You’re listening to the Transform Your Life from the Inside Out podcast. Starting next week, the new title will be Brainwashed: Exit the Human Lie with Jim Fortin. This week’s episode is titled Stop Being Controlled by Your Feelings, Exit the Lie, number four. Now, when I say number four, that means I’m doing a whole series here, and this is the fourth in the series. I think back to many years ago, to a coach of mine. Her name was Dr. Lori Emery, and she said to me, if you actually work from your feelings, you’re going to find yourself stuck in a ditch. Working with a shaman for many years, he has often said to me, a life spent in your feelings is a wasted life.
Now, in this episode, we’re going to talk about feelings, and your feelings are lying to you, but they’re not lying to you on purpose. The reality and the truth is your feelings are not giving you the facts. And realize this: your feelings aren’t facts, but notice how often your feelings make a decision for you. And most of us treat our feelings like proof aacnd truth. We think, if I feel it, it must be true. But notice that. It’s not the truth. So in this episode, we’re going to talk about how your feelings can appear as evidence, but they’re not always true. And we’re going to look at how your feelings can lead you to bad decisions and even from what part of you, your entire being, you’re making the feelings from. So it’s my objective to help you start making better choices and better decisions aside from your feelings. So if you’d like to do that, keep listening.
Hi, I’m Jim Fortin and you’re about to start transforming your life from the inside out with this podcast. I’m widely considered the leader in subconscious transformation, and I’ve coached super achievers all around the world for over 25 years. Here you’re going to find no rah-rah motivation and no hype because this podcast is a combination of brain science, transformational psychology, and ancient wisdom all rolled into one to take your life to levels you’ve never thought possible.
Okay, talking about feelings and you know, the name of the podcast now is Brainwashed: Exit the Human Lie. And the lie for a lot of us is we believe what we feel is the truth, but it’s not. It’s simply what we’re feeling in that moment. So in this episode, we want to start exiting these lies, the feelings that we’re living from. And again, we want to make more powerful choices and live in a more powerful way and a more free way.
Now, as children, we were taught to trust your gut. And there’s a place for that, because I’m not talking about that in this episode. But we’ve been taught to trust your gut, follow your heart. And here’s a big one: we are taught, and it’s a big buzz phrase this day and age, and I agree to some extent, but again, I’m going to go a different direction in this episode. We are taught that your feelings are valid. Now, that is true. So understand that your feelings are valid. However, somewhere along the way, we turned valid, are you ready, we turned valid into accurate.
Notice that for a moment. No one, I’m laughing because this applies to most all of us. No one generally stops in a moment when they’re having these feelings about things, and we know they’re valid because we’re having the feelings. But generally, no one stops and says, wait, okay, are these feelings valid? And the big thing: are they accurate? Specifically, how this can be a benefit to you, what you’re learning here, is I want to personalize this. We feel a particular way about ourself. Everyone does. We all have feelings about ourself. And most people, this is a reality, we feel that we are either inadequate in some way or we’re going to be rejected, we’re going to be abandoned because there’s something wrong with us, we don’t fit in in some way. And many of us accept these feelings as truth: our feelings of abandonment and our feelings of inadequacy. And this is all many times, you know, these feelings, they translate into our self-worth, and then we feel bad about ourself. But notice what I’m saying here. Just because you feel something about yourself, are your feelings valid? Yes, your feelings are valid. But are your feelings accurate? Is it accurate that you’re worse than everyone else? Is it accurate that you’re not as good as other people or everyone else? And no, it’s not accurate. But notice when you work from the feelings, we automatically, through default, we make it literally, this is the truth, it’s accurate for us. When in truth, it’s not accurate. So we’re living from a lie.
