Podcast Episode 45 - Contemplating Emotionality from an RRT and Human Design Perspective
I've been studying Rapid Resolution therapy, RRT. RRT is a modality that blends clinical hypnosis with neuro linguistic programming to create really incredible results. It's very powerful for clearing stuck emotions that are holding you back. It's almost like clearing traumas and really letting go of big things that are holding you back. It talks a lot about emotions, and it's a very different perspective on emotions.
I am somebody who's been studying emotionality for over a decade at this point. I have been studying emotions since I was a competitive athlete. You may not know this about me, but I was a competitive gymnast for about nine years, and I competed at a national level. I trained twice a day for several years, morning and evening. Every Monday, Wednesday and Friday, we had an additional morning practice. I was homeschooled. We traveled as a team. It was a whole world of being a competitive athlete.
While I was in that world, I came up against this issue where I was really good when there was no pressure, when no one was really paying attention, when we were just in the middle of practice, where we were kind of lost in the flow, where we are all just taking turns practicing our routines on repeat. I would nail them over and over and over again. Then we would go to a competition, and I would fall on things that I'd literally never fallen on; things that were extremely elemental. I remember one time I fell on my beam mount. I was literally jumping up off of a springboard onto the beam, and I fell. The board was a little bit too far back and I caught the end of the beam and slid down on my knee and face planted. I had done this hundreds of times in my life, and I skinned my knee in the beginning of this competition's first event.
This was a recurring pattern for me, where I would do great in practice, and then I would fall in something really dumb in competition. That led me to studying mindset, and that specifically led me to studying performing under pressure. When I was reading about performing under pressure, emotional regulation was such a major skill that a lot of high performing athletes talked about as being important. A lot of basketball athletes, NFL players, and competitive swimmers, Olympians, talk about how you have to have this emotional neutrality when you're in the zone in order to perform under pressure.
I've been learning about human design for the last several years, and so my current perspective around emotions is very much rooted in human design. That is the primary framework that I reference when I'm helping people with their emotions. I look at if their emotional center is defined or undefined, then I will look at the main triggers they have. I've really been able to see emotionality through that lens for a while. But because I'm learning a new perspective on emotionality through Rapid Resolution Therapy, I'm starting to see my perspective on human design and emotions be challenged with this new perspective. Since I have a defined ajna, specifically the 17-62 channel, which is all around opinions, perspective, and is very logical, it's time for me to broaden my perspective and almost define what I believe to be true based on how I'm integrating this new modality and perspective.
In human design, nobody is designed to make emotionally charged decisions. If you have a defined emotional center, you're an emotional authority. The advice is wait until you have clarity. Wait through the emotionality. You have to wait until you're emotionally neutral to have access to that intuition, that logic, your higher thinking, and then you'll be able to make the decision. It says wait until you're no longer emotional in order to decide. To make the decision, wait a couple days until you're not feeling all the things.
When you are undefined emotionally, your emotional center will play into your non-self themes. The decisions that you make can sometimes be based on wanting to feel a certain way, or not wanting to feel a certain way, so you’re going to do xyz because if you do xyz, you won’t feel like that. This is where we get people who might avoid confrontation. You don't want to have a certain conversation because you are afraid that it is going to make you feel a certain way, so you avoid doing what you know you need to do because you have fear around the emotions that you're going to experience.
It can also be that you are only doing something because you think that the results will make you feel a certain way. In that perspective, what's happening is you are searching for emotions. That might mean that you launch a big program to hopefully feel really, really good about the results that happen, or that you're trying to hit a six-figure month because you feel like if you do hit a six-figure month, then you'll just feel really good. Whatever it is, whatever it's related to, you're trying to search for some sort of emotionality. Either way, if you have an undefined emotional center, you are designed to make decisions from your inner authority, whether that's your sacral, spleen, or identity center. Whatever it is, you're not designed to make emotionally charged decisions either.
It's just so fascinating. What does that mean if no one's designed to make emotionally charged decisions? It sent me in my undefined head center into a whole spiral of what could this possibly mean? How does this information go together? The human design perspective is no one is designed to make emotionally charged decisions, and if you have an emotional authority, you will consistently have emotional responses, and then you can let those emotions settle before you move on to the future, before you make the decision, take the action. If you're undefined emotionally, you have to let go of the feelings that you're feeling, and again, tune into that intuition and make a decision based on what is correct for you in this next step.
