Episode 38 – Are You Hiding From the Darkness

Episode Summary

In this episode, we discussed the idea that in hiding behind a veil of positivity you can make yourself weak in the event unpleasant events happen and how to ensure you’re prepared to deal with the unexpected.

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Show Transcript

All right, hello, everybody, and welcome to another episode of the Emotional Embuffination podcast. I am 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 trying to both discover and optimize, maximize new levels of success and happiness. In essence, we’re trying to just make sure that we’re feeling as much of those good feelings all the time as we can. This podcast is just one of several resources I have available. If you want to learn more about anything else that we have through Emotional Embuffination, check out the Emotional Embuffination website which is embuff.com. That’s E-M-B-U-F-F.com. When you are on the website, make sure that you sign up for my newsletter, which is going to have some quick weekly Emotional Embuffination tips that are going to help you along your emotional embuffination journey. Okay. On today’s episode, we’re going to be talking about how you deal with the darkness. Are you hiding from it? Let me start by explaining kind of where this insight came from in my journey. And this actually started when I was writing the Emotional Embuffination book. And so in the book, I have some kind of heavy themes in there, and it didn’t really dawn on me that this was the case when I was originally writing it. But I wrote the book. I thought, okay, I’m incorporating all these different concepts, and if you don’t, let me back up a step, if you don’t know what the book is, I have a book, Emotional Embuffination.

It’s available in print, it’s available in audio on audible. And so you can go through that. And if you go through it, it just kind of outlines all sorts of different strategies and concepts related to emotional strength and resilience and dealing with conflict and that sort of thing. So wrote out the book, used a lot of research in it, used some personal experiences, some other stories that I ran through. I didn’t think too much of it. And so then I started the beta reading process. So once I got a draft done, started handing it out to other people to read it and give me feedback so I could make some changes and, you know, get insights that I didn’t have before, that kind of thing. Well, when I was doing the beta reading, I remember there was one person in particular who said that she was reading through. She gave me a lot of great feedback, but kind of early in the book, she’s like, I had to just put it down when I got to this one part, because it just got really intense and it was just kind of it felt like an emotional roller coaster to me. And then she picked the book back up and kind of resumed her reading and again gave me a lot of good feedback. I didn’t think too much of that in a vacuum.

A little bit later, I had another person read it and gave me similar comments about it, just it felt a little on the intense side. So again, I didn’t think too much of that. I just thought, okay, well, these are heavy themes or whatever. I ended up publishing the book and after I published the book I gave, there was one person that I handed the book to and this person I also gave the My Reality Generator journal. This is going to start sounding like a plug for the books, which I guess it kind of is, but the journal is something I’d created before the book, and the journal is basically a guided journal. It’s got a lot of like law of attraction-oriented prompts, a lot of things to kind of kick yourself into gear. A lot of concepts related to thinking positively. The orientation of that is very much around positivity and orienting your thinking such that you’re not dwelling on the negative. You’re thinking about abundance, you’re fixated on the things you want to accomplish, that sort of thing. So this person read the journal and read the book. And when I asked for feedback, it was very, very clear that this person did not like the book, very much liked the journal. She was all about the journal, but it was very clear she was not into the book at all. So I stopped and I was like, what is going on? After this particular person I thought, why, why does she dislike the book so much and yet liked the journal so much? And I thought, well, the obvious contrast here was that the journal is just all, it’s almost, I wouldn’t say it’s Pollyanna, but the focus is very much on the emotional positivity side of things. And then a little bit later after that, seeing that contrast between the positivity and kind of the heavier themes in the Emotional Embuffination that created this reaction from this one person, I had somebody else that said he liked the book, and I actually threw back at him like, hey, I’ve gotten some feedback about some of these themes being really intense. And he went, well, yeah, they kind of are. I see that. And so I went, okay, hold up, because then I talked to some other, I went back to all my people that had read the book, especially the beta readers, and I was like, what’s going on? Did you think that these themes were like too intense? Some of them didn’t know what I was talking about. They’re like, no, they’re fine. Other people said yes. And so it seemed to be a minority of the people that I was talking to that were giving me feedback that said yes, but there were definitely some people in there that thought that the book was too intense. And so all of that kind of made me recognize kind of how different people were interfacing with this darkness idea.