Okay, now talking about your feelings. How do we create our feelings and how are they made? Now, they’re made through a past history. And if you look at your life, you know, something will happen in your life, whatever it might be. And then whatever happens, this something will trigger an old reaction from your past. It can be, and if you’re married, you understand this. It can be a tone, a tone of voice. It can be silence. It can be a bill. It can be someone’s body language. And if you’re married, it’s that look. You know that look, right? If you’ve been in a relationship for any amount of time, you know, I’m laughing because this applies to most of us. Your partner can look at you in a certain way and say nothing, absolutely nothing, but they’ll give you a look and that look will trigger you. And that’s your body. That’s not your soul. That is your body responding to its past history, past thoughts about that look and what that look means.
Now, the next thing that happens is your individual mind notices the feeling and you might not even consciously ask this. But the mind is asking, the individual mind is asking, why do I feel like this? And notice that. Anytime you get that look, we generally don’t even stop and ask ourselves, why am I feeling this way? Until we stop and ask, why am I feeling this way? So what happens is our mind, boom, automatically, our mind looks into our past to give a meaning to this feeling that comes from this look. And we’re looking for the nearest and most reasonable explanation from our past as to why we’re feeling this way. And then we say, well, we’re feeling this way and it’s valid. But what we never do is say, is it accurate?
And you’ve had this in many areas of your life. You know, the examples that I just gave you, but maybe it’s your partner at dinner. Maybe it’s getting a bill, like I said. But let’s look at your partner at dinner for a moment. Now, if you’ve been in the relationship for any amount of time, you know exactly your partner, you know their mannerisms, their look, their silence, their movements, their facial expressions. You know them. This is what I call you have calibrated to them. And then you put meaning on all the calibration. But let’s say you’re having dinner with your partner. And for whatever reason, they’re just quiet that evening. It can have nothing to do with you. But notice you. I’m sharing this experience because it relates to me personally from a time in my past. If people were quiet around me, I used to initially think, uh-oh, what did I do? Because part of my old conditioning and old brainwashing as a small child, I used to work from that. For example, when I was a small kid and I got called to the principal’s office, I remember in third or fourth grade, I got called to the principal’s office and I started thinking, uh-oh, what did I do wrong? When in reality, I did nothing wrong. The principal wanted to give me an award for something that I did, air quote, right.
I used to hold a belief and a feeling that if people were normally interactive with me, and let’s say they get really quiet, inordinately quiet, in a situation they normally wouldn’t be quiet in, in that moment, I would start thinking, are they mad? Did I do something wrong? What’s going on here? Are we okay? And notice what I would do. And I’m sharing me because we’re all alike. And you have some example of this somewhere in your own life. But just because my partner was quiet, I would turn that into an entire story about why they were quiet. And then generally for me, I’d go off the edge of the cliff and I would make that story about me and that I was doing something wrong. And then I would have feelings about it. And then for me, those feelings sometimes might matriculate into anger. Like, what the fuck did I do? I didn’t do anything. And I never said that. But I’m sharing with you so that maybe you can see yourself in me because, again, we’re all the same.
Another example for you might be maybe, you know, a bill. Something comes in the mail and you get a bill. And you get that bill and notice maybe some fear creeps up in you. Maybe that bill even says, are you ready, maybe it even says IRS if you’re an American. And it says Department of Revenue on the top left-hand side. And notice what happens before you even look at the letter. Your chest gets all tight. You’re like, oh, shit, this is from the IRS. I’m afraid to open this. And then you might go into, you know what, I could never get ahead. Or as soon as I actually get money, the money goes right back out. Or money comes in, or I’m never going to be secure, or I can’t afford this, or how am I going to pay for this? And I have all these other bills over here, and I can’t pay this bill. Why is life so damn hard? Et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And notice this: notice how you feel. And recognize this: the feeling comes, and then after the feeling comes, we put an entire story to that feeling to explain the feeling.
