Hi, Jon here for Planet Kambo. Today's video is about allowing feelings to be. Allowing feelings to come up. When we use medicines such as Kambo and other plant medicines they can unlock certain feelings that have been pushed down. When these feelings come up, if they're negative our initial urge is going to be to want to get rid of them and the way we do that is through using substances and things like the internet.
Distractions of modern life
We live in an age now where there's no shortage of distractions, there's no shortage of ways that we can push our feelings down, ways that we can avoid feeling. You have one in your pocket all the time, your mobile phone is a device that allows you to avoid feeling so let me ask you this, anytime that you're bored, if you're sitting on the tube or whatever do you ever just sit or do you just immediately grab your phone and start scrolling or playing a game or something like that?
Dopamine addicts
What's happening is we've all become addicted to dopamine. Essentially the root of all addictions is dopamine which is the reward chemical in the brain. When we're using substances or electronic devices we start to alter the levels of dopamine in our brains and then the body starts to get used to a higher level of dopamine and then this leads to feelings of unhappiness so if every time that you're bored you feel an urge you get your phone out and you start scrolling all you're doing is you're conditioning your dopamine receptors to become less and less sensitive over time and then what happens is we start to become less and less motivated to actually do things.
You start to lose the desire to do everyday tasks. Things like going for a walk or similar basic tasks lose their sheen because they're not giving you enough of a hit and I know this from personal experience. Like everybody else I use the internet and I catch myself doing it, I catch myself scrolling through through Facebook or YouTube and I can actually feel what it's doing to my brain as I'm doing it. It's actually the anticipation of the next thing that I'm going to look at, it's not even finding something good to look at what it's really about is this anticipation as you're scrolling.
Your brain is getting excited because it's the potential that it's going to see something so it's this anticipation that is really it's messing up the dopamine part of your brain.
I can talk from personal experience because this is something that I've done my whole life. I avoid my feelings and this is just habit from childhood. When feelings come up, especially if it's negative ones without thinking about it I automatically get urges to use certain things whether it's a substance or whether it's some kind of electronic device or the Internet.
When I was a kid I was obsessed with computer games. It’s the same thing, I was always playing computer games and then as an adult, now we have the internet at any moment. I can just get my phone out and I can just scroll and I can feed that reward system part of my brain and as I said the problem arises where we condition ourselves to become less and less sensitive to dopamine and then everyday life becomes dull and boring because it's not giving us enough of a hit so what we need to do is we need to be able to be comfortable with just "being" when negative feelings come up.
If it's anger, frustration, grief or some other feeling we need to allow it to be and you need to fight that urge to want to get rid of it with a substance or with the internet.
Be conscious, and allow the feeling to be
So next time it comes up, whether it's after you've used Kambo or just in everyday life when you start to feel something, be conscious of what's happening and then allow the feeling to be.
If you just just sit and meditate on the feeling and acknowledge the feeling, feel the feeling, it will pass and as the as feelings begin to pass then they become healed so if there's an emotion that your body needs to feel, if you don't feel it and you push it down this is going to cause you problems further down the line and then this becomes a habit, a way of avoidance and we start to internalise all of our feelings, all of our negative feelings and they all get pushed down and then what's going to happen is over time you're gonna start to have problems, they're going to start to manifest as physical symptoms or chronic health conditions.
This is a topic for another video but I've read some books on this and discovered that almost all chronic health conditions are due to unexpressed emotions and this is something that I experienced myself. Throughout my life I've had lower back trouble and I've always thought it was a physical thing and then when I started to look into it someone recommended a couple of books and it really hit home how, by internalising all of my feelings and not allowing them to be and by not expressing them I'm actually causing myself physical harm and my body is just rebelling against what I'm doing and it gives me pain.
So what we need to do is we need to get comfortable with our feelings we need to get comfortable just allowing them to be. So periodically throughout the day what you can do is you can check in with your feelings ask yourself what you're feeling and then just feel it, acknowledge it. If you can, identify what the feeling is - “It's okay I'm feeling a little bit angry, I'm feeling a bit sad and frustrated, I'm just gonna sit with this feeling".
I often close my eyes and I'll just sit for five minutes and I just feel that feeling. Usually it's not nice, it's really not nice to feel these feelings. It's really unpleasant and the urge to want to get rid of it is very, very strong but over time what happens is that we're training up our mind and our subconscious that it's okay to feel these feelings and then the desire to wanna reach for something to get rid of it is going to get less and less and then over time feelings will just start to flow through you in the same way as clouds just flow through the sky.
Conclusion
If if you take one thing away from this video then it's just to feel your feelings, notice when the urge comes up to want to get rid of them and don't reach for that substance or for the internet and just allow those feelings to be.
That's all from me for now and I will see you in the next video.
Jon