get. It becomes clear what the answer is when you find yourself being able to say “I am” this, that, or the other. The answer will be a resounding spiritual awareness of a new part of yourself. It is spiritual and not material. Take the statement I am rich. This is less about material wealth as much as it is about spiritual wealth. There will be an energy that is a part of this resounding “I am” which is the emotional component. Think of it as boost in energy. This new energy is the new vibrational level you get to experience. This boost in energy is what is needed for you to live your new life. Consider how amazing it is that we have this built in system. Many people live very repetitive lives of repetition and become staunch defenders of the status quo. For those of us who like growth and expansion, we find ourselves with a built in mechanism that allows us to send the energetic question of Who am I and are guaranteed an answer that can help us to make conscious our true purpose for being here. This is a very large part of the human experience, to not only find our purpose but to manifest our participation into this world. Of course, with some time, a new twist or even altogether new purpose will emerge, but we can only work through so much at any given time. So how do we know that the answer has come our way? It requires you to be aware. There is constant communication between the spirit plane and you. Just quiet down a bit. Maybe put down all the electronics and just observe. Like a lightbulb, all of the sudden your awareness will switch on. Once you notice it, you will find that it becomes part of who you are. Now, can you see that you have a new version of the “I am…”
We learn in state of neutrality. When you asl the question, Who am I/ you enter this neutrality. You have left the victim mindset and want to move forward. It is guaranteed by spiritual law that you will be answered. The only thing left is to open yourself up to receive the input. Emotional Warriors understand this. They do not spend a long amount of time in darkness because that is not where they learn. They aim for neutrality so that they can work on their new level of consciousness. Its really not about controlling emotions but rather to use the energy to enlighten the heart and mind. If you want a tool to help to facilitate this, do the breathing for heart mind coherence. With your grid in coherence you will adjust your system to notice the answers you are seeking. I wish you the best with this process. It is truly wonderful to be able to know and shout the answer to your personal Who am I? Good luck. ~Peace Support this podcast
www.kaiehnes.com Ep46 Frontier Pragmatism Hello and Welcome to the Way of the Emotional Warrior Podcast. My name is Kai Ehnes and today we will be answering the question of: Is it worth being a Frontier Pragmatist? Pragmatic…Probably a term you have heard of at some point. There is quite a bit of debate over what it ultimately means but I think one way to look at pragmatism is as being practical, in the here and now. One explanation is that words and thoughts are not in themselves an exact version of reality. That means that words and thoughts moreso are a tool to be used to get something done. Let’s try an example. You do something the best that you can. Someone you respect tells you that you did a “good Job.” On one hand this could mean that there is a clear cut definition and standard of what a good job is. Of your performance matched or exceeded that then you actually did a “good job. Pragmatists would use the word for several purposes. Of course it would mean that your performance was acceptable. But it also probably means that the person who is evaluating your performance wants to support you and entice you to improve. So, the idea of “good job” means, you did well, and you can find some places to improve and there fore carries an emotional intention that serves expediency in the moment. I realize that this is wordy but let me transition to the Way of the Emotional Warrior. A Frontier Pragmatist is someone who sees the world as it is and not how they want it to be. Its about getting something done now. It gets forward moving action and energy flowing. The other side to this idea is living in the world of ideals. Don’t misunderstand this subtle point here. There is great merit to idealism, there is beauty in the pure ideals of something absolute. The difficulty is that it can lead to stuck or stalled out energy. Example: How can you really know that you have found absolute truth? The search may never end. However, it doesn’t help to give up. Idealism is a wonderful part of how you view the world. The Frontier Pragmatist thinks in the Now. The added term of Frontier to Pragmatist leads to the idea of self-reliance. The great U.S. Supreme Court Justice, Oliver Wendell Holmes embraced this thinking in his view of Common Law decisions. Holmes meant it as the name for everything that arises out of the interaction of the human organism with the environment: beliefs, sentiments, customs, values, prejudices--what he called "the felt necessities of the time." If a law is so absolute that it does not serve the decency of the community then what good is it? Think of common sense. For the best of the community. One of the Emotional Warrior pillars is neuroscience and this case it not so much about the workings of the brain but moreso the prospects of a neuroscientifically-informed pragmatism and a pragmatically-informed neuroscience on issues ranging from the nature of mental life to the implications of neuroscience for education and ethics. How does this help us as Emotional Warriors? As we uplevel our emotional vibration we have to consider that we will need to reevaluate the ethics and education that are necessary for human interaction on those new levels. Think of this way, there is the letter of the law and then there is the spirit of the law. Frontier Pragmatists operate on behalf of the spirit of the community and the environment we all live in. It’s a combination of both sides. Emotional Warriors become Cutting Edge Pragmatists. They use their ideals to set the direction of their life compass and then live their day to day seeing their world the way it actually is in order to get things done in the Now. To me this means that we have to think and live sustainably. Guiding principles include: balance, perspective and fairness. We work together to exist the best way we can with each other and within the laws of the world we live in. Are there any tools we can glean from this topic? We can... Support this podcast
www.kaiehnes.com Ep45 Generativity…Really? Hello and Welcome to the Way of the Emotional Warrior Podcast. My name is Kai Ehnes and today we will be answering the question of: What is Generativity and How can it help us?
So…Generativity means that a person has concern for and belief in the future. People with a high degree of generativity have reached a point in their lives where they take on actions, behaviors, mindset which promotes goals and direction towards a better future. The person has an appreciation for possibility. Looking for and implementing positive stepping stones for a bigger and better future for themselves, others, mankind, animals, plants, the planet. No matter how bad things may be at any given moment, you can persevere and redeem yourself. Highly generative people are driven to help others for the betterment of the future. They might choose professions where this type of behavior is natural, healthcare, education, protectors of peace. Or, they are people who simply implement those behaviors into any job or situation they may be in. These people see their lives as redemption stories. Its not necessarily about personal redemption but realizing that as a whole the future can always be made better. Their lives become the hero’s journey, as Joseph Campbell said. In psychology, Erik Erikson’s model of psychosocial development, established the idea of generativity as being the polarity of middle age. Generativity or doing positive things for a better future is opposed by stagnation which means what it says, doing nothing and simply marking time. A healthy outcome of this is to do what one can to ensure a better future. Some people are highly generative while others might be slightly generative, in either case, the person is still generative which means forward positive moving energy. The difficulty with generativity is when the individual runs into barriers that don’t allow for betterment. For example a person puts a ton of effort and time into a community project that simply does not manifest. Should that person give up? Of course not. Each day is a new day and maybe its simply a matter of course correction as to where to put their time and effort. Let’s take a look at the neuroscience. On a simple level, the story goes like this. When you do something kind, or positive, the brain in response to that action secretes neurotransmitters that make you feel good. They can make you feel happy and satisfied. The regeneration or renewal pattern is that because it made you feel good you end up wanting more of those feelings so you do more generative behaviors and actions and slowly your baseline outlook rises and you feel overall better about things. You create a more positive outlook for your own future and of course for others. Time to apply this to the Emotional Warrior. Heart based resilience means that not only is the brain between your ears but your second brain, which is in the heart, becomes more activated and engaged. Practicing heart based breathing and gratitude, creating a personal philosophy of altruism and positivity set the tone for a beautiful life. There really is no need to convince anyone else of this for momentum to begin to rally. Simply work on yourself and your personality will inspire others to join you. It is truly a wonderful thing when you think about it. We spend our early years as part of our parents’ world, then move into making a place for ourselves in society and the world and then we get to help out others. Our physical, emotional and spiritual systems are designed for this. We are meant to be altruistic and we are meant to improve life on this planet for future generations. This sounds like a phenomenal purpose to be a part of. ~Peace Support this podcast
www.kaiehnes.com Ep44 Select This…Attention Hello and Welcome to the Way of the Emotional Warrior Podcast. My name is Kai Ehnes and today we will be answering the question of: Can selective attention help us to find inner peace? In this episode I would like to take a closer look at how learning to ignore things can be the fastest way to achieve inner peace. In previous episodes I have tried to point out how removing interferences, sort of like peeling away the layers of an onion, allows to live a cleaner and healthier life. I do want to share some foundational assumptions about this path. By clean and healthy, what I mean is the way a human being can live a life on this earth. One that is sustainable, happy, giving, filled with gratitude and love. Removing interferences means to get rid of negative emotions, energies and frequencies that take up tremendous amounts of time to correct while in the meantime cause one to miss valuable quality of life experiences. I mean, we don’t know how long we have to live and somehow due to experiences by those ahead of us and around us we believe to have on average around 80 years. So why, if you know this, are we so eager to give away any of our precious time? Why we do this, I would like to save for another conversation. Today, I would like to focus in on the idea of removing interferences , specifically by using something we possess quite naturally, called selective attention. How often have you looked at your phone while someone is trying to talk with you. You think you can pay attention to both but in the end the phone wins and you miss out on the immediate conversation. The phone wins because of something called visual capture. Visione is such a dominant sense that it takes over as the top priority while hearing/listenting takes a back seat. So what is selective attention? According to John Spacey, there are 9 types of selective attention: selective auditory processing, selective listening, selective visual attention, covert attention, automaticity, divided attention, sensory distraction, situational awareness, sensory overload. All of these are examples of selective attention which is the human ability to filter sensory information to focus attention. The neuroscience: in an article by Harold Schupp in the Journal of Neuroscience, his team found that negative stimuli ie: mutilation had the added emotional component added to attention. Showing that how incoming information is encoded and processed in the brain is not only based on emotion but amplified by the concurrent emotional experience. As I have said in prior episodes, our brain spends the bulk of its efforts keeping us alive, meaning survival based activity. The neuroscience shows that we pay attention to that which is negative or harmful quicker and amplify that experience with emotions if we think our survival is threatened. Now, the emotional warrior…how can use this information? Selective attention can help us to filter out negative stimuli. Since we already have the power of selective attention, lets use it four our own gain. Pay attention to what matters to your own personal growth and fulfilment. Much of the work and emotional warrior has to do is priming of thought. We have to take charge of our thinking. Of course bad things can and often do happen every day. But with the small steps philosophy of kaizen, you can choose the context for your thoughts. Ex: You wake up and before anything comes into your mind, actively or selectively do a mental gratitude list of your life. Such as: I am happy and grateful for my life, my health, the love of my life, my mindset, the abundance flowing my way etc… This sets into motion which thoughts of the millions around you get called into your awareness. Maybe you begin to notice small seemingly miraculous events and situations right in your immediate vicinity. No need to worry, the negative stuff is always right there, waiting, but it is your right and apparent hard... Support this podcast
www.kaiehnes.com Ep43 Do We Really Believe in Our Own Limitations Hello and Welcome to the Way of the Emotional Warrior Podcast. My name is Kai Ehnes and today we will be answering the question of: Do we really believe in our own limitations? How often do you find yourself having a great idea, at least it is one in your mind. The lightbulb goes off and you are convinced that you have found the answer that will fix some sort of major problem. But immediately, the loop of negativity begins to play. You hear the voices of all the nay-sayers, including your own. Oh there are so many obstacles that I have to conquer, so many steps, so many reasons to fail!! Crazy right? Why do we do this? Spirit, Source, God, whatever you want to call it, sends a great idea your way, only for your brain and ego to shoot it down before it can ever take hold and become something real. On one hand, we have the lizard brain or survival brain. Its job is to keep us safe. If you really let it do its best it will guide you to live in a tiny corner in a small room and even there be worried about surviving. Isn’t it interesting that this is what we call survival? Absolute zero quality of life. So we have to take what this part of the brain tells us, evaluate the dangers, but in the end make more logical decisions. This means that we have to use our higher/reasoning part of the brain. While this may seems obvious, why don’t we do it more naturally? The answer is habit. We think between 60 thousand to 70 thousand thoughts per day and 90-95% of those thoughts are the same, day in day out. The room for a novel thought in one’s mind is quite slim. Is there anything we can do to help us with this? Enter the mindset of an emotional warrior. Emotional Warriors believe in possibilities. The repetitive mind lives within the confines of limitations. If every day is the same old same old, then novel ideas are almost Dangerous to us because they take us out of our routine. On one hand, there is nothing wrong with repetition of thoughts. One can master the steps in their lives, execute a task list and get a lot accomplished. However, where is the excitement, the jois de vivre? Mastering ones emotional life which is the basis of The Way of the Emotional Warrior means that there is a basic methodology involved. This basic system of thought or mindset has to be centered around happiness, fulfillment, success, contribution, love etc… Lets look at an example. You fill up your car with fuel. There is a standard for basic gasoline and most cars run well on that fuel. However, some cars require a higher grade fuel in order to run efficiently. Maybe, its worth looking at a vehicle that runs on a completely different fuel source? This is thinking in possibilities. If you put the same information into your consciousness every day then that will become a habit and your life will reflect only those thoughts. If you truly want something better and uplevel your life you have to break out of the routine. Yes, this requires some effort but the benefits are tremendous. A great place to start is to simply substitute one or a few emotions for higher level ones. Using the small steps philosophy of kaizen try driving to work with an audiobook or podcast playing instead of music. Maybe your commute that normally aggravates you and is a source of frustration and anger can become a more serene space because you enjoy listening to the content. Remember to drive safely😊 The point of all this is that you are better served living in a world of possibilities than limitations and certainly will gain more value from your life when you increase its quality. Consider exchanging the following. Lower level emotions are shame, guilt, apathy, grief, fear, desire, anger and pride. Substitute one of them for courage, neutrality, willingness, acceptance, reason, love, joy, or peace. Emotional freedom does not mean the absence of emotions it means accessing and living in and... Support this podcast
www.kaiehnes.com Ep42 Eternal Now Hello and Welcome to the Way of the Emotional Warrior Podcast. My name is Kai Ehnes and today we will be answering the question of: Is there really any other time than now? I recently came across an interesting piece of research which talks about an emotion called “acedia.” It means being listless, low energy, anxious. The inception of the term was describing what monks have to process through as they enter their monastic life. Much of their time is spent in isolation and the proverbial walls of their cloister cells tend to cave in on them. What really stuck out was the line, a mind seized by this emotion leaves the person unable to stay still and unable to devote any time to what one actually wants to do. In our house we call it antsiness. Of course you like your place and those close to you but all you want to do is break out. In terms of our pandemic lockdown situation, I think it really challenged our ability to spend time with ourselves. There are many reasons why this has been difficult but among some of the highest is much of our pre Covid lifestyle revolved around a bombardment of information and frenzy of energy to match it. What we call busy lives may be more along the lines of doing so many things and many of them at the same time that there is no time for being at peace by ourselves. One of the main goals of an emotional warrior is gaining internal peace. Often it is called being at peace. Apparently this harder than most people think. The moment TV, phone and computer/internet energies cease one simply does not know what to do. There are online courses on how to detox from some of this incoming energy...irony. However, there is validity to the idea that humans need to spend some time just Being, being at peace in their environment. Emotional Warriors know to insert this into their lives. It could be as simple as scheduling time to do so. Maybe Friday starting at 5pm all electronics shut down for 1 hour and then slowly build up to 24 hours. With enough practice a healthy balance will emerge. This brings us to the main topic of this episode…the Eternal Now. This is often referred to in philosophy and literature. The eternal now is at the end of the day the only reality we can be in. The past has happened, it can not be changed and too many people wallow in it either for longing or regret. The future is great but can on happen down the road. There is the ever present Now one has to move through to get there. That is why I spoke earlier about all the distractions. Too many distractions simply do not allow for living in the Now. All news is the past. It already happened. Of course it is important to be up to date on worldly events but constant news updates do not allow for being in the Now. Why is the Now so important? Consider the idea that we only can live and make decisions in the Now. An emotional warrior seeks freedom. In other words its all about emotional freedom. It makes sense that emotional freedom happens in the domain of the Now. Making choices in the Now about the Now and for the Now means that you are present. Of course you have to set goals. That is a separate topic. For now, lets clarify the point. Acedia is a type of restlessness that leads to emotional energy running amuck. There is no emotional direction or focus. How can you make choices that help you increase the quality of your emotional, spiritual and physical life when you are simply reaction to incoming energy that is in a frenzy. The point is to settle down your energy. Once you settle down you can spend more time being present and living in the Now. You will be happier because you can actually concentrate on yourself and clean up your interior world. This will let you be a better person not only for yourself but those close to you and your community. The eternal now is our plane of reality. It is where we live and operate as human beings. This leads to being emotionally... Support this podcast
