Tag: processing feelings

What do you REALLY want?

~ The Healing Modalities ~ Leave a comment

Allow yourself to desire.

Sometimes we don’t allow ourselves to tell the truth about what we REALLY want. 

We anticipate the feeling of disappointment ahead of time and think, “I’ll feel so disappointed if it doesn’t happen. I don’t want to feel disappointed, so I just won’t think about it.”

Is feeling disappointed a good reason to not allow ourselves to desire or want something? Disappointment is a vibration in our body that happens when we think something like, “It’s not happening,” or “This isn’t what I wanted,” or “It’s never going to work out.” 

Yes, disappointment is an uncomfortable feeling. If we know how to process our feelings, we can let disappointment flow through us instead of getting stuck. We can realize that as “bad” as disappointment feels, it is still just a vibration in our body that can pass through us if we allow it to. When we resist the feeling of disappointment is when it can seem stronger and more persistent than it needs to be. And what if we are willing to feel disappointed? It can stop being something scary to avoid.

When we want something, not getting it or not having it happen is the worst case scenario. And for some reason, the worst case scenario is usually what we think about. 

But what if we allowed ourselves to give the BEST case scenario equal air time in our thoughts? What’s the best case scenario of our desire? That we get what we want. That what we want happens. 

What might it be like to allow ourselves to fully desire something? Without the “what if it doesn’t happen?” part? What would that feel like? 

I want to offer that it can feel empowering and tingly and even FUN to allow ourselves to fully desire something. And who says the best case scenario won’t happen?

Your turn: What are you not allowing yourself to fully desire? Why? What might you create in your life if you allowed yourself to fully desire something? Are you open to playing with that idea?

Subscribe if you want to receive this content directly in your inbox.

Work with me: Want to see how self-care is transformative and can help create a more meaningful life in which you start committing to yourself and show up the way you want? I can show you how. I offer first-time seekers a complimentary 60-minute exploratory session. Sign up here.

What’s on your mind? It can be powerful to learn from each other and our common struggles when it comes to our practice of self-care–or just being a human being. If you have something you’re struggling with and would like some perspective, share it here. Your issue may be chosen and addressed in the next post–it’ll be totally anonymous.

“I should feel happy all the time”

~ The Healing Modalities ~ Leave a comment

Life is 50/50.

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 you felt happy all the time, you would have to feel happy even through things like the death of a loved one, an accident, an illness, someone betraying you. And all of these things, my friends, are part of the human experience. Things we basically sign up for when we’re born. 

In our effort to feel happy all the time, we stay away from discomfort that could help us evolve and motivate us to make our dreams come true. If we can accept that emotional balance means that 50% of the time, we’ll be on the other side of happy, we might be willing to fail epically and try courageously. That is the normal human experience.

Our emotions are an indicator of what’s going on for us. To be authentic, to have a true relationship with our life, is 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-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, jealousy. 

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 throw away 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 discomfort, we will decrease our buffers and the negative consequences they produce. In fact, when we allow ourselves to really feel 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 before and bearing the consequences that come along with them. 

For example, when you limit your drinking, you don’t experience hangovers and get to feel good in your body. When you watch your eating, you get the pleasure of not worrying about your 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?

Subscribe if you want to receive this content directly in your inbox.

Work with me: Want to see how self-care is transformative and can help create a more meaningful life in which you start committing to yourself and show up the way you want? I can show you how. I offer first-time seekers a complimentary 45-minute exploratory session. Sign up here.

What’s on your mind? It can be powerful to learn from each other and our common struggles when it comes to our practice of self-care–or just being a human being. If you have something you’re struggling with and would like some perspective, share it here. Your issue may be chosen and addressed in the next post–it’ll be totally anonymous.

The Self-Coaching Model

~ The Healing Modalities ~ 3 Comments

Take responsibility.

The Life Coach School, where I received one of my coaching certifications from, teaches the Self-Coaching Model. It looks like this:

Circumstances are neutral and factual. They’re things that are mostly not under our control, like the weather and traffic. Circumstances also include what people say/don’t say and do/don’t do.

