Ep #5: Considering Divorce? Understand the Life-Death-Life Cycle First

In this episode, we delve into the profound dance between life and death, challenging the conventional fear and discomfort surrounding the latter. Discover the beauty of this cyclical process and how embracing it can bring immense growth and transformation.

💔 Grieving and Growing: Explore the complexities of grief and the simultaneous birth of new experiences. Learn how allowing yourself to grieve opens space for new opportunities and how acknowledging the ebb and flow of emotions is essential for a fulfilling life.

🌱 Your Garden of Life: Picture your life as a vast garden, with different aspects like relationships, career, and personal interests. Understand the importance of choosing wisely where to invest your limited resources and ask yourself: What is the goal of your garden, and what does your soul truly desire?

🔍 Stripping Away External Labels: Challenge the external labels that define you. Explore the essence of who you are beyond roles, relationships, and achievements. Discover the strength that lies in connecting with your soul self, transcending external categorizations.

🌈 Trust Your Intuition: Dive into the magic of intuition as your inner compass. Trusting this deep knowing opens the door to a life beyond expectations, a life painted with the colors of joy, excitement, and authenticity.

🔄 The Cyclical Nature of Life: Acknowledge the cyclical process of joy and sorrow, life and death. Understand that the journey involves both letting go and welcoming the new. Learn to navigate these cycles with compassion and a deep connection to your soul.

🔮 Always More Ahead: Challenge the scarcity mindset and embrace the belief that there is always more ahead. Explore the abundance that comes with allowing life to unfold, knowing that every ending paves the way for a more aligned and fulfilling future.

🌌 Your Centered Journey: Shift the focus from external relationships to your inner self. Recognize that you are the center of your life’s journey, and allowing paths to diverge can lead to personal and collective growth. Embrace the sufficiency and abundance that comes with prioritizing your authentic desires.

🌟 Conclusion: As you navigate the interplay of life and death, remember your constant presence in the ever-unfolding tapestry of existence. Embrace the depths, make peace with transitions, and trust that there is always more love, joy, and fulfillment ahead on your unique journey. 🌈✨

Show Notes

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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?

It’s Okay to Feel Sad While Considering Divorce

In fact, it can be really good for you.

In the Disney movie “Inside Out” there’s a poignant moment where the character Joy tells Sadness that she has a “super important job for her.” She then proceeds to draw a circle and tells Sadness that her job is to make sure all of the sadness stays inside of it.

Feeling a little familiar? Lock that sadness up.

A lot of my clients want to do just this with their feelings of sadness.

“Yep, come right over here, check out this great closet.” *shove in, lock the door, run away terrified hoping you won’t be able to hear the sobbing from the other side of the house while you clean, multitask, and take care of everyone else.

But the reality is, you can’t hide from emotions.

And actually, as you learn at the end of “Inside Out,” it’s the dreaded emotion of sadness that allows your brain to process grief and loss and eventually move forward. Without it, you just run around in circles feeling “happy” all the time while simultaneously feeling perpetually terrified deep down by the banging coming from that closet.

Sadness gets a bad rap in a culture where our most beautiful faces and spaces are on display through social media, and there’s constant interior pressure to keep up. But research on sadness has turned up some interesting insights.

For one, sadness can actually improve your judgment.

You know the saying about wearing “rose colored glasses?” Well, that’s all well and good until you’re trying to detect whether someone is telling the truth or not. A study by Joseph Forgas showed that when people are happy they’re more likely to make “social misjudgments due to biases.”

Basically, when you feel happy, you’re more likely to have blind spots about what’s really going on.

Sadness can also help increase your motivation to make changes.

It’s common for women who are considering divorce to experience what I have lovingly termed “the merry-go-round from hell.”

This is that cycle of something bad happening in your marriage, you feel upset and want to make changes, but then it starts to get a little better, the pain wears off, you talk yourself out of it, fear and complacency move back in and then Bam! another drop happens and you get to start it all over again.

Allowing the feeling of sadness can help you get clearer on where things are really at, what you want, and increase your perseverance for making changes.

In coaching we learn how to experience emotions in our bodies rather than in our mind, and it’s radically different than what most of us think “feeling our feelings” is like.

Letting yourself feel the sadness while considering divorce can be the very thing that helps you grieve and make peace with the past, and move cleanly into your future.

Photo by JonatĂĄn Becerra on Unsplash

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