
Awakening Together, Relaxing into Happiness with William Cooper, Master of Theology, Licensed Professional Counselor
Experience Awakening....Relaxing into your Being and, therefore, Happiness. William earned a 4 year on campus Master of Theology from Harding Theological Seminary. He was a Unity board president and, later, a Oneness trainer. In 1994 he went into private practice as a Licensed Psychotherapist. He has been to India 14 times averaging 3 months per visit to explore awakening with gurus and awakened beings. Also Bhutan, Brazil, etc. This series explores the hows of awakening and experiencing the flow of your Being, (love, peace, happiness, fulfillment and joy). A practical blending of East and West. Meditation, yoga and Energy meet psychotherapy and awakened Beings...and beyond All. For more info and writings on the subject, www.williamecooper.wordpress.com
Awakening Together, Relaxing into Happiness with William Cooper, Master of Theology, Licensed Professional Counselor
143 Thawing Your Frozen Radiance - part 2
Part 2 is a deeper examination of the issues we discussed in part 1.
Your Being is pure Radiant Light just as powerful as any guru. Why doesn't it feel that way? Most of us have taken a vast portion of our light and siphoned it off by creating repressed problems, attitudes, and delusions. We are Awareness and all Awareness is love, peace, and joy. Just as we can freeze life giving water into a destructive shape such as a frozen ice knife, we can freeze Awareness into problems. How? We focus our destructive attitudes into free flowing Awareness and freeze it into an thought emotion object that hurts us and others. Ice melts when it emits its cold. A psychological object melts when it emits it's attitude.
These podcasts are here to support your personal path of awakening whatever that might be. I feel they are most powerful when listened to in sequence from podcast one forward because each is built on the last. Though they, also, all stand on their own. If anything does not resonate, please disregard it and follow your heart.
These podcasts are here to support your personal path of awakening whatever that might be. I feel they are most powerful when listened to in sequence from podcast one forward because each is built on the last. Though they, also, all stand on their own. If anything does not resonate, please disregard it and follow your heart. All my podcasts and website are free. Enjoy!
Though I am a psychotherapist, and these podcasts are offered to be spiritually helpful, they are not psychotherapy. If psychotherapy is ever needed, please reach out to a psychotherapist.
www.williamecooper.wordpress.com for more support. You may, especially, enjoy the short contemplations and the resource page which gives you some supportive material.
Hello everybody, this is William Cooper. Welcome to Awakening Together, Relaxing into Happiness. You are a beautiful light, and the qualities of your light are love, peace, joy, happiness, well-being, every good experience and feeling that you've had in this life is in its pure form in your inner essence. That is the quality of your being, but often we don't experience ourselves that way. Today, I'd like to look more deeply at who you are and how to experience who you are very, very profoundly and deeply, viscerally. Let's start by imagining yourself as a bright, bright light, like a light bulb. You actually are that bright light, but let's start by imagining yourself as a very powerful light bulb, where the light is blinding and the qualities of that light are love, peace, well-being, radiant bliss and joy. That's who you are. Imagine how it would feel for that light to be streaming out of you and affecting everybody and everything around you. Miracles even happen. That's not the goal, but with such clear and beautiful light, everything is affected all around you, intentionally and even unintentionally. Everything is affected by your beauty, by your grace, by your radiance, by your wholeness, by the beauty of your heart, the beauty of your being. If you've ever been around a very powerful guru, that's what the experience is like. They're so clear and radiant that the light that flows out of them is like coming from a bright, bright light bulb and its qualities are love, are peace, are well-being, and it affects you and everybody around them. Well, your being is equally powerful, equally bright. There's only one. You are the same being as that guru. You are equally powerful. You are emanating a radiant light, love, peace, well-being, joy, and happiness. You don't have to do a thing. That's who you are already. It's happening now. Well, if it's happening now, how come we don't experience ourselves that way? How come the people around us aren't overwhelmed with the bright light that's streaming and radiating out of us, just like they experience when they're around a clear guru? How come this just isn't our experience at all? Well, first of all, I want to say it can be. And in this podcast, we're going to look at how to make