Not happy all the time?

November 9, 2023 ~ The Healing Modalities ~ Leave a comment

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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Work with me: Want to see how self-care is transformative and can help you create the results you want in your life? 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.

When it’s taking too long

August 17, 2023 ~ The Healing Modalities ~ Leave a comment

We get to do the work.

When we’ve been doing the work of growing and expanding ourselves by learning concepts and tools to help us evolve into who we want to become, sometimes we may think, “I should know this already. I should be better at this. Why am I still reacting this way? Why is this still hard for me?”

Why, my friends? Because we are human beings with human brains.

Just because we know the work, the tools involved, and the ways of thinking that can benefit us, doesn’t mean we no longer have human emotions and human experiences. That we no longer have to do the work.

We learn the tools and beneficial ways of thinking in order to help us navigate our human experience on purpose, consciously and deliberately, with compassion and grace for ourselves and others.

There isn’t a point where we get to stop doing the work—unless we choose to be stagnant and stay exactly where we are. It’s possible to do that, but also as human beings, it’s unlikely that we’ll want to choose that for ourselves.

We will always get to do the work. And that’s not a “bad” thing. It means that we’re continuing to expand ourselves and grow beyond where we currently are. That we want to be even more of who we are becoming.

Our primitive brains evolved to want to be efficient (to do “easy” things), to avoid pain, and to seek pleasure to help us survive.

When we’re wanting to live a fulfilled life where we’re not just surviving but thriving, we can’t always choose the easy things, we will likely be uncomfortable facing new situations and experiences, and we will delay immediate pleasure/gratification in order to attain our long-term well-being.

So we do the work in order to overcome our primitive brains and utilize our sophisticated brains (our prefrontal cortex) to their fullest potential.

Some thoughts for helping us continue doing the work:

I’m getting better at processing my emotions.
This is still hard for me, and that’s okay.
I’m learning something from this and that’s why I don’t already know better.
I’m reacting this way and catching myself instead of being unaware.
My awareness is helping me through this.
I can see that I’m learning and growing through this challenging experience.

The work is always here. No matter how much we know, we don’t get to escape the work. And it’s worth it to see who we become.

Your turn: Are you willing to keep doing the work to become the best version of you possible? Instead of thinking “This is taking too long,” are you willing to process and be with your feelings for as long as it takes? Are you open to remembering that you always have a choice to do the work or to not do it, and to confront the consequences depending on what you choose?

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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.

When things don’t work out

August 3, 2023 ~ 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 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.

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 there’s nothing wrong with us or our lives? 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 (sometimes along with grief, loss, hurt, etc.) 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 until you have what you want?

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Overeating, overdrinking, over-anything?

July 27, 2023 ~ 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.

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 (false) 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.

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?

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What do you REALLY want?

April 20, 2023 ~ 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?

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“I should feel happy all the time”

February 9, 2023 ~ The Healing Modalities ~ 1 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.”

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.

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The Self-Coaching Model

December 20, 2022 ~ The Healing Modalities ~ 5 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?

December 15, 2022 ~ 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:

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
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?

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When you can love “what is”

November 3, 2022 ~ 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?

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“It’s all gone terribly wrong”

October 27, 2022 ~ 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?

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