Thoughts are phrases that our minds produce about the Circumstances.

Feelings are one-word vibrations in our bodies, like scared, angry, happy, sad, nervous, excited, etc. that come from our Thoughts.

Actions are what we do or don’t do based on our Feelings.

Results are what we create for ourselves in our lives regarding the Circumstance when we take/don’t take Actions.

Our Results usually provide evidence for our Thoughts.

We’ve been conditioned to think that our Feelings come from the Circumstances. But there’s a space between the Circumstance and the Feeling, which is our Thought about the Circumstance. Circumstances are all neutral until we apply a Thought to them. When we apply a Thought to our Circumstance, we judge the Circumstance as “good” or “bad” and everything in between.

To read more about how this can play out in terms of how we feel, see below.

When we think other people cause our feelings, it looks like this:

Me: I’m going to a 75-minute yoga class today.

Mom: I really need your help with something today. Do you have to go to the yoga class?

Me: Feels guilty. (Thinks it’s because Mom said what she said. In reality, it’s because I’m thinking “I should stay home and help Mom” or “I’m selfish for going to yoga when Mom needs help”)

Mom isn’t “making” me feel guilty. I’m thinking a thought (or multiple thoughts) that are creating the feeling of guilt for myself. I’m responsible for my feeling of guilt. Mom is responsible for what she says. She is not responsible for me feeling guilty, even if that’s her intention. It’s whether I agree with her or not that I’ll feel guilty. And I may WANT to feel guilty.

From the feeling of guilt, one option of an action I take–likely an automatic response–is that I don’t go to the yoga class and help Mom. But that likely creates resentment, even if I agreed to do it. It wasn’t what I really wanted to do for myself.

When I recognize that I don’t have to think a thought that makes me feel guilty, another option–one that takes a bit more effort–is that I communicate with Mom and find a solution that works for both of us. For example, “I hear that you need help with something and I do want to help you. I also want to go to this yoga class. Would it work for you to do the task later today so that I can help you then?”

Or if the truth is that I know the task is something that I’ll have to take time to figure out and I don’t have time to do it, I can tell the truth to Mom, “Mom, I’m sorry, I don’t know how to do that and it’ll take too long to figure out. Would you be able to ask ____ / call a ____ to help you do it instead?”

These are just a few options and only one of them come from the feeling of guilt. There are multiple possibilities of responses that might work in this situation. We just have to recognize our automatic responses and take some time to communicate and find other creative solutions instead.

The Unintentional Model (automatic response) looks like:

C – Mom says “I need help with something. Do you have to go to the yoga class?”

T – I’m selfish for going to yoga when Mom needs help

F – Guilty

A – I don’t go to the yoga class, I stay home and help Mom, I don’t stick with my plan of going to yoga, I do something I’d rather not do

R – I don’t allow myself to take time for myself; OR I create resentment for myself

The Intentional Model looks like:

C – Mom says “I need help with something. Do you have to go to the yoga class?”

T – It’s possible for me to do both things

F – Empowered

A – let Mom know I want to help, ask if she can do the task later so I can help her then

R – I find a solution that works for both of us

If we’re willing to slow down a bit, we’re likely able to find solutions that work best for us while staying connected with others.

Ready to stop procrastinating?

~ The Healing Modalities ~ Leave a comment

Feel the feelings.

Some of us thrive on procrastination, saying that it’s the only way we get stuff done—the incentive of a deadline and having no time left to do anything else but the thing we could’ve done two weeks ago. The adrenaline, the motivation. Procrastination has become a habit for those of us.

And that’s great for those who like the adrenaline and the deadlines and the rush of it all.

For those of us who wish we could stop procrastinating so we didn’t need to crash into deadlines, or feel the thing looming over us the whole time, or experience the stress of adrenaline, there’s another way. 

It may not be easy, but it’s simple. 

Why do we procrastinate? We can probably come up with a bunch of reasons, but the main reason is we associate some level of pain, fear, or discomfort with the activity we’re procrastinating about. That’s it. 

To overcome procrastination, we need to understand that all of that pain, fear, and discomfort is mostly imagined—coming from our thoughts in our heads. 

