I'm Justin Michael Williams,
And welcome to the Kingdom.
This is Spiritual Church for everybody.
We begin each session with a prayer.
God,
Spirit,
Universe,
All that is,
All that ever has been,
And all that ever will be,
We thank you.
We thank you for guiding this community together,
And we send our prayers out to all the lives that have been lost in this physical domain,
And we send prayers that way we may feel their connection always with us whenever we close our eyes and think of them.
May we each remember that before we are Israeli or Palestinian or Jewish or Black or White or American or French or South African or Canadian or any religion or Catholic or this or spiritual or that,
That we are human beings,
That we are human beings.
May this earth help inspire us.
May nature help inspire us.
May all of your creations help to inspire us to remember fully and see by example that we are all interconnected in this web of life and that we all rely on one another and that we all support one another and that we can and will rise together when we can come together in a space of intimacy and love and connection.
May this message spread to the hearts and minds of our leaders.
May it spread to the hearts and minds of our families who have been through so much.
May it spread into our own hearts and minds so that we can be the ones to spread this ripple,
This gospel,
This change out into our lives and out into the world and everyone that we touch.
May we take responsibility.
May we say yes.
May we say yes to creating this new world together in the image of what we all know to be the universal force of love.
May our minds and hearts be protected as we go into this session today.
And may we remember that no matter what it is that's going on in our lives and in the world that if we take action,
It gets better.
This is your moment now to welcome in your own personal prayer.
God,
Spirit,
Universe,
All that is,
All that ever has been and all that ever will be,
We thank you.
Thank you for bringing this community together far and wide,
This web of love that we've created throughout the world.
May we be able to meet in person very soon.
May we all be safe and healthy and well,
Vibrant,
Alive so that we can spread the message of love and hope and power and togetherness around the planet far and wide.
May all the people who don't know about the kingdom yet,
But who are meant to be here in this community and with this family find us and may we each help that happen as we spread this mission around the planet.
So it is,
Thank you.
So here we are,
Fam.
Here we are kingdom family.
So grateful to have you here.
Welcome to all of you who are just coming in right now and we are ready to begin with our session today on the power,
The power of mental health.
And so many of you might know that today is mental health awareness month.
Mental health awareness month is the month of May and I wanted to do a deeper dive with you all on mental health this month because mental health tends to be one of these words that we kind of like honestly just toss and throw around in a lot of ways.
And we talk about,
Oh,
My mental health,
I need to get my mind right.
Oh,
I'm reading books.
So I'm doing that.
Oh,
I'm doing this.
You know what I mean?
And without really having a really clear and a full understanding of what mental health actually really is and what mental health really means,
You know,
And how it actually functions in our lives and how we can actually start to build the capacity of our mental health in a clear and authentic way.
And I think you all will be a little bit surprised at the way that I talk about this today because to be very honest with you,
Believe it or not,
Like going to therapy does not mean that you are increasing your capacity for mental health.
Doing shadow work does not mean that you're increasing your capacity for mental health.
Doing certain practices of meditation are not increasing your capacity for your mental health.
But these things can,
If we know the approach to take and if we have the right,
I guess you can say goal in mind to help us increase the capacity of our mental health to understand what mental health actually really means.
And wow,
Nadine,
I'm so excited.
I just saw Nadine's comment here.
She said,
Wow,
Serendipity.
I began listening to your podcast to help heal my mental health postnatal,
Which I know is massive for so many women.
My sisters have both had children and my first,
This is your first live and here's the theme.
So this is perfect.
Now there's a lot,
There's a lot to discuss around mental health.
Okay.
There's a lot to discuss and a lot that gets confused.
Sometimes we confuse relieving stress and anxiety with mental health.
Sometimes we think mental health means feeling good all the time.
Sometimes we think mental health means always being happy or being able to see life through a positive outlook.
Sometimes we think mental health means being grateful.
Right?
And so it's interesting when we look at this.
And so I want all of you to type into the chat box what you think mental health means.
And I want you to do what the brother brothers corn say and like we call it dare to suck,
Dare to just let yourself get it wrong so that we can see what we think here in the community of what you think mental health is.
And when you all type that in,
Just give it your best shot.
And I'm going to go through a little bit of a definition and some examples of some things that you should know about mental health.
So I see some of you coming in mental health.
These are interesting.
So mental health is resilience.
Magdalena beautiful.
I love that.
What else do you,
Hi guys,
How mental health?
Ah,
Interesting.
Mental health is a space that we can become more fully ourselves.
Mental health is flexibility.
Mental health is preventing depression,
Increasing your serotonin,
Feeling balanced and grounded awareness of your mental state in any given word.
Alonzo,
I see you.
