Audra Boyd on Cultivating Emotional Intelligence
On today's episode, empowerment coach Audra Boyd returns to HEAL, to go beyond grief and talk about all our uncomfortable emotions. I know! Great! Right? And how critical emotional health and healing is to the quality of our lives and relationships.
Referenced in the Show
Audra’s Bio
Audra was born in Wisconsin and grew up in a funeral home. Yes, that’s right. Funerals were the family business. She grew up surrounded by grief and other unpleasant emotions. And to her; they’re a natural part of life. Early in life she developed the ability to talk to anyone about anything. And to listen…really listen. This ability became the foundation for a career in training and development. Audra herself encountered grief in several areas of her own life including the loss of her health. This experience with grief was the catalyst for her current passion; helping others make sense of their emotions and grow through grief.
Full Transcript
Sarah Marshall, ND: Welcome to HEAL. On today's episode, empowerment coach Audra Boyd returns to HEAL, to go beyond grief and talk about all our uncomfortable emotions. I know! Great! Right? And how critical emotional health and healing is to the quality of our lives and relationships. I'm your host, Dr. Sarah Marshall.
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Sarah Marshall, ND: Audra Boyd, welcome back to Heal. Thank you so much for doing this again.
Audra Boyd: Oh, my gosh. It's my pleasure.
Sarah Marshall, ND: Yeah. And so Holy moly, I think it was a year ish ago. We did this for the first time. When we dove into one of often, many people's least favorite emotional state grief.
And I am excited. Yeah. Right. It's like that. Not where we always like to hang out in grief for very long, if at all, if we can try and avoid it, which we're going to talk about actually not avoiding our emotions today. And you know, in season four of Heal, we took a look at everything over this last year and, and are bringing back some of the more, you know, all of the episodes are incredible. And there were some that stood out that it was like, we really want to have the next conversation and go deeper and get into that topic more. And so I'm really excited to be able to do that here with you today. So what's been happening when we came this last year for you? What, where are you now with all of it?
Audra Boyd: Oh, that's such a good question. Well, I think, you know, a lot of life happened for all of us this last year. Maybe not the kind of life we would have chosen, but it's been an interesting year and with the emotions, you know, one of the things that I'm, you know, really present to is.
It's not just grief, right? There's a whole bunch of emotions that we don't want to be with and we don't want to feel, and we don't know how to make sense of them. Yeah. And so we, you know, we try and put them on mute. You try and hit the mute button. Now a lot of us have spent some time on zoom, so we're really familiar with that, but it’s definitely...
Sarah Marshall, ND: And, you know, when we were talking a bit about that, like what, where did we want to go in this episode? You were talking about just how for you, you know, it did start with exploring grief, but now through your work with clients and seeing what they've been doing in your coaching practice, it's really just been about this broader range of well kind of all emotions, but definitely powerful emotions and what you're seeing people struggling with… I dunno how you'd put it. Like I would say for me is like where I ha I'm not always willing to just be authentic and straight about what I'm feeling or what I'm feeling. I've got the feeling itself. And then layered on top of, is a fear, a fear of expressing it, a fear of if I tell the truth about it, what that means. And like, I don't even want to look at it.
Audra Boyd: Yeah. Yeah. You're not alone. You know that it's so common. We all grow up in this set of. You could say they're inherited conversations, right? They're not even ours. We got them from our parents. They got up from there is where it's, you know, it's not okay to express your emotions.
Definitely not publicly. I mean, it's barely okay to do it in your room when you're on your own. And we just have a difficulty making sense of our emotions. It's like, there's a capacity that we could have learned as kids, but we didn't. Or we learned some ways of trying to deal with our emotions, notice what I said, deal with them, but we didn't really learn how to make sense of them and that, Hey it's okay.
You're like emotions are going to be like this constant river that runs through you.
Sarah Marshall, ND: Yeah. And like, I do want to get into some of the, like, how do we do that? How do we identify our emotions? What are the tools? But I'm also like, okay, here's the first question? Why, why do we care? Why, why is this important?
Audra Boyd: Such a good question...
Sarah Marshall, ND: Like, what are your emotions do for you lately, anyways?
Audra Boyd: Well, there's, you know, it's so great, right? Because for a while, the conversation was that, Oh, emotions are noise and they're just not useful. And they have you be less effective as a human being, you know, like in business. And what we've found more recently is that's just not the case.
In fact people who can make sense of their emotions are generally more successful in school and in careers. And it's the, it's the two marshmallow. To marshmallow study. Have you ever heard of the two marshmallows? So there was a study that happened, I want to say it was in the sixties at Stanford and they took a group of four-year-olds.
So you all want to channel your inner four year old, right? And they put a marshmallow in front of each of the four year olds, and then the person who was doing the study said, okay, I need to go run some errands. Now you can have this one marshmallow now, or if you wait until I get back, I will give you a second marshmallow and you could have two marshmallows.
Sarah Marshall, ND: Awesome, and then what happened?
