Feelings Are Feedback

(soft music) - What is up SDC family? We are back with another episode. I told you guys I'd be back with another episode here pretty quick and I'm super, super, super excited for today's episode. I think it's gonna be incredibly powerful. I think if you go through all 35 episodes, this is gonna be one of the ones that is most fundamental to understand and really integrate and really make part of your curriculum as you embark on this journey and find freedom for alcohol. As I've mentioned before, I have my group program launching the first week of January. So if you have not filled out an application yet, be sure to do so. The group program is gonna be accessible and affordable to just about anybody who has thought about quitting drinking and really wants to work a solid holistic 360 degree A to Z program that's gonna provide you all the system, structured tools, resources, accountability, community and coaching to help you finally crack this code and get to the other side and finally experience the freedom that you've been wanting and deserving for so long. So in this episode, it is titled Feelings or Feedback. Feelings or Feedback and this is something that came up almost on like three back to back coaching calls with my clients and I just got this download that told me this is something really, really important to understand. So I wrote a little something here and almost all my podcasts, I'm usually just riffing but I wrote something down and I want you to really listen to this because this is gonna help kind of provide the basis and the framework for what we're gonna talk about over the coming podcasts. So Feelings or Feedback, okay? Okay, Feelings and Emotions, they're not the thing to avoid. Okay, and what you have to understand here is that every single person who struggles with alcohol, I don't care what your socioeconomic status is of what your background is if you're a multi-millionaire, if you're a billionaire listening to this, if you struggle with alcohol, right? The thing that you fundamentally struggle with is managing your minds, managing your mind but also managing your feelings, managing the sensations that flow through your body because what we've been accustomed in condition to do is every time we get a bad feeling, we get stressed out, we get overwhelmed, we get frustrated, we get angry, we get sad, we get lonely, whatever it is, right? We turn to alcohol and what that does is that numbs out the feeling, it numbs out the sensation in our body and it gives us this temporary relief to throw it in the back of our truck and to not deal with it. And as we do that for years and years and years and years and years, our life just gets worse. Our relationships start to crumble with our partner. We aren't showing up in the way that we could be, as a mom or a dad. Our work performance, our motivation, everything starts to suffer because we're not understanding that feelings and emotions are just feedback they're not the thing to catastrophize. They're not the thing to look at and to hyper-fixate on and say, oh, I gotta get rid of this. Oh, I don't like this, right? Because we aren't taught what feelings and emotions are fundamentally when we're incarnated into being this human, right? We have a misaligned, misunderstanding of feelings and emotions as a tool for feedback, right? We're somehow conditioned to believe that the good feelings, you wanna pursue those and you wanna attach to those and you wanna maximize those and you wanna keep them going. You wanna keep the party rolling. And anything that doesn't feel good, you push it away. You numb it out. You lock it away in a box, right? And that's just not true. It's just not true, okay? When we experience a feeling or emotion, there's kind of a three-step process here. First thing that we have to do is we have to acknowledge it. And this is step one. And you'd be surprised at how many of us, we don't even wanna acknowledge it. We immediately wanna push it away. We wanna numb it out. We wanna change it. Okay, so step one is we have to acknowledge it. And the way we acknowledge it is this, okay? We all sit at a neutral baseline. Everybody's baseline is different, but we all have some sort of neutral baseline. And maybe you've heard me talk about this before. That neutral baseline is you, like when you wake up in the morning. Okay, you're not craving. You're not particularly super happy. You're not particularly sad. You're just kinda neutral. You're chilling. You're fine. Right, we all have that neutral baseline. And you have to start to become familiar with what that neutral baseline is like for you. So that when it deviates, lights can come on internally. Self-awareness can start to kick in. And you can begin to develop the awareness and courage to move through this process. Okay, and this is a skill. Mental and emotional resilience and navigation is a skill just like playing the guitar. I shit you not. You don't look at it that way. You're like, dude, I've been living in this body. I'm an adult. I make money. I have a family. I have kids. I know how to manage my mind and my emotions. Not true, not true. Maybe you do a little bit, but when it comes to the arena of addiction, when it comes to the arena of alcohol, when it comes to the underlying drivers that are causing you to be stuck in this vicious cycle, you're in first grade. You're in first grade still. I was in first grade two when I was trying to figure this stuff out. So let me help you better understand what's actually happening here. Okay, so the first step is to acknowledge. Okay, I'm having a feeling and emotion. Step two is to accept it. Not deny it. Not reject it. Not push it away. Not try to numb it out. Right? You have to think about it like this. Imagine who you would be a year from now if you're a year alcohol free. Two years alcohol free, five years alcohol free. How would you handle uncomfortable feelings and emotions? You would acknowledge them. You would accept them. And then you would learn how to process through them. Right? So if you want to become alcohol free, you just got to start doing that now. Okay, so step one is accept. Excuse me. Step one is acknowledge. Step two is accept. And step three is to investigate. Okay. Here we go. The feeling is the feedback towards previous thoughts, beliefs, perspectives, stories, interpretations, actions, or lack of action. Right? Feelings and emotions don't just pop up out of nowhere through the void. That's not how this human operating system works. Feelings and emotions are a response to something. But a lot of people, especially in the early parts of this journey, don't, they haven't developed the intuitive subtle understanding to realize that. They think, oh my God, I'm just anxious all of a sudden. It's like, no, you weren't anxious an hour ago. You weren't anxious 30 seconds ago. You had a thought or a belief or an image in your mind, or a movie in your mind, or you took an action or you said something or you didn't say something or you didn't take an action that then produced that feeling or that emotion or that sensation inside of you. And a really good, helpful thing to do early on in this process is to start looking at feelings and emotions as simply sensations, objectify them. Because feelings and emotions have miles, millions of miles of stories and attachments related to them. Oh, I'm anxious. Oh, you know, there's all these stories related to anxiety and what it means, right? And who I'm blaming and who's fault it is and why I'm feeling this way. And it all goes back to this person and my childhood or this or that, right? So just take a step back like you're in a movie theater and you're watching the movie and objectify what you're seeing on the screen as just data, just sensation, okay? The feeling is the feedback towards previous thoughts, beliefs, perspective, stories, interpretations and actions. Feelings and emotions, okay, provide an intelligent understanding of our thoughts and actions in order to help us survive, navigate and ultimately thrive in the world. Just like when a child is happy and stubs his toe, he goes from happy to pain and frustration. If he denies, shuts down, fights and numbs the pain, he doesn't learn the lesson inside of the feeling that is the feedback. He doesn't learn how to be more present. He doesn't learn how