The Hidden Key To Mastering Your Mind, Neuropsychologist, Dr. Julia DiGangi

what we're all kind of doing is Seeking a pain-free existence but this is absurdity right if I'm in a situation where there is no pain-free option which is the more powerful pain meaning what is the pain that delivers me the greater transformation the deeper satisfaction the more Vitality everyone seems to understand this on the physical health side no one's like you know what I really want to get stronger so what I'm going to do is I'm going to avoid the gym I'm going to avoid walking in my neighborhood I'm gonna eat a lot of Hot Cheetos okay if you want to get more emotionally powerful and by emotionally powerful I mean you want to feel more at ease in your own flesh you want to feel more satisfied you want deeper intimacy you want greater self-confidence you have to start carrying more of an emotional load becoming more authentic more expressed more honest hurts welcome back to the transmission my friends and I have to say I have discovered one of my new favorite things and it is when I am speaking with an expert on a certain topic and we reach this place of what I would call complementary mystery where we encounter something too big to be captured by that expertise yet somehow that mystery is complementary to their expertise it's a mystery that's like the pulsating Nexus of truth that underpins all disciplines yet transcends all disciplines at the same time of course not all experts are comfortable with this many of them try to Gaslight you into thinking it doesn't exist or they try to explain it away themselves point being though I think it's a really special magical moment when you're able to intellectually rub up against whatever that unspeakable mystery is and I know that this is very vague but worry not because it will all come clear or at least however clear something unspeakable can become but point being I think we get there several times in this lovely fiery mind meld with neuropsychologist Dr Julia deganji Dr deganji has had appointments at Harvard Medical School Boston University School of Medicine and More she's an expert on stress and Trauma and mastering your emotions and your energy so that you can use it toward maximal effect to your own growth and healing which by the way she is done with numerous people in very high positions as you're going to hear in this mind meld she's also got a new book out on that topic among other things energy Rising the Neuroscience of leading with emotional power and don't let the Neuroscience angle fool you because it's written in a really approachable practical way and I really want to take a moment to say that this woman has it she drops so much Clear sharp powerful wisdom in this mind meld on the importance of struggle breaking problematic habits dealing with difficult relationships this one was immensely enjoyable really tickled my Wonder whiskers and I also want to say that I greatly appreciate how open-minded she is throughout this conversation given her deep and vast expertise anyway links for Dr deganji and her new lovely book are in the description as are all the necessary portals and keyboard mudras you will need for third eye drops by the way do please presently tickle that algorithm with a like a sub a comment a share whatever other tickle points they present to you I know you've heard this pitch numerous other times today but it really is the sole source of nutrition for this media vessel to grow so I thank you did you know that we have over 300 Audio Only podcasts that you will never be able to hear hear on YouTube that means you must subscribe and hopefully review wherever you listen to podcasts Apple pods Spotify wherever that may be you can also support third eye drops by checking out our merch at third eye drops dot shop and consider joining our Wonder Lodge going a layer deeper at patreon.com forward slash third eye drops where we do Zoom hangs we do a book club we have a patron only Discord server just a lovely community of really bright Wonder Dippers and more and without further Ado my friends let's meld Minds with the wise wonderful Dr Julia deganji I always love to get into the Practical nuts and bolts of the brain the Mind habit change how to actually make scientifically backed decisions about your life and your behaviors all of those ways to empirically Empower yourself are just so important and you are an expert on this topic and I love how you've laid it out in this new book so I'm really looking forward to to diving into all of this for it with you not for you maybe it's for you too based on based on uh some some other things but well I'm excited to be here thank you thank you so much for having me Michael yeah I thought maybe starting with this quote would be a good jumping off point because there's just there's a lot of there's a lot of soul in this quote and I really felt this quote when I read it I think this is toward the end of chapter one um you say telling you these stories of human transformation still brings tears to my own eyes and chills to my own body witnessing such staggering acts of Bravery rooted in profound self-devotion and deep hope for a brighter future has shown me that there is so much freedom in our pain we Hemorrhage so much of our holy energy frenetically avoiding the things that make us feel bad but in what I suggest to you is the greatest Paradox of human existence those painful feelings the ones you swear are destroying you are here to set you free and when you realize this your emotional Rising is well underway I I love that quote I really love that quote you hit me in the fields I love it too yeah so yeah so first of all I resonate with that so much that your your freedom is really in sinking into uncertainty sinking into the things that you're afraid of but I this this phrase of holy energy holy energy in some ways that's the sort of uh like irreducible bit of of what you talk about in this book is this this notion of energy in the brain and and the end in the body and I guess in your life in general and the spirit yeah yeah yeah okay so can you please get into that please this idea of energy what what exactly do you mean by that so you know I I think that you really said it so powerfully I mean all we are in the most it's almost kind of like mind-blowing and disorienting to really even think about it because it's you know you almost get this like dizzy feeling when you look too close at it but all we are is energy yeah and you know I'm a I'm a neuropsychologist I have a very strong scientific background I'm very published in the scientific literature and I really kind of think about my life as the intersection of where the scientific meets the spiritual or the human spirit and so we have all of this energy in our bodies and I I focus specifically on the nervous system everything that we want in this lifetime is determined by the energy of emotion so here's some basic questions have you had a good life depends on how you feel about it yeah are you a good person do you make enough money do you have enough time all I mean should you stay in your marriage should you have another child I could go on and on and on all of these things are fundamentally mediated by emotion so when I talk about the energy of emotion I am talking it's fine to think metaphorically but I am also talking neurobiologically I mean our emotions which are these sacred neurobiological