Bölümler
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“There is an old-fashioned word for the body of skills that emotional intelligence represents: character.”― Daniel Goleman
Daniel Goleman defines the four dimensions of emotional intelligence as, self-awareness, self-management, social awareness, and relationship management.
To be a self, social, or relationship adept you need emotional intelligence, but to be a physicist, engineer, or mathematician you do not. None of these play a large role in one’s analytic ability divorced, as it is, from the realm of human relations.
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“Your subconscious mind is trying to help you all the time.”— Jim Harrison, poet and novelist
Discussions about the unconscious have grown from Freud and Jung’s work of 100 years ago. It’s been reinterpreted by therapists but it’s disregarded in social conversation. We rarely talk about it and it hasn’t moved our thinking forward.
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Eksik bölüm mü var?
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I talk with Natasha Williams on her podcast Spiritual Warrior Journey.
I explore the way our brains work in a combination of scientific and metaphysical discussion, sharing insights on plant medicine, native tribes, dreams, and insanity.
Natasha says, “A truly interesting take on life, that deviates from the norm.”
Lincoln is a clinical counselor, hypnotherapist, with experience in physics, software, consulting, neurology, brain training, sleep, dreams, and altered states.
Natasha Williams is an author, spiritual coach and entrepreneur. She has helped thousands of women find confidence and belief in themselves. As a lightworker, she is deeply moved towards personal growth and helping raise the vibration on the planet.
Find Natasha Williams at:
https://www.spiritualwarriorjourney.com
INSTAGRAM @spiritualwarriorjourney
FACEBOOK: @spiritualwarriorjourney
TIKTOK: @spiritualwarriorjourney
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Looking for hidden messages, especially those to be revealed by experts, makes dreamwork less rewarding and casts it as a kind of work. This is why few people do it and, perhaps, why few people remember their dreams. Freud, the father of dream interpretation, famously disrespected your point of view, and the interpretive approach to dreams retains something of this flavor.
When dreamwork is welcomed as a form of conceptual play it becomes recreational. You don’t have to share dreams, endure dreams, or reveal them. See your dreams as explorations of all the relevant things that don’t make sense. Take that attitude and you’ll feel relieved and rewarded.
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“If a little dreaming is dangerous, the cure for it is not to dream less, but to dream more, to dream all the time.”— Marcel Proust
Thinking DifferentlyDreams involve a different way of thinking. We don’t get far by applying conscious thinking, which is linear, causal, and rational, to the holistic presentation that dreams employ.
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We all have personal vulnerabilities, and this is normal. We all experience trauma and deal with depression. We complain about the bad things but not the good things. Are these good things real, or are they excursions into unsustainable positive emotion?
While there is nothing wrong with needing to breath, there is something wrong when you’re desperate for breath. What you need should be a regular part of your life, not an ecstatic or occasional experience. What makes you happy?
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I met Stefan Deutsch online and sent him my Operating Manual for Enlightenment. He sent me his Love Decoded: Getting the Love You Deserve. Here are his “Nine Laws for Fulfilling Relationships,” taken from the introduction, along with my comments.
1. Love that has to be earned isn’t love...
2. Become aware of your own and others’ unloving, conditional behaviors as well as loving, unconditional behaviors...
3. Never reject others’ loving energy. It hurts them...
4. Never allow others to behave unlovingly without consequence. It hurts you...
5. Do not assume that there is any intentionality behind any act that hurts, disappoints, or angers you...
6. Assume all people, like you, are always doing the best they can...
7. Loving energy is real, nourishing, and visceral. Everyone needs to give and receive it in all our relationships, not just a few...
8. Loving energy is not to be confused with automatic, physical, and sexual energy...
9. The act of giving love must involve a conscious decision to be unconditionally loving even when you are upset with another person...
What I Consider Important...
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In a wide ranging discussion, Daniel and I talk about the intersections of life and growth, health and sanity, parenting and education, creativity and architecture.
Daniel Thomas, a British transplant living in Germany by way of Australia, is a versatile storyteller, writer, actor, and filmmaker. He has been featured in commercials, TV & Film & has written & directed his own shorts. He also hosts & produces podcasts that showcase his creative range & passion for meaningful & collaborative storytelling.
Lincoln Stoller, an American transplant living in Canada, is a physicist and psychotherapist, with a focus on learning, healing, and growth, exploring connections between culture, heritage, and the mind. Lincoln’s work challenges institutional knowledge, emphasizing emotion, intuition, and insight. Through his books and speaking, he aims to expand perspectives by integrating learning, healing, and invention.
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Gratitude is a combination of things, primarily two: a thought and an emotion.
Selfish gratitude is needy. You are grateful for what you’re getting. It’s contingent and dependent.
Gratitude offered with appreciation asks for no reward. And while gratitude so offered feels nourishing it can also feel empty.