www.kaiehnes.com Ep41 How to Get Out of a Funk Hello and Welcome to the Way of the Emotional Warrior Podcast. My name is Kai Ehnes and today we will be answering the question of: When my mood is less than optimal, how can I get out of my emotional funk? Doing some cursory research for this episode, I found that there are quite a few websites that will tell you 10 to 45 tips on how to maintain your mood. On the heavy hitter list are strategies such as a mood journal, proper diet and exercise, and interactions with nature. I thought that it might be a good idea before we get into any strategies, to actually take a look at why we have mood swings. Of course there are triggers. Maybe someone slighted you or you simply are at odds with the current state of affairs, locally to globally. But aren’t there times when none of that changes and you find yourself feeling okay, dare I say good? On some level, I think that it has become normal to be below a 5 on scale of 1 to 10. Somehow the grumbling and complaining has become the norm. In a way I am sure it is about attention. To some degree it is about fitting in. For example, you find yourself in a group that you have to attend, ie a group at a job, and after 2 hellos it becomes a complaint fest. As if any of the participants are even in a position to change anything. So, when in Rome, right? What do you do? You add to the list of complaints, everyone is happy that you too are miserable. If you step back a second, how much of your life is dictated by the low vibration of others. You don’t want to make any waves etc… Since most people extend their work relationships into their friendships, you can see where this goes…nowhere empowering, that’s for sure. We have many reasons for doing all this but with enough time, it becomes normal. According to neuroscience, Dr. Joe Dispenza, states that by the age of 35 your dominant personality and outlook on life are in place. Your subconscious takes on that particular mindset. Are you stuck in this repetitious cycle? Why, you may ask.. It has to do with 2 natural laws which are the law of rhythm and the law of polarity. Polarity means “poles” or bookends of a continuum. Think of good and evil, up and down, light and dark etc… The reason for opposites is simple. There can only be expansion if something is thrown out of kilter so that something new can emerge. That new something can be an improvement. For people, we fluctuate between constancy and variety. We seek comfort through constancy but immediately want something different for variety. This allows us to gain perspective and grow. The law of rhythm is what drives the experience of polarity. Think of it this way: Rhythm is movement and the direction is somewhere between the polar opposites. Why does this matter? An emotional warrior can learn to use this to live a better quality of life. In your life dimensions, health, relationships, finances etc…what if you could predict where on the continuum you are? Just like there are seasons of the year, think about the seasons for every aspect of your life. Certain foods grow better in spring and summer and not so much in the fall and winter. What if you aligned your life with these rhythms? Investments have cycles, your budget has cycles, your relationships have cycles. An emotional warrior can be ready for these cycles and better yet, know the parts of the cycle and live accordingly. Ex: winter is a great time to work out because there is less outdoor activity, in the summer your system naturally functions longer throughout the day and has more energy to do so. Money has cycles. There are times where it makes sense to save and then there will be the right opportunity to spend that saved wealth and seize an excellent opportunity of value. The key with all this is quite simple. There is no need to stay in a negative environment and mindset. Find your own groove. Learn to identify the polarities and... Support this podcast
www,kaiehnes.com Ep40 Resilience Hello and Welcome to the Way of the Emotional Warrior Podcast. My name is Kai Ehnes and today we will be answering the question of: How can I be resilient? Resilience…seems like an obvious concept right? So what does it mean to be resilient? Its really about knowing where you are on the continuum of your own actions. Are you reactive? Do you find that life happens to you? How can you tell if this is you? You find yourself having to constantly fix something. This could be something tangible like a car battery to your relationships, to your health. Things happen and you have to deal with them, usually from a place of being under or a victim. Jumping to the other side of the continuum…you try to preempt and control everything. In order to not be in the position of being under, you take the “bull by the horns” and go all out in terms of trying to control everything. The reason is that if you control it then you can determine what happens and how they will impact you. The issue with both of these extremes is that they simply do not work exclusively. If you are a controller, how has that been going? How much anxiety do you have? How often does all of your controlling simply leave you at odds with events because even with all of your manipulation, things don’t work out according to the plan? There is a tremendous amount of frustration with this approach. It might feel like you are always fighting with people and the world. So, not caring leaves you a victim and caring too much leaves you ill and frustrated. Is there a middle ground? This is the Way of the Emotional Warrior. It really starts with working on yourself. How can you get right and solid? It begins with Heart-Based Resilience. This means that you set your life up to function from your heart vs your head. You absolutely have to take the time to center and activate your heart. This means you have to start with taking some time for yourself. Start with 15 minutes a day. What should you do in these 15 minutes? You place your hand on your chest by your heart. Breathe deeply, in and out. Try to count to 5 in each direction. Next, keep a journal and set yourself some heart based resilience goals. The middle of the road means that you know the extremes and find a space in between where you feel you can live sustainably. You are Right with the ebb and flow of life. Each day you find something to work on, set it into your mindset by bringing it to yourself by way of the heart. Why no the mind you might be asking. Well, the mind is obviously included but remember the brain’s job is survival programming. The extremes mentioned earlier are the result of brain thinking vs heart thinking. Brain formulates strategies for survival, reaction or preemptive control. The heart seeks unification, sustainable living. What does any of this matter? I would think it has to do with living, more particularly, living a good life. This might seem pie in the sky but the extremes around this lead to strife and dysfunction. What can you work on in terms of resilience? 1. Resilience means that you can identify the actual issue and 2. That you can adapt to deal with the issue. So the idea is this: Let’s work on 3 things. Your health, your relationships and your finances. Of course each one is super important but just for a cursory look, here we go. Your health…heart-based resilience means that you value your life, not just once a year but at all times. You don’t live in fear. You work on your diet, your exercise, your mental well being. Address each area by creating solutions. Maybe you elevate your diet. How to start? Maybe its just by eliminating some unhealthy choices. Your relationships: You most likely have a good list of what someone else should be like. Depending on your age you have had experiences that leave you seeing how others don’t measure up. Heart based reliance would be that you set aside finding something for a bit... Support this podcast
www.kaiehnes.com Ep39 Your Best Life Hello and Welcome to the Way of the Emotional Warrior Podcast. My name is Kai Ehnes and today we will be answering the question of: Have you lived your best life? At times I have had the opportunity to sit across from someone who relaxes a bit and allows some of their truth to come out. More than once has the following happened. The other person starts to reminisce about their past by bringing up their moments of triumph. That in itself is not the reveal, it actually happens when they continue to talk about their past and then…wait for it…they flat out tell you that those were the best days of their lives. For ex: back when I was in my twenties, well, let me tell you, the things that I did..those were the days… Spooling forward to the present, you can see their energy drop. Their life choices have gotten them to a place where they never imagined themselves to be. I am not saying they don’t like their current lives, they simply seem to feel that their BEST days have already gone by and when they get nostalgic they can’t help but enter a feeling of regret and longing for a better time in their lives. One example of this is shown in a song by the musician Eric Church. Young and wild like they said we should've never been And still a child filling those nights with grown up sin I burned up some cars, burned down some hearts Just to call myself a man I might not do it the same but I'd do it all again To stay young and wild as long as you can He sets the mood in the song that those were the best days. Another example comes from the all time great, Bruce Springsteen, in his song: Glory Days. He says: There's this girl that lives up the block, back in school she could turn all the boys heads Sometimes on Friday i'll stop by and have a few drinks after she put her kids to bed Her and her husband bobby, well they split up, i guess it's two years gone by We just sit around talking about the old times, she says when she feels like crying she starts laughing thinking about
Glory days...
Think i'm going down to the well tonight and i'm gonna drink till i get my fill I hope when i get older i don't sit around thinking about it, but i probably will Yeah just sitting back trying to recapture a little of the glory of Well the time slips away and leaves you with nothing, mister, but boring stories of
Glory days... The reason I wanted to do this episode is that an Emotional Warrior focuses more on forward moving energy. Of course there is nothing wrong with looking back upon your life. Its your life, after all. However, the part that one needs to be careful about is that when the past becomes the best part of your life then you end up living a life that is about marking time to the point where you die. Glory days exist. There have been phenomenal moments in all of our lives. They can be great memories just don’t let them become energy traps. One of the best parts about growing older and wiser in life is the accumulation of knowledge and understanding which lets you become more creative and interactive with the life you lead and interactions with those around you. An Emotional Warrior is about living with Heart based Coherence and resilience. We know that the one constant in the universe is change. It happens all the time. Often change is not easy for people. Awareness of the changes and subsequent rhythms governed by the law of rhythm and the law of polarity let you become more attuned on how to weave and navigate the waters of the future. The neuroscience of resilience is fascinating. The bulk of our brain, 90+% is dedicated to our survival. It is mostly subconscious programming, to survive. What if you can use that programming to your advantage? What if your Glory Days, your ability to be Wild can be accessed every day? What if it is not about being crazy and doing outrageous things but instead expanding your interior awareness and Support this podcast
www.kaiehnes.com Ep38 Living…Normal Hello and Welcome to the Way of the Emotional Warrior Podcast. My name is Kai Ehnes and today we will be answering the question of: How can one live this thing called normal?
So the main issue we need to look at is the notion of what is normal? You hear this all the time. Normal this or hey, that’s not normal. Somewhere out there I think most people believe that there is a normal or point of reference. Then it is believed that the closer you are to it the more normal or right you are in your thoughts and actions. If this were really all so simple why is normal such an elusive mistress? When I was little I never fully understood what this normal life actually was. Think about it, we are born, not really by choice, (well…mostly) into a family we didn’t have a choice over, (mostly) and into a time and place outside of our control. Talk about not having a center. On top of being cast into a life without an operator’s manual, we are supposed to act normal, when essentially few people can agree on what that actually is or means? Let’s look a bit deeper into normal. The Cambridge definition says that normal is ordinary or usual, the same as would be expected. So we can already see that normal is pretty bland, the same old same old. Sure it is consistent and that is good for a while but it will pretty quickly get challenged by novelty and variety. To me normal would be good as a point of reference but not really of value to living an authentic vivacious, dynamic life. One way to look at normal is through the lens of neuroscience. The term in this field for normal is homeostasis. This helps animals maintain stable internal and external environments with the best conditions for it to operate. So if we use normal and homeostasis interchangeably you can see that it is no longer bland. Homeostatic balance means that you can have your own being interact with the world around you in the best overall fashion. This is what I would call a sustainable state of being. IS there more? According to Donald Riggles, our brains process a staggering 11 million bits of information per second, of that 50 bits per second are conscious. Neuroscience shows that survival and pleasure reactions are the main task of our unconscious mind and are directly involved with our health and well being. Consider this for a second. Our health and well being are being handled by our unconscious mind and mainly work on our interaction with pleasure and pain. There is a secretion of adrenaline, dopamine and oxytocin, all which maintain our balanced state. These bookends or guardrails keep us in check and balanced. So…tieing this together, Our brains are hard wired to consistently bring us back into a state of balance which means that we have an internal sense of normal. We know what normal is at all times. However, with our lifestyles, we spend a lot of time and effort on being out of balance, consider diet and exercise. So if we know what normal is internally and by design, why do we have such a hard time with it? Let’s look at this from the perspective of an Emotional Warrior. What is clear from this viewpoint is that the heart controls the show. Resilience and love are the tools for emotional balance and vibrational consciousness. This means that the Emotional Warrior spends their time actualizing their natural, authentic, normal state and then navigates their external world to find places and activities where that normalcy can be lived. Simply put, an Emotional Warrior lives an authentic heart based life on the inside and the outside. Confusion and chaos begin to fade away allowing for growth, fulfilment and actualization. Consider how wonderful this lived life is and can be. In the next episode we look at life within these guardrails. I look forward to seeing you there.
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www.kaiehnes.com Ep37 Rock Back and Gain Perspective Hello and Welcome to the Way of the Emotional Warrior Podcast. My name is Kai Ehnes and today we will be answering the question of: Why am I not moving forward? Do you ever notice that you are simply not moving forward in your life? It always really frustrated me to feel like I was stuck. To be fair nothing was really wrong, it just felt like there was no forward movement or momentum. Generally, I have the type of personality that likes for things to move forward. Sure, I don’t like or want things to be out of control…I mean who does? However, within the guardrails of a “Good Life” I certainly appreciate forward movement. What do I mean by forward movement? I view it as a type of improvement. One of the theories that I advocate weekly is called kaizen. It is a Japanese Business philosophy that translates to continuous improvement. I think it is super rewarding and gratifying to improve yourself. This is not based on competition but rather an intrinsic exploration and actualization of yourself. For example, one can work on their negative emotions. The ones that are below the vibrational level of 200. They do not serve your growth. They bring your energy and vibration down and now it becomes increasing more difficult to improve oneself. So, aim for the emotions above the 200 level. They are: Courage at 200 Neutrality at 250 Willingness at 310 Acceptance at 350 Reason at 400 Love at 500 Joy at 540 Peace at 600 Enlightenment at 700 to 1000 Just looking at this list feels good. Just let possibility enter your mindset. So, those kaizen small steps of continuous improvement can help you expand your way of thinking and interacting with the world. The only comparison you should worry about is yourself and even that is unnecessary. When you live in a state of Flow, doing what you like, there is nothing to compare to. You are doing your “thing” the way you want to do it. In that state you are vibrating at least at 500. That has built into it a momentum that keeps everything moving forward. So, you can see that you are already Not Stuck. I heard the following: Before you move forward, maybe you need to take a step back and gather some perspective. In that case, not moving forward is by design, a way for you consider if you are moving forward in the right direction or if you need to change course. What about the Neuroscience? According to neuroscientist, David Eagleman – not only does adventuring make you interesting, you know the type of person people are drawn to, but it also makes your smarter, even more productive at work (!!!!) and more attractive to the opposite sex.” In a psychological study conducted at Indiana University it was found that by merely imagining we’re on an adventure, we improve our creativity and self-awareness. So when you step back or rock back and allow for a new perspective to emerge think adventure. Doing something really cool. That will awaken your creativity and self awareness. Imagine the possibilities. Emotional Warriors not only know about this but practice this quite regularly. This rocking back to get a new and different perspective is a wonderful skill to add to your emotional toolbag. The expanse of possibilities can be scary but if you know that you can practice a technique of higher vibration to channel your forward moving energy into becoming an asset for your own adventure. Peace End: I hope you enjoyed this episode and I will see you next time around…take care. Support this podcast
www.kaiehnes.com Ep36 Micro or Macro Optimist Hello and Welcome to the Way of the Emotional Warrior Podcast. My name is Kai Ehnes and today we will be answering the question of: Are you a Micro or Macro Optimist? Lets start with what is an optimist? An optimist is someone who has a hopeful outlook and typically expects good outcomes. For example: in the US, 42 to 45% of first marriages end in divorce and 60% of second marriages divorce. So, roughly ½ of marriages end in divorce. Yet: and here comes the kicker…Newlyweds believe that their marriage will survive. So, when people get married they do not believe that their marriage will end in divorce. That translates to an anticipated zero % divorce rate. So, why marriages end in divorce is a different topic but that ½ fail while no one believes it will be theirs is our topic of investigation. Neuroscience has some very interesting research that basically shows how we are hard wired to be optimistic. We will get to that in a second. First, I want to explore my title of micro and macro optimism. The idea is this. A person can be quite optimistic bout the long term, like: Of course everything will be alright once everything settled down. Or, certainly I am mostly happy. However, how optimistic are people in the short term? You might think that you are optimistic in the overall but day to day you look at various life situations only to discover that you simply don’t like most of what you do each and every day. So micro optimistic is that in the immediate, you find yourself very frustrated. Everything is slow, not really satisfying, not allowing you to be happy. But, on a macro level when someone speaks with you, there is an overall hopefulness and belief that everything will turn out alrght. To me this is quite strange. How can so many small non optimistic experiences still allow for a long term positive outlook? Let’s create a plan on how to use this all to our advantage. 1. Always a good frame of reference is neuroscience. An expert in this field is Tali Sharot. Her work as a professor of cognitive neuroscience at University College London focuses on the crossroads of how emotions and memory play on our perceptions and behaviors. One of her favorite ideas in this field is the so-called optimism bias; the tendency of humans to be biased towards positive thinking. Worries and woe might seem like fundamental cornerstones of the human condition, but it appears that we tend to perceive our personal future with staunch optimism, even at the risk of being irrational. In that sense, Tali bluntly notes: “People are not driven by facts, they are driven by emotion” her studies showed that brain activity clearly shows a pattern of shushing negative foresight, yet livening up at the thought of positive visions. When processing thoughts about our own future, the brain effectively has a ‘good vibes only’ policy. - Check – our brains have the predilection to push us towards optimism and positivity 2. Since we perfectly align with Macro-optimism to the neuroscience findings, we are also already good to go in this area. 3. What’s left is the micro-optimism. How can we shift our emotions and thoughts to not get locked up in negative self doubt spirals? Answer – we become Emotional Warriors. This means that you pull yourself together and set your intentions and then move towards manifesting them. You do this best through the small steps philosophy of kaizen. Kaizen means continuous improvement. So how can you improve your micro-optimism? Think about an area that is not filled with too much doubt. Don’t immediately try to fix the worst offenders. So let’s say you find something wrong with your body image. Maybe your nose, cheeks, arms, your butt…who knows, something along these lines bothers you. Try finding something that lets you be more positive about it. Let’s say its Support this podcast
www.kaiehnes.com Ep35 Measure of your Heart Hello and Welcome to the Way of the Emotional Warrior Podcast. My name is Kai Ehnes and today we will be answering the question of: How would you govern your realm? What prompted me to want to do an episode on it was a segment of the new U.S President’s Inauguration speech. The segment I want to point out is a great example how one lives in a realm of emotional warriors. He said: To all those who supported our campaign I am humbled by the faith you have placed in us. To all those who did not support us, let me say this: Hear me out as we move forward. Take a measure of me and my heart. And if you still disagree, so be it. That’s democracy. That’s America. The right to dissent peaceably, within the guardrails of our republic, is perhaps our nation’s greatest strength.” In another January on New Year's Day in 1863 Abraham Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation. When he put pen to paper the president said, and I quote, 'if my name ever goes down in history, it'll be for this act, and my whole soul is in it'. My whole soul is in it today, on this January day. My whole soul is in this. This just made me stop my wheels for a second. Did he really just talk about authentic heart and soul? I move forward, optimistically hopeful.
