Episode 21 – Self-Love and Dealing with Difficult Emotions with Benjy Sherer

Episode Summary

In this episode, we talk with Benjy Sherer about emotional fitness, self-love, and the how to accept difficult emotions.

To learn more about Benjy’s emotional healing program, go to: www.benjysherercoaching.com.  You can get a free webinar (“Healing Feelings First”) here: www.benjysherercoaching.com/replay.

You can also join the Facebook group: ‘Self Love and Shadow Work: Modern Awakenings’.

Check out Benjy’s book “Feelings First Shadow Work: A Simple Approach to Self Love and Emotional Mastery” available in paperback, audiobook, and kindle.

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Show Transcript

David Enevoldsen: Hello everybody, and welcome to the Emotional Embuffination podcast. I’m your host, David Enevoldsen, and here on Emotional Embuffination we are training to become emotionally buff enough to overcome any conflict in life. And at the same time, we are learning to discover and optimize new levels of success, happiness and just all those joyful, positive feelings in life. This podcast is just one of a number of different resources I have available. If you want to learn more about any of that, check out the Emotional Embuffination website, which is embuff.com. That’s E-M-B-U-F-F.com. Also on the website, you can sign up for the newsletter which has weekly Emotional Embuffination tips that you’ll get sent out that will help you in your emotional embuffination journey. On today’s show, I have the pleasure of getting to interview Mr. Benjy Sherer. There is a fine line between emotional awareness and spiritual awakening, and that’s where Benjy thrives as a mentor and teacher. Guiding people to emotional mastery Benjy Bridges The gaps between psychology, spirituality, and philosophy. Those three realms are all intrinsically connected in Benjy’s completely unique and yet intuitively and compellingly simple approach to self-love and emotional mastery. His overall approach is about feelings first, referring to the notion that we can master our emotions directly without the need for deep intellectual analysis, ultra spiritual practices, or pharmaceutical medications.

David Enevoldsen: He teaches people how to connect directly with the emotions and sensations of their body without fear, guilt or shame, and to allow these feelings to run through them so that they can be truly released. It’s about building emotional muscle, not seeking rational answers. As he says, emotional healing is not an intellectual activity.

David Enevoldsen: All right. So, Benjy, thank you very much for agreeing to interview with me today. I’m actually kind of excited about this because I know we talked a little bit before this, this recording here, but I kind of stumbled on to you and discovered your message seemed extremely similar to mine with the Emotional Embuffination framework. And you’re all about kind of emotional fitness and cultivating that fitness and emotional strength and dealing with conflict in life. And it also sounds like your journey is similar in many ways to my own. So thank you very much. As a preliminary matter for agreeing to be on here. Sorry. Go ahead.

Benjy Sherer: No, I’m just going to say it’s genuinely a pleasure. And yeah, we are so on the same page. I still want like, I want to snag the logo that you’ve used for this podcast and use it for all of my ads. It’s exactly, exactly what, what I have in mind when I talk about emotional fitness. So yeah.

David Enevoldsen: I love that. Well, let’s kind of stop, start with some foundational stuff. So you call yourself an emotional fitness trainer. Is that correct?

Benjy Sherer: Yeah. So that’s actually a term it’s been in the back of my mind for the last year or so. I felt like it’s the best way to describe really what I do, but it’s only recently that I started leaning into it. I thought for a while it like maybe it sounds a little too out of left field or a little too unique, but like eventually I started realizing, look, that’s that’s what I do. The whole point of the way that I help people is I want to bypass the intellect, bypass the analysis of our past and our trauma. Not necessarily the intellect entirely, but true Emotional healing doesn’t come from logic. It doesn’t come from analysis. Emotions are not logical. And I’ve had clients who have spent 30 plus years in therapy and with counselors talking and rehashing and going over their past and never really getting anywhere. Now, I do believe that therapy is helpful in many ways and for a lot of people, but I think that it has its limits in that perspective.

David Enevoldsen: Well let’s circle back to that in just a second. I really want to talk about that part because I feel like maybe that’s one of the parts where we may or may not differ depending on how you’re defining some stuff. As a preliminary point maybe we can talk a little bit about your background and how you got into this line of work in the first place.

Benjy Sherer: Sure. So, came up about six, seven years ago, probably by now. Like I had struggled with anxiety and depression and some issues throughout my life. Really trying hard to kind of find my place and understand myself and the world, like life, the universe and everything. That’s why I studied philosophy and world religions and a lot of things. And so about 6 or 7 years ago, I was in some senses living my dream. I was running my recording studio and I was working at a couple of clubs and just even though I didn’t have everything that everyone could want in the world, I was living as myself and I was really enjoying where I was at. I was helping people in my own ways. Anyways I was living my dreams in my own ways. And at one of these clubs it was it was a burlesque club that I started working at and it was the first place in my life that truly felt like home. The first place in my life that I felt like I could open up. And long story short, the first year there was amazing, and then things started turning very sour. I didn’t realize how kind of emotionally abusive the environment was, and they started kind of all turning against me and simultaneously fell in love with a self-described sociopath there who was also an alcoholic and suicidal. And so having developed these intense emotional connections with that place and with these people there and with that woman, and then having them all kind of turn in that way and not understanding the emotional dynamics of what was going on at the time sent me into a really terrible downward spiral, which brought me into the lowest place that I had ever been in my life.

Benjy Sherer: Being as someone who has been desperately afraid of death my whole life, even I became suicidal. And there were days, months, weeks at a time when I would just be thinking, hey, you know, my my building is really tall and thinking about how easy it would be to take that step. And the more that I reached out for help, whether it was through therapists or counselors or family or friends or whoever, the more that they would try and, you know, explain things to me or try and analyze things or try and help me in that traditional way, and having already understood these things about myself, all of these attempts just made me hate myself and the world even more. Because when someone is trying to explain something to you as if understanding this is supposed to make you feel better, and when you do understand it and it doesn’t make you feel better, it just makes you hate. Like, clearly I’m the problem, right? So it sent me into a really deep downward spiral where I couldn’t do anything. I couldn’t, I had to shut down my recording studio. I got let go from the clubs. I couldn’t focus on anything, even though it was my dream and it was what I loved the most. I would be sitting here in my studio while a musician was on the other side of the glass doing their session, just shaking my leg and couldn’t focus and couldn’t pay attention.