Audra Boyd: Well so the kids who waited, right, like processed, waited, and didn't eat that marshmallow right away for that instant gratification. They got the second one, they followed them and saw how they did in school and how they did in their careers. And the ones that waited for the second marshmallow did better in school. They did better in their careers and they were just overall more effective and successful people in life. Yeah. So,
Sarah Marshall, ND: so how does waiting for a marshmallow connect to our emotional capacity? Right?
Audra Boyd: How does that, if you think about your emotions right there, your emotion was probably right there as a kid, like, Oh, instant gratification, I want the marshmallow, I'm just going to eat the marshmallow, right? Excited. Right. Anticipatory. Right. But those that actually were able to go wait a minute. Okay. I'm excited. But I would be even more excited about two marshmellows and really took the time to make sense of their emotion. Like, what is it that has me be so happy and then like adjusted their actions to fit with the information that they just processed. They got the two marshmallows. Hm, you could say they got more out of life.
Sarah Marshall, ND: That’s what I was about to say.. so you're out to have people have two marshmallows.
Audra Boyd: That’s right, two marshmallow life. That's what I want for people. Exactly.
Sarah Marshall, ND: So with, like with your clients and in your coaching practice, what, what do you see that people like are struggling with like kind of putting it down on the court?
Audra Boyd: Well, one that we're feeling emotions, you know, we do that mute thing so often we don't even have the capacity really. And I'm speaking from myself, but I found this with other people as well, to identify more than like the six basic emotions. Like we can identify when we're happy or when we're sad, but you know, identifying when there's apprehension present or boredom, or like to be able to like process the information and get to the subtleties of emotions so that we can more effectively not only make sense of them, but take action or inaction in life is, is so, so limited. I find in human beings and there's all these moments where they just stuffed their emotion or muted their emotion and there's things that they, they didn't deal with. So we develop all these coping mechanisms are these, like, I like to call them distraction strategies, right? It's like, Oh, I need to distract myself from feeling that emotion that may be useful in the short term, but when it comes down to it, you know, we aren't using our bodies to, you know, sense what's the information coming in from our body. What's the information coming in from our mind, what's the information coming in from the outside world so that we can really process and effectively make choices.
Sarah Marshall, ND: Yeah. You know, and when I think about like why emotions, you know, it cause also on my side of the fence and physical medicine, you know, in the biochemistry of the body, When you think about how our brains developed and we, you know, some people know, like we have these kind of three brains or three levels of the brain, and we talk about our brainstem and the reptilian brain, which operates literal, basic physiology, your heart rate, your breathing, your digestive patterns. I mean, some of digestion comes from the higher brain too, but it's like this basic running of your body and they say reptilian brain. Cause it's like kind of the level of the brain function of most reptiles and it produces life, which is really great that keeps you alive and keeps you moving and has some basic instincts wired into it.
And then the second level of the brain is the limbic system. And the limbic system is actually where emotions evolved. And we know that that happened before language. We should actually point to something. And I think this is where some of the way, if we ever got taught about it, or even the way we talk about it in culture, we've messed some things up.
As we say, things like, Oh, the reptilian brain STEM is the lower brain and the limbic system came on next. And then the higher brain is cognitive thought, logical thinking the frontal cortex, right?Well, Many of the shows that I've done in many people that listened to the, you know, podcasts and things.
There's been a whole new world of exploration in life, spirituality and health about psychedelic medicine and also about flow state. And what's interesting about flow state is it's a state of the brain that we drop into, like under either incredibly high levels of stress, like life or death circumstances or when we're actually in our mastery of a skill.
So Olympic athletes extreme sport athletes, people that like kayak, you know, class six rivers and literally kayak off of waterfalls or skiers and extreme mountains. That's actually where they did a lot of their study was extreme sport athletes in order to test their brains and figure out what flows state is about. We also know that flow state is what the Navy seals will drop into, to work as a team. When the brain drops into flow state is like a neurologic state of the brain and we know more and more now... there's actually two books I read on this one, The Rise of Superman and two Stealing Fire. And there we'll have that in the show notes.
I think it's Stephen Cotner and I'll think of the other author of those books. They created the flow genome project. And they've been studying this for now, like 15, 20 years. And at first it was all we could do to just observe this state of the mind. And now we're actually starting to figure out, can you train people in it because productivity goes up.
So like it, Google productivity goes up dramatically inside. They have at the, at the headquarters, like meditation pods and float tanks. And these are all things that help us get us greater access to flow. Now, why am I saying all this? One of the key components of flow state, which can increase productivity by 500%, is that it Inhibits the frontal cortex. It stops our judgment brain from running a muck on all of our opinions. And judgments and right wrong and good and bad. And all of those thoughts, it actually quiets all that down and it puts us back into this more innate quote unquote primal way of being.