What I’m wanting you to notice in this moment is that feeling generally comes from something that triggered it, and what triggered it could have happened 10, 20, 30 years ago. And we react today, right now, as if that feeling is real, and we are experiencing the feeling, but that feeling came from a trigger that’s 20 years old. Now, the challenge for a lot of us, I did this for many years: once we get into the feeling, in that moment, once we start engaging the feeling, our body takes it as proof. And what we’re really saying is, okay, I’m in this feeling and my body’s giving me proof because it’s getting all tight and I’m upset and everything. And we start building a case, as I started alluding to, we start building a case to support the feeling. And then what we do without even recognizing it, like jumping off the high diving board, jumping into the feeling, jumping into the stories, we make all of this real when it came from the past.
So what I want you to recognize today is that when we have that feeling and then we get into the stories about the feeling, that becomes for many of us our identity. And we just say, that’s who I am, not even recognizing that’s not who you are today. That’s the experience you’re having today. And you’re having that experience from these triggers from something that happened 20, 30 years ago, but you’re having feelings about it today and you justify the feelings and then you base your identity today on something that happened 20, 30, 40 years ago. And that identity could be things like, I’m just an angry person and I’m quick to anger. Now that’s not mine, but some people say that. Another person could say, well, I’m just a nervous person, I’m just an anxious person. And I said earlier in this episode, a big one for a lot of people: I’m not good enough. And then they tie their feelings to some event that created that thought in the past. And when they had that thought in the past, they tied feelings to it, which were completely valid, but not accurate. And even today, this could have happened 10, 20, 30 years ago. They can feel the same way today, and they never stop and ask, okay, I’m not feeling good enough. Now, I’m feeling inferior to these people around me. Can I validate the feelings? Yes, I can. I mean, I’m feeling this. But are they accurate? Is it accurate that I’m not as good as other people? And you know what, no, it’s not accurate. It’s simply this case building, this illusion that we’ve created in our mind. And this illusion comes from our old brainwashing.
You know, you think about, for example, maybe there’s this path and you’ve been walking the same path every day. And without recognizing the path, you used to walk across grass and you keep walking and walking and you’ve got, you know, you’ve got a shortcut through the grass, but you’ve created the pathway. Well, the more we live as if our feelings that come from our triggers are true, we create neural pathways in the brain. They become habituated. And then it just becomes a habit for us to believe that we are not good enough, we’re never going to get ahead, we’re never going to be secure or whatever it might be for you. You’re the one who created every bit of this in your mind, but you don’t even recall it. You don’t recall when you started it. You’ve done it over and over. You’ve validated the feelings. You’ve made them accurate. And then you will live in that place for 10, 20, 30 years. And that’s brainwashing. But recognize this: you are brainwashing yourself. And you’re repeating it yourself over and over and over again, meaning these psychological strategies, and you’re not even noticing that you do it.
So your key point here: every time that you obey your feelings, even when they’re not accurate, every single time when you obey your feelings, even when they are not accurate, you make those feelings more believable. Ponder that.
Okay, so here’s what I request you understand: you can have the feeling, but you don’t have to believe it. And that’s your turning point in this episode, is that you can feel an emotion fully and still not believe what it’s telling you. Maybe you can feel it in your body, but remember this, after what we just talked about, you don’t have to buy the story. You don’t have to buy the story because your story is just your analytical mind trying to validate and substantiate the feeling. And where I choose to stay is in the peace and in the calm, aside from the feelings, and especially aside from the stories.
And a metaphor that I use in my own life, like for example, right now today, you probably can’t hear it, but it’s thundering outside. I live in Colorado, and we are having the Super El Nino right now. It’s been raining every day like cats and dogs. As I look outside right now, it’s rainy, and it’s lightning, and there’s thunder outside. Now, the truth is, this storm is going to move through. It’s going to pass. But you know what? Even right now, and even after it passes, the sky is still the sky. The takeaway for you is that your worth and your value at a soulful level are still your worth and your value despite the storm, and the storm can be an analogy for the feelings in that moment, and these feelings come from your past.