Benjy Sherer: So I had to shut everything down. And I spent the next year and a half to two years just trying to find myself again, just trying to heal and at the same time started going through a spiritual awakening of sorts, which, you know, that’s a whole other topic that we could dive like we could talk for hours about that. To the extent to which it was real versus to what extent, it was just my own mind trying to, you know, find some salvation again. I do believe that there are elements to which it was real and other elements to which, you know, I kind of lost myself. Anyways. I spent a year and a half to two years going through my own healing journey and starting to do what I called playing chicken with the universe. What I mean by that is I started getting these strong intuitions to do certain things, certain, you know, healing retreats or healing modalities or to start investing in myself. And in this idea of doing coaching and whatever. And I just had this strong intuition, and I was at a point in my life where I had nothing left to lose. So I was just kind of going towards what felt right, even though it seemed weird in a lot of kind of logical senses. And the more that I started going in that direction and the more that I started expressing myself and sharing myself, the more clear that it became that I really did have something to offer, something real that people needed. And as weird as it is that like admittedly my academic background is not in emotional health, it’s not in psychiatry, it’s in philosophy and religion.

Benjy Sherer: So that was a huge obstacle that I had to overcome for myself and for the people that, you know, needed to hear my message because I was afraid and ashamed of the fact like, how can I talk about something that’s so sensitive and so important and so big without having that specific academic background? And I had to come to terms with this identity, this goal, this purpose. The idea that, like, I’ve found my calling and yes, having found my own way out of depression and anxiety and being suicidal and having found my own way of doing it and recognizing that I do have an ability to express things in a way that really connects with people, that the mainstream way of approaching mental health doesn’t do. Yeah, this is where I meant to be. And so after the first couple of years of doing that inner healing spent the last 5 or 6 years by now talking on this subject and building up my skills and building up my courses and my books and creating all sorts of methods and tools and skills and building the confidence to stand up in public and say, Yes, this is who I am, this is my purpose, this is my calling. I do have something to offer. And for those who are willing to listen and willing to open up their ears to my perspective and my approach, I have changed countless lives and I intend to continue to do so.

David Enevoldsen: That’s awesome. Man, there’s a lot that you say there that just reminds me of my own path here. And I won’t hit you too much with my own history on this. I mean, I think talk about it in like my first episode of this podcast, but there’s so much there. Like I got diagnosed with anxiety and depression. You know, your comment about hating yourself even more when you’re sitting there talking to therapist like I remember sitting in a therapist’s office one time and saying how much I hated myself because I hated myself. And it was like this weird loop that felt very similar. You know, there was a spiritual element to what I was going through. Even when I kind of circled back out of that, I remember having a similar thought about, Your not having a background in this particular training like I literally spent probably four months contemplating going back and getting some sort of masters in behavioral health or something, right? I was like, do I really have the credentials to be even talking about this. I was a psychology undergrad, but I didn’t have any specific clinical training. So there’s a lot there that just really resonates with me. So if if your journey then kind of took you to this idea that analyzing kind of using some of the traditional talk therapy kind of approaches to things did not doesn’t ultimately work, or maybe that’s not necessarily useful in kind of other people’s emotional journeys, what does like what do you offer to people in terms of getting on getting them through those dark places and coming to somewhere better?

Benjy Sherer: Yeah. So firstly, I do want to clarify that I would never I don’t think I would go as far as to say that therapy isn’t helpful or doesn’t work exactly. Like I said, I would say that there are limitations to how far it can get us. And I do believe also that therapy has been crucial for many people, and even more so for society as a whole, because if we go back 50 years, let’s say we weren’t even willing to talk about emotions and the culture around therapy has brought mental health into the public sphere. We are now we have progressed immensely because over the last 50 years more and more people have been doing therapy and I think it was absolutely necessary to get us from a place where I mean, like I wasn’t alive at the time, but I imagine, you know, in the 50s if you tried to complain to your dad or to someone, they’re like, Oh, you caused me emotional pain as a child. And that’s why I’m, you know, abusive today. They would have rolled their eyes at you and they would have, you know, paddled you on the butt and said, Get back to work, whatever.

David Enevoldsen: So, still might happen today.

Benjy Sherer: Exactly. So there has. Yeah. So therapy has been crucial for a lot of individuals and for us as a society. But in terms of what actually needs to happen, basically the way that I like to express it is that every emotion that comes up inside of us, it needs to be felt. Think of emotions a bit like food in the sense that every morsel of food that you take in needs to be processed and digested and broken down so that you can push it out the other side and you’re not carrying it around with you. The same goes for all of our emotions. In a moment of pain, in a moment of trauma and trauma doesn’t necessarily need to be the worst of the worst things that happen in the world. Trauma can be something as simple as you expressing yourself to your friends and being made to feel stupid about it. Like, Oh, I really like like if you’re six years old and you say, Oh, I really like this TV show, and your friends go like, Oh, that TV show is stupid, and you should, you know, you should feel terrible. Then all of a sudden in that moment, firstly, there are all sorts of emotions that are coming up that you don’t know how to feel and you’re not safe to feel in that moment because in that environment. Let’s say in that very small example that I gave in that moment, if you cry, if you express yourself, if you yell or defend yourself, that’s likely going to lead to more judgment, more criticism.

Benjy Sherer: So we start learning in moments of pain and in moments of trauma that if we actually feel and express the emotions that are moving through us in those moments, that it’s going to lead to more pain and trauma. So what’s the lesson that we learn? We start learning to shut down that emotional response and we spend our lifetimes building an identity around our defense mechanisms, around all of the things that we do to keep ourselves safe. So it’s sort of like, okay, these emotions, you know, crying, shaking, those aren’t the emotions, but the emotions that come up need to be processed and expressed in a particular way. Could be crying, shaking, screaming, laughing, whatever you might have. And those processes are natural bodily processes that need to happen to keep your body operating properly and to keep your mind to keep your subconscious operating properly. The same way that when you start overheating, your body starts sweating. That’s your body’s natural way of releasing certain toxins and keeping your body operating at a certain temperature. So over the years, when we start building up these defense mechanisms and building up our personalities and identities around them, it’s basically like we’re training ourselves not to sweat. It’s like we believe that, okay, well, if I sweat, I’m going to get judged, I’m going to get mocked or it’s going to lead to danger. So we somehow managed to train our bodies, not to sweat. Now, what would happen if you manage to live your life without sweating? You, you would die.

Benjy Sherer: You would literally boil alive from the inside out. There’s actually a condition called anhidrosis, which is the inability to sweat. And people who suffer from that often die from heat exhaustion. And that’s exactly what’s been going on with our emotions. There are these natural bodily processes that need to happen, and your body knows exactly how to process these things, but we’ve spent a lifetime actively shutting those things down. So in a moment of trauma, it’s like your body is saying, okay, here’s this stuff that we need to process. Can we please deal with it? But since you’re not safe in that moment, it’s like your head says to your heart, okay, no, we’re not safe right now. So hold on to that emotion. I’m going to come back around and deal with it later when we’re safe. The heart goes, okay, cool. So it kind of stores that emotional sweat somewhere. And then as you go through your life, basically every moment that you’re getting triggered by something, when something in your actual life is bringing up emotions, that’s like your heart sending up this stuff and saying, Hey, here’s this thing that you didn’t deal with ten, 20, 30, 50 years ago. You promised me you were going to deal with it when you were safe. Are you safe right now? And the brain still thinks that we’re not. That’s our problem, is that we still feel and believe that we are in that dangerous place. The initial point of trauma, we still feel we still believe that truly feeling and processing and our expressing our emotions is a threat.