Let's talk about the Rapid Resolution Therapy perspective on emotions. This is kind of a different perspective, but I really, I really love it, and I've really enjoyed learning about this. Rapid Resolution Therapy says that emotions are not generated from the body, but they are generated from the mind. This brings me back immediately to when I was learning NLP and the experience cycle.
There are four steps in this experience cycle. The first thing that happens is we have an experience, so we get results from an experience. Let's use my gymnastics self as an example. Let's say that myself as a gymnast falls. She's working on a release skill. She doesn't catch the bar. That's the result that happened. She missed the bar. The thoughts that are going to pop up next, because of the results, and then we have thoughts about the event.
Our mind starts to sort information, and this is really our nervous system taking in the sensations around us. We have these sensory neurons that are taking in sight and sounds and feelings. They are taking in the sensations that we have in our physical limbs. They're taking in all this information, and it's organizing it. It's sorting it. It's dealing with do I have to respond to this? Is this important? Is this not important? It's looking for threats. It's scanning that information and organizing it in a way that's going to make sense of what just happened.
So, let's say I fell, and I missed the bar. Boom. I'm on the ground on my stomach. There are thoughts that are in my head. First thought: I missed the bar. That's me rationalizing and mentally understanding the situation. Now, the emotions are then going to be triggered based on the thoughts. I think that this is really important because the nervous system takes in information, it goes through that central nervous system, and then it's responded to.
From a physiological standpoint, emotions are chemicals being released in our body and in our nervous system. They are nervous system responses. I think about excitement and fear. Excitement and fear physiologically are very, very, very similar. When you're really excited about something, your breathing gets shallower. You start to breathe faster. Your heart rate goes up. Your blood vessels constrict in certain areas and dilate in other areas. All that energy is being pushed into your muscles so that you can move or take action. Fear is almost exactly the same. When you're fearful of something, there is still that same nervous system response. It's just that the thoughts and the mental perspective around the physical feeling that we're feeling is different. Emotions are not actually the sensations that we're feeling, but they are our mental perception of the feeling. They're created from our thoughts.
What I've been playing with understanding Rapid Resolution Therapy is I want to see where the emotion is coming from. Is the emotion coming from present reality, from the actual experience that just happened, or is it coming from a past experience? Emotions are motivation. Our body is creating these emotions to give us energy, to give us fuel, so that we can take more action. All sorts of emotions can be motivating, they just have a different response.
When you are using fear as a motivating factor, it is fuel. It can definitely be fuel. However, the perception of labeling it as fear creates this negative nervous system response because it's putting you in fight or flight. If you were super excited about something and not fearful, it's still an excited response, but there's not this survival aspect that's rooted there. There's something different.
Going back to the example of just falling after missing the bar, the situation and context is really important, but RRT says that the environment and the situation does not create the emotion. The mind creates the emotion. So if I fall, let's say I miss the bar, the mind is going to be able to interpret that situation differently. I'm going to have a very different emotional reaction based on my mental perception of the situation.
If I missed the bar, and the mental perception of the situation is that that was the first time I ever attempted that skill all by myself, without a spotter or maybe not over the foam pit, but over the real bars, for me, I could be really excited about the fact that I did it. I did the thing even though I was a little bit scared. Even though it was new for me, I pushed my boundaries, and I was really excited even though I missed the bar. I was successful at that moment.
I could be really excited about that situation. But if I fall, and the mental perception is I'm looking at my past and at the history, my mental perception is saying, "You've caught the bar before. You know how to do this. You shouldn't have missed the bar," then my emotions are going to be different. As soon as I'm saying something happened and it shouldn't have happened, I'm going to get stuck because that shouldn't have happened energy is going to cause anger. That's going to cause resentment. I'm angry that it happened, and I feel like it shouldn't have happened. I feel like it shouldn't have happened because I've done the skill before. I've caught the bar before. I have done it before, and therefore I should be able to do it again and again and again and again.
If I'm angry or resentful in that situation, that emotion is being caused by my brain. My brain is perceiving that fall as something out of the ordinary. Because I've caught the bar before, it is perceiving it as something that I could do, and saying that I should have been able to do something better, but that is stuckness. The anger is being directed at something that's not actually happening anymore. I can't go back and change the fact that I missed the bar that time. I have to accept the fact that I fell. What do I want to do next? The emotions that I create, they may be in response to what just happened, however, I want to be emotionally clear in order to make the corrections for the next step.
