As divorced women it can be challenging to find any kind of respite during our day, even if it's just for a few minutes. Well this doesn't have to be your experience any longer. Join me while I interview my guest, Jake Eagle - co-author of the book, The Power of Awe. Jake is a seasoned psychotherapist, mindfulness instructor, and fellow member trainer of the International Association of NeuroLinguistic Programming who stumbled upon an incredible discovery of The Power of Awe.
Listen in as we talk in depth about the capacity of awe to reset our nervous system, help us embrace the beauty and positivity of our world, even in the face of adversity and even help reduce inflammation. Jake will reveal his research findings and the interesting concept of micro-meditations (similar to micro-dosing but with awe), which has been proven to yield superior results than the traditional 10-minute meditation.
Jake and I also explore some how to make our relationships easier. We discuss the intriguing concept of the 'redo', a practice that encourages us to take responsibility for our own behavior and make amends promptly, fostering healthier connections.
I promise you The Power of Awe is not just another self-help theory but a practical strategy backed by research and personal experience that can change your life and relationships. Tune in and discover how The Power of Awe can support your journey to becoming a better, healthier, and happier divorced woman, 10 seconds at a time.
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Grief and trauma are the two biggest struggles women deal with as they go through their divorce. It's highly likely that you are experiencing both and don't even realize what you're feeling. I'm here to tell you that it's okay for you to grieve your marriage (even if it was shitty) and it's normal to be experiencing some kind of trauma (which is essentially a disconnection from yourself - your mind, body and soul). I can help guide you through the grief in all of the forms it show up so you can heal. I can also teach you how to ground yourself in healing so you can ease through the trauma. Schedule your free consult by clicking here.
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Full Episode Transcript:
Hello, my friends. I'm so glad you're back because I'm here too. And yep, you guessed it, you're listening to Becoming you Again, episode number 120. I'm your host, Karin Nelson. Welcome to Becoming you Again, the podcast to help you with your mental and emotional well being during and after divorce. This is where you learn to overcome the grief and trauma of your divorce. We're going to do that by reconnecting with yourself, creating lasting emotional resilience and living a truly independent life, so that your life can be even better than when you were married. I'm your host, Karin Nelson. All right, my friends, I am so, so excited for you to hear this episode. Remember back to the last episode and a few episodes ago, when I told you that I lost an interview. Well, this is the redo interview with my very special guest. We had recorded an episode months ago and you may remember me telling you that my computer died because I did not back it up on the cloud. Lesson learned, right. I lost the original interview. However, I reached out to my guest and asked if he would be willing to do a redo interview, and he so graciously said yes. And so this is it. You get to hear it today. You all get to hear this interview and I must say I truly believe the first interview was amazing and I definitely wish that we all could have experienced hearing it together. However, the second time around, I think that this conversation is truly incredible and I am so overjoyed to present it to you today. So here you go. I hope you enjoy. Welcome back to the podcast. I am so excited about this conversation that we are about to have. I think that we are very lucky to have this guest on today's episode, not only because of the fact that he already was on once and I lost that podcast episode when my computer died and he has so graciously agreed to come on again so that we can hopefully talk about many of the same things that we talked about before, but I am also very excited because, as you all know who's into this podcast, I talk a lot about grounding work and connecting our brain and our body and our intuition, and oftentimes with self help. It feels very much like it's a little bit diminished because it's not always grounded and based in science, but today, with my guest, who is the co-author of the Power of Awe, he is going to be talking about that book and what they teach and how it is all grounded in science, and so I am so excited to welcome our guest today, jake Eagle. He is a psychotherapist, a mindfulness instructor and a member trainer of the International Association of Neuro-Linguistic Programming and, as I mentioned, he is the co-author of the Power of Awe. Hello, jake, thank you so much for being here. Tell us a little bit more about yourself.
Jake Eagle:2:55
Nice to see you again and be back. We did this podcast before and I do a lot of them, and ours stood out. So when I realized that it got lost, I was very willing to do it again because I had a good time. I thought we had a really valuable conversation, so I'm happy to be here. I have an idea about this conversation because we already had it and I was thinking we might spend the first half talking about awe, which is a remarkably powerful emotion. But what I liked about our conversation last time is we kind of drifted into interesting discussion about couple relationships, romantic partnerships, some ideas I shared with you about how to make them easier, how to make them healthier. So I hope that we can find our way back to that, because I really enjoyed it.
Karin Nelson:3:49
I think so, and I think that will be very valuable to my audience. As you know, it's divorcing or divorced women, and I think that's such an important part of just navigating new relationships. It's something that we all desire is to have a relationship that feels easy and that feels connective in a way that maybe they hadn't had before, and so I agree, that was a great part of our conversation and I would definitely love to end on that note for sure.
