How To Embrace Emotions Rather Than Stuff Them Down With Food

Welcome to the Satiated Podcast, where we explore physical and emotional hunger, satiation, and healing your relationship with your food and body. I'm your host, Stephanie Mara Fox, your somatic nutritional counselor.

One key feature of many struggles with food is difficulty feeling emotions. This can occur for many reasons, such as trauma guiding you outside your body, having a smaller window of tolerance where every emotion feels dangerous to experience, or family conditioning of being told to stop crying or experiencing that it wasn't safe to share your emotions growing up. The focus in food recovery often needs to shift from food to what food is supporting you with. The more you're able to notice, describe, connect, and move through different emotions and sensations, the less food needs to come in to protect you from this experience.

I chat about emotional processing and so much more with Robert Weisz and Daniel Blackwood today. Robert is now retired after 50 years of practice as a clinical psychologist, consultant, educator, trainer, and Ph.D. in clinical/community psychology. He has done research and authored a number of articles in scientific journals in the field of sleep and dreams. He has authored two chapters in books about mental health and he is the co-founder of the Milton Erickson Institute of Clinical Hypnosis and Behavioral Sciences of New Mexico. He has been deeply interested in the spiritual/philosophical path of nonduality. Daniel is the co-author with Robert of Mindfulness-Based Somatic Emotional Processing (MBSEP) and author of Integrity Recovery™. Daniel specializes in trauma recovery and offers training for therapists who want to broaden their scope of working specifically with emotional processing and emotional regulation in the larger context of mind/body therapies. Daniel founded The Evolution Group, where he serves with a team of talented clinicians and administrative staff.

We chat about what it actually look like to process emotions, the cultural conditioning that fosters fear of intense emotions, using breath and physical sensations to regulate, allowing emotions to move through the body, the impact of emotional work on relationships, and simple practices to connect with and feel your emotions.

The first Somatic Eating® Program class happened this past Thursday, and it was an amazing kick off call. You can still join this current class until this Wednesday, November 4th. I walk you through the steps to increase your interoceptive awareness to know what it is that you're feeling and provide you a roadmap for how to connect with and move through intense emotions and sensations in food and non-food ways. You can go to somaticeating.com to join now or click on the link in the show notes.

Now, welcome Robert and Daniel! I am really excited to have both of you here and to get into our conversation today. And as listeners know, I always like to start with how you got into the work that you're doing. So, sharing just a little bit about your history and how you got into the work that you are doing today and sharing with the world.

Robert Weisz 03:53

If I can start, I can say to you that this work has really come out of my own life experience as a human being and out of my professional experience as a psychotherapist, having done about 50 years worth of psychotherapy with many, many people, and having the privilege and the responsibility to witness how other human beings live their lives, and how there is such a struggle to maintain some kind of balance and to deal with difficult situations, which tend to generate some pretty intense emotional activity. And so, what I've noticed is that our culture has trained us to be somewhat fearful of intense emotions, and to regard them as problematic, a sign of not being in control of our lives, or perhaps if we really allowed ourselves to feel our emotions, we would go insane, and all of those things are, as you know, untruths, but they're part of our cultural condition.

Stephanie Mara 04:50

Yeah, I agree with that. What about you, Daniel?

Daniel Blackwood 04:53

Well, I think my path is similar and different. I pursued this field out of a desire to grow and learn and be healthy, and as I came into knowing Robert, I'm in my 40th year of practice as a clinician, I learned about a simple way that I can tune into what's happening inside and have a way of working with that, which is especially nice, especially when that feeling is difficult, and it really lends itself to working with clients as well. So, the thing I love the most about this approach is its simplicity. Looking forward to sharing that with you.

Stephanie Mara 05:39

Yeah, I agree with both of you that there's like this fear of inhabiting the body, and I see that a lot with those who are at least listening here are sometimes in a struggle with being in their food interactions or body image interactions, and we have been taught in so many different ways that the body is something to force or coerce or not listen to or numb out from, and so I'm curious where you've seen kind of with those that you've worked with in updating of that. Like, how have you been able to explore kind of shifting the belief around the body that it's an unsafe place to inhabit.

