Heal Your Soul By Embracing Expression

You are part of a creative species and thus you need to express yourself if you want to be a healthy and balanced human being. This talk will help you find out what type of expression suits you, and you will leave behind false shyness and restrictions.

Transcript

You might be an introvert or you might be an extrovert.

You might be a very physical person or a thinker.

You might want all the attention or you might want none.

But what you and all of us have in common is a need to express.

Because only when you express yourself can other people see,

Understand and respect you.

And only when you express yourself can you release tension and confusion.

So today we're looking at why it is important for you to express yourself.

The goal is to see and experience yourself as the creative species you're designed to be.

We will try and uncover what kind of expression might suit you.

Our goal is also to get rid of shyness and restrictions you might have built up over the years that hold you back from truly expressing yourself.

Wyndon Lewis said,

What is the good of being an island if you're not a volcanic island?

Let's find your volcanoes.

One of the first things you ever did in your life was express yourself.

You were born and shortly after you felt an urge to drink and you expressed your urge.

Maybe with a certain look or a movement or even by crying.

But there it was,

Your first expression ever.

Your expression allowed you to survive.

But today I want to take the idea of expressing yourself a bit further than the survival tool that it is.

Let me start by making the claim that every human on this planet,

Including you,

Has ideas.

And if you have ideas,

Then you are creative.

And if you're creative,

Then you have the need to express yourself.

Depending on your upbringing and current circumstances,

Expressing yourself might be easy or difficult for you.

I would make the claim that parents and schools on average make children less expressive.

This is because they are trying to make them less chaotic so that children are easier to control.

Later,

Work environments continue this trend.

But that does not mean that the created lack of self-expression is healthy and fulfilling.

So I would like to invite you to investigate today how expressing yourself can bring beauty and happiness into your life.

Now,

Everyone,

Including you,

Is unique.

Of course,

You can define yourself with a group like introverts or extroverts.

Defining yourself might help you navigate life to a certain extent.

But I would like to challenge your definition.

Because defining yourself as something also means you are excluding yourself from other things.

So please make sure that you keep an open mind.

Now,

There are a million ways to express yourself.

And plenty of those are available to people who are more shy than others.

Expressing yourself can be writing a short story and sending it to a competition.

It can be the way you dress.

It can be taking pictures and putting them up on your wall.

It can be smiling at your husband.

It can be looking sad while sitting at the bus stop.

So you're starting to understand that you're constantly expressing yourself whether you want to or not.

Expressing yourself is fundamental to communicating what current state of mind you're in.

And others recognizing your state of mind is fundamental for human connection.

The more you allow yourself to share your authentic self with the world,

The easier your growth and the more fulfilling your life will be.

So this also means that expressing and sharing both negative and positive emotions is important.

I would like to share a story with you now.

A few years back,

I went for a walk with a friend in a park.

It was a beautiful sunny day and everyone in the park was playing and enjoying life.

We came past a man sitting on a bench,

Crying.

And when I say crying,

I mean really crying.

My friend immediately sat next to him,

Took his hand slowly and asked him if she could do something for him.

I was shocked because back then I would have never dared approach someone in that state.

The sad man looked at my friend and said that he received bad news and he just needed to sit and cry for a moment.

My friend said that she would sit with him for a minute so that he didn't need to cry alone.

So we both sat down next to him,

My friend held his hand,

We leaned back in silence,

Looked at the joyful happenings in the park and we held space for the man crying next to us.

He calmed down a bit and without saying anything,

My friend gave him a hug goodbye and we kept walking.

When the crying man looked at my friend leaving,

His eyes were still filled with sadness but there was now also a millimeter of hope.

He allowed himself to express his authentic self and he received love and empathy in return.

To this day,

Watching my friend do what she did was one of the most beautiful moments in my life.

She taught me that if you allow yourself to express your state of mind,

Then chances are that others can react to it in a positive way.

In the story the reaction was the love and empathy from my friend.

That love might not have solved the man's problems but it will definitely have made his moment of sadness a whole lot easier to deal with.

Now let us talk about expressing moments of joy.

Expressing positive moments comes easier to us but they are just as important.

When you allow yourself to express joy,

Then you can immediately share it with others.

People around you will be happy with you and for you.

They will want to share your joy and their own feelings of joy with you and that will make the feelings meaningful.

The next important thing happening when expressing yourself is a feeling of release.

There is an urge inside of you to express and you giving yourself permission to express means the urge is released.

Now what happens when you don't express that urge?

It gets suppressed.

And what happens when it gets suppressed?

It grows into something unhealthy.

It will grow into something that drags you,

Makes you heavy and unhappy.

It will not add to your personality but take away from it.

Now the immediate effect of expressing yourself is a feeling of lightness.

This is necessary because over time you might consciously or subconsciously build up tension.

Then something needs to move through you and out into this world.

Once you do so through your expression,

The feeling of lightness comes.

Again,

I want to remind you that it doesn't matter how you express yourself.

Maybe you write something,

Paint something,

Dance,

Sing,

Read out loud,

Shout,

Shake,

Whisper in someone's ear,

Pretend to be a monkey,

Whatever floats your boat.

All of these expressions will create a feeling of lightness.

Now what happens when you spend a lot of time with judgmental people is that you unlearn how to express yourself in an authentic way.

The feeling of belonging is very strong which sometimes leads us to get trapped in the wrong groups.

Surrounded by judgmental people it can be scary to express yourself authentically.

Still,

I would urge you to express yourself in an authentic way even if that means you cannot belong to a certain group anymore.

In any case,

I would argue that expressing yourself in an authentic way will sooner or later make you belong to the group you are meant to belong to.

The first step for you to take here is to consciously accept other people's unique needs and ways of expressing themselves.

If you can find a way to judge others as little as possible,

Then you will very soon be able to stop judging yourself.

Furthermore,

You will also be able to not care about other people's judgments of you.

This will make you improve your ability to express authentically and develop into the person you want to be.