Some of the people were just kind of accepting it, thinking that it was okay or maybe not okay, but they they weren’t fazed by it. Whereas other people saw it and didn’t want anything to do with it. They they felt negative and therefore just kind of avoided it. And so there’s, in effect, there’s a sort of mindset, and I’ve seen this in other contexts, too, wherein people try to just avoid the darkness. And you see this a lot with like the Law of Attraction people. And as you know, if you’ve heard any of my stuff previously or listen to any of the previous podcast episodes, I’m an advocate for the Law of Attraction. And so I think within the Law of Attraction, a lot of people think that, well, if the Law of Attraction is by its nature that I’m going to attract whatever I’m dwelling on, you know, my dominant thoughts manifest themselves in my world. So if I’m thinking negatively all the time, I’m going to start seeing negative things pop up in my life. Therefore, I’m never going to think negative. That’s that’s one of the mindsets of some of the Law of Attraction followers. Well, I kind of agree. And if you’ve heard some of my stuff in the past, I’ve advocated for things like don’t watch the news. This is a big one to me, is like not just sitting around watching negativity.

However, I think that there’s an important caveat and a distinction that I would impart within this mindset of just avoiding the negative stuff because there is a difference in my mind between I’m not going to live in and dwell on some negative stuff, versus I’m just going to avoid it at all costs. And I think this has a law of attraction implications too. But I would submit to you that it’s almost more problematic from a conflict resolution standpoint to say, I’m just going to avoid it. Like I’m just going to pretend it’s not there. I’m going to say, I don’t I don’t want to even acknowledge its existence, because to do so is to indulge in that negative stuff. But if it does pop up in your life, then you’re going to have a very difficult time dealing with it because you’re not going to know, and I’ve seen this before. I’ve seen people where they were just living in their little bubble, and then something catastrophic happened, and they have an absolute meltdown because they don’t know how to deal with it. And I think of lots of examples of this. One that comes to mind is I’ve been very into martial arts for a long time. I think I’ve referenced this in a number of different podcast episodes now, but I’ve really been fascinated with the idea of different martial arts. The most recent one that I’ve been studying, the instructor takes videos and plays them. He plays them in class, and they’re often things that are really illustrative of, here’s what could happen on the street, or here’s a scenario where you see this technique that we’re working on and how it could apply, or how somebody didn’t do it correctly. And I find that very useful as a, as a learning tool, a pedagogical tool. Sometimes you’ll see things that happen where somebody gets thrown and they land on their face and it looks really rough, or somebody spins in a certain way and their arm gets broken. And if you watch around the room, almost invariably a couple people, if not more, will wince and look away and they’ll go, oh my God, you know, they don’t even want to think about it because it’s just so horrific. And in a way, there are, it is very possible to ignore that stuff and study martial arts. I’ve seen people that kind of take that approach sometimes with some of the softer martial arts, I’m not going to call out specific arts here, because I don’t want to get lynched by people that practice those arts, but there are certain arts where people, I think, almost put their heads in the sand in martial arts and just kind of pretend like, well, we’re not going to think about potential for injuries. We’re just going to say, well, here’s how we do these motions, and it’s going to be all nice.

However, when you’re studying a martial art, you’re thinking about this concept of, I’m going to be in a fight with another person or multiple people. And so in essence, by not thinking about the broken arm or the person that’s landing on his face, you are hiding from that same darkness and you’re trying to embrace the overarching paradigm without acknowledging the bad stuff that could happen out of it. Now, if you’re doing that and any of that bad stuff does pop up, you will freeze up. There is I just read a book by Rickson Gracie. If you don’t know who that is, he’s a world renowned martial artist who’s proven himself numerous times in the ring as being a very effective combatant. He’s a, he illustrates Jiu-Jitsu. At any rate, there’s a part in the book where he talks about how he was going to do this fight with a guy, and before the fight started, the guy said, please don’t break my arm. And so Rickson’s comment was, well, you’ve already lost because he’s already thinking about, I want to avoid the darkness. I want to avoid the injury. I want to avoid the thing that’s going to take me to this terrible place. And Rickson’s mindset was always just, well, I’m going to do whatever it takes to win. Like the idea of getting injured wasn’t even a thing in his mind. Like, he didn’t want to get injured, but the fear of injury was not in any way dissuading him.

