The HOW Sessions: Your First Steps
Attachment, neediness, all that stuff that makes me feel desperate. I work on this as hard as my homework. The feeling of being totally comfortable with being alone. Only needing the love of my lil ol self. I feel this is totally possible, as opposed to what all you naysayers think. I’d rather be a hooray-sayer. New cool phrase? Mabes.
Anyway, this is something that I talk about a SHIT LOAD in my workshops. It’s a big part of my personality even though there are still instances where I feel instantly desperate for a girl that I just met. Stuff like that happens, but it can change. Just like the ides of march change on a windy day.
Funny story… Last night I get this number of a really cute girl. She’s a sweetheart. Adorable. So I text her later that night. No reply. Wuhhh?! Dang. Text her again that night and get, "You have the wrong number buddy." No way, this chick gave me a fake number? I woke up the next morning and remembered my night. Three numbers, not bad for getting back into the bar scene after five straight months off of it. I’ve been busy busting my ass for school lately, I want to graduate.
So anyway, I remember that the girl I was interested in most gave me a fake number. I instantly felt this slight tightening in my chest. Maybe she was so drunk she messed it up, cuz she seemed really into me. Eff. That sucks.
In my mind I can hear myself saying, "Anthony, you can choose your emotions, there’s no reason to choose to feel shitty about some random girl flaking out on you."
I also concentrated on ignoring all that noise in my head and thinking in the moment. The Power Of Now by Eckhart Tolle taught me this (nuttily good book by the way). I then looked at the name of the girl I texted, and her name was Tyler.
Wait a second, that sounds kinda like a dudes name too. Then I realize that Tyler is one of my friends from Seaside, that chicks name wasn’t Tyler at all. I looked at my phone and saw the girls number sitting nicely in my phone book. I am a retard.
In a drunken haze I stupidly texted the wrong person. I instantly felt better.
Okay stop. What the fuck? How lame is that? All I am doing is lying in bed, when I normally should be feeling peaceful bliss. My bed is so comfy, my Dad bought me a badass bed. But this morning was different, I was lying in bed feeling a bad emotion. That realistically shouldn’t make sense… unless I was physically sick.
How can I be lying in bed comfortably with a peaceful serenity and have a bad emotion? Think about that.
Why? Because I was reliving a false moment in my head. Why is it false? Because the only moment is NOW. To this current moment, last night never happened. 5 Seconds ago never happened. That’s because this current moment is happening all the time. Todo la dia. Todos las dias. Instead of thinking about it in terms of your life being a movie that is playing constantly, think of it as one realllllllly long moment. Where time is stopped, because there is no such thing as time, just a psychological thing we made up in our heads in order to organize life better.
Remember in Saved By The Bell when Zach would go, "Time out!" and everyone but him would freeze? Time stopped for him. Think of THAT as how life truly is. Time stopped. There is no time. Just one frozen moment. Time doesn’t pass.
A very peaceful thought, yes? It is for me. I don’t feel rushed, I don’t feel like my life is constantly passing by. There is no longer worry for me because the future is an illusion, the future will never happen because the only moment is the NOW.
Worry is an emotion you get from thinking about something that might not go as planned for you in the future. "What if what I want to happen doesn’t happen?" It is an immobilizing emotion that stops you from thinking freely and confidently in the present moment.
Guilt is the same thing, except for its realm lives in the psychological past. "Why did this happen when I didn’t want it to?"
You can’t change something that already happened, because you’re living in the now. You can’t control the future, because there is no future. These are two 100% without a doubt USELESS emotions. They are unnecessary in your life and in fact deter from your happiness.
Rid them of your life. Right now. Anytime you feel yourself slipping into worrying or feeling guilty, stop and think,
"Fuck that emotion, it is useless and it only deters from my happiness."
Then start thinking about your current moment, and realize how great living is without those two erroneous zones. Thanks Wayne Dyer.
Getting back to the story. I ended up texting her and now we’re talking. Where does this feeling come from?
I feel it comes from when we were kids. When I was a kid, my parents main focus was keeping me happy. So I always was. But those times where I did not get what I wanted, I flipped. I felt horrible. I remember this one time kicking and screaming to my Dad on the floor because he wouldn’t let me go on vacation to Costa Rica with my friend and his family. I was 12. He was not ready to let his son go to another country, a country that is not the safest in the world, just so he can be feel cool cuz he was making a friend.
This may not have been what your childhood was like, but children are always comforted when they feel bad. I should know, I work with kids. Anytime a child cries, they are comforted with an external thing. Maybe an ice pack, maybe the love of a mother. Whatever it is, we are not taught to have comfort in ourselves after something bad happens to us when we’re kids.

Now that we’re all growns up, we’re just expected to be mature and feel fine when shit happens. If a girl doesn’t give me the right number, I feel crappy, I want what I can’t have. If I’m told that I suck at life and nobody likes me, what do I do? Hold a feeling of NEED to be comforted. Somebody needs to make me feel good.
Do you now realize where this comes from? Now when I’m in class with kids and one of them starts CRYING because there are no more blue balls left for him to play with, he has to have green, I no longer give him a hug and try to find a blue ball for him.
Instead I say, "That’s how it goes. It’s not fair and you have to deal with it." Then I walk away from the four year old and continue teaching class.
Realize that these are socially conditioned emotions, and they are 100% changeable. Think of your brain as a malleable piece of material rather than a piece of Play-doh. Play-doh is moldable, but eventually hardens and stays that way forever. That’s what psychologists used to think. Years ago. Now they are realizing that it is ever changing. We can always do what we want with our brain because it can always change shape.
You can choose what you feel. It just takes a bit of training. Learning anything takes a good bit of training. Wow, learning to get vibrato in my singing voice took years for me. I was so frustrated that EVERY singer had this characteristic in their voice except me. It is a beautiful sound and I did not have it. WHY?!
Voice teachers couldn’t teach me. I went to the library and picked up books on singing. I tried to find the thing that makes the vibrato, the fluctuation of pitch in a voice. I studied it, I wanted it so bad. I took me a couple years of training myself to pick up this characteristic. Now I have vibrato, and I like it a lot. It makes my voice seem so much more warm and crisp. And let me tell you, I worked HARD at getting it. (And no, I did not buy Brett Manning’s magic pill product to get it either.)
I started off with a weird sounding vibrato that happened every now and then. I ended up stressing my throat too hard (stressing the brain) but eventually it became nicer and nicer.
Liken this to the overly confident chode in the bar. He doesn’t know what being confident feels like, so he tries too hard and it comes out looking really weird and not right. Kinda like how it first sounded when I was working on my vibrato.
I want you guys to work on your vibrato (metaphorically, that is) and realize that this stuff doesn’t happen over night. I don’t wake up one morning going, "Laaaaaaa!!!!" It is a gradual thing, it takes time. A good amount of time. Clock time, not psychological time. It takes constant reminding, always living who you want to be.
Until next time yo, I love you all. Smooches.
Posted in Uncategorized | 7 Comments »