But what people talk about, like there was one of the stories in the book I think it was in the Rise of Superman, was a base jumper, you know, someone who literally just leaps off of a cliff with a parachute in his hand, her hand. And then at a certain point, let's go with a parachute and you really hope it opens. Right. But that's kind of the thrill. Like you're not even that far off the ground. Well, they were based jumping into these big caves in Mexico that go down into the ground. And when this person released their parachute, it didn't fully inflate and they're falling more or less at terminal gravity. And they were up against the side of the cliff because they'd been pushing the cliff and their fingers are literally getting ground off on the rock. As they're trying to grip on the rock to slow themselves down. Now, clearly this person survived, otherwise we wouldn't know the story. And they said while they were falling, they could count the number of swallows flying around their head.
And there was another gentleman who was a Mountaineer and he's on top of a mountain and his rope with the, to his partner breaks. And he starts sliding on the side of a glacier over the edge of a cliff. And he's got his ice pick into the ice sliding down. And as he was falling to his theoretical death, you would think he'd be thinking about all kinds of, well, you know what he's thinking about? He was like, Oh man, well, I'm going to die. So who's going to do my lecture on Tuesday. I wonder if this person's available, like that's literally what was going through his head, right? Like that's just, but that's, what's going on in those states, but they say key things to flow is timelessness, time disappears, things slow way down and actually it's like the fear of mortality disappears. Not because they're like, Oh, I don't care if I die. It's literally like they recognize and experience oneness with everything. Like there is no death. These are all similar circumstances people talk about in a psychedelic medicine and psychedelic, you know, Chemonics ceremonies, and it doesn't have to just be psychedelics.
It can be through like holographic breathwork Wim Hof method can get people access to this. Just meditation, deep transcendental meditation can get people access to this. So this is this whole field that is like cutting edge performance. Well, my thinking of the theory is, that's tapping people deeper and deeper into a more profound, powerful relationship to their limbic system, AKA their emotional state, which is like, this is a whole area we haven't, I say this is the next frontier of neurology. Now, I don't think I'm the only one, but there's not a lot of people saying this. And so I'm so excited to be having this conversation with you. It just to set up this like other way of looking at it, where for sure, there's my day to day functionality in life that I'm happy, I'm like pretty good with life. And when I'm sad, I'm not. And I'd like to be able to do something about that. But I also think there's something way bigger about our sense of connection to each other and intimacy and belonging, which are all major issues as a culture, as a society, as a world people are dealing with right now.
Audra Boyd: Oh, absolutely more so than ever. I think, at least in my lifetime.
Sarah Marshall, ND: Yeah. Yeah. So I can really see that the, you know, the power of learning about cultivating and mastering our emotional spaces is, you know, there's glimpses in the research that shows this is, this is actually like the next frontier of performance and satisfaction in life. And we really don't know a lot about the emotion and what they're for and how they serve us. And like, That's fascinating to me too.
Audra Boyd: Exactly. Yeah. You know, it's, it's really great. Cause even, you know, even in corporate America, if you will, they're seeing if the benefit of people who are in touch with their emotions, you know, technology moves so fast now, there's many companies that that's not even what they look for in an employee. They're looking for their emotional intelligence, if you will, how, how well can you relate to others? How can you feel empathy? Can you have difficult conversations with people? Can you read. Can you right?
Sarah Marshall, ND: Cause whether or not somebody has the skill set of the technology at this point is sort of irrelevant. And I even know some people that are like, we'd rather have someone who doesn't, so we can just teach them exactly what they need to know, but we need to know that they're workable and then they're going to work with a team and they're going to be able to handle the pressure of a startup or whatever those details are.
Audra Boyd: Yup, exactly. Exactly.
Sarah Marshall, ND: So let's say this is hitting some people and they're like, yeah, great. I am one of those, like, you know, I mean, I know a lot of people, mostly our society operates in like, I'm good. I'm bad. Like, how are you today? Good. How are you today? Eh, not that great. You know, then we've talked about the six basic emotions, which like the I think it was, is it Disney or Pixar or one in the same that did, I don't know... Inside Out.
Yeah. And you know, you have what, five or six characters in there is like happy, sad, anger. So there's joy, right? Sadness, anger and disgust. I think they got into
Audra Boyd: yup. That's it. They get into the five, right?
Sarah Marshall, ND: But like I noticed that, that doesn't always tell the whole story.
Audra Boyd: No for sure not, right? I mean, that's like the beginning, it's the beginning of it. I don't know if you've ever seen there's some really great emotion wheels or emotion flowers out there that are so useful. It, they start from those basic five, but then they, you know, it expands into the nuances of our, of our feelings and our emotions. And you get things like you get to, it's like, okay, I'm not really sad, but I'm bored or Angry, no I'm infuriated or, you know, right.
Like what is the exact emotion or, yeah, I'm happy. No I'm elated or, you know, it gets you just the experience, your experience broadened. They even have some of those that not only have the emotions, but then what does it feel like in your body? So if you're not quite sure what the emotion is, you can kind of go to that and look at, okay it feels a little bit like, okay, there's this sensation in my tummy or, you know, so it helps guide you to what's actually going on for you. What's what's the, what is the information that your body is actually processing?