Benjy Sherer: So to come full circle and answer the actual question that you asked about how the healing really happens is reconnecting those emotional processes starting to show your brain and your mind and your heart that you are safe to fully feel all of the things that are moving through you. And the secret really is where we kind of branch off really from therapy is that these emotions and your traumas and your triggers are presenting themselves to you every day. You don’t need to go hunting for them. You don’t need to go analyzing the past because every moment that you are getting triggered is your trauma revealing itself to you. Every moment of that turning feeling in the pit of your stomach, the tightness in your chest, the lump in your throat, every moment where you’re getting defensive or judgmental or aggressive, or you feel the need to put on a mask or any of these things. That is your trauma showing itself to you. And there is a cycle going on. Between your thoughts, your emotions and your sensations that keep those defense mechanisms active. And when you can learn to separate those three elements, your thoughts, your emotions and your sensations, learn to understand the subconscious cycles that are going on between them and learn to confront each of those things head on. Then you can finally allow your body to go through the purging process that it’s been trying to go through for decades.

David Enevoldsen: I love the sweat example. That’s I really like that analogy, and I agree with that. Now, do you think that this can go too far in the opposite extreme? So let’s say, for example, you have embraced the idea that you need to experience the emotions. You need to just throw yourself into them. You need to have cry it out, whatever. Do you think it can go to a point where you’re indulging too much in the emotions or you’re allowing them to go out of control and that can start to sabotage various situations?

Benjy Sherer: I think if someone listens to maybe five minutes, let’s say someone listened only to what I just said and took all of that at face value and didn’t take the time to learn more about the tools and the skills and the processes and the actual overall wisdom that I teach people, maybe. People could misinterpret what I’m saying, as in, Oh, you need to just cry all the time and you need to just feel everything. People could misinterpret it that way. But no, if we are genuinely and sincerely applying the tools and skills that are relevant to this, then the act of feeling the emotions is firstly an act of purging. You’re finally letting go of some things that have happened in the past. So every moment that you allow yourself to properly do this, there’s less and less inside of you that you need to purge and process. So you’re letting go of a bunch of it. And then the other side of it is well in line with the title of It’s Emotional Embuffination. I say emotional like we’re building emotional muscles.

Benjy Sherer: So as we build these muscles, you’re not going to be as triggerable firstly because you’ve been letting go of things and now because you have the skills and you have the tools, and most importantly, you’re not afraid of the emotions, you’re not afraid of anything that’s going on. So over time, we’re building the emotional strength. So it’s not going to lead you into this spiral of being overly sensitive all the time where every tiny little thing is going to trigger you into a breakdown where you’re just going to need to separate yourself from the world and cry. It’s that you’re going to use those initial moments that do trigger you as opportunities to heal. And as you get better and better at it, there’s going to be less stuck inside of you that you need to heal. There’s going to be less from the world that can trigger you in that way because you can see all of your inner cycles. And it’s not I don’t believe that it would ever send you into that downward spiral that you were alluding to.

David Enevoldsen: Fascinating. Yeah, it’s really interesting because I feel like you’re saying the same things I say, but in a different framework, Like the words you’re using are different. But I think the end result is very similar. You know, one of the things I talk about a lot is kind of leaning into the emotions or accepting the emotions for what they are, because I find that in my own personal experience and like I’ve seen other people do this too, that when you resist the emotion, just like you said, I’m not going to sweat. And then you kind of just stuff it down. Then you start creating all these other problems and the emotion seems to amplify in terms of like you’re almost experiencing more. Whereas if I just say, okay, I’m feeling sad right now or I’m upset right now, just by virtue of simply saying that to myself, I can tone it down immensely just by saying, All right, I accept that I’m not happy and that’s okay, you know, as opposed to I’m sad. No, I’m not. I’m happy. I’m really happy. And then it’s like you feel worse because you’re not feeling the thing that you think you should be feeling. And then it just and you stuff it down. And then behavioral mechanisms start to train you into other things. I totally agree with everything you’re saying. Just frame it differently. So I think that’s awesome. There’s a couple things that you talk about the confronting uncomfortable emotions. So we just sort of touched on that. You also talk a lot about unconditional self love. Is that correct?

Benjy Sherer: Yes.

David Enevoldsen: Can you elaborate on that a little bit? Like what does that mean to have unconditional self love?

Benjy Sherer: Okay. So that’s it’s an interesting, complex and admittedly hard to describe point, but I would say every single thing that I teach, every tool, every skill, every exercise, every piece of wisdom is, how can I put this? It’s all it all stems from unconditional self love. Like when I started my healing journey, those were the only words that I had to guide me. Unconditional self love. And when you can fully understand what those words imply and mean in every context, there’s no room left for, you know, sitting in your victim mentality or for judging people or for getting angry because unconditional self love will imply everything, for example, you can’t be cruel to someone else without also hurting yourself. It’s I know I’m trying to jump into a big topic all of a sudden without a lot of context.

David Enevoldsen: I guess I steered you there, so.

Benjy Sherer: Yeah. No, it’s okay. Like I said, it’s a very hard concept to try and explain. So unconditional self love. Firstly, judging yourself, getting down on yourself. Obviously that goes against unconditional self love. Betraying yourself in any way goes against unconditional self. Love. Being in conflict with your own beliefs goes against unconditional self love. But then, as I was saying, even being cruel to someone else goes against unconditional self-love because there’s always this back and forth. We are naturally empathic creatures. Think about it. You know, basic physics. For every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. You can’t punch someone in the face without also hurting your hand. And as naturally empathic creatures, if I knowingly cause you harm, the natural human response is to feel guilt, to feel shame, to feel some of that pain in return. The only way to be cruel to someone else and to not feel terrible about it is to be so shut off from your own nature and from your own emotions, which is just not a good place, a good way to be living your life. So unconditional self love if we apply that to to any area of our lives will lead us in the direction of emotional healing. And I’m like. Yeah, it’s I know that that was not a phenomenal answer because it’s just there’s no way that I can give a short answer to that question.

David Enevoldsen: Fair enough.

Benjy Sherer: We’d have. Yeah.

David Enevoldsen: Well, and I think I get the idea from that. So if you were to take kind of these two concepts, both the confronting the uncomfortable emotions and kind of the unconditional self love, and you were to go back and analyze your experiences at the burlesque club that you were talking about a few minutes ago. Um, what do you think happened, you know, with, with your current understanding?

