How Do You Want It To Feel

Often we devote so much energy to anticipating the outcomes of experience. We become anxious with the reality that the outcome, no matter how much we prepare, is unknown until we find ourselves alive in it as it unfolds. This episode explores the idea that WHAT we have been focusing on in the hopes of preparing and easing our suffering is actually the wrong thing. If the outcome is largely out of control, what would it be like to focus on how we want to FEEL regardless of how things play out?

Please note: This track may include some explicit language.

Transcript

Wake the Fuck Up,

The podcast that mingles mindfulness,

Buddhism,

Brain science,

Evolutionary biology,

And real authentic human experience.

Welcome to Wake the Fuck Up.

Hello,

My loves,

And welcome to this episode of Wake the Fuck Up.

I am your podcast host,

Tiffany Andres,

And today's episode is titled How Do You Want to Feel?

And I'm giggling because this whole episode is spurred by somebody that I mentioned in our last episode,

A beautiful radiant human being who has become such a close and dear friend of mine,

Rachel.

And Rachel asks me this question almost every day,

How do you want today or the rest of the day to feel?

And it's interesting because when she first started asking me,

I don't know that I gave it the attention and the depth that that question really carries.

And Rachel is a channeler and a healer.

If you are at all interested in the work that she does,

Please feel free to visit her website,

Rachelinsebastian.

Com.

She is so powerful and incredible at what she does.

And I've been blessed to have an angel reading one on one with her as well as to show up for her biweekly offerings every other Wednesday of a group angel dialogues.

And if you're interested in that,

I would highly encourage you to hop on and join one of those group sessions.

What I find personally is that every single time I show up,

You are invited to have a question that you want guidance from the angels around.

And I'm feeling compelled in this moment to share that the word angels is a concept.

Rachel has shared with me and I'm going to put this in my own language.

So Rachel,

If you're listening,

Forgive me if it's not 100% correct and accurate,

That the word angels is something we can use to define an energy and an experience of our guides or the wisdom energies or the gods or the buddhas or however you want to conceptualize it and whatever feels true and real for you.

But the word that Rachel uses is angels.

And so I just love and roll with that.

But what I've found in every single one of these angel dialogues is that without standing up and asking my question,

Without presenting my individual and unique question to the angels,

My question always gets answered.

And one of the things that has come out of almost every single session is the invitation to understand that our life and how we feel inside of our life is guided by how we want to and choose to feel.

And I want to be tender as I offer this because for me,

There's a realness in the past that this idea that we can feel how we want to feel about things sometimes comes in conflict with the natural emotions and responses that arise within our body and mind.

And so what I do not want to do is suggest that any emotional response you have to anything in your life is bad or wrong or needs to be changed.

But instead,

This question,

How do you want to feel,

Is an invitation to set the sails on your sailboat and to have a trajectory for where you're going.

It doesn't mean that the habitual and conditioned ways that we have learned to engage with,

Perceive and experience the world inside and outside of us is always going to match those intentions.

But what I've found for myself to be true is that when we don't ask the question,

How do I want to feel,

We're guided by that unconscious protection that we talked about in the last episode.

And of course,

For those of you that know me,

So much of my learning and leaning in and curiosity and growth at this time period in my life comes from my experience of separation from my wife,

The loss of my family,

The distance from my son and the whole process of divorce and lawyers and the physical separations and untanglings that are just a natural process of this experience happening in my life and the life of those I was once tied to.

And so I'll say this to say that where this episode came from was a beautiful session of the Angel Dialogues with Rachel that happened to come the day before my lawyer was set to speak with my soon to be ex-wife's lawyer.

And it was the first conversation happening between our lawyers.

It's been about nine months since we separated and four months since we stopped really speaking.

But this is or was like a very kind of culminating moment,

Right?

Like what's going to happen?

And what got offered in the Angel Dialogues,

Again,

I did not ask a question,

But somebody else showed up with a question who also happened to be going through divorce.

