[00:00:00] Welcome. This is Anything and Everything with Kelli Youngman Singh. We are here to live the most expansive experience of your life, guided by intuition and desire and rooted in self trust, authenticity, and love. That's what expands your capacity to receive, allow and fully enjoy what you really want. Nothing is off limits. Nothing needs to be justified. Here for an extraordinary life and to have it all on your terms. Let's begin.
[00:00:44] Hello and welcome back to the podcast. Today I wanna talk about something that builds upon the skillset of Loving Neutrality. When we are utilizing Loving Neutrality, what it really facilitates is a deeper opportunity to learn and grow, to know ourselves, to witness ourselves. When you become so aware, you begin to witness in yourself this relationship to all things. So one of the ways that we do this is we understand that it's not about other people. It's never about other people.
[00:01:26] And if you are in a place in your life, where you think so and so is hurting my feelings, so and so is saying things that are mean, and we're trying to make sense of why we feel a certain way in our body. So we're pointing at the other person. But what we are missing out on is the fact that every time you are upset, you are triggered, it's really an opportunity for you and you. It's never about the other person. It's always about ourselves.
[00:02:02] And something that I've gotten really really good at, all of my friends tell me this, they reflect it back to me, my husband sees it in me, is that when I have this space for Loving Neutrality, not only do I have such openness with other people, I really have this immense love and safety within myself.
[00:02:29] When we really understand and get comfortable with being with our own emotions, what we start prioritizing is regulating our own nervous systems, regulating our own bodies, regulating our own emotions, instead of trying to control, judge, criticize, blame other people or other circumstances in our life. We just get to witness ourselves and learn from our experience.
[00:03:00] On my former podcast, I called this concept Layered Learning. When you're learning yourself, it's going to the next layer, where you're not just looking at the circumstances that are happening, you're looking at how you're relating to the circumstances. When we do this more of the time, if we do not make other people wrong, if we don't make ourselves wrong, if we're not looking for whose fault it is, what becomes available is simply to ask, how am I feeling now and what can I give myself in this moment to help support myself? And maybe that is different thoughts. Maybe that is a different mindset. Maybe it is simply love and acceptance.
[00:03:52] And I'll give you this example, because people get so uncomfortable when people are upset at them. I remember a point in my life where I'd be so uncomfortable with an exchange that happened that I would be feeling sensation in my body and be so unregulated, so uncomfortable I wouldn't know how to process emotions. And I would be like, well, that person's an asshole. That person is rude. They're being mean. And I couldn't separate my judgments from the experience that was happening.
[00:04:31] And in that moment, what I would look to do was try to get the feeling out of my body and then it would spiral into, well, if this thing happened, it must be my fault. I must be a bad person. And after I went through the power struggle of trying to figure out who was right, who was wrong, I would just be left feeling like shit, thinking I must be a terrible person. I must be bad. If they're upset at me, it must be my fault.
[00:05:00] Then we go into this place where we're giving our power to other people, we're giving our power to our bosses, our bank accounts, our loved one's emotions. We're giving all of our power away.
[00:05:15] Instead of really looking at, okay, this is what's happening in my body, in my experience. Let me give my love and attention to myself in this moment. To help one, regulate the nervous system. And if you don't know what that means, it's really just being able to feel the sensations in your body. Whether it's your heart beating really fast, your throat clenching up, or a wrenching feeling in your stomach. That's your nervous system responding, sending signals through the body, which produce sensation that we experience as emotion.
[00:05:53] When we have the ability to be with ourselves, help our body get out of fight or flight, and we bring our body back to neutral, we start being available to think different thoughts and have different relationships to the events that occur.
[00:06:12] All of that to say, when you're being curious about when you're triggered, you're being curious about what's getting you fired up, we don't have to be mad at someone else that they made us feel a sensation in our body.
[00:06:26] I actually have gotten to a place where I feel really grateful. Because what I make it mean when I get triggered or activated is that there's something available for me to be curious about. There's an opportunity for growth. There's an attachment to a judgment or a rule, a conviction of how I think things should be, and to me, that's always a place to get curious and expand my perspective about something.
[00:06:58] I feel like this episode has three parts that I'm really trying to convey.
[00:07:05] Anything that's happening in your body is a result of your thinking. It's happening because your thinking thoughts about the event, which is creating new physical sensation in your body. So the sensation in your body, the emotional experience you're having is never coming from the event, it's coming from your thoughts about the event.