Benjy Sherer: Okay. So that’s a great question that I think can help me contextualize this whole unconditional self love thing a little bit more so. When I started working at the burlesque club just as a sound engineer, but very quickly, like I came to love the place and I actually started performing there as a as a burlesque artist. I called myself Man Halen, and I was doing it as a way to because I was also, you know, I was in the music scene. I wanted to sing and do other things. So I was doing it as a way to grow my confidence and to learn how to express myself and to be the biggest version of myself. And being in the music industry came after a few years of being in law school where I just I hated my I hated life. I hated everything. I thought life was never going to be good again. So as I, you know, created my recording studio and found myself towards the burlesque world and started working in that field and started performing there, I was discovering and experiencing and expressing myself more and more and more the true version of myself. And I thought and learning how to express yourself is a huge part of unconditional self-love. Not hiding anything, not wearing a mask to appease others. Now, I presumed that everyone else there was doing the same thing that I was doing. That the ways in which they were performing and getting on stage and, you know, being that version of themselves, I presumed that that was them expressing their greatest selves the same way that I was and that they were, you know, growing as people the same way that I was and with no judgment or offense to anyone there, event… when things started turning sour and I started recognizing that like they were actually doing the opposite. A lot of them, they were running from who they were. That’s why, you know, the burlesque world, it’s a lot of glitz and glamor and smoke and mirrors and makeup and pseudonyms and sex and drugs and alcohol. And I was like at a point in my life where I was finally like, I’m free to explore all parts of myself. Whereas a lot of them were running from their own pain and were covering up their true identity with all of those things. And that’s why at the beginning it was going very well, because they saw how, you know, how much I loved their scene and I fit in really well. But as things started progressing and it came, you know, subconsciously to all of us, I don’t think that anyone was doing this intentionally. But as it came subconsciously to light that I kind of genuinely loved myself and was expressing that, not that I had a lot of healing left to do, but that’s the direction that I was moving in. I was doing this because I was learning to love myself and they were doing it because they were running from themselves. It created this this tension between all of us. There’s an expression in the spiritual community that, like your your light will will trigger other people’s demons. And that’s kind of what was going on. So as I learned to express myself more and more and more, and as I became more comfortable being the truest version of myself and shining a genuine light of genuine happiness, again shrouded in a lot of my own stuff that I still had left to heal.

Benjy Sherer: But that’s the direction that I was moving in, the energy that I was putting off. And the it shined a light on the fact too many of them that they weren’t doing the same and they didn’t like it. And so they started pushing me away. And so here’s where the unconditional self love kind of thing comes in. And what went wrong there is that when they started pushing me away. I didn’t recognize it. I didn’t understand what was going on. And I, not that anyone, let’s let’s leave all blame and judgment out of it for now. So it’s not that anyone was doing anything wrong, but they were responding to their emotional demons and triggers. And when they started pushing me away, I started responding to mine also because I just started hating myself more and more and more like I desperately would seek out their approval. The more cruel that they were to me, the more that I desperately wanted them to approve because I loved this place and I didn’t understand the, you know, emotional for the emotional abuse that was going on there. So because I didn’t love myself enough to recognize that if these people aren’t allowing me to be and express myself, if they’re trying to make me be someone else in order to get their approval, then that’s that’s against my own unconditional self love.

Benjy Sherer: So the more that they pushed me away, the more that I would seek out approval and the more that I would seek out approval, the more that they would push me away and the more that they would push and back and forth and back and forth, sending me into this deep spiral of I don’t understand what I’m doing wrong because I’m being like, I was not perfect in these scenarios. And the more that they drove me into that downward spiral, the more that I started acting out in ways that were at least awkward, that like in the end I understand why they had to fire me, why they had to get rid of me. But it created this spiral where I was just the crueler that they would be, the more kind that I would try and be. And then my kindness was met with more rejection, with more cruelty, which made me hate myself even more. And like the it all comes down to a very like, cliched thing that we would tell our kids, which is like, you know, if your friends are making fun of you, then they’re not really your friends. That’s kind of what all of this came down to. But I didn’t recognize that and I didn’t realize that. So I put their love and approval for me over and above my love and approval for myself. And I desperately would try and change and would try and do whatever I could to earn their approval. And that was me betraying my own self love in ways that led me into that deep suicidal depression.

David Enevoldsen: That that’s perfect. It was a great example of that. There’s several, again, several things here that are resonating with me. One is I have a I think I talked to you about this when we were on the phone before this. But I have this concept that I promote all the time that we are drawn to or draw in people who are at comparable emotional developmental levels. So when you have somebody essentially that’s kind of in pain and they’re kind of manifesting that pain in a certain way, they’re often drawn to and attracted to and attracting people that are also in pain and kind of a similar way, but sort of manifesting it in a complementary way. So I think frequently using your framework there, you can look at like a domestic violence situation where you’ve got one partner who’s doing everything to placate, be nice, be kind to the other partner who’s lashing out I mean both of them are coming from this place of sacrificing their own sense of self to to do something that’s manifesting in either the abuse or the sort of tolerating the abuse and trying everything they can to change themselves. Either way, it’s kind of a conflict in the self love concept. So I totally agree. I really like that framework. And I have to show you this real quick. So this is my I wrote a book Emotional Embuffination Um, chapter 21 of that. You can see that.

Benjy Sherer: Self love. Yeah.

David Enevoldsen: Self love, right? So it’s I think it’s a critically important piece of this whole equation and 100% agree with you.

Benjy Sherer: But like I said, you know, and I think that sometimes when people hear the term self love, they get thrown off by it because they think that self love is selfish. That when I say self love, it means like, Oh, you have to focus only on yourself. And this is why I, you know, I already brought up the point that true self love will imply that you must be kind to others. You must be compassionate to them. But the self-love needs to come first. That’s the dichotomy. So if you’re using the kind of Christian golden rule of like love thy neighbor sort of thing, and if that’s your golden rule that you need to care for others first, then you will drain yourself and you will end up with nothing left to give to anyone is the classic example of, you know, when you’re on a plane, put on your own oxygen mask first. So if you are desperately trying to be of service to others and you’re ignoring self-love, then everybody loses because you will never become that greatest version of yourself. You’ll only ever be giving 10% of yourself to the world. But when you focus on self-love first, then you learn how to build up your self, how to build up your real identity, your real self expression. And when you get to a certain point, again, self-love will imply that like, I cannot possibly judge you or be cruel to you or take advantage of you or be violent to you without also hurting myself. So self-love has boundaries. We don’t it doesn’t mean that you can’t, like when I say that we need to be kind to others we need to like unconditionally love others in order to fully, unconditionally love ourselves.