Mental health means finding your balance with your emotions,
Acknowledgement of your thoughts and emotions,
Depression,
Bipolar,
All of these things are mental diseases.
Understanding your emotions,
Freedom,
Resilience from turbulence,
Knowing yourself,
Recovery,
Being in alignment with universe or spirit.
Yeah,
These are really beautiful.
Being present with all of your emotions,
Being aware of your thoughts and where they go.
Beautiful,
Beautiful.
So I want to give you all a little bit of a definition,
But what I want to talk to you about here today,
And I'm actually going to turn the music down so you all can just hear me very clearly as I go through this with you today is I want to reintroduce you for those of you who haven't seen the power of emotions episode to the feelings wheel.
So this is the feelings wheel and I'm going to make it as big as I can for you all right now,
So excuse me as my video disappears and I'm going to just enlarge this a little bit for a moment.
And this is the feelings wheel by Gloria Wilcox and there's many different versions of these.
And I'm going to show you what the feelings wheel is.
If you can enlarge your screen or zoom in,
Great.
If not,
I have some other images that will show this to you better or you can even Google feelings wheel by Gloria Wilcox if you want this to come through more quickly.
And so what the feelings wheel is,
Is if you look at it just in this wheel format,
It has what she calls the six primary emotions at the center of the wheel.
And here we have sad,
Mad,
And scared at the top of the wheel.
These tend to be the more like we call difficult to feel or difficult to hold emotions.
And then we have peaceful,
Powerful,
And joyful at the bottom of the wheel,
Right?
We got this at the bottom of the wheel and then extending from each of those with the corresponding colors,
We have emotions that are connected to these six primary emotions.
And so an example here is I'm showing you the lower end of the wheel.
And so if we look at joyful,
For example,
We can see some connected emotions like sexy,
Energetic,
Creative,
Aware,
Which are like immediately connected and then branching out from those,
Stimulating,
Fascinating,
Daring,
Amused,
Extravagant,
Delightful,
Right?
So these are all connected to joy.
And then on the flip side,
When we have some of the more challenging to feel emotions,
We can look at things here like with,
Let's just look at scared.
So scared,
We have rejected,
Submissive,
Insecure,
Anxious,
Embarrassed,
Weak,
Foolish,
Foolish,
Discouraged,
Bewildered.
And if you flip over to sad,
You have miserable,
Stupid,
Bashful,
Inadequate,
Inferior,
Bored,
Lonely,
Depressed.
So you can see how powerful this emotions wheel really is in helping us have the language to describe what it is that we're even feeling in the first place.
And this is a really important concept,
Okay?
And I'm going to explain to you why,
And then we're going to circle back to the emotions wheel,
But I want to tell you about specifically about what this has to do with mental health,
Okay?
So each of us based upon who we are,
How we're born,
The families that we have,
The emotional capacity of the families that we have,
The emotional availability of the families that we have,
The trauma that we've experienced in our lives,
The things that we've had to overcome and our own personal,
Genetic and emotional,
Physical makeup of what we're comfortable with,
We each have a window of tolerance.
And I look at the way that I can describe this as you think of the window of tolerance like this.
And this window of tolerance inside of this window is the fluctuations of our emotions across the emotional wheel.
So really it kind of goes all over like this,
But our fluctuations in the challenging emotions,
We can say go down and the more easy or what we consider positive emotions going up.
Now I want to be very clear that I don't want to label any emotions as good or bad.
I'm going to name them positive and challenging,
Even though it's not as clear as that and you'll see why in a moment.
Okay,
Y'all following me?
So here's our emotions and here's our window of tolerance.
And as long as whatever we're feeling is inside of this window of tolerance,
We're good.
And we experience what we call emotional health,
Right?
We experience emotional health.
Emotional health isn't this static thing that you have or mental health isn't the static thing that you have that you then just always have because of you've accomplished something or gotten to some goal or listen to enough podcasts.
Mental health and emotional health is something that expands and contracts with our lives depending on how much we work it and how much we understand it.
So we all have this window of tolerance and anything that happens in here inside the window means we experience mental health.
Just like if your body is regulated,
You experience physical health.
But if your body gets sick,
If you have too much of something or if your fever gets too high or you get something in your system,
Then even though at one point you had physical health,
Now you have physical sickness or physical illness,
Right?
And so what happens with mental health is as soon as something goes out of this window of tolerance and notice I'm going in both directions,
We experience dis-ease,
Lack of ease in our mental health.
We experience a hiccup in our mental health and our emotional stability.
And if that goes very extreme outside of our window of tolerance,
Then we experience things that are called mental illness,
Right?