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Lincoln Stoller is a former mountaineer who now specializes in psycho-, hypno-, and neurofeedback therapy, in tandem with numerous other counseling and coaching services.
Lincoln lives well outside of the bounds of normalcy. He says we should “just keep doing out-of-the-box stuff. And if people aren’t calling you a little crazy or a little nutty, then you probably aren’t exploring enough of the boundaries.”
Today’s conversation revolves around the high-risk potential of hard-charging performers and achievers, whether they exist in sports, business, or other areas of life.
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I’m in the minds business; I’m also in the programming business. I sometimes think of therapy as a programming problem. That’s not a bad idea, but you can’t take it literally.
Taken literally, “to program” creates a series of steps that always choose between right and wrong. Programming requires such steps to exist, that you can discern them, choose between them, and follow them to the end of the path. None of these requirements are met in the minds of real people, but we can still talk about those rare situations when they are. The right steps are often called “good ideas.”
As a therapist, my job is not to come up with good ideas so much as help people learn how to find them. I avoid the word “teach” because the process of finding good ideas is not taught. I can show a person how they’re sabotaging themselves, how to relax, and experiment, but there is no formula for finding good ideas...
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“Life is the balance between holding on and letting go.”— Rumi
I felt it important to respond to a journalist who asked what people might expect at their first therapy session. Many come to me who are ambivalent about beginning therapy, and I’ve been to a few therapists myself.
I’ve not felt good about these first sessions with other therapists. A good therapist is wise but ignorant, and makes no attempt to hide it. No therapist is an expert because no two clients are the same.
An honest therapist knows as little about what to expect as you do. When I make my ignorance clear, everything goes beautifully because it’s you who guides me. I’ve never met a therapist as comfortable with their ignorance as I.
The journalist’s seven questions concern protocol, method, and service, but this is not what therapy is about. If you’re inviting someone to “therapise” you, you’ve lost your way at the start. No one is going to figure or straighten you out. You do this yourself, or else it doesn’t happen.
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“The measure of intelligence is the ability to change.”— Albert Einstein
Is Intelligence a Real Thing?The history of intelligence is odd. It’s variously defined and plays different roles. Even within one culture, different standards are applied to different genders, ages, and people of different inclinations.
Historically, intelligence was assumed as something you did or did not have. In the past, people did not have much education. More accurately, the lucky ones did and the unlucky ones didn’t. It was assumed that intelligence preceded your ability to learn and it could be measured by what you knew.
Despite now having tests to measure intelligence, it’s still rated based on what you have learned. Our IQ tests are supposed to measure a person’s fundamental aptitude, but this is a fiction. It’s convenient because it ends up justifying the original premise that your intelligence is what you can learn. What you can learn is measured by what a particular group, inevitably the group in power, thinks is valuable.
We’re told these IQ tests are justified because people don’t change their scores over time. This is a “low IQ” argument which is a good reflection of how notions of IQ justify themselves. People don’t change their scores on IQ tests over time not because they can’t, but because they choose not to learn how to...
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“The term neural synchrony… refers to how the brains of people carrying out an activity together will start to behave in the same way.” — Morten Pedersen, technologist
MysteriesThe Keys in PsychotherapyPsychotherapy’s MysteryEmpathySynchronyBecoming Synchronized
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Sociogeny is the development of social phenomena, such as common behavior and social patterns. In non-humans, we identify these as instinctive behaviors because we cannot identify them as reasoned thoughts. In humans, we take an entirely different approach because we believe our thoughts are free and our patterns chosen. This is a mistake.
People act according to what they feel, not according to what they say. We have a poor understanding of other people’s feelings. I know this from my experience dealing with many types of people and from my clients. My clients are trying hardest to understand others and themselves, and despite this, they make uncertain progress.
The amazing thing is that we see ourselves as individual, rational agents, thinkers, actors, and personalities when we are not.
If you’d like to examine how many of your thoughts are your own, schedule a free, zoom call at: https://www.mindstrengthbalance.com/schedule15
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“The questions you ask determine what you think.”— Lincoln Stoller
A one hour interview about all the exploits that led me into the counseling profession. Chris offered some casual humor about mental health and addiction, and I took the opportunity to bait the hooks he offered. The dynamic of him being lighthearted and me being serious persisted throughout our conversation.
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In this episode of "Conversations with Rich Bennett," Rich sits down with Dr. Lincoln Stoller, a neurofeedback trainer, clinical counselor, and hypnotherapist. They explore the transformative power of brain training, how anxiety can become a self-fulfilling habit, and the impact of neurological patterns on personal growth.
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“Being slightly paranoid is like being slightly pregnant–it tends to get worse.”— Molly Ivins
Balance is the first thing we lose when our mental health begins to fail. Balance is a combination of appropriate awareness and response. Appropriate refers to things that are effective in bringing one back into balance. This definition is recursive because balance is recursive. It changes as situations change. Call it resilience: an ability to return to an effective, functioning state...