Robert Weisz 06:25

That's a really interesting issue. I think the felt sense of the body being unsafe has to do with some level of awareness that the body is the territory of emotional experience. The mind is the commentator about it, the one that tells the stories and tries to come up with a with a solution, but the body is where we feel our feelings, and there's a certain fear around meeting those feelings where they're being felt, because somehow that might get us into trouble with society or with our conditioning, or with our sense of being in control. And there's this whole myth of control makes us believe that we must control our emotions, but we can't control our emotions. But we can deal with them, we can meet them, we can work with them, and we can learn from them.

Daniel Blackwood 07:12

One of the really interesting things about the old Star Trek series, Roddenberry is dealing with the mind-body split through the characters of Spock and Kirk and Bones is that the experience, as Robert's saying, happens in here, and and this is the way we talk about it. So a lot of people try to resolve things through the story and the revisiting of the story. And don't get me wrong, I love a good story, but what this does is it gives us a simple way to move down into where life really happens, and it's in the body. And you're right. I think a lot of times, due to experiences we've had, we become afraid of being there, or we don't know how, or both. And so, mindfulness-based somatic emotional processing is a again a simple, an elegant method for being with our emotional experience.

Robert Weisz 08:10

And here's where the where the role of witnessing is really significant, because witnessing is the willingness to be present with an experience, either with our own experience or the experience of another person, but in that witnessing, which is a very special and very powerful form of bringing attention to something, in the witnessing we bring attention to the experience without evaluating it or criticizing it or making attempts to resolve it or fix it or to get rid of it. So that witnessing orientation, which, which is not meditation, but it comes from that 1000s of years of meditation. There's a quality of presence that we would call witnessing, that allows us to really be there with what's happening, as it's happening in the body in this case with emotions, and be willing to notice and to receive information and to be present with it without trying to alter it or fix it or explain it, and that's a really important piece of it. That's why it's called mindfulness-based. It's a particular quality of attention that is quite easy to learn, but there's a certain discipline that we have to develop to maintain that witnessing presence, and that's where a certain amount of motivation and skill building comes in.

Stephanie Mara 09:25

Yeah, I'm curious if you can say more about that experience of discipline because I know that word even can kind of get misconstrued of just like I know for a lot of individuals listening to this, like discipline has so been connected to like diet culture. Like I just have to discipline myself to like eat in a way that I'm told that I should eat, quote unquote. And sometimes that ends up, and then I feel like in sometimes fighting the body or not being able to listen to it because we're getting all these external messages of what it means to discipline ourselves, and so I'm curious in your modality what that means and what that looks like to be in a discipline of embodiment is what I'm hearing.

Robert Weisz 10:12

You know the way you're talking about discipline and the way that the culture thinks about it, there's sort of the punitive, judgmental quality to it that you know tends to feel somewhat aversive to people, so they they don't want to enter that discipline. But discipline is more associated really with willingness, and willingness is associated with the motivation to engage in action that helps to create a change or helps to approach a situation. The nice thing about our approach, mindfulness-based somatic emotional processing, is that it is not punitive. It is not judgmental. It's not evaluative, and it's not control oriented. But it is really based on the the motivation and the willingness to approach something, you know, to come to it and then to need it without struggle, without evaluation, and without the need to control it. That's what makes this approach so accessible as well as simple. You don't have to control anything. You don't have to punish anything. You don't have to get rid of feeling. But you do have, hopefully, the interests and the motivation, and then just a simple skill to witness your experience of emotional events, memories, situations, relationships as it's manifesting in real time in your body right here and now. So that's the simplicity of it that I think makes it really accessible to anyone who might be interested in just number one becoming more acquainted with their emotional reality, with their emotional experience, to be able to approach it and to be present with it and to learn from it, and also to be able to manage it without trying to control it, and to process it by using this approach. And by processing, I mean the ability to work through something so that we can see it more clearly for what it is, without struggle and without judgment.