[00:07:29] When you're triggered or activated or something upsets you, it's not a problem, it's an opportunity. We can actually lean in and be curious about what is this telling me about my current identity? What is this letting me learn about myself? Then I gain insight about myself, my current belief system, and also places that I might want to expand, let go of, release.
[00:07:58] The trigger is not a problem. It's an opportunity to learn about yourself.
[00:08:03] And when we gain more awareness about ourselves and where we're still getting stuck, it's gonna help us understand where we've put a stake in the ground, where we keep coming back to this one perspective, where this is how I see the world. This is how I see this specific person. This is how I see money. This is how I see other people's opinions.
[00:08:27] Because when you understand that everything is a perspective, what you gain is a lot of personal freedom. Because then you're not spending your day thinking about how someone else behaved was so bad and so wrong, and they hurt your feelings, you just understand that your feelings were hurt. They said words, and you can move along with your day if you're not making that mean something bad about you.
[00:08:54] And I think it goes both ways. Because then when you are the person who maybe behaves badly or doesn't get it right and says something that hurts someone's feelings unintentionally, then you're also in a place where you don't have to self punish, because you're not trying to punish other people or make them the cause of your pain.
[00:09:16] Everyone is gonna have their own emotional experience every single day, reacting to things that are happening based on your expectations, your belief systems, your point of view. When you really understand that everyone is accountable for their own inner world, their own experience... like I can't jump in your body and make you feel excited. I can't jump in your body and make you feel disappointed about something if you're actually relieved. Whatever emotional experience you have inside of your own body is a result of your thinking and your relationship to events, to people, to things in your life.
[00:10:03] So when you know that, you also give yourself the permission, the freedom to not self punish if someone else calls you bad, wrong, greedy, I don't know, whatever name in the book, you can look at yourself and really take ownership of like, yeah, maybe I would've handled that situation differently in another moment. But that is how I reacted. I am sorry if it hurt your feelings. Of course I'm sorry. And I still love and forgive myself too.
[00:10:40] And I think that's the place where most people are not even aware of the fact that they're overworking so much in their lives to avoid being judged or criticized or being called bad or wrong, and at the end of the day, that's only producing more shame in your own body. That's only producing more fear. That's only producing more people pleasing. And I say this as a woman who's done a lot of work to let go of the responsibility of other people's emotions. And I do this with love for myself and for them.
[00:11:18] Because if I am then bending over backwards to try to control a feeling in someone else's body that I literally cannot control, it's gonna reinforce a belief system that I have to behave a certain way in order to stay on someone's good side. And truthfully, I'm uninterested in that. I'm uninterested in being liked for a version of me that's trying to please someone else. And I truthfully don't want relationships where people are trying to do that to me either, right? I wanna be in relationship with people who are accountable to their own emotions, who can hold space for when I have emotions or when they have emotions, and then we get to rendezvous in this place where we also have this understanding and love for ourselves that we're human. And this opens up a space for non-judgment on both sides.
[00:12:17] Because what I know to be true is that if you're holding people to such high standards in a way that produces judgment or wrongness, or blame, I also know you're treating yourself the same way. And I know because I've been that person, right?
[00:12:36] And so this is where the work is always about you and you. It's always about you and you. And if you're always thinking that your negative emotions or even your positive emotions are a result of other people, you're gonna be really dependent on certain people, certain things going a certain way, so you can feel how you wanna feel. That's how most people are operating. But when you become more aware, when you become more radically responsible for your own emotional world, what happens is you're less dependent on other people behaving a certain way or things going a certain way in order to fuel how you wanna feel.
[00:13:21] If you constantly need outside reassurance or validation, or alignment or approval to feel good and confident about your choices, when you're not getting that, you're gonna be like, whoa, whoa, whoa something's wrong. They're not giving me the feedback I need. I must be bad. I must be wrong. Where someone says to you, you are a terrible person, and you believe them in a way of like, oh my God, I can't believe so-and-so thinks I'm a terrible person. No matter what that feeling produces in your body, we already know that you've abandoned yourself.
[00:13:54] Now with Loving Neutrality, if someone says to me now, like, you are horrible. I actually am not offended by that. i'm like, okay. My brain goes to the space where I could understand why someone would have that feeling about me. And truthfully, I don't reject it because maybe in some moments I am horrible. Right? I think we all are horrible at some point , whether it's our intention or not. So I don't reject someone else's judgment about me. But I also don't let their judgment replace my self love. No matter what I love myself on my best days, my worst days. And I also know it's available to love other people on their best days and their worst days. But that comes from the self practice of love, acceptance and Loving Neutrality that I have towards my own behaviors, my own limitations.