Jake Eagle:4:17
Great, so we'll go there, but I think maybe what is helpful is to start talking a little bit about the emotion of awe. The book that I wrote with my co-author, michael Amster, was the result of doing two research studies at the University of California, berkeley, and I won't go into a lot of history, but I'll just tell you briefly how those came about. I had been doing an online course in which I was asking people to meditate about 10 minutes a day, and more than half the people said they couldn't do that. They just didn't have 10 minutes, and so I came up with the idea of having them do what I at the time. I called it a micro meditation Just take a few seconds and meditate and focus on something that you care about, that you appreciate. At the end of the course, I always do surveys to see did people benefit? How did it help them? And at the end of that course, what I found was that the people who had only done these micro meditations were getting results equal or better to the people that were doing 10 minutes of daily meditation. So that really surprised me, and my co-author was in that program. He was curious about what I was doing, so he signed up and he joined that course. He and I then decided to do our own pilot projects. He worked with people who were in chronic pain, because he's a pain specialist, and I worked with people that were having emotional challenges, based on my psychotherapy background. We both ran 21 day programs where we taught people how to access the emotion of awe and we condensed that into a 10, 15, 20 second practice and we started referring to it as micro dosing mindfulness, because that's really what happens when we access the emotion of awe we're giving our full, undivided attention to something, which is what happens when we do mindful practices. What's unique about our approach is that we're asking people to start by placing their attention on something they value, appreciate or find to be amazing. So we start with a little bit of a positive slant. So he and I ran our programs. We both did them. We got great results Again, really impressive. And then Michael went to the University of California, berkeley, and met with Dacker Keltner. Dacker is probably the best known researcher on the emotion of awe in the world and he was so excited about our results that he agreed to help us put together these two studies. We did the studies and they ended up being at the height of the pandemic. So we did one group of doctors, nurses and healthcare professionals about 200 of them and then we did another group that was patients and family members and that was about 300 people At the end of 21 days and we met four times during the 21 days where we would have a one hour Zoom presentation explaining to people how to access the emotion of awe. At the end of the 21 days we saw decreases statistically significant decreases in depression, anxiety, loneliness, physical symptoms of pain. We saw a reduction in burnout and this is at the height of the pandemic and we saw increased well-being and this is really surprising.
Karin Nelson:7:48
Yeah, I love all of this because I mean, if we think about my audience specifically, anxiety, depression, loneliness, burnout are probably the top four, besides, maybe, grief emotions that these women who are going through a divorce are feeling. And so can you explain why? Awe seems to be the different emotion that kind of can raise or heighten or release I guess maybe is a better word those emotions from your body and kind of bring on a more positive feeling inside.
Jake Eagle:8:27
Yeah, let's talk about sort of what happens when we access the emotion of awe, and then a little bit later I'll go into the actual steps to do this so that your listeners can practice Great. Essentially, when we access awe, we're shifting our level of consciousness, and I've been in the field of psychology for about 30 years and around 10 years ago my wife and I created a model. We worked together when we run groups and we created a model showing people that there are three ways to define levels of consciousness and those three levels. The first one is safety consciousness, and that's where we spend most of our time. It's where we're taking care of business, taking care of the kids, getting things done, making the meals, generating an income, doing all the things we need to do to create security and safety in our lives, and it's where we spend the vast majority of our time and it's valuable. We wanna be good at that, but it's also limited. If we wanna go to the next level of consciousness, we call that heart consciousness, and heart consciousness is when we enter a state of gratitude and all of your listeners who have this experience we all have where we're just very grateful for something or someone, and when we have that experience, we detect a shift in our physiology. Something opens up, something relaxes, we feel a softening. That is the state of heart consciousness, and physiologically it's been proven to be really good for us. If people wanna learn a lot about it, they could look at heart math. Heart math has done a great deal of research about entering the state that I'm referring to as heart consciousness. The next level, the third level, is called spacious consciousness, and that is something that people have talked about for hundreds, thousands of years. It's a state that people strive to achieve, typically through some kind of contemplative practice meditation, qigong, yoga, tai chi, whatever it is that people choose to do. The challenge is that it often takes a long time to get good at this Months, sometimes years before people are really good at these kinds of contemplative practices that bring them into a state of spacious consciousness. When we enter that state, it's timeless. Time drops away. So imagine no urgency, no time, nothing you need to do, and words go away. There's no thinking, there's no talking. It's remarkably restorative.
