How do we release the negative emotions that come along, and do it from within a compassionate, self-loving, understanding place? That ultimately is the key to staying motivated. I'm able to stay motivated because I keep loving and appreciating myself. And when uncomfortable emotions like sadness, anger, fear, grief, shame, guilt, or resentment come up, what I do is I go into them. I say, I'm willing to feel whatever emotions are present now, in a space of self-love and understanding. This is what works for me, and I want to share it because it could really make a difference in your life.
I just share whatever's going on within me. I share what I do. What helps a lot to release emotions is to focus on just what I'm feeling. As I'm talking, I'm reading comments in the background about what's happening in the world and who's died, and it helps to just focus on what I'm feeling right this moment. The more I have a story in my head, the more difficult it is.
Let go of the story and stay with the feeling
What helps a lot to release negative emotions is to let go of the story, because the story is the part we don't have control over. I don't have control over who's dying where. There are over 100,000 people who are going to die today, and every day, on this planet. If I can stick to my own emotions, then I can feel better, because that I do have control over. I'm able to say, look, I'm feeling sad right now. And it doesn't matter why I'm feeling sad. It just matters that that's how I'm feeling. And I do it within a space of love.
The difference is mental. I'm constantly reaching for a positive thought even while I'm feeling sad. Let me share what happened this morning, and this will also answer a question someone asked me. Danny said, let's say I smash my finger, or hurt myself accidentally. I swear like a sailor, and it instantly pisses me off. How do I control that? What I'm about to share will wrap into that as well.
The morning I banged my ankle
Let me tell you about my morning. It was a very nice morning overall, but some negative emotions came up. I've offered to get the kids ready and get them off to school for the last 20 minutes of the morning, so my wife can go to work and start her morning off a little smoother. I figure I'm driving them to school, so I might as well be responsible for getting them in the car. She's had some tough mornings getting them in the car. My daughter's in kindergarten. My son's two and a half years old. Sometimes they put up a fight and fuss and they won't get in the car. Any parent, I'm sure, can relate to this.
This morning, everything was going perfectly smooth until it was time to leave. I leave at 7:52. I asked my daughter, as I had several times, all right, we're getting in the car, will you please come strap your brother in? Then I went back in. My daughter was laying in the bedroom, curled up like in a ball. She was upset because I was going to give her a Starburst instead of a Lifesaver for candy when she got in the car. I was in a good place at first. I picked her up, like, all right, let's go get in the car. And then I banged my ankle on a stool that was right there, and it hurt. And now suddenly all these feelings burst out. I'm annoyed that I banged my ankle picking my daughter up, when she could have walked out herself. So I kind of dropped her quickly, kind of threw her out of my arms. And then she stops right in front of me. So I pushed her to keep her moving, and she goes down on her knees. And I said, get your little ass in the car.
And then, all of a sudden, I'm triggered. Now I feel bad that I just did that. And I'm annoyed that I was put in that situation to start with, because my intention is to be a kind, nice, gentle, peaceful, happy, loving, just angelic parent in all situations. She starts crying immediately, goes out, gets in the car. And I feel like I just channeled my father, because that was very much what I experienced, and much more than that, as a kid. My dad would hit me and kick me if I wasn't getting moving, and spank me if I got too far out of line. And all those kinds of feelings came up all at once, just from myself, like my own childhood, and the discrepancy between how I want to parent and what just happened.
What I immediately start doing is I start looking for that next best thought. Thank you, God, for this human experience. I love my daughter so much. I am so grateful to be here and to have this experience today, even though my mind is just desperate to go into how bad of a parent I am. You shouldn't have done that. You need to tell your daughter she shouldn't have put you in that situation. So I've got those two things going on in my mind at once, like that vacuum of negativity where we think we need to ruin the whole rest of the morning because we just had one uncomfortable moment.
What I do is mostly keep quiet on the way to school. I tell my daughter I love her. I say, hey, how about tomorrow, why don't we just have a great time getting ready and have it be really smooth together? And then once we get to school, I drop her off, I get home, and I feel these emotions are still really going around in my head strongly.
Getting the emotion out of my energy field
So my son is two and a half. He likes to talk a lot. I'm feeling all these emotions, and meanwhile I'm praying to God for support, and I'm setting the intention: I want to feel good. I want to feel God. That's when these emotions are going around like a storm. I'm all over in my energy. And I say, son, I'm going to be quiet right now. What I noticed is that if I feel like somebody's constantly chatting at me while I'm feeling that emotional storm, often more things will come out of my mouth that I'll feel bad about. So if I just stay quiet and focus inward, it helps me to concentrate on the feeling.
The feeling right now. I even started thinking thoughts like, I love my father so much. I accept my father and my father's parenting completely. My father is completely loved and understood. He didn't need to parent me any differently. I'm very happy with how he parented me. I'm thinking these thoughts while my mind is just desperately trying to go toward rehashing that little uncomfortable moment over and over again in my head. And finally I sit there and I'm like, let me just feel whatever emotions need to be felt. Let me just feel the emotions. And the more I thought about how much I love my father, and how much I love myself and am proud of myself as a parent, then all that negative stuff started to just pour out of me.
I went and laid down on the couch, took one of my son's blankets, which are one of his favorite things, and I just curled up in a ball. One thing you can do to release negative emotions is get the sound out. Often just a little, hmm, just like children. Children know exactly what they're doing, and they are very good at releasing negative emotions. As adults, we've at some point been told that's not appropriate and to put that tool away, but in my experience it still works just as well for us as it does for them. So I sat there on the couch, with my son playing nearby, and finally I got into a really good, kind of wailing, crying thing going on. And I could feel all that negative energy just pouring out of me. All the things my mind was producing, telling me I had to think about this and focus on it and fight it. I just let all that pour out of me. I let the sound pour out, let the tears pour out, and meanwhile I loved myself and was proud of myself that this is how I get this feeling out. Instead of it coming out with 10 or 20 or 30 or 50 more negative comments throughout the day, instead of it coming out in a lot of other ways, I let it go.