Benjy Sherer: It doesn’t mean that you allow people to abuse you. It doesn’t mean that you allow everyone into your life. You have to set up boundaries, but you can set up boundaries without hating, without judging, without carrying the anger inside of you. Because the anger and the judgment and all of these negative like it’s corrosive to you. So there’s another example, as in terms of unconditional self love. The reason why I want to be kind to someone and it’s going to sound weird isn’t for you. I’m not being kind to you for your benefit. I’m being kind to you for my benefit. It’s sort of a like I like to use the, you know, more extreme example. It’s like, screw you, I’m going to be nice to you anyway. Like, even if you’re being cruel to me now, I can set up those boundaries and say like, I can walk away from you and say that you’re not allowed to be in my life anymore while also not holding a grudge against you. That’s unconditional self-love. But like I said, when we prioritize love for others first it leads to that problem. So, unconditional self love is not selfish. It means that you are going to create the greatest version of yourself so that you can give of yourself to the world in all of the ways that are most meaningful to you and when and where someone is not willing to accept that greatest version of you instead of changing yourself to fit into who they want you to be, you’ll wish them well and you’ll walk away until you find the places and the people who truly appreciate you for being the real you. And that’s unconditional self love.

David Enevoldsen: Man. Yeah. Again, totally agree. So, in that, I just mentioned I have the self-love chapter in my Emotional Embuffination book. A subsection of that chapter I talk about what I’ve described as false confidence, which is because one of the things I’m trying to explore in that I think is exactly what you just touched on, is this Where’s the line between where it becomes kind of this arrogant, almost narcissistic behavior pattern versus I’m just confident and actually like have some appreciation and love for self. And then because I think there’s this tendency from the outside to see somebody and say, oh, they look really confident, they have self-love, but it’s this sort of selfish kind of I’m taking everything. And so where is the line between that? That’s one of the things I explore. I think you just hit that nail on the head perfectly. So I think you’re spot on, man. I totally agree with your analysis there. Um, let me shift gears here a little bit. Now, you mentioned earlier you kind of touched on this idea of spirituality playing a role in kind of your journey here, and it sounds like you kind of backed off from that a little bit or at least you’re not necessarily offering that. Can you explain what I guess as a preliminary matter, what’s the role that spirituality had in your shift from that dark place with the anxiety and the depression and kind of placating others and sacrificing your own needs? What role did spirituality had have in your transition to where you are now?

Benjy Sherer: So the spiritual awakening was a huge element of how I got to where I am. And it came through the lens of, I mean, there was a bunch of like a bunch of things going on, but the main element of it was through this concept of twin flames. Have you ever heard of that?

David Enevoldsen: I have, yeah. But in case someone hasn’t can you briefly explain what it is?

Benjy Sherer: No, no, of course. Of course. I was going to explain. I was just asking you personally first. So, Twin Flames is in a similar vein as soulmates, but not quite the same. It’s this much more intense experience, and there are a lot of interpretations around it. And here’s where you know why I followed it for a while and backed off on the other. Because like I so I fell in love with this woman, as I mentioned. And like we had been hooking up for about three months before we even stopped to have a conversation of like, well, what is this? You know, are we a thing? Are we not?

David Enevoldsen: This was a woman at that burlesque club?

Benjy Sherer: At the burlesque club. Yeah. And so after about three months, we both had that conversation, and we both agreed, like, I was too focused on my direction and my career and the life that I was building. And she straight up told me like, she’s not emotionally capable of having a relationship. So we both agreed, like we’re not anything. And then I’ll skip through some stories. But, you know, basically she was having a a moment, let’s say, and I sensed that she was in trouble and danger. And I went to take care of her for a few days. And during that time, I kind of like I fell for her in whatever ways. You know, when you take care of someone, it just, I don’t know, brings something out. And that’s when emotions got real and she basically ghosted me, which was super uncomfortable because we worked together. But she wouldn’t even explain to me why we couldn’t hang out. And so it took me a while to like she mentioned, that she’s not emotionally capable of having a relationship. So as soon as the emotions got real, she had to run. And from that point. That’s when I started, like for 3 to 6 months at least, at least it was right at the beginning, I could not stop thinking about her. Like crazy. Like not a minute of my day could go by. That’s why I couldn’t focus on anything. That’s why I had to shut down my recording studio because I just could not. She was just on my mind every minute of every day, like I said.

Benjy Sherer: Not to mention that we were working together in this highly sexualized environment where now she wasn’t being open and honest with me and she had never told anyone really about the relationship between us. So all of a sudden there’s this woman that like, I’m madly in love with, and I didn’t even realize at the time that I have to pretend like I don’t care. And that led to like, she didn’t encourage any rumors or spreading lies around me. But as things started getting more awkward, you know, rumors spread and she didn’t get in the way of that. She didn’t feel it, you know, she, anyways. So point being, over time, I started falling like I, I could not stop thinking. It took me about 3 to 6 months of that going on before I even recognized that like, I guess I love this woman. I guess that’s what’s going on here. And I couldn’t make sense of it because it was just it was beyond anything that I ever experienced. And so one day I’m scrolling down Facebook. And at this point, my spiritual awakening has already started in certain ways. Like I’m starting to connect with things. I’d been doing mushrooms from time to time to try and help with my healing, and I was also connecting with spirituality in that way. So I was scrolling down Facebook one day and saw a suggestion for a group on the side panel. It said Unconditional Self Love, Twin Flame Community. And as soon as I saw the words Twin Flames, it’s like something snapped in my brain.

Benjy Sherer: It’s like I had never heard those words before in my life, but it’s like I instantly understood what was going on. And like, I interpreted, okay, that’s that’s what this is. It’s a twin flame. And so I started looking more and more into it and there’s I’ll give you the two sides of things. There’s the intense spiritual like viewpoint of what Twin Flames are, which is what I fell into at the time, which is that your twin flame is the other half of your soul and that there’s the masculine and feminine kind of side. And in this dynamic, she was actually the masculine. I was the feminine. And there’s this runner and chaser dynamic that happens between the masculine and feminine, where the masculine kind of wakes up spiritually first, but then kind of goes back to sleep. And when the twin flames meet, it creates this like this energetic frequency between the two of you that lights up something in your brain and in your soul that sparks the feminine into an awakening. But that awakening pushes the masculine away, and it creates this runner and chaser dynamic where in order for the two of you to come together and achieve your greatest versions kind of thing, the feminine now needs to go through this spiritual healing journey because the desire, energy, the that intense need that you have to be with this other person is going to push that person away. The it goes back to the law of attraction, which I know you talk a lot about.

