When things suck
Sometimes we have this idea that everything should be happy if we were doing it “right.” Well, turns out that this is a big fat lie from society. Like, if I had the right job, married the right person, or did the right thing, it would be easy and I would live, “happily ever after.” In real life, not in the movies, we encounter moments in life that are tough, that hurt, and that leave us unhappy. Nothing has gone wrong. This is actually how it is supposed to be, there is not a right way or right person to make everything magically easy. As much as we would love our own fairy godmother to come down and wave her magic wand, it will not happen.
The fact is life is not all about being happy. When a loved one dies, we want to feel sad, not happy. When we don’t get a job we really wanted, we want to feel disappointed, not happy. The challenge comes now in actually feeling the emotions we experience when things suck, and we would much rather run away from that awful feeling. My teacher, Brooke Castillo, teaches that emotions are vibrations in our body. They will not kill us. However, our brain tells us that we absolutely, at all costs, should avoid those uncomfortable feelings, which leads us to overdrink, overeat, over shop, over work, over (fill in the blank with any and all vices) in our lives. This leads us farther from the goals we want: losing weight, spending time with our kids, having more money in the bank, etc. We avoid the uncomfortable feeling and end up with a result that is even more uncomfortable than the feeling we were running from!
To feel our feelings, we must first name them. Name when you are sad, mad, glad, disappointed, joyful afraid, embarrassed, excited, or even schadenfreude. Once named, sit with it, and feel what is happening in your body. Writing it down is the most effective way to process the emotion. Ask yourself questions like, what color is this feeling? Where is it in my body? Is it a tight, loose, or empty feeling? Is it fast or slow? Start moving through your whole body and sense what is going on for you. After a few minutes, you can tell yourself, “This is what (fill in the emotion) feels like for me.”
When you encounter this emotion in your day, then you can bring yourself back to this exercise and greet the emotion. Say hello to it and just let it be there. Don’t resist it, stuff it down, numb it, or react to it.
This work takes practice, and it is some of the hardest work to do, but the most freeing and empowering and you are worth it!