that our experience. If you're new to this series of podcasts on Awakening, they're most powerful if you start with podcast number one and work your way forward, because each podcast is built on the podcasts that precede it, including this one. However, all of them stand on their own, and this podcast will be very powerful all by itself. So yes, continue to listen. But if this podcast is meaningful to you, please consider going back to the beginning and working your way forward. It's more powerful that way. It's as if each podcast is a colored tile that makes up a beautiful mosaic, which is you. So you want to listen to each podcast and experience all the colors in your journey of awakening. In these podcasts, I've attempted to include the hows, instead of simply saying you need to accept things or you need to love one another, or you need to let troubling things go or release and so on and so forth. Those are absolutely true statements. But what I was left wondering on my path is okay, yes, I want to let go. But how? I want to awaken. But how? I want to love. But how? I'd like to experience myself as peace. But how? So in these podcasts, I've attempted to put together those things that I've found most important on my path. If I say anything that doesn't resonate along the way, just disregard it and take what does work for you. Okay, let's get back to the subject at hand. Am I really as radiant as a powerful guru? Is my being naturally as bright and shining as they are? If so, why isn't anybody experiencing that? Why aren't I experiencing that? Well, yes, your radiance is just as powerful as the most powerful guru. Well, I don't feel that radiance. I feel a lot of hurt sometimes or anxiety in my life. Maybe I feel depression. Maybe I have moments of happiness. But at other times, I have anger and frustration. That's what I feel. And it can be very intense. What's the problem? There is no problem. That intensity is your radiance. It is your being. It's just been frozen and twisted in shapes that you're not enjoying. It's not emanating as pure beauty and love and well-being. There is some of that in your life. There's happiness and joy and peace. But there can be a lot of anger and frustration and depression in many of our experiences, because we've taken our natural radiance and we've twisted and frozen it into another form, into a form of hurt, fear, and anger. So we have a lot of energy streaming out of our light bulb, but we've taken that light and we've put it through different lenses and changed the color and the texture and the experience of our bright light, our bright, clear light. And we've turned into hurt, fear, anger, frustration, anxiety, a lot of that. And it doesn't feel good. Can we stop that? Can we center ourselves back in our purity and re-experience ourselves as love, peace, and well-being? Absolutely. And we're going to talk about that in this podcast. And as I have said, it's built on previous podcasts as well, but there will be a lot here in this podcast. So first, before we talk about how to re-center into our purity, let's look at how we got away from ourselves, so to speak, and how we created a life that doesn't feel as good as we would like. So to start with, let's look at how we create things such as blocks and anxiety and troubles and problems, the things that are eating up our energy and creating problems for us. How do we create these blocks and obstacles that we're experiencing that are covering up our bright light and siphoning off our energy? Well, all there is in creation is consciousness. And consciousness is made of bliss, happiness, and well-being. Let me back up. We experience ourselves when we're clear, as I like to say, a rainbow. On one end of the rainbow, it's beyond creation. And we can only know ourselves on that level through our intuition. It's great emptiness, but it's a very full emptiness. It's explosive, but we can't talk about it in normal terms because it's beyond creation. And words only talk about objects, and objects are created things. So on one end of our rainbow is this potential of everything that exists. That's who we are, the infinite. And as that infinite comes into creation, it comes in as right light. And as it slows down, it slows down into sound, the deep sound of OM. And then there's a high pitch sound. And as that slows down further, you experience yourself as bliss, peace, well-being, happiness. And as that energy slows down, it turns into atoms, which turn into molecules as they slow down. And those molecules come together as objects, dogs, cats, trees, so on and so forth. Well, we as creative beings can take this consciousness, this pure consciousness, and we can create objects out of it. We can create very easily. For instance, you can take pure consciousness and you can turn it into a thought. You can picture a dog or a cat or a tree, and you can create this thought. And if you focus your willpower on that thought that you've created, that hallucination called a thought, if you concentrate very hard, you