You know that feeling you get when negativity or the past surfaces- you don’t really know what to do with it? You want to feel it, but you also feel like you’ve felt it so many times that you don’t want to deal with it again.
There’s also this blurry line between going with the flow and being a pacifist. It’s hard to know where the boundaries are and when they’ve been crossed.
Then you’re in limbo with emotions you really don’t want to feel. Anger. Resentment. Sadness. Loneliness. Bitterness. Betrayal.
Here’s the thing- those emotions are what makes life just as worthy as all of the emotions we want to feel. It’s how we feel about them that gives them so much power and control over us.
We think we shouldn’t feel a certain way. So when that happens, we repress the emotions and run as far away as possible. It’s in avoidance that things become more catastrophic. But when we accept them and allow ourselves to feel the things we don’t want to feel, they don’t hold as much weight.
We wouldn’t truly:
- know happiness if we haven’t experienced sadness.
- know love if we haven’t experienced hatred.
- know gratitude if we haven’t felt resentful.
- cherish our relationships if we haven’t felt lonely.
- understand fulfillment if we haven’t felt bitterness.
- understand how good things can get if we haven’t felt betrayal.
That doesn’t mean we should strive to romanticize the “negative” feelings. That’s also not to say that we wouldn’t appreciate the good things. I think we absolutely would, but we wouldn’t really conceptualize the depths of our blessings if we didn’t experience the opposite. Because how can you know how something really feels if you didn’t live the polarity?
So, should we allow ourselves to feel it with every fiber in our bodies to come out on the other side? Absolutely. Remember, the reason these emotions have such a strong hold on us is because we’re resisting them.
I’m going to give you a really simple exercise you can do when you’re feeling down and need to get out of it. If you don’t want to read my experience, scroll down to try this.
FOR CONTEXT:
6 years ago, I moved to Santa Fe with no job, no friends, and no family. My father had also recently passed away.
I wound up falling into a depression- the kind that haunted me during my drinking days. I never thought I was going to come out of that alive. And when I did actually come out of it in late 2015, I made a vow that I would never allow myself to fall into suicide ideation again.
So it freaked me out when I was nearly 3 years sober, living in Santa Fe (which at the time was a dream come true), when the depression reared its ugly head.
Then, I got an intuitive insight that I still use till this day. In less than 5 minutes, the depression was gone. It NEVER came back.
TRY THIS:
Get comfortable- sit or lay down. Close your eyes.
Feel the emotions you don’t want to feel as if it’s the best thing you’ve ever felt. If you’re feeling angry, feel the anger like it’s the most amazing emotion. Smile. Laugh. Be happy about what you’re feeling.
Keep feeling it as a “good” emotion until you feel good. It may take a few or several minutes. Give yourself the time you need to get happy.
We put a weight on the negativity, much more than the positive. And it consumes us to the point that we live our lives according to how we don’t want to feel instead of how we want to feel.
This is teaching ourselves how to feel instead of allowing our emotions to control us and showing us that a perspective shift is sometimes all we need to heal.
You can do this whenever you need to beat the blues or you just want to feel happier than usual.
I’ll see you soon…in the meantime, love yourself so much that even a Hallmark Christmas movie would be jealous.