Stephanie Mara 12:04

Yeah, Daniel, do you have anything to add?

Daniel Blackwood 12:07

Well, there's all kinds of things running through my mind. I guess it's easy to forget that we're all part of nature, and you know, being up in your head can divorce you from your body in the same way that maybe being in urbanicity too much and not getting out of doors can disconnect you from nature. MSEP, as we refer to it, of this approach gives you a simple way to move toward your body and towards what it is you're feeling, and it's sort of like that thing, I'm sure you've experienced this, Stephanie, or you might remember it from high school or whatever, where you're talking about dancing, you're thinking about dancing, but then you get out on the dance floor and you start moving, and you're in it. And so this is a simple way just to move into that flow. It's natural. We're not devising anything here. We're talking about a structure for moving into what's natural safely and with some structure. And what happens after that is completely natural. It's our body doing what it needs to do, as Robert often says. This is just our body really being supported to do what it would do naturally, anyway.

Stephanie Mara 13:23

Yeah, you know, I approach those in food recovery in a very similar way of I find that whatever someone's working through, whether it's food or anything else, we see it as the problem to be fixed, rather than this is the answer to something that I'm feeling that I don't have the capacity to feel. But if I can build the capacity to experience this, even if it's really intense, like a really intense binge urge, like you were describing, like rather than fighting it, rather than trying to like numb out from it or try to change it, can I connect with it? Can I describe it? Can I move through it and come out the other side and being like, oh, it was okay that I had that experience. It's more what I do with it that kind of creates a different end result. So I'm curious in your work, like if you could provide an example of the process that you're talking about of connecting with the body and moving through what's there.

Robert Weisz 14:24

Yeah, start out say with the example of grief. Working with grief, extends powerful emotional experience that most people are afraid of, and they try to stay away from it. And in that case, they don't work with the grief. They don't meet it. They don't learn from it, and they never get to the other side of it, which is, you know, some wisdom is gained from that experience, and part of that wisdom is that grief is an expression of love, because we have lost what we love and we grieve it. But to tell you that just as a as a mental concept doesn't work. But if you can discover that for yourself, that inside of that grief. You meet it, and when you allow it to move through, that's the other important part. That we, instead of blocking the feeling or fighting with it or struggling against it, we allow it to be felt, and as we stay present with it, we allow it to move through us. And sometimes it just moves around in the body, and then it begins to move out. And that is kind of the direct evidence that as we're working with this and the feelings are moving through us, the intensity of that emotional issue begins to diminish, which is telling us that we're actually holding it and relating to it in a different way. So, just working with grief, for example, I've done many of these sessions with people who have met intense grief, and what I would ask that person to do is just to begin to recognize how that grief is present in terms of the sensory, physical experience of the body. Just to begin to notice that, and you know, with grief, there are a lot of bodily responses to that strong energy. But by orienting the person to how it is in the body, number one, we're shifting them from the mental orientation of why did this happen, why didn't I do work to prevent it, what's wrong with me that I let this to happen. Instead of going into all of those mental things that just make the situation worse, we stay present with the physical manifestation of the grief. We identify the sensations. It might be a tightening of the throat and the pain in the heart and a sense of being pushed by some unseen folks. And instead of fighting those symptoms, we simply witness them. We simply stay present with them. Don't try to change them. Don't try to fix them. And because we're doing that, and we're not engaging in some kind of struggle. The experience begins to shift. The energy begins to move, and eventually it begins to release. And that's direct evidence that something helpful is happening. The proof is in the experience, which begins to show you that something is changing. Because when we don't fight the grief, we meet it. It has a chance to do the work is there to do, which is to help us to recognize something really important about us and about our loss that helps us to become wiser through these things.