When I would get resentful, when I would say that shouldn't have happened, I would get angry. I'd get angry at myself. I'd get angry at everything, and then when I would go again, because I had this anger in my body, I wasn't able to think logically. I wasn't able to think about the swing, or my releasing time, or spotting the bar. All that's going through my mind is I shouldn't have missed that one. I shouldn't have missed that one. My focus is no longer on taking a deep breath here, and kicking up here, and then swing here, and spot this, and release here. Look for the bar, grab. It's not focused on the actual movements that I'm doing. I am preoccupied in my mind with this anger going through this story of today's a bad day. I can't catch the bar. I'm being so stupid. I should have caught that one. I don't know what went wrong. That is going to be a distraction from me just doing what's necessary.
Emotions can be a distraction because they pull your focus. I think that that's a really beautiful connection between human design and Rapid Resolution Therapy. In RRT, we're saying that if I've fallen and I’m angry that I shouldn't have fallen, then my actions are fueled by this anger. In human design, we talk about how you're not designed to make emotionally charged decisions because when you're in that emotional energy, you're focused on the feeling, but you're not focused on your clarity, your truth, the intuition that's underneath that emotionality.
Thinking back, I feel like that makes a lot of sense. There's this one competition in particular where I fell on something really stupid, and because I was so angry and I was in this energy of that shouldn't have happened, I got back up, and then I fell again on something else that was stupid and shouldn't have happened, and I was so angry again that I got up again and I again, third time in a row, fell on a skill that I have never fallen on in my entire life. Because I was angry, because I felt like that shouldn't have happened, I was distracted and I was so emotionally worked up that the results that I kept creating were not going to get better. When you're in that emotionally charged state, you're not focused on what's actually valuable and what's in front of you.
What I wish that I had been able to do as that little competitive gymnast who fell on something really stupid, was laugh it off and get back up, and then finish the routine absolutely perfectly. In that perspective, I would've been able to prove to myself and everyone else that I have no idea what happened, but that fall was a fluke. It's not that I can't perform under pressure, it's that that fall was really weird and silly, but I recovered really well. That is the ideal place that I would've been in. In the future, my goal is always to be able to experience the emotion that comes up, and then respond with clarity and respond where I have access to my intelligence.
When we have these emotions, the anger is coming up, and I think the competition example is really powerful here because my little body, my little brain, put so much pressure and importance on competitions. When I think of something important, when I get a piece of mail that says important, I am going to open it with a little bit of anxiety. I'm opening that letter like, "Ooh, I really hope this isn't like I missed some giant IRS payment, or something happened with the paperwork for my company, and it's not registered in the right state." I'm worried that it's going to be something big. I'm worried it's going to be something bad. I'm worried that I messed up, and there's something that I'm going to have to change.
When I labeled competitions as an important routine in my mind, my body said, "Ooh, I'm going to give you extra motivation. Here you go. Here's some fear. Fear is really, really strong. Here's some anger. Anger is really, really strong emotion," because your body wants to give you the tools necessary. Your mind is saying, "This is important to you," and your body's saying, "Okay, I'm going to give you absolutely every resource I have to help you get that done." It's going to give you the anger. It's going to give you the fear. It's going to give you the resentment. It's going to bring up that memory of the past time that you fell and how mad you were. It's going to bring that up because it's a strong emotion, memory, experience.
Anger specifically sends all of that blood to your jaw. When the blood is in your jaw, when the blood is in your muscles because you're in this fight or flight state, you're ready to run, you're ready to bite, you're ready to fight, but you're not ready to think. Imagine if in that moment, we're using this athlete again, she's just fallen in competition on something, she's super stressed, everyone's watching her, she has to get back up. Imagine asking her a math question at that point. There is no way she's going to be able to answer that question quickly. She's going to have to get herself out of the things that she is feeling before she's able to access that part of her brain, because the blood is not there. It's focused on her muscles. It's focused on keeping her alive. It's focused on keeping her in a fight or flight state so that she can survive the next couple of minutes, not answering math questions. It doesn't have the ability to make decisions like that, all you have access to is this extra motivation that's flooding your body.