It was like a non-issue. And so I think that that’s kind of where you want to be is for any given issue is and I’m not saying this is easy to just fundamentally do. And we’ll talk a minute about how you get there. But I think that the ideal state is to say I can acknowledge the darkness is there. I can acknowledge that there’s things I don’t like that are out there, but they’re not going to drag me down. I’m going to act as though it’s just a non-issue. I’m going to respect it. I’m going to appreciate it. But I need to be in a state where I’m not afraid of it, because that fear can alter how you are interfacing with it. Here’s another example where I see this come up often is firearms. Now, I’m not trying to turn this into a political discussion. I know there’s been a lot of dialogue about firearms and right to bear arms and, you know, the the causal links with things like school shootings and various other stuff. I’m not trying to go there, but regardless of what your political position on this is, I think it’s almost indisputable that some people are almost irrationally afraid of firearms. And usually the people that are irrationally afraid of it either suffered some really traumatic event that had to do with firearms, and they’re now terrified by it, or they have zero experience with firearms, and because they have zero experience with firearms, they just saw or heard something like they saw something on TV about a school shooting.

And now they think if you’re anywhere near a firearm, everybody’s going to die. And it becomes this like crazy, irrational fear. However, I don’t think that it should be that way. I think you should have an understanding of how firearms function, what they do. You should definitely, definitely respect firearms. They are designed to kill people. They are dangerous in and of themselves. Many, many people have obviously died from firearms. So you should never, ever, ever think that a firearm is something that you should not respect or that you should acknowledge the danger of. But what I’m talking about is when you have this kind of over-the-top fear that you can’t even be in the same room as a firearm, you start to just absolutely wig out. Even if the thing is like disassembled and, you know, strapped down in boxes with locks on them, you know, all that kind of thing. If you’re still flipping out about the idea that it’s there, that, to me, is kind of giving in to that same sort of darkness. When I was in high school, I got robbed and or mugged and it was, I was, I was just a teenager. I had zero martial arts training. I had zero self-awareness. There was just nothing in my head that made me know what was going on.

And I remember I was walking into my apartment complex. It was the end of the day. It was like nighttime. It was dark out and my mom was parking the car. I was walking into our apartment complex and I was walking up to a gate. And so we lived in this little gated apartment complex. There’s this gate that you had to get the key out and unlock, and it was very common to sort of unlock the door and then open it, and other people would be coming in at the same time. And so I saw these two guys out of the corner of my eye walking towards me. And so in my head I thought, well, they’re going to go through and I’ll open the door for them. So I start unlocking the gate and I open it, and then I turn so that I can open the gate for them. And I start to say, go ahead. And I turn around and I see one of them pulls out a sawed off shotgun and shoves it in my face, and the guy says, give me your effing money, eh. And I remember I zoned in on the gun. All I could see the only memory I have of that whole event from the moment he said to give me his money, up until the point where he, I handed him my wallet, the other guy started asking me for my watch.

The first guy said, you know, turn around and run. I did that, I turned around and just kind of took off. Through that whole event in the exchange with them, the only thing I remember seeing was the barrel of the gun. And apparently this is a common phenomenon. I learned years later when I started studying psychology, that when people are involved in scenarios where they have a weapon, especially when they’re untrained or don’t have a lot of exposure to the weapons, they get what they call weapon focus, where people just kind of zone in on the gun and that’s all they can think about. And I remember thinking, which is apparently what a lot of people think in these situations, I remember looking at the barrel and going, is that a real gun? And that was all I could think. And so later on, the police showed up and the police started asking all these questions like, you know, what happened, you know, tell me all this. And they asked me if I could identify the two guys that did this, if they brought them back and handed them to me again. And I remember I looked at him and I went, no, I don’t think I could. And I remember that there was two cops there, and they both I saw them make eye contact with each other like, well, there’s nothing we can do. They didn’t say anything, but they’re like, okay, well, we’ll investigate and look up on this.