Sarah Marshall, ND: Yeah. And I've actually seen that. I mean, I'm going to categorize this a little bit more in my male clients, from my female clients, but it's not always the case where there's sort of a collapsing of physical symptoms and emotions, where like, what they say is my stomach is upset or I don't feel good in my body. And then when we actually uncover it, it's way more about an emotional state, but it's like, I, you know, I'm, I'm kind of going out on a limit on a research for this, but my experience is like, we teach little boys a bit more about like, they're allowed to have a stomach ache, but they're not allowed to be sad and vulnerable. Right. So a lot of times it kind of transfers over into that sort of collapsing. Do you see that with your clients too?
Audra Boyd: Oh I definitely do. And it. And it also isn't limited to right, like to the boys and to the male, because there's the cliches that we grow up with. Right. Like big girls don't cry. I can't tell you how many times I heard that. I must've been a real trip for my parents.
Sarah Marshall, ND: And you were talking about some of the things of like you remember from your childhood that influenced, you know, the way you went about dealing with your emotions growing up.
Audra Boyd: Oh totally, you know, I can still remember, like it was yesterday a time where I was with my dad and we were on the porch and I'm clear, I must've been throwing what we would call a temper tantrum. But my dad looked at me, said, I don't know what we're going to do with you and this temper of yours, I think we're going to have to take you to a psychiatrist. And I thought, Whoa. I mean, I was a little kid at the time, right. That was like, I don't know, it was like, it nearly shocked me into, like, that was like a sentence, a life sentence, only crazy people had to go to psychiatrist or whatever.
It just stopped me in my tracks. And I remember, you know, I don't know when or how much later it was, but I remember watching this movie and there was a character in the movie that, so that she wouldn't express emotion on her face. She was digging a fork like into her hand or into her leg. And I remember thinking, Oh, that's a good strategy. Right? Thinking about it now, I'm like, wow, that, that was, you know seems like a good strategy to me.
Sarah Marshall, ND: Yeah. And I've so heard from several, you know, through my years with clients, people sharing things like they had the experience when they were a kid of being too much.
Too happy, too exuberant, too loud, too expressive, too angry. And so, you know, those places where I think it's so easy and reflexive to do with kids when they are having strong emotions, because we can't be with our own strong emotions. We can't be with theirs either. And especially not when it's in the restaurant, out at the dance hall, you know, on the soccer field, whatever is that reflex to automatically go to, you know, be less sad, be quiet, tone it down. Not here, not now. Which I think many of us can also remember times in our childhood when we had, we received that information. But I have two friends that I've really gotten to watch over the years, raising their kiddos and, and their mom is a therapist, a social worker, and she's just incredible. One of the things that always struck me, was how, when her kids would get upset, she'd actually name the emotion and be like, I really get that, that made you sad. Like, I really get angry about that. She didn't try and change their emotion. She didn't try and talk them out of it. And it was just this like, God, I mean, cause that was, you know, this kind of leads into the other thing that you've been sharing about. What you're really interested in is being able to create emotional intelligence and parenting. So tell me about that.
Audra Boyd: Well you know, I look at it, you're right, as kids, our brains aren't as developed as they are now as an adult. And it's almost like our emotions are intensified when we're younger, right.
You to feel happiness at such a higher level. And just the being able to process that and deal with it. You know, Sometimes they will cry as a kid just because we aren't sure what to do with this emotion that we're feeling is like the only way that we can, can let it out. And as, if we have emotionally intelligent parents, what I see is all the work that I do with my clients, especially my adult clients who struggle with it.
Right. Struggle with what is the emotion or, you know, it's not okay to feel my emotions if we actually taught them. Like your friend was teaching her kids. Oh, I got it. You're feeling sad. Oh, I can see how that would have you feel really angry. It develops our ability to make sense of our emotions and that it's okay to have them.
Yeah, just see a whole different world, if, you know, if all parents were that way, right. With their kids, our kids would grow up. Who knows what would then come from, you know, what you were pointing to with the flow state, like how more quickly we could access it and how many more people could access it and what then becomes possible for human being, you know? It’s fascinating.
Sarah Marshall, ND: Yeah. You know, and I feel like I grew up with pretty emotionally intelligent parents to begin with. They and they encouraged some areas. So it was interesting to see that like certain emotions were very safe and others were not allowed. So like expression of sadness, disappointment, upset, crying, like those were all free game, knock yourself out. Anger? Not so much that one. So I remember in my late teensI, was in college, I think I was 19 when it like hit me that I, however my parents did it, the way I internalized it was anger was never okay. Like, it just was not acceptable to ever be angry. And I like first accessed being angry, listening to I think it was Tool. My sister had given me a CD and I like cranked it up and I like intentionally leaned into the emotion. Now, now I know like I've actually been to retreats and workshops where they'll do this as an exercise on purpose, like in a safe space, create the opportunity for us to turn the volume up on emotions that have been, you know, trapped or suppressed or unexpressed in our bodies.
