Destructive and Creative Power of Emotions

This week's Soul Session is focused on emotions. If you don't understand your emotions and how to work with them they will  turn into destructive patterns. If you can use their power, you can create passionate relationships, live out your highest boldest purpose and be fully alive with joy, radiance and ecstasy.

In this session we explore:

• What are emotions?
• How we developed our Emotional Template
• Why we make irrational decisions
• Why we cannot look for love based on chemistry alone and what that chemistry says about our emotional life.
• How to work with emotions
• What about empaths and intuitive people, how do emotions play a role in their life?
• How to begin to understand your emotions in a deeper way
• Why there are no bad emotions

Enjoy this deep conversation and continue the conversation in our Facebook Community at https://facebook.com/groups/creativemindcoaching

•••

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Transcript

Destructive and Creative Power of Emotions

Tue, 7/7 2:00PM • 50:13

SPEAKERS

Debra Maldonado, Robert Maldonado

Debra Maldonado 00:03

Welcome to Creative Mind Living, a podcast for personal growth based on the works of Carl Jung neuroscience and Eastern philosophies. We're your hosts Debra Berndt Maldonado, and Dr. Rob Maldonado, founders of Creative Mind Coaching. Hello Rob.

Robert Maldonado 00:24

How are you? Beautiful colors. 

Debra Maldonado 00:26

Oh, thank you. Well, I thought we were talking about emotions today. So I thought you know, let's just make it a little colorful because emotions are colorful. 

Robert Maldonado 00:36

What does that say about my emotions?

Debra Maldonado 00:38

That means you are dark and dreary and I am feeling them all at the same time. So festive, festive colors. Fair enough. One of us has to have bring color into the relationships right? So hello everyone in the creative mind community and we are excited about the topic today which is emotions and it's the creative and destructive power of emotions. They can be our best friend, or worst enemy. And we are feeling people. And everything that we do in life is matched with an emotion. It gives life meaning, it helps us fall in love. And so we're going to talk about how they work. Why we can't control them sometimes and the transformative power that they hold.

Robert Maldonado 01:34

Before we get started, can I do a little intention?

Debra Maldonado 01:37

So You sure can. 

Robert Maldonado 01:39

Thank you. 

Debra Maldonado 01:39

Let's do that.

Robert Maldonado 01:41

Yes, so the intention, like last time, is that the Spirit leads us from the unreal to the real, from darkness to light, and from death to immortality. Now what that means is that we, we essentially live in this unreal, not that it's, it's not happening, it's happening but it's not the absolute reality. And through this work who we want to move to the reality, the absolute reality which is spiritual essence, a consciousness essence. The second part is that we're in ignorance often not of the physical world, but of the deeper spiritual laws that are operating in the universe. So we will want to always be moving towards that higher understanding. And then thirdly, that we will want to move from the limitation of just being a physical, biological being to that broader concept of ourselves as conscious beings as cosmic participants. So with that, then let's get going.

Debra Maldonado 03:13

And so what do emotions have to do with spirituality? Because I think when I first started doing personal development, I would think that emotions were more human and we don't really need them if we transcend to become spiritual beings, and we don't have to deal with emotions and we can just float on our little that's what I thought, you know, float on my little cloud and put yourself in my bubble of love and, and not have to deal with them. But, but we do have to deal with them because it's what bring it was makes life worth living and it gives life meaning. So let's just talk about what emotions are to begin with, like, what are they? Why do we have them biologically we have the sensations in our body that creates them, kind of something that happens in our brain that says this is sadness, this is love. This is anger. This is frustration. This is fear. How does that whole mechanism work in, in one sentence or one or two words.

Robert Maldonado 04:14

It is a big topic, you know, and it's been ignored a lot in psychology and science. We we like to think of ourselves as these rational beings, almost like Mr. Spock, or data that operate on pure reason and that's just not so. The research shows, we sense the world, with our whole body, our hoping, and it's an emotional experience that we're having of the world. When we feel good when we whatever we, it has meaning for us. We're experiencing it through the emotions right?

Debra Maldonado 04:16

So I know that you and I talked about this before. And if you think about your life, and you think about, you know, one of the things we're going to do in the retreat is look at our life and you know, where the emotions have been kind of anchored in. And if you look at your life, every memory you have is connected to an emotion. So it's hard to remember things that are, you know, you go to the Starbucks and think happens and you leave and you just kind of forget about it. But you go to Starbucks and someone bumps into you and spills coffee all over you and doesn't apologize and you're in the car and you talk about them every day. And you're that's an event and so it's stored in it's anchored in and and so our life is about those anchoring emotional events that help maybe define us, tell us where we are at what we're doing, and then the narrative around that. So it really is if we don't remember things that don't have an emotion.

