Begin to see that who you think you are and who you think you have to be is so very different than your true self. Taking this Emotional Mastery Journey allows you to truly begin to see with such clarity the story of who you’re here to be. You get to see a lot of the things that have gotten in the way of you living as your true self.
And while those things that get in your way do cause pain, they were created and installed from a place of great love. And so as you learn to recognize them, you begin to shift your relationship to them, and that begins with your mindset.
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Transcript
Transcripts are approximations
Welcome to Love Lies Beneath. I’m Zette Harbour.
I’m glad to have you here. Do you feel like stress, fear, or pain take up way too much of your energy? Have you wondered if you’ll ever be free of that heaviness of your past? Do you long to feel as good on the inside as your life looks on the outside? In this podcast, you’ll discover the story of who you really are and how to set yourself free together.
We’re going to travel into those wild spaces of our inner landscapes and dive deeply into the rich soil of our lives. Reclaiming soul through story and healing. Our hearts. My book Love Lies Beneath is the. Be sure to subscribe to this podcast. So you don’t miss any of this enriching journey. And now let the adventure begin.
In Episode 37, I share the section of my book called Emotional Mastery. If you wanted to explore Yosemite, you would first want to have a map that would show you all of the really exciting, beautiful, and important landmarks that you will want to be able to visit or pay attention to along the way. Our own inner journey is exactly like that.
And in order to truly feel a sense of mastery over our emotional experience, we first need to understand the territory. And when I talk about mastery, I do not in any way mean that you will never feel stress, fear, or pain ever again. And I also don’t mean that you will get really good at stuffing it away or ignoring it or shutting it down.
None of that is emotional mastery. Emotional mastery is being present to the moment. No matter how stressful, fearful, or painful it may be learning to decode the message and truly connect to the Love that lies beneath. Because everything that happens in life and in particular, those things that we find to be unpleasant or negative, they are all messengers from our deep inner wisdom.
And they are the map showing us the path to come home to ourselves. And so as we look at this map of your emotional mastery journey, remember to bring along your kind curiosity, listen for the story, wisdom and trust that your Soul knows exactly what you need for you to return to wholeness.
Emotional Mastery Journey
In my work, I have observed and defined a pathway that makes it possible for your stories to empower you. There are three main destinations to which you need to travel, to live with joy and freedom. You will need to spend time at three specific landmarks along the way to each one. All together, completing these nine steps will ensure that you live your life of freedom.
Envision: Discover what your stories are really telling you about yourself, your world, and your place in it
Embody: Activate and renew your relationship to your Soul
Emerge: Live out your most powerful, affirming Story
Envision
Rejuvenate Your Mindset
Move from uncertainty to confidence. If you have had to dismember parts of your Soul, it makes sense that life will feel stressful and unmanageable. Outwardly you may appear to be an accomplished, positive person. Unfortunately, inwardly you carry a heavy burden of self-doubt. You spend much of your energy coping with pain, fear, and stress without the hope of life getting much better.
By rejuvenating your mindset, you achieve increased self-awareness. This allows you to feel curiosity about what is truly possible. From this vantage point, you can begin to see the light just beginning to emerge over the horizon. Now you understand that maybe things are not as locked in as you had believed them to be and that this means you can hope to enjoy your life and yourself more.
Create Core Intimacy
End the feeling of aimless wandering and find clarity of vision. Here you will learn why sometimes life seems to go well, and other times it is frustrating and disappointing. Without this clarity, life choices are made by guessing, trying to meet others’ expectations, or by your hidden limiting stories and beliefs.
This knowledge becomes a compass revealing which directions to move toward, as well as where to focus your energy, time, and money. The clarity you attain at this step makes it possible to continue, knowing what nurtures and empowers you. Life becomes less stressful and painful.
Heal Betrayal
Feel yourself transform from worthless to treasured. Here you discover how you abandon yourself whenever a thought, feeling, or action is unpleasant, painful, or does not fit who you think you are supposed to be. As a result of being cut off, shunned, and forced to remain locked in suffering, that part of yourself becomes an increasing source of pain and stress. This may even manifest as severe physical illness or other major life trauma.
Create awareness that self-betrayal is a natural and normal part of human experience, especially in times of vulnerability and distress. Become willing to look with compassion at your undesirable thoughts, feelings, and actions. Here you discover that in allowing them to remain as accepted parts of you, your unhealed wounds become legitimate and worthy of your acceptance and love.