But it was very clear they knew there was nothing they could do for me. And if if I had not been so fixated on the gun, if I had not been consumed with the idea of fear around the fact that there was a gun there, because at that point I had no exposure whatsoever to guns, I think one time I’d been out shooting with my dad like a decade earlier or something, but I had really no exposure to guns, so guns to me were super alien. Now you couple that with somebody shoving a gun in my face and demanding my money, I shut down. And because I shut down, I was not in a position where I could have even identified these guys, much less was I thinking rationally, like I just went on to into complete autopilot. Now, I haven’t been mugged in my adult life like that. I’ve had some experiences, but I’m very curious, I would like to see, I’ve done now probably decades of time where I’ve studied martial arts. And I’m not saying I could ninja my way out of this or that I would necessarily even try to get the gun away, but I am more curious about my reaction to the gun and whether or not I would have been a little more aware of what was going on in the situation, such that maybe I could identify these people later on.

Now, I can’t unequivocally say that, but I very much believe that now that I have a lot more, comfort’s, maybe not the right word, but I’m more used to firearms at this point because I’ve spent a lot of time around firearms. I had a large amount of time where I was working in a job where we had to carry a gun. I had I’ve owned a gun for a long time, so it’s not something that just the exposure to in and of itself at this point is terrifying to me. It is something that I respect again. I know that there’s a danger involved with that. And I don’t want to be flippant about the gun, but I think that if you’re taking away the concerns about ignorance of the gun, you know, not having had any exposure to it, that fear of the darkness sort of reduces and it just becomes the thing out there. Here’s here’s another example of kind of where this in my mind, can go awry. Also, from when I was little, I remember I was living on a at the very edge of town. My mom was going to college and we lived like right at the edge of town in this tiny little town out in the middle of nowhere, otherwise. If you looked out our back window, there was just nothing. There was like trees and hills and that sort of thing.

So one day, this pitbull that I don’t know where it came from, but it came out of somewhere. I don’t know if it live with a person or if it was just a stray or what the deal was, but this pit bull came kind of tromping down the road and was just sort of meandering around doing its thing. Everybody, including me, my mom, like the neighbors, like everybody freaked out. You know, they thought, oh my God, pit bulls are dangerous. I’d never had a pit bull before at that point. I didn’t know anything about pit bulls. I just saw this big, stocky looking dog that looked scary, and it was just roaming around and doing whatever it wanted to do, and it wasn’t doing anything that I recall as being aggressive, but everybody was super panicky. Everybody was hiding in their homes. Someone, I don’t remember who called the police about this dog. And a little while later, the dog was still kind of roaming around and a campus cop showed up. It was an older guy. We’d seen him a few times. It was a small campus, so everybody kind of knew everybody there. And so he shows up and he just walks out in front of the dog and says very loudly, very sternly, “Go home.” And he starts pointing out in the opposite direction. And the dog looked terrified and just ran off. And that was the end of it.

And so later on, many years later, I kind of analyzed this again with this mindset of the fear of the darkness. And, you know, it occurred to me that, like so many of these other situations, we were sort of irrationally afraid of this thing. Now, again, I’m not saying you should never be afraid or never respect danger of things, a pit bull, you don’t know what’s going on. I mean, this pit bull has the potential for danger. I don’t know what its background was. It could have been trained as some sort of fight dog. I don’t know, you know, it could have been wild and starving and, you know, saw somebody there that it thought was threatening its food or something. It could have lost its mind. I have no idea. It could have been totally fine and docile. My point is that we were not, we were just indulging completely in the dark side of this. By avoiding any exposure to these potential things before the fact, when this dog actually showed up, we were consumed with fear. And so this officer shows up who I can’t speak to his mindset, but I remember what he did, and he may well have respected that this dog was a potential danger. But he also was not afraid of it, and he came out like it was not a big thing and just told the dog to go home. And it was like it didn’t even faze him, at least as far as I could see.