Robert Maldonado 05:58

Yeah, so it's a good idea. Start at the beginning, when we're born, our first emotional experiences, is that attachment that we have with our mother.

Debra Maldonado 06:10

Hmm, yeah,

Robert Maldonado 06:11

Right. It's the beginning of psychology really, if you think about what Freud was doing, and Jung and Adler, they were looking at this initial template of our relationship with our mother, and emotionally what it what it meant for the rest of our lives. And we know it's still holds pretty much. The more current research in neuroscience indicates that we do have like this emotional template that's laid down very early on, and we're primed for it. Even before we're able to reason and think through and really use our cognition. We're able to sense the world emotionally and we're able to sense, and we're designed to sense each other's emotions intuitively, and it's a much older brain structure. It's called the limbic system. And it tunes us into each other's vibration in essence, right are our emotional well being, or illness or sense of discomfort. We pick that up intuitively.

Debra Maldonado 07:24

Hmm. And then we end up. You know, for me, the emotions played a role in love. I mean, if we think about looking for love, it was always as I grew up, I always went for the guy that I felt chemistry with. And so if I had this emotional state that arose in me, and then I was thinking, well, he's the one must be the one he must be someone I should marry because he gives me this feeling of love. And, and all of us can relate. I know you're out there, that it's often not a rational thing. Decision it's why did I fall for the guy who lives 3000 miles away who tells me he doesn't want a commitment, but I'm still in like, it's like, he's still like withdrawn. And what I noticed is that I was the feeling I had with that identified with love was longing. So it was a longing, it was like a romantic longing. And so that is what I always wet would always match up with people that kept me longing. It wasn't and then when someone was nice to me and someone wanted a relationship, and they were longing for me, it was like it didn't match. It was like oil and water was like what it was almost like a painful to feel that loved and adored by a man like it was just not painful into like a conscious way, but more like discomfort. And so we end up going through life looking for partners, even looking for careers that match our emotional template, and we think we're making choices. But that emotion is doing it. And that's kind of what I've learned over the years before I met you is the flirtiness. So I'd be like, that was my gauge. That was a really wrong instrument.

Robert Maldonado 09:14

Not a good way to.

Debra Maldonado 09:15

Yeah but you don't want to also be too ultra rational where you're thinking, well, I just want someone who's good on paper. I've had clients who've come to me and they're like, I met the I married the right guy that my family likes that looked good. He fit in with my life, he made rational sense, but I have no emotion. And so you don't want that either. You don't want completely logical and you don't want completely irrational.

Robert Maldonado 09:39

Well, going back to the attachment theory. So what what happens early on is you have to answer these two questions. Am I worthy of love? And can I trust other people with my emotions? In other words, can I open up? Can I be intimate? And these are unconsciously answered. We answer these questions on consciously by the experiences that we have in early life. So very early on we we make that decision. Am I worthy of love? And can I trust others with my emotions? And based on that, and we go off into life and try our hand at it without most people because they're unconscious of the of these answers or these questions, and then they end up or we end up making a mess of it. Like I did, I mean, it was it was rough going, because I wasn't aware of these, even after I knew psychology, because psychology was so focused on the cognition, like there was a cognitive revolution going on when I was in school, it was, you know, the, the whole emphasis was, can we on understand how the brain processes information And make sense of the world through through the these kind of cognitive processes. Nothing about the emotions.

Debra Maldonado 11:07

Yeah, I was I was even in hypnotherapy it was all about, you know, thinking, changing the thinking, changing the beliefs. But I mean there were some motion there too but it was really more of the thoughts your thoughts create your life and we see that all the time. Your thoughts create your life and your thoughts. Yes, they do create, but you can't have a thought without an emotion and the thought is conscious, but the emotion is unconscious. And many times the ego uses thought as rationalization, justification to push down emotion and to avoid us feeling so the ego is very clever. It loves to use our thinking rational mind to avoid feeling uncomfortable. So we tend to justify why that you know, kind of that person hurt me or left me. Well, I have to justify my mind, they must be a bad person, they must have done something wrong. And that suppresses that feeling of rejection.