And I think it's really fascinating and profound the way these things every single time I've showed up to these sessions has happened.

But what the angels offered was your divorce is going to feel how you want it to feel.

And it was like a strike in the heart to recognize that I hadn't asked myself that question.

How do I want my divorce to feel?

Not,

And this is where I think we get caught up and stuck,

Not how do I want it to go,

Not what do I want the outcome to be,

Not what are my expectations and attachments,

Right?

But how do I want it to feel?

In a way we're asking how do I want to feel through this process?

And I'm speaking to a process that at least for me feels very big and monumentous,

Right?

Divorce is not a small thing.

And my wife and I were together for 10 years untangling the life that we had built and allowing that to fall away and regrowing from the freshness of the composted earth of what was at least for me feels fucking huge,

Right?

So asking this question,

How do I want to feel through this process of divorce?

How do I want my divorce to feel was so profound.

But we can ask this question just like Rachel has done throughout the entirety of our friendship.

How do you want today or the rest of today to feel?

She'll ask me that question at 8 o'clock at night.

And it's still relevant.

It's still meaningful because as long as we're awake,

As long as we are breathing,

And as long as we're here,

The question matters.

And I know I've talked before about my feeling,

The evolution for me of what karma really means,

Right?

But I'll share it again here because I think what we're really talking about is setting our intentions,

You know,

Setting our sails.

And one of my favorite quotes is the mind is like tofu.

It tastes like what you marinated in.

So what we're really doing when we ask this question is we're building our marinade.

And I have firmly come to believe that karma is not some universal energy that exists that when you do something bad,

This universal energy is going to punish you.

And when you do something good,

This universal energy is going to reward you.

But instead,

Karma is that if in one moment,

We set our mind and our body and our spirit into the energy of negativity,

Of disliking or rejecting,

Of anxiousness and mistrust,

Then what we're likely to get in the next moment is going to match that energy.

Whereas if we set our energy and our intentions and our mind and our spirit and our bodies in something positive,

Loving,

Connected,

Open and tender,

Then because we've marinated in that,

We are more likely in the next moment to be attuned to that which creates those exact experiences.

And I'll tie this again to something I know I've talked about before,

But I think we have to hear things a thousand times before one time it just strikes us and it's super meaningful and powerful that the science suggests that in any given moment,

There are 3 million bits of information that we could be using to paint our picture of reality,

But we only use about 200,

000 of those.

That means 2.

8 million bits of information every single moment are not being used to form our perception and our understanding of what's here and happening in the moment.

And this is where I think karma takes hold because if we've marinated ourselves in something painful or negative or difficult or rejecting,

Then it's more likely that those 200,

000 bits that our mind unconsciously chooses to use are the ones that are attuned to the marinade from the moment before and it's going to be negative.

But if we've marinated in something beautiful,

Then we've attuned ourselves to that energy and frequency of beautiful,

Positive,

And loving and the mind is naturally going to pay attention to those 200,

000 bits of information.

Years ago I recorded a short morning meditation that was an intention setting meditation and I've started doing this again recently and it was spurred by this exact same experience in the angel dialogues with Rachel,

You know,

How do you want to feel?

Your divorce will feel how you want it to feel.

When I woke up the next morning and knew this conversation was on the horizon for that day,

I realized my mind was immediately jumping to,

Well,

What's going to happen?

What's the outcome going to be?

How's the conversation going to go?

What's my lawyer going to tell me?

And I realized immediately that none of that had anything to do with how I was going to feel.

Instead it was actually perpetuating in that moment a feeling of anxiety and being out of control and uncertainty with not knowing.

So I asked myself the question,

How do I want to feel?

And what I came up with was loving and compassionate because I can recognize that this isn't just hard for me,

It's also hard for the person that I loved for 10 years.

I love and hate the idea that there are no happy endings.

Endings are painful,

They're hard,

They're sad,

They're a loss,

They incite grief.