This led me to the point of inviting you to a thought experiment. If you were given the chance to rule your own realm, what type of ruler would you be? How would you handle dissent? Who would you choose to surround yourself with? What would you prioritize in your kingdom? What rules or standards would you put in place for everyone to live by? What level of government intervention would you put into action? Do you believe that your citizens should be empowered, to a large degree, to rule their own lives? What is the direction and goal for your realm? If something or someone threatens your realm, does defeating them take precedence over the welfare of your people? What will be the standard of living for your people? If you went into this role wanting to be noble – how will you achieve it? What if the desires of your citizens develops into something different than what you had planned? Will you implement an education system? What will be your standard for an educated citizen entering into adult society?
This are just some questions to get you started. The reason why I think this is an important activity is because it obviously applies to the world of man and societies and realms, another way to look at this is how you rule yourself. You are the prime ruler of your own internal domain, yet how little do we govern it? Think about the things you say to yourself The food you eat The care you take of your body The careful training you do of your mind The amount of heart and spirit you allow to accompany you in your life.
So here it is full circle. If someone had to take measure of your heart…what would they find? Is your soul in it? You whole soul? Peace
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www.kaiehnes.com Ep34 Miracles and The Soul Hello and Welcome to the Way of the Emotional Warrior Podcast. My name is Kai Ehnes and today we will be answering the question of: Soul baby, you’ve got to have soul. The Dalai Lama, the spiritual leader of Tibetan Buddhism says: “Being Born is a miracle, so what are you going to do with your Life? Picture that for a moment. Statistically and spiritually we are all miracles by being born. So, that makes your life your birthright. You were given this. Next, he asks what we are going do with this unfolding and uncovering of ourselves, called life. What are we going to do with it? Hm…this is super interesting when the context of yourself is that you are a miracle. The Miriam-Webster dictionary defines a miracle as an extraordinary event manifesting divine intervention in human affairs. Wow…according to this, our birth is such an extraordinary event that the divine is involved. I know babies are cute and amazing but add the notion that the baby is divine manifestation!!! Amazing. So, let’s look at this through the eyes of the Emotional Warrior. We develop through the stages of early childhood, middle childhood, adolescence, young adulthood, middle adulthood and old age…which is an amazing life span. Next, we keep asking ourselves…why are we here? What are we supposed to do? Why do certain things and events happen to me? The questions about our existence are really never ending. However, what I would say regarding our emotions is that we have gifts that allow us to experience this world on multiple levels. Not only do have the gift of the physical life, we also have the ability to live special lives. Special lives you say?? Yes, grasshopper…special lives. Here is something I wrote on a cocktail napkin in 2004. Soul…at the moment of creation, the body, at conception, wraps around a piece of the whole, which I think is the soul. The soul stays dormant in the body until there is a spark, a spiritual epiphany. At that point the awareness of your relationship with the whole/all emerges. This is spiritual consciousness. It requires effort to stay conscious. Through ritual we reconnect and stay connected to the whole.
I recently found this in a drawer and see in light of the miracle of being born in a whole new light. Our purpose is really quite simple. We are miracles and our job is to experience and live a miraculous life. To me, this makes for such a beautiful experience. Look at the moments in your life and see their miraculous value, their miraculous purpose just for you. This is super empowering. An Emotional Warrior can wear this wisdom as a second skin of sorts. Every day is really about living a miraculous life. Notice those special things. Empower yourself. This is what is in your ability to control. We have been so conditioned to open the floodgates for toxicity to enter into our system that it just seems natural and eventually becomes our reality. As it turns out though you can absolutely change your inside world. Start by double checking if what the toxic events coming your way are actually welcome guests in your life. If not, then start to develop techniques to keep them out. One such technique is to build up your own positivity and resilience. Remember kaizen steps of continuous improvement. One small step at a time. Your reality is your domain…therefore your experience of the miraculous is also your own. I did want to bring in some neuroscience. Nils J. Bergman discusses the neuroscience of birth – the case for zero separation. His main point is that newborns should be completely connected to the mother. He calls this zero separation. His article claims the following: Currently, Western maternal and neonatal care are to a large extent based on routine separation of mother and infant. There is no scientific rationale for this practice, instead, there is a case for Zero Separation of mother and newborn. For the infant, Support this podcast
www.kaiehnes.com Ep33 Leaders and Lovers Hello and Welcome to the Way of the Emotional Warrior Podcast. My name is Kai Ehnes and today we will be answering the question of: What do great leaders and lovers have in common? In our current times of upheaval, a question that came up for me is what is a good leader? What in the world would make me want to follow anyone in this world, especially someone who thinks they are a leader? The first person that came to mind who wrote a great book on the issue is Simon Sinek. His book, Leaders Eat Last: Why Some Teams Pull Together and Some Don’t, lays out core principles of what makes a good leader especially because what they accomplish is to bring people together into teams that produce ideas and work greater than any one single person could. A few of the core principles he proposes are as follows: Real responsibility means caring about other people and allowing yourself to get attached. Leaders need to take the mental and physical well-being of their followers into account if they want those followers to work as best as they can. To be an effective leader, you’ll need to learn to delegate and trust people to do their work effectively. If you’ve done your job as a teacher and inspirational manager well enough, your followers should do what they need to perfectly. Humans First, Numbers Second I agree with Sinek that leaders with these qualities make it easy to follow them. The ship is moving in the right direction with an effective captain at the helm. So…What does this have to do with lovers? Nothing…I just wanted a cool title…just kidding😊 Actually, Gary Chapman’s book entitled the 5 Love Languages shows that lovers and leaders can actually have quite a bit in common. For example: one love language is Words of affirmation. If this is your love language then a great leader would know instantly to work with you that way. Another one is Acts of Service. This love language means that a great leader would know when you are overwhelmed and would step in to relieve that pressure. Then there is the love language of Quality time. “This love language is about being together, fully present and engaged in the activity at hand, no matter how trivial.” A great leader knows to put down the phone, move away from the computer and give you their undivided attention. So, there it is. Great leaders are great lovers in the sense that they fully engage in their peoples’ love languages. Is there anything the Way of the Emotional Warrior can add to this? I propose that great lovers and great leaders possess the quality of timing…timing…exquisite timing. When you do something is as important if not moreso than what you do. Both, great leaders and lovers know intuitively what to do and when to do it. This is a carefully crafted skill with tremendous skill and acumen of human behavior and needs. I believe that what I have described here is actually most beneficial when realized and accomplished within oneself first and then expressed to the outside world. Imagine that you start to understand the timing of your own inner world of wants and needs that are physical, emotional, and spiritual. It is truly an act of empowerment and advancement of one’s consciousness when you can become your own best leader. It is truly accomplished when aligned with the heart frequencies. Peace Support this podcast
www.kaiehnes.com Ep32 Transcending Fear Hello and Welcome to the Way of the Emotional Warrior Podcast. My name is Kai Ehnes and today we will be answering the question of: How do we transcend fear? Welcome to the New Year of 2021. Most of us love to create a new vision of what we want to become at the beginning of a new year. Resolutions, vision boards, new affirmations or mantras, getting into better shape, trying something new…all in all making some changes. Let’s take a breath for a second. What an amazing amount of pressure we put on ourselves each New Year’s day. We just made it through the holidays and family interactions, some good, some crazy. Now we want to totally reinvent ourselves? How successful have you been at this in the past? Sure, you probably declared new intentions and even started them but take a look how long or short these declarations last. Gym memberships skyrocket the first week of January and then decline sharply. Diets get started but if you are lucky you make it right to Valentine’s Day when all the sugar treats get thrown in front of you. This goes on and on, year after year. It is the fodder for any late night comedian. So, why do your intentions simply not last? This is the work of an emotional warrior. You have to have some sort of leverage to be able to sustain the shift. So how do you get that leverage? What does this even mean? Leverage means that you have something in your life that you value more than whatever the activity holds that you wish to change. Let’s say you want to work out because you think it will help you feel better. All fine and good until not working out simply feels better than working out. Duh…of course you are going to go work out…NOT. So, how do you find or get the proper leverage? For some people it will be a life threatening event. Maybe through a heart attack you find healthier food and being alive carries more value for you than eating charred meat. There are numerous examples but what I want to focus on here is the emotional component of leveraging yourself. What is it that makes us feel so good doing things that are not good for us? Its simple. We firmly believe that feeling good means that we are safe. We seek comfort because that is how we knew that we get to live. Think of the baby that is comforted in its mother’s arms being held close and told that everything will be ok. Now that you are an adult consider the flaw in this though. Instead of eating healthier foods after the heart attack you get the sack of greasy food which is what you put you into danger in the first place. In his 2011 work, Stephen Porges, posits that in order to meet our need for socialization, a third subsystem in our brain developed called our “higher social brain” aka the “ventral vagal complex. Evolution transformed our brain to a more complex brainstem which activates when we see a smiling face, a relaxed face, hear a soothing voice, notice that others are calmly gesturing. He called these our social safety cues. This allows us to feel safe in the closeness of others. That is the neuroscience of our safety and comfort net. It obviously works and has served us. But there is more. We can transcend this. Why should we? Because we all have the right and ability to grow and become more. That is the point of our life. Authentic emotional warriors seek expansion in their lives. So can you and how do you conquer fear? According to Tim Ferris, conquering fear starts with defining fear. What about those people who are always optimistic? He says that often they are disguising their fear in their excessive optimism. In the world of Emotional Warriors we always seek balance, harmony and homeostasis. The best place to begin defining fear is take the worst case scenario version of what you are stuck in. Ex: Let’s say you want to eat healthier. You stumble upon vegetables. OH my, I couldn’t possibly stop eating meat. I need the iron and... Support this podcast
Ep31 Eustress…huh? Hello and Welcome to the Way of the Emotional Warrior Podcast. My name is Kai Ehnes and today we will be answering the question of: Is there such a thing as good stress? We have all heard of distress. Distress is what we mean when we usually talk about and hear about people being stressed or stressed out. Phrases like: work has me stressed out, the kids stress me out, everything is pressure, I’m so stressed I will explode. I am sure most everybody has experienced this to some extreme or another. So, what actually is this stress? It has to do with your autonomic nervous system. It starts with our system in a state of homeostasis. Everything is in balance. All of a sudden something that appears to be dangerous to our survival steps into our immediate proximity and our survival mechanism kicks in and our autonomic nervous system kicks in by secreting massive amounts of adrenalin and other chemicals that allow our body to escape what it perceives to be danger. Then our body looks for safety and gets us there. Whew…safe again to live and fight another day. Now we have our sympathetic nervous system jump in and bring our entire system back to balance…homeostasis. That is the normal path of our system. The key to that story is that homeostasis or balance is our normal state of being. However, in today’s world that is not how we live. We activate and make our “survival” system turn on all the time. 24 hours a day we caffeinate, push, and strain our system to the point of where at times we can not do it any longer and the system breaks down. Then we go right back to doing it again. Our society rewards us for more hours worked, more time spent shuffling our kids around from one organized even to another, buying more material goods with the promise of rewards points. Then you realize you have to pay for it all which means more work and time being traded for money. This is known as the “rat race.” Stop for a second and consider this: are you a rat? Is there actually a race with anywhere to go? Did you actually sign up for this race? I know that this sounds like I am saying stop and run away from it all. But, that is not at all where I am going with this. First, there is amazing knowledge and power in the simple awareness that one is even involved in this race. Most people do it from a subconscious place and that means they simply do it like an automaton or sleepwalker. With the knowledge of being in the race, what can you do? Time to be an emotional warrior. Emotions are the energy underlying all thoughts. Thoughts drive our experience but emotions determine the outcome. Think about that for a second. Emotions determine the outcome…so then do you simply emote your way to freedom? Well, actually, yes but first you have to understand and master the fact that your freedom achieved by your thoughts. Thoughts are 5% while the emotions are 95%. Together they make up our experiences. Now, do you want your experiences to control you or do you want to create your life journey? That is where eustress comes into play. Eustress means positive stress. The prefix “eu” comes from Greek meaning health…so, healthy stress. What, there is healthy stress? Sure, think of getting up the energy to ask someone out, giving a speech or a performance. Its all about the good feelings in your gut that let you gather the courage to do something outside of your comfort zone. Breaking out into new experiences means entering the unknown, which of course means that there is the possibility of failure. This in turn means that a lot of noise is happening in your experience. Doubt and failure creep into everything you think about. This is where most people run back to what they think is safe. The irony is that what they think is safe is actually dangerous because it is a world filled with distress. So how can you have more eustress and less distress? The answer is being an emotional warrior. You set up your life,... Support this podcast
www.kaiehnes.com All of us would like to wish all of You Happy Holidays. A state of gratitude allows you to connect to your own heart and communicate authentically with others. We look forward to creating new episodes in the New Year. Be well. Peace Support this podcast
www.kaiehnes.com Ep29 Things a man oughta know Hello and Welcome to the Way of the Emotional Warrior Podcast. My name is Kai Ehnes and today we will be answering the question of Hey, are there really things a man oughta know? I thought we could talk about a song that I heard the other day. The title is “Things a man oughta know!” The performer is a woman which I think is an interesting perspective on what a man oughta know. When I was a kid you learned how to be a man from other men. Male role models were the conduit for this scared knowledge known as manhood. What is really interesting is that you don’t necessarily get to choose these role models. They are assigned to you like your father, grandfather, uncle etc… I mean in my own case they were there but not what I found to be the men who truly “knew.” They were simply men. I was mostly raised by my mom, so without knowing it, I was introduced to the world through a female mindset and perspective. I know, I know…get to the part of what he oughta know…in a minute… Men see the world through the masculine lens. That does not mean macho in this context, it means manifest, obvious, of the world. Mystery is not the main driver of knowledge and awareness. For me, it meant the mainstream version of being a man. Get a job, provide for your family, a good life would be one where you do what most men do. Whatever that is. So isn’t that what a man oughta know? Let’s see what the song has to say: How to know when it's love How to stay when it's tough How to know you're messin' up a good thing And how to fix it 'fore it's too late If you really love a woman, you don't let her go How to chase forever down a driveway How to never let it get there in the first place
This really peaked my curiosity. Did or Do I have any kind of clue? I thought I had a bit of a clue but really…do I? So, I decided to ask my wife. One might say, bad move dude, why would you open up that can of worms and poke the bees nest? In my search for truth…sometimes you go to the source and get amazing insight. She agreed with the list from the song. Check…I can work on that. Then she said, personally I would add the following. I want you to tell me its going to be okay, even if I’m crying or when you have no idea of a plan Thinking your woman is beautiful even when she doesn’t feel that way Looking at her like she is a queen even when she feels like a scullery maid Remembering the good times and forgetting the faults Loving the woman she is now not the girl she used to be
Hm…the list is getting longer. However…consider the moments each piece of the list lets you be part of. I never wanted to be a passenger in this life…boring…I wanted and want to be out front. That means you get the full experience..Like Jimmy Hendrix said: “Are you experienced” I have had the honor of experiencing everything on this list and with a person that is truly my better half. But, do I have anything to add. What about my list. Certainly, I agree with everything said so far. But I thought I would offer a bit of what I think as a man. I make sure that at least once day I see her. I heard it called, stopping the world. We stop the outside world and I look at her and see her for the beautiful soul she is I knew she was “The one” the moment we met. We were not even supposed to meet that day, it was a fluke, but it was clear. That was amazing…God/source saw to it that we would meet. While corny, she is the wind beneath my wings…since we met she inspires me every day to improve and step up my game and consciousness I have learned to reassure her that everything is okay. This is Trust. I believe that together it will be okay, even when I have no clue. When I hold her in my arms and she embraces me back, I feel that we are one. One heart beating together. I have learned to listen, actively listen, Listen between the lines. Relationships are a delicate dance and I am... Support this podcast