And the dog just took off. Problem was solved. There was no big issue. So this in my mind, like these are sort of illustrations of how the darkness can impact you and how it can, if you’re not, if you’re not allowing for it in your life and you’re just simply avoiding it, which is not the same as indulging in it. But if you’re just avoiding it, then these are the dangers that can happen. Now let me analyze this from a law of attraction perspective for a second, because I think this is one of the important places you can go with it. With the Law of Attraction, as we were talking about earlier, you always think in terms of what you’re dwelling on manifests. So a lot of the time we say, well, I don’t want to dwell on anything negative. Therefore I’m just going to keep all my thoughts purely positive. And I’m not even going to think about things that I don’t want. And there’s some level of merit to that. But there’s also a bit of a problem in this same kind of darkness avoidance concept we’ve been talking about. Because what sometimes happens is you end up, for whatever reason, a situation you don’t like pops up. And sometimes with a law of attraction paradigm, you can have a situation where I don’t like what’s going on, but if I kind of allow it to happen, it might take me to where I ultimately wanted to be.

And I’ve had a number of experiences like this where it feels in the moment like something catastrophic is happening. But when all the dust settles, that catastrophic thing took me to what I was fixated on before the catastrophic thing happened. And so ultimately, the catastrophic thing becomes a good thing because it led me to where I ultimately wanted to be. This happens a lot in my experience with the Law of Attraction. But you can alter the trajectory of that. If I’m sitting there saying, I want this thing, I want this thing, I want this thing, something feels bad. I go, no, no, no, I don’t like this. I have a total meltdown and I implode. I can sort of alter the path. And if you look at it from a universe responding to you sort of perspective, I could say, well, the universe was taking me where I wanted to go, but now I said, no, no, no, things are bad, things are bad. I’m thinking bad. Now all of a sudden you’re going in a different direction and you ultimately don’t get what you wanted. So this is one of the dangers of kind of darkness avoidance within the the law of attraction paradigm. And the other thing I would offer with the Law of Attraction is the emotion that you’re injecting into it. So with the Law of Attraction, I think that emotions are a gauge.

If you’re not familiar with this concept of how your thinking is coming off and you want your thoughts to be aligned such that you are manifesting in your life, whatever it is that you are wanting to manifest. Now, if that is positive stuff, then you want to try to align your thoughts in a way that are going to leave you feeling positive, post thoughts or during the thoughts. And so if you are just sitting there thinking about the negative, if you’re dwelling on the negative stuff and that is an indication that your thoughts are aligned such that you’re going to manifest negative things. Now that brings us back to this darkness thing. So you can have thoughts about the darkness that are not resulting in these strong emotional reactions. And this is the ideal. This is kind of where we ultimately want to be. This is when I talk about at the end of every show, I make this comment that what I want is people to be emotionally strong enough to go from saying, “The struggle is real,” to saying, “What struggle?” That’s kind of my ideal state. And we’re shifting from there is a struggle there. Something’s going on. But then I want to shift my mindset such that I go, whatever, this is not even a big deal. Like it’s not even a thing. I’ll just deal with it and it’s done. That’s the same thing I think we want to cultivate when we’re talking about indulging in the darkness is this ability to say, all right, there’s a thing here that I don’t like.

There’s a thing here that’s potentially dangerous. There’s a thing here that can cause problems in my life. Whatever. I’m just going to deal with it. That’s the ideal state. That is the place I want to get to. Where I’m saying I got this. And I’m not indulging in the fear. And if I’m not indulging in the fear, then from a law of attraction paradigm, I’m not going to start manifesting the things that I’m afraid of. I’m just going to say deal with the problem. And then the things I do want are going to come on the back end of that. Okay, so hopefully that that made some sense there after my ramblings. That begs the question though, how do you do that? There are a number of different ways. One, I talk about this in the Emotional Embuffination book, and this is kind of the focus of Emotional Embuffination in a general sense, is trying to get yourself to a state, which is why I end every episode with that quote. You want to get yourself to a state where you can just deal with stuff, and it is not these life ending catastrophes, it’s just problems to solve, right? If you can embrace that kind of mindset, then the darkness doesn’t matter. And I think this is why, when I look back, the story that I was telling at the beginning of this episode, when people were reading the book, they were getting exposed to things that they weren’t really exposed to previously.

