Robert Gonzales Training Legacy

Anger is neither good nor bad. When you don't foresee it or you haven't cultivated a relationship to anger, you may behave from it and hurt yourself and others. There are three reasons anger may rise: primitive anger, resistance, and lack of resources. For practicing with these last two types of anger, we'll look at four practices: cultivate awareness, pause and expand, self-care and planning, and allow grief.

We can shift from being absorbed and identified with our inner chatter and feelings to being the space of awareness of these things. Observe your breath. Then observe your mind generating thoughts. Next, feel sensations of your body, particularly the difficult ones. Now, connect with the underlying energy of needs. Ask your unconscious mind for universal needs words related to what you now notice, think and feel.

Trainer Tip: Without knowing our feelings, its harder to live fully present, take care of ourselves, and make sound decisions. If its difficult for you to know what you feel and to express your feelings, consider reviewing a list of feelings, practice expanding your feelings vocabulary, and naming your feelings.

Grief is often confused with anguish. Anguish is a painful feeling that comes along with deep resistance to an experience or truth. Grief that leads to healing is an expansive state. It is a willingness to be with an experience and truth. If you're not resisting grief, then it's a neutral-to-pleasant experience. Pleasant sensations can include a sense of space and relief as something is integrated and tense holding releases.

Being put on the spot or confronted in an unexpected way can be an unpleasant experience to have. Even more so during lockdown when meetings are held on Zoom. In Life Hack 35 we're exploring the feelings that come up from hearing a difficult message as well as ways you can respond. Esme recently had this experience and offered to record a one on one session with Gesine to explore the situation.

Welcome to Part Two of our 3 part Embodied NVC Life Hack series. Last time we looked at rewiring your brain to navigate our primitive mind and sometimes default reactions such as fight, flight or freeze when faced with conflict. In this episode, we're going beyond self-empathy and looking at ways we can empathize with the other person.

Responding to your own reactivity is an inside job. Robert reveals how your reactions are often a secondary reaction to a triggering stimulus, and that accepting responsibility for your reactions can lead to less blame and more inner peace.

When we're faced with certain situations we tend to go into a fight, flight or freeze mode. While these can sometimes be helpful and even lifesaving, they can also be crippling when the situation may not be life-threatening. In this episode, we give you some tips on how to shift into a more intentional way of handling difficult situations.

With these practices make space before reacting to emotion or external stimulus. This can enable your capacity to respond from your self-connection to universally shared values. With practice you can create the capacity to temporarily put impulsiveness aside, in the service of connection with yourself and others, and in service of more informed and effective strategies.

Here's a daily self-acceptance practice you can bring into your life whenever you are experiencing pain, tension, contraction, lack of fulfillment, or unmet needs or values. Giving your often undesired experiences space can be a path to greater inner connection and peace.