Messengers zing zing Zab Zab zoing zoink are really the the the very energetic Force by which we understand our lives and to me that is both that is both scientific and it is totally sacred totally yeah yeah I feel the same way it's it's scientific in the way that you can empirically measure it you can look at brain waves you can look at uh you know hormones neurotransmitters how how the nervous system is impacted by all of the above and and more but also just zooming out on the beauty and efficiency and weirdness of the system as a whole is just a Eternal mind for me personally at least and you know it's funny when when you say this it's I'm just like getting this this idea of I'm sure you're well aware of that academically speaking it's very much not in Vogue to talk about us having some kind of Vitality or or quintessence or there being some kind of you know thing that encompasses our uh our ability to be a being to be in motion to be you know in Spirited or whatever yet when we talk about energy in this way this like weird nebulous force of energy flowing through our body in extraordinarily complex ways that thanks modern neuroscience and medical science we're beginning to kind understand and get a grasp on in ways we definitely didn't know of an Antiquity there still is this pesky weird okay there's this weird thing we call energy in the body that is doing all sorts of things in incredibly complex self-organizing ways and that in and of itself is just such a ceaseless uh source of Wonder for me it's incredible you know one of the things I think about is like our entire understanding of everything about our life is entirely mediated within this three pound blob of primordial jelly so even when we're like we're having a conversation with someone it seems like yes there absolutely is this energetic exchange that's happening but yet still but yet still everything I understand about my life everything I understand to be true is entirely determined by a zing zing Zab Zab zoing zoink within my own skull right so and then you know there absolutely is this thing about Collective Consciousness right so like we I mean we can just look I mean technology has obviously sped things up so much it's like things that we did not agree with or even think about 10 15 20 years ago that the collective Consciousness has changed but the reason has changed is because millions and billions of brains have changed so I I'm totally in awe I mean I think the brain is the most Extraordinary Machine on the planet yeah no doubt no doubt and I mean even bringing this Collective Consciousness down to a more local level in terms of how we interact with one another I mean like phenomena like mirror neurons like the the ability of seemingly one brain tube empathetically mirror the neurological state of another brain like correct me if that's like incorrect Neuroscience or something but that that's something I've always looked at with great puzzlement too yeah one of the things you know I I think a lot about leadership so in my classically I'm I work I'm a trauma expert I work with very extreme forms of human suffering and I plenty of the people that I work with don't have extraordinary level you know I work with combat veterans I've worked with state-sponsored torture survivors I've worked with child soldiers I've worked with a lot of domestic violence so plenty of us don't have that level of trauma and suffering in our life but there still is something that can be learned in across the range of human experience and so I think a lot oddly enough about leadership right and whether we want we think of ourselves as a leader we want to be leaders almost irrelevant we are invariably invariably the most powerful single single actor in our own life okay and so one of the things that's really struck me in in my work with human behavior in a lot of forms is like here's the best definition I can give you for leadership leadership is Whoever has the strongest emotional energy in the room now this kind of goes back to what you were saying about you know mere neurons and empathy right so we Neuroscience is very clear that emotional energy is a thing of contagion we can catch each other's emotional energy similar to how we catch colds the way that I do a lot of work and you know with like high performing teams but the the way I really got clear on this idea of leadership of being about who has the most powerful emotional energy is actually in my work in family systems like ifs or or like actual okay no I mean like absolutely so I have actually I mean like my own work with for example parents of small children so I will work with parents who have you know let's say a very difficult a very challenging four-year-old and these competent High performing have their together parents are brought to their knees yeah because of the energy of this four-year-old and you can see in your if you think about your own relationships if you can think about what happens on social media how other people's emotional energy can send us into a tizzy and then it's kind of like the whole becomes greater than the sum of its parts so it's like the emotional energies just starts like ricocheting off each other and so I think if we want to change our lives we have to think powerfully about how emotional energy actually works so interesting yeah this this notion of emotion emotional energy as a contagion is so interesting and for whatever reason maybe there are some neuroscientific underpinnings to this for whatever reason it seems like negative energy has such a disproportionate influence on the way that we feel and the way that we react like you know the the you know you mentioned social media unfortunately which is a dimension that I exist have to exist within a lot and by and large it's it's the sort it's the story you always hear right 90 plus percent of people are positive constructive if they're gonna comment it's just gonna be a quick little positive emanation right then that one negative comment that one negative comment even if you're trying to be the bigger person and and you end up not responding it's still like ripples throughout your mind and your nervous system and you're constructing retorts and you're like oh this little you know you're and you're and you're going through the mental postures of combat even if you're not following through which me is like 99 of the time I just won't respond but I'm still you know I see it and then it stays with me so like it's like marinating in your system yeah right right it's um it's wild it's wild how so first of all you're you're right Your Instinct about Neuroscience is right so the brain absolutely has a negativity bias right and like it's really quite simple and I always say like we pay more attention how to operate this the Machinery of our cell phones then we pay how to operate the Machinery of our brains and there's a lot of relief and a lot of clarity and a lot of empowerment that comes when we just understand what the brain is doing it's like nobody gets mad because gravity makes things fall down like it would really make my life easier if like balls would bounce up it's like okay well they they're not gonna fall up so can we get on with it so a lot of times what happens is like we get a negative comment and it's gonna ping what happens though and this is actually why I call the book energy Rising is the body and the brain like the your biology is