And when we have a certain mental illness or we're dysregulated,
Which is a word that I like to use instead of mental illness,
But if we're dysregulated,
Meaning it's out of our zone of regulation,
Then sometimes people have to take medications,
For example.
And what the medication is doing,
Right,
If you really look at any mental health or psycho medications,
Then what psychoactive medications rather,
What they're doing is they're trying to pull these emotional kind of rollercoaster back into your window of tolerance.
It's trying to kind of compress or limit the severity or the extremity at which you're feeling those emotions so that they can be back inside of your window of tolerance.
And so this is a really important way for us to understand what mental health means.
And another piece of this that's crucial,
Okay,
Crucial is what most of us think is that,
Whoop,
What most of us think is that mental health means only experiencing the things that are in the easy or the more positive or lighthearted to feel emotions.
So we think mental health means I feel just more peaceful or I feel more powerful or I feel more joyful in all the things that are connected to it.
But that's not actually what mental health means at all.
Mental health doesn't mean that you feel less sadness or less anger or less fear in place of,
You know,
To replace joy or whatever,
To have joy and stuff be in its place.
What mental health means,
Listen to me carefully,
This is what I'm telling you right now,
This is the big takeaway.
What mental health means is that you have the capacity to paint with every color of this emotional wheel on the canvas of your life.
That you have the capacity to paint with fear and peace and power and joy and sadness and anger and depression and rage and skepticism and amusement and sexiness and you can paint with every part of the spectrum,
The full palette.
And so this is what emotional health is,
Is expanding our capacity and our window of tolerance to paint with the full spectrum so that when one of the emotions come up for you,
It doesn't take you and snap you completely out of your window of tolerance.
Does this make sense everybody?
And so what most of us think is if my mental health is good,
Then I feel more peace or I feel less anger.
No,
It gives you the capacity to paint with the full spectrum.
And when we do certain practices like meditation or mindfulness,
Again,
Not all of them,
But some of them,
And I'll explain the difference to you in a moment,
What studies have shown over and over.
And many of you know that I'm like very woo.
I got my,
I actually don't have my crystal necklace on today.
Oh my gosh.
I got crystals and stuff all around me.
Got my tarot cards,
But I'm a total neuroscience and psychoeducation nerd.
This is like all I read about and all I do is reading this books and listening to these podcasts.
I'm a geek about this,
The research,
But the reason why I have so much mental health and stuff woven through my book and everything is because we have to understand how to implement this in our lives.
Because listen to me clearly how it all ties together here.
Y'all because of intergenerational trauma,
Which means the trauma that is passed down from our ancestors through generations and generations because of intergenerational trauma,
It is our responsibility here now to expand our capacity to feel more so that we don't pass on these limited windows of tolerance to the future generations.
And I see all your lovely comments right now.
Do you understand how this matters more than just for you?
So let me give you a clear example.
Let's say you have children or you have,
Like I have nieces,
Right?
Well,
Let's say you have little children and one of the emotions that you have trouble feeling is anger or no.
Yeah,
Let's stick with anger.
You have trouble feeling healthy anger.
Okay.
And so what will happen is when your young child is expressing anger,
You will have trouble holding that anger and will send the message back to that child that their anger is not safe or healthy to be expressed.
And now that child picks up the same pattern that anger is not a safe or a healthy emotion to be expressed.
Let's say you have trouble with fear,
Right?
When someone's scared,
When someone's scared,
Your tendency is to push it down,
Try to make them not scared,
Avoid it,
Avoid it,
Don't feel scared,
Don't feel angry,
Don't feel mad,
Don't feel too much,
Whatever.
And so your child or someone around you,
It doesn't even have to be your child if you don't have children,
Your students,
If you're a teacher,
Your nieces and nephews,
This is a social thing,
Right?
This is something that we're creating together with the people that we're around.
If fear is something that you can't hold,
Then when one of your children or your students or your mentees or someone,
A young person close to you in your life is trying to push forward in something new in their life that they're afraid of,
Let's say it's a young kid and they really want to do gymnastics or they really want to do ballet or dance and they're afraid to do it.
And because you're not good with handling your own fear,
You might convince them to do something more safe instead of going after their dreams.
And now they now don't have the capacity to hold their fears and step forward into their truth.
This is how we pass down intergenerational trauma.
And it goes all the way back.
Many of you have heard me talk about in slavery,
Right?
Talk about in slaved Africans in the United States had to push down all of their emotions.
And I'm going to say something a little bit triggering here.
So especially for any of you who've had any sexual trauma or anything like that,
If you want to mute right now,
Feel free.
Cause I'm going to say something a little triggering,
But it's,
It's real.
It's reality.
And I need you all to feel this,
That this happens not that many generations ago.
Okay.