Daniel Blackwood 17:10

I feel like your question that Robert just gave a response to was maybe like, how would you help a person in that moment who's maybe struggling around a habit or habitual behavior, and I and I think just to give maybe an additional example, I might have a client who is struggling with maybe acting out in a certain way, and so work to try to bring awareness to that moment, which heretofore seems automatic. But after we bring some attention to it, we're opening up a little bit of a window there to try to help them see that in that moment there's some emotion that they're having. There's there are possibly very strong emotions that they're having there. So what we do is we stay present to what that is in much the way that Robert just described, and support them in processing that emotion very directly. And there's so much learning that takes place there, let alone discharge of maybe of emotion or digestion, I should say, of emotion, where we're beginning to open up this window where there may be a choice, a more felt choice down the line, because what we're doing is dealing directly with the emotion that prior to that they were coping with rather desperately by trying to regulate it through this behavior or substance or whatever. Maybe that helps to also illustrate this.

Stephanie Mara 18:53

Yeah, absolutely. You know what I really hear first of all, and what you're talking about is how important it is to get out of the story and connect with the sensation that is happening in the body, because the story is trying to help manage the sensation, but doesn't actually connect us with what is actually happening in the body. It just keeps us in the the narration of what is going on. And when you describe, for both of you, the experience of moving something through, like I know what that means only because I've felt it. But for anyone who maybe doesn't know what that means of like moving an emotion or sensation through, because sometimes some questions that I get asked is, but how do I know when it's done, or how do I know when to move on if I don't have the time to get to a place where it's done?

Robert Weisz 19:48

Let me talk first about how we believe that something is done. First of all, we are not here to get rid of emotion. We're not trying to eliminate the emotional experience. We are approaching it in a way that allows us to process it in a somatic way, meaning that it's not the mental capacities that is doing the work; it's some intrinsic capacity that is in the body of most mammals actually, that helps them to release the energies that are generated from trauma or fear or some difficult situation. So, the other piece here is that we want to get away from the struggle, because the struggle engages us in a futile effort to somehow manage and get rid of and control or somehow fix something that can't be controlled and it can't be fixed. So a big piece of this work is that we stay out of struggle by doing something that is very simple, very accessible, very real and tangible. Being present and attentive to the experience of emotion in the body, and also, by the way, at the same time, using the breath to help regulate the body. And we use the breath as a as an instrument to help people stay regulated as they process, so that the processing can actually move forward. If the person is majorly dysregulated, they can't process. So we need to be in touch with that level of kind of emotional activation. We call it the window of tolerance, and within that window of tolerance, people can actually be present with something intense and difficult, but they also have the intrinsic capacity to process it in the body. So those are really you know important components of this. But I want to come back to struggle. The struggle is what we've taught to do with our emotions: struggle with them, so you can control them, so you can make them go away, or at least you know, stay out of your way. People are told, in order to succeed in your profession, you have to file your emotions in a safety deposit box and only take them out when you really need them. The pressure, you know, to control to avoid strong emotions is pretty pervasive all over the place. Again, there is this intrinsic capacity that we've discovered is there for the body to process, to digest, to go through the energies of an emotional event in a way that allows them to be released. But there's no obligation, nor is there any necessity, to get rid of feelings. We want to meet them. We want to approach them. We want to be with them. We want to listen to them. We want to pay attention to how they're present in the body. And as we do that, they begin to work their way through. And then we have a different relationship to that emotional situation because it is not so charged that we can't approach it and see more about it that allows us to learn a lot more about who we are and how we function.

Daniel Blackwood 22:43

I think a person who is experiencing this will often say the feeling feels a little stronger or sharper, or I feel heat in this area, and then interestingly, they'll then notice that it moved to their neck, or to their hands, or their feet. The physical sensation of emotion moves around in the body when it's being processed. I would reassure people that your body knows what it needs to do, and it will let you know when it's done, and that that is a felt sense experience. It's not an intellectual arrival. I mean, some people come back after working on something and they'll say, "You know, I feel complete with this. I feel like I've done what I needed to do." But there's a knowing that happens emotionally at the body level, there isn't a knowing like up here. It's a knowing knowing. People say, "How did you know you wanted to buy that car?" And it's a feeling, right? It's when I turn on the radio or whatever. So I just want to reassure people to have some confidence about that. Their body tells them stuff all the time, and they know how to know at that level.