www.kaiehnes.com Ep28 Trust, You Say Hello and Welcome to the Way of the Emotional Warrior Podcast. My name is Kai Ehnes and today we will be answering the question of ___. Why is so hard to trust: others, god/source, yourself? The last few weeks have been quite tumultuous for us. Lots of big decisions to say the least. What has been most interesting to me is seeing and learning what real trust looks like. Here is how I used to see trust. If you try to live an ethical and moral life it puts you into that vibrational frequency. Other people are also in the same vibrational field. To me, this meant that they would be completely trustworthy. Then of course came the character arc and you find out that they did something that ended up breaking that band of trust you thought you had with them. Of course, not to lay blame only on others, I inadvertently also changed my mind about some things and that would be grounds for a breech of trust in their eyes. Certainly a difficult process, this thing called trust. So, have I learned anything? I think so. Trust is more about yourself and your approach to the world. I generally approach the world and my day believing in myself, my place in the world, and process known as life. That is a basic requirement for me. If I wake up and as of the first second I don’t trust anyone or anything then I am not sure there is a point to engaging in the day. Here is what I have experienced lately. I believe dreams and goals do work out. Sometimes what you had in mind is not necessarily the best use of your skills so you need to be nudged accordingly. This is the process of life. The things you thought should have worked out and that don’t simply means that you have to do something else. When you are in the right place doing the right things, everything becomes easy. All green lights, doors open easily for you. The right opportunities emerge and you have the wherewithal to take immediate and decisive action. Then the two way street takes on its own life and momentum. This is a beautiful thing. Is it hard to get to this place of being in the “zone” of your life? Here is a nugget! It is only as difficult as you are resistant to it. Crazy right? Let me offer an example: let’s say you are a plumber but you should really have a family style ice cream shop. When someone points it out to you, which inevitable will happen, you scoff at the suggestion and carry on doing the job you can’t stand. That is a simple example of resistance. The emotion of pain and suffering resides underneath that resistance and the best way to integrate your new life is through trust. Trust what? Why is it so difficult to trust anyway? I find that my outlook on life and actions I take are consistent with how much they align to my heart. Ever since I have adopted heart-mind coherence into my life, slowly but surely the ship called my life has recalibrated itself to the direction allowing me to be my most authentic self in my daily life. So, what I am saying is this. Each of us is special. We have a place in this life on this planet. This purpose is supposed to be how we live. For me, there has been a lot of trial and error. Nothing easy about the process of getting there. But once it became clearer that I was only blocking myself by over-thinking everything and subsequently moving my awareness into my heart…trust just became the basis of my experience. Since part of the Way of The Emotional Warrior is to look at neuroscience, I wanted to see if the field had some answers about trust. According to Researcher Paul Zak, he found that trust, the simple process of at least 2 people being able to be vulnerable with each other, actually has a chemical foundation. His team isolate that chemical to be oxytocin. He set up experiments that proved that with more oxytocin, people were more like to trust a stranger. Also, they were less willing to take extreme gambling risks. He... Support this podcast
www.kaiehnes.com Ep27 Hello and Welcome to the Way of the Emotional Warrior Podcast. My name is Kai Ehnes and today we will be answering the question of ___ Is it right to ask for Abundance? When I first encountered this idea of asking for abundance, I instantly had my hackles go up. My childhood programming came right into the forefront. Who do you think you are? What makes you think you have a right to more than your lot in life? If you dare ask for it, you will surely be met by some sort of calamity. Its quite interesting how the mindset of my family had such limitations. I thought about why other people had abundance. When I was young I simply attributed it to fate and luck, for both sides of that question. However, as time and life have given me some perspective, I have moreso adopted a quote from Adam Savage, one of the hosts of the TV show Mythbusters. He said, “I reject your reality and substitute my own.” I just love that line. It takes courage but it is well worth it. So if I reject my childhood programming on abundance, what is the substitute? Abundance my friends, abundance. Years ago, the movie “The Secret” came out and it simply disrupted my sleepwalker ways. It talked about the law of attraction and how we can align with it. This took me down years of rabbit holes, research and great discoveries. It turns out there are quite a few LAWS of the universe. At first it was daunting and frustrating because who is to say this typoe of thinking is correct? Napoleon Hill’s Think and Grow Rich put me on the right track and all of a sudden a treasure trove of thinkers from a bygone time emerged. What they had in common was the awareness, realization and implementation of these so called LAWS. How can this benefit us as Emotional Warriors? The answer is quite simple. Aligning with and living within the LAWS allows us to live the type of life that is intended for us on this planet. The great Buckminster Fuller wrote a book called Earth: The Operator’s Manual. It is a quick read but tells us that there are rules to live by while on this planet. These rules are LAWS. Once you understand why you are here and what being here is about you can slowly by way of KAIZEN continuous improvement, build your life to be what you want it to be. Think about that for a second You can build the life that YOU want. So where to begin. Kathleen McGowen writes the following steps. 1. Get clear with God, source, the divine 2. Embrace your place within the divine plan 3. Make a commitment to be of service to your fellow humans and the planet - Now you have earned the right to ask God/source to expand the abundance in your life.
With that in mind please be careful of what you ask for. Ask, believe, receive is the name of the game. So don’t ask for what you don’t want. She says to really focus on the quality of your life. Stuff is nice but you get over it quickly. There is no sustainability in worshipping stuff. So now comes the quality of your life. Why do you want something? What would you do with a windfall of money? How do you relate to this quality of life? Here is an example: “I want to have a nice house for my family. I want us to enjoy living together, to be safe and allow us to live our lifestyles.” This is a simple request. But look at what was asked for. Its about the relationships in the house. The getting along, the love and the ability to expand. That is quite different from the idea of I have to have a 4 BR house, 2.5 bathrooms, 2 car garage. What if you got this house but no love in the home. What good is the house?
So let’s tie this all together. Yes, there are rules of how to live on this planet and with each other. Those rules are designed to work in your favor. You slowly learn how to operate within those rules and you start to incrementally see the... Support this podcast
www.kaiehnes.com Ep26 Gratitude Hello and Welcome to the Way of the Emotional Warrior Podcast. My name is Kai Ehnes today I wanted to take a moment and express my gratitude. I am grateful for this podcast and grateful for all of you, my tribe. I love making this podcast and having the opportunity to share it with you. If you would like to find out how to create calm in times of chaos, I would like to invite you to visit my website at kaiehnes.com I wish you a great Thanksgiving Holiday and wish you and your families the best. Be safe and stay healthy. Peace Support this podcast
www.kaiehnes.com Ep25 Broken Heart…not so much Hello and Welcome to the Way of the Emotional Warrior Podcast. My name is Kai Ehnes and today we will be answering the question of Can your heart actually be broken? Think of all the ways people experience a broken heart. Some causes of a broken heart can be: A relationship breakup, people letting you down, people not stepping up for you, someone does not say Thank You when you do something for them, they don’t say I love you back, sadness, loss, rejection It is a long list of possible culprits but in the end these shocks to the system cause a reaction in your system. Rightfully so. You feel it in your gut, maybe you can’t breathe, your throat tightens up, you want to scream but you can’t, you shake, feel nauseous, get depressed…on and on This is actually all emotional pain but it certainly feels physical. According to Guy Winch PhD, fMRI studies have found that heartbreak activates the same mechanisms in the brain that get activated when addicts are withdrawing from substances like cocaine and opioids. These powerful withdrawal symptoms from the loss of love impact our ability to think, focus, and function in the broadest terms. Neuroscience is showing the intensity of the emotional stress a broken heart can have on our system. Emotional pain sits deep in ourselves, hurts and tends to stay around for quite a while. Our survival brain is wired to protect us so quite often emotional pain generates rumination. Thinking negative thoughts over and over. They keep us awake and offer no solution. By no means do I want to make light of this issue. It is obviously a widespread experience amongst human beings. However, lets look at this from the perspective of an emotional warrior. Is there opportunity within a broken heart? Can we do something about it that is healthy and productive for us? What if a heart can’t really be broken? What I mean is this. Instead of the heart being broken, I mean consider the language, is it really broken? If so, why do we even bother trying to mend it? Broken is broken. Super glue or duct tape can’t fix what’s really broken. What if its actually more along the lines of expansion. These are very sophisticated matters of the heart. Experiences we think break us are actually what move us out of the old into the new. Let’s look at an example. You are in a relationship. You think everything is moving along nicely. One day I becomes clear one of you is no longer getting their needs met, specifically your emotional needs. So you or the other person look for ways to pacify those needs. Maybe you find it super easy to talk to a coworker or you create online relationships etc… The result is the same. One of you has outgrown the relationship. In emotional language, your vibrational levels are no longer in harmony. Then cones the drawn out attempts at reconciliation or simply hanging in there hoping it will get better. But it doesn’t. What is happening? Your heart is trying to expand. You came here, or found yourself here…either way, it is pretty clear that we live best with a purpose. Purpose driven life baby!!! Having said that, relationships where both people work with each other, challenge each other, support each other, grow with each other…those are the ones that last. Think of empowerment. An empowered heart cannot be a broken heart. Your heart is the seat of your life force. Why else do we say the things we say about the heart. Like: “Trust me, I love you from the bottom of my heart.” Or “I love you with all of my heart!” This doesn’t sound like a fragile place in my world. The heart is your strongest place of truth and determination. When it expands, so does your consciousness. In the quantum world, your heart becomes your energy generator. Raising your own vibration impacts and lifts the vibration of... Support this podcast
www.kaiehnes.com Ep24 Don’t I Already Know Myself Hello and Welcome to the Way of the Emotional Warrior Podcast. My name is Kai Ehnes and today we will be answering the question of Don’t I Already Know Myself? Most people think they already know themselves but in reality they don’t. What do you mean I don’t know myself? Of course I do. I live with myself 24/7. Hm…if only it were that easy… So how do you recognize if you know yourself? You can start with an inventory. The typical inventories would look at sectors of your life like family, relationships, finances and the like, and these are actually good places to look. However, I want to dig deeper. Let’ say that you actually have your categories fairly well in check. Life is actually moving along nicely for you. Of course there are hiccups and bumps but you generally bob and weave and adjust as needed. Yet there is a nagging voice, you know the voice I am talking about. It speaks to you and makes you question what you have going on. In a way the voice is a nag and causes you imbalance in your life at times. On the other hand, the voice is your soul talking to and with you. The last few episodes have looked into that topic. The soul is a powerful part of your life. And a great way to connect with it and keep it active in your life is to breathe into and through your heart creating heart-mind coherence. While that is a great way to be present is there a way to connect the voice, your heart, and your soul? Of course there is. It is the path of the Emotional Warrior. Emotional balance and fruitful expression is the way of the warrior. An interesting piece of research made its way across my feed today. A study published in the Journal of Clinical Psychiatry, senior author Dilip V. Jeste states that “those people with meaning and purpose in their lives are happier and healthier than those without.” Further in the study they found the age where meaning in life is found… Drum roll please…the magic age is 60. Over 1000 people ranging from 21 to over 100 participated. The results show that up to 60 a person is on the side of searching for meaning while at 60 the presence of meaning is at its highest. Since life expectancy goes well beyond that it gets interesting after 60 because the search component starts all over again. Mental well-being was positively associated with aging and Presence but negatively with Search. The study’s conclusion is that finding meaning in one’s life constitutes a sound strategy for thriving in later years — in part because it supports the preservation of a person’s physical and mental well-being. Let’s organize all of this. 1. You truly benefit from actually knowing yourself. 2. A great place to look at this is by age. 20 to late 50’s and searching for meaning in life is normal. This search creates careers, friendships, community engagement etc.. 3. Most things have settled down at this point and by the age of 60 you are at the peak of presence of meaning. You have arrived so to speak. 4. However, past 60 sets you up for the next chapter in your life. New things matter in your life. The chase for certain worldly affairs have subsided. 5. New goals come into your life. This sets up the need to have your emotions online in a balanced and harmonious fashion. This balance allows you enter the 3rd chapter of your life with passion, caring and compassion allowing you to experience more growth and fulfilment. Can you see how this all falls into the awareness of knowing yourself? Doing so allows you to expand how you live and experience who you want to be. Living an authentic life with your inner world in coherence allowing you to create the external life that reflects your inner awesomeness. This is the life journey of an emotional warrior. Peace. Support this podcast
www.kaiehnes.com Ep23 You can see things for what they CAN be. Hello and Welcome to the Way of the Emotional Warrior Podcast. My name is Kai Ehnes and today we will be looking into the power of your ability to see things for what they CAN be I am creating today’s podcast on the eve of the 2020 U.S. Presidential election. I am not quite sure really where to begin. My goal is to give all of you one tool to help you get through whatever turbulence you may be experiencing. My personal research has taken me to the following place. I think that we are in and heading into a new normal or way of being and existing. Most of the systems we have been living in are outdated and stretched to a brink. Why? Because we are ready for a new expanded life. The turbulent times are what is actually a great awakening of the souls of people. Last week I spoke about living with an awakened soul. Many of you have that going on in your lives. You have an awakened soul and you see things for what they are and especially for what they CAN be. I want to stress that…you can see things for what they CAN be. But try to see how many people live with their souls asleep. Their souls are patiently waiting to awaken from a dream state. However, the body and mind of their host are doing repetitive things, so much so, that we repeat about 90% of the same thoughts every day. Consider that for a second. Every day we repeat the same 90% of our thoughts. That just makes me cringe at myself, that my precious and wonderful gift of life is spent daily repeating the same thoughts over and over. I mean honestly, who cares what a co-worker said or thinks about you. Do you think it matters what anyone else thinks about your shoes? Or what car you drive? Or what you believe about anything? So, let’s look at where we are. If you are listening to this podcast right now, then that is who you are at the moment. You are a caring person who thought that you would get value from a name that said Way of the Emotional Warrior. You believe at your core that this is you. That you are an emotional warrior. You resonated with my call and are willing to give me the gift of listening to some of my thoughts. I hope and pray each week that I can offer you some value in terms of your emotional warrior journey. If nothing else, just know that you nor I are ever alone. There are plenty of emotional warriors and we are all trying to navigate through this thing called life. Are there any tools that can help along the way? I would love to share what I have found with you. I have mentioned this before and am super thankful to learning about the Heartmath Institute and heart-mind coherence from Gregg Braden. The tool is the practice of aligning your mind to your heart. Please hear the order of what I am saying. Its about aligning your mind to your heart, not the other way around. All of the great research comes from the Heartmath Institute. Their studies have pioneered and have been peer reviewed in the field of studying the power of the heart. With its own set of brain cells called sensory neurites, the heart actually thinks on its own and it is super fast. It yields unfiltered thoughts instead of all the thoughts that have been edited through emotional stacking and experience. Any time you experience turbulence and chaos and moreso daily external pressures and find yourself overwhelmed, the tool I use daily is the practice of heart-mind coherence. How do you do it? Its all about breathing. Sit, stand. Lie down, it does not matter. You do need to be still. Breath in deep and out slowly. Do this a few times to get yourself centered. Next, using either hand, tough the area of your chest right by your heart. I use my right hand and take the middle 3 fingers and tough my sternum. Now, you are focusing your awareness on your heart. Breathe in counting to 5 and breathe out counting to 5. Just gently pay attention to... Support this podcast
www.kaiehnes.com Ep22 Hey You…Wake Up – Life is Calling Hello and Welcome to the Way of the Emotional Warrior Podcast. My name is Kai Ehnes and today we will be answering the question of Hey You…Wake Up – Life is calling You know those moments where things click into place. Everything feels right, smells and sounds and sights are just amazing. You are awake – everything is alive. Most of us can only sustain these experiences for a few moments and then they simply stop. That leaves you wanting those moments, you yearn for them but they are simply gone until the next little glimpse. What we learn and internalize is that we can only have those moments of being awake a few times in our lives and we resign ourselves to believing just that. It continues that we actually start to have ominous feelings that living awake begets something negative, maybe something awful. Thoughts like: You better not like it too much, you better not think life can be that good. It is so strange that we have been conditioned that living well and happy and abundantly means you are out of balance and that normal is struggling and being entangled to lower emotions. Haven’t you heard: The same old same old or “The struggle is real.” Enter living the good life. I say we have every right to live right, joyful and abundantly. We have to declare and intentionalize that we want and will to live that way. Let’s call it living with passion! Why? Because passion awakes the soul…your soul The definition of passion is any powerful or compelling emotion or feeling, like love or sexual attraction but it also means hatred and anger. I find it highly curious that a passion can be positive, upward or light like love or attraction but it can also aim don on the vibrational scale like hate and anger. So how do you choose or will to aim your passion toward love, fulfillment and growth? You start with the feeling you experience in these moments of being alive that I mentioned earlier. Build on that feeling, leave the therapy and fears on pause. Know that freedom of your soul when you are fully present. That feeling is you and your soul being alive and in harmony. Your soul is awake and you feel more than just happy. You feel soulful joy, true authentic joy of being alive. This is the foundation of being an emotional warrior. An emotional warrior dares to be alive with passion. A passion for love, compassion, tolerance and abundance.