And I see that a lot in my detox work with people as we go through, when we start working on healing their gut, healing their liver, healing different parts of their body. We're releasing toxicity and we're rebalancing their, their endocrine system and right alongside of it, there'll be like emotions that surface, suppressed. You know, they'll go through a period of time where they’re angry for like three weeks. They don't know why there's nothing happening in their life and it's like, well, we just treated the liver. And in Chinese medicine, the liver is what processes anger. And that's a whole map that is also not in Western medicine, but as in many medical systems is like, the emotions are right in there embedded in our, in our organ systems. You've got fear in the kidney and grief in the lungs and anger in the liver. Those are the big ones, but then worry in the stomach. And there's like, you know, all sorts of different ways that are, we actually literally embody our emotions, not just as like a metaphor for something.
Audra Boyd: Oh, absolutely. A lot. You know, a lot of my clients in addition to the work that I do with them also struggle with exactly those types of things, those issues in your body, the physiological effects. Right?
Sarah Marshall, ND: And so I've had like a pretty good start. I've I've done work in this area more or less a lot of my life.
And here I am, like, I still notice the resistance, like, you know, Monday night got in an argument with my partner and it took me until yesterday. So like three and a half, almost four days to be willing to go through all the logical explanation. I did all the, like, this didn't work for me and I'd really like it to be this way.
And actually here's my requests. And, you know, I handled those things like Tuesday, Wednesday, and it wasn't until last night that I finally got to a place that I was willing to get vulnerable enough to just say that hurt. And I'm sad and cry until I was done crying. And that's, it's so interesting because like I kept trying to address the upset.
We talked about the things we were arguing about. We even made an action plan to resolve the things we were arguing about on Wednesday. And I didn't feel any different. My brain knew we had an action plan in place and I still didn't want to kiss him, touch him or sleep next to him. Yeah. And I'm like, okay, what else going on?
And it was like, I just didn't, whatever reason I didn't want to go there. And it took something, it took courage. It took vulnerability. It took me being willing to lean into my trust of him again. And it was so interesting that it really wasn't until I fully expressed the emotions and got heard that it actually resolved the argument.
Audra Boyd: Hmm. You know, you said something so powerful in there. Sarah, you said your brain knew like with the plan and how you're going to handle this or that. Well, the prefrontal cortex part of your brain knew, right. And logic part knew it almost. Right. Like, but it wasn't until you connected in that limbic, right.
Part of your brain that you actually, where you allowed yourself to feel the emotion and share that and express that. That's where that you could say the healing happened
Sarah Marshall, ND: Yeah. Yeah. And put it even further on the court, like, you know, and, and we're all good. And I'm just sharing about how it can be. Right.
But like, if you asked me on Wednesday morning, I'd be like, I don't, I don't know if we're going to stay together. I don't know if this is going to work out long-term that was part of where my judgment brain was going, was like, well, how's this going to be in the future? And if that's how we're going to handle things, blah la la la….
And it was like packing bags and changing living situations, you know? And what's, and this is what I think it points to the value of this work. It would have been so easy to stay there. Like that was the truth. Like that was reality. And at best I could force myself to give my word to the action plan and stick it out cause I said so, but I'd be dragging my suffering along with me. But then by not just having the conversation about, you said X and I said Y and I apologize, and here's what I'm going to do about it. You know, like that piece until I got to the emotional expression. And then, you know, now you asked me this morning and I'm like in love, and I can't wait to spend more time with him.
And like, this is so, you know, like we're going on vacation in a week and I can see us, are you freaking kidding me? Like right there, one conversation that could have been the end of the relationship if I didn't let myself go there. That easily, could have been that little tiny splinter under my fingernail that I left fester and didn't deal with.
And then I built evidence and I said, see, I told you we couldn't communicate. And this was never going to work out, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And yet it just, you know, now it's like I'm in a completely different relationship again, having let that piece out. And I think that's where, because I've done a lot of performance coaching and I've spent a lot of time in like, okay, how do we move on?
What do we do? What's the next action? What's the next action? And I can see where I'm a little weak in remembering all of the emotional tools I have and I still resist them.
Audra Boyd: Yes. I know I do too. I resist them with my clients. Well, you know, look, it was just, it was just how you and I grew up what we developed, right.
To fit into what the conversation was in, in society. And it's not bad noticing it is like the first biggest woo-hoo right. Cause now you've got access to something. Now you have access to, Oh, this is what's going to make this, this work, right. This is what's going to have my life actually work. You know, we wonder why the divorce rate is so high because people stop right where you were. They stop and they don't allow themselves to feel those emotions.
And there's, it's so useful. You know, we think that emotions are, are permanent or pervasive, right? Like permanent. Oh my gosh. If I allow myself to feel that it's just going to take over my life, you know, and it's just not the case. Emotions are a little bit more like a wave, you know?
Sarah Marshall, ND: Yeah. And you know, I mean, that's, I've definitely heard that like the ocean of emotions and I have been in those places where there was so much suppressed grief or anger that I really was afraid.