Robert Weisz 24:04

What we're talking about here, Stephanie, is sense the wisdom of the heart. That wisdom of the heart is not an intellectual, verbal wisdom; is an emotional, grounded wisdom that is available to us when we're willing to approach it. And I want to just mention this: the issue about pain. You know, a lot of the work that we do is to deal with emotional pain. You know, not just the pain of grief, but the pain of conflict, the pain of abandonment, the pain of betrayal. You know, there's a lot of emotional pain in a human life, and we want to be able to approach that pain in a really caring, compassionate, clear way, and to be present with it. That is another important concept here: that willingness to be present. And again, we can't force ourselves to be present, but we might become interested and motivated to be present when we begin to. That when we are present with an important event for us, as it's unfolding in the body, things begin to happen that are really helpful, and it has nothing to do with control or struggle, but exactly the opposite. The willingness to be present was something difficult, but with the knowledge and the reassurance that as we do that and really stay with it and work with it. It begins to release. It begins to open up, and then it shows us very basic, important emotional truths about ourselves that we really need to know better, so that we can be in relationship with ourselves in an honest and authentic way, and we can be in relationship to others in that same honest and authentic thing, because we know ourselves, and we can be open about that, and we're not afraid of our emotionality. We don't have to hide it.

Stephanie Mara 25:48

Yeah, thanks for adding that, and for both of your responses of what this looks like, in that this isn't an intellectual process, and also that this isn't a matter of the goal is to be a less emotional human being. It's is you are always going to be a human being that feels emotions. And how do we grow your capacity to be with that experience so that you feel like you can connect with it? You can get curious about what you need in it, even when I talk about moving through, sometimes it is physically actually getting up and expressing the emotion with your body by actually being in movement with it, and so that you feel like you just beautifully added Robert around then you feel like you can be more connected to yourself, which might mean that you can be more connected to your environment. You feel safer to connect with other people, knowing that you have this kind of grounded relationship with yourself that whatever shows up in whatever environment around whatever people, you know that you will be able to navigate that because you have already been practicing navigating a lot of things on your own internally with yourself.

Robert Weisz 27:03

I want to add something here about relationships. You know, relationships are the most important and complex things that we encounter in our lives, and a lot of emotion gets generated in relationships. Whether your parents are being angry and punitive, or whether they're fighting with each other and scaring you, or whether there's a lot of conflict that is handled in a very punitive and negative way. You know, relationships are these amazing entities that all that really support life in a basic way, but they're also really challenging and complex. And one of the reasons for that is that we do not have the tools to approach and manage and work with the emotional energies that get generated in relationships, and that makes it really hard, for example, for people to problem solve or to be authentic with each other or to to deepen their intimacy, because strong feelings are there, but somehow when strong feelings are there, people then respond in ways that are not very helpful. That maybe are negative and punitive and painful. You know, this basic knowledge here can make a lot of difference to all of us in terms of our capacity to communicate effectively, to be authentic. Yes, I'm sorry that I I was so nasty with you. I didn't realize what I was doing. I apologize. You know, to be able to to do some repair work, we have to be able to do that work about our reality and our emotional experience, and also then to be present with each other. If my spouse is dealing with some really difficult emotional material, if I can stay present with her and help her to process that in that way, I am supporting her in her life, and that's also part of our relationship with each other. That we are skillful and knowledgeable and effective in supporting each other in this very emotional life, human beings live an emotional life. If we weren't living an emotional life, life would be quite flat and one-dimensional. I don't think we would like that.

Stephanie Mara 29:10

Yeah, Daniel, did you have something you wanted to add?