Now, I have a profound question to ask you. Who or what, these feelings of inadequacy or these feelings of anger or whatever the feelings are that, again, probably are not accurate, but the feelings, the question I have for you that’s profound: who or what is noticing the feelings? Think about that. I’m going to say it a little slower. You have these feelings, and you think the feelings are you, but they’re not you. They’re simply feelings that you are experiencing. And back to the question: who or what is the one noticing the feelings? Because there was a part of you. So for example, the sky example that I used just a couple of minutes ago, the sky was there and it’s been there for, I don’t know how many hundreds of millions or billions of years prior to this storm. And there’s a part of you that existed before the feelings that you are experiencing now. And that part of you will exist after the feelings that you’re currently experiencing right now.
Are you starting to recognize you are not your feelings? Your feelings are something that happened from your human experience. Your feelings happen from your past. We validate the feelings and then we make the feelings true and we make them accurate, and many times the feelings hurt us, like I’m not good enough and I’m not worthy and I don’t deserve, and then we actually, again, we don’t look at the accuracy of that, and then we live in those feelings for an entire lifetime. But that noticing part of you, because I asked you a couple of minutes ago, what part of you is noticing the feelings, that noticing part of you is the part of you that was never brainwashed. It was never programmed by culture. It was never programmed by your past. It was never programmed by other people. That part of you that’s noticing, that is your awareness. That is your soul. That is your consciousness. And that is your consciousness being aware of the old stories of this container, this human identity that you call you. It’s your soul noticing the bad feelings. That’s like the sky noticing the storm, the metaphor that I’ve been using throughout this episode. But you know what? The storm doesn’t affect the sky. The sky has always been there as has been your soul and the power and the freedom and the expansiveness and divinity of your soul.
Now, what I want to share with you also, this is not about suppressing your feelings. This is not about pushing them way down. And this is not about saying, ooh, don’t feel that. It’s simply a new approach and a new understanding. And my whole point is, like I said earlier, you don’t have to take orders. You don’t have to take marching orders. You don’t have to obey your feelings. Always remember back to the metaphor that I gave you of the sky and the storm. The sky doesn’t take orders from the storm. And the same thing about you: your soul does not take orders from your human feelings. But yet most of us, like Don Javier was saying, most of us spend our lives in our feelings, and we waste our life spending our lives in our feelings. So your takeaway for this part of our conversation is you don’t have to silence the feelings. You don’t have to do anything. All you simply have to do is recognize, again, the metaphor, the sky and the storm, and recognize that you are the sky, not the storm. Your soul is the sky, the blue sky, the infinite blue sky, not, well, until you go to outer space, so to speak, and that’s physics, but I think you know what I mean. And so all we simply have to do is stop believing and stop listening to the feelings.
Now, to something I said earlier, I do want to point out, your feelings are valid at times. And what I mean about that is many times people will think, well, I follow my gut and I go by my feelings and following my gut. But that’s all 3D. Beyond that is using your sense, S-E-N-S-E. And using your sense is using your higher mind and your higher knowing. But I want to point out, for a matter of safety here in this episode, sometimes your feelings are valid. Maybe you’re going to walk down an alley and you feel like, I don’t know about this, something doesn’t feel right about this. Well, in that moment, your feelings may be valid because they are protecting you.
I told someone today that I’m looking to bring this person onto the team. And I said, I’m not ready yet. Give me a couple of days. And I said, something doesn’t feel right yet. And when I said that to that person, what I meant was is I follow my feelings, but I dig deeper than my feelings. I kind of use them as like my first level alert. And then I go deeper: what is this feeling? What is it telling me? What’s behind it? Is this from my past history? Is this from my past learning? Is this part of my old identity? And then for me, I always go back to the metaphor of the blue sky again, because I know my soul operates beyond my feelings. So today, I told this person that I wasn’t ready to move forward yet, and I said something doesn’t feel right yet. Now, there was nothing related to this person that didn’t feel right. But what didn’t feel right is maybe going that direction with my business. So what I’m going to do is I’m going to sit with it for a couple of days, get quiet, listen to the internal voice, and see what comes to me.