Robert Maldonado 12:09

Yeah, repression we know leads to a lot of the problems with health, a lot of depression, anxiety, because we're not processing the emotions properly. We're repressing them, pushing them away, trying to get rid of them, or simply pathologizing them.

Debra Maldonado 12:29

Like if I have these emotions, that means there's something wrong with feeling shame, guilt, anger, all those things. Yeah, let's see, they're all emotions that we, you know, we had them for a reason for survival. But, and they do serve us because if we didn't have guilt, we do terrible things to each other. If we didn't have shame, we would we would hurt others without any shame people that are shameless. If we didn't have jealousy, you know, maybe there you know, there's that kind of like wanting what other people have or recognizing that someone has something good that it can be a very creative emotion. But what happens is that we label them as good or bad. And then we don't want to feel the good, bad and we only want to feel the good. And and the way we process it is that the external is giving us the emotion versus we can generate the emotion within ourselves. So there's a lot I mean, we can go on and on so many layers to this, but let's talk about this destructive power. Like if we just in general, if we don't understand our emotional life, wee try to intellectualize it too much. What happens?

Robert Maldonado 13:38

Yeah, in essence, the emotions will have their day whether we like it in one way or another. So we either learn to work with them and befriend them, in essence, and really coordinate with them, or they're going to take their revenge on us, meaning they're going to sabotage our work, our relationships, blow up in them in the moment that really counts. We're going to trip and fall or falter, or have a moment of doubt or anger because the unconscious is really powerful. It's very powerful. If we think back to Okay, what was going on when we were kids? We were reading the family situation emotionally, and absorbing it. And our mind was keeping track. What does this mean for me out in the world? 

Debra Maldonado 14:44

Always replay it out in the world.

Robert Maldonado 14:46

Yes. So that emotional template then becomes the way we see the world if we don't revisit it, if we're not able to examine it and bring it to awareness. Now it's not about just an intellectual examination and thinking, well, if I know all this stuff I'm clear. You have to really process them. In other words, you have to be able to feel the emotions. And it's almost like if it's pure energy. These emotions are psychological, emotional energy. They're fuel. You say they're like fuel. They're the fuel, the inspiration, the passion for our work for our relationships. But if we've repressed them, and we haven't really understood what they are, and we're misreading them, that's when they trip us up.

Debra Maldonado 15:43

And don't you think that this world or the way our world is worked is this very masculine, active world, that we're not really people don't talk about emotions, they don't talk about how you feel. Or just be happy, you know? Just be happy. Don't be depressed. And, and a lot of times it's it's kind of like in the corporate world, it's very, you know, don't process emotions and maybe now I think people are becoming more woke. But, but I remember it's like, you know, you just make all these rational decisions like rationality and logic seem to be more powerful than someone you know that a lot of you talk about being empaths and sensitive and emotional and and it's like pushed aside that because you can feel things and sense things in people that's not a power, but it's the intellect that has the power so we culturally we, all of us have in the West have really discounted the power of emotions and it's almost like you know, don't go there. It's not healthy and we don't talk about those things. Those are soft, soft, mushy stuff we don't want to get into and you know when I when I was first starting doing love coaching my coache asked me, she said I want you to do a search on match for the word love. And no, there was no, no one put love in their in their profile. It's almost like we're, it's one thing that we want to have is love. And no one's even said I want love, or I want to feel love, or I want to meet my love. Very, very rarely. So we and then we look at when we're searching for a partner, it's very rational like do they fit in with my life? Do they? Are they attractive? Do they, you know, fit in, check all the boxes and then it becomes this very mechanical thing and then we kind of we have hope in the beginning and then it gets squashed and then we just kind of lose that often that passion to find our partner. So emotion is really, really a key to us, going for what we want, but we have to know how to use them.