Thinking about doing it can seem scary. So the more we think about it, the more we procrastinate. But actually doing it? Doing the thing we’ve been thinking about, the thing we know we need to do, can be liberating. 

We stop expending energy on thinking about NOT doing it and why we HAVEN’T done it yet and we just expend energy on DOING IT.

The feelings of fear and discomfort may be there for us, they may be real. But allowing it to be scary and uncomfortable and DOING IT ANYWAY shows ourselves that we can feel our feelings AND do hard things. 

Most of the time, our perceptions become irrelevant while we’re doing the thing we THINK is painful, scary, or uncomfortable. Actually doing the thing frees us from our fear—it’s almost never as “bad” as we told ourselves it would be.

There’s an added benefit as well: soon what we imagined would be uncomfortable settles gently inside our comfort zone. Just from doing it and realizing that it wasn’t “so bad” after all. 

We start to build trust with ourselves, knowing that we’ll do the thing when we say we’ll do it. And get it done. Without having it loom over us or stay on our to-do list for days, even weeks.

So in order for us to find the motivation we need to do the things we habitually procrastinate on, we must:

  1. Remember that our thoughts about the thing are what makes it uncomfortable (scary, painful, uncertain, etc.)—not actually the thing itself or doing the thing
  2. Allow ourselves to feel the feelings of discomfort and DO IT ANYWAY—because we know we’re going to have to do it at some point, why have it looming over us the whole time and spend mental energy on it that way?

When we start doing the things we used to procrastinate on, we’ll start to feel proud of ourselves. We’ll realize that the choice to procrastinate is exactly that, a choice—one that we no longer have to settle for now that we’re clear about what was causing it.

Your turn: What parts of this resonate with you? If procrastination is just a choice and not an “identity” (e.g. “I’m a person who procrastinates” vs. “I have chosen to procrastinate in the past”) how would your life be different? What are some things you can start practicing with—doing them when you say you’ll do them instead of putting them off like you used to?

Subscribe if you want to receive this content directly in your inbox.

Work with me: Want to see how self-care is transformative and can help create a more meaningful life in which you start committing to yourself and show up the way you want? I can show you how. I offer first-time seekers a complimentary 45-minute exploratory session. Sign up here.

What’s on your mind? It can be powerful to learn from each other and our common struggles when it comes to our practice of self-care–or just being a human being. If you have something you’re struggling with and would like some perspective, share it here. Your issue may be chosen and addressed in the next post–it’ll be totally anonymous.

When you can love “what is”

~ The Healing Modalities ~ Leave a comment

Stop resisting.

Most of us are used to–and mostly unaware of–creating unnecessary emotional pain when we fight against reality by thinking thoughts like:

“It shouldn’t be this way.” 

“This shouldn’t be happening.” 

“I shouldn’t have to do this.”

“It” can be replaced with any of these: she, he, I, they, my weight, my life, etc. 

“This” can stand in for whatever is happening that feels uncomfortable, undesirable, or unfair.

When we think these types of thoughts about something we have no control over or really can’t change, we’re resisting reality. 

We’re spending emotional energy on it and wishing it were different. But if it’s something we can’t change, it’s not only pointless, but painful. And it doesn’t do anything to change what happened.

The opposite of resistance is acceptance. On the way from resistance to acceptance, there is non-resistance. And beyond acceptance, there is “loving what is.” That’s the big one.

When we start to practice non-resistance, when we start to acknowledge that we may be fighting against something that we can’t change and just let it be what it is, there can be peace and ease. 

How do we know it was supposed to happen? Because it did. 

That might be hard to swallow, but then there’s nothing to fight against. Then everything is going the way it’s supposed to go.

I know this is a big leap for many people, some high-level sh*t. Many people feel resistant to even thinking of this as a possibility for themselves. To let go of how things “should” be or “should” have happened, and let things just be as they are. 

Maybe it’s not exactly “loving what is” yet, but what about some acceptance, or even some non-resistance? Instead of all the resistance, along with the emotional pain it brings.

