How do we change sadness and despair into hope, love, faith, fantastic energy and passion? I'm grateful today to have this to share with you because this is what I just did, and I hope it shows the good sides of things like hope, sadness and despair. I hope it gives a very clear way to get fantastic levels of energy and enthusiasm in life.
Thank you for reading about day 194 of Happier People Podcast and I hope you enjoy it!
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Unlock Bursts of Energy by Transmuting Sadness and Fear into Love and Hope! #194
So many times people ask:
How do you have so much passion?
How do you maintain your inspiration and your motivation?
How do you have so much joy?
How do you have the energy to create and share this?
It often comes directly after fully experiencing sadness, despair, misery and depression.
I spent about an hour just crying this morning with my daughter, and that's what was alive in me.
Now, my mind is begging me to give you a reason, to say, "Why? What's wrong, Jerry? Why? Can't you just be perfectly happy all the time and have a smiling face on, no matter what's happening in the world?”
What I find is that life is an emotional trip.
It is like a school, we are here to learn things like unconditional love, we are here to experience all of life, not just ecstasy, the emotion, and highs, naturally, and all of the joy and happiness. We are also here to learn and lots of times our learning comes through what we call negative emotions.
It comes through what we call sadness. It comes through what we call pain. Lots of times that's how it comes through, and thank God, I've got my two and a half year old daughter who helps me to have the courage to just feel my feelings whatever they look like and not to be afraid of what people around me will think when I just, "Let it go, let it go, can't hold it back anymore. Let it go, let it go…"
I don't know the rest of the song right off the top of my head. I get fantastic energy and emotion today.
"Why are you screaming at me, Jerry?"
Because when I am open to experiencing all of life, then I unlock my full power.
When I used to hold back on things like sadness, when I used to just try and drink my negative feelings away, when I used to hate my misery, when I used to hate my sadness, when I used to be disgusted by my weakness, when I used to refuse to be vulnerable, it was very hard to genuinely produce something that had my full power and energy behind it.
You can tell the difference, you can tell when something comes from the heart, it has this magnificent power to it.
I feel like I'm about to just sprout wings and fly into heaven right now and that's because after an hour of crying, after an hour of looking at the despair of the world and hearing some of my father's Vietnam stories recently, watching a woman he loved get blown up on stage in front of him, thinking and crying over the misery of this world, then I'm motivated to ask:
How may I help?
How may I help today?
What can I contribute to be genuinely useful to another person?
What can I do from the comfort of my home today that might help someone else anywhere in the world to feel good, to unlock the full power within?
I love the analogy I've been reading in "Many Masters, Many Lives" by Brian Weiss.
The analogy goes something like this:
All of who we are is like a diamond in soul terms. We are immortal souls, beings that are no different fundamentally than God. A piece of God just like a piece of a diamond is a diamond. When you take a big diamond and smash it up into little diamonds, it is a diamond. When you take God and smash God up into little pieces called immortal souls, those are each God, a piece of God.
Each of us is like a diamond and it seems that our task here is to polish our diamonds, that many of us come into this world in one state of polishing or another.
We have got filthy diamonds, and when you look and see the souls, you see some filthy diamonds out there, and when we remember underneath what might look filthy on the surface, there's a beautiful diamond under there, and that's who I am and that's who everyone else really is, and why we are here.
I used to think we couldn't know the answers to questions like why we are here.
We can.
We are here to polish our diamonds.
We are here to learn about unconditional love.
We are here to be like God if you like the word, God.
If you don't, we are here to be like love, to love in every situation, in every circumstance.
That's why we are here.
This often becomes clear ironically in the middle of despair and sadness. Whereas in the middle of happiness, ecstasy or joy, it can also be clear, and yet it's the middle state of denied sadness where everything gets cloudy.
It's that messy state that many of us call normal existence. The restless, irritable and discontent state you would often associate with being at work.
You know, where someone is on edge like another driver is just about to blow up at you because you pulled out in front of their car and, "Oh, my God. You pulled out …" It's in that essentially normal state, especially in the USA where I live, this normal state of irritable.
It's really hard to remember why we are here and what we are doing. It's really hard in that state to remember our purpose.
I have so much energy and enthusiasm to share with you because other people have helped me feel safe to feel my feelings, and experience the despair without thinking there's something wrong with me.
There's nothing wrong with any of us today.
There's nothing wrong with any of us and that's how we are able to overcome this idea that it's not okay to just feel sadness. It's not okay that if you feel a moment of sadness you'd better go get someone to give you something to get rid of that, or you'd better take a drink to get rid of that.
We do things that often we think of as the enemy, we go to these specialists, we go to people, we talk to our family and friends and all of a sudden depression, sadness and anger start to become the enemy.
These are the enemy, we need to stuff these out, we need to live a life where we never get sad anymore.