So African slaves in the United States or in the United States,
When they were enslaved,
Would get sold on the chopping block away from their families,
Away from their children,
Away from their husbands.
Oftentimes this is the triggering part for the next sentence.
So just a warning here.
Oftentimes what happened,
We think that it's,
Oh,
They were standing up on this thing and you were just buying a slave.
No,
It was like buying a piece of cattle or property.
So they would have the slaves stripped down naked and sing and dance to show if they were going to be good entertainers or if they were fit,
Strip naked.
So imagining you're a mother and a father and you're sitting there and your young 12 year old daughter is naked in front of a whole audience of men and women who are coming up to her,
Your young 12 year old.
And literally this is in the record books,
What they did,
They would stick their fingers and items into their private parts to see how fertile they were.
And you as a mother and father had to sing and dance and be jovial while you were watching your daughter do this.
Because if you showed any negative emotions,
You would get slashed or lynched or whipped and watch as your daughter gets sold off.
Okay.
This is real American history.
This is not,
I have no exaggerations here.
You can look this up.
This is what happened.
And so what happened intergenerationally is when you think of today,
When we think of the image of a strong black man or a strong black woman who holds it together and who doesn't show any emotion,
Who can really just get through it and black women who experienced greater birth trauma and who scientifically get less pain medication when they're experiencing surgery because doctors have this bias that assume that black women are stronger than other women.
This is intergenerational trauma because black women and black men have passed down this value of being strong and not feeling emotions.
Because at one point it was not safe to feel those emotions.
And for many of our ancestors,
Not just black people,
For many of our ancestors,
Those who went through the Holocaust,
Those who went through different things,
It was not safe to feel your emotions.
But even though it's safe in some context for us now,
The intergenerational trauma that has been passed down to us makes us feel like we got to be strong.
And so when you step up and do this healing,
When you allow yourself to cry,
When you allow yourself to experience deep,
Deep,
Deep grief,
Grief,
Which is on the wheel of emotions,
When you allow yourself to experience your power and your joy and your confidence,
When you allow yourself to experience bliss and peace and being in the moment,
This is revolutionary because the only reason we're actually able here to be able to be safe to experience these emotions is because of all the work that generations past have done for us to get to this place.
And so I want you to understand that yes,
Your mental and emotional health is incredibly important for yourself,
But it is important for all of us in this generation now to do the healing and processing and cry for the ancestors of ours who were unable to cry.
When I cry,
I cry for all the black men and all the middle Eastern men,
This is my mix,
And all the Italian men who were in my past not able to cry.
I cry for them,
Which is why when I cry,
It's okay.
I get angry for them.
I feel joy for them and for me and to show those around me,
The other queer black gay boys who are watching me that it's okay.
And so it's all intertwined.
This is with the kingdom.
This is why I say that we're beyond,
We have an expanded definition of self.
We're all connected to one another.
And so this is how we become the ripples of change.
And this is beautiful,
Allison.
What if we have not a safe place to cry?
What if you don't have a safe space to cry?
What I want you to remember,
And this is big,
Some of us don't have safe spaces to cry,
Is you want to try to make yourself a safe space to cry.
And so if that's in your car,
In the bathroom,
In the shower,
You want to first,
What you have to first create in the safe space is this body,
This vessel.
You have to make it okay to see your own self experiencing it.
And so this is it,
Right?
This is it.
Yeah,
I see that,
The suck it up thing,
Right?
I heard that a lot as a kid.
Suck it up,
Don't be a sissy,
Right?
This is trauma.
And if I continue doing that,
Then I'm passing it down.
So let's talk about this one more time.
Now that you have this full context,
Right?
So what a lot of us think is that these easy,
What we call the more positive emotions,
Peace,
Power,
Joy,
Are the easy ones to feel.
And that the difficult emotions,
Sadness,
Anger,
Fear,
Are the ones that are harder to feel.
But that's not true.
That's not true,
Right?
Because we all know,
I want you to be really honest with yourself,
And this is going to be the practice that we're going to do in a moment,
Is some of us,
Like I know for me,
Okay,
I'm really,
Really good,
Really good at experiencing sadness and scared.
I'm good at experiencing scared.
I'm really good at experiencing sadness,
Right?
Sometimes,
It's hard for me to cry sometimes,
But I'm really good at experiencing,
Like if you go into the sadness column,
Like the experiences that are easy for me to access is loneliness.
Oh,
Sleepiness?
Look at this.
I got that,
Right?
Ashamed,
Inadequate,
Bashful.
I've felt these my whole life.
It's not hard for me to feel those.
I can wallow in those quite easily.
And then if you look at scared,
Insecure,
Anxious,
Rejected,
Discouraged,
Insignificant,
Embarrassed,
I've gotten really good at feeling those.