Benjy Sherer: The energy of desiring something is the exact energy of having something. So the more that the feminine desperately needs this other side of her, the more that it pushes that other side of her away. Which means that if you ever want to be with this person, you need to deal with your own shit and you need to learn how to sit in your not not specifically how to sit in your pain, but how to sit in your power, how to confront all of that stuff, how to stop chasing everything, how to heal your past and heal your wounds. And then there’s this story that goes on with the twin flame thing that as the feminine begins to heal, it’s the feminine. Like the part of the story is that Twin Flames are here to help the world evolve. We carry a higher frequency within us, and we are meant to step into our power and to step into our mission work. So that was the story being told by the Twin Flame journey and looking back on it now because there’s a lot of other stuff that goes on. It talks about telepathic communication. And if you’re dreaming about her, it means that she’s dreaming about you and that like her, I believe that her soul was crying out to me for help. And I believe, like one of the reasons why I dove into the emotional healing for myself. This is, as I mentioned before, I didn’t realize how much emotional healing I had left to do because I was at a point in my life where I was learning to express myself.

Benjy Sherer: I was learning to be a bigger version of myself. I didn’t realize how much healing I had left to do, but I started diving into the emotional healing because, as I mentioned, she was a self-described sociopath. I would never call her that. That’s what she like she called herself that to me. She was an alcoholic. She was suicidal. She was let’s leave it at that. There’s other things that I could say. But she was in a lot of pain.

David Enevoldsen: Yeah.

Benjy Sherer: And as I started believing that she was my twin flame and as I started looking into the twin flame journey, basically what it was saying is that she’s the other half of my soul, meaning that if I do my healing, she will heal as well. So, the twin flame narrative was the spark that pushed me into doing my emotional healing, and that even pushed me into learning to rise up as a coach because I believe that that was my mission. That was my purpose, that was that was the mission work that I had to do. And if I ever want to get her back, I need to rise into my power and I need to be this version of myself. So it was without the twin flame narrative, I would not be where I’m at today. Now, in hindsight, I can recognize that so much of what I believed on that end was nonsense.

Benjy Sherer: The ideas of telepathic communication, that she was trying to send me messages or there’s all of these stories like, I’ll tell you, the most crazy part of the narrative sometimes with Twin Flames is that once the feminine is in enough of her power, the masculine will kind of show up unexpectedly. And that did kind of happen. But and I can tell you about how that kind of happened if you wanted. But anyways, but before that happened, there were like months or weeks at a time where I would like put a letter on my front door for her, expecting her to show up at any time. And she didn’t even live in the same province as me. So there were all of these things that I came to believe and the idea that she’s the other half of my soul and that we’re here and that like by being with this other person, you can achieve a level of spiritual power that you can’t do on your own. There are all of these things that, like, I can now recognize. I like I had lost my mind. I was beyond, and, you know, for people who are still in that space and who believe in those things, hey, maybe, maybe it is true. I can’t say for certain what is true on the spiritual side of things, which is why I’ve pulled away from teaching about spirituality. But but basically it’s that the twin flame narrative pushed me to do the healing, pushed me to step into my mission work, pushed me to do this coaching.

Benjy Sherer: And once I was finally in this new version of myself genuinely standing in my power, it’s like the drugs wore off kind of thing, and I was able to come back down to reality and to be this version of myself without the need for those over-the-top spiritual beliefs, which this is what leads to how much of it was real and how much wasn’t?

David Enevoldsen: Right.

Benjy Sherer: Because there is no denying that this is my calling. And I hope I can say this without any ego or arrogance. I am really good at what I do. And I’ve transformed people’s lives and I’ve saved people’s lives, or at least ten different people who told me that they were actually planning on killing themselves before they started working with me. And so how can it be possible that the journey that led me here is complete bullshit if where it led me to is so undeniably true? So some of it was real. Some of it helped me discover my truest self and my real calling and my real mission and purpose and my unconditional self love where I can finally stand up in public and be the version of me that has something real to offer this world, while at the same time recognizing that in many ways, a bunch of which that I didn’t even mention here. I had lost my goddamn mind. I was way past the realm of of of reality, of physics, of like, just of of life. Yeah.

David Enevoldsen: So what to what extent do you embrace that narrative now? I mean, obviously, we’re saying that some portion of that was potentially real. What do you believe now? I know you’re not promoting it as part of what you’re teaching or talking about more publicly. Obviously, we’re talking about it, but you’re not actively promoting that.

Benjy Sherer: No, definitely not.

David Enevoldsen: As part of what you’re offering. What do you believe now?

Benjy Sherer: So I do believe in a large extent to various elements of the spiritual awakening that I came to. I believe that we are multidimensional spiritual beings having a human experience right now. I believe that there is more there are multiple dimensions in this universe. Basic quantum mechanics requires 10 or 11 dimensions. And I believe that there is more to this universe than the physical dimensions that we are seeing and that there’s more to who we are as humans than the physical dimensions that we are seeing. Now. As far as the twin flame narrative, what I believe is the universe is not above lying to you to get you to where you need to be. So it used my higher self, if you want to put it like that. Or the universe used love and used the twin flame narrative to get me to the version of myself that I needed to be. And once I was there. Then I had to let go of it and had to come to terms with, you know, it helped me. I had to process a lot of shame around the things that I did, which just helped me on my healing journey. So the universe is not above lying to you.

David Enevoldsen: That’s fascinating. So it’s almost like you’re saying there’s kind of a spiritual element that’s going on in terms of where you were, but you’re not really buying the Twin Flames component of this to the extent you were at least. But but there is something spiritual that was going to make it so.

Benjy Sherer: Yeah. Although the interesting element of it. So, you know, like I said, part of the twin flame narrative is that when you meet this person, it sparks something inside of you that that awakens, it awakens that part of you. And there’s no denying that that’s what happened. I met this person and my love for her and the pain of being apart from her sent me into a spiritual awakening and into a healing journey where I was then able to discover my real purpose and calling. So, at the at some level the twin flame narrative played itself out perfectly. But the other end of is she the other half of my soul? Are we absolutely meant to come together? Is there stuff that I can’t achieve without her? Blah blah blah? And then on the other hand, for those listening who might still be more spiritual on that end, who might even be on that twin flame journey and might not like that, that I’m saying that I’ve come off it, even I can admit, who knows? Maybe it’s the case that 20 years from now, her and I actually do come together in the way that the twin flame journey predicted. I can’t know. So, and and if that narrative is true, it wouldn’t be surprising for it to take an entire lifetime for us to come back together. Because in human terms, you know, like the next year is a long time. But from the universe, from eternal terms, when it’s saying you’re so close, you’re almost there, you guys are about to come together. That could mean 30 years from now. 20. Yeah.

David Enevoldsen: I’m going to have to check in in 30 years because I need to know the answer to this.

Benjy Sherer: Yeah.