brilliantly designed right and your body by and large knows how to get rid of waste so for example you eat food and you know how to get rid of it right you take in oxygen and you put out carbon dioxide your skin cells every 27 days just know how to get gone yeah yeah but then when it comes to negative emotional energy the energy quite literally starts to rise in the system and instead of just letting it pass like letting the feeling the feeling and letting it go we bite down we avoid we stew we marinate we deny we over process we and it's just we shove it down we shove it down we shove it down we shove it down we shove it down and then what happens over time is we become emotionally constipated we're brittle were we have a very narrow emotional bandwidth and then things that really could just pass like an annoying comment on social media we turn it into the event of our week right but here here's this piece that I think is so healing who did that who did that I did it yeah if I had to distill down all of my work I work with you know a lot of I do a lot of work with romantic couples I do a lot of work with families I do a lot of work in organizational settings I would say the number one question people come to me with is how can I get this very important person in my life to be different so that I don't have to feel Sensations in my body that I do not like yeah I need you to talk different why so why we say things like oh because it's not right or because you're doing X Y and Z but if you really understand what's happening in the nervous system the ultimate Arbiter of that is a zing zing zoing zoing Sensation that I just don't like sitting with yeah well that's kind of weird because your nervous system is packing 150 million years of evolutionary power meaning it's designed it's it's literal design is to feel feelings so we have to understand how to cooperate with emotional energy in our life if we really want this Transcendence if we really want this emotional Ascension yeah really well put that that was one of the things kind of deep in my notes for for sort of interesting questions that I might pose to you and you sort of brought it up under different circumstances is how does what you cover in the book or or just what you know in your expertise apply when it comes to trying to seed change in someone else's mind and that sounds like sort of a black magic proposition right like how do I like it sounds like I'm trying to you know influence someone's mind for for nefarious purposes or something but that's not really what I mean what I mean is more like if there's a change we know someone needs to make in their life but for whatever reason they have developed you know this host of avoiding mental and physical practices to not address that thing what actually would be because I totally take your point by the way that in a lot of interpersonal cases it's an individual change that not not a not of this other person needs to change I 100 agree but in cases where maybe that other person does need to change maybe they have an addiction maybe they have a super unhealthy habit maybe they have whatever it is what can we do to try to nudge that or encourage that or facilitate that in some way if anything so okay okay powerful Converse great we'll we'll break our hearts I think a lot of us come from families where there's a lot of trauma there's a lot of mental illness and the the desire the the fierce longing that these people would be different than what they are is so natural it's so sacred but a lot of times what happens is there any way to change another human being's Behavior the answer is no now the reason we know this the most clearly and I learned this kind of in my own life is like I used to try to my kids are little but they're not babies anymore you know I would try to put like the one-year-old like in the car seat if the girl did not want to go in the car seat the girl was not going in the car so you're just like doing like the back arch and like the screaming so even with these humans that emerge from our flesh we learn very early that we cannot get people to do what if if the emotional energy in their body is no they they won't do okay so then what starts to happen is we start to get obsessed with changing their behavior so like a big thing in relationships that you'll hear these days and I think it's in some ways it's wonderful that people are sort of speaking more about mental health and difficult relationships you'll hear people talk about you know lots narcissism a lot gaslighting okay so there's a lot of like you shouldn't you shouldn't treat me so bad you shouldn't treat me so bad but here's a very very powerful question and sometimes the medicine it's a tough pill but it's so healing if I am having a conversation with you for one year five years ten years about why you need to change because it's hurting me who is really hurting me right one of the most powerful things we can do is to really say to ourselves and and if you're not gentle gentle and you're not tender it doesn't work because we really start to get so deep into like the belly of the emotional system that you have to be gentle but what we're really doing when we keep asking people to change who've shown us over and over and a lot of times too they'll they'll say like I hear you and maybe I even want to but for whatever their reasons are they can't and they won't why do we keep we are thirsty we are thirsty why in the world do I keep going to a well desperate for water when the well has shown me a hundred times there is no water here so I keep going to the well and I keep going to the well and I keep going to the well and I and pretty soon I'm gonna desiccate I'm gonna die because I like human beings have certain emotional needs but we we mistake who the perpetrator is and a big reason if I can get into another emotional energy is sometimes the pain of our frustration and our disappointment is an easier pain to carry than the pain of our grief oh yeah that Dad I'm not going to have this type of relationship with you anymore I'm not going to have the same conversations over and over I'm not going to try to convince mom I love you like for a million lifetimes and I can't continue to be like this with you I have to like whoa partner child you see how the relationship sometimes is so important to us that we would rather be in bad energy yeah then have to hold the grief of letting go oh yeah that's a that is a powerful very real point I I 100 agree and and that and the complexity of that is just so difficult because you know to your point those questions you were posing earlier that ultimately really come down to the subjective quality of how you feel about it are you successful are you X Y or Z it all depends how you feel and in the in these difficult situations too it boils down to feelings right like what what would you rather do would you rather continue to exist in the the simmering slow cooked uh pain of whatever this relationship the reality of this relationship is or would you rather cut it off and it's like there's there's not there's not always a right or wrong answer it's like it's like a pick your poison type answer unfortunately I think sometimes but totally you know one of the concepts I talk about at energy rising and again I think it's just so empowering and so healing is a lot of us are out there so let me just say this about the brain your brain has we've