But then on the other hand,
Right,
We have these emotions like peace,
Feeling loving or trusting or intimate or nurturing or joyful,
Playful,
Creative.
So some of us,
It's not just that our window of tolerance,
I'm going back to this window of tolerance,
It's not just that,
Oh,
With the negative emotions spin us out,
Some of us limit how much joy we feel.
Some of us limit how much compassion we feel.
Some of us limit how much peace we feel.
We feel a certain amount of peace and whoop,
Whoop,
Something has to go wrong,
Back into my window of tolerance.
We experience confidence,
Oop,
Something has to go wrong,
Something has to sabotage this now,
Whoop,
Back into my window of tolerance.
This is too much joy.
And I'll show an example of this that happened on the collective level just very,
Very recently.
Okay,
Remember with the court case that happened with Derek Chauvin with the George Floyd trial,
Right?
So we had the court case and we had the charges,
Right?
And we had the verdict,
I'm not going to say all the right words here right now,
My brain is farting on the indictment and verdict and this and that,
But indictment,
Right?
So we got this news,
Right,
Which was traumatizing for everybody to be honest.
It was really hard for me to watch.
You know,
I felt compassion for him.
I know that sounds crazy,
But I really did.
I was watching Derek Chauvin on the trial and his face and hearing those charges read to him and watching the look in his eyes and having compassion for him because I think he should be held accountable and the system failed him too.
The system that rewarded him constantly for his actions failed him too.
So now here's two lives completely lost from this senseless situation.
But the point that I want to talk about,
About our collective mental and emotional health,
And I want you to be careful of when you get stuck in this,
Right?
Because we're very susceptible to the mental dis-ease that our communities might have,
Whether it's the LGBTQIA plus community,
The Black Lives Matter community,
That these communities,
Whatever community you want.
So I want you to listen to me very carefully.
Do you remember after the Derek Chauvin trial,
This was the biggest win,
If we call it that,
That has ever happened in the capacity of something like this,
Right?
Culturally in the United States,
It was massive.
This has only happened two or three times in history where a cop really gets it,
You know?
And what happened right away was every black person and every social justice person that I saw online started saying,
The fight's not over.
We didn't win anything.
This is not justice.
This is not justice.
This is accountability.
There's a difference between accountability and injustice.
We don't celebrate yet.
There's so,
So much work to do.
And I'm sitting here thinking,
Y'all can't even celebrate.
Celebrate.
This is a big deal.
This is amazing what just happened.
This man was indicted,
Was held accountable on all of these charges.
And in jury,
This is the first time this has ever happened in our modern time.
Celebrate the moment.
It's okay,
Black community.
It's okay,
Social justice community,
To let yourself feel joy.
And then,
Yes,
Tomorrow we'll get back to work.
But for right now,
Don't push down the joy because we've gotten so used to being in this limited capacity of being the oppressed ones that we can't experience what it's like to feel a victory.
And so I want you to feel this on every level when things happen socially,
Collectively,
Personally,
Interpersonally,
When you limit your joy and your expression of freedom.
Right?
So this is really important.
I want you to watch because we're watching these leaders on social media whose mental health container is limited.
And then we think that we're supposed to follow suit.
No.
So when I watched what I posted that day,
I said,
This is what justice feels like.
Breathe it in,
Feel it,
Enjoy it for the moment.
And Alonzo,
I love your comment here that says,
As soon as I start feeling peace,
I have to catch myself thinking,
Is it too good to be true?
I literally start to brace myself for what might happen.
My recent mantra to stop this thought is I am here.
It immediately stops my what if thoughts and brings me into the present moment.
That's beautiful.
Everybody,
You can try that right now.
Hands over your heart,
Whatever you're feeling,
And just drop into,
I am here.
I am here.
So beautiful.
And so as we expand our capacity and our resilience and our mental health,
What we're experiencing is expanding.
This is the main point is our window of tolerance,
Expanding it to paint with the full canvas,
Full spectrum color palette of our emotional wheel.
And this leads me to why I teach meditation.
Why a big part of the reason why I wrote stay woke.
So in the power of emotions episode,
You all heard me say,
Feel,
This is the process.
Feel reveal,
Heal.
I want you all to type those words in feel,
Reveal,
Heal.
And the reason that is,
And this,
I got this from Casey crown.
Who's been a guest twice here on the kingdom is you have to feel it to reveal the message.
And it to then heal it.
And if you don't let yourself feel it,
Nothing gets revealed to you and you can't heal it.
And what doesn't heal repeats.
And so you keep repeating the same traumas and cycles over and over with a different relationship with a different person.
This time they're in a skirt and this time they're in a suit and this time they're in pants and this time it's your parents and this time it's this thing.