Daniel Blackwood 29:12

Oh, I was enjoying Robert's description of that. I guess we deal in the second half of our book with training clinicians, and we really are quite thorough in our explanation about how to do this work as a practitioner. And then we offer even you know two days of foundational training and an advanced course, which therapists can avail themselves of. But the first half of the book is for the lay reader, so that anyone can learn how to use MSEP. The line there maybe is when the emotions feel too big to do alone. It would be nice to have the help of someone supporting us. That's when maybe to the practitioner, but for the lion's share of emotions day to day that we deal with, having this as a practice is a practice after all, not only helps with whatever the day to day emotions are that we need to process, but it's so interesting that after a while, that practice ends up being a natural regulator of emotion, and we find that we're just our keel, if I could use a sailing analogy, is just more even as we go because we're we're in the habit of doing this when emotions come up.

Stephanie Mara 30:39

Yeah, I love that addition because what it normalizes is whatever we are struggling with right now is also part of how we have been conditioned by our environment and by what we've been taught of this is how I'm supposed to connect with my body and what it's experiencing or not connect, and so what you're describing is like that conditioning can change, and through repetition and practice and time, through the repetition of the practice, sometimes that you know I've seen a lot of people challenging the phrase of like time heals all wounds, but if you're not doing anything in the time to practice something different, time is just passing, but in the practice, what you're describing is that, and I've experienced this in my own body as well, and with those that I've worked with, is that when the pattern starts to be, oh, when I feel something intense, I turn toward myself rather than away from myself it starts to create a new pattern where the practice or the conditioning, so to speak, is you don't even have to think about it so hard anymore because it's just oh, when I feel something so big now my habit, my pattern is to turn towards it.

Robert Weisz 32:05

Yeah.

Daniel Blackwood 32:06

Bingo. Yeah.

Robert Weisz 32:07

I want to come back to to the to the use of this practice to be skillfully supported with important and you know carry the the people in our lives that we feel close to and we care about, because this is a very skillful and very simple and amazingly effective way to provide emotional support. You know, right now people, the kind of emotional support people provide now is saying you shouldn't feel that, or you shouldn't feel like that, which is completely useless. You are feeling like that, but you know, this is an interpersonal life in this in this world, and we are in a position when we gain some skill with this practice. When we are capable of doing it rather skillfully with ourselves, we have then some qualification to be authentically able to support and help the people who are close to us, the people that we care about, and I think that's an important part of what this is about. It's not just a practice for self work and self knowledge and self processing, but it's also a practice for being genuinely effective for providing support to people that we care about. I think that's really an important piece of it too, because it is fundamentally a practice for working with ourselves, but when we have that skill, we can use that skill to help other people to do that work. I think that part of the way that this can spread and be really useful for anyone who's interested in approaching this and working, learning how to be effective with it.

Daniel Blackwood 33:39

I have couples that I work with taught this too, who hold this kind of space with each other. It's a very different way of being with a true other is to honor their emotional experience in this way.

Stephanie Mara 33:53

Yeah, it's kind of interesting to consider just thinking about somatic work as not just because I feel like what it has been popularized is this approach to regulate ourselves, or which you know now regulate is often just misconstrued. It's like fixing what it is that is happening or how our body is feeling, rather than just continuing to show up for it. But what you're also naming is that there's something really powerful in that when we are able to validate and acknowledge what it is that we're feeling, that we are in actually an act of service in the world. Which I feel like the whole idea of, and I'm even exploring this more now in my PhD in some classes, learning how social justice is not just going out and being a part of these big events where you're picketing or whatever, but it can be on the micro level of like how am I embodying my body? Because when I am in relationship with myself, I can be in relationship with others, and I can be a really strong co-regulator for someone else that then also is more regulated in their own life that can go out, and the cycle just continues. They can go out and have different kind of conversations and relationships and interactions with other people, and so there is something really profound about doing this work for oneself because there is an experience of also it being of service to everyone around you as well. It's a little bit of what I was hearing you describe.

Robert Weisz 35:36

Yes, you've you've expanded on it very nicely. That's what motivated us to write the book and to get it out there. Because this is a way for people to be more effective and more compassionate and more skillful with themselves. And as they develop that skill, they can use that skill to help other people to be more effective, to be more authentic, and to be more kind of grounded in their body, and to relate to emotions not as dangerous forces, but as life-affirming friends. When we have that kind of a relationship with them, we're not afraid of them because we learn through experience that they're not dangerous. They're not making us crazy. They're not causing us to be dangerously out of control. They are powerful forces that has something to show us, and they have something that is helping us to learn who we truly are. At the foundation of human life is the fact that we care for each other, and it's because we care for each other that we can survive in a really challenging world, but in that care for each other, there can be some real skill that allows us to really work with challenging things that happen all the time.