to be more conscious and mindful of where he is walking, his environment or his actions, which a lack of awareness and understanding of, caused him to fall down and stub his toe. Let me read that again. He doesn't learn how to be more present, conscious and mindful of where he's walking, his environment or his actions, which a lack of awareness of, caused him to fall down and stub his toe. Every single feeling or emotion that we have is the same, whether it's shame, guilt, stress, overwhelm, sadness, anger, boredom, et cetera. The sensation is the feedback. It's the mirror back to the previous operating of our consciousness and our behavior. feelings and emotions are the guidance system that help us survive and navigate our life. So rather than numbing them, we must acknowledge them, we must accept why they're here, and then investigate and hold the mirror to ourselves to dive deeper and discover what we can learn from them. Inside each feeling or emotion is a medicine, a source of wisdom, a lesson that helps us mentally, emotionally, physically, spiritually mature and evolve. By shutting them down, running from them, all we do is we stunt and we halt our personal development, maturity and progression through life. So this is a bit of a different perspective. This is a bit of a different relationship that we can begin to foster towards the sensations that flow through our body. What happens is when you don't look at feelings and emotions this way, the natural inborn default that doesn't take effort, that doesn't take skill, that doesn't take energy, the natural inborn default biological system of your brain as a protective mechanism to help you survive. Fixates catastrophizes the feeling in the emotion and it just tries to figure out, it goes into threat management mode. But that is not what allows us to heal, that is not what allows us to develop self-awareness, that is not what allows us to begin to spiritually evolve as human beings. So the feeling and the emotion is just the feedback. So imagine if you're watching this in video, imagine a timeline, like a thread, a timeline from this point all the way to the other point. We're moving through the timeline, we're neutral, we're fine, we're chilling, and then boom, something happens and then we feel a feeling and emotion that doesn't feel good. Could be a craving, could be an urge, could be a trigger, we get pissed off, we get angry, we get frustrated, we feel misunderstood, we feel disrespected, whatever it might be. That triggers the sensation inside of our body called fear or anxiety or overwhelm or stress or disrespect or anger, whatever happens to be. Rather than placing all of our attention and catastrophizing that emotion, then thinking that we have to numb it out, what we need to do is we just need to trace that thread back to what happened. Every feeling or emotion that doesn't feel good is a source of wisdom. It's the mirror and the mirror always goes back to ourself. It says, and the question becomes, right, at step three, investigate. Now it's time for us to reflect and say, what about my life, what about my thinking, what about my perspectives, what about my stories, what about my interpretations? Right, what about my actions or my behaviors are leading me to feel these feelings and these emotions. Feelings and emotions are just a cause for a tool for deeper self-investigation, examination. And when we look at it that way, when we develop the courage to do that, that is when we begin to mentally, emotionally, physically, spiritually progress and mature as adults, as human beings. Right? So for example, you get to the airport and you're stressed out and overwhelmed because you're about to be late for your flight. Okay? Why? Right? You're yelling at people, you think everybody owes you something, you think they should let you get to the front of the line, like whatever, right? That stress and overwhelm is a response to you not getting up early enough, to you not organizing your luggage soon enough, to you not to you sleeping in, to you not being conscious and mindful of ordering your Uber or making sure that it gets there on time. So the stress and the overwhelm is just the feedback. It's the signal. It's like your check engine light coming on saying, hey, if you want to live in operate in more harmony, alignment and connection and flow in your life, you need to be more self-aware. You need to be more conscious. You need to have better time management. You need to be more conscientious. You need to consider all the objectives on the playing fields before making a decision. The shame and the guilt that you feel from drinking alcohol is feedback. We don't want to feel the shame. We don't want to feel the guilt. We want to just keep numbing it out. But the shame and the guilt is the mirror. It's saying, hey, you took a bunch of actions here that involved drinking alcohol, drinking a poison, making sacrifices from hanging out with your friends and family. You chose the alcohol and now you feel like shit. So the shame and the guilt is the mirror to say, hey, you're out of alignment. You shouldn't be drinking alcohol. That's it. The shame and the guilt is there to show you, to teach you. The reason it doesn't feel good is a lesson. This system has 86 billion cells. Each working in perfect harmony to try to keep you alive. Each cell has multiple different types of functions. All it's doing is trying to keep you alive and help you survive and ultimately help you thrive. So when you do things or you think in ways or you perceive in ways that create feelings of hate and anger and frustration and apathy and sadness and overwhelm, whatever it is, those emotions, those sensations are an intelligently guided system to point back to you. Where are you not operating in the way that you should be operating? Where are your thoughts? Where are your beliefs? Where are your perspectives? Where are your stories? Where are your interpretations? What is your communication like? What actions are you taking or not taking that you shouldn't be? That's all. When you begin to look at feelings and emotions as that, now you begin to see, okay, The feeling in the emotion is not something to stew in, not something to bask in. It's not something to catastrophize and get caught up in. Your job now as an intelligent mindful human is to look back, step back, like you're in a movie theater watching the movie. Say, okay, what went wrong? What do I need to change? What do I need to update? What do I need to eliminate? What do I need to optimize? And when you do that, you will begin to grow and evolve mentally, emotionally, spiritually, physically as a person. That is how you get better. Because if you learn the medicine, if you learn what the feeling or the emotion is trying to teach you about you, the conscious witness, about how your system is working, then you can go in and make the necessary adjustments so that you can continue to move through life. Hopefully, not experiencing the same pain, the same challenge over and over and over again. That's it. The idea of moving through life is not to have it be this constant war all the time. The reason it feels like a constant war all the time is because your system is misaligned. You've got thoughts, you've got programs, you've got patterns, you've got stories, you've got beliefs, you've got perspectives that are misaligned, that are not in harmony with your authentic self, that are not in harmony with what your soul craves, with what your soul wants. And so that's why the system's constantly got all these check engine lights on. Right? Drinking alcohol is like taking like the check engine light comes on and you just, you numb it out. You just turn it off. You turn off the dash because you don't want to look at the check engine light. Like it's insane. As a human being, like you didn't come to earth to get a job, to raise a family, to have all these responsibilities and then just feel like, oh, I just need to take the edge off. Like no, your job is to develop courage, your job is to develop more resilience, your job is to learn how to mentally and emotionally regulate, your job is to learn how to manage the energy system of your vehicle. When I say energy system, I'm talking about your mind because your thoughts are energy and your body. Emotions are energy and motion. They