This is not to say that we don’t change what is possible to change, or that we don’t move towards the change we want to see in our lives, or that we condone injustices.

But again, when we think injustices “shouldn’t” happen when they do in fact happen unfortunately all too often, we’re fighting against reality, resisting how things actually are in the world. 

And that only creates emotional pain and suffering for ourselves. When we’re in pain, we usually aren’t taking the actions that create change. 

Of course, we need to process the emotions we feel when something happens that we didn’t want to happen. The emotions of disappointment, frustration, sadness, anger, hurt, loss, or grief. And let it take as long as it takes to process them.

But how long do we want to keep wishing it didn’t happen and add suffering on top of those emotions?

When we can create more space for how things are, we surrender a little, we release some tension, we find some freedom. And that’s when we’ll get clear about what we really want and move towards creating the changes we want to see.

Your turn: What have you been resisting recently? What would happen if you allowed it to be what it is, without needing it to be different? How can the question, “How is this happening FOR me?” create some space in your experience?

Subscribe if you want to receive this content directly in your inbox.

Work with me: Want to see how self-care is transformative and can help create a more meaningful life in which you start committing to yourself and show up the way you want? I can show you how. I offer first-time seekers a complimentary 45-minute exploratory session. Sign up here.

What’s on your mind? It can be powerful to learn from each other and our common struggles when it comes to our practice of self-care–or just being a human being. If you have something you’re struggling with and would like some perspective, share it here. Your issue may be chosen and addressed in the next post–it’ll be totally anonymous.

“It’s all gone terribly wrong”

~ The Healing Modalities ~ Leave a comment

But what if it hasn’t?

When we’re in the “other half” of our 50/50 emotional life, sometimes we may think something has gone terribly wrong, that maybe we’re wrong, that our life is wrong, that everything is wrong.

I want to offer that life and our human, emotional experience is 50/50 – 50% “good/positive” and 50% “bad/negative.”

It has to be this way because we wouldn’t know what “good” is without “bad.”

I think we’ve been taught incorrectly that our emotional lives should be “good” most, if not all, of the time. So when something happens and we feel the “bad” 50%, we think something has gone terribly wrong.

But if that “bad” 50% is supposed to be there, has anything really gone wrong?

No. We’re just in the 50% that sucks sometimes. And that’s okay. We’re okay. It’s all okay. We’re in the human experience.

It may not feel okay in the moment, but when we can stay with the negative feeling and allow and process our emotions, that’s when we’ll move forward. 

Avoiding the negative emotion can hurt us. Instead of experiencing the emotion, we buffer: we seek other things to make us feel better. Other things, like false pleasures, we don’t necessarily want, like over-eating, over-drinking, binging Netflix, over-Instagraming, over-working, over-spending, etc. 

We do these actions instead of allowing and processing an uncomfortable emotion like boredom, loneliness, shame, fear, jealousy.

But experiencing the negative emotion can help us. When we’re willing to experience the range of emotions, we open our lives up so much more. That’s when we know we can handle any emotion.

When we open up to the 50/50, we get some authority over it. Then we don’t have to be in a hurry to seek false pleasure or change things impulsively to feel better. 

Your turn: How would your life be different if you recognize that your emotional life is 50/50 and that’s okay? Are you open to allowing and processing negative emotions instead of avoiding or resisting them? What would you be more willing to do for yourself if you embraced the 50/50 of your emotional life?

Subscribe if you want to receive this content directly in your inbox.

Work with me: Want to see how self-care is transformative and can help create a more meaningful life in which you start committing to yourself and show up the way you want? I can show you how. I offer first-time seekers a complimentary 45-minute exploratory session. Sign up here.

What’s on your mind? It can be powerful to learn from each other and our common struggles when it comes to our practice of self-care–or just being a human being. If you have something you’re struggling with and would like some perspective, share it here. Your issue may be chosen and addressed in the next post–it’ll be totally anonymous.

Why should I feel uncomfortable?

~ The Healing Modalities ~ Leave a comment

Stop buffering.

This week we’re talking about buffering. What is buffering? 

We buffer to avoid feeling emotional pain or uncomfortable emotions.

