“We cannot live our fullest expression if we are unwilling to have a relationship with our emotions, and that’s what hopelessness and despair allow for.”

In this episode, I’m diving into two of the most avoided emotional states we experience as humans, hopelessness and despair, and addressing how crucial these are for true transformation in ourselves and our world. With these times we live in and the callings that sit heavy on our hearts, it’s essential that we’re able to be with, feel through, and transmute contractive emotions in healthy and productive ways, but we can’t do that if we’re unwilling to face what’s hard and what hurts. Worse yet, our capitalistic societies keep us too busy working to support our lives (then too numbed out by ‘entertainment’) to have space for this work. If you’re curious about how to create true transformation in this often overwhelming and horrific world, this is the conversation for you.

Learn how to work with your emotions and this concept of The Void.

Read our book, What Really Happened?, to break free from interpretation.

What to listen for:

Understanding what hopelessness and despair mean
We have to be able to bear witness to the suffering in the world
If we’re not present, we can’t create true transformation
How hope can easily turn into bypassing

“The way that you know that you’re bypassing with hope is that you’re not holding hope ‘with.’ You’re not doing both. You’re not holding hope with heartbreak, grief, the triggers, the activated state that inevitably happens when we’re bearing witness to these things when we’re present with them. You’re not feeling your rage and fury. You’re not feeling your grief and terror. You’re simply ‘hoping’ for a positive outcome. You’re simply trying to remain optimistic. And this is no different than toxic positivity and spiritually bypassing.”

How we continue to create a world that lacks freedom
We can’t live our fullest expression without a relationship to our emotions
Dropping through our contractive emotions leads to source states
How we dehumanize others because we view everything as ‘content’
The balance of self-care and not hiding from what’s hard

“We will use our desires, the life that we want to live, the things that we’re going after, the ways that we want to feel as a reason and an excuse to not engage with what’s hard and what hurts in our life, in our communities, in the world. And bypassing that reduces our capacity and ability to have the life that we want.”

The invitation is to embrace hopelessness and despair
We have to feel the raw energy, not tell stories about them
The emotions that force us to realize what’s wrong with the world
Learning to live outside our ‘comfort’ bubbles
How capitalism keeps us numb to everything else—by design

“When we allow ourselves to feel hopelessness fully, we might drop through to despair. And when we allow ourselves to feel despair fully, we might drop through to grief. And when we allow ourselves to feel grief fully, we might drop through to rage, fury. We might drop through from there to love, peace, calm, centeredness—our source state. And that is where we can be the most effective for ourselves and other people; when we can move through the emotions that we fight so hard not to feel, especially hopelessness and despair.”

Our avoidance of things being ‘meaningless’ doesn’t help
The power of shattering our worldview and sense of self
Strengthening our heart and soul muscles
We need to allow ourselves to be devastated by life