fluctuate. They come and they go. Sometimes they're great. Sometimes they're not so great. But your job is to figure out how to put the pieces together, how to put the right safeguards in place, how to put the right actions and behaviors in place, how to put the right perspectives and goals in place, so that you can move towards creating and experiencing the things that you want. Not constantly in the shitter with things that you don't want. And if you're constantly in the shitter with things that you don't want, it's nobody's fault, but your own. Yeah, sure, we all have trauma. Many of us have fucked up childhoods. Many of us are neglected. Many of us don't get the support and love and safety and reassurance and skills and tools that we need to grow into this mind and body in a way that feels healthy and functional. But now that you're here as an adult, it's your responsibility. It wasn't your responsibility what happened to you, what deck of cards you got or what the arc of texture was from zero to 14, but now it's your responsibility to figure those things out. And that's why you're here. That's why you're here. You're not here to work. You're not here to just have a job, just watch Netflix, order shit from Amazon, eat food. You do those things to survive. But what's left is you learning how to manage those things, your mental operating system and your emotional operating system, and at the core and root of addiction, that's what we're talking about. We're not just talking about some disease that you have to live in the shadow of forever. We're not just talking about you have to go to meetings for the rest of your life. We're not just like, you're here to learn how to manage your mental and emotional operating system. That's the only thing that's real. You don't have anything else but your mental and emotional operating system. All of reality is filtered through your five senses. All of reality comes in and you create a picture or a movie in your mind about what it is and what it means and you use the language to project a meeting onto it. And then you've got varying degree of flowing sensation in your body. Neutrality, happiness, sadness, orgasm, hunger, thirst, got to go to the bathroom. That's its own sensation, excitement, fear. That's what it is. You're learning how to drive your car. And to the degree that you learn and get good at driving your car is to the degree that you're outside life and your inside life, how you feel internally and the state of your avatar and the outward reflection of your life is a reflection of that. How good you are at driving your car. That's it. People who are like terrible at driving their car have lives that feel hard and difficult and seem like they're always getting the short end of the stick. Not because they're somehow smitten by God or like they just have that lock. It's because you don't know how to tell better stories in your mind. You don't know how to orient your life towards a system and a set of protocols that's going to help upkeep the system. Just like a car, you have to put the right type of fuel into it. If your car takes ethanol and you put diesel, that doesn't work. It doesn't work. It's going to ruin the engine. So you have to start by putting good things into it. You have to clean it. You have to change the oil. You have to change the air filters. You have to change the brakes. You have to change the tires. If a car that's mechanical, we know requires all this upkeep in order to function properly and last a really long time, what makes you think that you don't have to have that? Just like yourself that. And take a moment to reflect on how have I been upkeeping my avatar? How have I been upkeeping my mind? What type of information am I consuming? Ask yourself that. What type of food am I consuming? What type of liquids am I consuming? How often am I moving this thing? Am I building muscle, eliminating fat? What am I doing here? What am I exercising my heart, exercising my muscles, exercising my mind? Having good stimulating conversation that's meaningful. That's why your soul feels empty and disconnected because you're not doing the things that feed and nourish your soul. That's why you keep drinking because you're disconnected and you don't know how to manage the check engine light. The check engine light comes on. You become fearful. Shut it off. Here's some other ways to think about feelings and emotions. Comparing feelings and emotions to the warning lights of a car's dashboard. A check engine light signals that something under the hood needs attention. Our emotions are a signal that something within us requires care or adjustment. Ignoring the warning light doesn't make the issue go away. It just often leads to bigger problems down the road. People use alcohol to turn off the warning lights. sobriety involves learning. This is a skill because you haven't paid attention to the warning light in the right way for 30 years. sobriety is a skill that involves learning to pay attention to these signals and to take the appropriate action. If you don't know what action to take, you've got to work a program. It's like climbing Mount Everest. I've never climbed Mount Everest. If you were to ask me, could I climb Mount Everest right now? I'd be shaking in my boots. I don't know what path to take up the mountain. I've never done it. It's a huge mountain. I've tried doing it before, but I get like 100 meters or I get a mile and then I turn around just like without a wall. We get a week. We get a month. Then we turn around. We go back to what's known familiar and comfortable because we don't know how to navigate ourself outside of that. We don't know how to navigate ourself out of wedding yet. We don't know how to navigate ourself in a vacation. We don't know how to navigate ourself with that one friend. We don't know how to navigate ourself when our partner is gone and we're home alone. We haven't learned these things. That's why I say we're not quitting drinking. We're learning how to live alcohol free. If you don't know how to do that, take a class. Join a program that provides you a system and a path and a structure that says, "If you do these things, your mental, emotional, physical, spiritual, and neurochemical operating system is going to improve and you're going to learn how to develop the skills and tools to drive your car." That's why you have to work a program. That's why you need community support and accountability so you can talk to other people who are in the same class. Emotions are like weather patterns. They can be sunny. They can be stormy or overcast, but they always change. And that's another really fundamental thing to learn about your human avatar, about your operating system. Is that the craving doesn't last forever. The urge doesn't last forever. It lasts 30 minutes or an hour. When you get stressed out or angry, that doesn't last forever. It pops up. It lasts for an hour, maybe a couple hours, but then it slowly but surely starts to alleviate. Just as we prepare for different weather conditions, we can learn to navigate our emotional climates. Caring an umbrella doesn't stop the rain, but it keeps us dry. Similarly, emotional regulation equips us to handle our feelings without being overwhelmed without catastrophizing them. Alcohol might seem like a way to avoid the storm, but it doesn't stop the rain. It just makes us less prepared to deal with it. Human emotions as messengers that come knocking at your door. They come bearing important information. If you ignore or slam the door in the messenger, you miss the message. Accepting and listening to the messenger allows you to receive valuable insights. And that's hard for a lot of us to do. Because when we're in pain or we're stressed out or we're overwhelmed or we're sad or we're feeling isolated or lonely, the story in the narrative is nobody understands. I don't have anybody to talk to. Nobody, I don't matter. It doesn't have any meaning. What's it all mean anyways? You're missing the message. If you're feeling isolated or lonely, again, the idea is not to hyperfixate on the isolation and loneliness. Isolation and loneliness is feedback. It's saying, "Hey, as a human being, your soul wants more human connection. It wants more love. It wants more acknowledgement. It wants more validation. It wants more of a sense of meaning." So