can make it solid in your mind where you almost will never forget it. It's a solid object. And if you tie it to emotion very strongly, you make it even more 3D where you really, really can embed it into your beingness as a created object. You created that object. So when you use your force of willpower and attitude, and you embed it into consciousness, you shape it into a very sharp edged object. Your consciousness previously was free flowing, love, peace, and wellbeing. And now you've twisted it and shaped it. Usually the reason why we do that and we embed it is because we have a lot of intensity behind us to do that. And usually the intensity is derived from hurt, fear, or anger. I'm very angry. So with my willpower, I create an image and an object, a thought form. I don't like you. I hate you. You're so horrible and I will never forgive you. That's a strong image. That's a strong, that's something that we might carry with us forever or hurt. You really hurt me. My life is terrible or my life hurt me. And it's been so terrible. And I carry that with me and I'll carry it forever. I've been marked forever, scarred forever, or I might have fear. Something happened. It was so traumatic. I've got PTSD. I can't shake it. It's there with me forever. I've put a lot of attitude into that consciousness and I've created this object of fear or PTSD or anger or hurt. And those form blocks, what we might call blocks or traumas or feelings of depression or anxiety. We form a personality around these frozen objects that we have created and embedded them in our mind, emotional body. We've embedded those objects within us and they are what is using up a lot of our radiance. The Guru has released a lot of these. And so he's not using up his radiance, he or she, and it is just a beautiful love, peace, and wellbeing. They emanate beingness, the qualities of being. We take the qualities of being and we twist it into hurt, fear, and anger. We still have some quality of being left over though. And at times we do feel peace and happiness and wellbeing, but it's mixed with these objects that are floating around within our experience. Let me give you an analogy. Water is free flowing. It's life giving, it's nourishing. We need it for life, but we can take that same water and we can freeze it into a hurtful object. We can freeze it into the shape of a knife. And when that water turns into ice and is in the shape of a knife, it can be used to stab people, to hurt people, to kill people, or just the knife blade inside of our pocket or our jacket might jab us and hurt us. Well, that's what we've done with consciousness. We've frozen it into a jagged edge and it's inside of us and it's hurting. We've frozen it with a strong attitude and lots of willpower. We've embedded it inside of us. And if it hurts a lot, we don't want to feel that hurt. So we repress it. This object, the sharp edge knife object is still inside of us, but because we don't want to feel it, we look the other way inside. That's called repression, or we distract ourselves from it. It's still in there, but we're looking the other way. So we don't notice it so often, unless somebody looks at us funny or cuts us off in traffic or does something that triggers us. And then this repressed object comes to the surface and we feel it once again. We might even blame the person who does something to quote unquote trigger us as the one that's hurting us. It's not really them. They're not hurting us. They just did something that made it hard in the moment to repress the sharp edges that we created and stuck inside of us. Remember, there's only one person inside of us that can hurt us. And that's us. Nobody else is in there. So if life triggers us or somebody else triggers us, the thing that we're feeling is of our creation. Now it's true. Even if we haven't created an old thing, that's hurting us, that's triggered and coming up. When somebody does something, we could create a new thing and hurt ourselves with it. So that doesn't feel so good. Is there a solution? Absolutely. What do we do? Okay, let's go back to that knife made of ice. We put it in the sun and let it melt and then it turns back into life giving water. Simple. Well, that's what we do with the knives inside of ourselves. Remember, when ice melts, it emanates cold and that cold is uncomfortable. If you're holding that ice cube in your hand, it's cold. It hurts a little bit and it radiates cold all around it, but it does melt into life giving water. That's the process. It emanates cold, it releases cold, and then it turns back into water. The ice falls apart and melts into free flowing water. Same with these emotional objects that we've hidden inside of ourselves, our thought, emotional objects that are sharp edged, made of hurt, fear, anger, anxiety, et cetera, et cetera. When we don't get involved in them, when we don't refreeze them and we put them out in the light, they melt. They don't emanate cold, but they emanate the attitude that hasn't been embedded within them to hold them