Peace Support this podcast
www.kaiehnes.com EP21 – Our Dark Side…uggghhh Hello and Welcome to the Way of the Emotional Warrior Podcast. My name is Kai Ehnes and today we will be answering the question of…I thought I was a really good Person, why did I do that horrible deed? Have you ever thought the following while you were at your job: Its just a post-it note pack, they will never miss it. Or hey I could use a stapler at home, they charge enough money its ok. How about speeding on roads where you know the police don’t patrol. These types of minor acts are still crimes…yes you are stealing from your employer. One thing is for certain, if they shorted your paycheck by even a single dollar you would be all over payroll to fix it. Why the ambiguity in morality? Quite often when we feel like we are being taken advantage of or we simply feel under, there is a small voice that that tells us we can even the playing field by things like taking a longer lunch, looking up stuff that’s for personal use on company time, or simply slowing down our productivity. I mean seriously, who doesn’t enjoy sticking it to the man! For our purposes, I would like to investigate what type of people are more prone to do these acts or worse. Numerous researchers in the field of psychology have studied the idea of why seemingly good citizens can do atrocious acts. Rabbi Harold Kushner wrote the book, When Bad things happened to good people. Various stories in the bible, like the story of Job, to Viktor Frankl and his book Man’s search for meaning. These are just some of the examples of why seemingly normal and good people have to endure tragedy and suffering. Would these people be justified if they acted out atrocious acts on others, animals or the planet? If you look at their stories, they transformed their pain and suffering into successful and helpful lessons and theories. Kushner wrote the book, on his take on God’s role in life and the tragedy of his son’s illness, to create a platform for how to deal with tragedy and loss. How many people have learned from the story of Job…countless and Viktor Frankl, I remember when I read his book in college. The fact that he physically survived the concentration camps is absolutely remarkable but then to create a new discipline in psychology called logotherapy whereby through a search for meaning and purpose in life people can develop ways to deal with tragedy and hardship, well I believe that qualifies him and the others as Emotional Warriors. So what does this have to do with our dark side. The classic experiment was carried out by Stanley Milgram in 1963 whereby he studied Obedience to authority. It aimed to test the level of naive subjects’ obedience to authority. The subjects were told that the experiment tested the potency of punishment in improving learning capabilities, and were asked to administer electrical shocks to a “learner” (an accomplice of the experimenter). The subject did not know the shocks were false; measures were taken to convince the subject that the shocks were real. The “learner” was given some pairs of words. Then he was told one word from one of the pairs, and four more words. The “learner” had to choose the word that came in a pair with the first word, and press a respective button, which turned on a respective light that the participant could see. The subject did not see or hear the learner. If the answer was wrong, the subject was to apply an electric shock to the “learner” and continue. Each time the subject had to increase the voltage of the shock by 15 V. The voltage of electric shocks ranged from 15 V to 450 V, and there were 30 switches. When the participant paused or stopped, four standardized phrases were used to tell them to go on. If, after being told all the phrases, the subject refused to administer more shocks, they were considered as one who defied the experiment. The others, who carried on and administered the highest shock (450 V), were... Support this podcast
www.kaiehnes.com Ep20 Use-ism - Use Your Stuff Hello and Welcome to the Way of the Emotional Warrior Podcast. My name is Kai Ehnes and today we will be answering the question of Do I actually use all my stuff? This week I watched a show on minimalism. It was interesting to see people talk about their lives and how they earned 6 figure incomes in corporate jobs where their main goal was to climb the ladder in order to earn more money. Why do people do this? Because one of the main mantras of our society is that more money equals more ability to buy things. So, we have to assume that behind this ping pong game of trading time for money is something meaningful right? I mean it would have to be. We get up at crazy early hours, work late giving up other activities and so on… It must mean that the payoff is tremendous. There is a lot to be said about our obsession with shiny objects. Growing up, it was always made clear to me that more money meant more things so more things equal success. You get a nice used car and instantly see someone else with a newer car or a nicer looking one. When does it ever happen that you actually have the best of something? Is it even possible? It always becomes clear that someone else has a shinier object than you. What to do? Enter minimalism. In the show, people were scaling down to the point of one case where a guy had all his worldly belongings in 2 bags. I think less is more is a great philosophy. There is something very elegant about streamlining and efficiency. However, an Emotional Warrior knows to approach things with balance and harmony. Extreme minimalism will of course work for some people. The human condition works according to zeros and ones, called polarity, so the bookends of minimalism are good to know. I have experienced both of these extremes in my own life. From having very little to having to cull excess is a strong dichotomy. In one of my prior episodes I talked about comparing yourself to others. In doing that research I came across Wallace Wattles and he wrote that part of the human condition is to immerse in the world of the material. That is how we experience and grow. Again, moderation grasshopper…moderation. So what perspective can I offer here? Well, let me think on that a bit. Now it is 2 days later and here is what came to me. I will call it Use-ism. What is use-ism you ask? Its all about using your stuff. If you have things then just sequentially go through them and see if you actually use them. They will transform from being shiny objects to helping you live a better and fuller life. Clothes etc are always a good place to start. Wear what you have, something every day. If you don’t love it, send it on. Gotta love that dress shirt and sweatpants combo for ZOOMJ You will find that some stuff you have will be pretty useless. Other stuff is actually quality stuff but you just don’t use it. Why keep it then? Is there any neuroscience on this topic? In a study Led by Flinders University Professor Mike Kyrios, it was found that Hoarding Disorder assigns great significance to the emotional attachment that individuals place on possessions as a way of compensating for a lack of emotional warmth experienced in their early years. “As a consequence, by not having a strong sense of emotional belonging, the people who hoard cling to personal belongings, to mimic a heightened sense of security and control. “The strong attachment to possessions compensates for their feelings of uncertainty or being threatened. “In addition, a need to keep possessions in view compensates for poor confidence in their memory. They deal with fears about decision making by holding on to possessions even when the resulting clutter is detrimental to their quality of life.”
I realize that hoarding is an extreme version of having stuff but the emotions are most likely the... Support this podcast
www.kaiehnes.com Ep19 Does Your Conscience Bother You? Hello and Welcome to the Way of the Emotional Warrior Podcast. My name is Kai Ehnes and today we will be answering the question of ___. Does Your Conscience Bother You? Ever get that feeling, you know, the one that speaks to you to say: “Hey, You…you probably shouldn’t have done that!” Your conscience is what’s speaking to you, its actually nagging at you because its letting you know something is wrong. Who knows what you did, however it was just not right. What does that mean? A wise woman said, “Your conscience is the mirror of your heart. It follows you like a shadow, your entire life.” So, your conscience is an indicator of how in tune or aligned your thoughts and actions are with your heart. Call it intuition, call it instinct, gut feeling – all roads lead to the idea that your heart has neurons and thinks with a baseline purity to it. So what am I saying? Your conscience constantly guides you to navigate your life by aligning it to your heart-mind. If your conscience is your mirror of your heart then we can use the analogy of having a clean mirror to mean that you live a clean life. Think of it as an internal guidance system. At all times you know if what you are doing is rightly aligned with the direction of your heart. Since the heart space is pure, then it seems like a pretty good source to look towards. You can constantly gauge the quality of your life, specific to you based on how your conscience has you feeling. This is not about morality. It is more about the way a clean mirror allows you to experience and master your emotions. Its not about comparison to others. Its not about guilt and shame. It is about you and your life. Think about how many times throughout your life you had an internal dialogue going back and forth about doing something or not doing something and in all honesty not being able to decide. I know that I have experienced that too many times to count in my own life. What if you did not have to play the guessing game or go endlessly back and forth so that in the end you choose based on a coin toss. Consider the emotional empowerment you gain from this. Can’t you feel how palpable the energy is just talking about this? As you go through your day and those many long nights, you find comfort in having a clear conscience. Your heart vibrates to the frequency of love. So now what happens is that your decisions slowly become more rooted in love and compassion. This means that your life becomes more rooted in love and compassion. This is what is known as living your life in coherence. It means that your heart and mind are in sync or entrained. The neurons in your heart interact faster and without all the filters or emotional stacking experience. You don’t have to stress so hard about your decisions any more. There is a true guidance system that you can access any time you want. Now you become resilient, you become an emotional warrior. Emotions tell us about our immediate situations. So, in order to make good decisions, we have to use emotions because they set our context. Much of psychology teaches us strategies based on the mind being in charge but heart based decision making means that you are A) not suppressing your emotions and therefore an integral part of yourself, but B) stop ongoing indecision. You act because you are rooted and in the present. Ignoring your emotions can cause you to get stuck in zero and one thinking or worse, you end up inert, frozen and incapable of choosing. This leads you to a much wanted state, namely, self awareness and confidence. With these characteristics in hand you slowly begin to build your decision making power. You gather momentum and gain control in different parts of your life. You start to make an impact because your decisions are solid, rooted in heart based resilience and love. People begin to notice what is happening in your... Support this podcast
www.kaiehnes.com Ep18 What is Your Path Hello and Welcome to the Way of the Emotional Warrior Podcast. My name is Kai Ehnes and today we will be answering the question of ___. What is your Path? Here is the story. A mother explains to her teenage child: “In order to truly be at home, you must choose your path. One path is to choose what others want you to do and be. The other path is to choose what you really want to do with your life.” As life typically unfolds for any of us, the child begins to find herself in all sorts of situations. These situations are classic life challenges that offer an individual the opportunity to decide who they really are and who they want to be. Time to see how this applies to an Emotional Warrior. A person who chooses their own path sets a life into motion for themselves that creates a story of intention, resilience, free will, empowerment, emotional strength…personal liberty. You build yourself a solid foundation of emotional understanding and reality. You start to gain spiritual and psychic strength. Picture this life. You live between the lines. You intuitively have a feel for doing the right thing. You know when to stand up for something that is wrong. You know when you may have to give up something for the greater good. You operate from a baseline of heart and love. You spend more time in light than darkness. The famous scripture line “Whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also reap” starts to become one of the main tenets of how your life structure is held together. One by one you have life experiences. Initially they alternate in extremes in terms of how you react and deal with them. Over time a sort of middle path or average starts to emerge showing the direction of your internal compass. The line I mentioned means the following: the way you behave in life will affect the treatment you will receive from others. While this is certainly important for how we interact with others, I have found that it is the core of how we interact with all of life. Living in the middle ground would mean that you are not doing things with the intention of manipulating what you get in return. It means you do the proverbial right thing because by doing so you act and you put forth energy that when it comes back to you helps not only to elevate you but others as well. How does this relate to choosing your path? Well, lets look at the other side of the scenario first. If you choose to do what others tell you to, implied or directly said to you, it means you really have no idea of what to do from one situation to another. You not only second guess yourself every time you face a decision but you literally have to consult someone to give you advice or confirm what you believe before you can act. You are good in your day to day but any higher vibrational experience that requires a decision to act gets you flustered because you need validation from outside yourself to act. This happens to someone when they are raised in a very authoritarian household. One’s own ability to choose an action is always deferred to the authority figure. Once grown up that simply transfers to adult decision making. If the authority figure is not around, the individual seeks someone else to validate their perspective and influence their decision making. An emotional warrior prefers a life of intention and choice. This type of empowerment means that you have to be able to trust yourself and the decisions you make. How can YOU begin to trust your decisions? It starts with how you act and behave. As we saw earlier, what you sow so you shall reap. Here are some examples: You want to make more money. You want to have an amazing close relationship. You want to be truly healthy. You want to live right on and with this planet. You want to know how to relate to other life on this earth. You want to live your life in peace. These are just... Support this podcast
www.kaiehnes.com Ep17 So that's Creativity...Who Knew Hello and Welcome to the Way of the Emotional Warrior Podcast. My name is Kai Ehnes and today we will be answering the question of What actually is Creativity? What is creativity? Imagine the following: At a certain point there is pretty much nothing but then out of the blue there is an onslaught of ideas. According to Richard Foster, lecturer in management at Yale, that moment is creative insight. But what he found more important are the traits, the knowledge and ways of thinking that lead up to this moment. He says creativity is about making something new, rather than merely applying or discovering something new. Creative solutions are insightful, they’re novel, they’re simple, they’re elegant, and they’re generative. A key to being creative, says Foster, is the ability to find associations between different fields of knowledge. This process requires people with curiosity, energy, and the openness to see connections where others cannot.