Karin Nelson:11:18
Yeah, I'm imagining it right now as you say, those words and it sounds incredible.
Jake Eagle:11:23
It is. It's incredibly valuable for us, and what Michael and I did not intentionally, we stumbled upon this is we discovered that awe is a way to access spacious consciousness. It's a short, quick, easy way to take ourselves into a different state of consciousness. And this is a very long answer to how is it that awe is so helpful? Well, when we shift our level of consciousness, we're shifting our physiology. When we shift our physiology, we're shifting our emotional state, and it's been documented, not in our research, but a study that was done in 2015. That study demonstrated that accessing awe actually reduces levels of inflammation, which is really significant, because, if your listeners aren't aware of it, inflammation is at the root of all illness. Any kind of illness, whether it's mental or physiological, involves inflammation, and so what it means is that our nervous system has gotten charged up and we are producing what are called cytokines that drive our immune system to generate inflammation. Now, that's not a bad thing If you sprain your ankle. The inflammation is actually helpful. It's appropriate. The problem is, when the inflammation becomes chronic, then it is destructive, it's no longer helpful, and so most of us are living in a state of chronic anxiety, chronic inflammation. We see chronic diseases a huge issue in America, and when we access awe, we're giving our nervous system a break, we're resetting it. The way I talk about it is, I think of my nervous system like a spring, and when I get up in the day, the spring is fairly loose, but then as I start taking on challenges and tasks, each one puts more pressure on the spring. It starts compressing the spring. It gets tighter and tighter and tighter, and that's my nervous system getting tighter and tighter. More constricted have less energy. So the awe method that we'll talk about in a minute is a way to release the tension on the spring, to release the pressure in our nervous system.
Karin Nelson:13:56
And if we do?
Jake Eagle:13:57
that, and if we do it multiple times a day and we had people do it three times a day that's when we saw these significant reductions in the symptoms that you and I discuss depression, anxiety. And you mentioned grief, and one of the things that's so interesting about awe as an emotion is that it can coexist with other emotions. Now, that's not true about all emotions. A person can be unhappy, but they can't be unhappy and happy at the same time. A person can be unhappy and experience awe. A person can be in grief and experience awe, which is really profound, and what happens when we're experiencing grief is that we're primarily focused on the loss of something that was precious to us. When we access awe, we go through the grief and reconnect with our capacity to have things in our lives that are precious. We reconnect with the capacity to love. We reconnect with the beauty that is part of life, which is still there even though we may have lost something, even though we may have gone through a divorce.
Karin Nelson:15:19
That is such a beautiful way of putting it of going through the grief, because I talk a lot to my audience about how we can't just put our emotions down or ignore them or pretend like they're not there, because they're still there. And so allowing these micro-dosed moments of stepping into awe and really just feeling it and experiencing it and opening yourself up to that spaciousness for even 15 seconds here and there throughout the day, you're opening yourself up to some healing. It sounds like when you're experiencing these moments of awe.
Jake Eagle:15:55
That's right, and if you have experience accessing the emotion of awe, you're less resistant to the negative emotion because you don't fear that you will either get stuck or overwhelmed by it. It's as if you have an exit door right. You have a door that says if you need relief, you have the capacity to step into a moment of awe. And that moment of awe feels so nourishing that it helps us deal with the difficult things in life. We have a whole chapter in our book called I don't remember the exact title, but essentially it's dealing with times of strife and the value of being able to have this emotion available to us when we go through hard times.
Karin Nelson:16:46
Yeah, and I'm sure when you did your study during the pandemic, that had to have been so profound for the people who were participants of that. We're, as a human collective at that point. We are all experiencing this pandemic that has never been experienced by anyone, probably alive at that time, and these depressive emotions and these things that were like what is this world coming to? And to have a space where there was this microdose moment of everything is OK right now, in this moment, in the present, I feel relief, I feel light, even if it's just for a moment. I think it does offer some hope that things are going to be OK.
Jake Eagle:17:39
Yeah, it's exactly right. Hope is so essential to healing, and awe is a way to reconnect with hope.
Karin Nelson:17:49
Yeah, absolutely All right. So tell me, can you walk the audience through what this awe looks like, like if they were going to do a practice of it on their own? And you know, I think the important thing with this, this practice that you have discovered, is that it's so, you know, it's not taking you so much of your time. I think for my audience, especially these single women who are feel often that the weight of the world's on their shoulders and they do not have time for the even the 10 minute yoga meditation that they might really be yearning for and wanting, but there is just no time for that. So can you just walk us through like what this awe method looks like and explain the importance of it just truly being a snippet, like a millisecond I mean it's 15 seconds or so but like a small section of your day throughout the day?