When we buffer, we use external things to change how we feel internally. This means engaging in an action to put a buffer between us and a feeling we don’t want to feel. The action could be something like overeating, overdrinking, overspending, over-Instagraming, over-Netflixing, overworking, over-cleaning, or over-exercising. It could be anything if we’re using that thing/action to prevent ourselves from feeling an emotion.

These things become false pleasures that have a net-negative outcome: When we overeat, we gain weight. When we overdrink, we end up with hangovers and half of the next day is ruined. When we overspend, we go into debt or don’t meet our savings goals.

If buffering is what we do to avoid pain/discomfort, it makes sense that when we stop buffering, we’ll feel pain/discomfort. But most of us don’t understand this, which makes it almost impossible to stop buffering.

We have to be willing to feel uncomfortable in order to move past our buffers.

An analogy for this is like stepping into a house and turning on the lights and the house is a mess. The obvious and easiest answer is to turn the lights back off (to buffer) so the mess will “go away.” But the mess doesn’t go away–you just can’t see it now because the lights are off.

It’s similar with emotions. Avoiding an emotion doesn’t make the emotion go away—it just helps us not to see or feel it. We pretend it isn’t there, but it is there, and it’s there for a reason.

In order to figure out the reason, we need to stop buffering and turn the lights on. Then we need to remember that yes, the mess seems overwhelming, but we can handle it, we can clean it up. Turning the lights off prevents us from cleaning because we can’t see. Going unconscious by buffering has the same effect.

When we stop buffering, we’ll likely experience temporary pain. And the pain isn’t caused by the lack of buffering. What we need to do is stop buffering ourselves long enough to find the cause of the pain. 

When we give up our buffers, we’ll still get upset, but we’ll deal with it differently. We won’t head for the ice cream, which will just make us feel sick or regretful. We’ll deal with it by becoming aware and examining why we’re upset. Soon, we won’t even want ice cream or chips because the pleasure we get from food—or whatever buffering actions we’re doing—actually diminishes, and the pleasure we get from taking care of ourselves and fueling ourselves increases.

When we trade the false pleasures in our life for real well-being, we gain confidence, and that confidence creates more confidence, which creates even more confidence.

Instead of using external things to change how we feel, we can use our minds to change how we feel. Or we can even choose to feel and process the emotion in the moment.

Your turn: What feelings have you been avoiding? What are the false pleasures you’ve been engaging in? In what way would your life be better if you didn’t have these false pleasures? Are you ready to stop buffering and willing to feel some discomfort instead, to move towards real well-being?

Subscribe if you want to receive this content directly in your inbox.

Work with me: Want to see how self-care is transformative and can help create a more meaningful life in which you start committing to yourself and show up the way you want? I can show you how. I offer first-time seekers a complimentary 45-minute exploratory session. Sign up here.

When it’s time for self-care

~ The Healing Modalities ~ Leave a comment

Sometimes our brain gets in the way.

Why is it so hard sometimes to make changes in our lives that have long-term benefits?

It can be hard because of how our brains have evolved. The prefrontal cortex is the part of our brain that makes us human. It can plan and think about what it’s thinking about. Our primitive, lower brain is the same brain that animals have. It wants to be efficient, avoid pain, and seek pleasure–this is the Motivational Triad. 

The Motivational Triad can get in the way of us making the changes we want. Why?

Change is new and different. We’re not used to doing new things. So the primitive brain doesn’t get to be efficient when we’re implementing changes. It wants to go back to doing what it knows how to do and what it’s already good at doing. The easy stuff that we’ve been doing and that might not necessarily get us the results we want in our lives.

When we’re making changes in our lives, we’re usually also experiencing discomfort. Whether it’s because we’re waking up earlier, eating less sugar, drinking less alcohol, feeling deprived, moving our bodies more, or spending less money. 

We’ve been used to the instant gratification, which is what the brain likes–the seeking of pleasure and the avoidance of pain. Doing these new things doesn’t give us instant gratification. But it will give us long-term benefits.