if you just numb out the isolation or the loneliness because you're like, "Ah, doesn't feel good. You're missing the point. You're missing the path to your evolution." And so now this is the hard part or this is the part that we're all resistant to. As we'll fuck, to solve my isolation and loneliness, I have to get out into the world. I have to go put myself in environments and I have to meet new friends or I have to meet people or I have to go to a networking event or I have to go to something in my city or I have to call someone. And I feel scared to do that because I have shame and guilt. Okay. Well, you've got another in emotion that's pointing back to what needs to be optimized or fixed. Right? So all of a sudden, now there's layers to this thing. I've got shame, I've got guilt, I've got loneliness, I've got isolation. It's like, "Okay." That's all just feedback. It's saying that the way that you're living your life now is not in alignment with what your soul wants. Your soul wants connection. Your soul wants friends. Your soul wants you to be alcohol-free. Your soul wants you to be empowered. But your spiritual journey of going from kindergarten to first grade to second grade to third grade all the way through to PhD level science in college is you developing the courage to work through social anxiety to get to the root cause of your social anxiety, of developing the courage of improving your communication skills so that you can get better at talking to people, of learning how to be an environment where you feel fear or anxiety and then just learning how to be with it and recognizing the fear or anxiety isn't going to kill you, learning to discern as an adult. Is there a gun to my head that's actually dangerous? that I should be fearful of? Or am I just sitting in a room with a bunch of people who are at a networking event who are all there for the same reason I am? To make new friends, to meet somebody, to get a phone number, to get a valuable contact. Every feeling and emotion is just feedback, to something that we can change or evolve about ourselves. And your evolution, when you think about the person that you imagine yourself being, that ideal version of yourself, this is the work, my friend. This is why I say, quitting drinking is the most profound, powerful arena to change and transform your life. There's no better excuse to finally go out and become the person you've always wanted to be. Because when you put the bottle down, all those little other things that you've been ignoring and denying and numbing, slowly but surely come to the surface and you're forced to confront them and learn skills to work through them. That's why the program is so life-changing. That's why I was so profound for me. I went from 15 years of been drinking, hundreds of AA meetings, trying everything in the book to drinking every single day, 20 to 30 drinks a day, four to six bottles of wine a day, driving myself into the ground and realizing it doesn't work, moderation doesn't work. You can never have another drink of alcohol or you're gonna end up back in the same place. And when I finally got to that point where I was like spiritually ready, mentally, emotionally ready, a program popped up and saved and transformed my life and led me to become the stop drinking coach and the program that I now run is that program. And if you've come through my program, you know how powerful it is, how life-changing it is when you work it, when you apply it, when you do it. You can't just do it for a week. You can't just be like, all this sounds good for a month and then stop. The physiological system that you inhabit while it works like a computer, it's not like a computer where you can just replace the fans. You've got 30 years, 20, 30 years of like gunk and patterns and programs that you've built up. So you have to stay consistent long enough to allow the system to transform and heal. But rest assured that when you follow a system and a protocol that lays out a lot for you, it's possible. It's possible. You just have to be willing to take it one step at a time and to do the work. Suppressing emotions is like sealing a pressure cooker without a release valve over time the pressure builds and then leads to an explosion. Healthy emotional regulation acts as a release valve, letting go off steam, letting go of steam in a controlled manner. Alcohol might temporarily relieve pressure but it doesn't address the heat source that's building inside of you. Developing skills to regulate emotions prevents the buildup that can lead to relapse or emotional breakdowns. Think of your mind as a garden. Emotions are the plants that are growing there. Some plants are beautiful flowers, others are weeds. But you can't ignore the weeds. Ignoring the weeds doesn't make them go away. You have to tend to your garden by acknowledging and dealing with all the different types of plants that leads to a healthier ecosystem. So let's talk about shame, right? We have shame because we drink. I had shame for a long time. Dude, if people only knew how bad it was, they would look down upon me. They would judge me. I personally had shame because I thought, "Fuck, I feel like I'm pretty smart, man." But why can't I figure this thing out? What's going on? I've tried every which way. There must be something wrong with me. There's shame there. Why do I keep doing the thing? I promise myself, I tell myself I'm not gonna do. You experience shame. It withdraws you. It represses your energy. You can't be the fullest expression of yourself when you're in shame. The shame is the mirror. It's the feedback. Look, you're drinking. You're numbing out. You're not growing. You're not evolving. You're not developing courage to stay present to your operating system. You're not learning new skills and tools. And you keep falling into the cyclical cycle of behavior of numbing. So you feel shame. The shame is not the thing to avoid. The shame is the thing to bring to the forefront and develop the balls, the courage to confront. Fuck, I'm fucking my life up. I'm fucking up the life of my family. I'm coming short. I've got a limited amount of time left and I've got all these goals and ideas of possibilities of who I could be. If only, if only, the if only is done here in this arena, my friend. The if only is done here. This is why this is so powerful. Because when you put the bottle down and you can't run and numb anymore, whatever the if only is comes up and now you got to start working on that. But you do it with a program, you do it with tools, videos, resources, integration, guides, meditation. Like you've got tools, like you don't have to do this by yourself. You're not alone. You know, you're doing it with me, you're doing it with coaches, you're doing it with community, you're doing it with people who you're rubbing shoulder to shoulder with who are like doing it with you. Who you can talk to. Emotions are like waves in an ocean. You can't stop the waves, but you can learn to surf them. We've all heard that. Surfing requires balance, skill and practice, just like emotional regulation. Some waves are big and scary, others are small and manageable. Drinking is like being in the ocean and trying to flatten the ocean. It's impossible, it's exhausting. Learning to surf empowers you to navigate the emotional waves without being wiped out. Emotions are like letters from our inner selves. This one might hit for some people. It's like you're younger self, it's your inner child. Ignoring these letters means missing out on important information about our needs and our desires. Opening and reading them allows us to understand and address what's inside. What do we need to heal? What do we need to change? What do I need to become more conscious of? What do I need to eliminate from my life? What do I need to sacrifice? In order for my operating system to begin to recalibrate, drinking alcohols like tossing these letters into a drawer unopened. sobriety encourages us to read and respond, fostering what happens when we read and respond. It fosters self-understanding and healing. In the end of the day, man, mental and emotional regulation is a superpower. Mental and emotional regulation is the most important skill in life. There's no other skill that's more important than mental and emotional regulation. Because if you can learn to step back and become the observer and witness and learn how to manage your mind and can get to a place where you feel courageous and willing enough to manage any sensation that flows through your body. There's nothing you can't do. Do you understand that? There's nothing you can't do once you learn how to manage your mind and learn how to manage your emotions. And learning those two things teaches you how to manage your behaviors. Anything that you want to do is manageable. If you can learn how to overcome alcoholism, if you can find freedom from alcohol after having attempted this thing for years and not figured it out, but then what you do figure it out, then you can do anything. 