The newness,

The rebuilding,

The fresh life,

The birth that comes from that and happens often simultaneously,

That's where the good and the beauty come from.

But the end,

The death is painful.

So I wanted to be loving.

I wanted to be compassionate.

I wanted to be open and playful towards whatever the outcome was because I could recognize that no matter if I came up with a thousand or a million scenarios,

None of them were going to be the exact thing that happened.

And sure enough,

I could not have even conceptualized that outcome.

It was way different than anything I could have possibly expected.

And because I had set my intention to be open and playful and loving and compassionate,

I didn't feel the resistance and the anger take hold of me that I know would have had I not asked myself that question.

And this is another thing I want to offer.

When we set our intentions and we really set our energy body to marinate in a specific frequency,

It doesn't prevent our habitual and conditioned responses from coming up.

So when I say that,

I say that to say that when I got the response after that conversation,

It's like I could feel those habitual and conditioned responses showing up,

Like I could feel that there was a part of me that wanted to resist.

There was a part of me that wanted to be frustrated and angry and annoyed.

But because I had decided in advance how I wanted that experience to feel,

I could be with those emotions and not let them run the show.

I stayed open.

I stayed playful.

I stayed soft and loving and compassionate.

I took a breath and there was just this sense of,

All right,

This is okay.

So from a playful perspective,

Where do we go from here?

And I have now asked myself that question every single day since that moment.

And I have revisited the meditation that I recorded,

The intention setting meditation.

And I'll offer here that that meditation is slightly different than just saying how do you want today to feel or how do you want X,

Y,

Or Z to feel because it's an invitation as soon as you wake up in the morning to think about what's ahead of you in your day and maybe even intentionally bring up anything that you expect to be hard or to maybe not go so well or so easily and then ask yourself that question.

Not what do you want it to look like or what do you want the outcome to be or how do you want it to go because God knows we are not fucking in control.

But how do you want to feel?

Imagine those situations going as poorly as possible and ask yourself the question,

How could I feel inside of that experience such that regardless of how shitty it goes,

I walk away feeling okay or I walk away feeling proud of myself or if it goes really,

Really badly,

How do I want to feel and how can I show up in a way that maybe,

Just maybe,

It tips the scales and makes it something that can be done together and that we walk out of successfully and with ease.

And again,

It's not being attached to the outcome.

It's recognizing that the only thing we really have autonomy and control over is ourself even though that's also very hard.

And it's also giving ourselves the space and the permission to not feel the way we set our sails toward.

Setting our sails doesn't prevent a storm from coming in and blowing you completely off course and that too is just a part of life and life experience.

I know I've said before but I not too long ago read The Alchemist and if you haven't read that book,

It's absolutely beautiful but what I walked away from that book after reading it with was this feeling that we as human beings are both blessed and cursed with this very narrow perspective.

All we can see really is our own experience and we can only see the present and the past but from a wide enough perspective,

Taking a look,

A gaze at the fullness of the earth and her process,

The fullness of our life and our experiences,

Our whole lifetime.

In the end,

Every single thing we feel,

Experience and go through ends up being for the good.

That does not mean that it doesn't royally suck while it's happening but that it's just a part of this brilliant,

Radiant,

Wild human experience to take those things and just like the earth takes our trash and composts it and turns it into flowers and food,

We too are that earth.

We take the trash and the filth of our experiences and we turn them into roses or calla lilies or any other flower that you love.

From a wide enough perspective,

It's all beautiful.

So then the question becomes,

How do you want it to feel in the moment and can you give yourself the gift every single day of taking a few minutes to make a marinade that tastes fucking delicious?

Thank you so much for listening and being here with me today.

I am honored by all of you that have taken the time to listen.

I hope these words,

These thoughts,

These concepts and ideas plant seeds for you that grow into beauty and love and tenderness and connection like you've never known.

Thank you for caring and loving for yourself enough to sit and listen for these 20 minutes.

The light in me sees and deeply honors the light in you.

Until next time.