You’re not supposed to be.
I want to offer that life and our human experience is 50/50 – 50% “good/positive” and 50% “bad/negative.”
I think we’ve been taught incorrectly that our lives should be good most, if not all, of the time. So when something happens that’s in the “bad” 50%, we think something has gone terribly wrong. But if that 50% is supposed to be there, has anything really gone wrong?
If we felt happy all the time, we would have to feel happy even through things like the death of a loved one, an accident, an illness, a relationship betrayal. And all of these things are part of the human experience – things we basically sign up for when we’re born. So, unfortunately, we won’t be able to avoid them or the emotions that come along with them.
Our emotions are an indicator of what’s going on for us. To be authentic, to have a true relationship with our life, means also to be willing to experience negative emotion 50% of the time. If we’re willing to do that without trying to escape it, we’ll remove all the buffers in our life, and at the same time, we’ll remove all the negative consequences that come with them.
What are buffers? When we buffer, we use something to distract ourselves from feeling an uncomfortable emotion. A buffer could be over-eating, over-working, over-drinking, over-Instagraming, over-Netflixing, over-spending, over-cleaning. We do these actions instead of allowing and processing an uncomfortable emotion like boredom, loneliness, shame, fear, or jealousy.
What are buffers? When we buffer, we use something to distract ourselves from feeling an uncomfortable emotion. A buffer could be over-eating, over-working, over-drinking, over-Instagraming, over-Netflixing, over-spending, over-cleaning. We do these actions to create false pleasure instead of allowing and processing an uncomfortable emotion like boredom, loneliness, shame, fear, or jealousy.
We engage in false pleasure to “force” ourselves into the “positive” 50%. Then we think we’re OK and we avoid doing the harder things (like processing our feelings), and instead, we gain weight, we get hangovers, we go into debt or don’t meet our savings goals, we waste time consuming other people’s content when we could be creating our own, or doing something to take care of ourselves, like going for a walk, run, doing yoga, meditating, or cooking a healthy meal.
When we allow ourselves to feel the discomfort of the other 50%, we will decrease our buffers and the negative consequences they produce. In fact, when we allow ourselves to really feel and be with our emotions, we get to know ourselves in a much deeper way.
What happens when we get to know ourselves in a much deeper way? We start finding the causes of our unhappiness, and then we can start to change them, if we want to.
This is sustainable, unlike engaging in the false pleasures we’ve been using to buffer and dealing with the consequences that come along with them.
For example, when we limit our drinking, we don’t experience hangovers and we get to feel good in our body. When we watch our eating, we get the pleasure of not worrying about our weight. These results are real, ongoing pleasures.
Your turn: How would you think about your life differently if you accepted that life is 50/50? What if nothing has gone wrong when you’re in the other 50% that’s not “good”? What would you be more willing to do for yourself if you embraced the 50/50 of life?
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The Healing Modalities 