So I lay there, I have a good cry, it all goes out, and then I'm back to my normal self. I'm okay with everything that went on this morning, and with all of eternity before that. I'm excited to see whatever's going to come after. Now I'm restored to full functionality and full sanity. My mind is truly focused totally on the positive, and not feeling that negative pull constantly right there. I've used that process a lot of different times to release all kinds of negative emotions, and I share it with you to help you. You don't have to have some big emotion come up and then stuff it down, or try to stay positive and pretend like it's not there. You can just, like children, release it. My kids, several times a day, have big emotions. They get really upset about something, they cry, they whine, they release it, and they're back to having fun.
What I see is that, as adults, lots of times we don't do this. So we hold on to these emotions. And in my experience, if you stuff a whole bunch of those emotions down, those will eventually turn into physical symptoms, whether more minor or more major and life-threatening. So today, I'm grateful I get this stuff totally out of my energy field, and then I'm free to move about the rest of the day in love.
It doesn't matter what other people think of my processes. They work really well for me. They keep me happy, peaceful, positive, kind, joyful, loving, and self-accepting almost all day, almost every day. If someone else has a negative judgment about that, that's their own problem. That's not my problem.
The same process works for any painful situation
A lot of these scenarios can be handled in the exact same way. For example, if you've had an argument with a loved one, that exact same process can be very effective. You just feel how sad you are, feel how much it hurts. And one thing you've got to do mentally is have the discipline to not buy into the story.
You'll notice I didn't tell a story about what an awful parent I was. I refused to accept that story. I also refused to let my mind tell me that my father wasn't as good of a parent as he should have been. I refused to allow that. I said, I love my father. I'm proud of my father's parenting. I love myself. I love my parenting. And I accept that. I also didn't go and apologize to my daughter and say, oh, I'm so sorry. No, because she did her part and I did my part. I set an intention: hey, let's do better tomorrow. That's making amends. Hey, let's learn from what we did today and see if we can do even better tomorrow.
There's no handbook that comes with a kid. There are a lot of people who'll give you handbooks for kids, or parenting, or being a spouse, or having a partner, or being a child. And I think the people around us are here to challenge us. The people around us are here to bring these things out. My children, I'm very grateful, help me practice what I'm teaching.
If you've lost someone important to you, you might need to do this same process. For example, if your child or parent or someone you've really loved has just left in one way or another, you might need to do this process five, 10, 15, 20, 30 times in a day to get the emotions out. But the beautiful thing is, I know that it's possible, if you just process the emotions when they come up, to live happy the whole rest of the time. Feel the emotions, let them out. Happy. Emotions come up, feel them, let them out. It's a beautiful thing.
I also talked to my wife about exactly this. I shared my whole experience with her, and she said, yeah, those kids are tough to get ready in the morning, and that's why you volunteered to do it. I did.
One person, Jose, said he has two autistic little ones who take him on an emotional rollercoaster daily, and added, but Jerry, I love you, man, I ain't making them weird-ass sounds. You say that now, and you're probably feeling good now, and that's okay. But next time you're feeling miserable and you want to feel better, you're going to think about it. And you're going to think, damn, is it really that easy? Is it really that easy? I'm just making some of those sounds, and then I can get these feelings and these emotions out.
We all bounce off each other, and that's okay
Danny said, I've been noticing my kids pick up on my negativity. Yep. But it's a group thing. My kids have their own negativity and their own emotions, and what we often do is we all bounce off of each other. It's not fair to ourselves as parents to say that I should be purely good and positive in all situations all the time, while my kids can just be however they want, and I should never affect them, and anything they do shouldn't affect me. That's holding ourselves to an unreasonable standard.
It helps me to remember that I'm just a big baby like they are, in a lot of ways. I don't like having my feelings hurt either. Things upset me. I am not better than my children. I may be bigger than them, but I'm not older than my children. My children are immortal souls just like me. Just because they have smaller bodies, we are truly equals. It helps me with my children to realize that if I were some idea of a perfect parent, that wouldn't be any better or worse for them than my imperfections.
That perspective comes from doing my own work with my own father. I love my father, and I love my mother, and I would not change how they parented me. Even the bad parts. Like my mother throwing the keys at my father when she was upset and walking out of the house saying, you're never going to see me again. Or storming off with the keys and driving the car away and saying, you're never going to see me again. My father hitting me, spanking me, punching me, slapping me upside the head. There were times he'd have to turn the camera off. Damn it, Gerald! And the camera would go off, and then it would come back on, and you could tell I'd just cried.
I would not change my father's or my mother's parenting today. I would not, even if I could. I would not go back and edit it and say, well, my dad should, in this situation, instead of yelling at me and smacking me upside the head and dragging me by my arm into my room, instead just be all zen and be like, oh, that's okay, you just ripped that toy out of your brother's hand. I wouldn't change my father's parenting or my mother's parenting, even if I could. It was just perfect to get me to where I am today. At the same time, some of what they showed me shows me what I don't want to do, and some of what they showed me shows me what I do want to do. And that's a true place of love.
Unconditional love is total acceptance of what is. To say, this is fine. What happened before is fine. What is going to happen is fine, too. And how do I want things to be?