all heard this before in varying ways like you kind of have two brains right you have this like very primitive or reflexive brain and then you have this like very sophisticated human brain okay yeah at the reflexive level this primitive level your brain basically treats all pain the same and I mean all pain so for example if I put my hand on a hot stove and I burn it I'm my brain's going to yank my hand away if someone makes a comment to me that I don't like immediately if I have that bad feeling of danger or threat or aggression I'm gonna react I'm gonna Fawn I'm gonna freeze I'm gonna flee but I'm gonna have some kind of immediate reaction so in in the most basic level what we're all kind of doing is Seeking a pain-free existence but this is absurdity right this is like trying to like convince the universe that like again like gravity should make things fall up or like I don't know like we should be able to divide by zero you know we're like universe Universe I'd really like to divide seven by zero and the universe is like you can't divide by zero here's all the evidence and like for you know 30 years of our life we'll keep trying to divide by so we we kind of get in these Loops like we're trying to avoid pain well that's based on what The Human Condition is impossible if there's one thing I'm certain of it's that all of us suffer to varying degrees and in varying ways but we all suffer okay so if I cannot live a pain-free life then how can I come into a more powerful relationship with my pain and so one of the when I sort of coach you through this in energy Rising but I think a phenomenal question to ask is if I'm in a situation where there is no pain-free option which is the more powerful pain yeah meaning what is the pain that delivers me the greater transformation the deeper satisfaction the more vitality yeah yeah fascinatingly fascinatingly everyone seems to understand this on the physical health side no one's like you know what I really want to get stronger so what I'm going to do is I'm going to avoid the gym I'm gonna avoid walking in my neighborhood I'm gonna eat a lot of Hot Cheetos okay and I'm gonna like binge watch Netflix it's like sometimes we do that but we're not confused by why it's happening it's like if you want to get more emotionally powerful and I'm emotionally powerful I mean you want to feel more at ease in your own flesh you want to feel more satisfied you want deeper intimacy you want greater self-confidence you have to start carrying more of an emotional load one of the things that people you know when you point it out to them they're like oh my God that makes perfect sense self-confidence hurts if it didn't hurt to be more self-confident everyone on the planet would be more confident becoming more authentic more expressed more honest hurts yes if it wasn't the entire planet would look a lot different so you can you just see the astounding amount of dysfunction and pain and wasted holy energy we create in our own lives when we're unwilling to come into this intelligent this bees have an intelligent relationship with this energy of emotional pain because the emotional pain if you really think about it I think you'll like this Michael it doesn't belong to the situation it's not the thing my husband said to me or the or the stuff the people on social media did to me or the fact that they did call or didn't call it's the energy of grief is just in the universe the energy of uncertainty is it's like a radio frequency in the universe the energy of sadness the energy of Joy the energy of so it's like sometimes we're gonna like hit these energetic pockets 100 100 do we know how to roll roll our little boats to cooperate not rage against and not run from but to like really have this powerful harmonious relationship with emotional energy right right and what's really striking me too is is from a complete like from a more conceptual lens you're almost perfectly explaining what the what the on what the shadow in the unconscious is and how it exerts control over our conscious mind and then how it manifests through behaviors we don't really want to have and we look at this and we think that like oh well this is how this is this will allow me to as you point out perhaps live in the sort of Epicurean fantasy of where I can avoid pain in avoiding pain you're castrating yourself with like your your you're you're losing your libido slash power not sexual libido but actual like psychic libido to actually exert more control over your life over your psyche and you know they're the the the shadow of the the shadow topic is much more complex and it's something I've covered kind of a lot on the channel but young never gives a really you know he never gives a succinct definition of anything really but one but one of the closest things he says to defining it is something like it's it's the totality of that which we don't want to be or something like that and and when you when you think about it in that way and you think about trying to completely other all of these things that you don't want to be think about what is automatically implied by that it's like all of your you're taking all of your potential and all of your ability to change at the same time and you're casting it aside because to yourself and that you said that so well you yeah I mean I thought your idea of like you know kind of decreasing your energetic libido your Your vitality and like one of the things we know is you can't you can't Tamp down you have an emotional range and if you constrict the emotional range on the negative side of emotion you're going to constrict it on the other side so it's like unfortunately I mean listen if there was a way where people could feel at peace and self-express without having to endure suffering it's like I'm not I'm not pro-suffering I'm I'm Pro Power right right can I can I share a quick story with you that I think will really sort of speak to this so go I mentioned at the beginning of our conversation I do a lot of work with extreme trauma and so one of the populations I've worked a lot with is combat veterans and so I treat a lot of PTSD both you know PTSD happens to civilians too but this story I'll tell will be about a combat veteran so the whole thing of PTSD and people kind of miss this trauma is not what happened to us okay trauma if you really understand what trauma is trauma is not what they did to us it's what it does to us trauma is not really about what happened in the past it's about what happens to our future okay if they hurt me then people will hurt me forever they weren't safe then no one can be trusted my life was chaotic then the rest of my life is volatile okay so what happens then is when we when we really kind of come into a relationship to heal trauma we have to understand how emotional energy works so I'm this combat veteran comes in to see me he'd been back now for many many years okay and his life was not going well so I was like so tell me like what are you doing to cope with this PTSD that he um basically had as a result of combat and he said well I don't go out in public I don't go to restaurants I don't go to movies I don't drive so a lot of his trauma happened in the context of a convoy I can't be around loud noises so I can't really be around my children I'm very irritability is a big symptom of PTSD I'm I'm like getting in all these altercations with basically his marriage had broken down so if