Avoiding Feelings – Part 2

How to feel your emotions instead and change your life.

The alternative to resisting and reacting is allowing.

Allowing is about feeling emotions in the moment as they come up.

Like a pipe with water flowing through it, when an emotion comes through, we stay wide open instead of constricting, resisting, and ultimately trapping it inside us.

Most of us have something like fear or sadness come down our pipe and we immediately close off and restrict flow. Then it’s like a blockage, and more and more emotions get stuck behind it as we continue resisting allowing it to process.

That moment when we explode on our kids or spouse, or end up crying it all out in a big overwhelming deluge, is usually the blockage getting pushed through finally.

You know that relief you feel after a good cry? It’s cause you’ve let the emotions finally come through.

But what if you could feel that relief from processing all the time, and in small manageable amounts rather than giant overwhelming floods?

It’s absolutely possible and it’s a skill that you can learn by just using 5 questions.

  1. What are you feeling now? – name one emotion
  2. Where is the feeling in your body? – heavy in your chest, tight in your throat, fluttering in your stomach
  3. What color is this feeling? – dark grey, deep red, bright green
  4. Is this feeling hard or soft?
  5. Is this feeling fast or slow?

As you go through each of these questions, stay in your body rather than your mind.

Try to experience the emotion as a sensation in your body rather than thoughts in your head.

Going forward in your life, whenever you notice yourself resisting or reacting, you can stop and take yourself through the 5 questions.

Allowing your feelings is absolutely possible and a skill that you can learn with practice.

As you learn how to process rather than resist or react, you will show up in your life more centered and empowered because you know you can feel any feeling.

Avoiding Feelings – Part 1

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:

  1. Reacting or
  2. 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.)

Feelings are Meant to Last 90 Seconds

Say what?!

What do you think of when you hear the word sadness?

Or how about anger?

You might envision someone crying or yelling. A visual representation of what they’re feeling inside.

But what if I told you that you could feel an emotion as strong as hatred in a room full of people, not react at all, and still have processed it within 90 seconds. Crazy right?

Not so. It turns out this is actually physiologically what our bodies are built to do.

In Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor’s book she explains this fantastic ability we have to process emotion,

“When a person has a reaction to something in their environment, there’s a 90 second chemical process that happens in the body; after that, any remaining emotional response is just the person choosing to stay in that emotional loop. Something happens in the external world and chemicals are flushed through your body which puts it on full alert. For those chemicals to totally flush out of the body it takes less than 90 seconds. This means that for 90 seconds you can watch the process happening, you can feel it happening, and then you can watch it go away. After that, if you continue to feel fear, anger, and so on, you need to look at the thoughts that you’re thinking that are re-stimulating the circuitry that is resulting in you having this physiological response over and over again.”

My Stroke of Insight: A Brain Scientist’s Personal Journey

No one teaches us how to feel emotion.

In fact, we’re presented by the media with the exact opposite of that – movies and shows where people “act out” their feelings.

This makes for good entertainment, but it’s a different thing entirely when we start believing that’s what feeling our feelings looks like.

Instead, I describe this 90 second process of feeling emotion to my clients as a wave.

  1. You have the stimulus and thought that trigger the emotion.
  2. It starts to build rapidly and increases in intensity until you reach the crest.
  3. Then you come back down, and it’s like the emotion washes back out to sea.

This is how emotion is meant to be processed.

A wave of emotion cannot hurt you.

In fact, it’s only when we drive ourselves insane by running away from it all the time that we start to hurt ourselves with all of the excessive actions we take to avoid.

Instead, consider watching your emotions. Get curious.

How do they start? What does the crest feel like in your body? What happens after it leaves?

You Are Meant to Feel All of 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.

Photo by Tengyart on Unsplash