How do we push past the discomfort? It’s not by using willpower. It goes back to processing and allowing feelings. And to using our prefrontal cortex.

We use our prefrontal cortex to make plans to implement long-term change. But our primitive brain likes to try to override these plans because it wants to be efficient, avoid pain, and seek pleasure.

So we make a plan first—and know that the primitive brain will try to impose.

If we want to stop overeating, we decide 24 hours ahead of time what we’re going to eat and eat only that.

If we want to stop overdrinking, we decide 24 hours ahead of time how many drinks we’re going to have and have only that.

If we want to stop overspending, we decide 24 hours ahead of time how much we’ll spend and spend only that.

The primitive brain will create urges. So when we have an urge to overeat, we have to allow that urge to be there and feel it. Usually the urge will pass if we’re not fighting against it.

When we have an urge to buy something new, we allow the urge to be there and feel it. And let it pass and stick to our spending plan.

When we have an urge to do anything that deviates from our plan, we allow that urge and let it pass without fighting it or thinking we need to answer that urge.

It might seem impossible at first. But once you start practicing allowing urges, it can become easier.Your turn: Think about the last time you did something that seemed impossible for you to do. But then you decided to do it and you did it. When you actually did it, what did you think of it afterwards?

The fact that you did it probably felt gratifying and instilled the confidence that you could do it again if you wanted to. What would happen if you made a plan 24 hours in advance and allowed an urge to be there without answering it? How would doing that bring you closer to the results you want in your life?

Subscribe if you want to receive this content directly in your inbox.

Work with me: Want to see how self-care is transformative and can help create a more meaningful life in which you start committing to yourself and show up the way you want? I can show you how. I offer first-time seekers a complimentary 45-minute exploratory session. Sign up here.

What’s on your mind? It can be powerful to learn from each other and our common struggles when it comes to our practice of self-care–or just being a human being. If you have something you’re struggling with and would like some perspective, share it here. Your issue may be chosen and addressed in the next post–it’ll be totally anonymous.

How to feel your feelings

~ The Healing Modalities ~ 2 Comments

Stop resisting.

All of us experience emotional pain at certain points in our lives. We often turn to food, alcohol, shopping, work, or something else to ignore the pain we feel. These temporary distractions only prevent the process that needs to happen to let the painful feelings go.

What happens when feelings hurt:

• Something occurs to trigger your emotional pain.

• You can barely make sense of it and it overwhelms you.

• Emotional pain enters your body—the vibrations in your body caused by the thoughts you’re having are excruciating.

When this happens, you can make a choice to: avoid it, resist it, react to it, or process it. 

Avoiding

When you choose to avoid your pain and pretend it isn’t there, you are basically lying to yourself. This doesn’t work long term. The truth is that avoidance causes pain to fester. The more you avoid it, the more you have to avoid it. You might eat, for example, instead of feel. Then you might get upset because you ate when you weren’t hungry. Then you might obsess about your body or your exercise routine. All of these tactics keep you from addressing the cause of the pain and instead, multiply undesirable symptoms such as weight gain.

Resisting and Reacting

When you resist the emotion, you tell yourself that you shouldn’t be feeling this way and then you feel bad in addition to the painful emotion you’re already feeling. When you resist, it’s like trying to hold a large beach ball under the water. The beach ball always wants to pop back up and gets stronger the more you try to push it down. 

When you deal with pain this way, you act it out or fight against it. You might yell at the person you believe caused your pain. You might talk behind their back, you might give them the silent treatment, or maybe take even more drastic measures against them. This may seem to help with the pain temporarily because it alleviates the vibration in the moment, but these actions almost always backfire.

When we react from negative emotion, we almost always get a negative result. Our actions are usually uncontrolled and unthoughtful. Fighting against the emotion becomes a losing battle–anxiety speeds up the vibration of the already painful emotion, making it even more intense.

Processing and Allowing

When you choose to process pain, you are choosing to feel it. We are so reluctant to feel pain on purpose. We tell ourselves that feeling pain is a bad thing because it feels bad, but this isn’t actually true. When we allow ourselves to feel our pain all the way through, we see that it’s manageable and it can do no long term harm (unlike avoiding and fighting, which can have many long term consequences).