Daniel Blackwood 36:51

Yeah, I think if we think about society or social interactions as like a mobile, if my nervous system is regulated, right? Meaning that I'm I'm in balance with myself, or practiced at doing that when I get imbalanced. It's going to affect the overall balancing of the mobile, right? And so, in that way that you're saying, Stephanie, it really is being of service and being mindful about how I'm holding space for another, for for myself and for another, that changes the world order. It's nice to show up to the big things too, but on the micro level, I think you're describing it just right.

Stephanie Mara 37:37

Yeah, it sounds like you've both been in the field of somatics for quite some time, and as it's gotten more and more popular over the last, you know, decade or so, I'm curious if you feel like there's anything that is not being explored or talked about or is being misconstrued, especially in the work that you've created. Like, I'm wondering if you feel like there's for anyone who's listening, either the practitioner or the person interested in somatic work. What do you feel like is not being talked about or addressed enough?

Robert Weisz 38:10

Well, I think what's not being talked about at the most fundamental level is that we are emotional beings rather than mental beings. It's not like they're opposed to each other, but we have not really acknowledged that simple truth because emotions are the energies that move us, that shape our perception, that determine our choices, that are carried in our beliefs, that have to do with every interaction we have of life, and I think that fundamental truth has not really been acknowledged. There is this primacy, this priority associated with the fact that we have this formidable intellect that can do all kinds of calculations and invent all kinds of things and make technological wonders. But we have ignored this fundamental truth. We are emotional beings who think rather than mental beings.

Daniel Blackwood 39:00

Yeah, I would add maybe another couple of colors to that. I worry that our field really embraces cognitive and intellectual techniques, and I think we know anecdotally, but I think even the research is beginning to back this up that interventions that don't involve the body really miss the boat. And so, when you have an insight or you have an aha moment, when that is felt in the body, realized as sensation, that's where the rubber really meets the road, and that's how change really happens. That's when we know. So I worry that in in our own field, there's too much emphasis, and then I worry about that with everybody, you know, run into AI for answers to things. It certainly doesn't incorporate somatics, felt, sense, experience, and emotion, and it's mind, body, emotion, and spirit.

Stephanie Mara 40:10

Yeah, I agree. Especially the addition of AI has potentially continued our reliance on cognition and getting some kind of mental answer to whatever it is that we're struggling with, rather than as you're both saying, returning to the body, feeling the emotional body, connecting with it, and that insight is only solidified when it's felt, rather than just understood.

Robert Weisz 40:41

Yes, and just adding to that, insight comes from feeling as well as thinking. The actual experience of insight is a very emotional experience.

Stephanie Mara 40:51

Yeah, completely agree.

Robert Weisz 40:53

This all has to do with kind of a certain basic emotional knowledge, which starts with just a recognition: we are emotional. Emotions are an essential and fundamental part of our experience, and they influence every aspect of our life. So let's begin to meet them, to accept them, to acknowledge them, to allow them to be felt. And when we do that, they begin to get processed. And it's kind of surprising how simply and elegantly that can happen. We don't have to do incredibly complex computer calculations to deal with emotions. We just have to, as human beings in the moment, be willing to accept them, acknowledge them, meet them, and stay present with them compassionately and with care.

Stephanie Mara 41:39

Yeah, so well said. I am curious, just as we move towards wrapping up, you know, I always like to offer listeners a baby step of something that they can tangibly kind of walk away with of like, hey, here's something that I can practice in my own life with all the things that we explored about being with, connecting, moving through. I'm wondering if each of you have a baby practice that someone can start to play with today in their own lives.