You know, I want to share another thought here, and it’s something I can relate to. In 1987, I had clinical depression, anxiety, and panic attacks all in the same year and at the same time. Talk about a really challenging year for me. What I want to share with you is that we tend to, and I did, we tend to identify and make those experiences the totality of us soulfully. Again, the sky and the storm. In 1987, I was in a storm emotionally and in terms of my feeling. And I didn’t know what I’m sharing with you now. And I can look back and I can clearly see that the storm was not the sky. And what I want to point out, whatever medical attention you need, psychological care you need, please get it. But please recognize also, these feelings, these storms, this trauma that we say that we have, this depression and anxiety that we say that we have, it’s simply, are you ready, it’s simply chemistry. It is biological, neurological chemistry. Again, fourth time or fifth in this episode, go back to the storm and the blue sky. The chemistry is the storm, but there’s a blue sky beyond the storm. So it’s really important, please, because I care about your well-being: it’s not about brushing off the pain. It’s not about brushing off any suffering. It’s simply about this, and this may take a little practice for you: it’s about not letting the pain and the feelings make your decisions for you, because that’s where we get into trouble.
So a question you might be asking at this point is, should I just ignore my feelings? No, absolutely not. Now, earlier I said a couple of times, I talked about, are your feelings valid and accurate? Yes, they are valid because you have them. But simply what you want to look at is, are my feelings accurate, especially third time when it comes to matters of how I feel about myself? You can listen to them. You can ask your feelings questions. Just do not blindly obey your feelings because that is your brainwashing and something that happened to you many, many years ago.
Okay, let’s talk about how you can put this into action for yourself. Now, the next time a feeling comes, whether it be anxiety or anger or a feeling of I’m not good enough, anytime any of this comes to you, do not fight it and do not try to fix it. Back when I had the clinical depression many years ago and the anxiety, holy crap, I tried relentlessly to fix it. My coping mechanism, and this was probably, I don’t know what, 40 years ago, my coping mechanism was the same as a lot of people. For me, my coping mechanism back then was alcohol. Then I was drinking so much alcohol because I was trying to fix it. But what you want to start doing is conditioning yourself, reconditioning yourself, and simply saying, this is not me. It’s not the truth. This is simply my brain chemistry and my past. Repeat: this is not me. It’s not because it’s not. Your feelings are not you. You are the one observing your feelings. This is not me. It’s not the truth. This is simply my brain chemistry and my past.
Now, the reason that I request you say this aloud is because it helps you step outside the story. It helps you literally see the story. Like, for example, I can look out my window right now and I can see the storm. And if I were to fly over Colorado right now where I live, I could be at 40,000 feet and a blue sky and it’s blue up there. And I can look down and I can see the storm clouds and I can see the storm. And that’s what I’m giving you right here. When you can see the storm, when you can see the feelings and the feelings may be overwhelming and the feelings lie to you and then we act from the feelings. But when you can see the feelings from a different level and recognize that your feelings are just your brain chemistry, I’ll say it again, your feelings are your brain chemistry.
A friend of mine reached out to me yesterday and he went silent and he may be listening to this episode. He went silent for about three weeks and I’m texting him every day like, are you okay? And I was getting a little concerned. This person had some things happen in their past and I wanted to make sure they were okay. And for a month, I said, are you every day, every two or three days or four, whatever. But every week, I’m like, are you okay? And I check in like twice a week. Dude, where are you? Let me know you’re okay. And he responded back and said, that’s just my trauma response. Well, his trauma response is the storm, but his soul exists beyond the storm. And hopefully you can see this in your own life and the ways that your neurology and your biology drives you right into the storm when that’s all 3D. And we want to go beyond that to the place that I call the observer or the place that I call being aware. And being aware would be flying at 40,000 feet, being aware there is a storm below you. And when we can find ourself in that place, that is when we start living in peace and power and freedom.