Jake Eagle:18:52
Yeah, one way to think of this is that essentially, it is a breath cycle. A breath cycle is about 10 seconds for most people, but what we ask people to do is, when they exhale, to have the exhalation be a little bit longer than it would normally be, and I'll tell you why. In a minute it could be one breath cycle, it could be two, but the point is that this is literally a 10 to 30 second practice. So you can do it standing in line at the grocery store, you can do it at a red light when you're sitting in your car. You don't have to close your eyes. You can, but you don't have to. And the three steps are very simple and we built them around the word awe, a, w, e. We created an acronym, so the A stands for attention, and the first thing you do is look around and find something that you value, appreciate or find to be amazing in a positive way, and it's going to give that your full and undivided attention for 510 seconds. Now it can be an object around you. It could be reaching out and petting your dog or your cat. It could be a memory that you have. So it's not necessarily not necessary that it's something in your environment, it's something you value, appreciate or find to be amazing. You give that your full, undivided attention. That's the A. The W is weight, and the weight is just a couple of seconds where you amplify the amount of attention that you're placing. So, instead of 100, it's 110% of your attention, just all of your attention, is focused on this source of awe. And then you the E is exhale and expand, and that's when you allow yourself to exhale. It's going to be a little bit longer than a normal exhalation, because when you do that, you activate something called the vagus nerve. And when you activate the vagus nerve, the body relaxes, the nervous system relaxes and whatever sensations are in your body will be amplified and they will be magnified. So we started off by focusing on something that's positive, so the sensations in our body are going to be positive ones. We then wait, and waiting is a beautiful thing. I don't know if you've ever had anybody hold the door for you and wait, or if you've been talking and the other person waits until you're done before they speak. It's a really beautiful thing that we do for people. Well, here what we're doing is we're waiting for ourselves, we're just waiting a couple of moments. Then we exhale and these positive sensations will expand and when that happens, depending on the intensity, we often will experience some kind of a release of energy. Now it can be very subtle. This whole thing can be very subtle. It can just feel kind of pleasant, or it can be where you feel a rush of energy up your spine, and when I do it I often will have my neck actually adjust and I feel the energy rise up into my head. Now I've been doing it for three years and you know I'm very comfortable and relaxed when I do it. When people start out, the way that they make this more difficult is they try too hard. So don't try hard, don't overthink it. The first two, three, four or five times you may have to think okay, I'm going to give my attention to something, now I'm going to wait, and now I'm going to exhale and expand. But after you've done it a half a dozen times, you're no longer thinking because there's only three steps and they're completely natural. So the idea is don't overthink it, don't try too hard, just allow yourself to be fully present with your attention on something that you value or appreciate.
Karin Nelson:22:57
Yeah, I love this idea of being fully present. I talk a lot about healing happens in the here and now, and this is such a great, focused way, a very intentional, focused way of really bringing you to the here and now, whatever that is in your life. Like you say, you can do it when you're at a stoplight, when you're driving your kids around, or you can do it when you're washing the dishes, or, you know, when you're getting ready to go to bed, when you're getting ready to lay down at night whatever moment it is where you feel like you're even want to intentionally create space inside and that feeling of peace and positivity. You can bring it into your life in that moment. And so I love just that really focused energy of focusing everything, 110%, on exactly what's happening right now for a minute pause for yourself, like you say, which is such a great thing and then really just breathing into it and allowing it to be there. It's such a beautiful practice.
Jake Eagle:24:00
And it's so simple. This is what has been very rewarding since we've developed it is that I've developed other things over the years that I think have been helpful. But they take time and it's amazing how resistant people are and me too, I mean. I just have been part of a course. In the course, I ask you to meditate three minutes a day or listen to these little audio recordings, and there are days where it'll come in my email and I'm you know I don't have time. That's my attitude. I'll do it tomorrow. Yeah, but when you say to somebody, well, do you have 10 or 15 seconds? I've never heard anybody say no, yeah, yeah.
Karin Nelson:24:40
Which I think is so powerful. That's one of the most powerful things about it is it can be done in such a short amount of time, and yet the results can be so profound.
Jake Eagle:24:52
Yeah, and in our book we talk about how things go from being a trait which is temporary to a state which is lasting, and one of the keys is repetition. You have to do something repeatedly, but the other key is it has to have a benefit, and in the awe method the benefit is immediate. You do it and you feel better and you go. That was nice, and so there's really no resistance to doing it multiple times a day.
Karin Nelson:25:25
Yeah.