David Enevoldsen: That’s fascinating.

David Enevoldsen: Maybe if I can shift gears one more time, there’s one more kind of topic of substance I was hoping to hit with you. So you mentioned at the beginning of this conversation this kind of idea that analyzing and intellect was, I guess, not the way to kind of deal with the emotional traumas and the emotions that are coming out. Can you elaborate a little bit on that? What do you mean when you say that like intellect is not don’t let me put words in your mouth. Maybe I’m summarizing incorrectly, but if with this idea that intellect is and analyzing is not necessarily the right pathway, what do you mean?

Benjy Sherer: So the way that I like to express it is this. Imagine that you had a persistent headache and it’s been getting worse and worse over the years. And you show up to the doctor, you sit down and explain to the doctor, well, I have this headache. And it started over here and you’ve been explaining how it is, and you explain all the ways that it’s getting in the way of your life. And the doctor sits down and explains to you, okay, here’s why you’re having the headache. It’s because of these processes that are happening in your brain. It’s because of some certain chemicals and it’s because, you know, maybe ten years ago you fell and you bumped your head and there’s some trauma left over. Do you believe that that would make the headache go away?

David Enevoldsen: No.

Benjy Sherer: Of course not.

David Enevoldsen: Well. Maybe. Probably depends on what’s causing the headache. If the doctor was actually.

Benjy Sherer: Really? Is there any any situation in which the doctor explaining to you why you have a headache would make the headache go away?

David Enevoldsen: Well, if the headache was purely psychosomatic. And he said, my explanation to you is going to make it go away. And you believe that potentially I’m defining a very narrow circumstance and in a general sense, yeah.

Benjy Sherer: Okay. You are free to to to hold that. I don’t believe like even in a even in a psychosomatic thing, like I think there would need to be deeper healing to go on there of why that’s happening. But like basically I don’t believe that understanding the headache would ever make it go away. And the same goes for the emotional pain. The understanding is nice and it’s helpful in the sense that, like, we can learn to hate ourselves a little bit less when we understand that like, Oh, right, these, these reactions that I’m having are actually the result of trauma. But the real healing is in the fact that as we were talking about before, these emotions get stored up inside of you, there are all of these processes that need to happen that never got happen. There’s a famous book of The Body Keeps the Score and like that’s just one example of all of the many, many people who’ve acknowledged that trauma gets held in the body in various ways and in the mind. And even if we’re looking at it, you know, I’m not a neurobiologist, but so I hesitate to make these claims sometimes, but I imagine so there are various chemicals that we associate with fear, with anger, with joy, with sadness. And in moments of experiencing a certain emotion, even your brain is creating certain chemicals.

Benjy Sherer: And those chemicals need to be processed and broken down. And if they don’t get processed in an appropriate way, they stick around they’re somewhere. And this is where the actual feeling of these things come into play, that analyzing it, recognizing like, for example, I know that when I was young, I have an older brother. He’s just a few years older than me, and when we were very young, he was everything to me. You know, like he was the role model. He was everything that I wanted to be. And I wanted nothing more than to hang out with him all of the time. And when he uh, went into high school around that time. You know, it was no longer cool to hang around with your little brother anymore, but I still desperately wanted to be around him. And so in order to try and hang out with his friends and fit in with them and not be the like, clingy younger brother, I had to start pretending like I didn’t care. I had to hide my affection for my brother. I had to play it cool, you know, And I am well aware of that and I’ve always been aware of that. And that has played into why I’ve often held back in relationships, because I have always been afraid that if I show too much affection that it’s going to push that person away.

Benjy Sherer: Because with my brother, if I showed him too much affection, he would have to push that away because it wouldn’t make him cool to have his little brother hang around. But if I was just one of the guys and I didn’t care, then maybe I could hang out with them. Now, I’ve known that my whole life. There was never a point at which when I was ten, when I was 15, when I was 20, when I was doing this throughout my life, there was never a point at which I wasn’t aware that that’s what happened with me and my brother and where I wasn’t aware of how that was impacting me. But being aware of it didn’t help at all. The issue is that when you are in a circumstance where you’re doing that or where you want to truly express yourself to someone and you feel unable to. There’s discomfort somewhere in your body. There’s discomfort somewhere in your mind. You feel an actual sense of pain, tightness in your chest, lump in your throat, turning, feeling in the pit of your stomach, shooting pains in your abdomen like it’s shaking, twitching in your eyes. People experience these in various ways. In the moment that’s the real problem. And the issue is that we keep on running from that discomfort.

Benjy Sherer: So knowing about the logic of where this came from didn’t change anything, and it was never going to change anything. The only way that I could change anything was learning how to confront that discomfort head on, that to recognize that that turning feeling in the pit of my stomach that some part of me is interpreting as a sign of danger is actually my body’s way of trying to process something. And the reason why it persists is because when it comes up, I keep on pushing it away and I do everything that I can to not feel it and to not express it. And so every time it comes up, I still keep on thinking that it’s a threat. So when I’m in a situation and I want to express myself to someone and that turning feeling comes up, I go, Oh shit, I shouldn’t express myself because that thing is assigned to me that I’m in danger the same way that I was before. But no, that’s actually that part of me saying, Hi, here’s this pain that you didn’t deal with once 30 years ago, and it’s never just once, but whatever. Here’s this pain that you didn’t deal with 30 years ago, and if you finally allow me to process this, then you will be able to enter this new situation without that defense mechanism.

David Enevoldsen: Okay. So then I want to verify that I’m hearing you correctly. So it’s not necessarily that analyzing and kind of taking an intellectual approach is necessarily wrong. It’s that doing only that and kind of stopping at that point and assuming that’s going to fix the problem by itself is the problem. So in essence, you have to both understand it and take some sort of specific actions to either embrace the emotions, dive into them, do something to deal with what’s going on and to improve yourself. Is that accurate?

Benjy Sherer: It a little. So I would I would say, look, understanding these things is great. In general when I’m working with clients like what I want my clients to understand is the generic concept around it. I want them to understand that holding back in their relationships is a trauma response. It doesn’t specifically matter if they know exactly where it comes from or not. So when you’re saying that we need like your interpretation was that we need to do both, I would say.

David Enevoldsen: I’m not sure I was necessarily saying we need to do both. But I’m saying, if I’m hearing you correctly, it’s not that the intellectual and analytical approach to this is bad per se. It’s that using only that in a vacuum doesn’t get you anywhere.