'Cause there's nothing like, imagine how hard this has been. If you're still struggling or struggling now. Imagine how hard this has been. If you learn how to work through this, anything you want to do becomes possible. You want to start a business. You want to find in foster a beautiful relationship, whatever you want to do is becomes super possible. Because everything that you do here is a fully 100% transferable skill to every area of your life. Because guess what, quitting drinking has nothing to do with alcohol. It's you. You're building life skills, mental and emotional resilience and management. You're learning tools and strategies that you didn't know before. You're developing a higher level of self-awareness and understanding. You're expanding your totality, your the total map of the universe, your understanding of your inner world and outer world. From the moment you were born till the moment you die. You don't know what you don't know. You're expanding into unfamiliar territory. You're hyping up a mountain that you've never climbed before. And this mountain has things that you've never seen before or heard before. It's profound. It's profound. And so, really like, are feelings and emotions, they're just a GPS. They're just a GPS. I don't care if you're a man or a woman. Doesn't matter. Or anything in between. Your feelings and your emotions are not this thing to sit and wallow it. Your feelings and emotions are not this thing to catastrophize. Just like that. It's just the feedback. Boom. And then just go back to kind of neutrality and then pursuing meaning, purpose, and connection or inspiration. See, where we all fucked up, where Hollywood has his, has destroyed our internal compass is that they've said that life is about happiness. Okay, life is not about happiness. If you think that life is about happiness, you are going to constantly be unhappy. Happiness is elusive. Think back to the last time you were happy. How long did it last? Dude, happiness is like water or sand trailing through your fingers. You get it in random bouts. When you earn it, happiness comes from alignment. Happiness comes from the pursuit of meaning. Happiness comes from harmony. Happiness comes from gratitude. What we should be pursuing in our life is healing, meaning, purpose, connection, inspiration, and growth. If you pursue these things, all of the things that you want in your life will come. But if you're just pursuing happiness, if you're pursuing empty dopamine, if you're just pursuing the party, you are going to live in misery. Because you can't win the game that way. You're a slave. You're a slave to the alcohol. You're a slave to the substances that are fleeting. You're a slave to the dopamine that's fleeting. You're building neurochemical tolerance. Dude, it's a rigged game. You think the alcohol is fun and exciting and sophisticated. And you've got this type of drink and that type of drink and from this bottle of wine and from this part of the world. And this is how it was brewed. Bro, it's all fucking marketing. It's all marketing to have those companies line their pockets, to keep you a slave, to keep you addicted. While you don't pursue meaning, while you don't pursue connection, while you stay fearful, while you stay anxious, you become a battery. You become an empty battery for the companies. Dude, it's nonsense. How could you not see it for what it is? You become their slave. You work. You take your extra money and you just give it to them. You make an offering to them. You get on your knees. You put your head down and you bow and you make an offering to these companies to make them richer. That's all that's happening here. They say 75% of all alcohol consumed is consumed by people in the spectrum of alcohol used to sort of alcoholics. 75%. If you're listening to this, you're lining their pockets. While simultaneously destroying your health, shortening your lifespan, getting angry about it, gaining weight, destroying your relationship, perpetuating generational trauma for your kids, all because you're afraid of being present to anxiety, all because you're afraid of being present to stress, all because you're afraid of other people, all because you're afraid of, like doing the work of growing up. Dude, it's a fucked up system. It's a fucked up system. You know, your check engine light goes on and you're catastrophizing it and turning it off. Be present. Be present to the check engine light. Investigate it and then develop the courage to look at yourself. The journey of maturity, the journey of growing up, the journey of your personal evolution comes from more ownership, more accountability, and more responsibility. More ownership, more accountability, and more responsibility. Everybody's so quick to want to go out and change the world and point fingers at politics. You know, we've got the election coming up. Everybody's on edge right now. Everybody's losing their fucking mind, pointing fingers at everybody else. Everybody's crazy. Everybody's lost their mind. It's like, dude, whoever gets elected, I mean, I don't want to go into it. But what's going to happen is what's going to happen. I don't know. The only thing that you can control is you. You can control what you pay attention to. You can control your perspectives. You can control the story that you tell yourself. You can control your finances. And you have a sense of influence over your family. That's it. You can't control anything else. Because those things within yourself aren't fucking rock solid, you become lost in the game of politics. You become lost in the game of everything else. Listen, your heart can hurt for other people who are struggling. You can have empathy. You can have compassion. But at the end of the day, what's going to happen is what's going to happen. You're not a politician. You're not a climate expert. You know, you chose your path. So control and focus on what you can control. And when you do that, you'll find that like, dude, the world just gets better. It just gets better. When I was in active addiction, I had so much so many fingers to point. So much blame. So much anger. So much judgment. I don't have that anymore because I know who I am. I've done my work. And I feel clear. And I feel like I have enough choices and available options in my life to manage myself. And it doesn't matter who gets elected or what happens. I'm going to figure it out. I have enough confidence and self-esteem and personal power that I know I'll figure it out. And don't you want to get to that place to know that like, listen, it doesn't matter what happens outside of me. I've got it. I've got myself. That's what sobriety teaches you. That's what finding freedom from substances that are causing you to be a slave teaches you. Because that's what you learn. You go from being a slave obsessed to no longer being a slave and finding freedom. Imagine paying to picture in your mind. Imagine being in a jail cell and you try to get out a thousand times and you can't get out. Because it's so hard because the guards are all around you. Got all these influences keeping you in there. Then imagine once you get out to the other side over a long enough time horizon. Imagine you're like, dude, I can fucking get out of any jail cell. It doesn't matter. I'm not scared of anything anymore. I'm not scared of any feeling. I'm not scared of any emotion. I'm not scared of what my mind is going to tell me. I can figure it out because I figured out the hardest fucking thing that I possibly could imagine. That plagued my existence. That killed my dad. That kills 500 people a day. How do we figure that thing out by having the courage to be present