into a certain shape. Maybe it's the attitude of anger. Maybe it's the attitude of anxiety or frustration or hurt or depression or so many things. Whatever it's made of, that's what it releases as it melts back into free flowing consciousness. Once in a free flow as being, now your light emanates peace, love, and well-being because all of the attitude has been released from the consciousness. Just like the coldness is released from the ice and turns back into water. The attitude has now been released from this form that you created from consciousness and it turns back into free flowing light and wellness and well-being. The good news with melting a knife made of ice is now it becomes life-giving water. The difficult part is if you don't like cold, you have to feel cold as it melts and that's uncomfortable. The good thing about our attitudes melting the objects inside of our body that have sharp edges, depression, anxiety, hurt, fear, unforgiveness, so on and so forth. The good news about the melting is our energy becomes clearer and clearer, stronger and stronger and more unified. We become that bright light bulb without us being crusted over with ice cubes and objects that we've formed that are unhealthy. That's the good news. The bad news is the way that we froze these things is we put so much attitude within our consciousness to freeze them that that's the equivalent of the cold coming out of the ice. We're releasing the attitude that we put into our consciousness. So when we put in a lot of anger to make an object to embed within us, when it melts, it releases a lot of anger. When we put a lot of anxiety within our consciousness, when it melts, it releases the anxiety. When we put a lot of hurt, it releases the hurt. So it hurts or we feel anxious as the anxiety pours out in the melting or we feel anger or frustration. It feels troubling. Have you ever felt triggered and then suddenly you feel very angry? Well, that's the anger releasing. Often though, the problem is because we don't want to feel uncomfortable, we refreeze what's trying to release so that we don't have to feel it so that we can repress it again. Now those sharp edges are inside of us and they're jabbing us. They can't be doing us much good. Maybe we're feeling depressed and we don't know why or we're feeling anxious or we're feeling so many different things because we've embedded so many ice cubes within us that they're piling up and they're hurting us underneath the surface. So they're not doing us much good, but we don't really want to feel what we've done. We don't want to feel the anger releasing. We don't want to feel the anxiety. So we try to refreeze them. How do we refreeze them? Well, if we do anything except for let them release their cold, release their anxiety, release their anger, if we do anything except to let them exude what they're made of, they can't fall apart and they refreeze. They stay in ice cube form. So what are some of the ways that we refreeze what's trying to release? Life is trying to help us. It triggers us. It's trying to let the stuff come out. But as soon as it comes out, we don't want to think about it. Oh, I don't want to talk about it. I want to refreeze it. We don't consciously think that, but that's what we're doing. What are other ways to refreeze it? Well, instead of letting it emanate the energy that it's wanting to release, we get involved with the thought form. Yes, that person is terrible. They did something bad to me. I'm so angry about it. I hate them. I will never forgive them. Therefore we've not only kept the original frozen object intact. Maybe we've added a little ice to it. Rather than simply being aware that this thought emotion complex exists and just watching as it falls apart and experiencing, letting it release it's hurt or it's fear or whatever it's anger, rather than just doing that, we have jumped on the bandwagon and have made it more solid. We've refrozen it. What's another way? Well, we could treat it as real, therefore keeping it frozen. We could just get lost in a fantasy or a thought about this object that we've frozen in place. So rather than letting it emanate its attitude and release it, we're just looking through the thought and getting lost in the thought. Another way to keep it frozen is we could react to the frozen thought and emotion and hold it in place so that we have something to react to. For instance, I have this problem or I have this bad feeling or this attitude and I'm going to react against it or react because of it or react from it. All of these versions means that it has to stay in place so I have some place to push off of. All of these versions of keeping it frozen have one thing in common and that is that I just don't observe it and non-reactively just let it melt, let it exude its attitude, let it emanate its anger and fear without me reacting to it, without me fantasizing about it, without me being in opposition to it, without me making up a story about it. Instead, just let it unwind like a tight rubber band just