It's okay to fail
My son is working on potty training. He just peed in his underwear today again, and he said, daddy, I want a diaper, I don't want your underwear. I said, why, because you're afraid of peeing in your underwear? And he said, mm-hmm. I said, son, you're learning, it's okay. Pee in your underwear as many times as you need to, until you remember, before you pee, take your underwear off and go to a potty. It's okay to fail.
It's okay to set an intention that I'm going to be nice all the time, and then be a jerk sometimes. That's okay. It's okay to allow yourself to be both dark and light. It's unreasonable, no matter how positive you are, to set up some idea that you should always be nice and then guilt and shame yourself when you don't meet up to that. That's what I refuse to do today. I will not hold guilt and shame for myself because I had a moment that doesn't line up with how I think things ought to be. That's okay. Each time that happens gives us more clarity about what we want.
It helps me see that sometimes I'm not even sure exactly what I want. Do I want to just let my daughter dictate what time she goes to school, and be late for school if she feels like screwing around for a few more minutes at home? No, I don't think I want that. Do I want to use force to get my daughter in the car to make sure she's at school on time? I'd prefer if she just got in on her own. But I also see that if my children aren't lining up with what I think they should do, sometimes I will reconsider my opinion and my position and my request, and other times I will not, and I will use force to make them do what I think they ought to do. And I'm okay with that. Because when you choose to be born, you choose to accept those kinds of conditions. I'm here to help my children, I'm here to help my spouse learn and grow, and I'm here to enjoy this life.
In fact, I think it's things like guilt and shame and always feeling bad, oh, I can't believe I yelled at my children, that actually guarantee we're going to do the same thing again, unless we change our intentions and say, well, how do I want to act? I want to lead by example and show my children that it's possible to be loving and peaceful and kind. But I also want to show my children that, look, if you're not nice, or you're not peaceful, or you're not kind, here's how you forgive yourself for that, and here's how you turn that into a learning opportunity.
Because my children are not loving and peaceful and kind all the time. My five-and-a-half-year-old daughter will go and rip things out of her little brother's hand, push him down, smack him upside the head, kick him in the butt, push him over. There are lots of times she's not nice or kind or loving to him. My son at two and a half is kind of a bully with other kids sometimes. He'll go push other kids down at the park, take things away from them, which my daughter was never like. It's interesting to see their different personalities. So how do I show them, hey, sometimes when you're not nice, this is how you feel better?
It's a beautiful thing when you can come to a place where you really love and accept yourself as you are. When I accept that sometimes I may be mean, sometimes I may not take somebody else into consideration, that helps me accept it when other people do the same thing and I'm on the receiving end of it. Sometimes my wife is going to say things that are just purely mean. And when I'm the one saying mean things, I'm experiencing that emotion myself. Then I can accept and forgive, and not fight back with her. The better and nicer I am to myself, the more chance I have to do that with others. This is a big part of what I keep talking about with the people in my Jerry Banfield Family community, where we work through this kind of thing together.
Trying, forgiveness, and getting excited for the next chance
Danny said, that's why I believe trying is setting yourself up for failure. If you try, you're leaving the option for failure open. Do it, or don't.
It's nice to see that anyone can be loving and positive and kind, any of us, when things are going our way. To me, one of the biggest tests is, if I act in a way that I don't like, or that I don't think is right, or that I think I could do better, can I love and forgive myself? And how fast can I love and forgive myself? And how strong of an intention can I set for the future?
What I see is that I will continue to be given the chance to master the same lessons over and over again. Next time, I'm now excited about tomorrow morning. I'm excited to get the kids ready for school again, instead of being afraid of the situation. A lot of us, if something triggers a negative emotion, get kind of a PTSD about it, where, oh my God, I don't even want to get the kids ready for school, because what happened yesterday is probably going to happen today. I get excited. I'm like, let's go. I want to have another shot to get the kids ready for school. I'm going to deal with all their emotions, and we're going to see how well we can all do this together. I'm excited to have the same scenario again tomorrow and see how I can go at it. That's the path of forgiveness and self-acceptance.
For example, if you just had an argument with your spouse, and you called them several names, and you did some things you feel bad about, the question is, can you love and accept yourself today? Can you say, look, I did the best I could do at the time, how do I want to handle it next time? And can you get excited right now about having a second chance as soon as this comes up again?
Somebody messaged me saying, oh, this girl and I broke up, and I need to go back in time to get back with her. I said, no, you don't. You're going to get another chance to have the exact same scenario come up. And the question is, when that scenario comes up again, are you going to be ready to master it? How do you want that to go next time? And not from an external point of view, but internally. Internally, I want to maintain my peace, my composure, and my focus on love and gratitude at all times. If you've messed anything up in your life, and you're thinking, God, I wish things had gone differently with this or that, be excited, because you're going to get another chance, maybe today, to have a similar situation. And the question is, how are you going to do with it today?
Setting intentions instead of external goals
Someone asked whether I'd noticed personal benefits since becoming a partner on the streaming platform. Not significant personal benefits, no. But I have noticed a lot of gratitude that the partner badge was given, and a lot of gratitude for myself that I kept doing my livestream, that I explored and fully considered whether being a partner was the best option for me beforehand. I did some streaming elsewhere first to get an idea of whether this is something I want to commit to. I'm proud of how I handled the whole partner process, and I've learned a lot from it.
That's why today, instead of setting these big external goals, the goal I'm setting is, I want to love what I do every single day, and be supporting and helping and serving others with what I do, and I want to be among a supportive, loving community while I'm doing it. That's my intention. Instead of setting some income goal like, I want to make this many thousands a month with my gaming, I set the intention to love what I do.
