Friday, October 9

The days are full, and bright, and good. Thank you for being here. :)

lightward.com/newsletter

Y’ALL WE LAUNCHED A PODCAST

We launched Empowered Human Academy, our first-ever podcast! And we are SO THRILLED. It’s always life-giving to converse with inspiring humans, and it is exhilarating to share those conversations with you! And we are so grateful for everyone who has taken the time to listen to our first episode. We have an incredible line-up of conversations ready for you to listen to, and there’ll be a new one coming out every week.

You can check it out at empoweredhumanacademy.com, Apple Podcasts, or anywhere you listen to podcasts! We’re also on YouTube. ;)

And! Once you’ve listened, can you take a moment to rate and review our podcast, on whatever platform you’re using? It really helps the internet algorithms make it visible to more people. And we believe, hard, in what we’re sharing here. ❤️

Emotional autonomy

I have good news! YOU GET TO CHOOSE THE WAY YOU FEEL.

NO REALLY. And not only is it okay to behold a context in which everyone is feeling terrible, in which the standard, so-called appropriate response would be to also feel terrible, choosing to feel good is the only way to break the cycle of toxic reactivity. Like begets like, like attracts like, and if you want to create or attract anything good, you gotta choose thoughts that feel better than what’s on offer around you.

This is what I’m calling “emotional autonomy”. It’s a little different than the psychology definition, which talks about it in terms of separating from the social fabric of your early development. And while this is similar, this is about choice in your feelings. Actual, real independence from socio-emotional mores. Independence from your own, for you get to choose what emotional habits serve you, and which do not.

So yeah, I’ve been thinking a lot about this. Feelings are usually described in terms of reaction, right? “This makes me feel x”. So it took me a good long while to figure out that I had a choice about how I felt.

A couple weeks ago, my bit of the newsletter involved a spectrum of emotions, ordered by good-feeling-ness. (Here’s that issue, if you want to look back on it.) It’s been my many-times-daily work to register a bad-feeling emotion, and to then upgrade it, taking whatever I’m thinking about and reframing it using the emotion that’s one step higher on the scale from where I started, then repeating to move higher still.

That process is predicated on the idea that you get to choose thoughts, and some thoughts feel better than others. It’s possible to just choose a good feeling and move to it, yes, but until you’ve got that muscle strengthened it’s easier to choose a thought that feels good, and let your habit of reactive-only feeling do its thing. Totally valid.

I say that quickly – “totally valid” – but let’s talk about that for a second. Abe was in a shitty-feeling place earlier, and I asked him to choose a better-feeling thought about the situation. I phrased it something like, “Okay, you’ve described this situation to me in a way that feels obviously terrible. That is a valid, real story. Now, tell me a story about this same situation that feels good.” And he rejected it outright, at first, saying that I was asking him to deny reality.

Which makes sense. But our perspective is our reality. Facts are emotionless, and if you’re having emotions about facts, it’s because you have a perspective on them. AND IT IS ABSOLUTELY VALID TO CHOOSE A PERSPECTIVE THAT FEELS BETTER. It is no more denying reality than staying with the perspective you started with.

Let’s take this further.

I’ve spent years holding empathy up over compassion, thinking that it is better to interact and merge with the emotional payload of a situation, rather than to stand back, stand removed, and acknowledge the hardship without unifying myself with it.

(Sidenote: observe that the description above obviously was going to be about negative and/or difficult emotions. We could do with empathizing with positive and/or easy emotions a little more, eh?)

It’s probably most true that both empathy and compassion are useful, and appropriate, in their turn. But if we’re talking about how we relate to the state of another, and if our priority is facilitating a movement towards health and life for all of us, then the choice about how we feel becomes a critical piece in what happens next. Like begets like, like attracts like, and choosing to feel good is no longer about breaking our own bad habits, it’s now about interrupting the negative-negative-negative reactivity cycle that society itself is engaged in. If the stream of self-propagating negativity finds its way to you, and you choose not to sustain it, if you choose in fact to respond with good-feeling-ness, then at minimum you force your microcosm of society to figure out how to deal with something new. At best, you show others how to do what you just did, and we all move up the scale together, a little at a time.

Can you feel how freeing that idea is? And why it might be a little dangerous to talk about? If you’re standing in a circle where everyone is bemoaning the state of affairs, expressing disappointment or anger at the way of things, it’ll feel something like blasphemy to say “but I am hopeful that we will learn”, or “I am enthusiastic about our collective awakening”, or even “I am joyful in my knowledge that we are part of a larger system that is self-balancing, and that because life wants to live, I am happily expectant that new, healthy forms that will arise, for well-being is absolutely available here too”. The reaction of dread and hand-wringing is not mandatory, and you may dare to be happy in a place where no one else is.

But start with you. Start with you. Recognize the freedom of choice that you have. No one has control over how you feel. No one, and nothing. Your thoughts are your own, your feelings are your own. And because your feelings are the lens through which you see life, and because you’re going to find more of what you’re feeling out there, it is absolutely in your best interest to feel good, so as to access the good that I promise is always available for you.

Emotional autonomy. Tuck that idea in your pocket. Claim your freedom.

Sometimes I gotta wear my shades
'Cause there's sunshine dripping down my face
Don't let these people lie to ya
Don't let 'em see ya smile too much
They only tryna take it away
Sometimes you gotta hide from 'em
Don't let 'em see what's under the shades
🎶 “Shades”, The Knocks

Wellness for you,
and for me

Just breathe.