Like if I go into that depth, that cavern, like I will never crawl back out. And I do know I'm just going to put this caveat in here as the disclaimers. Like there are people in this, a whole nother ball of wax is like, like I am dealing with chronic fatigue syndrome now I'm way healthier than I was seven months ago last summer.
And I know one of the things that happens for me now that I've distinguished is when I've pushed my body too hard. I've surpassed my daily carrying capacity of work. I don't have enough energy left in the tank. One of the first places, it's actually a warning sign that I need to stop working, I need to rest my brain again, is my emotions start to get way disproportionate to what's happening around me, you know? Justin may make a comment about dinner and I'm off to the races about how he hates my cooking. And it's like, I'll know, okay, that is actually, for me now gotten identified as a red flag about my physiologic condition, that's separate. And I know that's also like it can cloud things. And I say that because they're also people that they really are full on, legit dealing with chemical imbalances and neuroinflammation, which that's a whole thing we can also talk about. I've been learning a lot more about taking the gut brain connection way deeper into like literally how dysbiosis in our gut microbiome, when it's unhealthy is altering our capacity to manage stress at the level of emotional intelligence, not just our endocrine system.
That's like. I'm fascinated by it. I'm learning a lot about it, but like, so there is a place where if you're going to start to tap into your emotions, doing it with. A coach, a therapist, a very supportive partner. Somebody who can help that, like I often am quoted saying, I promise I will not leave you in this space forever.
Like it's okay to be depressed for a little while. Depression isn't always bad. And if in two or three weeks, things have not significantly lifted and you're not a new place I will intervene. I'm not, you know, like knowing somebody's there for you to support you through those kinds of things can be integral to not get lost it too far down the rabbit hole.
Audra Boyd: Yeah, exactly. Well, and that, you know, that's one of the challenges when it comes to our emotions, right? We've been so conditioned or we've conditioned ourselves to emote alone, if you will. Right. And really if you're ruminating or if you're, you know, having challenges your best, working with someone on that, like you said, a trusted friend or a, an emotions coach or a therapist, if that's right, like that may be what's appropriate.
And, you know, it may not be forever that you dothat, it might be to some level. Right. But I meant the therapist that you would necessarily have that forever. Sorry. Yeah. But with the friends and with, you know, a coach potentially, I guess you could, could do them, hopefully you'll do that forever, right?
Sarah Marshall, ND: Yes. Maybe even more and more of them.
Audra Boyd: Exactly. You'll empower more and more people around you and your kids and you know, their friends when they come over and who knows, right. Like, that's my dream.
Sarah Marshall, ND: So, what are some of your favorite tools to help people start to you know, just begin to get into this, even identifying what they're feeling?
Audra Boyd: Sure. You know, one of my favorite tools right now is it's an app for your phone. It's called the mood meter app. It's I don't know. I think it's 99 cents. Both for iPhone and Android. I've checked it out.
Sarah Marshall, ND: We have no financial relationship to this company. It's just a tool.
Audra Boyd: no. In fact, it was developed by Yale scientists.
At the, you know, at the Yale center for intelligent… Emotional intelligence I think is who developed it. So a great little app and you know, you use it throughout the day to identify what it is that you're feeling. It's super simple. It gives you four quadrants, you get the quadrant, right. Then you can, you know, get into the emotion.
And as you're doing the work, you get more familiar with more and more emotions. Right. So. And then you can look, it also will guide you if you want to stay in that emotion. Great. If you don't, if you want to shift out of that, it'll give you a suggestion. And a quote, and you know, sometimes, sometimes I find the suggestions more useful than other times, but at least it's like pointing you in the right direction, giving you access to getting more in touch with your emotions. So that's one of my favorites right now.
Sarah Marshall, ND: Yeah. And I've used one is a book called The Language of Emotions by Carla McLaren. I read it a long time ago, maybe. Well, long, 20 years ago, maybe 15. And it's like an encyclopedia on emotions and she's an empath and has worked in that field most of her life and kind of had to sort herself.
I mean, empath’s in particular and I have an opinion that actually all humans are empaths. It's whether or not your culture and where you were raised, cultivates more feeling conversations or doesn't. But I think it's, it's ingrained part of our physiology that all of us actually can tune in and feel each other's emotions and connect into what each other's dealing with.
But some of us as even a coping strategy of trauma in childhood, some people actually crank up their sensitivity cause they had to know like if they have an alcoholic parent or they were dealing with certain substance abuse, like what, what mood is my parent in tonight? And to know, is this a good night or a bad night?
And so they actually, as a survival mechanism, cranked all of that up and it leaves us sometimes very susceptible to other people's moods and emotions. And so I read the book from that standpoint and she gets into, I think there's 26 chapters and each chapter goes into the benefits of each emotion, why we have them, what they're useful for.
And like one that I'll highlight is anger is often considered a negative emotion, but really her stand is there's no such thing as a negative or a positive it's all information and anger is, is pretty much about boundary betrayal. And one is the recognized, well, what has actually been betrayed? What is the boundary that got crossed?