to our feelings and our emotions and to recognize our feelings and emotions aren't this bad catastrophe. It's just a way it's a medicine. It's saying, hey, Barty, you got angry here? Got it. What can you do differently that would allow you to not get angry in this situation? John, you got really stressed out here? Got it. What can you do? What can you put into place? What actions? What behaviors? How can you be more conscious, mindful, have better time management, more conscientious? How can you change the way that you communicate? How can you be more patient? How can you be more present? How can you be more empathetic? How can you listen better? How could you be more prepared? What skills do you need to learn? What do you need to put into place? What do you need to eliminate? That's all feelings and emotions are. They're pointing back to those things. Alcohol's procrastination against your personal evolution. You're just staying stuck. Listen, alcohol served a purpose 5,000 years ago when the water wasn't super contaminated. So we had to drink alcohol so that we could consume a liquid that we had to mix the alcohol with water to kill the bacteria. It served a utility. No more utility in 2024. If you're 2024 now listening to this, you're probably relatively self-aware. We understand that big pharma, big food, the big system, right? After COVID, everybody woke up to the fact that we don't have a loving government that's looking out for us. The game is fucking rigged. Everybody's bought out by these huge megastructure private equity companies, BlackRock, like whatever. We understand the whole game is rigged for you to lose and for you to be a slave and to be a battery to the matrix. You understand that now. So if there's a part of you that's sick and tired of the fucking game, sick and tired of the same old feeling, sick and tired of running into the same problems, it's time for you to take it into your own hands. You're free to do something about it. And you don't have to do something about it alone. Stop drinking coaches here. I offer a program, a structure, a system, support, tools, checks. Hey, you're at this part of the journey. Okay, look out for this. You're at this part of the journey. Okay, here's what you can start to consider. Okay, you're at this part of the journey. Here's some things to dig into with coaching and support and coaching calls and community and other people who are doing it alongside you. We're all together. We grow, we evolve, we evolve our consciousness together. We become the best version of ourselves together. We reach our potential together. You gotta just start waking up and seeing that dude. It's a very, very, very poor trade-off. It's an extremely poor trade-off. 30 minutes in hour of being a loopy fucking goose per days. Okay, let's look at this in hours. If you wanna talk about trade-off, okay? If you're a binge-rinker, you feel the effects of being hungover before you return back to good, full mental clarity for at least five days. At least five days. So let me pull up my calculator app and do the math here. 24 times five, okay? You drink alcohol so that you could feel the buzz to alleviate your whatever. Stress, overwhelm, sadness, anger, whatever. For an hour, you get 30 minutes to an hour of being loopy. And then the rest of the two, three, four, five hours you're drinking, you're just chasing that high. You're just drinking more, destroying yourself. Not ever able to get back to that, the feeling of the first drink. Or second drink. And the trade-off is, so you do that for an hour, the trade-off is that now you have to feel like shit for 120 hours for five days before your mind and your body starts to kind of feel clear and normal again, like sharp, at least. What kind of trade-off is that? What kind of game are we playing with ourselves? You have to ask, it's pathetic, it's ridiculous. So why not just start learning mental and emotional regulation? Why not start developing the courage to just make micro baby steps towards facing what's underneath? But you don't have to do it alone. Why would you not do that? Unless you've just given up. Right, what's the alternative? The alternative is you keep drinking, you keep drinking yourself and believing the voice. Listen, we're the same person living in a different body. If you struggle with alcohol, you are no different from any addict. I'm not trying to label here. You're not different from anybody who has an addiction. Okay, the voice in your head, the thing that you have to learn how to manage is the voice in your head, whether you're a day alcohol-free, a year alcohol-free, 10 years alcohol-free, a hundred years alcohol-free, from time to time, a voice pops up and says, "Hey, you could just have one, it'll be different this time, one won't hurt." It's really simple to binary system, it's on or off. That's what you have to learn how to manage. And it's like not that complicated, right? We're not reverse engineering a rocket here. There's only two options. Alcohol-free or drinking. And if you're alcohol-free, you know that you only have two options, that you either continue alcohol-free and continue your healing and freedom journey where eventually life gets a thousand times better, but you have to develop the patience to go through it. Or, or you just keep giving into the voice and it leads you right back to the other side of the street. Dude, there will never be a time. Ever, I don't care if you're a year, 10 years, a hundred years alcohol-free, where that voice is being truthful and saying, "One won't hurt." There's nothing you can do. There's, if you have alcohol use disorder and you can't like manage or moderate or stop or whatever, there's nothing that you can do. And there's no amount of time that could pass. That if 500 years from now, you happen to be alive and you take us to the alcohol, that will change the way that alcohol interacts with your brain chemistry and what it does to you. And while this is like the hardest pill to swallow, especially if like you're starting off on this journey and thinking, "Oh, maybe like, you know, I'll just reintroduce it for Christmas or like New Year's." No, it doesn't work like that. It's a hard pill to swallow, but it's also really freeing. You know, everybody who quid's shrinking says, "Dude, being sober is so much easier than moderating." Modeling is a vicious fucking hellhole. You're a slave. You can't moderate. There is no moderation with this stuff. You know, you've tried. You've tried. It doesn't work. You play games with yourself. And this is what keeps people in the alcohol merry go round for decades, 20s into their 30s, into their 40s, into their 50s, into their 60s. Just the fucking worst opportunity cost. Destroying your mindset, destroying your clarity, destroying your motivation, preventing you from making more money, starting that business, moving up the ladder, you know, traveling the world, like all the things that you wanna do, finding the right partner, getting caught in toxic cycles, relationships, constantly feeling not good enough, constantly, you know, judging other people, constantly carrying dysregulation inside you, dude, it's all alcohol. It's all alcohol. If you look at our society, if you look at like, imagine like the US, like, or like the world could like be a utopia, I would say like, of the five things that we would need to change, like one, like, we would need to treat others as we treat ourselves. Two, we would need to distribute resources so that everybody has an opportunity, right? Like, there's all these things that we could do to like create this utopia. Three, we would ensure that like, nobody can have children unless they like, are fully equipped to have children, because if you have children and you're not fully equipped to have children and you don't know how to raise a proper human being and understand childhood development and all these things, like, you're gonna treat that child like shit from time to time and it's gonna incur trauma and it's gonna wire them into being a less productive human, right? So like whatever, one of those things on the list would be the elimination of alcohol. Alcohol, if you step back and look at this from a 50,000 foot view, alcohol is the primary, the number one sort of bug in our system that perpetuates generational trauma. It's alcohol. Because