Robert Maldonado 17:54

Yeah, if you think about inspiration, passion for your your project. Your relationships, self love, self respect, the ability to, to really take yourself seriously and passionately work towards your ideals. You need to be able to access the power of the emotions. If you have trouble, then all those things are going to falter. And they're going to be lacking in that, that essence, that passion for life that we need to bring to things. Now, if you look at the recent history, modern history has been really defined by the failure of institutions. So the church has definitely let people down. Educational systems have failed the government, you know, it's failing, essentially, in every way. And so it's so important even now, even more than ever that we as individuals are able to really manage our minds and really think through things in both a balanced way, not only using logic, but the emotional power of compassion, of empathy, like you're saying,

Debra Maldonado 19:19

Well, even just the idea of anger. A lot of people think angers or interests can be very destructive. And I see anger as unexpressed passion. So it's a passion because passion is anger. It's actually the same thing. It's just a different word to express it. It's it. When it's anger, it's feeling powerless. It's feeling frustrated. It's a stuck feeling. So for holding anger, we're not really, we want to be, we want to destroy things. We want to tear things down. We want to tear people down. We want to harm others. But when you transmute it into passion, it becomes love and it becomes a force of I have power to change, and I'm passionate about it. And I'm not happy about where things are, and I'm passionate about change. And that is such a difference. And I see that's what's happening. You know, with the movement that's happening now. You see people, they're peaceful protesters, but they're angry, but they're passionate. You know, it's not this destructive force. I mean, there was a little destructive force. I don't know how to do it. The peaceful people are we're definitely not a part of it, but it's that kind of how can we use it in a creative way versus a destructive way? How can we get in touch with our emotions? And one of the things I love that you said a couple of years ago, we were teaching a class on emotions and he said, Well, they're like children, you know, they are they're like, tiny, younger parts of themselves. emotions. Yeah. The emotions are like children you want don't want to drive, but you can't stick them in the trunk. You know, you think you have to deal with them in the car and as they're climbing over the seats, and they're telling you what to do, and they're having upsets. And, and it's about they're kind of wild in a way until we understand them. And we don't want to tame them where we dampen them and dilute them, you know, and or push them away or suppress only the ones that are uncomfortable, but we want to be able to use their creative energy. And that's really the idea of and when you do that you actually are changing your emotional template in your mind. You're not acting from the rigid, conditioned judgments of those emotions and those responses to the world.

Robert Maldonado 21:35

Yeah, another big factor is the idea of the paradigm. If we were operating from a materialistic paradigm, and we see the body as simply a biological machine that we inhabit for a while, and then abandon, we're missing the point. But if we see it is a conscious universe. Everything is arising from consciousness, including our bodies and including the world, and everything is alive. And everything is connected. Everything is a kind of swimming together in one big ocean of consciousness. So then your understanding emotions in a clearer way. You know, it's not just about your individual body expressing these powerful emotions, but it's sensing the world and it's a lightness, that it's connecting as literally to each other, to what's going on to nature. And if we lose that connection, that's when we feel angry, and we feel frustrated and we feel depressed and anxious. That connection is vital for our really our way of being in the world. Because it ultimately the Punisher, I'd say that everything thing we're experiencing is us.

Debra Maldonado 23:01

Mm hmm.

Robert Maldonado 23:02

No matter how remote it appears how distant it is us. It is our own awareness our own consciousness and the emotions connect us. They give us a direct experience of that. It's not just the logical.

Debra Maldonado 23:18

It's a way to kind of experience the world versus just watching distantly the world go by and different activities happen. It's a way for us to drink up the light and dark the the you know the good and bad the the battles of life and the drama of life and experience at all. All the edges of it.

Robert Maldonado 23:40

That's right. And for love and relationships, the you know, the work you were talking about. It's so important because when people are in tune with their emotions, people pick it up. Emotions. 

Debra Maldonado 23:57

You feel more open to someone when they're talking to you.

Robert Maldonado 24:01

That's right. That's right. And it's a very powerful experience. You're attracted to those people.

Debra Maldonado 24:07

It's almost feels like when you talk to people and fear just go back to dating for a minute. Or even if you're a coach and you're trying to get clients and where you're in business and you're trying to make business connections, your team at work when you're talking on that logical level, it feels this kind of void between people it's like almost like you're at a hands length, you know, kind of being very practical. But when you really connected to someone, a friendship of family, I think that's why family feel so connected because we are more openly emotional, usually with our family. Well,

Robert Maldonado 24:43

We hope. 

Debra Maldonado 24:44

We hope. But it's, you know, real, someone you really trust that you can connect with. And in dating you you kind of if you're on a date, and you're going so what do you do for a living, but then when you talk about something you're passionate about, and there passionate about it. It's like a connection that happens. That's much deeper than, well, it sounds like I like to go on, you know, go in the lake and fishing and so do I, and I'm an outdoorsy person. And, and you're not talking about the emotional part of it, or I always find that when you're just vulnerable about how you feel like you know, I'm feeling a little nervous right now. Oh, I'm nervous, too. It's just a way to connect. It's a way to kind of connect on an emotional level. And we're, I think it's lost in a lot of society. It's like, don't talk about how you feel.