You can ask yourself, when you’re experiencing any of this stuff you call trauma, you can ask yourself this very question, and I constructed it this way for a reason: These feelings that I’m feeling, where do I feel them in my body? Where do I feel them in my body? And the second you ask that question, you’re going to recognize you’re in the storm. Why? Because you’re in the body. You’re identifying with the body when you are soulfully not the body. You’re the blue sky up above the body. You’re the blue sky up above the storm. Once we start recognizing that, that is when the peace comes to us.
Now, this question that I just gave you, where do I feel this in my body or where am I experiencing this in my body? You do this a few times, I promise you. Even if you think I’m full of crap right now, just do it, okay? When you do this a couple of times, what will happen is you will actually, you’ll recognize how easy it is to move beyond the feelings and you’ll realize the grip of the old feelings in particular, I’ll never get ahead, I’m not good enough, people are going to leave me, and all the associated feelings, you will start to drop all that negativity and all those feelings, the negative and the bad feelings.
So recognize this, okay? Your feelings are not your enemy. Are your feelings valid? Yes, because human beings have feelings. We just don’t want to live in the feelings. And many people wallow in their feelings for a lifetime. But the question you ask yourself, and you can even do that if you want to do a shortcut here, is whenever you’re feeling bad about something, and I know you will this week, it can be the upcoming midterm elections and you’re feeling bad about it. It can be your money and you’re feeling bad about it. It can be a marriage and you’re feeling bad about it. Ask yourself, okay, are these valid feelings? Well, yes. But next, ask yourself, are they accurate feelings? Do I have to obey these feelings? I can hear them because I can hear my voices, but do I have to listen to them? Because you are not your feelings, you are the one noticing them.
And the great lie is that your feelings control you, as I’ve said, I think three times now, and you have to control the feelings. I can’t tell you the amount of times I had feelings and I would get reactive because I had some kind of feeling and I never stopped and said, wait, okay, are these feelings accurate? No, I never even questioned it. And I know that if I never questioned it, you probably never questioned it as well. And when you can get your mind around what I’m sharing with you right now, in that moment, you start to live from conscious awareness.
Okay, we’re going to keep going with this series, and the series is called Exit the Lie. And I was planning on doing, I don’t know, something like 16 different episodes. This is episode number four. But be sure to come back next week, because next week I want to talk about something that I know that you want. And I know you want it because I desire it. We all desire it. What I’m going to talk about next week is power and freedom and where they come from. And when I say power, I don’t mean external human power. I mean true power.
Now, one more thing before we go today. Tens of thousands of people will listen to this episode. But the question is why? And I want to say that I’m grateful that you guys do listen. I’m very grateful and I’m honored to be able to serve. But why? Why do you listen? Well, the reason that you listen is because, plain and simple, you want something. But the question is, what do you want? What you want, without recognizing it, are the things that I just mentioned. You want the power and you want the freedom. Ponder that. Because your entire life, maybe you’ve never recognized it, but your entire life you spend in pursuit of power and freedom. And again, when I say power, I don’t mean external power like political power or financial power. We want, all of us, we want internal power, which is courage and the power to choose our life and the power of freedom. And you were born with those things. But the cultural brainwashing took those things away from you.
And what I request you do is let’s start escaping that old brainwashing. Take the brand new brainwashed quiz that we just posted. Even if you took the old one, maybe three, four, five, six months ago, we have a new quiz. It’s called Brainwashed: Exit the Human Lie. And what you want to do is go to https://jimfortin.com/brainwashed and take the quiz to discover just how brainwashed and indoctrinated you have become to society and the cultural institutions and the politics and the media and the family and how much power all of this has stripped away from you.
Okay, thanks for listening and I’ll catch you over on another episode. Bye-bye.