And let me give you some examples from the book. There was stuff like right off the bat in the beginning of the book, I started talking about this multiple homicide that this guy went through, and he was just on this angry rampage where he was out to just kill everybody, and he ended up turning the gun on himself and killed himself. And that was kind of the end of the whole sequence, but it was a little intense. I didn’t think of it as being intense at the time. There’s a little later in the book I talk about dealing with child molesters, and there’s some people that engaged in sex abuse of children. Also a potentially intense topic, especially if somebody is kind of triggered by that. There’s another story in there where I talk about a woman who this was actually a story we read in law school in our crim law class. And as I understand, it is pretty common to to read this case in law school. But the facts on that involved this woman who was just horribly, horribly abused by her husband. He would beat her and call her names like constantly. He would make her eat out of a dog dish, told her she was a dog, made her sleep on the floor, made her eat dog food, would break glasses on her, was burning cigarette butts on her skin.

There was one point where she tried to kill herself by OD’ing on something, and then the paramedics came and he was like yelling at the paramedics they needed to let her die. He was prostituting her out to other men. It was like crazy, crazy stuff, right? And when I wrote the book, as I said before, this to me wasn’t that much like I didn’t feel fazed by it. I recognized that these were problems. These were bad things. These were things that we didn’t want people to live in. These were dangers, you know, for certain people. But I wasn’t sitting there thinking, oh my gosh, I feel so horrible when I read this. Like it was just like a thing. It was a consequence. And this is why we don’t want to go down this road. It wasn’t something that I was getting emotionally wrapped up in, and when I saw people that had not really studied this stuff because I had been kind of living in this for a while, I’ve been thinking a lot about when I wrote the book, a lot about emotional strength. I’d been working as a family law attorney, where I’d been seeing some really ugly stuff for many years, and I feel like I’d gotten to a point then where I was able to say, all right, these things are not fazing me the way that they used to.

And that for me was sort of the ideal state is, I mean, I still had plenty of learning to do. I still do have plenty of learning to do and growth and whatnot. So I’m not trying to say I’m perfect, but I think I’ve come a little ways in terms of my understanding of how to interface with that darkness. And when I was running into people, that and I’m not trying to just make this like I’m blaming people for feeling bad that read my book. But I think that what was happening there was some of the people that were reading my book were running into things that they really hadn’t thought about or didn’t want to think about and were going, oh, this is inducing an emotional reaction. I don’t like this. And so in the book, one of the things that I talk about is I have a chapter on this is keeping it in the yellow. And what I mean by that is you’re always kind of push yourself a little bit out of your comfort zone in whatever you’re doing. The example I give in the book is when I learned how to do trials. So in my in law school, we had a class called Trial Practice, and in the class we kind of broke down all the different elements of a trial, like how do you do a direct examination? How do you do a cross-examination? How do you do opening statements, how do you do closing arguments? It was just all this stuff, and we just learned about all the elements of the trial.

And at the end, our final was we got to do a mock trial. It’s kind of fun. We figured out how a courtroom works, that sort of thing. Well, when I first got out into practice, I remember I had my first evidentiary hearing. It was actually a really simple, like, little trial. It had one witness. It was basically just the parties on each side. And I don’t think there were any exhibits, even. So, I didn’t have to worry about very much in terms of evidence. It was in a family law hearing, which in Arizona we have very lax evidentiary rules. So there was very little I had to worry about. It was just an hour long, so it was pretty short. And so I went into it. I remember when the hearing started, I reached down to grab a cup of water I had on the table, and I drank it, and I looked down and my hand was shaking and I was like, oh my God, I’m nervous. I kind of put my hand down really quick on the table. And I was like, oh God, I hope the client didn’t see that. And so then the hearing started and we got going, and I remember having this moment where I still felt really nervous.

