Hey there,
I wanna be a reminder right now,
Or maybe the first person to tell you that there are real dangers to holding your emotions in or suppressing your emotions.
As kids,
We're taught different things like have a stiff upper lip or suck it up if you're feeling anything kind of emotional in that moment or maybe that boys don't cry or girls don't get mad.
And also for evolutionary reasons,
We're wired to move away from what's uncomfortable,
To hold it down,
To keep it at bay or to move toward what's comfortable in that moment.
But ultimately these are emotions.
Emotions are energy in motion.
And when we suppress them,
We're suppressing the energy that's there or suppressing the emotion that's there.
And what that does is it creates stress or at least science and research shows and also our own personal experience shows that that creates stress on our physiology.
And it also does something even greater,
Which it teaches us that there's a part of us that's not worth paying attention to or that doesn't belong.
And then it creates this cycle of feeling defective or deficient or that something is wrong with me.
And so we feel this great experience of shame that starts to cycle through us,
Which by the way is measured in the brain in the same area of stress.
So we actually begin to increase stress in our minds and bodies.
You know,
Professions that are taught to do this or to be able to kind of keep the emotions at bay in order to do their job are professions like the military or first responders or physicians.
And what we also find in those same professions is some of the highest rates of suicide and substance abuse.
So see the correlation there.
Being is suppressing our emotions and not paying attention to them is unhealthy physiologically and mentally.
And so one of the things we wanna do is we wanna be able to recognize the feeling.
We wanna just be able to name it.
If we're feeling sad or if we're feeling angry,
If we're feeling afraid,
If we're feeling shame,
We wanna be able to recognize it and name it.
And in doing that,
We can step into that space between stimulus and response where choice,
Possibility,
And freedom and perspective lie.
And in that space,
What happens is we can ask ourselves the question like,
What am I actually needing right now?
And when we ask ourselves that question,
What we find is that we're needing something very similar to what we did as a kid really.
It's not so different.
We need to feel loved.
We need to feel safe.
We need to feel cared about.
We need to feel understood.
We need to feel a sense of belonging.
And we need to feel soothed.
And when we are able to recognize that,
Then we can move towards ourselves with the inclination to wanna support ourselves.
And that is what creates balance.
That's what creates confidence.
That's what creates health.
That's what's going to stop these downward spirals into anxiety,
Depression,
And the rumination of hopelessness and helplessness that leads to so much suicide.
So we need to be able to not suppress our emotions.
That's the wrong message.
We need to be able to hold our emotions lightly with care,
With tenderness,
Because really like if we were,
Imagine what the days,
Weeks,
And months ahead would be like if you got better and better at being able to recognize what you needed and be able to give yourself what you needed.
We can look towards different poets that talk about this like Rumi,
The 13th century Sufi poet Rumi who said,
"'Don't turn your gaze,
Look towards the bandaged place.
That's where the light enters.
" Or Hafiz who said,
"'How did the rose ever open its buzz and show to the world all its beauty?
' It felt the encouragement of light against its being.
Otherwise we all remain too frightened.
" When we recognize the emotion that's there and we don't suppress it,
But we are able to name it and hold it,
We can recognize what we're needing and send light against our being.
In other words,
Giving ourselves what we're needing so that it can be an antidote to fear.
So take your time in the next days,
Weeks,
And months ahead to be able to recognize the difficult feelings.
There's a lot going on in the world right now.
There might be a lot going on in your life.
You're not alone in that.
So recognize your feeling that's there.
They're a part of you.
Notice them,
Turn your attention towards them.
Ask yourself what you're needing in that moment.
And you'll send yourself the message that you're worth paying attention to because you are worth paying attention to.
Turn toward yourself with that kind attention.
Turn that light against your being and notice what happens.
Okay,
Bring this into your life and I look forward to being with you again.