I read a book called "Dying to Be Me" where the author had an amazing near-death experience she shared and one thing that stuck with me, she said that we don't have to be positive all the time, we don't need to be putting on a smiling face especially if that's not true, if we feel sad, we need to let it out.
When a lot of us understandably are scared of feeling sad, we are afraid the others are going to judge us and condemn us to a miserable existence.
"Oh, my God. Why are you so sad and depressed? You need to go see someone. You can't be around like this."
Why?
Why can't I show up to a baby shower thinking the world is disgusting and that the best thing that could happen in this planet would be for all of us to be wiped out?
Why can't I feel like that sometimes?
Because I do feel like that sometimes.
In my darkest feelings, I feel like I'm a cancer cell and that humanity is the cancer on this Earth and that the best thing that could happen to all of us would be to be eliminated, all of us, to just stop reproducing and quit.
Imagine if you had cancer.
Imagine that the cancer cells just looked around and saw what they were doing, and said, "Oh, my God. We're going to kill this person. Let's just enjoy what we have today. We're going to stop reproducing and all the cancer cells will just die off and the cancer will just go away within days."
That's possible.
The lady in "Dying to Be Me" seems to have actually experienced that. The cancer cells just stopped reproducing, even though she was in stage 4, according to the doctor, she was hopeless. It's all on medical record, the cancer just disappeared for no reason.
It's okay to experience sadness and misery.
It's okay sometimes to feel whatever is alive inside of us.
It's okay to feel our feelings, and one thing that helps if we want to have fantastic energy, if we want to experience our full power, if we want to transmute our suffering into something useful, it helps to have people, it helps to have animals in our lives, that can help us do that.
Thank God that my wife and my daughter make it safe for me to feel feelings for no reason, to just cry and sob, it's all wrong and to know that first, it's nothing personal.
I'm not mad at you. I'm not sad at you. I'm not going to hurt you because I'm crying. I'm not going to say nasty things. I'm just hurting right now. I'm crying, I'm sad and it's okay.
Now, my two and a half-year-old daughter she sometimes just has a breakdown for no reason, or if you want a reason, because she's tired and it's the end of the day, she's been told 50 things to do that day and the fifty-first thing just puts her over the edge.
"No. I don't want to take a bath right now."
That's okay, and we try to respect that.
"Okay. You don't want to take a bath? How may we help you go to bed then?"
Thank God, my wife and my daughter make it safe for me to feel my feelings. They don't take it personally most of the time. None of us are perfect and that's been a big thing for me to learn to be a better husband and not to take it personally when my wife is crying or sobbing, that I am good enough even if she's temporarily miserable and to know and have absolute faith that she will walk through her misery.
Now, what blocks our ability to transmute sadness, misery and depression into something useful is a "what's wrong?" mindset.
If we are feeling sadness, if we are feeling that human beings are the scum of this planet, or if we are feeling something undesirable, that something is wrong with us, that tends to block us from getting the good out of it.
Although the pain of consistently doing that is likely to help us, to force us through just sheer misery to get something better out of it.
The question is what's my threshold today?
Today, I'm pretty sensitive. My two and a half-year-old daughter is pretty sensitive. If she does something and I were to yell at her, she would instantly just sob and cry about it.
In fact, if I just get a little scared of something lots of times, she will break down and cry. Just me experiencing a moment of fear is sometimes enough, and then she cries.
Now, we are in the middle of a world of fear.
Our religion, if you want to look at a religion for all of humanity, there are two religions: Fear and Love. Those are the two basic religions. They are within every religion. You look at any religion like Christianity, both of the essentially true religions of fear and love are alive within Christianity.
All of the religions, fear and love. Those are our choices each moment. The question is, what will I choose this moment?
When I choose love, I give up fear and often there is a lot of feelings of sadness, and fear is often what I'm feeling when I don't like how I'm feeling. When what's alive in me is fear, often I need to cry to let that go to fully experience how afraid I am.
"Oh, my God. I looked at my bank account and I'm not sure how the numbers are going to add up. Oh, my God."
Then, I just need to sob for a minute.
"I'm going to die someday."
Oh, now I feel better. Now, I'm ready to do something genuinely useful today.
How may I help?
How may I help?
How may I help today?
Thank you for giving me the chance to share this with you.
Thank you for collaborating with me to have a wonderful life.
I'm obsessed with thinking about, how may I help?
What can I do to give you all the tools to have a life as wonderful as I have today?
Because I've known a life of misery and suffering, and it's really useful to have a wonderful life today.
I love you. Thank you for reading. I hope this day 194 of Happier People Podcast was helpful. If you found this post helpful on Steem, would you please upvote it and follow me because you will then be able to see more posts like this in your home feed?
Love,
Jerry Banfield with edits by @gmichelbkk on the transcript from @deniskj
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