With that angry gymnast that missed the bar, in that moment, I want her to have access to her higher thinking. I want her to be able to remember those teeny tiny corrections that she's been working on. I want her to remember that feeling in her body and that sensation of self-trust and knowing that this is muscle memory, and she doesn't have to overthink it. She doesn't have to force it. I want her to remember that she's in gymnastics because gymnastics is fun, and it's playful, and it is something that she gets to do on a daily basis, and this is just another routine. That's where I want her to be. She just wants to fly through the air and feel good about that and stick the landing, and then salute as everyone is cheering for her. That's what she wants, and that's the experience that she's trying to create, but that's not going to be created when all of that energy is in her jaw.
This is where emotional intelligence happens. If you are super excited and you're in this emotionally charged state, your body's giving you this extra motivation, but you don't need it. It's unnecessary. It's additional. It's extra, but it's not needed. I think that that's something that human design was trying to connect with and create as well. With defined emotional centers, in my experience, I do have big emotions that come up for a lot of things, and I do get to sort through that and come back to myself consistently. I feel like people who have an undefined emotional center, it might be easier for them to maintain a state of neutrality, and then if something does come up, they process it, instead of consistently processing feelings over and over again. I'm still playing with what that means there and how I want to interpret that.
Rapid Resolution Therapy is focused on clearing those emotions, the anger and resentment, that are holding us back and have built up over time. I see this in business when you maybe have one launch that doesn't go well, and then you think this next launch has to go well, but then you're about to prepare for a new launch, and you're fearful. You're anxious. You're super worried. You want to overextend yourself. You want to do more than is necessary. Day one goes by and you don't get as many signups as you thought you would, and it gets even worse. You get even more afraid. You're like, "Oh no, absolutely no one is going to sign up. This isn't working. It's a failure again. I can't believe this is happening again." All of that is just your body saying, "Hey, this was important to us. You're feeling big things about this. You're thinking big things. Because you're focused on that and you're in your mind, I'm going to give you extra motivation to get it done, because obviously this feels like life or death for you, so I'm going to give you some life or death emotions to play with and to work with to have the fuel to do the thing."
You don't need all that emotion. If your last launch failed, great, epic, amazing, whatever. You probably learned some lessons. I hope that you did. But then this next one doesn't have to be a failure. This next one, you don't have to be afraid. You don't have to feel guilty. You don't have to feel bitterness. You don't have to feel any sort of negative emotion to fuel that action. It's more beneficial to be fueling that from pleasure, from alignment, from peace. When you're in a state of peace and pleasure, you have access to your higher thinking and your intuition. You have access to your power.
Another thing that I want to say around emotionality is the introspection that happened. If you are a happy, healthy, super aligned individual, let's say something happens, and you feel really good about it. You had an amazing launch. You might go through and do some reflection around why it was amazing, and where it came from. What led up to this experience? There might be some reflection, but there's hardly ever introspection. “I feel so happy. The reason that I feel so happy is because when I was 13, this thing happened with my parents, and that was the first time that I ever experienced this emotion, and that's why this situation means so much to me now, is because of this thing in the past…” Sometimes there might be that sentiment, but it's not always there.
When it's a negative emotion, if you're feeling anger or something bad happens, suddenly, you do pull up negative emotions. You do look at the things that happened in your childhood and how this pattern is played out over your life, and all this introspection will again keep you stuck instead of supporting you with just living your life.
Emotions make a lot of our decisions way more complicated than they actually are. As an emotional authority, I get really excited about things, or I will feel like I don't know if this is fair. Can I actually take that much on? I have learned, and I'm working with Rapid Resolution Therapy, to fine tune my emotional process and wait through my emotionality. I feel the things. I'm like, “I'm feeling the things, and that might be some extra motivation. It might not be. I don't necessarily need it, but I don't not need it.” Maybe I do want to channel that emotionality into something, so I'm playing with it a little bit more in a different way. With undefined emotional centers, it might be easier to just focus on you being neutral, and you can let go of the emotions, and the emotions are coming to you as optional motivation, but they're not necessary motivation.
I think that the quality of the emotion counts, and it is really important based on where you're sourcing these emotions and motivations from. Because things like anger and shame and guilt and fear trigger that nervous system response, they don't let you rest. They don't let you recover. If you're constantly holding onto resentment or guilt, you're still going to feel that guilt when you're resting. You're still going to feel that guilt when you're taking time off, when you're not doing the thing that you should be doing. It's always there. At that point, if you're feeling guilty, you're feeling guilty when you're doing the thing, when you're not doing the thing, when you're doing the thing right, when you're not doing the thing right, all the time, and that is when the emotion is interfering with your experience. That is when the emotion is pulling you away from the present moment.