unwinding, expending its energy. So the common theme of melting, when you know something is melting, it's just like an ice cube. How do you know it's melting? Because it's exuding coldness and it's falling apart. How do you know these emotional thought objects are melting that have been clogging you up and blocking you and causing so much trouble? How do you know they're melting? Because they're exuding hurt, fear, anger, frustration. Very simple. You don't get involved with them, you just experience them, you feel them as they fall apart. Just like you don't refreeze the ice knife, if you're holding it in your hand, you simply feel cold. You feel coldness and you watch it start to drip as water starts to be released, as the ice falls apart. Same with the emotional objects that you form that are melting out of you. As each emotional object melts out of you, you're less clogged up, you're less cluttered, and that consciousness, that life-giving water drips down into a big reservoir of water and your levels of water get higher and higher and more and more and more. Your levels of free-flowing consciousness through your body-mind mechanism are more freed up and flowing. So you become more and more powerful. Not that that's your goal, but as a side effect, it just makes sense. Just like a guru, you become brighter and brighter and brighter, more healing to both yourself and others because you're not healing anybody. What's healing people and what's healing yourself is so much free-flowing wholeness in your being. Your being is free-flowing, it's not being diverted off. So when you experience that much love and that much peace and that much well-being, you feel better and those around you feel better. So just like to melt ice, we put it outside in the sun and it melts. How do we melt these emotional thought forms? Well, we put them out in the sun of our awareness and they melt. Let me give you some examples. And we've talked about these examples quite a bit in previous podcasts, but I'll review them now. The common theme of all these examples is we're no longer repressing these emotional thought forms because they hurt. Instead, we're just letting them come to the surface and to the degree that we're able, we're just experiencing them. We're letting them melt and we're feeling them emanate their hurt, fear, and anger. So the first method is just as you do in meditation and you can do in life itself, you sit still and because you're sitting still in meditation, it's hard to repress things. You can't run to the refrigerator suddenly and eat a pie or call somebody or watch TV because you're getting antsy. Instead, you're sitting there. What can you do? And because you're simply sitting there, eventually the repressed stuff starts to come up. And as it comes up, rather than refreeze it, push it away and refreeze it. Instead, you simply watch it. You're aware of it. So what can it do? This object, it's now sitting out in the open and just like an ice cube, it begins to melt. In meditation, another reason you sit still is because you want it to emanate and release its anxiety, hurt, or fear, and you don't want to run away from it. Or as we previously stated, you don't want to distract yourself as a way to run away from it and eat a pie instead. So you just simply observe it. You experience it. And it's like a rubber band that's wound so tightly, tight, tight, tight, tight, tight. And then you let one end go and it starts to spin and release its energy. And as it does, you feel that energy that it's releasing, which is all the attitude that you've stuck in there, the hurt, fear, and anger, whatever it happens to be. It releases that and you let it, it unwinds. Now, as it goes through the process of releasing, releasing, releasing, and unwinding, at some point it becomes loose and limp or pretty close to it. When it becomes loose and limp or pretty close to it, the second thing that can be very helpful is let it look around and let it receive the goodness that's all around it. Now that is you or your environment. For instance, when you put a lot of anger into consciousness and turned it into a grudge, or let's say you put hurt into something and turned it into unforgiveness or something like that. That was a lot of duress and stress, bad things were going on. And that part of you now that's coming up and releasing all of this, it in a sense can be trapped into time. It embedded in it. Not only is the emotion that you put into it, but it's also the timeframe. And it can feel that it's very young. It can feel like it's in the past. It might not realize all that you've gone through to get to where you are today. So as it's spinning, spinning, releasing its coldness, releasing its hurt, releasing its fear, and it's released a good bit of it, let it look around and ask it the question, is it better to be here today with me or back in the trauma when it was happening back when you were being abused or hurt or whatever was going on, which is better. And let that part that's now starting to