And then it gets passed down until you finally feel it.
And so if we can't give ourselves permission to feel it,
Then we can't lean in to do the shadow work to help us understand what the feeling is trying to reveal in us in the first place so that we can heal it and move forward.
This is it.
And so what I want you to give yourself permission to do is to feel,
I'm going to give you another little hint.
What you practice,
This is a quote from Shauna Shapiro who eventually I'll have on here as a guest.
She's amazing,
Amazing colleague of mine.
Shauna is the truth and Shauna's quote,
And she's a mindfulness teacher as well.
She says,
What you practice grows stronger.
What you practice grows stronger.
And so the reason why this is an important thing is because as it relates to meditation and mindfulness,
A lot of people think,
Well,
As long as I meditate,
Then I'm increasing my mental health.
Not true because it depends on the kind of meditation that you're doing because some meditations,
What they ask us to do is to shut down our emotions and shut down our thoughts and not think or feel anything.
And these are the meditations that say,
Focus on a candle flame,
Focus on your breath,
Stop thinking,
Slow down your mind,
Don't think about anything.
And all of you know who've worked with me in my meditation practices is that's not the kind of meditation that I teach or that I rec chat.
And so the type of meditation that I teach,
Freedom meditation,
And there's a whole lineage of these styles of meditations,
Are meditations that invite us to welcome our emotions,
To welcome our emotions.
And one of the examples that I do,
That I give you all is this,
Is the practice that I want to do with you all today.
So we're going to do our power practice,
Okay?
Which is,
I think,
Going to be one that's really,
Really fun for you all.
So let me just get us to the slide.
So here's our practice for today.
It's very simple and it's a metaphorical practice.
So wherever you are right now,
I want you to spot,
To look at some spot in your room that's not moving,
So don't let it be the screen.
Look at something in the room or the space that you're in and lock your eyes directly on this one point without moving your eyes from that point at all.
So for clarity,
Find one spot to look at in your room.
It could even be a spot on the wall,
A tree,
Something outside your window.
Look straight at this one spot and don't move your eyes from it.
Straight at it.
Now focus.
And as you focus on this one spot,
I want you to notice how it feels to try your best to focus without moving your eyes at all.
Okay.
Now here's step two.
Keep looking at this one spot with a gentle focus,
Try your best not to move your eyes.
And while looking at this one spot,
I want you to start to expand your peripheral awareness,
Your peripheral vision.
So that means while looking straight at this one spot,
Notice how far to the right of you you can expand and see without moving your eyes.
And notice how far to the left of you you can see without moving your eyes.
And notice how far above and below you you can see all without moving your eyes.
And feel yourself expanding.
You're going to stay gently focused on this one point and start to expand and notice you can even put your arms out to the side and see how far back you can let your arms go while still being able to capture a glimpse of your thumbs.
You might even notice you can almost see behind you some of you a little bit,
Depending on how wide and expansive your vision goes.
Now the last piece of this is I want you to notice as you expand left,
Right,
Up,
Down,
All while looking at this one point,
How many colors you can spot in the space around you.
How many textures you can spot in the space around you.
How many shadows you can spot in the space around you.
Just notice the diversity of your experience all while looking at this one point.
Now what I want you to notice is this.
Here's the big takeaway.
As you look at this point,
What I'm inviting you to do with your eyes right now is the same thing that we do with our minds to increase our mental health in meditation.
We focus on a point.
In my practices,
It's a mantra or your unique energy signature.
And we welcome in the full pallet,
The full landscape,
The full diversity of our internal emotional experience.
The same way you're looking at a point with your eyes and welcoming in the diversity of your visual experience.
In mindfulness,
We welcome a point,
Focus on it gently with our mind and welcome in the diversity of our mental and emotional and physical experience.
That's it.
All right,
You can come out of that now.
That's it.
And so when you're doing this kind of meditation practice,
I'll show you this visual thing that I did really illustrates the difference between the two styles,
Two schools of thought as it relates to meditation.
When I had you first look at a point and I said,
Look at this one point and don't move your eyes,
Those are monastic styles of meditation,
Which often come from monks,
Which say,
Look at this one thing.
Don't think about anything else.
Don't look at anything else.
Focus directly on one point and don't move your eyes,
Meaning focused directly on your breath or a candle flame or an image or your heartbeat and don't think about anything else.
That's one style of meditation.
That's not,
It's that style works for some people.
That's not the style that works for me or the style that I teach.
The other class of meditation,
Whole lineage in line that in my,
In my lineage comes from the Vinyana Bhairava Tantra meditation for people who live in the world.
It's still saying,
Hey,
Focus on a point,
Something positive in your life,
But don't push down your emotions and your thought.