Jake Eagle:25:26
I do want to go back and touch on something that you said about how we can use this, and I want to suggest that, in addition to what you mentioned, we can also use it proactively. So, instead of waiting until we feel bad or until we feel stuck and we want to get some relief, we can use it proactively. So, for example, if you needed to have a conversation with someone and you thought this is going to be a difficult conversation and you're a little bit reluctant, if you were to go and access a moment of awe before the conversation, it would shift your physiology, it would shift your attitude, it would shift you energetically. And now it's a different conversation. If the other person knows this as well. Let's say you're a couple. This is a wonderful thing to do, where you say you know what. We need to sit down and talk about X, Y and Z. Why don't we take a moment and access awe before we do that? And sort of reconnect with what's really important, reconnect with how fortunate we are to be alive, to be able to have the conversation, even if it's a difficult conversation, and now we come into it with a completely different orientation.
Karin Nelson:26:50
I love that. I think that's a great visual for many of these women who maybe are stepping into the dating pool, who are maybe getting into new relationships, as something that can connect them in a way that maybe they haven't been connected to previous partners. There's kind of a vulnerability in opening yourself up to experiencing the same kind of emotions that your partner is feeling in such a beautiful way, and so I love this idea of taking this and having your partner also be on the same page as you and saying let's just have a moment where we both experience awe in whatever that looks like for us, and then we proceed with whatever it is that we need to talk about. But I also think it's important for women who aren't maybe in that relationship yet but maybe have to go to court and maybe have to text their ex something that might be tricky to talk about and really bringing themselves into this moment of preparation for what's next and getting their mind and their body kind of all online, all regulated and supported in the way that they might need in those moments to come.
Jake Eagle:28:07
And it breaks the cycle of feeling like a victim, which is so crucial. It's a way that we can all empower ourselves before we have to interact with someone that we're uncomfortable with or before we have to take on a challenge that we might rather not take on. So we can do something to empower ourselves before we engage changes the experience.
Karin Nelson:28:34
Absolutely. I love that. The last time we talked I had asked you if you could walk us through maybe your favorite way of practicing awe, kind of how you do it throughout your day, as you've been doing it for three years and you're kind of very practiced at this and I loved you just kind of shared your day and how you kind of fit awe into your life just little moments. If you could share that with the audience again, I think it would be really helpful for them to kind of see what it might look like if they were to put this practice into their lives.
Jake Eagle:29:08
Well, when I started and I continued this to this day when I started I did it three times a day, kind of no matter what, and the first time was in the morning. I would get up and wash my face, brush my teeth, do those kinds of things, and then I would go outside. I live in Hawaii so I can go outside all year round, but I would do this no matter where I live, go outside and have a moment of awe. And again, I just really want to remind people. I'm talking 15 to 30 seconds, right.
Karin Nelson:29:35
Right.
Jake Eagle:29:36
So go outside, have a moment of awe, and I would do that as a way to set the tone for the day. And then somewhere midday, usually before or after lunch, I would do the same thing. I would stop and have a moment of awe. And then every day when I go to bed, before I go to bed, I go outside on our porch and I look at the stars and I have a moment of awe. And these are very consistent for me, kind of regardless of what's going on. I always have these three practices every day. Now, what's happened since then because I've been doing it for a while is the moments start to arise spontaneously during the day. So I'll be driving somewhere with my wife, hannah, and we'll come around a corner and there's this beautiful view and I'll realize it's beautiful and I'll start to have a moment of awe, without actually having prescribed it, it just arises within me and I recognize what's happening and so I give myself that full experience. If I'm talking with Hannah, I'll stop talking. If I'm listening to something on the radio, I might turn it off or ignore it, and I just really take in the beauty of what I'm seeing. And that becomes a moment of awe when Hannah and I hug, it's always five to 10 seconds longer than it used to be, and many of those are moments of awe and just incredibly sweet ways to connect and not take our connection for granted.
Karin Nelson:31:14
Yeah, I love that, and our previous conversation also and this is kind of gonna just go back to this idea of partnerships and relationships. You had mentioned that you and your wives relationship is the easiest relationship that you've ever been in and that you believed that that was something that was possible for anyone, that relationships didn't have to be hard, and there was a practice that you had mentioned where I think it was a rewind, or can you explain that again to my audience? I think it will be. It was so profound and I loved it and I think it will be very useful for anyone listening, including myself. I would love to hear you explain that once again.