Robert Maldonado 25:33

You're right. That's why I was mentioning the institutions, often the institutions were ways for us to channel and kind of acknowledge those different platforms that we were reaching. So the let's say the coming out initiation of a young woman. She reached a certain age, and so there was a grand ball or ceremony of some kind that acknowledged that she's now an adult. She's now a woman and has left the child behind. Those were important milestones in people's lives that the ritual served as a kind of a bringing it to social consciousness. Right? And this was happening.

Debra Maldonado 26:24

Individuation almost. 

Robert Maldonado 26:25

Yeah, that's right. 

Debra Maldonado 26:26

You are becoming your own woman.

Robert Maldonado 26:28

And now we're the failure of those institutions. There are no mechanisms for people to undergo those processes. So everybody's kind of left on their own to do their own emotional work, somehow.

Debra Maldonado 26:41

And our you know, our parents didn't teach us their parents, you know, and I mean, we recently taught to, you know, don't cry in public. Be good to other people. Be kind, don't be angry, be nice. And don't be too pushy. And you know, most of us some people are thought to be pushy, I don't know. But it's said that kind of like not acknowledging how each other feel, you know? And isn't it funny that when you go to therapy, that's the question they get. How does that make you feel? It's like, why do they ask that because most people don't even ask themselves how does this making me feel? And, and so a lot of people confuse that feeling with intuition. You know, a lot of times they if you are going on your emotional template, like for me, that flurry feeling that longing, I was like, intuitive, I thought it was my intuition saying, This is my soulmate, and we end up kind of having the superstitious ways we work with emotions and what they mean. And they're not really truly our deeper self guiding. It's our ego guiding and the ego is very clever. It likes to pretend it's a spiritual guru. And it's telling us things and it's telling us to move away from things that are good for us sometimes because it's new and different

Robert Maldonado 27:58

and

Debra Maldonado 28:00

So it's locked in emotionally.

Robert Maldonado 28:01

Yeah. What do you mean by fluffy feeling is chemistry right?

Debra Maldonado 28:05

Yeah, that kind of like butterflies and that but it's that longing like, oh, like I have this. I really like him and I feel connected and he's so fun and you know, there's something about him that I'm drawn to and that that yeah, that kind of romantic chemistry that something but it was a longing for me. That's how it felt for me. For other people, it may be different. It may be someone who complements you a lot. You might have chemistry with that person, you know, whatever it is. For me, it was longing.

Robert Maldonado 28:35

Yeah, there's always a sense of exhilaration and excitement. Yeah, almost like you're you're entering into a new psychological emotional space thing you've never been in before. And so it's incredible. That's why we crave love and we're designed to seek it out. The problem what we see is that because of the conditioning, that emotional template that is unconscious. Often we have that emotional chemistry with the wrong person because it matches, essentially. If we answered the question, are others worthy of trust? And if our answer is no,

Debra Maldonado 29:20

We're gonna match up with someone who isn't worthy.

Robert Maldonado 29:22

We're going to match we're going to have that chemistry with people that match that, that are emotionally unavailable, or emotionally in turmoil and conflicted. And to us, it feels Well, I'm going with my feelings. I'm going in with my instinct, my gut feelings, or my intuition, but it's leading us in the wrong direction.

Debra Maldonado 29:45

Also, worthiness, I found, like if I look back at the men in my life that I dated that I was so infatuated with but I was coming from a place of I'm not good enough, and I'm unworthy, and I'm not that great, and this person's going to come in make me feel great if he loves me back when I was like so into them I was like a mess I would like be so like, obviously interested and hope in and and what I found is that, you know, looking back they didn't feel worthy of love so when I was pursuing them or being this like adoring of them, they couldn't accept that, that imprint as well, so my unworthiness and their unworthiness, kind of clashed. And if and I saw this actually with a relationship, where he was pursuing me for a while, and I was like, I don't know. And then I decided I liked him, and then he moved away. So it was like, we were both unworthy, felt unworthy, and we were playing this game and it was like, you know, whoever's pursuing the other one moves away. And that's a lot of what happens in relationships is that many of the people we're attracted to have the same emotional template, but we express it differently at different times on the surface and it looks like oh, He's confident because he's Mr. Cool, but actually he's thinking, unconsciously he's rejecting love as well. You know, he's rejecting someone that can love him.