Embody
Expand your Archetype IQ
Shift your life from meaningless to meaningful. A lack of knowledge of your archetypes leaves you feeling empty, and as a result, there is more pain. You struggle to feel a sense of power over your life’s conditions and feel isolated in your suffering. You are not able to tune in to guidance that can give your life more meaning.
In this step, become aware of how being conscious of your archetypes makes you more powerful in your life and how not understanding them causes pain. Here you acquire the essential skills of listening for and to your archetypes. You learn how to put their messages to work to help you achieve your goals and desires. These potent allies become sources of energy and power.
Master your Soul Connection
Move from confusion to successful communication. If you do not understand the nature of your communication with your Soul, you will not understand why painful stuff keeps happening or how to stop it. You will feel at the mercy of life’s stressful or disappointing moments. This will leave you believing that coping is the best it can get and feel powerless to improve your life conditions.
In this step, you learn how pain and stress are a language from your Soul. Discover that the Soul does not use words as much as it uses metaphors in the form of thoughts, feelings, and actions, which generate results that are either pleasing or painful. Become conscious of what language you are teaching your Soul to use. Let the quality of your results and the conditions of your life help you learn to measure the success of your communication with your Soul.
Empower Emotion
Transform your self-criticism into self-acceptance. Right now, your criticism and lack of acceptance of yourself dominate your life. This creates feelings that you are unworthy and unlovable. You suffer from a lack of gratitude toward yourself. Knowing that you do not actually love yourself is painful. You have judged yourself, and you have come up short.
Being seen is the beginning of healing how you think, feel, and act toward yourself. Welcome unpleasant thoughts, feelings, and actions as valued messengers. Then, experience genuine gratitude without judgment of your worthiness. Finally, express love of yourself, warts and all.
Emerge
Story Wisdom
Heal feelings of being fragmented and move toward wholeness. Without the ability to tap into the wisdom of your stories, you will compartmentalize parts of yourself as a way to manage pain and stress. This will lead to a feeling of brokenness. You will remain at a loss about how to heal internal and external fragmentation in yourself and your life. This will leave you feeling powerless in the face of painful or stressful thoughts, feelings, and experiences.
In this step, you learn what Story Wisdom is and how it plays a role in healing your fragmented sense of self. You will discover how to access the wisdom in your story to heal and move toward a sense of wholeness. Understanding what a particular event is telling you and how it can support you in becoming your fullest self brings peace.
Transform Fear
Free yourself from fear as a way to attain wisdom. Seeing fear as an enemy to be defended against or conquered limits you. This conflict-oriented posture leaves you powerless and deflated. Your default reaction is that fear is to be avoided or dismissed.
Learn the true nature of fear and the role it plays in growing your wisdom. Become adept at transforming what appears to be a weakness or an enemy into a source of power and wisdom. As you do, you will master the ability to glean the gifts of fear by understanding its true nature and power to deepen your wisdom.
Embrace Power
Evolve from feeling limited to enjoying spaciousness and freedom. Being blocked from your power leaves you limited in your ability to freely and whole-heartedly show up in the world as you wish. Despite desiring more, you lack full conviction about why it is important to discover your life’s meaning, deliver your gifts, and have an impact. This creates feelings of regret and disappointment in yourself.
As you claim your most powerful story and how you want to be, you affirm the importance of discovering your gift, meaning, and purpose. You will celebrate how to live meaningfully, deliver your gifts, and make a difference in the world.
See The Story
There is so much to talk about when it comes to each of these landmarks, the three different levels that you will move through. This is where you get to truly begin to see with such clarity the story of who you’re here to be. You get to see a lot of the things that have gotten in the way of you living as your true self.
And while those things that get in your way do cause pain, they were created and installed from a place of great love. And so as you learn to recognize them, you begin to shift your relationship to them, and that begins with your mindset. So you will begin to see that who you think you are and who you think you have to be is so very different than your true self.
Our next stop is create core intimacy. And this is where you will come to know what it is that fuels your life. What has been driving your life already that was invisible to you and yet had complete power over you? And when you become intimate with this knowledge, you suddenly have the ability to allow this incredible force to let you know where is it right for me to go and how can I get there with ease and purpose?
And after that, it’s time to look at the landmark called heal betrayal. Every single human being understands what it feels like to be betrayed, some of us much more than others. What I have learned is that something happens when we feel betrayed by others, and really, betrayed by the world.