you can see what happened to go back to your example of this like notion of energetic constriction he was avoiding all of these things that he actually wanted in his life in an attempt to stay safe but what was happening was every time he tried to stay safer and safer and safer and safer he was shrinking and shrinking and shrinking his life to the point where it was becoming intolerable it was just too depressing and and too small so fortunately I say to him we have great treatments for PTSD but the treatment is very counter-intuitive instead of continuing to avoid your trauma we're going to talk at length about this thing you've been avoiding and we're going to talk about it over and over and over again so in a lot of these treatments one of the treatments is called prolonged exposure you have people record themselves talking about their trauma on their phones and they go home and they listen to it and listen to it and listen to it now remember this guy had been suffering supremely for many many many years now he comes back into my office around like week 12. okay holds up his phone he's like attack can't listen to this anymore so I'm like sit down tell me what's going on holds up his phone and he's like every time I listen to this thing I fall asleep it's dull as wow so his willingness to courageously because this treatment is very effective and ultimately very healing but it's tough so his willingness to come into a relationship with the emotional energy he'd been trying to run from all those years was really finally this like it opens this trap door and then the energy can really rise the healing can really set in yeah yeah I may have written something down from this is this the person in the book you call James correct um there's another interesting element of this too that that I wanted to perhaps bring up and I'm really glad you brought it up and I remember at one point he he's worried that talking about the trauma might make him vomit and you like shove the sort of you like shove the waste basket over to him and you're like okay but but there there's some to me there was something that really pinged me and was really beautiful about that because part of my whole you know uh Wonder dipping seeking path has been experimenting with psychedelics and I've gone to um Peru and I've done ayahuasca and as you I'm sure you're well aware one of the primary things that happens in those Ayahuasca experiences is purging like that the body somehow and the mind and the body somehow does this thing where you can take Shadow trauma emotional content and have the experience of literally physically removing that thing from your body via vomiting and it makes no sense empirically right like there is no nugget of trauma that you're going to puke out however you still somehow psychosomatically correct and have that experience and it's like he his body already knew that it needed to like jettison something leave him yeah yeah well I I will um so two things I'll say here is I've worked with sexual trauma and sometimes people will say like I feel like I'm going to urinate you know so they'll go home and they'll do some of the imaginal exposure and sometimes they do urinate which like okay you just wash your underwear like is that right it's like definitely and they'll they'll say like I got so much relief so I think your point about like energy moving and this idea of like the body does keep score yeah yeah well these things are inside of us and sometimes you know you you know there's a very um regimented protocols but human beings are complex and sophisticated and you you know as a as someone who works with a lot of people it's like what's going to work for them and I've had patients where they respond really well to come into a energetic relationship with a part of their body yeah for example like my shoulder hurts right what is my shoulder saying to me first pass it sounds silly right but like one of the things that is like the more meaning you say is there I promise you the more meaning you will find and like the body will talk to you I think a lot of us grew up in certainly in families certainly in cultures where we were and it wasn't even malicious in the objective sense but we got a lot of messages directly but also implicitly do not trust your emotional system let me give you a few examples of this I have little kids I think about this all the time the kid doesn't want to eat the broccoli so the kid says I don't want to eat the broccoli eat it anyway right you know one kid smacks the other kid go tell her you're sorry and the kid's thinking well he just stole my toy I don't wanna get up right now get up right now and go tell her you're sorry well I thought I I wasn't sorry so I think where we get a lot of messages in our life that what we feel cannot be trusted but here's the problem with this the thing that we want on this one I'm so convinced of this on this planet more than anything else is access to our own power access to our own energy well the mother energy the native energy is always emotional the universal language of the human being is a language of emotion we all came out speaking and if we're totally Frank about it we all came out speaking negative emotion we were all red-faced and screaming and terrified and enraged and then for the next you know X number of years in our life we are severing ourselves we are severing how we behave and how we think from how we feel well I I say you know people love to say emotions are so confusing emotions are not confusing there is an emotional math to our life you are the most powerful version of you is one that flies on all engines right the emotional the behavioral and the thinking yeah well if I divide my emotional energy meaning I want to say no but then I say yes I have divided myself from myself and even if this is the piece I want people to hear Michael even if the world accommodates me or the world gives me what I want in that moment it does not matter if the world gives me everything if I am willing to show myself that I am the dangerous person in the room wow yeah that's that's powerful stuff it's not something that's impossible for me to ignore is uh one of the wells of ancient wisdom that I'm always going back to is is platonism and all the platonic thinkers and when you when you just like listed off the three parts of the mind or the three ways we think casually like that I kind of got goosebumps because are you are you familiar with Plato's idea of the tripartite Soul very Loosely so feel free to educate me it's almost the same thing you just said it and what's interesting is to to Plato the word he used for soul was was psyche so to him this notion of the thinking mind also being our soul was part of his metaphysics of mind right and the three parts of the Soul almost map perfectly onto what you said which is which is very weird so for so for him the three parts were arrows thymus and logos and you know each each one kind of commands larger and larger influence over the way that we want to naturally be at we want to naturally react so the idea of Eros you know of sort of the the animal the desire the wanting to fulfill those pieces of our biological needs like that's gonna just innately command a lot of our biology and then thymos is a little more nebulous because it's this sort of like passion and this is where I think you get more into ideas about like emotion and human types of