Next comes some answers to what creativity is, by Robert Franken in his book Human Motivation. Creativity is the tendency to generate or recognize ideas, alternatives, or possibilities. Tests of creativity measure not only the number of alternatives that people can generate but the uniqueness of those alternatives. the ability to generate alternatives or to see things uniquely does not occur by change; it is linked to other, more fundamental qualities of thinking, such as flexibility, tolerance of ambiguity or unpredictability, and the enjoyment of things unknown. One of my personal favorites, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, in his work: Creativity - Flow and the Psychology of Discovery and Invention. He describes creative people in the following ways: 1. Persons who express unusual thoughts, who are interesting and stimulating - in short, people who appear to be unusually bright. 2. People who experience the world in novel and original ways. These are (personally creative) individuals whose perceptions are fresh, whose judgements are insightful, who may make important discoveries that only they know about. 3. Individuals who have changed our culture in some important way.
He continues with Characteristics of the creative personality: 1. Creative individuals have a great deal of energy, but they are also often quiet and at rest. 2. Creative individuals tend to be smart, yet also naive at the same time. 3. Creative individuals have a combination of playfulness and discipline, or responsibility and irresponsibility. 4. Creative individuals alternate between imagination and fantasy ant one end, and rooted sense of reality at the other. 5. Creative people seem to harbor opposite tendencies on the continuum between extroversion and introversion. 6. Creative individuals are also remarkable humble and proud at the same time. 7. Creative individuals to a certain extent escape rigid gender role stereotyping and have a tendency toward androgyny. 8. Generally, creative people are thought to be rebellious and independent. 9. Most creative persons are very passionate about their work, yet they can be extremely objective about it as well. 10. The openness and sensitivity of creative individuals often exposes them to suffering pain yet also a great deal of enjoyment. When Does Creativity Happen?
The late Maya Angelou also suggested that thinking creativity helps foster even greater creativity: Creativity or talent, like electricity, is something I don’t understand but something I’m able to harness and use. While electricity remains a mystery, I know I can plug into it and light up a cathedral or a synagogue or an operating room and use it to help save a life. Or I can use it to electrocute someone. Like electricity, creativity makes no judgment. I can use it productively or destructively. The important thing is to use it. You can’t use up creativity. The more you use it, the... Support this podcast
Ep16 oh…that’s why I love creativity Hello and Welcome to the Way of the Emotional Warrior Podcast. My name is Kai Ehnes and today we will be answering the question of...Why do I truly enjoy being creative? This week I wanted to take a look at an idea proposed by Wallace Wattles, in his book, "The Science of Getting Rich." He proposed that an individual has a two fold option of how and where to live their lives. There is the plane of competition which is where most people operate. Here we do exactly what the name states. We try to further ourselves and better ourselves through competition. This means that we have to beat someone else or many others to achieve the proverbial win. The victory moment of beating someone else and thus be the winner. The other side he proposes is the plane of creativity. This is where a person achieves a sustainable life. This is a mindset that does not depend on beating someone else. There is no need to compare yourself to someone else. There are no regrets based on someone else doing something with a higher value in the eyes of society. Instead it is derived from an internal space. Creativity means you Express yourself. You bring forth your own ideas. Of course, balance is the key. It is not healthy to pull off to anything extreme. But there is a way to Express your soulful self. There is harmonious life where you feel good. You live in a state of balance. When you take on your day or projects you easily enter into the state of flow brought forth by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. In this state your power of creativity is fully turned on. Time disappears because you become part of the process of whatever you are doing. What state of mind should you be in as you do all this? The answer is a state of gratitude. You know as well as I do that we can quickly find what's wrong with a situation. We easily judge others to prop ourselves up. But in that state of gratitude you can easily live within the rails, meaning sustainable. So in gratitude you enter a vibrational state whereby you appreciate everything around you, value your own place in the world. You connect to life. You attune to the rhythms that are present. When you are in this state your creative energies are free to play. By staying in the state of creativity you avoid falling into competition. The games other people play in their competitive minds simply do not affect you. Competition means that for you to win or be superior someone else needs to be inferior. If you fall into those energies more and more does inferiority and winning take over your thoughts and time. You have a choice in how you want to live your life, perceptually. Since you get to choose this, you have to ask yourself, Is this how I really want to live my life? Wattles talks about how the creative power makes us into the image of that which we give our attention. The grateful mind is constantly fixed upon the best, therefore it tends to become the best, it takes the form or character of the best, and will receive the best. It is your desires and passions that are the driving forces of your creativity. The balanced way to approach these forces is not only practice gratitude but also be open to opportunities and open doors that come your way. You have to be vigilant and aware to these gifts being brought to you. Then you have to act. Leave no rock unturned is what a friend told me 30 years ago. It has been solid advice for sure. Keep your mind clear and focused. Then you can recognize the opportunities in front of you and live in a state of gratitude. Watch your mood and emotions. See how you live balanced. The crazy town around you is still there but does not affect you the way it does when you are out of balance. Your business transactions become simpler. The struggle becomes less and less. And life... Support this podcast
www.kaiehnes.com Why we compare ourselves to others Hello and Welcome to the Way of the Emotional Warrior Podcast. My name is Kai Ehnes and today we will be answering the question of why do we Compare ourselves to others? One of the basic tenets of the way of the emotional warrior is self awareness. That being said, one of the more self contradictory rituals we do to ourselves is comparing ourselves to others. The fastest place we do this is when we scroll through social media and see what friends, even family, post stories about their successes. Even ads that pop up try to convince us that the golden life is just ahead of us if we do things their way. But we also do it in the analog world. We compare ourselves to other people when we are in public or simply watching tv. Of course it is important to see something other than yourself. Other people can easily show us inspiration in their journey. They obviously have made something out of themselves. Great people can be emulated in their perseverance and quite often leave a trail of steps of how they achieved their success. So there is a good reason to compare yourself. They are at a certain stage or success and give you the hope and motivation to move yourself forward. However, how often has the following happened. Someone posts that they have achieved something. You see that they are about your age and it instantly becomes clear that they have done something you have not. You look at this as a weakness on your part. A failure of sorts. The proverbial race, where you did not come in first. That is not motivational. It may make you feel less than. Not good enough. If you want to resolve this dilemma, you have to make a decision as to where you are actually coming from. What I mean by this is where your sense of reality sits. What is your base level of being, where you feel is ground zero for you. This is psychologically and emotionally your resting place, your departure point. It is on this foundation that you build everything onto. This is analogous to the ground that you build a home on. The ground has to be leveled and packed, let’s call it the pad. It has to be prepped and leveled for a house to be built upon. This is the space where it all begins. It is your true birth place of your Self. It takes courage to go there. This is how deep you have to look. It might seem scary but once you find this place inside of yourself you can decide what gets added to it as you build and expand who you are and want to be. The reason I am talking about this is that comparing yourself to others can cloud or even negate this sense of who you are. We can easily layer in lies to keep up with others. There is room for all sorts of intrusive interferences that cloud who we really are. So, what does the neuroscience tell us. It turns out that when we compare ourselves to others and the perceived difference between where you perceive yourself to be and where you place the other person, if the need for you to be like them is extremely high, you become very prone to take high risks. This is known as Risk-Sensitivity theory, originally founded in studies of evolutionary biology and animal foraging, states that “risk-aversion [shifts] to risk-preference in situations of high need, where need describes disparity between an individual’s present state and goal (or desired state). In a study conducted by Keith Payne, a professor of psychology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel, he found that riskier gambling decisions were much higher under the high inequality conditions, revealing that people feel the need to risk more when they are aware of others already having more than they do. Again, this is a double edged sword. You are told to take more risks on one hand but on the other, taking extreme risks can be very detrimental.
So here we are. You have done the work and found that truly vulnerable space inside of you that is... Support this podcast
www.kaiehnes.com Ep14 What…me stressed? Where is my oxygen mask? Hello and Welcome to the Way of the Emotional Warrior Podcast. My name is Kai Ehnes and today we will be answering the question of What…me stressed? Stress overload. There are certainly times where the stress simply piles up and creates such an incredible pressure that you simply want to lose it. There simply don't seem to be enough hours to get the demands of those above you, met. They make decisions without any regard as to whether you can complete them or even have any ability to do the task. To be fair, sometimes those directly above you are getting slammed with a healthy dose of crazytown from a level higher than themselves. Trickle-down worked so well in the ‘80s, let’s just keep on using itJ How can you be held accountable for something that you can not do because the internet meeting you are supposed to have at 10 does not happen because Zoom crashes or your internet is down. Yet, you were supposed to have it done. That is all before lunch and then come the next demands. You give 10 to 12 hours 7 days a week to a job that pays you for 37.5 hours. So it is for many of us. You can't quit because you have built a life based on your salary and other jobs or careers are not easy substitutes. There must be something in your toolkit that you can use, right? Before we can go there though there is plenty of time to stress out more. So we do it another day, maybe have a drink every evening, try to go to sleep and then find yourself not being able to get any rejuvenation. Next morning, coffee starts your day, your phone is blowing up, already stacked with new demands. At least you feel vindicated that your new office is your dining room table, couch, or even your bed. You put on your remote work uniform which is a nice shirt and sweat pants. Everyone does it and knows it but no one sees it on our new ZOOM screen frame of reality. That is your victory. Then the emails crank up. The ding sound followed by "you will." Quick, run for your third round of coffee. Damn did the dog get to go out? Certainly this will lighten up tomorrow, is your mantra. In a moment of pause you ponder…Of course THEY don't want us this stressed. They don't want us to feel this way. They surely want us to be happy and fulfilled at the workplace. But it just keeps going, day after day. So what do you do? You have to look and dig deep inside. For what you ask? Your humanity, your soul. For me, I had to simply put everything on hold and spend some time with family. Realizing their honest and loving support allowed me to get out of my own way and get centered. I went outside and just practiced being present. Next, Prioritizing became the next step. Using the analogy of an oxygen mask on an airplane and that you would have to use it first in order to be able to help someone else, I realized it was time to grab my own oxygen mask. For me I practice coherence. I talked about this in the last episode. Heart-mind coherence is easy and fast. You breathe in 5 seconds and out 5 seconds. While you breathe you immerse yourself in the words: Gratitude, compassion, thanks, and Love. I word for each 10 second round. You quickly get your heart and mind to sync up. Next comes the prioritizing piece. What actually is important. I use kaizen principles which means taking small steps towards a goal. Through continuous improvement which is what kaizen means, you make overall progress towards the larger goal one small step at a time. Maybe things will work out in your job. Maybe they don't and you have to make some hard decisions. They key is to put yourself first. Of course there are family considerations and being a good person. You do have to put that oxygen mask on first though. If you don't you really can't Support this podcast
www.kaiehnes.com Ep13 Why Do I Care? Hello and Welcome to the Way of the Emotional Warrior Podcast. My name is Kai Ehnes and today we will be answering the question of Why do I care? Great question. Periodically I check in with this notion. I mean really, does it matter? What does caring get you? Should you stop caring if you don't get the validation you want from the outside world? What if it's closer than that and your friends don't acknowledge you enough? What if it's closer than that and your family does not meet your emotional needs? Where are you supposed to get emotional comfort from to care? How do you fulfill that yearning for belonging that eludes us so easily? It does make it easier on one hand not to care.
Does caring come from outside oneself? Much of our life is spent interacting w the outside world. It makes sense that one would begin to look for answers there. Religion and institutional belief structures fall into that external category. There is even talk about a personal relationship w God but even that is external. There is nothing wrong with seeking the answers outside of yourself but there is a block to fully experiencing what all these external relationships actually have to offer. What is that block? The block is that experiencing from the outside blocks your emotions. Im sure you have hear of being “emotionally available.” There you go. You are not available when you live in the external.
Hm…now what. It is actually obvious but oh so hard to do. It starts inside of you. The real work is within you. The real battles even wars are within yourself. All the stacking of emotions and experiences create a veil that stops us from seeing that it all starts from within us.
It appears that to some degree we have the ability to choose. If that is so where do you mentally go to base your choices on? Some people love science, others love logic. Some just let things happen on a whim. Yet there are those who simply follow what the mainstream says to do. So how do you choose? Pro and con lists? Do you search online but unknowingly get results of Confirmation bias? Trial and error? Is it possible that we have an internal guidance system? Is there a space inside each of us that knows truth? Most everything I have mentioned here comes from thought and the brain. Is there a better place to look?
My journey has taken me to the heart. It has been studied by the Heartmath institute extensively. Their studies show how integral the heart is in our lives. The heart has “brain cells” that live in an unbiased world. They propose something called heart-mind coherence which is to settle into your heart space and then to let the brain entrain itself to the heart’s rhythm. What emerges with this daily practice is a more relaxed human rhythm that allows for emotional availability and a fuller life experience.
The veil of doubt or right vs wrong, does not exist in the heart. The illusion does not reside there. The constant back and forth by the brain does not happen there.
You know when you almost instantly know something but then wait a bit and find yourself thinking about it and now questioning everything so much so that you can not take action or second guess everything you do? That is you living in the brain. This agitation is the nature of the brain because there are 3 levels of the brain functioning simultaneously to give you input.