To me, new people showing up is all about the law of attraction. Whatever I'm putting out that I want, people are being attracted to come to it. Lots of times we go about thinking of the people in our lives as if they're robots, like, if I do this, then they'll do that. But really it's more law of attraction. Think about it this way. I used to set my intention that I want the most people watching, and I used to try to make my actions so that I would get the most people watching. I would get the most people watching, but I often wasn't enjoying myself. That got me back to setting the intention, hey, I want to make sure I'm really having fun and loving what I do, and I'm in a supportive community of people who feel the same way.
With that intention, some of the people who were there just to help me get views, but aren't as interested in the deeper stuff, are leaving, and some new people are coming in who feel the attraction of the community itself, who want to be part of a loving, supportive community rooted in loving what you do. People could search for a game like Magic: The Gathering Arena all day. There are tens of thousands of people who do. Why is it that someone, at an exact time while I happen to be online, would think to search for that game's streams and then click on my stream at just the right moment, where they'd come in and be really happy and excited about the vibe? That's a law-of-attraction thing, where the person thought about it at just the right time and took just the right action. That's the level I'm on now.
Lisa shared that she had a 15-minute rule with her kids: if something couldn't get done in 15 minutes by them, especially before school, like picking up their room, she'd do it after school. We also have to give them space to accomplish it. Most younger kids can't do more than 15 minutes of anything. Fifteen minutes on the pot, off, try again, and so on. That helped me clarify what I can set as an intention. Maybe it will help if I give my kids a little more structure to get out the door, instead of everything being a free-for-all and then at the last second, okay, it's time to get out the door right now. Maybe I can assist and make that smoother myself. I'm excited to try again.
A constant battle with the body
Danny said, I'm disabled. This is a permanent battle with my depression. Some days are great. Some days my body won't let me do something I just did. I know I'm somebody, I'm important. However, it still affects my mental state. I'm only 35. My mind says yes, but my body denies me. It's a constant battle.
What I've found that's really helped me is a strong focus on what I want and what I love, and a complete rejection of anything I'm not interested in experiencing more of. A complete focus on how I want things to be, which sometimes means disregarding the present-day reality almost completely.
There's a great book by Joe Dispenza. Here's his basic story. Joe Dispenza is a chiropractor, and when he was a very young man, late teens or early twenties, around chiropractic school, he was in a race. An SUV doing 50 miles an hour drove past a police officer directing traffic and hit Joe Dispenza, and just smashed his back apart. He got hit and dragged under the car, and his back got destroyed. The doctors told him they didn't even know if he could walk, and that he had to have two rods put in his back so that he wouldn't get paralyzed.
Joe said no. He asked about the rods, and they're like, well, you're going to have pain, you're going to be paralyzed for the rest of your life, your back's going to hurt, all of this. And Joe said, well, I don't want that. No, I'm not putting these rods in my back. The doctor said, but nobody's ever refused this surgery before, you have to have this surgery, or you might be paralyzed and stuck in a wheelchair the rest of your life. Joe said, I don't want these rods, there's got to be another way. So he went home. They just sent him home, with his back on the edge of being paralyzed, with a bunch of smashed-up vertebrae.
He laid in bed. From what I understand, at that point he'd been to chiropractic school, so he knew how the discs in his back were supposed to look. He laid there for hours and hours and hours, and essentially prayed to God, or connected with his creator. He'd seen the radiographs in the hospital that showed the discs were broken and smashed and crushed in certain places. And he said, I want my back to look like this. I want this disc to look like that. I want that vertebra to look like this. He sat there and focused relentlessly on picturing exactly how he wanted his back to look. For two months. And guess what happened?
You have more power than you realize
His back fixed itself. He said he literally walked back into his life two months after getting run over by an SUV at 50 miles an hour, and in the last 30 years has had almost no back pain since. He laid there and pictured his back how he wanted it, and his body fixed it just the way he pictured it.
In my experience and from what I've come to believe, you have so much more power than you realize. I believe it's possible that if I lost a limb, and I focused on how I wanted it to look, I could regrow a limb. Now, I'd prefer not to test that. But if that happened, I imagine that's the route I'd be going.
Right now, I've noticed there are some red spots on my shoulders and my back. A lot of us relentlessly focus on that which we don't like, and I've done so much of this with these spots. I've said, I don't like how this looks, I wish it'd go away. I even went to the doctor, and they said it's a fungus and gave me a skin cream. It went away for a while, but then it came back. Now I see the solution is what I've applied to other parts of my body.
For example, I was having this thing where I kept biting my lip, and I'd bite it so hard it would get this huge canker sore. Sometimes these canker sores would last for weeks. About a year and a half ago, I was at my mom's house and I chomped down on my lip, just crushed it, bit it hard. Right after, I had the reaction somebody mentioned earlier, oh, damn it, oh man, and I started to expect I'm going to have this big miserable canker sore. And I had that canker sore for weeks. Every time I put water in my mouth, it burned. And heaven forbid I had an orange, or something with acid, it burned. I changed my eating habits to avoid burning this thing.
Then finally one day I said, this is ridiculous, I know this thing could have healed up by now. I was listening to Joe Dispenza's book, and I realized, I need to focus on what I want, not on what I don't want. Because the more you focus on what you don't want, in my experience you'll keep getting that which you focus on. If you say, I really don't want this, I really don't want this, it's like ordering at a restaurant and telling the waitress, I really, really don't want that, I don't want that, and that's the only thing you tell her. Then she brings it to you, and you say, why did you bring me that? And she says, well, you didn't tell me anything else, the only thing you said was you kept pointing at that and saying you don't want it, that's the only data you gave me. What I've come to believe is that the secret is to focus on exactly what you do want, what you do like, and what you love.