Jake Eagle:31:58
Yeah, so the basic idea that we've had since we've been together is that romantic relationships don't have to be hard. A lot of people think that they are, and then they prove that to be true. Many people think that having your partner trigger you is not a bad thing. It's an opportunity for growth, and I agree it might be an opportunity for growth, but I have plenty of opportunities for growth. I don't need to be in a difficult relationship to keep growing, and I actually believe and we've seen this over the years that people grow more when they feel safe and secure.
Karin Nelson:32:39
Yeah, I can totally attest to that. I just when I got divorced and then I met my partner that I'm with now we've been together for almost seven years Exactly that, like I, had a lot of work that I needed to do on myself. However, this man that I'm with now was so kind and loving in a way that I had never experienced before, and I really needed that presence to understand for myself that I also could be kind and loving to myself, and that laid a really great foundation for such an easy, happy, loving relationship that we have now. So I totally agree with that.
Jake Eagle:33:20
Yeah, and what you're saying is interesting to me too, because you've probably heard this idea that you can't love another until you love yourself.
Karin Nelson:33:27
Yeah, yeah.
Jake Eagle:33:28
I actually don't really agree with it. I think that sometimes you have to have the experience of either being loved or loving another, which deepens our capacity to love ourselves, sometimes in particularly post-divorce I've worked with a lot of divorced women and men. Oftentimes people are hard on themselves after a divorce and it's hard to love yourself when you're being hard on yourself Absolutely. But if you can find someone else to love, it softens. We soften ourselves when we do that. So I always say to people even if you're having a hard time loving yourself, see if you can find someone or something to love. Yeah, open that up. But let's go on to what I shared with you last time. It's called the redo, the redo, the redo, and the idea with this is that no matter how skilled we are, no matter how much therapy we've done, no matter how many tools we have in our toolbox, we will at times make mistakes, we will behave immaturely, we will react in ways we don't feel good about, and when that happens, what Hen and I have been practicing for a long time is what we call the redo, and the idea there is as soon as I'm aware that I'm not happy with my own behavior and this is my own behavior. I go back to the other person and I say I wanna redo myself. So, if I spoke to you in an impatient way, I come back to you and I say I wanna redo myself and I'm not exactly apologizing. It's more constructive than that, because an apology can sound like I'm defending myself. Well, I was short with you because I didn't sleep well last night, right, I'm sorry. A redo is much more significant than that. It's me showing you how I would like to behave toward you, how I would like to conduct myself. So I know I don't feel good about the way I did conduct myself. Instead of stewing in that, I'm just gonna come to you and I'm going to say I wanna redo myself and I'm now going to speak to you in the way that I wish I had earlier. I've never seen anybody object to receiving a redo, right, because it's an act of grace. Yeah, I'm not telling you anything about you. I'm coming to you and I'm saying I'm not that happy with the way I behave toward you and what we've found is that the quicker you do the redo, the less you suffer, right? So if I behaved in a way toward you that I don't feel good about and I wait two months before I address that. The entire time I'm suffering, and you may be too.
Karin Nelson:36:18
Yeah.
Jake Eagle:36:19
And Hannah and I have gotten it down now where it's probably about five, 10 seconds before one of us will say to the other you know what, I don't feel great about the way I just spoke to you, or I don't feel great about getting up and starting to walk away while you were still talking, so I wanna come back and make sure I really listen until you're done. Yeah, it's a very respectful way of relating with people and very simple.
Karin Nelson:36:46
I love this idea because I think you're right With an apology. It's almost like there's room to, there's the thoughts behind the apology of like I don't feel good about this and I'm sorry for acting in this way or doing this thing, or however it is, but there's not always, when it comes to an apology, the action that supports showing actual and real change and intention behind wanting to change and be different. And I think that's the key that I find really fascinating and beautiful about this practice of the redo is because it's taking this idea of we've got the thoughts going on and I'm gonna voice those thoughts to you, but then I'm going to back that up immediately by changing my actions and showing you and myself, even like, almost like ingraining it in me that this is the person that I want to be, not this person. It's this person here, and I'm going to act that out through my mind, connecting with my body and then putting it out there for both of us.
Jake Eagle:38:01
Yeah, it is. It's for both. It allows us to feel better about ourselves and it allows us to clean up something with the other person. And then how they feel is, of course, up to them, but generally people are quite appreciative and grateful when we go to them and we ask to redo ourselves. And it's important we don't spend a lot of time justifying or explaining why I behaved poorly in the first place. That's not the point. The point is I don't feel good about the way I spoke to you. I don't need to explain all the reasons why. I simply wish I had spoken to you, as I am now going to do. I am now going to redo what I said, but I'm gonna do it in a way that I feel good about.
Karin Nelson:38:49
Yeah, I just had another thought and it just left me, but it might come back, so I might interrupt our next part of the conversation. It comes back to me, but I just find that so fascinating and also.