when people are in addiction, it's because they're in pain and they don't have the skills to manage their system. And when you're in pain and you don't have the skills to manage the system, you don't operate harmoniously on earth. It causes more dysfunction, right? Hurt people, hurt people. Heels people, heal people. So think back, man, like think back until you're lineage. I was just doing a TikTok live before this and I talked about this in my last podcast, like dude, think about the tens of thousands of people, right? We all have grandparents that trace back to like the first human beings, right? Think about the tens of thousands of people that had to come together, that had to have sex, pro-create, manage families, and all of the fucking brutal conditions and sacrifices that had to be made within your personal family lineage for you to be born. The Great Depression, the 1800, 1700s, no technology, you know, think like how hard, how much harder the world was. Simpler, but harder. How much more famine, disease, pain, right? So think about all those people who, what they put in for you to be born. And if you're watching this on video, it's like, imagine looking up and you've got all your ancestors up there and there's like two rows of them and they're just like, they're like squatted down, looking at you. They just look at you and they're just like, people with, they go, what are you doing? All of that, like your lineage, and they look down and you're just like sitting there drinking on the couch, like feeling sorry for yourself. Like dude, where's the honor? Where's the respect? Where's the attribution to the fact that like, your life has more meaning? Where is it? I've said this before, it's like, one was the last time you got angry. One was the last time you got fucking angry at this thing. Anger's a good place to be, you know? Anger is the feedback. How tired of you are you of the same shit? Dude, it's so exhausting. So just choose something different for yourself. Take a step in another direction. If you keep doing what you've always done, you're always gonna get what you've always gotten. The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and again, expecting a different result that you're just gonna wake up one day and magically it's gonna be different. Dude, it's not. You gotta put in the work. And the work is so good, it's good, it's fulfilling. You feel the progress. You can see who you become versus. who you were. Like, dude, this is the zest of life. This is what creates meaning and purpose. The thing that you're so lacking or afraid of is the very thing that your soul is longing for. Your soul is tired of being fucking comfortable. Your soul is tired of numbing out. Your soul is tired of not having goals. Your soul is tired of not having accountability. Your soul is tired of not having any meaning or direction or purpose. It craves those things. And because you don't have those things, you're drinking. So if you put the bottle down and then work on the meat and potatoes of life, dude, you'll find that you don't need alcohol anymore. I don't need alcohol anymore. I'm free from cravings. I'm free from all that bullshit. Because my life cup is filled in all the different ways that it feels like it needs it. I'm inspired. I feel like I have meaning. I feel like I have purpose. I have a beautiful community of people. I feel like what I do and the way that I spend my time has has has has purpose. I feel like I'm making a contribution. I have good habits. I have good routines. I eat good food. I try to, you know, I have good upkeep. I try to manage my mind. I'm always learning new information this morning. I was watching a video on by this guy named Dan Cogue, great video, how to be more intelligent than 99% of people. And he teaches you mental models. And he teaches you perspectives and he teaches you basically what I'm teaching you, how to manage your mind, how to manage your emotions, how to look at things in new lights. I'm constantly growing. I'm constantly like trying to figure out, okay, what's the next step? How do we expand? How do we scale? How do we reach more people? How do we touch more people? How do we support? How do we create a better environment for myself and for the people around me? How do we create more harmony? How can we get all the different pieces of life to work together, to flow together, to nourish and feed itself? That should be all of our goals. Right? I mean, what's the alternative? To just sit in bask and negativity and to just be pissed off and angry about it and to point fingers? No, it's time to grow up. It's time to take accountability and ownership. When we do that, we create a better system for everything. Consciousness evolves. That's what we're doing here. This is an 80 to 100 year journey of an evolution of consciousness, right? It's 100% that. Think of what your consciousness was when you were six. It was a very limited consciousness. And then think of what your consciousness was when you were 12 or 13. Okay. Definitely more expanded than it was at six. It was more evolved, than it was at six. Then think of what your consciousness was when you were 21 or 22 when you were in college or around that age. Way more expanded than it was at 12. You have so much more access to life and resources and information and the map of reality. Right? Your map of reality at 21 was significantly more evolved and expanded than it was at six. You could not conceive what you know or have access to at 21 at six. It just wasn't there. Your brain wasn't capable of producing it. And if you were exposed to it, when in one ear out the other, never truly understanding it for what it is. Similarly, at 40, if you're 40, you probably have a much different state of consciousness that mean you did at 18 or 21 to some degree. And so the journey of finding freedom from addiction is just a run on this ladder. There's several more rungs that go up that you can't conceive yet, that you haven't been exposed to yet, that you don't know as possible yet. And it's not I'm talking necessarily information outside of yourself. It's the inward journey of who you are. There's layers and layers and layers and layers of the onion to dig into, to understand, to process, to heal, to gain skill over, to gain agency over. And so overcoming addiction, it's just it's a chapter in our book. But you have to decide, do I want this to be one chapter? Do I want to close this chapter now? Or do I want to allow this to be 10 more chapters for another decade? Because I'm afraid of a craving or I'm afraid of an urge or I'm afraid of investing in myself or I'm afraid of working through something that happened in the past. You have to ask yourself, what's the trade off here? And remember, staying alcohol free, like while it seems like this mountain, you're just managing one or two cravings a day. You're just managing some stress or some overwhelm or some isolation. Like this is this is very manageable, my friends. We're not doing spine surgery. Okay, I'm not asking you to open up, you know, run run a knife down someone's back. And to like replace a disc when you've never done it before. You're kind of dealing with things that like you kind of know how to navigate and manage a little bit like you're like a first grade or at it, second grade or at it, third grade or at it. But you can get better, you can get better at it. Managing your mind, managing the voice inside of your head, learning how to manage the sensations that flow through your body, learning how to optimize your behaviors, learning some new skills, learning some new ways to cope. Like this isn't like completely foreign. Right? So like you're there, but you just got to take that next step and really commit. Just one day at a time. You don't have to quit drinking forever. I have not quit drinking forever. I'm four years alcohol free on the stop drinking coach. I've impacted millions of people through my content and have helped hundreds thousands of people quit drinking who were alcoholics, who the medical community says works, you know, or AA people say you had sounds great, but it doesn't work for the true alcoholic. You know. You just got to, you got to just get honest with yourself. And you got to be willing to invest in yourself. You know. You don't just go to money to like, go to work and like make