Benjy Sherer: So I’m trying. There’s two like it’s sort of two parts to my answer. Number one is that we could I believe that if either one of them was going to solve it, we could solve it just by confronting the emotions without ever understanding where it comes from. That being said, you know, understanding where it comes from, that’s all well and good. But the second part of the answer is that oftentimes the analysis will take us too far off course. So it’s not that actually understanding where it comes from is bad or we shouldn’t do it. But it can, like you were asking me before, if feeling our pain, you know, feeling the emotions can lead us into that downward spiral where we’re overly focused on on like or we’re overly allowing the emotions to take over. And I said, I don’t really think that’s possible if you’re doing it right.

David Enevoldsen: Right.

Benjy Sherer: I would say on the other side of things, overly analyzing can steer you off course.

David Enevoldsen: Okay.

Benjy Sherer: If you if you believe that analyzing is going to solve the problem. And if you keep on avoiding it, then you can go through that cycle. Like I’ve had clients who have been in 30 years worth of therapy still thinking that the analysis was going to get them there. And the more that they analyzed, the more that they hate themselves, because I understand all of this and I’ve found the answers, but I’m still in pain and everything is still terrible.

David Enevoldsen: Yup. I totally agree with that. And I’ve definitely seen that exact same phenomenon. Um, all right. I’m looking at the clock here, and I want to be at least kind of respectful of your time here. I feel like I could go on for a long time with you about all of these topics. Now, you just to kind of circle back, I’m going to have one more substantive question, but you have written a couple of books we didn’t even get to really talk about those. One is Feelings First Shadow Work, correct?

Benjy Sherer: Yeah.

David Enevoldsen: And then the other one is Ten Mind Hacks for Quicker Emotional Healing. Is that right?

Benjy Sherer: Yeah.

David Enevoldsen: And okay, if anybody wants to like, check out those books more and more about you, reach out to you in some fashion. How would they do that?

Benjy Sherer: Okay. So if any, let me say the Feelings Feelings First Shadow Work is kind of the main first book, and that will give the conceptual overview of my perspective and my approach and kind of what the step by step to this healing is. But it’s the conceptual overview of what the step by step is. And that’s, I think, where people should usually start. Ten Mind Hacks is like it pairs very well with it. If you want to skip the conceptual overview and go right to ten mind hacks, then that will give ten different tools and tricks along with some wisdom of like why we’re using them. That you can start applying on a day to day basis of how to how to accelerate your emotional healing. So, some actual tools and skills. But overall, I would recommend starting with Feelings First. You can find that on Amazon or on most other online retailers. Some of the websites may be down right now because I’m uploading a kind of like just slightly edited second version, but you can find it on Amazon. So there’s paperback, Kindle and audiobook. You could also find the PDF and the audiobook directly from my website if you want. That would be at benjysherercoaching.com/ffbook. But overall you can go to Amazon. Yeah.

David Enevoldsen: And same website if they just want to reach out to you generally kind of learn more.

Benjy Sherer: So other things that I’ll just kind of mention right now, if you want to learn more about my course and coaching, you can just go to benjysherercoaching.com. Um, and I also have a free webinar. It’s about an hour long called Healing Feelings First where I dive into kind of the main shifts that need to happen to move from the kind of standard approaches to emotional healing to the ways that I recommend. You can watch that for free at benjysherercoaching.com/replay. And yeah I believe that’s that’s most, and anyone who wants to learn more can can check out those three options.

David Enevoldsen: And I’ll try to post some links every everywhere I’m posting this. So, all right,

Benjy Sherer: So, one last thing for anyone who wants. I do have a Facebook group called Self-love and Shadow Work Modern Awakenings, so I make a bunch of posts there if you want to join us.

David Enevoldsen: Awesome. So lots of different resources or different ways to get to you. Okay. Last question I’m going to ask you. This is something I’ve been asking every guest I’ve had. If you could offer just one piece of advice to people about emotional health or strength and maximizing that, what would that one piece of advice be?

Benjy Sherer: Oh. Really wish you had told me in advance like I could have prepared a better answer. Okay, so off the top of my head.

David Enevoldsen: It’s so much more fun if I just sandbag you.

Benjy Sherer: Well, one of the reasons why it’s hard to come up with an answer is also because we’ve already talked about so much.

David Enevoldsen: Right.

Benjy Sherer: Just straight up repeat something that I already said, but let me dive just there. Okay. I’ll give one something that I alluded to or spoke of really quickly and I’ll just give a little bit more. There are three main elements of your experience of reality. There’s your thoughts, your emotions and your sensations. And those are three separate things. The problem is that they constantly manipulate each other. So when something triggers us from the outside and it creates that turning feeling in the pit of our stomach. Okay, well, that turning feeling in the pit of our stomach creates fear because we don’t know how to deal with it and we perceive it as a threat. And that fear moves us into our intellect and into our analysis. And we start trying to analyze and we start trying to logic away the problem. And all of those thoughts send this message to your subconscious mind that you’re in danger, which creates more of that turning feeling in the pit of your stomach, which creates more of that emotion, which creates more of those thoughts. And around and around and around and around we go. So the if I could give one tip to everyone, it’s to start paying attention to the distinction between those things and to how they manipulate each other. Pay attention to how you think differently when you happen to be in a good mood versus when you happen to be in a bad mood and recognize that sometimes you’ll go to bed feeling great and everything is okay and you’ll wake up and you’re feeling a bit of anxiety and you’ll try and analyze it and you’ll think much more negatively than you did. But nothing has changed from the moment that you went to bed, to the moment that you woke up. So start paying attention to the ways that your emotions manipulate your thoughts or the sensations, manipulate your thoughts or your thoughts, manipulate your emotions. When you can see the patterns between them, you will start making real progress.

David Enevoldsen: Awesome. I love it. Sir, it’s been an absolute pleasure. I really like what you have to say. There’s so much here that resonates with me. I like talking to you. I feel like we could go on and on for quite a while, so I very much appreciate you being on today. Thank you very much. But I guess we can wrap it up there. I will, again, I’ll post some links to everything, but thank you for being on and all. Have a great rest of your day.

Benjy Sherer: Same to you. Thank you for having me. It’s a real pleasure, David. Honestly, I think we could talk for hours and hours and hours, so really glad you reached out. Thanks for having me.

David Enevoldsen: Absolutely.

David Enevoldsen: All right. So that brings us to a wrap for today’s show. I hope that you found this useful. I hope that you’ve enjoyed this. I know that I have. And I hope that there’s something here that you can at least take some little nugget away from that this is going to help you on your Emotional Embuffination journey and it’s going to make your life better. Don’t forget to sign up for the newsletter on the Embuffination website embuff.com. Also, remember, you got to keep working on this stuff. We don’t go to the gym one time, do a couple reps and say you’re buff forever. You keep going and you keep doing it and you keep making it a part of your routine all the time. At the end of the day, we want you to be emotionally strong enough to go from saying things like, “The struggle is real,” to saying, “What struggle?” Thank you all for listening. Have a great week. I will see you on the next show.