Feeling good all the time?
“The point is not to feel good, but to be good at feeling”
Michael Brown
The intention of this blog post is to applaud you for crying, screaming, kicking, being gloomy, turning red with anger, saying NO and not smiling.
We all want to feel good, but it is unrealistic to feel good all the time.
Ignoring our emotions and not giving them space is not validating what we feel.
If we don’t do it ourselves, who will?
We cannot delegate feeling. So, I invite you to give yourselves the space to feel the most uncomfortable emotions, without being eager to end the sensation.
It’s scary to feel emotions that we consider “negative”. Just feeling them a little bit makes us believe that we are going into a black hole from which we will not be able to get out. However, partly, it is the constant depressing of emotions that ends up leading us into very deep states of disconnection and suffering.
Rest assured, you will not stay there.
It is not the pain that creates the suffering but the desperation to avoid the pain that creates the suffering!
- Sit
- Feel
- Feel a little more
- No rush
- Notice the emotion in your body
- See what happens 😉
At first it feels as if we are the emotion, but you will see that as we give it space it takes on a smaller dimension, we notice that we are not the emotion and that we have the capacity to feel it without being overwhelmed.
This all applies even to the most “spiritual”. Buddha didn’t say that a realized being never feels anger, sadness or pain.
He said a realized being is someone that when they feel an emotion, they know they are not that emotion.
Instead of
- I’m angry: there is anger in me
- I’m sad: there is sadness in me
- I’m in pain: there is pain in me
- I’m joyful: there is joy in me
Don’t fool yourself!
We think of resilience as bouncing back from life’s down turns. However, this is just the final piece of the equation. There have been times that I’ve bounced back so fast that it has gone almost unnoticed. I’m not sure that meant I was being resilient. I swept all emotions under the rug and pushed through. However, I didn’t unblock and come out stronger, but with a pile of stuck emotions that later found their way out through constant “unexplained” anger or sadness, or via overreactions with random people. Resilience requires you to bounce back having integrated the learning brought by the pain. It means that you have increased your inner strength. For this to happen, you must dive deep into your emotions by acknowledging and giving them space. Feel them with no mediocrity, let your body assimilate the information they bring and then, bounce back.
Ah, just in case you have a doubt… emotions are processed in the body, not in the mind!
The taboo
We often learn to avoid or minimise our emotions early in life because we interpret that our parents – or caregivers – could not deal with them or because it was frowned upon. In addition, we have experienced situations where others unnerve, reject, ignore or invalidate our “negative” feelings and emotional states.
There is a social taboo against not being “ok”.
For example, many of us have learned anger is something not to be expressed. So, we repress it, are ashamed if we express it, and/or judge others when they do. However, it is not that black or white. There is healthy and unhealthy anger. Healthy anger, is when you express it to set a boundary defence in response to something in the present moment “you are in my space, get out, don’t touch me”. Unhealthy anger, is when you don’t express it in the moment, ruminate in the feeling, nourish stories around it and feed the toxicity inside you.
Emotional intelligence is sexy!
The more comfortable we are with feeling, the more comfortable the people around us will be. We even give them permission to do it too, and energetically, it can become part of our charm 😉
If you’re still not convinced, I’ll leave you with this:
We suffer because we don’t want to feel pain. It is the avoidance of pain that has nourished the collective block and belief that suffering is inevitable to life. While feeling is the antidote for suffering and, even more, the way to joy.
If we are not available for sadness and anger, we cannot be available for happiness and joy. It’s impossible!
P.S. If you haven’t already done so, download for free and enjoy the e-book: How to achieve the habits you want?