And then what are the requests to make to either restore the boundary? Or is there, was there no boundary and there needs to be one that gets established. And that changed everything for me. When I started to be able to look from there, she even gets into like depression as the stop sign of the soul and talks about how, and I'm not really talking about biochemical clinical physiologic, depression, but when we have depression as an emotion at certain periods in our life, It's like our soul is saying, you keep going in the wrong direction in life, I want you to stop, sit still and think about it and then redirect where you want to be going. So you lose motivation. Of course you lose motivation. You don't want to go anywhere. You don't want to do anything. It's because it's like your soul is holding onto your ankles, trying to get you to stop keep going in the wrong direction, you know, and that was also a total game changer for me to recognize when depression would start to come in, that maybe I should slow down and do some journaling. Where am I not telling myself the truth that I'm participating in something or I'm, I've made a commitment to something that actually isn't true to my heart. The biggest place being that was towards the end of my marriage, I recognize I actually did a I was interviewed on a podcast with somebody that I'll get the information for that in the show notes.
And I shared about a moment in time, it was one night where I truly was at an edge of suicidal ideation and I'd never actually been there where I could see myself taking action. Now I was very much not sober. I'd been at a party that I had decided to go to because I really wanted to stay home. Cause I was in this like big depression, all summer long debating about whether or not I was going to leave my marriage and I chose to go out and be social.
And in that process, Made a bunch of bad decisions and got really drunk. And in that process, I actually did reach out to my best friend and say, don't let me go home tonight because I know exactly how many tablets of Tylenol to take as a doctor to not wake up tomorrow. And I slept on her couch and I woke up with a wicked hangover the next day and had this thought, which was if I was willing to end my life, would I be willing to just end my life as in risk, leaving the marriage and having to start over. And I got in communication with family and started to build off of that. And then, you know, ultimately in the next year we did divorce and it was actually a really amicable divorce in the long run.
But that, that moment, one of the things was I got the message of my emotions and the other was, I got in communication with close friends and family.
Audra Boyd: Exactly. Just so brilliant. Brilliantly put Sarah. I mean, thanks for sharing that. Cause it's, it really does identify for people like, wow. Yeah, it can be, it can be that.
So, you know, for, for parents, it's like, Yeah, let's let them talk, you know, it's like, let's let them have their anger in the cereal aisle. It's okay. Right. Yeah.
Sarah Marshall, ND: Yeah, for sure. What have we not talked about?
Audra Boyd: You know, well, you know, you asked what some of my favorite things we touched on meditation, but meditation, I really find as being such a useful tool.
For there for those of us who really liked the prefrontal cortex of our brain, it's a useful tool, that allows us to shift into that limbic system. You know, they say, studies say yes, but you can actually start in, inhibiting the, the stress circuitry, right? Like that kind of takes you out from your emotions by as much as 50%, if you meditate like 30 minutes a day. That's all it takes. And there's so many really great meditations out there. In fact, there's one that I use with my, my clients all the time. It's three minutes, super simple. It doesn't take a long time. It's called the serene mind meditation and it was created by, I don't know, Oh, no Academy. If you go to YouTube and search for PK consciousness, the serene mind meditation, you'll find it. It's super simple. It has you look at okay, what is the emotion that you're feeling? And then it just walks you through a three minute meditation that will have you identify what you're feeling and take you into that limbic system and connect with yourself and potentially get you into, back into flow, get you back in a way that will have, you know, bring workability in that moment for your life. So I think that was the one thing that we kind of touched on, but really didn't say a whole lot about that I find really useful.
Sarah Marshall, ND: Yeah. There's a lot of science behind. And it's not quite all meditations are created equal. They do different things, but there's also particularly like, I know there's a lot of again, apps, no relationship financially, but like there's I use insight meditation app and there's also, Headspace are two really popular ones.
And they have all kinds of different there's, there's guided meditations, there's meditations on emotions, a lot of them. And one of the other areas that there's a lot of research for emotional balance in our body, restoring that calm. And it's also really great for kids of all kinds, but definitely also kids dealing with autism spectrum disorders ADHD is cultivating brain beta brainwaves. And beta brainwaves particularly helped with that rebalancing dropping us into the sympath, the parasympathetic nervous system, relaxing our body, getting us into this, this state of mind. And there are, there are musicians who've created musical tracks that just literally put you into beta.
And so there's, and there's also like now, I mean, cause we love to create technology to go along with our stuff. So there's actually like these meditation devices. One of my friends has one and it like sits on your head, like a crown. And he was super suspicious of like, really, is this gonna work? But it totally did.
It will tell you when you drop out of a meditative state and then it makes it changes some sort of sound on until you get yourself back into it. So it's actually creates a neurofeedback, which is another whole area, you can go work with a practitioner on neurofeedback, which is incredibly helpful, especially for being able to learn how to restore the calm, how to bring yourself back into a state after a lot of intense emotions have come up or someone, you know, it particularly like I know about it in studies with kids, with ADHD and autism, where they get really, really, really intensely stuck. And it's hard for them to learn how to come out of those. Neurofeedback can be great. And there's now devices where you can actually work through some of these kinds of neurofeedback at home.