I think we overcomplicate a lot of the decisions that we make. I know I do for sure, and I will emotionally torture myself and go in this cycle of this is how I feel about it, and this is how I think this person's going to feel about it, and if this situation happens, this is how I'm going to feel in that situation. I'm projecting my emotions and trying to process the feelings before I've actually had the experience, but I don't actually know what the experience is going to lead to. I don't know how I'm going to feel in that experience yet.
So, I think that it's really powerful to let go of emotions if they're coming from anything other than the present moment. If something happens, and it's super exciting, yes, I'm going to be excited about it. Yes, I'm going to feel happy about it. Yes, I'm going to feel joy. I'm going to feel delighted. I'm going to feel all those happy emotions.
If something bad happens, I'm going to experience that a little bit too. I might feel the fear for a moment. I might let it process through me, but I'm going to be intentional about what motivations or emotions I allow to motivate my actions. Because fear, anything that's going to keep you stuck, anything that's going to keep you in that fight or flight state constantly, eventually it's going to deteriorate your body. Eventually, that's going to cause harm.
In short-term bursts, yes, anger is a great little motivator. Anger and resentment and fear can be short-term sources of motivation, but in the long-term, because they're so relentless, because they don't let go, because they will pop up and remind you that you're angry, that you are frustrated, that you are guilty, and you should be doing more, they will interfere with your ability to rest as well, and that's when it will become all consuming.
I remember as a gymnast, there were certain skills that I would get stuck on. I would get stuck having an issue where I was able to do the skill perfectly for like a year, and then suddenly, I could not do it anymore. When I was experiencing that, when I was having these little mental blocks, it ruined my whole life.
I remember being at the fair. I was supposed to be having fun with my friends and family, and I was just stressed. I was thinking about what I was going to do when I got back to the gym on Monday. Am I going to be able to get my blind change again? I was just anxious and worried, and I was not able to experience the fun, the joy, the play that was possible at the fair. I was stuck in my head. That stuckness, that mentality, those emotions that were generated from that perspective that I was looking through were ruining my life and interfering with everything in the process.
I think that emotions are bad when they're interfering with your ability to sleep, your ability to live, your ability to enjoy your life and be present in the moment. If something does pop up where you experience anger or somebody says something, that can also be an opportunity to create a boundary in the future. I'm seeing emotions as not necessarily good or bad, but I'm trying to make them very neutral.
I have emotions pop up all the time. I don't think that Rapid Resolution Therapy suggests that we don't ever feel anything because I think that that's unrealistic. I think we're going to have emotions. I think that sometimes when we are experiencing emotions, it's beneficial to take a step back and see where the emotion is coming from. If it's coming from the present situation and you are just responding, your nervous system is just taking in information about what just happened to you, that's fine. You can process those emotions, you can feel those things, but when you are using emotions from the past, like guilt or resentment or anger or fear, that's where I think that it's actually interfering with you a little bit.
It's interesting because I'm a fear motivation individual in human design, and so I'm really curious to start exploring this more to look at the motivations. What about the people who are motivated by guilt in human design? Is that healthy for them? Is that an aspect of human design that maybe we get to rewrite with RRT, or is that maybe a perspective from RRT that could be blended a little bit into human design, where we can use that guilt and we can use that fear as a positive motivating factor? I'm not sure. I don't know all the answers. I'm still curious. I still have a lot of questions and contemplation to do around emotions and around my perspective on emotions, but I feel like my life is constantly fine tuning my perspective and understanding things at a deeper and deeper level, and that is what I’m going to continue to do!
If you are interested in learning more in a masterclass centered about what it means to be magnetic in human design and how to harness that, check out Magnetism. Join live February 28, 2023 or catch the replay after: Magnetism
If you are interested in a beginners guide to interpreting the details of your human design chart, check out DECODED! This guide is composed of the outlines Eden has created for the Energetic Resumes, SSCC, and a few of her most saved Instagram posts. These are notes that Eden regularly references that provide a clear breakdown of the details of your human design chart. Learn more here: DECODED