How I talked my body into healing the canker sore
What I did with my canker sore is I focused on the other side of my mouth. Think about that for a second. Instead of focusing and constantly running my tongue over the side with the canker sore, I started paying attention to the other side of my mouth, which for two weeks I'd ignored. I'm like, man, this side of my mouth feels fantastic. Oh, that feels so good over there. There's no canker sore, there's no swelling, this side of my mouth feels fantastic. And what do you think happened? Within 24 hours, the swelling went down at least 50% on the canker-sore side. The other side of my mouth had noticed I was no longer paying attention to it; it noticed I was now giving the healthy side as much attention as I'd given the sore side.
Every time my mind thought about the canker sore, I consciously switched over to the other side of my mouth. Oh man, this feels good. Oh, the top of my mouth feels so good too. And I also started to act as if there were no canker sore. I'm like, I don't care if it burns, I'm going to eat an orange and let it burn, I don't care if I drink water and chew on that side, go ahead. Within 24 hours, the swelling went down 50%. Keep in mind, for two weeks it had endured without changing. As soon as I switched my mental focus, the canker sore immediately responded, and within another day or two it was almost gone.
Then I bit my lip a few more times after that, and I started talking to my face. I said, look, face, you know how to chew without biting the gums, you know how to do that, and I love it when you chew like that, and I expect you to chew like that. And if you miss, if the teeth slide off to the side, I want you to slow it down. I started slowing my chewing down, because if I'm chewing really hard and fast, I have trouble stopping the tooth from getting nailed into the gum. Now if my teeth slip a little, it barely touches the gum. I've made the adjustments that prevent the canker sores from coming up. And when I occasionally bite my lip, I don't have that big fear reaction anymore. I'm like, ah, that's not going to be an issue, that'll fix itself. I've been mostly free from canker sores, and totally free from any lasting canker sores, since I made that mental adjustment.
In my experience, your mind is so powerful, and the stories you tell yourself are so powerful. If you tell yourself, this is how I am, this is how I've been, and therefore this is how I will be, what you tell yourself tends to manifest. And if you don't want to be how you are, you can disregard how you are and picture how you want to be, like Joe Dispenza. He didn't want to have a broken, smashed-up back, so he focused totally on how he wanted his back to look. That's what I'm doing right now with the red spots on my shoulders. I'm like, damn, this arm skin is beautiful right here, this just looks fantastic, I love how all this skin looks.
I realize how little positive attention I've paid to most of the rest of my life, and yet the little red rash that bumps up, I look at that every day. Ooh, is that a new one right there? Now I'm like, let me look at the parts of my skin that I really love and enjoy. Let me set the intention within my body: this is how I want my skin to look. I want some beautiful, slightly tan skin that looks clear and consistent, with maybe some occasional little marks to show that I've been through a thing here or there, but mostly clear, mostly consistent. And even feeling gratitude, like, thank you, thank you to this redness for helping me demonstrate how much power I have to create my body in real time, thank you for the chance to do that.
The stories we're attached to about our bodies
What I notice is that a lot of us have resistance because we're attached to these stories. This is how I am. I've had this rash off and on for eight years, and that's just how I am, that's just how it is, and it's never going to change. In my experience, that's not true. When you change your mind and change your mental reality, your body tends to follow. I've had one chance after another to practice it, from little things like canker sores.
I even had a lump on one of my testicles before, and I just stopped paying attention to it. For a while I was paying a lot of attention to it, thinking, should I go to the doctor? After a while I'm like, you know what, this is going to go away, and I'm going to forget about it, we're not going to do this fear, is it cancer, do I need to go? I'm just going to ignore this and trust it'll fix itself, it's temporary, it'll go away. And it did. I want to be clear this is my own personal belief and what worked for me, not medical advice for anyone else. There's definitely a place for medical care, and I'd encourage anyone to make their own choices about their health. For me, in that moment, I chose to trust my body, and I was grateful it resolved on its own.
I think back to a story I've heard and told a bunch of times. There was a man who went to his doctor for a routine x-ray, and they saw a big lump in his lung. The doctor said, oh my God, there's this big lump in there, we need to take a look at that. The results came back, and they said, this is cancerous, you need to take this out. The man was dead within six months of the diagnosis. For some reason, the doctors later looked back and found an old x-ray from 20 years before, and 20 years before, the man had had the exact same lump in the exact same place. For 20 years, that lump had not done anything negative to his health; it had stayed just where it was. But as soon as the man was given that idea in his mind, that he had something dangerous that might kill him, as soon as he took that belief on, he died. Something that had been harmless for 20 years now killed him.
Of course, it's possible that was going to happen at that time anyway. What I see is the power of mental suggestion, what some call the nocebo effect. If somebody tells you you've got a dangerous, fatal disease and you believe it, now you've got to deal with it. But if you don't have somebody tell you that in the first place, or if somebody tells you and you say, you know what, I don't know exactly what's going on, I'm going to explore things, I'm going to find out what's possible, I'm going to keep an open mind and focus on what I want, that's a different path. This is the same kind of thing I explore in my reflections on whether you can help heal yourself, and it's all my personal belief, not a prescription for anyone.
My father's diagnosis
The doctors my dad visited gave him the same kind of scenario. They told him, Gerald, you've got this lymphoma, or some kind of thing, this isn't working right in your body, and that's not working right, and most people are dead within 12 months. My dad died in about 14 months. And I wonder, would he have lived longer, and in less pain and better health, if nobody had told him that? If he had just gone on with it? Now, there's definitely a place for medical care, especially if you've been injured. I share this only as my own wondering, my own experience of losing my father, not as advice about what anyone else should do.
Danny shared, through the years I've been changing my hot temper. I changed my mood when it's pain-related. I refuse pain meds. Meds actually make me mad, and I control my frustration. I can distract myself, but it's temporary, because the pain doesn't stop. How can I block the negativity when my body hurts and my mind won't stop thinking?