I was getting dry mouth like it was it was just nerve wracking because I’d never done this before. I’d never been in an actual evidentiary hearing in a courtroom. And I get in there, and I had this moment where I went, wait a second, this is exactly like what we did in class. And from that moment on I was fine. Like I just went through the hearing, did what I needed to do. Everything came out great. If I had jumped into that before I started law school and I had no idea what I was doing and I hadn’t gone through that class, it would have been a real problem. It would have been a catastrophe. Today if I was going to do an evidentiary hearing like that, I would think nothing of it. It would not faze me. I would not feel nervous. I wouldn’t feel really anything. I would just be like, whatever. It’s another hearing because I’ve done so many at this point that it’s not scary. And so that’s what I mean by keeping it in the yellow is kind of illustrated by that concept, I think, where you sort of push a little bit out of your comfort zone. So when I went to law school initially and I was doing all those exercises in class that was a little out of my comfort zone, I felt uncomfortable getting up there.

But then I learned from it because I was pushing beyond what I was normally doing. When I did my first evidentiary hearing, I was a little out of my comfort zone. I was nervous, and so I pushed anyway, and that made me learn some stuff. And then I eventually became comfortable because I kept doing that with these hearings. And so what I would submit to you is do this with everything. Do this with everything in your life where if you become super stagnant, you become like these people that would read my book. And again, I’m not trying to blame the people because I appreciate that there are dark things that we don’t like to deal with. So please don’t, please don’t interpret it this way. But you get into the situation where it’s like if the darkness shows up at your doorstep, you can’t handle it because you haven’t pushed yourself into a place where you are comfortable with dealing with it. Again, doesn’t mean you don’t have to respect it. It just means that you have to be capable of thinking of it in terms of like, whatever, I got this. You know, reframing this again and go back to my martial arts example when you talk about techniques that might break somebody’s arm, for example, or throw them onto their head. It’s not that you just say, well, then I’m never doing martial arts now or I’m never doing that technique.

You just go through the technique very slowly and you start to understand the danger of it. You respect the danger of it, but you go through it in a controlled, slow manner until it becomes comfortable and you know what’s going on and you feel capable of dealing with that. If you’re out in a fight, not that you’re looking for it, not that you want it, but you just acknowledge that you’re capable of dealing with it. Rolling back to the Law of Attraction for a second, you want to get to that place where you are not injecting emotion into the darkness, not giving it the negative energy. And I think that’s how you start to circumvent this. So in essence, this is like all the stuff that we’re talking about in Emotional Embuffination all the time, which is learn to improve yourself. Learn to deal with the conflict that’s out there. But don’t be afraid of it. Respect it, but don’t be afraid of it. And if you you are hiding from the darkness come out, like step out and face it. And it may be nerve wracking at first, but if you can do that by keeping it in the yellow, pushing yourself just a little bit, confronting it just a tiny bit, over time you’re going to become so much stronger and you’re going to be able to deal with things that in the past you never could have dealt with, and many other people still aren’t able to deal with.

That is the objective of Emotional Embuffination. I’m going to leave it there. I hope that you have found this useful. I hope that you can kind of find something out of here, and I hope this is a concept that you can embrace and incorporate into your life. Don’t forget to sign up for the newsletter. Go to the embuff.com website and sign up there. Get the weekly Emotional Embuffination tips. Remember to keep working on this stuff, which again coincides with this whole message that we’ve been talking about today, which is you continue to work on it. You know, it’s the same thing as like going to the gym. You don’t go to the gym one time and say, well, I never have to work out again. You continually go on a regular basis and you work on it, right? Same thing with Emotional Embuffination, which is why we have these weekly Emotional Embuffination tips. It’s something you want to keep continually growing on. You want to keep pushing it so that the darkness doesn’t scare you anymore, and the darkness just becomes a thing you can handle. You live in the light and you confront the darkness, and you overcome the darkness without even thinking about it. Remember, at the end of the day, as we alluded to earlier, I want you to become emotionally strong enough to go from saying things like, “The struggle is real,” to saying, “What struggle?” Thank you all for listening. I appreciate you being on. I hope you have a great week. And I will see you on the next show.