Peace and calm is found in the heart. It is the place where that primal intuitive truth comes from. It is where you can have real relationships. It is the portal where love can enter but more so emanates from. That yearning for completion is settled there. It is birthplace of an Emotional Warrior. When you come from the heart space you care. First you care about yourself. Not the ego version of YOU but the true human you.... Support this podcast
Ep12 Fear Keeps Us Small Hello and Welcome to the Way of the Emotional Warrior Podcast. My name is Kai Ehnes and today we will be answering the question of How can Fear keep us small? Fear has been around since, basically the mammalian part of the brain came into being and it is something that ultimately keeps us away from danger. So when there is danger being sensed the amygdala fires up and fear comes into protective mode to get you the being to safety. Now I have heard it said that fear is an illusion and a case can certainly be made for that however, how are we supposed to grow as human beings when fear keeps us stuck in a tiny space and we are never able to expand our own horizons and never develop and become creative. Fear keeps us small and at some point we are going to have to make a leap of faith and jump into the future so that we can expand and live fulfilled lives. Thinking is one of our most powerful tools. We set goals and then we go through the steps to achieve them. So in order not have fear come in and block us we have to focus, we have to intentionalize, we have to strategize all the time so that we can recalibrate in order to achieve our goal. So lets look at 3 points of contention around fear. The first point is the fear of not being loved. This is around us and it consumes us. We like to be loved. It is one of the basic human needs where we want to experience love and belonging. In order to get around this anxiety you have to become okay with yourself and that’s not really that simple however it’s the task at hand. So how do you become okay with yourself. The answer is you have to become okay with your imperfections. They are what they are so be okay with that. Secondly, start to look at what your actual strengths are so that you can build on those. The concept of weaknesses shouldn’t even come into play at this point. The second contention is not being good enough. This one haunts a lot of people. It creates as an antidote all by itself, if it is not thought through, perfectionism. Anyone who is like this, you know very well this eventually fails. You can never be totally perfect all the time. So again, you have to be okay with where you are in your journey. Let’s review. The first was the fear of not being loved. The next one is the fear of not being good enough. The third one is the fear of not belonging. The fear of belonging is a human need. We are social animals. We like to be around other people. We like to be validated by other people, which of course implies that we should validate them. We like to be supported. We like to feel loved. The difference between I want to be loved and I want to belong is that I want to be loved for who I am. I want to belong is a need to socialize. So one is more about other people loving you while belonging is you belonging to the group. These three are the major contentions around fear. These are the basic fears that we build layers upon. The older we get the more dysfunction around this we have. You need to be able to get to the core issues at hand in order to address that fear. We are going to kaizen this fear based business right out of here. So remember, kaizen is about small incremental steps. If you find that the first step is too big and it kind of makes you go eek then make that first step smaller. Take your time it’s about continuous improvement. Small steps and whatever the time is that it takes. First of all you instinctively and intuitively know when you really need to be afraid of something. So that pops out and that’s ok. That’s not what we are talking about. So that’s time to act. You have to get out of the way of danger. However if you want to try some steps of how to overcome the fears that are not really dangerous but you perceive them as so then this is where you want to try the Be-Do-Have model. In terms of kaizen, what’ so important about small steps? They don’t invoke fear and more importantly they allow for... Support this podcast
www.kaiehnes.com Hello and Welcome to the Way of the Emotional Warrior Podcast. My name is Kai Ehnes and today we will be answering the question of Are there just times when you Just Don’t Want To? It’s a crazy feeling right? You had made all sorts of plans the night before but you wake up the next day and you feel like you are in an alternate reality. Yesterday you were in a great mood, today just about everything sucks. Even your body agrees. All you want to do is sleep but of course you can’t. you even go back to bed but to no avail. Your head and thoughts are just spinning around and around. So after a while you get up, feeling unrefreshed. Maybe you choose some caffeine drink. Maybe you go to the tv or internet and waste more time. I am sure this is a familiar story. What causes this? I would like to offer one opinion on this. I am sure there are many more answers but let’s try this one. In a previous episode I talked about emotional stacking. Stacking is simply the piling on of more things to do and responsibilities. For me, it was exactly this type of week. Work demands amplified, rain caused demands for our home to go up. Numbers of covid keep going up every day. Debates are now literal fights about whether to open up schools and businesses. It feels like things are out of balance everywhere. You kind of just want to find a corner and hole up in it. Oh, just before I started working on this episode there was a strange noise on what sounded like the entire roof made a crackling sound. Yes, that was an earthquake from about 80 miles away. How are you supposed to deal and cope with the emotional pile that sits on your shoulders? Personally, I start by recentering myself. I drink some water. Have a small amount to eat. Go to my favorite places. One is inside the house and the other outside, in nature. I clear my head by starting outside. I stand or sit, close my eyes and just listen. No judgment, meaning no interpretation, like a bird calling out, oh I wonder what kind of bird is that? None of that just listen. Bird calling. Leaves rustling. Various insects doing their thing. In a little bit of time, more sounds appear. Normally I would just walk through all of this on my way to DO something. What I am actually doing is Being instead of doing. Next, I go into the house, find my wife and invite her to our living room and apologize. I am sure I was a bit prickly in my stacking mode, so I apologize for being stuck, and tell her how grateful I am that she is my partner and confidante on this journey and how much I love her. She is great at helping me move forward when I am stuck like that and lo and behold she will offer various suggestions which let me do something that moves my life in the right direction. So now what? Have I solved anything? Let me continue…I throw of the entire stack from my shoulders. Technically I already did that when I cleared my mind, however, now comes the most important part about the rebuild. I believe and practice a method called heart centered breathing. I learned and studies this technique at the Heartmath Institute. Amazing people, amazing research. It goes like this. There is a device Heartmath sells that clips to your earlobe and connects to a phone or tablet. When you are breathing correctly the app will fee back to you that it is happening. Next, what the method does is to bring your heart and mind into coherence. There is actual scientific evidence that show how the brain entrains or aligns with the rhythm of the heart. Let me say it again…the brain entrains to the heart, not the other way around. This means that the heart is the key. This is bigger than just heartbeats and brain waves. Your system begins to align itself. This is called a state of coherence. Bottom line is,... Support this podcast
www.kaiehnes.com Ep10 Do You Have to be Right or Do You Want Peace Hello and Welcome to the Way of the Emotional Warrior Podcast. My name is Kai Ehnes and today we will be answering the question of … Do You Have to be Right or Do You Want Peace? Many of us were raised in a culture where being right was rewarded and being wrong was…well let’s say…admonished, laughed at, reinforced with psychological and emotional pain. So then…we quickly figured out how to protect ourselves from this pain. It could have happened at home, in school, or with a group of friends. You were little and saw true possibilities and wonder in the world. With a great positive momentum you decide to share your wisdom with someone and they look at you like you were the strangest person in the world. How could you think something so ridiculous…or…you are so full of it, what do you know. On and on…this type of embarrassment triggers our survival impulses in the survival brain and we react. Either we engage in conflict or hide ourselves away. So what begins to happen is that you are molded into a person who is supposed to be like everyone else. Family, friends, and teachers accept you when you are like them, see things the same way they do and agree with them. Putting the right answers on paper gets rewarded while thinking differently earns you failing grades. So we study and answer the way they want us to more and more because we are told and subsequently believe that this is the ticket to success. We raise our hands only when we know the right answers, we push ourselves to answer the schools’ tests and believe that we have learned things and go off into the world. Imagine for a second, a system where asking the strange questions and letting your imaginations fly would be accepted and reinforced. According to Psychology Today, Mel Schwartz states: “Getting the right answer becomes the primary purpose of our education. Isn't it regrettable that this may be inconsistent with actually learning? Can you imagine the generative and exciting learning environment that would result from a class that rewarded asking the best questions? If you think about it, the most intriguing questions are those that don't offer simple answers. Even more, they drive our thinking into greater complexity and curiosity. This experience would look much different than the rote memorizing and spewing back of information—rooted in right or wrong answers. Raising your hand to gain the reward of getting the correct answer is pointless. It doesn't teach you anything; you already knew the answer. It simply massages your ego, but it doesn't inspire a genuine learning experience.” Let’s look at this closer for a second. Schools and by extension, families, create a system of reinforcement and rewards for being Right!! So, since we were little kids we have been conditioned to be right.
Scroll forward: You are in a great relationship. The honeymoon period is over and you are settled in for the long term. Periodically you squabble with your partner. Maybe its about some event in the past or maybe its about a line from a movie. Mostly benign events in the bigger picture of it all. You get into it…tit for tat, you pull out all the punches and lo and behold…you win. The victory is yours, you are triumphant. You are RIGHT!! Let’s see what type of personality you are. Do you keep arguing over that miniscule piece of mental/ego territory saying and displaying all sorts of mean or derogatory things? Or do you find a gentle way to raise your point, if it is absolutely necessary. Maybe you even Let it go… So thin about that for a second…which one of these types are you?
Scroll forward again: You find yourself at a job/career. You worked hard to get there. Learned all the newest theory. You bring excitement to the game, only to be met with entrenchment, fierce competition, gross... Support this podcast
www.kaiehnes.com EP9 What's the Secret Sauce to Happiness? Hello and Welcome to the Way of the Emotional Warrior Podcast. My name is Kai Ehnes and today we will be answering the question of What’s The Secret Sauce for Happiness? Greetings and Welcome to part 3 of a 3 part interview with Dr. Andy Rosenfarb. He is a naturopath and acupuncturist. His specialty is working with people’s vision. In this segment, we take a look at how gratitude and appreciation are the fast track to happiness. It’s the secret sauce to happiness. Andy gives some great techniques on how to arm yourself to be trained and to be a ready to go - Emotional Warrior. Here we go… K: One of the things I try to practice daily is gratitude and I notice that it might sound fluffy but I find that this proactive work does let me have that moment where I can… I do this first thing in the morning and right before I go to sleep. I find that I wake up in a pretty good state and since I am already reaffirming it the moment I wake up before anything hits me. To go through the day, that moment where you say you have to take that inventory and seek that state shift, I find that to be a lot easier when you have been practicing something. In my case I like gratitude because it’s a humbling attribute. We go through the day and build up kudos and accolades, we try to make ourselves better. We look at success rates. There is this constant build up of the ego but I feel gratitude is this equalizer where you are just a bag of bones and some water and at the end the day are you really that important? Don’t put yourself down but with gratitude if that state shift is required I find it’s a whole lot easier. R: I couldn’t agree more. Gratitude and appreciation, from my perspective and experience, there is no faster track to happiness. Because that which we appreciate appreciates, magnifies, we give more energy to that. So if we are not appreciating something then going to the opposite side which is condemnation, hating it, cursing it, if we are not appreciating it then condemning it is what makes life a living hell. On the other side, if we magnify showing gratitude through appreciation, when we take time to train ourselves or create the habit of appreciating, everything that we could possibly appreciate, including the hard stuff, is not hard stuff anymore. If you show up to a difficult situation and you have appreciation for it, doesn’t it cease to be difficult? Its no longer difficult, it takes the bite out of it. I got this, I can handle this, let me see what I can do here. The appreciation process starts with appreciating ourselves. I appreciate present time, the situation for what it is. I appreciate that I might not see the lesson right now but I could see it. I may get a lesson, an upgrade, a value, an evolution as a result of this experience. Victim comes from not knowing…Oh this is horrible for me. I’m being this, I’m being that, this is happening to me. We may not know that there is a higher power or something or something that’s injected into our lives for our own growth and evolution and our expansion that we are just not aware of. We are just infusing appreciation and gratitude into everything and anything just makes life better. It is a secret sauce to happiness and effectiveness. K: do you teach any of this to your patients? R: yes, we have eye patient lessons where they have a slant towards eye health. More and more have I had patients and acupuncturists who are interested in training to learn this stuff. I have struggling forever, for 4 decades life was tough, it was a struggle, that was just my frame and at some point I just got tired of it. Does life have to be a struggle? Is there a better way? I had good days, there’s some fun stuff but in terms of production, in terms of relationships there is a lot of struggle, more struggle than I could have believed to be possible. In the last 5 years I have Support this podcast
www.kaiehnes.com Ep8 Can Spinach Really Change My Emotional State Hello and Welcome to the Way of the Emotional Warrior Podcast. My name is Kai Ehnes and today we will be answering the question of Can Spinach Really Change My Emotional State? Today is part 2 of a 3 part interview with Dr. Andy Rosenfarb. He is a naturopath and acupuncturist. His specialty is working with people’s vision. In this segment, we dive into how we can discipline ourselves to prepare or precondition ourselves with emotional awareness and readiness, the same way Popey had a can of spinach before he had to save the day. Andy gives some great techniques on how to arm yourself to be trained and to be a ready to go - Emotional Warrior. Here we go… K: One of the dimensions of the work we are researching now is that yes, certainly the large shock waves are fairly obvious in that way, the way you describe it, you lose a spouse, or an accident, but what we are finding also and this probably chisels away harder, are the small things. So I tried really hard last night to get this technology working and I found out that a camera wasn’t working. Then you go over here and the light is not right. I thought I had it all worked out last night and then today I thought let me check it out and something else doesn’t work, I mean, it should be obvious, open up a laptop, turn on the camera, but it didn’t look right and I didn’t want that for posterity’s sake on Youtube looking like you came through a cheese grader. What I’d like to ask you, see what your input on this is: how do we arm ourselves and take that spinach can for all of these little events. Let me give you an example: you have a situation where somebody’s life is continually spiraling down. There are these dominoes that have a downward spiral in their life. You are doing fine on a Monday and a tire blows out. You didn’t have enough money for the tire so you charge it on a credit card but you also need something else three weeks later and now at the end of the month you don’t have enough to pay the bills and it just continues. You have to borrow and then borrow more. You have to pay interest and you have to pay back more than what it was worth. Then comes the next month and it just keeps on going. How do we put the brakes into that? There might be one or two tools, to stop that at that moment, power up to play that out. Down the road we should be inoculated. If somebody has been doing this for a while, they eat spinach all day. In little doses, every 20 minutes they have a spinach hit, so they don’t get hit so hard. This is quite common. R: I know quite a few people who do quite well with dealing with big traumas, big situations, big shocks but they have a very hard time dealing with the little stuff. What happens is that its little microtraumas that simply keep on accumulating, tearing away at us. This is where practicing daily self care, radical self care, comes into play. By working out, meditating, eating right, prayer, whatever it is that fills up our tanks. That is going to be our insurance policy against this stuff. Trying to respond when our tanks are empty…good luck. The worst case scenario is when you are already down, add insult to injury and its like are you kidding me, it keeps coming. So what happens is you have to use a daily practice of decompression and tuning back in, that will give us that clarity. At least for me what I find is that when I go days without exercising, meditating, or spending time with my family. Basically doing things that I like for me. Its also about mindfulness, checking in with our emotions. Its sort of a chromosomal defect for those of us carrying a Y chromosome, ie: dudes, we are not really good with checking in with our feelings. We have 2 emotions while women have a much greater access to a spectrum of emotions. Its easier for them to dive into. For guys its harder.... Support this podcast
www.kaiehnes.com Ep7 Kai with Dr. Andy Rosenfarb on Emotional Resilience Greetings…Welcome to the Way of the Emotional Warrior Podcast. My name is Kai Ehnes. Today my guest is Dr. Andy Rosenfarb. We will explore emotional resilience. K: Welcome Dr. Andy Rosenfarb. To our way of the emotional warrior. My name is Kai Ehnes and I thought that we could chat today about emotional resilience. R: Its such a great topic and thanks so much for inviting me to this conversation. Resilience is a very important faculty for success, business, family, taking care of our children, taking care of ourselves, its definitely a keystone. K: I’d like to set a little bit of backdrop without exposing too much of how we actually met which is quite interesting. By trade you are a? R: I’m a naturopath and acupuncturist. L: We had quite a journey to his office, across the street from his office a great bagel shop, lovely office staff. Its not my story to tell. The outcome has been pretty miraculous. We are very very pleased. Thank you very much for stepping into our lives. Prior to that it was not looking real good. You are an amazing healer and I wish more people would know more about you and what you do. Its quick, easy (in relative terms) Maybe people will step into the newer vibration and that maybe there is a better way to live and that people don’t have to suffer. R: Its true. The glorification of suffering, this old school thinking that everything has to be a struggle and you have to grind your way through life. Sometimes we kinda have to but it doesn’t have to always be like that. K: The way that he and I got to connect is that I sat in on the process. You work specifically with eyes, right? R: Yes the nature of my practice is to ideally focus on people’s vision, help their vision with neurologic conditions like macular degeneration, glaucoma, eye strokes, retinal detachments. K: So, people come to you having seen the doctor that gives out glasses, people have gone to see the doctor who says that you need surgery. R: Yes, there are a lot of neurological conditions, vascular conditions. A lot of these people have gone to their conventional eye doctors and are told that there is no conventional biomedical treatment, meaning there is no drugs and no surgery for what they have going on. Fortunately, our methods supplement that lack of current conventional treatment. K: I was sitting alongside of all this and we got into chatting. My prior work was with something called Kai-Zen Consciousness which is about continuous improvement. Taking small steps instead of large ones that might be too difficult to make. In this small step philosophy you start to inch your way forward and hopefully build a new life. Personally I like to believe that we are constantly evolving. I am constantly striving, daily, if not hourly, to become a better person. To find a better way of being on this planet, how to relate better to things. Hopefully, along the way, be healthier. I’m sort of at that point in my life where I am like a vehicle at a hundred thousand mile tune up. I would like to heal back into a healthy way of living. That’s where he and I met, he was very kind. His clientele has to deal with resilience. Someone comes in with macular degeneration and they are basically blocked from seeing a full visual field. Even glaucoma, can lead to total loss of vision. Finding that out has got to push some buttons. So, what do you do when you find out something really shocking to your system. R: it’s a great thing, our resilience. I was watching the movie Rocky, where it talks about this. Life can knock you down. We are all going to experience where your life takes a hit. We’re going to take financial hits, emotional hits, social hits, be embarrassed, have health issues. We are going to take blows from life and resilience is about your fortitude our ability... Support this podcast