I've had a lot of physical pain in my life, and in my experience almost all of it first came from mental pain. What I see happen is that when there's pain in my mind, if I can deal with it in my mind, it won't go into my body. But if there's pain in my mind and it persists, my body will manifest the pain also. So what works for me is, like today, when an emotion comes up, to really feel it, feel the emotion all the way. And with physical pain, I think preventatively, which makes a huge difference. How can I prevent myself from having headaches? How can I prevent myself from injuring my body parts? I used to have a lot of headaches. I used to have a lot of back pain. I used to have a bunch of stomachaches.
Mental pain, physical pain, and getting sober
A lot of my physical pain was caused by my alcoholism and my drinking. That is a very clear, direct example of mental pain leading to physical pain. The first step is to take 100% responsibility for the present situation, and to really love and accept the present situation, and to see how it could be a positive thing.
Imagine one day being out of all the pain you're in now, telling other people how you did that. Think about being able to tell somebody, maybe online or standing up in front of a room, I used to be like this, and now I'm like this. Think about the hope that gives other people. That's what I've done with my alcoholism. I can say, look, I used to be in miserable pain, I used to not be able to go without a drink, and today I've had almost seven years sober. I love being sober. I have no interest in drinking. I've completely removed from my life, especially from being around, anybody who drinks on a regular basis. And that gives people hope.
If you can't even get to that level of hope yet, what helps is to surround yourself with, and look for, people who've been in a similar situation and have gotten out of it. What I did first with alcohol was to say, God, please help me, I'll do anything to stay sober. There was a big, strong desire to get sober, because the pain motivated me to make a very strong desire to stay sober. So the first key step is to focus very clearly on what you want. When it comes to health, I want to feel fantastic, healthwise, all day, every day. I want my body to feel flexible. I want my body to feel strong. I want my body to be free from pain. And if some pain comes up, I want it to be a signal that I can put attention on something to help it, that it needs some love. I want my body to be as biologically healthy, if not better, than it was at 18 years old.
Seven years ago, I experienced a lot of consistent physical pain. It's easy to say, well, if you hadn't drunk alcohol, you wouldn't have experienced that pain. Well, I was drinking alcohol because I was in so much mental, and often physical, pain. I had lots of headaches, neck aches, backaches, all kinds of muscle tension, and drinking alcohol was something I used to numb the pain. So I think it's a great step to not use anything to numb pain, because that's where, when the pain's the greatest, you have the most motivation to change. If you're curious how this has held up for me over time, I keep coming back to the theme of long-term emotional sobriety in action, because staying sober has been about so much more than not drinking.
Surround yourself with people who've done it
What helps a lot, if you're struggling to even have hope, is to surround yourself with people who have already done what you want to do, because that's what raises your belief. I didn't have anybody alive in my life who'd done it. My dad had passed away. He had gotten sober when he was 40, and he died at 63. Once my dad died, I had nobody in my life I knew who got sober and had an enjoyable, sober life that I wanted.
When I went to Alcoholics Anonymous, I suddenly saw people who'd been where I'd been, who, when I talked about how I felt, had been there, and look at where they're at now. They helped me get a very strong desire for what I wanted. I looked at people like my grand-sponsor, Ty, and I said, I want to have whatever you've got that allows you to courageously share from your heart, that allows people to open up to you and feel safe with you, that allows you to truly love and enjoy your life. I want that. How did you get from being a hopeless alcoholic to where you're at today? Tell me. And Ty told me, and he shared, and then I listened to a bunch of other people, and they gave me suggestions.
One lady who had 25 years sober said, I get a massage, and that really helps me relax. At first it sounded dumb, but then I realized, if I want what she has, I might want to do what she does. So I went and got a massage, and I'm like, wow, that really worked wonders. Massage is one of the things I do for my body that helps prevent the majority of pain from ever coming up in the first place. Healing touch is extremely powerful. In my experience, getting a massage is something well worth trying.
I tried all these other things, and suddenly I woke up and realized I am exactly what I wanted to be. Seven years ago, if I could have seen how I am today, I would have said, please tell me how I can turn into that, where I love myself, I'm happy about my life, and I'm not in physical pain anymore. Even when physical pain comes up now, often just not paying attention to it lets it go away. Sometimes I get cramps or minor muscle aches, and I stretch, I go to yoga, I do a fitness class, I get a massage every week. I do a lot of things to help physical pain not come up in the first place. And then if it does come up, often simply not focusing on it, paying attention to something else, lets it pass. Like, okay, I feel a little tension right there, let me just keep my body moving and focus on whatever else I'm doing right now. Then I'll check back in my body a few minutes later, and say, oh wow, look, that physical pain's gone.
Obsess about how you want your life to be
The key thing is to think, obsess, and think about exactly how you want your life to be, and to forget about how it is, except in the way that it inspires you to want something different. And then know that you're worthy to receive it. If you are in a wheelchair and you want to walk, think about how much you want to walk, think about how it'd feel to walk, and then think, okay, where can I find some people who've been in wheelchairs that are walking now? I want to get to know them, to raise my own level of certainty that this is possible. That's why things like support groups work so well.
One of the easiest things might be to find a book. I've read hundreds of books. The big book of Alcoholics Anonymous has a bunch of stories of people who've been through alcoholism and recovered, and that left me feeling hopeful. I'm sure there are books by somebody who's been in a wheelchair and gotten out.