[00:14:50] Because going back to the Layered Learning, I do get curious with myself. I do reflect on it and I've had this happen in recent events lately, where I also am not attached to people liking me. And I think maybe over the last year I had a little bit of Identity Amnesia, which I know I'm not introduced on this podcast yet. But Identity Amnesia is sort of like when you are acclimating to a new Created Identity, you're kind of in the middle and old belief systems are coming up, along with the new belief systems that you're creating, and you feel a little lost and things might get a little wishy-washy or a little bit hard when you're in The Messy Middle. Again, another concept that I'll teach you on the podcast soon.
[00:15:36] But it's like when all of these things are happening, if you lose your sense of self-love in the process, it's gonna be so much harder. And if other people's thoughts about you are affecting your levels of self-love or self-trust, if you are relying on feedback from the world or other people to qualify your self love, when things aren't going well, your self love's gonna go down. That's when we start feeling the shame, blame, wrongness. I must be doing something. I'm broken. I'm messed up. If I'm allowing myself to be treated this way, I must be so worthless. It's embarrassing.
[00:16:16] Like we go into this place of making all of this extra meaning instead of being curious and saying, huh, that is really interesting. Why did I tolerate that? What is this showing me? Why am I so angered by this perspective? And whether we realize it or not, sometimes those judgments or those reactions to other people's judgments start driving our behavior, instead of really staying tethered to who we wanna be and the outcomes we wanna have. That's when we get into like retaliation mode and we double down on feeling justified about our judgements instead of being grateful and thankful for whatever it's bringing up to look at.
[00:17:02] Now, it doesn't mean that everyone is always right, but I think that's the point. It's about letting go of good, bad, right or wrong, and just saying, huh, that's really interesting. I'm being activated by this. There must still be something sticky in this moment. Otherwise I wouldn't be concerned about someone thinking bad thoughts about me. Of course people are gonna think bad thoughts about me. I just don't choose to give my focus there. Because the people I choose to surround myself in my life are on my side. They love me for who I am, in my best moments and my worst moments. And I can trust that because I give it to myself first.
[00:17:44] And I think that when we model this for ourselves, our children, our families, we let go of this righteousness of people needing to be good enough or worthy enough and needing to earn our trust. And I'm not saying that we just let people treat us like shit, but I'm saying that when you really understand that no one is treating you like shit without your own permission, then that's where you get curious. You say, huh, interesting. Why have I been surrounding myself with this energy? Why have I been tolerating this? What would it have looked like to set a clearer boundary or to say, no thank you, or, I'm gonna go over here now and I'm gonna give myself permission to have a different life experience. It brings it back to you and you.
[00:18:36] And when I'm not blaming other people for how I feel, what I gain is the opportunity to grow, the opportunity to give myself a new experience, and also the opportunity to love people with their flaws. Because whether we realize it or not, no one is perfect, absolutely no one. And so I don't try to hold myself to a standard of perfection or righteousness, and I don't assume that for other people either. And I think this has been one of the greatest gifts that frees me from being afraid of judgment.
[00:19:15] Instead, I'm just gonna keep doing what I'm doing. I'm gonna keep building the life that I want, knowing that I am gonna make mistakes. I am gonna say things that are hurtful unintentionally. But I'd much rather be living in my authenticity and sharing my true emotions, holding myself responsible for the experience I'm having in my body, which really produces the Emotional Agility that my clients experience in their day-to-day life, too.
[00:19:45] Because then you're not resenting, feeling shame, feeling guilty, and producing those unintentionally on repeat. Instead you can say, Ooh, oopsie. That was not my finest moment. That wasn't exactly how I wanted to behave. I can see how that was a reaction, and I'm sorry. You don't try to defend or justify or need to be right. Need to double down. You can just be so free with yourself and understanding about why you behaved the way you did while you had certain Thought Feeling combos in your mind and body.
[00:20:28] And becoming so aware of this for yourself first is gonna help you see people with so much more compassion and understanding for where they're coming from too. Which I think produces a much more net positive experience of the world. That produces a lot more love, a lot more connection, and also general understanding.
[00:20:49] All right, that's what I got for you this week. Your triggers are your opportunity. The Layered Learning is here for you, and when you're not focused on blaming other people, you have 100% of your energy to dedicate to you and the experience you're having in your own body and in your own life and emotional world, which gives you the permission to move through things quickly and to also be way more kind and loving to yourself and others.
[00:21:23] I'll meet you back here soon.
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