What is a Good Life? #60
Healing Through Feeling with Matthew Zoltan
On the 60th episode of the What is a Good Life? podcast, I am delighted to introduce our guest, Matthew Zoltan. Matthew is a former monk, an author, and co-founder of Undo App - an app that helps you rediscover what makes us human through natural meditation.
In this conversation, Matthew takes us on his journey from being a monk for much of his 20s before realising his practice and methods weren’t supporting him to fully engage with the felt experience of his body. That for him, certain ideologies led to disassociations from the body and its experience.
He shares with us the importance of appreciating life sensorily, how one can perceive the fully felt experience of life. We also discuss the role of our mental reactions in accentuating pain, as well as the problem with starting off from the belief that we are lacking and need to improve, suggesting that you are the perfect expression of everything you have been through.
Ultimately, Matthew points to the significance of exploring our pain and resolving our hurt, describing pain as aspects of ourselves we need to give attention to.
If you are having trouble with accepting yourself, embracing yourself as you presently are, or engaging with your feelings, this episode will give you a lot to consider. While Matthew may confront a lot of your beliefs, he is really highlighting the importance of connecting with our felt experience.
The weekly clip from the podcast (4 mins), my weekly reflection (3 mins), the full podcast (85 mins), and the weekly questions all follow below.
1. Weekly Clip from the Podcast
📣 My weekly conversation group takes place every Wednesday at 7pm (CET) on Zoom. It incorporates silence and authentic communication - sharing thoughts and experiences from what is emerging in the moment. It is completely free for now as it’s for a course I’m designing and I’m experimenting with different themes. Message me here to find out more or sign up.
2. My weekly reflection
If I were to distill Matthew's message in this conversation, it is that we unnecessarily complicate our lives by consistently avoiding our feelings. The more we sidestep our emotions, the more challenging it becomes to engage with our pain.
As we resist acknowledging our pain, life becomes more intricate, with our thoughts weaving narratives that reject the straightforward facts life presents in favour of what aligns with our preferences and beliefs.
Consequently, the farther we distance ourselves from our pain, the more we become lost in this life as we lose sight of aspects of ourselves that require attention.
In this day and age, considering the multitude of distractions available to numb our emotions—social media, gaming, gambling, porn, alcohol, prescription drugs, recreational drugs, food apps, dating apps, watching sports, or streaming platforms—it is conceivable that, beyond work, we scarcely allow ourselves a moment to feel and process our experiences at all.
With so many socially accepted ways to evade our feelings, there is an increased need to consciously allow our bodies to naturally process emotions. This doesn't necessarily require therapy, coaching, meditation, etc.; it may simply entail moments when we refrain from consuming new information or adding more input to our already overwhelmed processing capacities.
An awareness that we are in unprecedented times in terms of access to information, opinions, entertainment, and distraction is important in realising that adopting the status quo, in terms of the consumption of technological devices, will most likely leave us disconnected and lost in life.
If we leave little space in our lives to actually feel the consequences of our actions and notice the feedback we are getting from the world, we cut out a huge component of our sensory intelligence and experience to guide us into actions and reactions that would lead to a greater sense of acceptance and belonging in this life.
Instead, we are numbing our senses and then mainly falling back on our mental processes to interpret everything. A source of intelligence that is at times very limited in handling the complexity, paradox, subtlety, and nuance and that is often overly neurotic and insecure, catastrophising, and separating.
Particularly in times of greater uncertainty, like we are in now, this mode of predominantly interpreting the world is only making us more resistant to acknowledging things that don’t align with our pre-existing beliefs and making us more intolerant of each other when we are not in agreement.
In my experience, there has been little to no substitute for actually feeling my feelings with regards to bigger and sustained changes occurring in my life. When I have felt pain in my life, and given myself the space to really feel it and sit in it, very little comes close to effectively learning lessons than that.
It does not require me to tie neat intellectual bows around the experience; something is simply known now on an entirely different level, like a child who has touched a hot stove who doesn’t need to be lectured not to do it again.
As unpleasant and as painful as our life experience or the world can be at times, just as unpleasant as it can be staggeringly beautiful I guess, I remain optimistic of where more regularly engaging with our feelings / pain could bring us.
I see our pain as a great source of hope to inform and educate us on a better life for us, both individually and collectively. For me, it’s clear to see that the distraction from it or the constant mental interpretations and analysing of it aren’t as helpful as simply feeling and acknowledging pain, and life, as it is.
If you’d like to work with me individually as your coach, to awaken your own self-inquiry, message me here to a arrange a free 30-minute 1-on-1 consultation
3. Full Episode - Healing Through Feeling with Matthew Zoltan - What is a Good Life? #60
Click here for Apple and Google
4. This week’s Questions
What part of you is your pain presently attempting to draw your attention to?
Can you think of a specific example when your thinking significantly accentuated the duration or intensity of the pain you were experiencing?
About Me
I am a Coach based in Berlin, via Dublin, Ireland. I left behind a 15-year career in Capital Markets after I became extremely curious around answering some of the bigger questions in life. I started this project in 2021, for which I’ve now interviewed around 200 people, to provide people with the space to reflect on their own lives and to create content that would spark people’s own inquiry into this question. I am also trying to share more genuine expressions of the human experience, beyond the facades we typically project.
If you would like to work with me, or you simply want to get in touch, here’s my email and LinkedIn.