Just gently focus on the point and welcome in everything around you internally.
Welcome it so it can come up and be healed.
Y'all follow me on that.
Now this is why it relates to,
And this is what I'm going to close with,
Why it relates to what Shauna Shapiro said about what you practice grows stronger.
Because if you're practicing a meditation technique,
If you're practicing a meditation technique where what you're practicing every day is focusing on something and pushing everything else down,
Then what's growing stronger.
That sounds to me like,
Let me focus on work and push down my sadness.
Let me focus on my kids and push down my anger or frustration.
Let me focus on whatever I need to focus on my art,
My business,
And push down what I'm really feeling.
We don't want to practice that.
If what I practice grows stronger,
What I want to grow stronger is me being able to gently welcome the full pallet and capacity of who it is that I really am and to hold it tenderly with compassion.
I want to practice healing inside of myself.
I want to practice feeling so I can reveal the lessons.
That's it.
That's right,
Wanda.
The type of meditations that you practice,
Some of them,
The ones that allow us to practice feeling and thinking and those things help our mental health.
The other ones might regulate us and make us feel better in the moment.
Let's say like,
I'll give you where these are very useful.
Let's say you're super triggered and you're going through something super big that you can't hold and you need to regulate your nervous system.
That's a great moment to go to one of those other meditation techniques to go,
Okay,
Let me just get myself regulated.
Let me do some breath practices and focus,
Focus,
Focus,
And block everything out so I can regulate myself so then I can allow myself to feel.
That's when those come into play for me.
This is what we're doing.
That's it.
The sun grows.
Then Nadine says she often gives herself a hug during meditation.
I do the same thing.
All right,
So here's your main takeaway.
I'm putting back up the wheel of emotions,
Right?
Here's what we're closing with today.
What I want you to do is type into the chat box the emotions,
Pick three of them if you can,
Up to three,
That you have the most trouble feeling,
That you have the hardest time feeling.
Meaning when it comes up,
You often try to push it down or avoid it or fix it.
I want you to type those in.
Your takeaway is this.
At some point this week,
And I don't want you to catastrophize what this means because we all feel a full range of the emotions throughout the week.
At some point this week,
You're going to have an opportunity to feel this emotion.
It's going to come up for you because of course it will.
When it comes up,
I want you to commit,
Commit to this action.
Here's our action.
I want you to commit that when the emotion comes up,
You'll grab yourself and hold yourself in a tender hug and tell yourself,
I'm here.
It's okay.
You're allowed to feel this.
And just pause.
And I don't mean pause for five seconds.
I mean pause for a couple minutes.
Take some breaths.
Pause.
I'm here.
It's okay.
You're allowed to feel this.
You guys should write this down.
And then after a few moments,
After you give yourself the allowance to feel,
This is important.
You don't go into this too quick.
You can then ask the question,
What do you want to reveal to me?
Now most of us try to get to that spot too quick.
We feel a little bit of stress and we're like,
What does this mean?
No,
You can't know what it means until you feel it.
Give yourself a few minutes to feel it,
Feel it,
Feel it.
I feel it.
Oh,
This is cracking me open.
This is breaking my heart.
Remember,
It might not be a sad emotion.
It could be power when you feel joy.
I'm here.
You're allowed.
What are you here to reveal to me?
So give yourself that ability to see what it's here to reveal.
And over time,
As you do this practice,
This simple practice,
Even if you're not meditating or anything,
You will start to build your window of tolerance,
Expanding it.
Meaning when you feel inadequate,
When you feel fear,
When you feel anger,
When you feel guilt,
When you feel sleepy,
You can learn the lesson that's trying to be revealed.
You can heal it.
And that healing it doesn't mean you never feel it anymore.
Healing anger doesn't mean I'm never angry.
Healing inadequacy doesn't mean I don't feel inadequate.
Healing inadequacy,
Anger,
Fear,
Things means that when I feel it,
Because I will,
I can hold it tenderly and I'll be okay.
That's it.
And like young pueblo sim is that the way that you know,
This is the way that I know I'm growing and it's over time.
This is kind of like your tester of how you know your practices are working is when the same trigger shows up in your life.
The same thing that usually flips you out.
And let's say typically when you feel that inadequacy or you feel that anger,
You spiral out for hours and then the next time it comes up,
Maybe instead of spiraling out for five hours,
You spiral for three.
That's growth.
Maybe the next time you experience it after that,
You spiral for one hour and then over time you spiral for 30 minutes,
10 minutes,
Five minutes,
And then you're no minutes.
Then the inadequacy comes up and you hold it and say,
Hey baby,
I see you.
I know you.
We're going to be okay.
And this is how you test your mental health.