money to just have it sit in a bank account and like collect dust. You go to work to save for like emergencies, right? Your car pops attire. You've got a medical emergency. Your kid falls, falls down. You, you know, have to help a family member out. Like this is an emergency. If you haven't been able to quit drinking and like your life is like you dwindling, like you, you, you, you are the emergency here. Your family depends on you. Your kids rely on you. Your friends, your work, your employer. Like this is the emergency. It's time to be willing to take all the time and energy that you put into a job to take those resources and put it into yourself because you deserve it. And you have to believe that it's possible. And I want to double down on that because like a lot of times when we're in active addiction and we're kind of lost, we don't really have a clear goal. We don't know and we're afraid even of what life is going to be like on the other side of it. But and that can prevent us from getting started. So you have to get to a place and I encourage you and implore you to take some time to begin to just dream again. Create some vision, create some goals. Start with the basics. Lose 10 pounds, lose 20 pounds. You know, whatever it might be, start, start small if you can't imagine big goals yet. If it's too overwhelming and you don't know where to start, just set set a few, set five pounds. Set some goals. You have to you have to orient yourself in a direction. If you feel stuck, if you feel like you can't move, if you feel lost, it's because you don't you don't have a direction to move. You don't know which way to go. So orient yourself, you know, orient your personal compass in a direction and you don't have to have all the steps in between. You just got to take the first step. If you take the first step and get into some sort of structure, right, that's why programs exist. So I my program exists. If you don't want to work with me, find a different program. But the good news is is if you just take the first step, which is like investing in yourself into some sort of program. And when I keep saying program, I'm not like just trying to pitch my program. I keep saying program because I needed a program. I tried every which way without a program doesn't work. Didn't work. Doesn't work. Didn't work both. I needed structure. I needed somebody to be there to answer my questions. I needed somebody who's been up the mountain, who I trusted, who I'm like, "Okay, I really like the way that you talk. I really like the way that you live your life and carry yourself. I feel like I trust you." So if you tell me something, I'm just gonna go with it. Even though I might not fully understand it, I'm just gonna believe it because that's what you did and I respect you. I needed that. I needed accountability because I wasn't accountable. I was the best at fucking sneaking away and going off into the closet and hiding and fucking hiding it and sneaking around and people not knowing when I was drinking or whatever. I was a master at it. So I needed accountability. I needed somebody who I respected or acknowledged or trusted, whom I could talk to and feel accountable to. I've got to be honest with this person. I've got to tell him what's up. I needed that. That was good for me. That was good for my development. That was good for my soul. That was good for my maturation. We all need that. Dude, we don't know what the fuck we're doing here. We're all doing our best trying to figure it out. But nobody really knows. Now, the physicists don't know. They're just measuring. Physics is just making measurements of how it appears to be. But we don't actually know what it means or why we're just making measurements. You know? So like, if you don't know, you know, this is getting kind of wordy with the nose and you don't know. If you don't know what step to take or how to navigate this process, do it with other people who have done it. System structure, tools, resources, accountability, videos, healing, meditations, reprogramming, tools like you need that stuff. You need that stuff. So probably going to wrap it up here, guys, and just remind you that the feelings in the emotions don't catastrophize them, don't numb them out. Okay? There's medicine inside of them. And the medicine is how you could be better. How you could be more mindful. How you could be more conscientious. How you could have better time management. How you could have better skills. How you could improve your communication. How you could implement certain behaviors in your life. Like, dude, they're not scary. I know they feel intense, but it's just a messenger. It's there knocking at your doorstep, like giving you a blessing. Hey, you're feeling lonely? Okay, I know the loneliness part doesn't feel good, but guess what? There's 8 billion people on earth. There's all types of online communities. There's thousands, tens of thousands of people in your city who would be happy to have a new friend to go get coffee with. It's pointing back at your soul. It's pointing back at the options. It's pointing back at the landscape, at the opportunities. So stop denying those opportunities. That's what you want. That's why you're drinking is because you want those things. You want the connection. You want the love. You want the confidence. You want the resilience. You want those are the things that you want. But it's like you're bypassing them because you're just focusing on the negative feelings, the stress, the overwhelm, the sadness, the isolation. If you look at it as like a triangle, it's like you drink at the top and then you have all these negative feelings at one point. But the negative feelings are pointing at the next point of the triangle, which is all the things that you want. But you're focused on the point with all the negative feelings. But the negative feelings are pointing to the things that you just need to fix so that you can stop drinking. You see it? And I know you missed the dopamine. I know you feel like you're going to be bored. You're not. Your mind recalibrates. Your brain recalibrates. Your neurotransmitters heal. You're not destined to live in the perpetual fear of missing out and boredom forever, dude. Just go to go to TikTok, watch some videos like everybody who gets to the other side of this thing who has a measurable time and of freedom from substances. All of them, 100%, say it was the best decision of their life. Everything's better. You're no different. You're unique. Your problems aren't special. Your family life, your relationship, your work, your, you know, it's not unique. Your personal spiritual, mental, emotional journey of being alive for 80 years is learning how to navigate your internal operating system. That's it. Your work is just a way to make money. You know, hanging out with friends is a way to pass time. Have fun. Like, the rest of it, the meat and potatoes of why you're here is to learn this stuff. And that's why going alcohol free is the most profound, beautiful journey of your life. It is a true metamorphosis from a caterpillar to a butterfly. So I'll leave it at that if you guys want to join the group coaching program, go to my website www.thustoptrinkingcoach.com, fill out an application. I recently added 12 video testimonials there of people who have worked with me just so you can get an idea of what people have to say. If you want to work with me one-on-one, still fill out an application, just indicate in the application one-on-one or group. I'm still running one-on-one until we launch the group program. So between now and January, we're going to be running one-on-one. Anybody who comes in with me one-on-one will have an opportunity to work directly with me for 90 days. And then once the 90 days is up, I mean, my calendar is still always open to people who ever need support, but you'll be able to integrate right into group coaching calls right after to help you achieve your first year alcohol free. So I appreciate you guys listening. Leave a five-star review on Spotify or Apple if you have not yet. And yeah, listen to this episode a few times. It's really, really important because when you begin to change your perspective and relationship to the sensations that flow through you, you're going to start to feel a lot more empowered. All right, I'll see you in the next episode.