Today, a story of how a seemingly trivial incident can drag you down for years.

One time I noticed that every time people around me were singing and I tried to sing with them, I felt sad. In fact I felt this…. well, the only way I knew how to describe it was a lump in my throat. It came with a feeling of being held back, drug down.

Odd as it was, this feeling had been with me for so long, I almost didn’t notice it. But it was coming up more and more. Something was up. Finally it occurred to me I might want to find out what it was about. Maybe I could get rid of it.

I learned a technique from Abby Rohrer, who explained to me that a lot of stuff that rattles around in our heads (and our hearts) simply comes from not knowing how to listen to ourselves.

In this technique, you sit down with a notebook and write down a question you want to ask yourself. You write it down with your dominant hand – ie if you’re right handed, write it with your right hand.

But then you put the pen in your “wrong” hand and answer it.

Abby explained to me that the mental effort required to write with the wrong hand ties up the logical part of your brain. That logical side is overpowering the emotions that aren’t getting heard. Writing with the wrong hand literally gets you in touch with the weaker side of yourself. The one you’ve been ignoring.

She was very insistent that when you do this, you have to write down whatever comes to mind no matter how irrational or nonsensical it seems, and just follow it.

So I wrote down: “Perry why do you feel that lump in your throat?”

I put the pen in the other hand and began to scrawl out an answer.

As I did this, I began to see this picture of an embankment next to a highway. I immediately thought “This is stupid, what does this have to do with anything?” but I did what Abby said and kept going.

In my mind’s eye, I see the grass in a ditch, then pavement and the white line at the edge. Then I see the highway and then I see IT.

IT was…. a dead cat.

It was our cat that we had when I was 6 year old, Mitsy. Mitsy had just had kittens and she disappeared one day and nobody could find her. A few days later, there she was 2 blocks from our house, smashed flat on the highway.

The instant that I saw the dead cat in my imagination, I ALSO felt that lump in my throat – that sickening feeling of sadness.

That’s what that sad feeling was, and that I felt when I was singing. I was still upset about a dead cat from being 6 years old.

I asked Abby what to do about that. She said, “It’s real simple. You were sad about your cat but you didn’t let yourself grieve. Now the thing to do is ‘Finish the feeling.’ You just need to finish processing the feelings you had about your cat. Go back into that head space of being six and feel everything you didn’t let yourself feel back then. Feel them until they go away.”

So one morning before I got out of bed, I just laid there and went back in my mind to being six years old. I remembered what it was really like. I put myself into the middle of that sensation and felt it very intensely for awhile…

Then after some time, the feeling passed and it was as though the sadness just evaporated.

I was done. And I have never felt that sadness anymore.

But guess what, I had carried that around for more than 30 years and never knew it.

My body was trying to tell me but I wasn’t listening. Finally I did. And I felt the shift.

Now this might not seem like a big deal but it was a big enough deal to make me feel sad when I was supposed to feel happy – not once but over and over again.

Plus it was a MUCH bigger deal than that, because later I did the same thing:

My mom went “bipolar” when I was 12; after a year and a half of bedlam they put her on meds and she was *never* the same after that. I lost half of mom. But I never grieved it. Like the cat, I just shoved it down and went on.

My dad died when I was 17 and I did the same thing — again. I shoved down the feelings and moved on.

And you know what? When I was 37 and suddenly hit the skids and didn’t understand why…. this was why.

I’d spent the last 20 years carrying around sadness and garbage. I was emotionally constipated and didn’t know it. But yes it did catch up to me and only then did I begin to learn how to listen to myself.

This was a big reason why even though I was doing well, I was really unhappy.

Doing well and still being unhappy and not knowing why — that really sucks.

So I sorted out all this garbage and I got a big benefit. You know what it was?

My intuition SKYROCKETED.

If you’re pretty good at business when you’re emotionally constipated, how good are you when you finally learn to listen to yourself?

For me it meant that decisions that used to take 20 minutes or 2 weeks now took 2 seconds. All I had to do was listen to my gut. My gut could do the thinking for me.

The pieces of your puzzle are very different than mine. But you’ve got a puzzle too.

Do you know how to listen to yourself?

If you’re getting “Memos from the head office,” are you able to hear them?

Perry Marshall

Inner Head Trash workshop Recordings
http://www.perrymarshall.com/financial/

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