Jake Eagle:38:59
This is perfect, because this is gonna be an example of a redo.
Karin Nelson:39:03
Yes, absolutely. So. Yeah, like really just opening ourselves up to who's the kind of person that I wanna be. What does that look like? And oh, here we go. Here's the thought. So the redo for me is I am really taking responsibility for myself and my actions and in that you become very powerful and very authoritative over your own life and the kind of person that you wanna be. And the more that you can kind of cement that into your thinking and into your actions, the more you become that person.
Jake Eagle:39:44
That's exactly right, and I think it's all about stepping into our own personal responsibility and empowerment, and this is why an apology doesn't always work, because I could come to you and I could say gosh, I'm sorry the way I spoke to you, I'm having such a hard time and I'm struggling and this happened and that happened, and I'm no longer presenting from an empowered place. What I'm doing now is I'm complaining and I'm acting somewhat victimized, right, but what you just described, I think, is the difference, which is to come from a place of personal empowerment, taking responsibility and conducting myself in a way that I feel good about.
Karin Nelson:40:26
I love that and I just think, when we can think about it in terms of relationships and we could do this with any relationship in our life, like with our kids or our parents or our friends or our partners I think when we can come from that space of I'm gonna own the way I'm showing up, that gives them permission as well to start owning that in their own lives, showing up with their own power and authority over themselves, rather than needing the circumstances to change or everything around them to change. It's really taking our own responsibility for ourselves.
Jake Eagle:41:02
Yes, and this reminds me of another one of the tools that we share when we work with people, which is, instead of complaining about what happened, ask for what you want. So, instead of complaining about what you didn't get, or complaining about what you got but you didn't like, just ask for what you want. Again, it's an example of being empowered. When I complain, I'm coming at it from a place of my own disappointment, my own criticisms of you. It's not going to go well. I can't think of a time when complaining works really well compared to simply asking for what you want.
Karin Nelson:41:54
And I think that opens it up to being more honest in your life and to me, honesty is so. There's vulnerability in honesty which is very connecting when we're more vulnerable and when we're complaining, there isn't it's almost like there's a shield up.
Jake Eagle:42:15
Yes, yes, and that shield is indicative of being in safety consciousness.
Karin Nelson:42:22
Yes.
Jake Eagle:42:23
I have to protect myself. And you brought up the word vulnerability a couple of times in. We think about vulnerability as being a little scary or a little difficult or a little risky, but it's because we're thinking about it from safety consciousness. If we step into gratitude, if we step into heart consciousness and then we think about being vulnerable, it's really a very beautiful and actually a very safe way to connect Very real, very genuine very present. Absolutely, and the problem is that we so often think about these things when we're in safety consciousness, and so the range of our thoughts are very limited. So if we shift our state of consciousness, new possibilities open up and the idea of vulnerability no longer is scary. It's actually a wonderful, wonderful way to connect with people.
Karin Nelson:43:25
Yeah, I love that and I like this idea of taking more moments in our lives and stepping out of that safety consciousness and stepping into the gratitude consciousness and stepping into the spacious consciousness, using this method of awe and really just like making more moments of those areas in your life rather than just staying in this safety consciousness space, which is great, but when we can, I think, expand our whole world, our whole being is going to expand when we expand those moments of gratitude consciousness and spatial consciousness.
Jake Eagle:44:04
Yeah, all sorts of new opportunities open up when we step into this new stance, this new perspective and attitude.
Karin Nelson:44:12
Yeah, absolutely Well, jake. Is there any final takeaways that you would like to leave with my audience today?
Jake Eagle:44:20
There's two things I don't remember if you and I talked about this before, but I think we touched on it and it's what sounds politically incorrect when I say it which is that in intimate relationships, Hannah and I also encourage people to be intolerant. I don't remember if you and I talked about this.
Karin Nelson:44:44
I think we did. Yes, I think we did.
Jake Eagle:44:47
And I said it's politically incorrect because nowadays we're hearing that it's so important we be tolerant of other people and I absolutely appreciate that and agree with it, but within an intimate relationship. What I'm suggesting is that we wanna be intolerant of things that are unacceptable to us, particularly early on. So if you're divorced and you start going out and dating again, my suggestion is to be intolerant of things that you find unacceptable. If somebody says they're gonna pick you up at seven and they're late, that's the kind of thing to say. You know, this doesn't work for me. I'm just giving you that information. You know, if you're gonna be late, it's just not gonna work for me. I wanna feel like a priority in your life and as a relationship goes longer and deeper, hopefully over time it continues to evolve. Tolerance grows over time, like I'll be much more tolerant of Hannah now than I was 30 years ago. I have so much more understanding of who she is and what's going on in her life and why she behaves the way she does in a given moment in time. But early on I think intolerance is something that is a form of self-respect and if you've been in a relationship and it ended and you've gotten divorced. There is a tendency sometimes to try to be more tolerant, and I think it's actually the incorrect strategy.