accomplishment based off of emotion but then above all of that there's this sort of like clear not just logical mind but mind that's like closer to almost like what you're talking about when you say energy where it's maybe it's a bit more intelligent than just blank energy but what he's arguing is that when you really get into the nuts and bolts of what's going to make you a more harmonious being you've got to figure out a way to actually place the logos over the top of these more bodily emotional kinds of knowing but I think to your point the only way that you do that is by really fully confronting and understanding and feeling the emotion and not pushing it away not like you can take like some hierarchical ruler like no you behave this way it's like I understand I understand what you're feeling and I understand why you don't want to eat the broccoli but you know it's like whatever the example is it's like it has to be somehow held in this higher knowing and fully acknowledged to change it not not through like a like corporal punishment type of ruler who knows better but like a like a Buddha type knowing or something that's like you're so right I think if you let the like the thinking get to you know too powerful and it's not sort of Tethered to the acting and most importantly to the feeling the system gets jacked up and what you start to see I would suggest you that one of the greatest forms of pain on the planet comes from what I call the overs right so overthinking over explaining over giving overdoing over functioning oh it's like the only part of you that's so work is lovely overwork will make you sick right so whenever we're like overdoing it we're doing it because we think it's the pain we think somehow if I overdo I can escape the pain but then the question becomes well what pain because it's two in the morning and my neck hurts from all this emailing or you know over whatever the greatest pain on the planet is the pain of humiliation yeah this really also came clear to me in my work with combat veterans because when they first started coming to see me for you know for PTSD I was like I have a good idea of what you're afraid of and that would be a fear of dying right as humans like that's a pretty big fear and they a lot of them said you know yeah like I didn't want to die but that was not the thing I was the most afraid of the worst thing for me would to be be the guy on the mission who didn't ever together yeah the guy that other people couldn't depend on to be the guy who could not protect his friend right so we this idea of like moral injury that there's something like just morally gross about us so we start to then because we we won't just safely let me feel let me look at the shame like what is it we then start to do all these workarounds that get us so sick we start to posture we start to use lots of filters on social media both literally and metaphorically we start to over give we start to over please but the whole reason we're doing all the stuff we don't even want to be doing anyway is because we refuse to look at the feeling of let me just sit with the sense that I feel humiliated right now let me just sit with it and if I this is what's so crazy a lot of times if I'm willing to just say Let Me Feel the feeling of humiliation it will just move through my body and go right you have to like it's like we are willing to work with the energy of weather patterns we're not like well I really wanted to have a picnic today and there's a hurricane I'm gonna go it's like that's disappointing okay let me kind of make some accommodation it's like right we in all these other ways we're willing to work with the reality of the way the human world functions it's like if the world would come into a new relationship with pain I swear to God tomorrow would like truly because if you think about it and this is the work I've been trying to do for 20 years which is why to have this opportunity to write this book energy Rising feels so meaningful to me until the world's most powerful people and I by most powerful people I certainly mean you know people in office and people running big companies but I also mean parents I also mean the way that we show up in our relationships until we are willing to look at our own pain the behaviors that are creating so much dysfunction cannot change because those behaviors are being driven by an emotional energy we won't look at yes a hundred percent a hundred percent so true yeah yeah it's like that it's it's like I wanted to use this example before just because the way my mythopoetic brain works in the in the example of the PTSD but it's exactly the same here is that it's like we know there's this dragon or or demon that's that's lurking right next door that right right in the the cave next to our house that this thing exists and this thing is is doing something it's doing something nefarious it's doing something dark of course in the story we want the hero to go down in there and face that thing that they're so afraid of and either kill it or transmuted or overcome it or befriend it or whatever but in our own daily lives we don't we we feel the exact same emotional effect of that being living next door but we don't develop we either don't develop the tools to slay or befriend the dragon or we just don't want to confront it we just want to let me cover the door let me you know do whatever the equivalent to covering the door is with any of these self-sabotaging behaviors right and that's no different to your point of all the people in power like they're all avoiding their dragon they're all avoiding their demon just like we are and that's actually a terrifying proposition like to think about that a lot of the people in power are actually dealing with the exact same emotional spiritual as we are and 100 yeah and they're just as inept no matter how much money they have no matter like what car they're driving they're all doing the exact same behaviors and that's actually I mean I could tell you I work with very powerful leaders and I could I mean they are buying you know amazing oceanfront property and coming into my sessions that week saying like I know that this should make me feel better and I feel so empty yeah sat you know sadness is sadness Emptiness is emptiness it's like we've all heard it a million times and for some reason we don't trust it right it's again it's like why don't we just learn how the Machinery works I thought what you were saying about this um the dragon in the basement it was so on point what I have come to understand though and I hope this is I hope this comes across as healing and is powerful to your listeners as I have I've understood it to be hell is the dissonance hell is actually in the moment between me being upstairs and me going in the basement I get I get chills the whole like chills on my body every time I talk about this I can almost guarantee that if you go in the basement the amount you're gonna start to say oh my God I thought it was a big Boogeyman down there it was just the tree on the outside like scraping the window right tell is the we underestimate here's something else that's really important when people talk about painful emotions they'll talk about Rage or they'll talk about sadness or they'll talk about grief one of the hardest emotions for the human brain arguably the greatest tax on the human brain is confusion the brain is a pattern detector in in laboratory