Robert Weisz 42:08

First step of the baby practice is how am I feeling when I'm feeling in my body already? How am I feeling, and where am I feeling? And that already is telling us that we're paying attention to how and where I'm feeling it, so that that's the way we gather and bring our attention to where the action is. How and where am I feeling this in my body? And then I want to just right now accept the fact that it's happening this way right now. I have this heavy feeling in my stomach, and I'm willing to be present with it without trying to change it or fix it. That's the baby practice. That's the essence of it.

Daniel Blackwood 42:44

I would add the baby step that's not so exciting as what Robert said, but it would be as many times as you can remember to do this a day. Inhale through your nose. Exhale through your mouth. Make your exhale longer than your inhale. Try to do that three to five times, as many times a day as you can remember. And what happens is, is it brings your awareness to your body when you're doing that. It slows you down. It relaxes your body, and just in the practice of that, it brings your awareness to the felt sense of your experience in your body safely.

Robert Weisz 43:30

A little piece about that: not the breath as an idea, but the breath as a felt experience with a really interesting sensory component. And I typically try to encourage people to really become intimately acquainted with the physical, sensory sensations of your breath, because this is the breath of life. The breath is an incredible doorway and a beautiful resource. It's so easy to approach it.

Stephanie Mara 43:57

Yeah, I love both of these offerings. First, in just they are simple, but actually quite difficult in practice because we have to remember to do it, and so that's why it is called a practice where we have to keep on practicing, checking in, noticing and naming what's happening, giving space to take a deep breath, and I love that also addition because we have to find ways that it makes it feel safe to connect with the body when it hasn't always felt that way. And sometimes, yes, the breath is an outlet to be able to be like, okay, can I just breathe in on a count of four, breathe out on a count of six, and do that a couple times throughout the day to be like, oh, okay, I'm connecting with my body in a very simple, tangible way that might not feel overly activating. Potentially, for some it might, but it gives some kind of practice to be like, hey, here's a way to make contact with the body, and you don't have to stay there very long. You can just do it and move on, and do it again later.

Robert Weisz 45:07

Yeah, you know, I like the way that we're coming back to presence. Presence is the willingness to be aware of and to stay connected with some experience without trying to change it or evaluate it or fix it, and that is really important because that teaches us to be present with our emotions where they're happening, and that is such a simple step. It's such a profound change from the way that we've been conditioned to behave around emotions.

Stephanie Mara 45:36

Yeah. Well, thank you both for sharing your wisdom today. I absolutely loved this conversation. I'm curious how listeners can keep in touch with you and the work that you're both doing in the world.

Daniel Blackwood 45:47

Website www.mbsep.com is probably the easiest way to do that without having to say much more. The book is available wherever you buy books, mindfulness based, somatic emotional processing.

Stephanie Mara 46:05

Wonderful. Well, I will put that link in the show notes so individuals can find you and keep in touch with this work. And just thank you so much for doing what you're doing. It's really important, and it is supporting individuals in ultimately having a deeper connection with themselves, which is a lot of the point of the field of somatics, is like can we connect with ourselves so that we can connect more with our world and other people. And so, just thank you so much for being here today.

Robert Weisz 46:32

Well, it's been a great pleasure to be here, and I so much appreciate this opportunity to bring a certain important awareness to people that emotions are our friends with care. They are really able to help us, and they are able to show us who we are and who we care to be.

Daniel Blackwood 46:51

Yeah, Stephanie, I would add too that we do these podcasts, and it was really a pleasure to do this with you and the clarity with which you received our work and gleaned it and contributed. It made for a great dialogue. Thank you.

Stephanie Mara 47:05

Yeah, absolutely. Well, thank you so much again. And to anyone who is listening, if you have any insights or aha moments from this conversation, email me at support@stephaniemera.com anytime. And I hope you all have a satiating and safety producing rest of the day. Bye!

Keep in touch with Roberts Weisz and Daniel Blackwood here:

Website: https://mbsep.com/

Book: Mindfulness-Based Somatic Emotional Processing: https://link.amazon/B0emA2GhO