www.kaiehnes.com Ep6 Its not Heavy…its just my Emotional Baggage Greetings…Welcome to the Way of the Emotional Warrior Podcast. My name is Kai Ehnes. Today I want to look at: Emotional Stacking It is absolutely necessary to understand what it means to stack and how that sets up our entire outlook on life. Specifically how we make decisions, deal with our finances, experience our relationships and fundamentally, how we look at and deal with our selves. So what is emotional stacking. Let’s start with the brain. First you have what I will call a primary experience, lets call it experience balloon 1.0. This is the first time and event takes place for a person. Let’s say your first experience of a loud bang is a balloon popping at your 1st birthday party. Nothing that sudden and loud has ever happened to you before. It scares you…a lot. Why? Because the brain’s fight or flight mechanism is designed to keep you safe. This is an unknown threat and you are hard wired to go for safety. You scream until you are safe in the arms of your mom or dad. Next, the brain takes the event and frames it, like a frame for a picture, by adding the notions of fear, lack of safety, must flee to the balloon. So, now balloons are stored in the memory center of the brain, the hippocampus, as balloon 2.0. In other words, for you, balloon equals loud noise which is met by your survival instinct with flight because it is rooted in fear. From now on, balloon 3.0, 4.0, 5.0 will contain the base experience of fear. So, when someone throws you a great surprise party and they all shout surprise you are okay but when the balloons come out, even though they don’t necessarily pop, you freak out. What is rather disconcerting about who we are is that we don’t even realize that this is happening. This is what is meant by stacking. Watch how this plays out. Balloon 1.0 is ok. 2.0 has the bang and now every balloon gets associated or triggered with fear. Then we compound it because our brain generalizes…meaning that parties are dangerous, that’s 3.0. Then it becomes groups of people that can become frightening which is 4.0 and so on. Down the road you won’t remember the earlier versions only the newer ones. That is stacking. Other real life examples are stacking on our parents divorce, the deat of a loved one, loss of a job, fear of getting sick, serious injury, food. The goal is to unstack your stories and create new ones rooted in positive and higher vibrational emotions. This will lead to a more fulfilled life. Emotional stacking is a fascinating subject. We associate all sorts of things. However, the most impacting associations revolve around our need for survival and safety. To keep us safe, the brain takes each version of the experience and creates rules or algorithms that our mind uses to keep us safe. In other words, our brain stacks experiences to keep us safe. Ex: “Must avoid balloon aisle in grocery store…could be dangerous” every relationship is doomed to fail just like your parents when you were 7. You don’t know why you do this, it just feels safe to do so. In a study published in the Annual Review of Neuroscience, in 2012 Squire and Wixted found that different medial temporal lobes affect how our memory is organized. They show that nondeclarative memory has a tremendous influence, albeit unconscious, on our behavior and mental life. It is here that dispositions, habits, and preferences arise. They may be inaccessible to conscious recollection but nevertheless are shaped by past events. I believe that our stacking takes place here. The last two Episodes of the Way of the Emotional Warrior dealt with shame and guilt. Please go back and listen to them after you understand stacking. You will be amazed at how much those 2 emotions have embedded themselves into how you live your life. Let’s apply this to emotional stacking.... Support this podcast
www.kaiehnes.com Ep5 Why Do I Constantly Feel Like A Victim? Greetings…Welcome to the Way of the Emotional Warrior Podcast. My name is Kai Ehnes and I am your host for this journey. So, why do any of us feel like victims, maybe some of the time or maybe quite often. Have you ever found yourself experiencing the following? “Why is this happening to me? Why Me? What did I do to deserve this?” Well…today we are going to look deeper into the emotion behind this feeling of being a victim. The emotion we are talking about is Guilt. This is the second emotion on the scale of Consciousness by Dr. David Hawkins. Last week we looked at shame which is the lowest vibrational emotion. It calibrated at a 20/1000. Guilt is the next emotion up calibrating at 30/1000. You can see that this still a very low vibration. I do want to address a point of reference for you. Hawkins found that the tipping point of emotional mastery begins at 200/1000. The majority of humans average right below that. So as a whole we are very close to breaking through. This is why I chose to do this work with my podcast. I want to help as many people as possible master their emotions to cross over the 200 vibrational level. Life takes on a very different quality at that point and it is absolutely beautiful and amazing. So, back to the emotion of guilt. What is happening at this level? Well, we tend to believe that life is a pretty “evil” thing. Key characteristics of guilt revolve around punishment. We punish ourselves, quite a bit, and we often lash out to punish others. This projection helps us to temporarily relieve our guilt. But fairly quickly, if we don’t try to resolve it, we are right back into the punishment quandary. Another trait is that in guilt we manipulate others. This is where the victimhood comes into play. We take life events which may very well be truly awful and perceptually tell the story of the event as something that happened to us. We manipulate others to pity and feel sorry for us, as well as, we get a sense of significance. Again, this is a temporary soothing of our wound. Many people struggle with this cycle their entire lives. It can lead unconsciously to being accident prone and even show thoughts of suicide. It is an unforgiving emotional attitude that can easily be exploited by those who use coercion and control for that purpose. Here is an example: You tell yourself the story that something happened in your past and you are consistently making yourself feel guilty about it. One day as you flip through the TV channels, you hear someone talk and they catch your attention. They are talking about guilt and in a very compelling way, convince you that if you send them money your guilt will be assuaged. In your mind it makes logical sense to give them money or property because they promised you relief from your guilt. You appreciate the release. The problem is that 1) they exploited you and 2) while you might feel some relief, you never addressed the core issues so your guilt creeps back in. Do you give more money? More money equals more release…but you are still not healed. There are many manifestations of this emotional vibration. However, without cleaning up the entanglement, all new events in your life will be perceptually tainted with guilt. Ex. Someone cuts you off in traffic. Emotionally clean – you would barely notice the event. Emotionally guilt ridden, you feel wronged and therefore want to punish them, so you chase them and as we all know, road rage never ends well. So how can we heal our past? Unresolved feelings about events affect our perceptions. They tend to disable us in certain areas of our lives. Is it worth paying the continuing cost? Our job is to develop techniques that let us handle these energies. In a second book by Dr. David Hawkins,... Support this podcast
www.kaiehnes.com Greetings…Welcome to the Way of the Emotional Warrior Podcast. My name is Kai Ehnes. Today, I thought that we would take a deeper look at the emotion of shame. Shame is the first of the lower emotions as described in the Levels of Consciousness by Dr. David Hawkins. Typically, the lower emotions are called negative emotions but it might be more advantageous to look at them as energy draining. You know, the ones where you feel kind of bad, drained, lack luster. Before we deep dive into shame, I wanted to foreshadow just a bit. Over the next few episodes we will dive into one emotion per week. At first they will seem very negative, which they are, however, there will come a tipping point. At that point we will move into the positive or energy creating emotions where the emotional needle will create a self perpetuating momentum and your life will take on a very positive, fun, exciting and rewarding rhythm…yay! So, what is this downer emotion called shame? Brene Brown has done tremendous work on shame and vulnerability. Take a look at her TED talk. It is amazing. She says that shame is an unspoken epidemic. Shame tells you are not good enough. Things happened when you were growing up and we all know it. Everyone is a critic but it turns out the harshest critic is you. She says shame runs two tapes, 1 not good enough and when you get past that the enters “who do you think you are?” shame is not guilt, shame focuses on self, guilt focuses on behavior. I am bad versus I did something bad. Shame is highly correlated to depression, addiction, violence, aggression, bullying, suicide, eating disorders. She says shame is different by gender. For women its about doing it all, doing it perfectly, and never letting them see you sweat. For men shame is “do not be perceived as weak. The antidote to shame is empathy and a great place to show and experience that is by consciously listening. On a similar note, Dr. David Hawkins investigated shame by using muscle testing to create a hierarchy or staircase of emotions from lowest to highest. He talks about this in detail in his book, Power vs Force. Starting from the bottom, he found that the lowest emotion is shame. Shame is experienced as the emotion of humiliation. Let’s take a look at this. Your emotional state is shame. This starts as the basis for your narrative. This becomes the reference point of every experience throughout your day. Shame will determine how we parent, how we interact with others, how we view ourselves. Every experience is filtered through this emotion and will become self deprecating because it is a completely negative, downward driving and draining emotion. It is experienced through the need for perfection which of course sets up failure and thus spirals further downward. Because you feel this through the filter of shame you feel miserable. On top of that you set the mood for the day as well as your overall approach to life. You have determined that all events, which by themselves are neutral, will pass through the filter of shame and humiliation. A great exercise is to write down as many of your experiences in one day as possible and see how your perception of them is determined by the reference filter of your base emotion. Let’s say you have a stressful email waiting for you at work. You open it, read it and a dissatisfied customer lists their grievances with angry email tone. Is it really as bad as you make it out to be? Is the person trying to harm you? The problem is that the email is experienced through the filter of shame and any issue by the customer is seen by you as a failure within you. You were not perfect. Or you react to it with anger and violence because you view it as an attack. If your base reference point for experiences in the day is rooted in shame then your difficult email just became an... Support this podcast
Greetings…Welcome to the Way of the emotional warrior podcast. My name is Kai Ehnes. Top 5 Strategies to Enhance How You Listen 1. Do you listen to people? Really listen when they are speaking or are you busy with your own inner dialogue waiting to speak? Ready to pounce in with a reponse. a. Picture that you are sitting at a café and you are meeting up with a friend. Your conversation is casual and a few minutes in the other person starts to open up and talks about something vulnerable. b. Do you notice the shift? Are you aware of their needs at that moment? Are you able to quiet down and truly listen? c. Are you able to shut down your own inner dialogue, you know the judge, jury, executioner voice, so that you can really hear what the other person is saying or do you make all about you? d. The other person may not even be aware of their own shift. It simply came out. e. How do you respond? Do you instantly want to “fix” them? Do you want to tell them how it should be solved? f. Can you shut down any of your own ulterior motives? 2. Conscious listening supports genuine transformation and honors the intelligence of the head, heart and gut in both you and the other person. 3. How do we actually communicate? a. The original research by Albert Mehrabian created the notion of the 7% rule, meaning that only 7% of what we say in words makes it to the other person b. According to research in psychology today, 7% is actual spoken words, 38% tone of voice and 55% body language c. So, tone of voice and body language have a tremendous role in what is communicated 4. What does this mean for conscious listening? a. It means that emotions play a powerful role in communication b. If how we say something and how we express it, make up 90% of what we take in as information then we are responsible for what we say and what we hear c. Example of café i. If I roll my eyes when the other person is vulnerable that could be devastating. ii. If I constantly look at my phone, my disinterest becomes pretty obvious iii. If I make it about me it stops their process. Simply share that you too have had such an experience and therefore can understand. 5. So what are some ways to listen attentively and genuinely? a. Mirroring – when the other person has a break in their story repeat the meaning of what was said back to them using your own words... Support this podcast
Welcome to The Way of the Emotional Warrior. This weekly show is dedicated to help you master your emotions. We will bring you cutting edge neuroscience blended with old school wisdom. I’m you host, Kai Ehnes. I am a veteran educator, Co-founder of The Way of the Emotional Warrior and the CEO of Kai-Zen Consciousness. This short form show typically runs from 8 to 15 minutes and releases every Wednesday. Usually a solo show but every now and then I’ll feature experts in the field of emotional mastery, eastern and western medicine, as well as, amazing people who have just figured it out. I can’t wait for you to join me here on The Way of the Emotional Warrior. Remember to tell all your podcasting friends that the show is available to listen to for free in any app that supports podcasts. And as you go and dive into the episodes never forget that the more you expect from yourself the more you will learn how to master and harness the energy of your e-motions to regain our power, vitality, confidence and quality of life. Support this podcast
How Your Why Elevates Your Game Hello, My name is Kai Ehnes and I will be your mentor and guide as we learn how to master the way of the emotional warrior. Join the Conversation at www.kaiehnes.com Instagram @https://www.instagram.com/way_of_the_emotional_warrior/ (way_of_the_emotional-warrior) What are we going to be talking about today? Today we will be talking about your why – your purpose An undeveloped why Then we will talk about some of the scholarship of what’s happening Then we will look at how that is going to improve your human experience Your why – I believe that deep down we all want to live an exceptional life An exceptional life is rooted in life experiences and as many of you have experienced in your own life, these usually come with lessons What are these lessons in terms of purpose? What happens is that after these lessons we create some sort of code This code is usually rooted in survival. Survival is often a good thing but sometimes when trying to live an exceptional life that coding or default setting can actively sabotage us from moving forward. In order to move toward the next quality of life step you have to begin to establish your values and this begins with declaring your personal why. So what is at the core of this, inside? Simon Sinek who has written some of the great mainstream material on the why, says that your purpose for doing something needs to be more than some sort of mechanical movement. The human experience is deeper than simple surface walking. So what is this why? What is your purpose? Why do you want to be better at something? Why do you want a better salary or position? Why do you want to lead or follow? Why do you want a great relationship or love someone? Is there a reason why you want good health? Why do you want to contribute to make a difference in the world? So your why is really a question of the heart. The brain questions come in either or fashions, that’s how the brain is wired. A this or that fashion and as at least as I have experienced in my life, I find that kind of answering incomplete and definitely unfulfilling. Heart questions like the why, they challenge all of your dimensions, like your body, your mind, your soul, your emotions. When someone has a strong why others will instantly recognize it and then they feel a sense of connection and belonging. On the other hand, when people focus on the what questions for their primary sense of purpose they often find themselves competing with others rather than bonding. When your why is strong enough it becomes your life mission. You instantly become able to make a difference because of your ability to inspire yourself and to inspire others. So how can you find your why? It starts with your needs. For sure, physical and safety needs have to be met but what emerges is that we are actually talking and your spiritual and emotional needs. Once these are set you can sculpt your world to meet those needs and subsequently elevate your quality of life. How do you identify your why? You begin by asking yourself, how do you want to live? Do you want to unite with others? Do you want to create nurture? Do you want to plant roots and feel connected? Do you want to produce something outside of your childhood programming? Do you want to design a code through which you want to find your way through the world? I think there are 3 manifestations of the why, we’ll call them groups. Group1: Most people’s why is unconscious. They are very involved in the material world. They have a compass but there is no needle that is pointing to the north. So, for them its about getting up to do a task list. They do the tasks and at the end of the day they have either completed the list -yeah – or not, boo. This continues day in and day out. Group 2: smaller group, they have a why, can tell you about what it is, but they don’t live it. They have a compass, the needle points north some of the time, but it is not... Support this podcast
Welcome to the Way of the Emotional Warrior Podcast. My name is Kai Ehnes. You might be asking yourself, what takes place here? What is the way of the emotional warrior? 1. Great question: Did you ever feel so overcome with emotions that you can feel them coursing through your body like electricity? Overwhelm, Hurt, Resentment, Anger, Fear, Uncertainty, Anxiety, Doubt, Distrust, Despair, Worry, Tension, Stress, Shame, Guilt, Regret That’s because we experience emotions as bursts of energy moving through the body. The Latin word emotion, ‘emotere’, literally means energy in motion…or E-motion. Often it feels like there is a gap of disconnect between the energy of our feelings and the actions we believe we are “supposed” to take. This is the interference that keeps us stuck in broken patterns. This constant consumption of our emotional energy can leave us feeling depleted and exhausted. It devours our time, our health, and our money. We feel wired and tired, burned up and stressed out. 2. Does all that pressure and stress of the daily hustle and grind bring you the joy and peace you truly crave? a. We must learn how to master and harness the energy of our E-motions in a healthier way to regain our power, vitality, confidence, and quality of life. 3. Where can we look for ways to master our emotions? a. Neuroscience i. Through innovative research in the neuroscience of emotions, scientists have discovered that the emotional brain is actually the executive branch—the CEO. It influences all other belief systems, memories, thought processes, and essential decision making. ii. We think the mind is in charge and is making rational logical decisions…but it’s actually the emotional brain running the show. iii. The thinking brain merely fills in the gaps with excuses, coping mechanisms, and stress as it tries to catch up. iv. The drive to move through your emotional energy is in every cell of your body because your nervous system is in constant pursuit of homeostasis (balance). v. This is how the emotional brain responds faster than our analytical (thinking) brain. vi. The mind will believe whatever your emotions tell it to (whether it’s factually true or not). b. Emotional and Spiritual masters c. Your inner self 4. What is the Way of the Warrior? a. Your ability to understand and effectively harness stress, worry, and fear is vital to transforming these energy patterns into clear, calm confidence and peace of mind. Everything that you want is already waiting for you to align your emotions with your intentions. This is where all dream fulfillment truly begins. b. We invite you to join us on a journey of personal transformation and self-discovery to become the sensei (master) of your own mind and emotions. We will explore strategies to unlock true success and fulfillment from within. When we create an inner space that is clear and calm it radiates outward into everything we do and everyone we cherish will benefit from this internal renovation. 5. The results are deeply powerful and long... Support this podcast