studies we put people in Labs we put them in these conditions where the machine will count down five four three two one and definitely shock you or the machine will count down 54321 and you may be or you maybe won't get a shock I've been hooked up to these machines they actually hurt quite a good deal people prefer to be in the condition where they are absolutely getting the shock right which tells you in some cases emotional uncertainty is literally more painful than physical pain it's like just punch me in the face already you know it's like so I the devil you know the devil you know yes but hell is the moment between being upstairs in your house and going into the basement it's that that dissonance of like and so one of the most powerful things we can do is say let me just open the door and see yes so yeah I love that I love that and and again the the you just intuitively using the word dissonance is very interesting to me because again returning to the platonic wisdom he would use Musical and harmonic terms to talk about like when things are in order in the psyche the harmony is so great that it actually gives forth gives birth to a fourth thing and it's it's so hard because like the words they use now we need to like recontextualize and re-understand but the word that he uh uses is justice so it's it's a little confusing but I'm actually not going to get into this because I really wanted to um in this conversation try to hit the the eight um I forget exactly what you call them neural energetic codes yes are you sure I'm super interested in what you think yeah there so what he's getting at is when when you when you do in this example when you do address these other parts of you that you're afraid of that are exerting too much control or just when your your psyche is not well ordered you are going to get this dissonance that's not going to allow you to achieve and actually I think he uses the word like music or musica however you pronounce it in Greek and he relates it to music like that the when you actually address these things and when you order the psyche correctly you produce like something akin to Harmony or music and then you know it's like maybe an easier way to understand it metaphorically is like if you have a bunch of dissonant notes it's just garbage right it's not things are not working it's just it's like oh this is not pleasant but now suddenly if all if there's three other instruments that make a three-part Harmony this new thing emerges that you didn't even know was possible until all three parts worked in in concert and I would not be surprised I don't you know I don't know how brain waves work I don't under I mean I know Loosely like this is what an alpha wave is is what a beta wave is ETC but I wouldn't be surprised if there's something akin to an actual Harmony that the brain achieves under different circumstances and maybe that's like what a flow state would be when you're when you're in like more of an alpha wave kind of state or something I don't know I'm just I'm just bro sciencing on the Fly here but um well I think what you're saying like and I I love this idea of what you were saying about Justice what I would say and I love how you said too it's when wherever we're doing translations we have to be really thoughtful about like what are we actually trying to say the word that comes to my mind and maybe it's because I use it all the time is integrity and by Integrity I don't even mean like oh being like really honest like integrating more like the systems are the three systems are working together it's like there's a lot of functional and in Neuroscience we talk a lot about basically functional integration of the brain so the and it makes it's very logical it's like the healthiest brain is the brain where all the parts are talking well together right yeah the healthiest human being is the human being we're like the behavior is aligning with the thinking and the thinking is aligning with the feeling so and again I think we don't need to go out there and say you know sometimes people will think like there needs to be this like bold almost aggressive thing like I I feel like I don't want to be here and I'm going to tell no it's more just like how can I how can I communicate myself in a way how can I speak in a way that is honest to my emotional experience you know and it's the more you condition yourself for this the easier it gets and then the easier it gets the more and this this seems like some kind of shock the more you start showing up in different rooms you start showing up around different people you start having different types of conversations your relationships start to work better so it's like again to go back to this idea of like energies calibrating to each other when we really start to hold ourselves differently the world around us is responding to us yes right so like energy speaks to energy and you already know this because there's plenty of people in your life who you know God bless them but they're difficult for you to be around because maybe they're always too negative or I mean we could go on and on we all have a lot of examples of this it's like so energy is like we're energetic beings talking to other energetic beings and then the universe is organizing itself yeah yeah yeah I love how you're laying this out and I love your your openness to bringing in these these other ideas it's it's you're really really fun to rap with I know you're super busy do you have a hard stop at the one hour point I can go I can go maybe like I actually have a meeting so I can go for about 10 more minutes is that okay with you okay yeah do you wanna do you want a rapid fire through through the eight neurogenetic um neuro energetic codes all right oh should I hand it over to you or do you want me to list them and then you can Riff on them yeah you list them in riff them because that you're like you're like testing my memory too much yeah okay great so the first one is expand your emotional power and I guess maybe maybe a quick what is it what is a neurogenetic code so neural energetic codes is this idea that when you understand how emotional energy is creating your life you can harness this energy in more productive satisfying ways it's this idea that like the brain is the most powerful machine you'll ever own so learn how to operate it wisely very well put very easy to understand um is it neuro energetic neural energetic code okay there's there's a typo in this PDF I'll have to I'll have to let let some let the appropriate person know but probably probably an autocorrect issue but anyway so the first one is expand your emotional power yes so this is really this idea that your emotional power meaning your wholeness your confidence your satisfaction your belief in yourself ends at the things you feel like you can't tolerate so if you want to become more self-confident you have to learn how to work with the energy of doubt if you want more peace you have to learn how to work with the energy of uncertainty if you want more intimacy or if you want more influence you need to learn how to work with the energy of rejection can you see how like in order to expand my connections and expression and confidence in life I need to be able to start feeling feelings I'm currently saying I'm not strong enough to potentially hold yeah yeah 100 percent um I I wanna I wanna riff but I but I know we don't have a lot of time so I'm