Robert Maldonado 31:11

It's a mirror.

Debra Maldonado 31:12

Yeah, yeah. And so I think a lot of women think, Oh, I have to be more confident. And then I'll attract someone who loves me back. But it's actually, it is true. Like you have to love yourself, but on a deep level, but don't make those guys that reject you. Don't think of them as Oh, they're so confident and great, and I wasn't good enough. It's more. They felt the same way because someone who's great and loving or loves themself would want someone who loves them. And I think that's what happened when I met you is that I was you were sending me poms and all these adorable things that I would have ran away a million miles in the beginning, but I was I was ready and open for love. So it changed that dynamic. My emotional template had changed. So I was able to let someone in that's I wrote the book let love in because it's really about letting someone in. And emotionally if we're not okay with our own emotions, why would it's like bringing someone into a house, that you have this like closet in the back that has all the emotions that you don't like to look at yourself, and you're thinking, I'm gonna bring someone in and they're going to open up the closet and let you know Pandora's box out. So we have to take care of our hole. If we feel comfortable with our own self and our emotions, we can let someone in so much easier than if we're defended in hiding things from ourselves. And that's what we're really doing in the emotional template. It's hiding certain aspects are things we don't want to feel.

Robert Maldonado 32:39

Well, Jung says that the best time to work on a relationship is before you get in as well. And that's what he's saying that you need to work on yourself first and prepare. Now you don't have to be completely perfect or anything.

Debra Maldonado 32:56

Although I was wasn't I? 

Robert Maldonado 32:58

Of course. But you were on on on the path, right? You were seeking. And that's what counts is that we intuitively emotionally connect with people that are also on the same path.

Debra Maldonado 33:15

Yes. And you know what I realized after, right, the year before I met you, I was on this I went to hypnotherapy school. And I was really kind of stepping into my own and I was really changing. And, you know, starting my own little practice and getting out of the corporate world. And then I noticed that people men that weren't ready to like grow with me or grow at all, we just fall away right away. They were like, I don't know about that. I mean, I even had someone say, oh, you're, you know, your stuff is your the way you think and it's a little too much for me. It was like, you're too much. And it's it doesn't match anymore. And it was it was like, oh, okay, that doesn't match anymore. I want someone who I can have deep, interesting conversations with that I'm not afraid to feel or not afraid to let me feel these feelings because I think ultimately, we want love. We want to feel love, but we're terrified of it because what we thought was love has given us heartache, but it's not really love. So our emotional template is kind of fixed to reject love, in a way reject closeness reject intimacy, because what we learned is what we labeled love this for many of us has been let down and painful.

Robert Maldonado 34:32

Yes, you know, the stages of growth that I was talking about, definitely reaching a sale, a level where you're ready to be intimate with another person in a serious way. To be a couple to be married or or at least to, to live together and all that it is another stage a completely different stage. Because now it's not just you. It's not just the ego existing and surviving and doing its thing. Now you have to consider another person. And really psychologically emotionally, you have to let go of that ego attachment that you have to yourself, your way of life.

Debra Maldonado 35:20

It's like a control that you have to let go of a little bit which is very ultimately the ego's control.

Robert Maldonado 35:27

This gets to what you were saying because there are very powerful defense mechanisms against letting go of the ego. The whole idea in the beginning is to create a very cohesive, powerful, solid sense of self that will allow you to face life's challenges. Now all of a sudden, there's this other person that you have feelings towards, and that love is asking you to let go of all that ego attachment, your build up, and it's not easy. That's why it requires commitment. It requires a maturity. And again, understanding the emotions. If you don't understand your emotions, then you're confused by the whole process.

Debra Maldonado 36:18

Well, the emotional template will always lead you astray in love. When you first call me, the phone rang three times before I picked it up, because the first response was fear. Like, oh my god, he's actually calling me. I got a call, and then I picked up but my ego was like sensed that the gig is going to be up soon, you know, you're gonna have to let go. This is something there must have been a powerful force with you.

Robert Maldonado 36:46

The force is with you.