My lovely, breathing friends - this is your weekly reminder to pay attention to your breath. There are breathing exercises that absolutely positively affect your body. One of them is breathing in a 2:1 ratio. So for this next week, I encourage you to practice exhaling for 4 counts, and inhaling for 2, for anywhere between 3-5 minutes to start. When doing this exercise correctly, 2-to-1 breathing eliminates volatile waste from your lungs, while calming and nurturing the nervous system. Try it. Let me know how it goes – message us on instagram (@abelopez). I love talking about this! As an empowerment coach, I end every single client call with a breathing exercise, in a guided meditation – it’s wonderful!

Progress requires unlearning

Isaac and I live really intentionally – everything we do is done in earnest, on purpose. It’s a practice, being intentional. It calls for us to think critically and thoughtfully about everything we do, think, and say. And while we aren’t perfect at it, we’ve gotten a lot better at it over time. How we approach our business, our daily routines, what we watch and consume, how we decorate our home, what our boundaries look like, and how we progress. It’s all done with intention.

A lot of people ask us if we ever get into fights or disagreements. And the answer is one million percent yes. It’s normal and healthy to have disagreements. We met when we were fairly young – let’s get real, we are still hella young – only a few years out of college then. In the almost 7 years of being together, we’ve moved 5 different times, to three different states, traveled the world together, Isaac left his job at Apple Inc. to start his own business, I moved through different seasons of trying out different jobs, let go of the religious beliefs we had growing up, overcame seasons of depression and mania, battled sustained injuries, made incredible friends from around the globe, won awards, and the list goes on and on and on. And it’s only been seven years.

And the constant? Well, first: love, and a deep-seated belief that our foundation as a couple is real and true and unshakable.

And also: we are unlearning things that have held us back from becoming our fullest, healthiest selves.

We have talked for hundreds of hours about things that we are learning and unlearning in order to become healthier humans, partners, friends, everything. We learned a few years ago that we had to un-learn the way we fought over a specific subject in our marriage that literally felt like groundhog day, getting mad about the same thing and fighting in the exact same way, leading us to a place that would feel good enough in the moment, but then would trigger a deep anger when it came up again.

It wasn’t until we unlearned how to fight that we started to make incredible progress, and fast. The idea dawned on us when we both said, one day in our apartment in Chicago in early 2018, that we were both ready to try something new – to unlearn, and then to learn again how to communicate during times of frustration.

I’m happy to report that we fight really productively now, because we’ve built up a practice of navigating hard conversations. We aren’t scared or worried about disagreements or times of frustrations because we have the tools that truly work for the both of us. And, we have the ability to keep evolving them.

Here are some examples of what I’ve unlearned in order to make progress in other areas of my life:

• I unlearned that my life needs to look like everyone else’s life and I’m learning that when I am authentically me, I feel the most free, I am more creative, and I am more healthy.

• I unlearned that I need to give up my agency in order to serve other people’s needs in order to feel worthy of their love. I’m learning that my own mental, emotional, sexual, physical and spiritual needs come first, and that I am more inspired to serve others when those needs are met.

• I unlearned the practice of feeling ashamed of my desires, including the sexual ones. I am learning to dive head-first into exploring all of my desires in order to truly live a life I love. Ha, that was hard to unlearn. :)

• I unlearned that the bullies in my childhood don’t dictate how great I actually am. I’ve learned that I’m a really, really unique and cool man.

• I unlearned being a complete asshole to myself because of what I weigh or what I look like or how smart I perceive myself to be. I am learning to own all of my gorgeous, infectious talent for what it is, giving me the freedom and excitement to get better at things I want to get better at in life. Not because I’m trying to compensate for a lack of something, but rather because I am beginning to love myself in a deep, powerful way.

Friend – there are probably things in your life that are slowing you down. You’ve learned and have been so practiced in a pattern that doesn’t serve you. I’ve seen it with my empowerment clients this year – once they unlearned to respond or to do things that didn’t actually serve their greater purpose, their joy and passions, they were able to create new, incredible patterns that lead to more confidence, joy, and a life they are actually excited about. But like anything good, this takes work. A lot of work, sometimes, but it’s just work. It’s just work. And everything gets better with every tiny step you take. You can do it, and you can trust yourself to do it, I promise.

What do you need to unlearn in order to unlock your joy? To stop the negative cycles you’re in? To start that new business project? To tell yourself that you love yourself? To level up?

You are incredible and I believe in you, fully!
Abe

A podcast preview, and a book giveaway

This week’s guest on Empowered Human Academy was Lisa Wardell, the only Black female CEO in the S&P 400, and we had a powerful conversation about honest engagement and belonging and inclusion, as regards race, and everything.

Next week’s guest – you’re hearing it here first! – is Katherine Gehl. She’s a business leader and political innovator, and she is a champion for evolving the way that we vote in the United States. Her book, The Politics Industry, is a powerful-yet-approachable introduction to how we make this whole thing better, by explaining where we came from, why things are the way they are, and what powerful-yet-achievable steps this country can take to transform our body politic into something vibrantly capable.

We’re giving away ten copies of this book. IT’S SO IMPORTANT. Enter the drawing below. Besides your mailing information (which will only be used for the drawing), you’ll be asked this question: “Take something that you have a history of feeling terrible about. Now: tell us a story about that same subject, using the same facts, that feels legitimately good.”

In closing, here’s something that came out of one of my work calls this week: how we work is one of the most important things we make.

We adore you. ❤️🌱 Go get it. Have an awesome day.