Karin Nelson:46:26
Yeah, yeah, I think it really comes down to and the word I use a lot is boundaries is just understanding what your personal boundaries are. And often when we get out of a divorce, at least what I've seen with my clients is that we don't know what those boundaries are, because they've kind of been stepped on and stepped over and forgotten about and we don't hold them and we don't know how to hold them and we don't even know ourselves well enough to know what they are. And so, really getting to that space of understanding, where is my line of tolerance? What does that boundary look like? And can I hold that for myself as an act of self-care, to protect myself and love myself in this way? And is that other person willing to also respect that boundary enough that we can come together in a relationship? If they're not willing to pick me up at seven o'clock ever and I've told them this kind of doesn't work for me it might be a time to reevaluate that relationship and step away, and better to do it at the beginning than 30 years into the marriage so much better, and that's why I say to be intolerant early on, I think prevents a lot of people from being heard and disappointed. Yeah, yeah, absolutely, I love that advice.
Jake Eagle:47:44
So I guess my closing remarks would be that all of this you can sort of detect a theme that I think romantic relationships can be easy. I think when we make mistakes, we can use the redo instead of punishing ourselves or feeling guilty, asking for what we want instead of complaining about what we didn't get. All of it connects to awe in that all of these things are ways of being proactive, All of them are ways of managing our nervous system more appropriately, and awe is the shortest, quickest way to shift our nervous system, to put ourselves in a resourceful, healthy state. And I encourage your listeners to just start off thinking you're gonna practice three times a day, do it for three weeks and see what you notice at the end of three weeks. And the reason I say three weeks is there's this myth that it takes 21 days to form a new habit, and I don't know if it's really true or not. I question it, but it's fine and it gives us a framework.
Karin Nelson:48:50
Yeah, something to shoot for exactly.
Jake Eagle:48:52
I'm gonna do this for three weeks and see how I feel at the end of that time. Based on our studies, most of your listeners will feel a significant difference after 21 days of doing this. I love it.
Karin Nelson:49:05
Yeah, I would also encourage my listeners to do this. Do this challenge, take it on for three weeks and, as they know, I say this all the time most things work. For most people, some things don't work, but you have to try it for yourself to see what's going to work and if you're going to notice any kind of a difference. So get out there and practice. Jake, before you leave, can you please tell us where we can find out more about you, if they want, or where we can pick up the book the Power of Awe?
Jake Eagle:49:31
Yeah, our website is the same as the book title. It's thepowerofawcom. On our website we have some practices that people can do that are really beautiful, great ways to delve into the world of awe. Our book can be purchased, I think, just about everywhere now. It's on Amazon, it's in most bookstores. It's actually being translated now into German, arabic, russian and Chinese, so it's really got some traction. People seem to be awe-deprived and they want to know how to have more awe in their lives. And then the last thing is if people have questions, you can send an email to info at thepowerofawcom and I will be happy to respond. Or if it's a question about dealing with chronic pain, then my co-author, michael, will respond.
Karin Nelson:50:22
Amazing. That is great. Well, I would just recommend everyone get this book. All my listeners know that I like to have a hard copy and listen, so I know it's also unaudible. So do both if you're like me and you like to read and underline and listen at the same time. Or get one, but it's out there. Please, everyone, try this out, see if it works for you. Jake, thank you so much again for being willing to be on the podcast. It's been amazing having you back and I appreciate it so much.
Jake Eagle:50:49
My pleasure, nice to reconnect with you.
Karin Nelson:50:52
Bye. Hi friend, I'm so glad you're here and thanks for listening. I wanted to let you know that if you're wanting more, a way to make deeper, more lasting change, then working one-on-one with me as your coach may be exactly what you need. Together, we'll take everything you're learning in the podcast and implement it in your life, with weekly coaching, real life practice and practical guidance. To learn more about how to work with me one-on-one, go to KarinNelsonCoaching dot com. That's wwwKARINNELSONCoachingcom. Thanks for listening. If this podcast agreed with you in any way, please take a minute to follow and give me a rating wherever you listen to podcasts and for more details about how I can help you live an even better life than when you were married. Make sure and check out the full show notes by clicking the link in the description.
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