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There is perpetual strife, poverty, inequity, and avoidable misfortune in the world. Things may have improved over the centuries, but have individuals changed? Few people seem concerned with the quality of themselves. Virtue is hard to measure and its benefits unclear.
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“Absolution forgives the guilt associated with the penitent's sins, and removes the eternal punishment (of Hell) associated with mortal sins. … Theologians say the absolution of a penitent more than twenty paces away would be questionably valid. Phone absolutions are considered invalid.”— Wikipedia (2024)
Magic
As I make a last pass, looking for errors in the manuscript of my book Operating Manual for Enlightenment, I’m reminded of how spirit supports mental health.
When I was studying ritual magic, adherents claimed magic had a direct, physical effect. This naïve belief in the power of faith is reflected in most religions. I was studying this because I wanted to see what a belief in magic amounted to when stripped of all the religious trappings.
Belief in magic is pre-scientific. From a scientific standpoint, magic is ridiculous. Yet a majority of the world's population believe in magic in its religious form. Many serious scientists have and are religious, and accept the magic of religion in some form. Many careful, thinking people see physical reality as different from religious reality.
The paradox can be resolved if magic applies to people, while causality applies to everything else. I can accept that “God created man in his image” only if God is a human image. In a world that doesn’t have humans, God is irrelevant. If you disagree, then you live in an imponderable world.
What is moral behavior? This is an important question we need to ask. Religion approaches this unscientific questions with an unscientific answer that fails in many regards.
Absolution
According to Webroot (2024), 35% of all internet downloads are related to pornography but there is no open discussion of this.
“Pornography hinders the development of a healthy sexuality, and among adults, it distorts sexual attitudes and social realities. In families, pornography use leads to marital dissatisfaction, infidelity, separation, and divorce.”— Patrick F. Fagan (2009), psychologist and former Deputy Assistant at Health and Human Services
Religion is designed to hide moral failure. It fails because we must address moral failure ourselves, an institution cannot do it for us. Yet, most people cannot do it, so religions are created to absolve them. In this way, we accommodate immorality within communities and ourselves.
False endorsement is a blank check written on an empty bank account; an evasion that obscures insight, erodes resilience, and damages mental health. Religious absolution is an illusion.
Religion requires instructions and a protocol, asserting that words convey spirit, but this mistakes incantation for insight and ceremony for understanding. The closest any religion comes to spirit is possession.
“Currently, when I attend my psychiatrist appointments, I often run into the same young man who stops me in my tracks and tells me flat out, ‘Jesus loves you and will return to the earth one day to save us.’... I have met others who have started entire organizations because of their experiences of a God in a psychosis. One woman, in particular, is proud to share the love that she experiences from her own beliefs. She always tells me, ‘It is not about religion, it is about love.’”— Andrea Paquette (2014)
Unwritten religions are not religions in the Western sense. These typically indigenous frameworks are social systems. I was not raised in such a system, nor in any religious system, so what I know now comes from watching and living with people of other cultures.
Spirit
Indigenous religions are experiential while the Abrahamic religions are intellectual. Experiential traditions focus on spirit, while intellectual traditions focus on behavior. Experiential traditions claim spirit must be experienced internally, while intellectual traditions claim it can also be written. Does intellectual experience prevent spiritual experience?
It is a mistake to equate experiential and intellectual religions. In the tradition of the Kwakwaka'wakw of the Pacific Northwest, a spirit dancer does not dance like an animal, they are the animal. The experience is an altered state of being. You are not a person speaking to a God, you are channeling a divine force. Is being possessed the same as having spirit?
Even though the experience of possession cannot be contradicted, it provides no tool for argument. In contrast, intellectual constructions can be righteous, obliged, pious, guilty, and absolved. Thoughts are not states of being. Intellect lacks spirit. The question is whether intellect can lead to spirit.
“Teosi’s words (the words of the Christian’s God) belong to the white people… No one had pronounced them before the missionaries arrived with them. This is why we do not really understand them. Our thought cannot open them out in every direction as we do with those of the spirits. If we go on following them for no reason, we will eventually forget the words of our elders. Then we will be called believers, when in fact our minds will simply have become as forgetful as those of the white people who know nothing of the forest... The xapiri (spirits) continue to let us hear their songs, which are our true language.” — Davi Kopenawa, Yanomami Shaman (2013, 204)
Spirit is a personal dimension of meaningful awareness that’s different from being healthy, stable, and normal. It does not cure disease, but it can foster mental health. Catalysts for spirit, like ceremonies, religions, therapy, and psychedelics, are not medicinal, though they can be used like medicines.
Because spirituality is not a commodity, it does not fit Western culture. Western culture seeks consolidation and condensation; spirituality seeks evolution and ethereality. Western culture encourages you to seek happiness, which depends on one’s mood, one’s mental weather. Spirit generates one’s weather.
I can help you find faith in yourself. Schedule a free call:
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