just going to move on to the second one do whatever do whatever you want so like if there's one thing that hits and you want to just run with that like we can end we can end like that and we can say check out the codes in the book because they are yeah honest to God like they're all they're awesome yes no I think I think they all like dovetail nicely but this next one is is pretty meaty actually and this is one I wanted to talk about specifically which is build your own pattern or build your own power pattern uh because this is really how you try to undergo the process of change right like this is really how you identify whatever it is and then you go about trying to confront the dragon alter the relationship with it going forward yeah but maybe we'll like go do a deeper dive on this and kind of end there if that felt okay yeah sure sure so you have to understand again the Machinery of the brain so the brain the best way to think about the Machinery of the brain is as a pattern detection machine okay so your brain is running you through your life going apple apple new situation fill in the blank it's an apple okay but all machines need a power source so what is powering the pattern detection abilities of your brain it is emotional energy so you're not actually going through your life going apple apple apple you're going through your life with a feeling and the feeling is going to be something like this now the whole point of building a power pattern is to make you get you out of pain and make your life feel more fulfilling okay so a lot of us have a pattern that's something like this things never work out for me things never work out for me things never work out for me then I get a new job and maybe it's okay for the first three months or the but by six months I can almost guarantee you'll return to the master emotional pattern and if the master emotional pattern is things don't work out for me then watch me feel that feeling if my master emotional pattern is people can't be trusted watch me put myself in relationships and lo and behold I have lots of evidence that people cannot be trusted so our life Rises and falls on the emotional energy of these patterns one of my favorite quotes in the world is everywhere you go there you are yeah yeah yeah right so everywhere I go there I am so if I think the world doesn't have care what I have to say watch me show up in rooms number one where people don't care what I say and or let me show up in a room where actually people could care what I'm gonna say but then I will I will look for the evidence of my own rejection one of the things I always say is don't go looking for evidence of your own rejection because I promise you it is available to you at this moment in time all realities are possible it is possible that the sun could implode at this exact moment right right yeah yeah so if I go looking for evidence that I'm not good enough I promise you I will find it don't do that so the idea of building a power pattern I take you through this like three-step exercise where you start to work on kind of these subconscious structures of like how do I reorganize my emotional energy in a way that allows me in this kind of structured way to walk myself to a pretty effortless better and more empowered Baseline yeah and then I just if I so if I go from people you know people betray me if I go to um maybe I change my pattern to even because you don't need to come up with something you don't believe like people everywhere are trustworthy okay maybe I start to say even if people hurt me I still know that I can trust myself and then how do I how do I really then start to get evidence there that even if other people disappoint me I can still show up the way I want to show up so it's like again this idea of like how am I working with the patterns in my emotional energy that is is I mean it's the thing that a life is gonna rise or fall on yeah it's it's so huge it's so huge and it this is starting to another one of my interests too is is positive psychology and it I think this dovetails too into I I guess if I try to nutshell that entire appendage which is an extremely irresponsible thing to do but if I were to try to Nutshell it it's that you can actually take yourself to a point Beyond Baseline to a net more positive psychological state by where you are placing your intention and then Downstream emotional positive emotional affect will follow from that you will actually start to change your mind by focusing on what is more positive instead of those like self-sabotaging behaviors you were describing like if you're looking for evidence of that um whatever you said that I'm I'm always like um life always disappoints me or things never work out for me it becomes the self-fulfilling prophecy totally one of my favorite you know I I little I mentioned that and Flash The Polar Express you ever seen that movie remember I don't let me just tell you this because this scene like it like really grabbed me so basically the Polar Express is this magical train that comes in the middle of the night and puts all these little kids on it and takes them to the North Pole to see Santa Claus okay there's this little kid on the train so they're like getting super close to the North Pole and he's really sad and there's he's talk they're about to get to the North Pole and the two kids are standing in front of this little sad boy and the little sad boy is going Christmas just doesn't work out for me Christmas never works out for me Christmas just doesn't work out for me and it just struck me so hard this little kid is moments away to meet the big man in the big suit and he's talking about how Christmas doesn't work out for him right right Christmas will not work out for you if you don't allow Christmas to work out for you which is not to say my God I'm a trauma expert horrific things have happened in our past yeah but do we need to let that then corrupt and steal our future we have a lot of influence over that yeah you are awesome Dr big Angie I love your I love your energy I love your ability to Rift too and because you know I love doing conversations like this with Scientists or people have books coming out but sometimes they just really want to stick to the to the message to the pitch to The whatever their narrow expertise is but but you do a great job of being Mercurial and adapting and riffing and going back to your well of knowledge so this has been really fun love to do it again sometime and anything you want to tell people before we wrap up well I wanted to say you were a phenomenal host you made me feel for these interviews you were comfortable and I would just encourage people to check out energy Rising if they're interested in understanding how to come into a more satisfying relationship with their emotional energy and then therefore their relationships and their life perfect

Channel: THIRD EYE DROPS

Views: 5,080

Keywords: science podcast, self-help podcast, psychology podcast, philosophy podcast, spirituality podcast, neuroscience, neuroscience podcast, science and spirituality, self-help podcasts relationships, science and spirituality podcast, philosophy, psychology, science, carl jung podcast, carl jung, best spirituality podcasts, psychology of the mind, psychology tricks, science and spirituality connection, julia digangi, dr. julia digangi

Id: t6Eu-Kfx2dc

Length: 70min 17sec (4217 seconds)

Published: Thu Sep 28 2023