I know a guy, Julian Crawford. He got in a nearly fatal car accident. The doctor said, Julian, you might never walk again. And he said, F that, I'm definitely walking again. And guess what? He's using a walker now, and the next step is being able to walk with no walker. He's consistently focused on, I want to be able to walk, I want to stay active. Anybody you can find like that, who has what you want and has been where you've been, can help you go where you want to go.
They can also help you appreciate where you're currently at. When you realize that the person most qualified to help you is someone who's been exactly, or very close to, where you've been, and who's now where you want to be, then you realize that you have the chance to be that person for somebody else. That actually allows gratitude for the present situation to come into play.
I used to hear people at AA meetings say, I'm grateful to be an alcoholic, and I thought that was a dumb-ass thing to say. At the time I'm like, I'm not grateful to be an alcoholic. I hate not being able to just control my drinking all the time. I could control my drinking lots of times, but sometimes it would get way, way, way out of hand. I hated being an alcoholic at first. I hated that I wanted to drink and I couldn't.
Grateful for the very thing that hurt me most
And now, I'm so grateful for that experience. I have a friend who comes up to me and is just pouring her heart out about how alcoholism is affecting her life, and I understand now. Not only that, but I'm able to say, look, girl, I've been where you've been, I've felt how you've felt, you can be where I am today. You can get to a place in your life where you don't care about, or aren't interested at all in, drinking, where you love being sober, where you have a wonderful man in your life, where you have the family you want. You can have all that, and I know, because I was where you are.
I remember being utterly beaten mentally and physically from my own drinking, after a girl had left me, and feeling utterly beaten when I realized my wife was about to leave me, and feeling hopeless, like I had to go down that road. And after a desperate prayer to God, going to Alcoholics Anonymous, and thousands more prayers after that, here I am. It's amazing. That's what happens when you really focus on exactly what you do want. You will find people who've got it, and you will find people who will help you get it. And one day you'll be somebody who is lifting someone else up who had what you used to have.
You can say, look, I know how it is to know that I should never drink again and still want to drink. I know how it is to have destroyed another relationship with alcohol and desperately want that relationship back, and wake up thinking about the person all day, and hate myself, and wish I could stay sober, and think I have to get drunk, and feel like people don't understand. I know how that is. I know how it is to wish that your life would just end. I know how it is to wish that there was an easy way out. And in my experience there is an easy way out: pray to something. Ask for help. Accept the help, and then think about how you want to be.
What I've come to believe is that you are God. You are an immortal soul who is a part of the totality, which you could call the totality God, but it can't really be separated into individual parts. You are part of the totality. You are, just like God, a powerful creator. You have made your life the way it is today because, on the deepest level, that's how you want it to be, because it gives you the opportunity, it inspires more of your creations. This is my own spiritual belief, my way of making sense of my life, and you're welcome to take what's useful and leave the rest.
Why I do this every day
The challenge is why I'm here doing this. Seven years ago, I was on the edge of taking my own life and feeling hopeless. I share this every day to let you know that there's hope, and I do it so I don't forget, either.
I remember my daughter was throwing up one day, and I was like, God, why is life like this? Not just my child, but there are thousands of people's children who are starving today, who are going to die today or soon. And I'm like, why? Why is this earth so full of so much pain and so much frustration, so much challenge? Things like genocides, why is it like this? And the answer I got was, so you can help each other. It's these things that challenge us that really bring us together. It's my alcoholism that has brought me to Alcoholics Anonymous, that's brought me to sharing these things. It's the things that have most hurt and been most challenging that are, ironically, some of the greatest gifts I have to share. When the world feels like too much, this is the same thing I come back to: that even when the world feels hopeless, we give value to people, and that's where the meaning is.
Someone said, I love the positivity. So I want to share where I'm taking all of this. What I'm loving is splitting these streams up. My intention is to be live consistently in the late morning into the early afternoon, so you can expect me at the same time. What I'm doing first is a stream like this, just where we're chatting and talking, with no game at all, so there are no distractions.
What I'm really enjoying is focusing on one thing at a time. Right now I'm totally focused on the conversation, on the comments, on whatever I have to say to give you that good vibe, that positive energy. Because there are a lot of you for whom that's what you really want, and I've got a huge passion for sharing it. So I generally do the just-chatting portion at the beginning, and then later I switch to gaming. That way, if you missed it, you can look back and see whenever I've tagged it as just hanging out, see the topic we're talking about, and listen back in.
Gaming as a way to feel better and recover
One person, Biggie Jameson, shared that he's a recovering heroin addict, three and a half years in recovery, and that gaming helps save his life. What I love about gaming is that it's a thing I can do that helps me feel better, if I play the right game. So I set my intention: I want to play whatever game is going to help me feel better today.
In my experience, gaming can absolutely save your life. The most basic way to recover is to feel better. To me, being in recovery is all about feeling better, loving myself, and enjoying my life, and gaming is a lot of fun. It gave me a new focus for my time. Gaming is a great way to fill your time. I suggest just taking a look at how you're feeling before and after you play a game. I was feeling really excited and joyful playing Call of Duty, and if a game like Warzone leaves you feeling good and you're excited to play it and having fun most of the time, that's good, keep playing it. But if you're noticing you're frequently getting ragey and upset and annoyed during a game, those are often signs that you're feeling worse as a result of playing.
I apply the same check to books. When I listen to a book, it takes me about 10 or 20 minutes to feel out whether, as I'm listening, I'm feeling better or feeling worse. Am I feeling kind of bored, like I don't care about this book? Someone recommended a book recently, and the first 20 minutes, I'm just shaking my head, like, nah, this is not the right radio station for me. I have a policy that if I'm going to say something that could be viewed as negative about something, I'd rather not point it out specifically; whereas if I'm going to lift something up, I'll focus on it. So I'll just say it wasn't on my wavelength. I'm a big believer that I am the creator, and this book was telling me, you are not God, you are not the creator, and I'm like, nah, I'm good, I'm going to return that and listen to another one. I started another book right after, same thing, not feeling it. Then I started a third book, and that third book got me. If you want to follow more of the conversations like this that I keep going around emotions, recovery, and feeling good, you can watch my newest videos in my Life playlist.