What most of us think is if I'm doing this work on myself,
I should be feeling no inadequacy.
No,
It's not this elevator ride to from complete spin out to completely fine.
Usually that can happen,
Right?
You can have massive breakthroughs in that way.
Of course we all have had them,
But generally it's,
You'll keep experiencing the trigger and that is when the healing happens because that's when you get to practice and little by little,
I love you.
Let's close out with our golden nugget,
Shall we?
So as we close every single one of our kingdom sessions with a golden nugget,
Place your hands over your heart,
Close your eyes,
Welcome yourself inward.
And I shared a lot today and I want you to think about what is your number one takeaway.
If there was one thing that you could remember from this session,
What is it?
One thing,
What is it?
And then maybe you repeat this thing in your mind a few times to help you remember it.
It takes 20 to 30 seconds to commit something to the longterm memory.
And then right now in your heart,
I want you to commit that you will share this one thing that you learned with someone you love today,
Whether that's with someone in your family or in your household or you send a text message or a phone call or you even post something on social media.
If you do,
Please tag me and I'll try to repost it.
But this is how we take these lessons and pass them around.
And it's not about you being a teacher.
I always say this and I don't,
I don't,
This is how I live around my teaching.
Don't teach,
Share what you know.
And so you can now type your golden nuggets into the chat box.
This is beautiful.
Allow yourself to be me.
Beautiful.
Step by step,
Breath by breath,
Moment by moment.
I'd love to see your golden nuggets in the chat box.
And somebody asked just briefly,
What were the first three things that you say when you hold yourself?
Very simple.
I'm here.
Thanks for that,
Alonzo.
So it's I'm here.
I think I have shoot.
Now I don't remember what I said.
I'm here.
It's okay.
You're allowed to feel this,
Something like that.
That will work.
I'm here.
It's okay.
You're allowed to this.
You can also watch the replay and catch what I said.
So I love your golden nuggets.
Mental health means that you have the capacity to paint with the emotional wheel on the canvas of your life.
We are ripples of change.
It's a canvas of your life.
I will feel all of the emotions,
The importance of feeling all of our emotions.
So don't pass on,
Suck it up.
Don't be too scared to feel or express your feelings.
You have to feel it to heal it.
Invite the feeling.
Mental health is challenge tolerating,
Challenging emotions,
No bad emotions,
Just challenging ones.
What you practice grows stronger.
We expand our capacity to feel so we don't pass on intergenerational trauma.
This is the power of mental health.
I love you all very much,
Family.
Maybe close with our closing prayer.
Hands over the heart,
Feeling the web of this community,
Feeling how different you might feel now compared to when you came to this session today and just noticing any change in your own emotions.
What do you feel?
God,
Spirit,
Universe.
All that is,
All that ever has been and all that ever will be,
Thank you for giving us the capacity to heal and feel.
Thank you for giving us the capacity to heal for the generations that couldn't before us.
Thank you for bringing us together and may we each give ourselves permission to be in the full spectrum of this life and who it is that we really are.
May we each remember that we are worthy and safe to feel our feelings if we can be safe within,
And may we each remember that you,
God,
Spirit,
Universe,
All that is,
That you are all of the emotions and that we may not limit God or spirituality or goodness to one particular state,
But that God,
Spirit,
Universe,
All that is,
Is in every state,
Every feeling.
We can hear the whisper,
God's whisper in each of the emotions if we're courageous enough to lean in and feel it.
May you all be happy.
May you be free.
May you be well.
We rise together.
And I'd love as we're closing this with an amen to type one word in the chat box from the feelings wheel that describes how you're feeling right now at the end of this session.
One word in the chat box that describes how you feel.
I'll put the wheel back up for us.
I am feeling.
.
.
Here's the wheel.
I am feeling proud.
I'm feeling energetic.
I'm feeling stimulated.
I am feeling loving.
I'm feeling sentimental.
I'm feeling nurturing and thankful.
So with all of your emotions,
We close.
Thank you,
God.
Thank you,
Spirit.
Thank you,
Universe.
May the world heal through feeling,
Through revealing,
Through becoming.
Hashi,
Aho,
Salam,
Shalom,
Amen,
Awen,
Satnam,
Om.
Thank you.
This is the kingdom,
The kingdom that shines.
We rise together and together we rise.
This is Justin Michael Williams signing out.
I love you all and I'll see you and meet you right here in this special place the next time we're together.
Bye for now.
I hope you enjoyed this session of the kingdom.
One of the best things that you can do right now is share this session with somebody that you love.
It is only by each of us sharing inspiration in the corners of the world that only we can reach that we will rise together.
Thank you so much for joining me for this session of the kingdom.
I'll see you in the next one.