Audra Boyd: You know, that's so great. You know, speaking of kids, I think, you know, one thing that I would want the parents out there to know is there are emotion flashcards, you know, like we had our… They created them for kids with autism, but there's so great. I can't believe, you know, we limited it to just... like shows different expressions, like how to, how to sense the different expressions and subtleties of expression that relate to emotion. And then they'll help you identify what emotion, some of them will have one emotion, but then it gives similar emotions. Right? You know, expand your breadth and scope both what you're able to identify with emotions. Those I find really useful, useful for my adults, but yeah,
Sarah Marshall, ND: But I can really see one of my weak points now is articulating the positive emotions. Oh, right. Like, it's like, I can, you know, all right, this is what I'm dealing with when I'm struggling. But I notice so every year I take on a couple of words as my theme for the year to, to kind of push me or create new, new things.
And this year, my theme for 2021 is joy, generosity and teamwork. I've been a solo practitioner doing it on my own for a really long time. And this podcast has been a big part, you know, working with Kendra. And I'm now like actually expanding and building team around. We're going to be offering online, like DIY courses on health and wellbeing and starting to build around things like that.
That I, I just can't do them by myself, but what's interesting is that I, I actually have never, ever, ever, ever set my intention on any sort of thing, like joy or happiness. And it's having me start to look at like, well, what brings me joy? And, and, and then what beyond that, like excitement, ecstasy, passion, joy, like elation.
And I'm like, I can feel it in my body. I still have some made up limited belief that I remember from childhood that has to do with like all happiness is all silly or it's like, Not sophisticated, smart and productive, which of course I was a precocious little kid that wanted to be taken more seriously than she was all the time.
And so like, I have this ingrained, like I don't even it's it's cause I'm not unhappy, but I'm like neutral. I can be really neutral a lot of the time and productive I'll be like doo doo doo doo doo doo doo handling all these things and just this mode, but like to actually stop and ask myself, like, am I enjoying this?
Have I done anything that like made me laugh and lit me up and were like, actually like intent being intentional about happiness. And this is new territory for me. Like, I'm literally, like I got a little blahh in the back of my throat about it. I don't even know all the reasons why that is, but it's really interesting to notice, like so many people you ask me, like, are you happy in your life?
And they'll be like, yeah, of course I am. But then it's like, What have you measured it? Like how many times a day do you actually experience joy or happiness? Yeah, that is a whole nother ball of wax for me.
Audra Boyd: Yeah, or desire or affectionate or optimistic or cheerful or?
Sarah Marshall, ND: Well, yeah, all those other words I didn't say.
Audra Boyd: I mean, there's so many triumphant. Sometimes it's triumphant…. blissful
Sarah Marshall, ND: Oh my gosh. We're going to have so many show notes from this and you guys have so many resources. It's awesome. And keeping Kendra busy doing her research for each episode. Well, this has been incredible and I seem to have hit on a theme.. It, it always cracks me up where I will reach out to people to interview and I'll have some concept of all these different topics. And then somehow, like I end up on a three-four episode theme. So you guys hang in there, like we've been doing this whole theme emotions keep coming up. Cause apparently that's just what we need right now and what we're, what we're dealing with. So you know, we threw a little gardening in there with with urban farm, but it's been awesome to have yet another, just profound exploration of this with you, Audra and your available, you are doing like full on coaching with people now.
Audra Boyd: I am. I am. Yeah. And I'm really excited about, you know, the program that I'm starting with parents in the next month.
Sarah Marshall, ND: Cool. Well, we'll make sure we've got links to those resources available and how you can be contacted anyone that wants to start to get into some of this work. And I can attest to, you know, now you and I have been working together almost two years and it keeps evolving, but this piece right about cultivating enjoyment in my life. And joy is one of the things that, you know, I have in our work together to keep, keep pushing me. So I highly recommend having people in your life that actually hold you to account, to enjoying your life. Otherwise, crazy things can happen and years go by. And you're like, what, what did I just do?
Audra Boyd: Yes. Awesome. Very good. Well, thanks for having me. It's been a real pleasure.
Sarah Marshall, ND: Great. Good. We'll do it again sometime.
Audra Boyd: All right, it's a deal.
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Sarah Marshall, ND: Inspired by the success of HEAL, we are now a community of over 2000 incredible listeners. We will be launching some courses and workshops in 2021. Be the first to know about them by joining our mailing list at sarahmarshallnd.com. Thank you to today's guest Audra Boyd for her love and compassion. For a full transcript and all the resources for today's show, visit SarahMarshallND.com/podcast. Special thanks to our music composer, Roddy Nikpour, and our kick ass editor, Kendra Vicken. Always thank you for being here. See you next time.