What I've found helps me enjoy a game is this: if I'm just enjoying playing a game and learning it, that's a good experience. But where I find I get the most joy, especially in competitive games, is when I've got natural skills and abilities there. I'm good at Call of Duty because I've played so many hours of first-person shooters, but I've noticed my natural skills and abilities are not most conducive to me being the best Call of Duty player. I do a lot better in Warzone than I do just playing multiplayer.
Finding the game your mind is built for
With a game like Magic: The Gathering, my natural talents and abilities are best suited to it. When you're playing where your natural talents and abilities are, then it tends to be really fun, especially when you can play against other people with similar skill. Someone mentioned that at 43, his reflexes and hand-eye coordination aren't what they used to be, that the extra 500 milliseconds in reaction time makes him a scrub. That's exactly why I feel it's so important to show myself playing other games, because it's frustrating if you take pride in and really want to be good at a game, and you're experiencing that decline.
I really like to be just incredible at the things I do. It was often frustrating, or disappointing, to see that no matter how much I was playing Call of Duty, I wasn't getting that much better at things like gun skill. I think there's a better way for me to use my mind. I'm playing Magic: The Gathering Arena, and in the first month I'm already up into Platinum. Bronze, Silver, Gold, Platinum, and I'm on my way to Diamond. I see that if I put as many hours into Magic as I put into Call of Duty, I could probably be one of the best Magic players in the world, because my mind works well with a strategy card game where there's no hand-eye coordination. Occasionally you might misclick on something, but it's purely mental. It's about calculating things, like if I have 24 lands in my deck, what are the odds I'm going to draw one? It's about math, about how things work together, memorizing cards, thinking about how things interact, seeing ahead how the game's going to go. I'm really good at all of that.
I like games that keep the brain thinking. I like Gwent for the same reason. I get the most joy when I can play where my natural talents and abilities are. That, to me, is a big part of choosing what to do with your time: find the place where your strengths line up with what you love.
Books, the Bible, and the right timing for things
Someone mentioned that, for them, the most interesting, hardest, and most intimidating read is the Bible. I've heard a lot of praise for the Bible. I've read a good bit of it. When I was reading it before, I found it wasn't really resonating with me at that time. Now, I could read it today, and I might be like, oh my God, I've got to read this thing all the way through. What I consistently encourage is, if you find a book that is really good for you, read it, live it, practice it.
My joy seems to be in reading new things all the time. I generally don't like to read the same thing I've already read, which means I haven't read most of the Bible. I might enjoy listening to it, though. I've only ever tried to read the Bible in hard copy. I might consider listening to it one day. Format matters, because I read and look at so much that I prefer to listen. I'm reading comments all day, and when you're playing games like Magic, you're reading a lot. So I prefer to get my inspiration in audio form, while I'm driving, walking, or doing something kind of mindless, so my hands are free to do something else.
It helps to understand that each of us has our own personal desires. The Bible, for some of us, may be a book we need to read, and want to read, and love to read every day, and for other people it might be the Torah, or some Buddhist book. For me, I generally like to listen to a new book, read things once, and then read something similar, and keep doing that. I rarely read a book more than once, but I might listen to the Bible.
And there's timing for things in life, too. I tried to read the Bible in the middle of my alcoholism before, and I started from the beginning. I remember the story about the man and his daughters, and I'm like, all right, this book is clearly not for me right now, because this is outrageous. I didn't read to the end. There are times for things. You'll notice that if there's something you really loved before, and then you go back and watch it, or read it, or listen to it again, you might be surprised, like, oh, I don't know how I liked this so much before. Someone shared, listening to the Bible is definitely a way to go, and choose a plan that has a theme so you can get more of what you may be looking for, which I appreciate.
People asked about my favorite book of all time, and my favorite book is whatever book I'm reading. If you want to talk about the authors who've affected me most, The Power of Now by Eckhart Tolle made a huge difference in my life; it helped me start getting a basic understanding of how my mind works. The book Alcoholics Anonymous made a massive difference, reading 45 stories of other people who'd recovered from alcoholism, and reading the instructions on how I could do the same. And Wayne Dyer's The Power of Intention made a huge difference in my life as well.
Lisa said, once your mind is open, you get a revelation, and it drags you further; that's what a good book does for you. Yes, and I've had a lot of amazing revelations reading books.
Appreciating how everyone else lives
What I'm so grateful for is that I can appreciate and take value from how everybody else lives. Sometimes it's taking value and thinking, oh, I don't want to live that way. Other times it's thinking, hmm, maybe I want to try that. And other times it's thinking, yes, that looks great, I'm living like that too, or I'd like to live like that, how do I do that?
It's okay if we have different preferences. That's part of what I'm grateful for. We're all here challenging each other, helping each other, and learning from each other. The very things that have hurt the most and challenged us the most turn out to be some of the greatest gifts we have to share. So whether it's an uncomfortable moment with your kids before school, an argument with your spouse, a loss, a health challenge, a craving, or just a hard day, the path I keep coming back to is the same: let go of the story, feel the emotion fully and let it out, love and forgive yourself, get excited for your next chance to do it differently, and focus relentlessly on exactly how you want things to be.
If this resonated with you and you'd like to go deeper, you can join me and a whole community of people practicing this together inside the Jerry Banfield Family, where I share more of what's working in my life and answer questions like the ones above.