reintegrate with you starting to come up, let it take a breath, look around and let it answer. Well, it's better to be here. This is safer here. This is quiet here. This is full of wellbeing here. This is full of nourishment. It's better to be here than being with my abuser being traumatized. So that being the case, ask it to just soak up the goodness that's here today. And if it's hardly able to soak up much because it's been in a posture of tightness and closed off frozenness, just say, well, how about soaking up one drop, just soak up one drop of goodness. Every drop that it can soak in, even one drop will help it relax some and help it release and help it unwind and help it melt more quickly back into consciousness. It's like when you get a massage and at first your muscles hurt and how that hurts, it hurts, but then there's a release and you begin to soak up relaxation and that tension disappears forever. That muscle releases. And once it's released, there's only relaxation. The tension is gone. Well, once this emotional object or this twisted off part of you takes in wellbeing and it releases just like a muscle tension, it dissolves it. Let's go. It releases back into consciousness and it's gone. There's nothing left to work on because it's gone. It's completely melted into light, love wellbeing. So that's the melting process in meditation. But this melting can be taken into life itself, not only in meditation. Meditation is a good place to start so that we can deepen the process and not get distracted and stay focused and not repress and run away and eat a pie and do things like that. But once we kind of get used to the process, we can take it into life. And when something comes up, let's say somebody cuts you off in traffic and old repressed stuff, objects come to the surface. You can just experience them and not re repress them, feel them and just don't get involved in them. It's just something that happened. And it's a good thing. You're getting to melt some junk that's stuck inside of you. Also, as it continues to melt at some point in the process, you can take a breath, look around and notice, Hey, I'm okay. Now I wasn't killed in that traffic incident. I'm fine. I've released a lot of stuff. As more and more of these ice cubes melt away, you start feeling better and better and better because a, you've got a bigger reservoir of pure water, pure consciousness and wellbeing that's unfrozen. And B you're not covered with ice cubes. Half of them have melted away. So you have more and more openings to feel the beauty of your true self. And there's a second thing that can happen in real life. Let's go back to the traffic situation. Somebody cuts you off in traffic. Let's say you don't have any repressed things that are related to this traffic incident. You're just not triggered, but it was somebody driving very poorly and they endangered you and you felt natural fear or anger rise up very quickly. That was there to protect you. There is healthy fear and anger and it jumps up to protect you rather than jumping onto the bandwagon and now freezing that into an object and sticking it into your body. You just feel it and let it process and let it release and go. Just let it dissipate and go. You don't, if you try to push any of this, if you try to man handle it or manipulate it, if you try to solve it through willpower or problem solving, you freeze it because remember when you put willpower into consciousness with attitude, it freezes it. So you simply want to observe it, experience it. When repressed stuff comes up, by the way, you don't want to put a lot of willpower trying to manipulate it or solve it. Although there is a place for that at times, but on the level that we're talking about, you just want to let it emanate its energy and dissolve. What I meant when I said there's a place and time for that is as you may remember in prior podcasts, I've said that we're multi-level beings and we experience reality on so many different levels. Well, on some of those levels, it is good to problem solve. And on some levels, it is good to sort things out or use willpower or use rationality and use different processes to untangle the knots. What we're talking here is deep frozen things that are emerging and just letting them melt. So in life, when that person cuts you off in traffic, if no repressed things come up, yet there's still a lot of energy, let it dissipate, let it discharge. And that way it doesn't go into your body, doesn't turn into PTSD, doesn't turn into a repressed object for you to release later. Instead, it just melts in real time and dissipates. So life itself can sense where you have repressed items and trigger you for you to feel them. Or if life happens and you get into a situation that formerly would have caused you distress and you may have reacted and then embedded things inside of you and repress them. Instead, you just deal with them. You respond to them the best you can in real time and any emotions that come up, you let them flow through your body instead of