50/50

Why we do it and why it’s so bad for us.

Feelings. They are freakin’ everywhere if you’re a living breathing human, but boy do we try to avoid them.

Say for instance, fear. When’s the last time you felt it’s presence and didn’t find yourself reaching for your phone or some ice cream to soften the ugliness of that emotion?

It’s what our society does and it’s what most of us witnessed our parents doing as we grew up.

We saw emotions get processed in one of two ways:

Reacting or
Resisting/Avoiding.

Reacting looks like that 45-minute cry session you had after 3 weeks of keeping it all together.

Or the outbursts of yelling and losing your shit with your kids cause you just can’t seem to keep it inside anymore.

Resisting/Avoiding goes hand in hand with reacting as it’s like the sneaky build up before the storm.

This looks like numbing your brain with Netflix, food, productivity, alcohol, shopping, cleaning, etc. to distract yourself from feeling.

But here’s the thing, humans are not built for emotion storage.

We’re meant to be processors of emotion, letting it come up, be felt, and pass through us.

But somewhere along the way, we got the message that negative emotions are bad and we need to avoid them. That the whole goal of life is to be happy.

“Isn’t it called ‘The Pursuit of Happiness’ for goodness sake?! Then why do I keep feeling all this other crap?!”

Well here’s the reality.

Life just isn’t happy all the time.

In fact, if you really get honest with yourself, you’ll see that it’s much closer to 50/50 – 50% positive emotions and 50% negative.

And why that’s so important is because, when we want it to be sunshine and daisies every day and it’s not, we resist and react and make it way worse than it really is.

I like to use the visual of a tea kettle on the stove.

When we are constantly resisting, it’s like the stove is always on, and the pressure inside just keeps building and building until it finally screams out of us through reacting.

But thankfully, you don’t have to feel like a tea kettle fully pressurized and ready to burst all the time…

(Check back next week for part 2 and how to feel your emotion rather than resist/react/and avoid it.)

Emotions are not good or bad, they just are.

What if you were always meant to feel it all?

No good feelings. No bad. Just feelings.

Emotions that vibrate through your body and then leave.

Like colors on a painter’s palette. The red is no better than the blue. The green no less desirable than the purple.

But somewhere along the way we picked up the idea that our paintings needed to only have certain colors in them.

Only the bright and shiny and light ones. No dark and deep and heavy.

Have you noticed though, how a life filled with only bright and shiny colors can seem empty?

Like eating cake for breakfast, lunch, and dinner.

We are meant to have contrast.

It is in the very nature of all life around us. Birth and death. Sun and Moon. The tide coming in and pulling back out. Pain and relief.

When we try to live in opposition to the duality of life, we can end up feeling stifled. Like walking along the top of a fence, we stay so focused on being in the middle to try and limit the depth of our lows, that we unintentionally also limit the height of our highs.

This can show up in your life as a general sense of malaise, depression, a lack of joy or anticipation for the future, and having no deep personal dreams or goals.

Sometimes we become so focused on living the “perfect” life, that we don’t end up living a “life” at all.

But if we accept that life is 50/50. Two sides of the same coin. One cannot exist without the other. Then we can start living without fear of the dark colors that come our way. We can allow them, and feel them, knowing that they too shall pass.

Glennon Doyle describes this experience so beautifully in her chapter entitled “aches,”

“The Ache is not a flaw. The Ache is our meeting place. It’s the clubhouse of the brave. All the lovers are there. It is where you go alone to meet the world. The Ache is love. The Ache was never warning me: This ends, so leave. She was saying: This ends, so stay.”

Untamed, Glennon Doyle

This is your one human life. I guarantee it will be filled with the whole spectrum of emotion. That’s the very nature of this existence.

Instead of running away from it, slow down, breathe deep, open to what is in front of you, and stay.

Avoiding Feelings – Part 1