Debra Maldonado 36:48

But to be wise enough to know that that's the ego not and what we tend to do, if we're not aware of our emotional template or understand how we work and how we've been conditioned to operate that way. We'll pay attention to that feeling versus the higher intuition. And so we want to, we want to be able to master our intuition. So we can use the emotions to live, but not let us make our choices for us all the time. Yeah. And I think the emotion we're just kind of on autopilot with the emotions and we want to grow it. So what does it take to transform it? You know, for me, it was always putting light around it and getting rid of the negative emotions and getting them away. But I always found that well, anger still found me and grief stuff like these emotions Don't go away where they're, they're part of our human makeup. We can't get rid of them. So we have to deal with them. We have to understand that they're all there for a reason. They're not. Not everything happens for a reason, but they're there for a reason. There's a reason why we have guilt. There's a reason why we have fear. If we didn't have all these emotions, we wouldn't be able to survive. So First of all, all emotions are good. They have a good intention. And second of all, that the way they've been conditioned in us through the template has been very limited. And so we want to live beyond that limitation. And so we would have to learn to understand them versus get rid of them, or suppress them. Yeah, for them up.

Robert Maldonado 38:21

Yeah, I'd say the first step is to really have an understanding of what emotions are. They're not pathology, meaning the doesn't mean there's something wrong with you. Because you feel guilt or shame or your your mind holds on to past experiences. That's what it's supposed to do. It's supposed to do that so that you can learn from past experiences. But if there's no mechanism, no way for you to process those emotions than they remain like this, and they remain like in a primitive state in your body.

Debra Maldonado 39:04

They almost become a burden, like to feel, and then we end up like, I don't want to deal with them.

Robert Maldonado 39:10

Yeah. Yeah, they, they disrupt the natural flow of energy in your mind body. And that's when people get sick or depressed or anxious. And, and so the first stage is to learn about them to understand what they are. And then some mechanisms, some tools to be able to process them to work with him. And the approach is essentially kind of a friendly approach. If you think about long lost friends or relatives that you haven't seen in a long time. You want to invite them in. You're curious as to what's been going on with them. What What do they have to teach you? What's their experience? Emotions are like that, you know Rumi has that beautiful poem of the guests room with a guest house or something. Yeah. And he says, Whatever emotion knocks on the door, invite it in, you know, ask it. What's going on? Why are you here? What? What is your message to me?

Debra Maldonado 40:20

You know, I love Jung had said once and I read this recently he said, what has come alive in me that has caught my attention. And so it's like this kind of something like the emotion has his story and it's alive. And it's a part of you. And it's calling for you. It's calling to say, hey, there's something here. It's the way we you know, it's the we have this kind of filter of how we experience the outer world and it's kind of a gauge of that. And it's to understand the world. We have to understand what's going on in ourselves and then that projection will change if you understand the film that's being processed inside. Yeah, and then you'll see what happens is if you don't look at the emotions, the ones that you reject will end up showing up in other people. So if you reject anger, you're gonna see a lot of angry people out there and you're gonna say, wow, there's so many angry people around. I'm such a nice person. But a lot of our clients have said, My persona is this nice pleasing person. And I have this raging bitch inside of me that I didn't know and it was like all this anger that I haven't dealt with. And and so it became become destructive. So we have to, when we do feel angry, or someone triggers us, we have to say what is that about me? What is this showing me about my mind? What is this showing me about me? What can I learn from this and like you said, that openness that welcoming, less judgment, more a curiosity instead of this harsh like, I got to fix this. It's this is uncomfortable. I gotta fix it. It's more I'm willing to be uncomfortable for a little bit so I can see what's this, what's in here? And when I've welcomed emotions this way, it's been very transformational for me. It's been amazing to to see Oh my God, my whole life has been about avoiding this feeling. And it's just a sensation in the body that we're afraid of this tension in our chest. So it's I'm tense in my chest, but our mind makes this whole big story. And it's going to be like this forever, and you're going to be alone forever, and you're never going to get what you want. And then it just keeps building and you think it's, you're afraid of the ghosts, that your mind creates these, these future problems that it's it spins from that emotion. And if we can just kind of get inside we can start directing that narrative in a different way.

Robert Maldonado 42:48

Yeah, and so those cliches about loving yourself and although they're true, but you have to approach it in this knowing way. And it's friendly way, even the difficult emotions like anger, you have to be able to, to face it in a sense to invite it in. And not get caught up in it at the same time. We know the power of this, this kind of meta awareness where we're looking at our mind, not just our thoughts, but our emotions from that higher vantage point where we're able to really let them mean to the mind, but without the understanding that they're not. They don't define us, they're not us. The thoughts, the emotions, they'll come and go.