getting stuck in your body and frozen, let them flow. And yes, at the time they will be uncomfortable as they flow through. Anytime you feel anger or hurt or fear, it doesn't feel good usually. So in real time, you'll feel that, but let it continue to flow and move through your body and dissipate. And you'll find that it dissipates and you return back to your baseline, which is the beauty and light of your being. And the qualities of your being are peace, love, joy, and happiness. This is who you are. Let everything that's not that melt out of your system. There's a very easy test that I like to use. My being is love, light, well-being and everything beyond that from which it flows. But in my body, that's what I feel. Happiness, joy, well-being. Anytime that I don't feel those qualities, that's not who I am. And that's a frozen attitude that I have either frozen and repressed within me previously, or I'm experiencing now and I let it go. So if I feel any tension, I let it come to the surface and let it exude its energy on its own time and let it unfold. This is not something you push. If you push it, you'll freeze it. Oh, I want to get this out. I want to feel so good right now. Let me work hard. No, that'll freeze it. It releases in its own time. So I let it come to the surface and release its tension. If there's hurt, I let it come to the surface and release its hurt. Anxiety, let it release its anxiety. Well, how long does that take? It takes as long as it takes to release the attitude that I put in there. Now, if I put a lot of attitude, maybe it takes a long time to release. Maybe that is how I felt all during my childhood for a decade. So there's a lot of attitude in there. So that takes a little bit longer to release. Well, what if this stuff is overwhelming? What if there's just too much? What if I'm weighed down by layers and layers of ice and icebergs, and I can't even see the surface? I'm so buried underneath these ice cubes. It's very important to move slowly. It sounds counterintuitive. Oh, I'm so covered up. I want to move quickly. No. Move slowly and easily. Be kind to yourself. Don't abuse yourself. If you're under a big iceberg, you don't have to melt that whole iceberg today or tomorrow or the next day. What else are you doing? You're going through life anyway. So let a little melt every day. The key is consistent daily baby steps. Just do what you can do today. Don't judge yourself. For one thing, when you judge yourself, that's an attitude. You're putting attitude into consciousness, and now you've got judgment within yourself. Don't judge yourself. Just be kind. Take your time. Let some drops melt out and then stop. What if you're feeling a lot of discomfort, a lot of hurt, a lot of fear, or a lot of depression? Well, as I mentioned before, there are lots of ways to work with this. None of these podcasts are psychotherapy. You can find a psychotherapist and really put attention there if you'd like. Sometimes it's nice to have the extra support and you can blend it with the spiritual depth that we talk about in these podcasts. Also in various previous podcasts in this series, we discuss a lot of ways to handle different difficulties. So if you're starting with the beginning and working your way forward, you'll have that support as well. Also, so much gets stuck in the physical body. That's the slowest moving part of our human existence. And we put so much within our body. So yoga can be very powerful. Some like Qigong, some like yoga, non-energization exercises. We've talked about most of all these in prior podcasts. Perhaps you're already acquainted with it, but that's another way to start things moving and flowing. Things come to the surface and you feel them. I like to do yoga slowly so that I can feel what comes up and let it release from my body. My experience is if I do quick yoga, power yoga, that's good for exercise. It's good for strength. It's good for flexibility perhaps, but it becomes more of a doing more of an efforting. And I can't let these attitudes exude themselves, release as profoundly as I can. If I do a yin yoga or a restorative yoga or a beginner's vinyasa flow perhaps, or Yogananda's energization exercises. If you really just need to take a break from the intensity of this practice, you can always just stop and find something restorative or a change of pace or a place to take a rest, a break. Nature is a good place to restore yourself. And it's a good place to sit quietly while you release. And, or it's a place to stop releasing for a while and just be recharged by nature. Sometimes, guided meditations for relaxation are a good place to release stress and let your nervous system rest. So find ways at times to stop, watch a movie, talk to a friend. A lot of these are not black and white. Maybe you're releasing a little bit, but sometimes you just have to stop and take a break. So baby steps, be easy on yourself. Okay. That's a lot. I hope you found this podcast helpful and I look forward to talking to you next time. Take care. Bye.