Allow the feeling to be in your body even if you can’t make sense of it in your mind yet. Observe. Say in your mind “I am processing pain” over and over as you feel the pain. You don’t need to fix it or make it go away.

Notice any desire to react, resist, and avoid. You can say the desire out loud or in your mind, or write it down. You don’t have to act on it—just acknowledge it. You can tell yourself, “That won’t help” or “That’s not worth it” every time you notice the desire. 

Remind yourself, “This is pain…This is part of being human.” Allow the painful vibration to be there as you do laundry, take a shower, drive your car, or talk on the phone. Notice its heaviness, its energy, its ability to take your breath away. Just notice.

As you do this, you’ll begin to see that your thoughts about the situation appear. It may take a few minutes, a few hours, a few days, or a few weeks. Let it take as long as it takes—there’s no need to force it. Just keep noticing what you notice.

Your turn: What happens to the feeling if you just allow it to be there and feel it all the way through? Where do you feel it in your body? Does it move around or stay still? Is it hot, cold, warm? What color is it? What happens if you’re allowed to feel this way without reacting to, resisting, or avoiding the emotion?

What’s on your mind? Is there something on your mind that you’d like to have addressed in these weekly posts? It can be powerful to learn from each other and our common struggles when it comes to our practice of self-care–or just being a human being. If you have something you’re struggling with and would like some perspective, let me know. Your issue may be chosen and addressed in the next post–it’ll be totally anonymous.

Subscribe if you want to receive this content directly in your inbox.

Work with me: Want to see how self-care is transformative and can help create a more meaningful life in which you start committing to yourself and show up the way you want? I can show you how. I offer first-time seekers a complimentary 45-minute exploratory session. Sign up here.

When you’re disappointed

~ The Healing Modalities ~ Leave a comment

Don’t give up.

When we’re focused on moving towards our goals, we can feel deeply disappointed when something doesn’t turn out the way we thought it would or wanted it to. 

We feel disappointed when we don’t get the job we really want.

We feel disappointed when we don’t see the weight on the scale go down fast enough. 

We feel disappointed when the offer we put on the house we wanted gets outbid.

We feel disappointed when a project proposal we put hours into gets rejected.

We feel disappointed when someone doesn’t show up for us the way we hoped they would.

We feel disappointed when a relationship we’re feeling good about doesn’t move forward.

It’s easy to want to give up and think we’ll never have what we want when outcomes don’t happen the way we want and we feel disappointed by them.

But we don’t feel disappointed because of the outcome. We feel disappointed because of what we’re thinking about the outcome and what we make it mean about ourselves or about our lives.

Usually the thoughts have something to do with us not being good enough or that we’re doing something wrong or that we’ll never get it right.

But what if what we need is a nudge in a direction that we haven’t yet considered? What if the outcome we received means that there is something even better and more aligned with us waiting out there? 

What if the outcome we get helps us see more clearly something we need to learn or do differently for ourselves? What if it’s a way for us to give ourselves more grace, compassion, and to become even more of who we’re meant to be?

If the Universe (or God or whatever Higher Power you believe in) has our back no matter what, then this outcome is happening FOR us. 

It can be challenging to see that in the moments of deep disappointment, but once we’re able to be with, acknowledge, and process the disappointment and have it move through and out of us, we can have more clarity in thinking about the outcome we received. What are we learning from this experience? 

The Universe gives us what we need to grow and evolve–which is not always what we think we want. And, my friends, this is a good thing. Are you open to seeing it that way?

Your turn: Are you open to allowing yourself to feel and process disappointment when an outcome doesn’t turn out the way you wanted? If you can dive deeper, what else are you making the outcome mean? When you’ve processed the emotions, remember to ask, “How is this happening FOR me?” And are you willing to keep going?

Subscribe if you want to receive this content directly in your inbox.

Work with me: Want to see how self-care is transformative and can help create a more meaningful life in which you start committing to yourself and show up the way you want? I can show you how. I offer first-time seekers a complimentary 45-minute exploratory session. Sign up here.