Debra Maldonado 43:47

Like weather.

Robert Maldonado 43:48

Or like weather but the awareness that's there, the true mind, the true self in our mind, the witness mind is able to withstand whatever we throw it. It won't be damaged, you won't be overwhelmed. And that's the power that we have the secret power, the secret weapon that we have is that the higher self in us is not damaged by any past experiences. And a lot of people buy into that story, that pathology that if something traumatic happened to me in my past, I'm damaged forever, that I'm going to live I'm broken and with this shame or guilt or anger forever, and that's just not true. The highest truth says that the self is indestructible, it cannot be burned, it cannot be cut. It cannot be damaged in any way.

Debra Maldonado 44:46

And you are that self. Yeah. One thing too I wanted to mention is you know, a lot of times we've been so conditioned to keep our our emotions like don't be too happy because you look crazy. And don't be too sad because You look crazy. Well, you know, like these people that are like over the top, and it's just like too much like they're too happy all the time. And but you can tell that they're kind of it's their persona. And so we have this kind of like, it's normal for us to kind of be all that mediocre numbness, that life of quiet desperation. And then I think we forget that when we're trying to create something in our life, whether we want love or success that we forget to engage the emotion with it. So finding love, to fall in love with love, to start a business to fall in love with why you're doing that business. I know for me, if I get too logical and think about steps and marketing and business and numbers, you can forget and disconnect from the emotional part of the the what you're doing and how you're helping people. And so when we think about falling in love with someone, think about the benefits that other person is going to feel, the love that they're going to feel for you that they get to experience as well. So, by you being open, you're not only helping yourself, but you're helping someone else have an experience of love because there's two of you that are going to experience it. And that's a beautiful thing. So falling in love with that idea that you're bringing more love into the world and being passionate about it. Passionate enough that like we say emotion overrides logic, but if a passion is strong enough, it'll override all the obstacles as well, that your mind puts up to to create so it can be destructive if you let it drive and keep you keep you in your patterns. But the emotion is also the fuel to break free. So to passion, incitement, engagement, love, joy, all those things can catapult us and change us and transform us into a new way of being. So we have to remember that it's not only just coping with them and dealing with them and sitting with them as well. Which is part of it, it's being friendly to them and also using them as fuel. And so that's where I think the challenge is that how do we be? How do we invite the emotions in? Without letting them take over? But then and how do we rein them in and use them in, in the Punisher as they talk about the chariot? And that the horses are the emotions, the senses.

Robert Maldonado 47:24

The horses of the senses, the reins or the mind or is the mind the emotions, I think would be the passion that the mind has four objects. It desires things in the world. And there's nothing wrong with desire, but when, again, when you don't understand its meaning and its proper use. Then the senses run away with your mind. And they're chasing after external things in the world.

Debra Maldonado 48:00

Like I was going just circling back to the longing is I was I wanted love, I wanted that experience of love. I was very romantic. I felt like I was so emotional and open and ready. And but I was afraid to really the longing was what I was comfortable with is the longing for love versus the actual receiving it. And so it could trick us into thinking well, I'm feeling love, I'm falling in love. I fall in love every week, you know with a different person and I'm always in love with someone. So I'm ready and and it's not it's it's how the Is it love or is it an ego longing and like an attachment to win that I can get that person? I feel better about myself versus feeling that love within myself. And I think right before I met you I got to the point where I thought I love who I am like I was the first time I think I really felt that. Like I love who I am even if I'm not in a relationship right now. And and it's not I love that myself but more like, in a deep knowing way that I have something really valuable that I can bring to a relationship. That for me is like I'm interesting person, I'm spiritual I grow I work on myself. Why would I want someone like that for me? Like, if I was a guy I would think I'm a great catch, you know in that coming from that place of you're bringing something whole and alive in you into a relationship.

Robert Maldonado 49:26

And that's what emotions give us is the knowing yes they say the cognition gives us the understanding the the concept, the conceptual framework, but the emotion is the knowing that you're there, right that you've arrived. That's the power of the emotion.

Debra Maldonado 49:47

Yeah. So great topic we have so much we could talk about like the brain, how it processes and all that.

Robert Maldonado 49:54

Thank you for all the great questions and hanging out with us for a while. We'll see you next time.

Debra Maldonado 50:01

Take care everyone and have a great day. Stay well. Bye bye