What happens is that we actually learn to betray ourselves in that moment and we cut off, we shun, or we lock away the part of us that is suffering. And when we do this, We actually are building a barrier to our own healing and it keeps us from restoring ourselves to wholeness. It makes these betrayals actual traumas rather than events that can be a source of great wisdom for us.
And then we move into the Embody layer and that begins by expanding your archetype IQ. Understanding archetypes is incredibly powerful for eliminating isolation and loneliness. You may be familiar with the term. You may have heard it some point in your life, or maybe you’ve even studied them more deeply. I invite you to consider that an archetype is less a label or a definition, and it is more an expression of a state of being. It’s an attempt to describe an experience and like all attempts to describe, which are stories, it’s easy to become confused and think that the story is the thing, but it’s not.
So the words we use to describe archetypes are never the archetype itself. The archetype itself is the sensations and the emotions and the thoughts and feelings that occur every time something happens to us. And the more archetypes you have to choose from to help you sort out your life experience, particularly the painful ones, the more ease and expansiveness you will have.
And then you move into mastering your soul connection. You know, soul, as I’ve described before, it is the rich soil of who you are and this rich, deep wisdom that you were born with and that you will never, ever lose, even if you lose your ability to connect to it, is a powerful source for you to guide you through your life.
And when you understand how you have unknowingly taught your soul to speak to you with negative or painful thoughts, feelings, experiences and people, you then learn, you have the power to teach your soul, that you will listen to much quieter, much gentler, much softer language in order to understand the direction of your life.
And then it’s essential to empower your emotions. So right now, even if you on the outside look confident and look like you, um, have things under control, no doubt that you have a strong awareness of your inner critic. I’m sure she shows up at all hours of the day. And most particularly when you feel vulnerable and would prefer that she not.
So when we learn how our emotions are genuinely sources of not just wisdom, but power for us, we begin to shift and you actually will find that you can begin to welcome the unpleasant thoughts, feelings, and actions, because you understand their true nature. And again, this isn’t to say that they’re going to feel good, you know, discomfort, stress, fear, pain, those are all natural human experiences. Where they become a problem is when they are translated into some sort of story.
And next you will Emerge. This begins with story wisdom. And when you are able to begin to partner with your stories and you understand their immense value and power as a way of managing trauma, unhealed pain, unhealed wounds, that you begin to understand that they have always been there as a partner, as a part of you that from a place of that deep love created these stories to protect you. And once you understand why they’re there and how you got, how you put them there and how valuable they are, then you can begin to shift the stories that you create, which takes us to transform fear.
Fear feels so overpowering. It feels so scary. And we’re never going to not feel fear. Fear is wired into our biology. We have a sympathetic nervous system that kicks in whenever we feel threatened. And if we, especially when we were younger, experienced, overwhelming threat, either physically, emotionally, mentally, or spiritually, and we were not given the proper support or tools to process it, to integrate what we needed to from it and to release it.
Then it is lodged in our body and there can bring up all kinds of feelings of powerlessness and fear as well as physical disability or illness. So when we are able to, again, understand that nature of fear and really see through the message and the messenger to the source that sent it, it gives us the opportunity to tap into our deepest wisdom.
And then finally you get to embrace power. It’s so hard when we feel like we do not have our full power and there’s a lot of conditioning throughout life that tells you do not be powerful. When we were children, it didn’t have to even be adults who wished us harm. It could simply be parents or teachers or whoever else thought that it was their job to guide us, who imposed their rule on how you could be, or even who you could be.
And so we learned so early and so often that there’s a lot of danger in embracing the power of who your true nature is and how you are here to be in the world. And this really makes it difficult to truly understand your life’s meaning to be free, to deliver the gifts that you brought here. And it prevents you from having that incredible impact on the world that you know you are to give. And when you embrace your power, that means you are able to claim your most powerful story. You’re able to not just share your gifts, but enjoy your gifts, revel in their meaning, joyfully celebrate your sense of purpose. And all of that allows you to make the difference in the world that you know you are here to make
I’m Zette Harbour. This is Love Lies Beneath. I hope you’ll subscribe to this podcast. I hope that you visit LoveLiesBeneath.com. Check out the links to the show notes, the interviews with my guests, the links for all of the resources that I offer here on the podcast. And in my book, Love Lies Beneath: how reclaiming my Soul through Story became the secret to healing my Heart.
And I welcome you to set up a virtual coffee date with me. It’s about 20 minutes long. You will get to tell me where it is you want to go in your life, who it is, you know, you are here to be until then,
Go raibh míle maith agat!
