And grounding is incredibly important,
Especially as we're diving into a topic about sitting with difficult emotions or difficult feelings.
And it's something that I've had to learn along the way and my own journey.
And I'm now teaching my child.
So my daughter is learning more about grounding and how to let her emotions move through her and why it's important to feel it to actually feel what we feel.
So that's what we're going to start talking about today as we move in to this next chapter of the journey,
Which I'm so excited that you're all joining me on.
But let's first dive into why exactly are we afraid of difficult emotions.
And I think there's a lot of reasons that you can say like if you were to stop right now,
Place your hand on your heart.
Or if you're driving,
Just imagine you're placing your hand on your heart and ask yourself that question.
Say why am I afraid of difficult emotions?
Of hard feelings?
It may be anger,
It may be sadness,
Could be frustration,
It could be very deep hurt,
Pain,
Emotional pain.
It could be rage,
Whatever feelings that you consider to be difficult.
Why are we afraid of feeling those?
Just sit with that for a minute because it's going to be different for everyone.
Some people may be terrified of expressing anger because maybe they lived in a household where anger was expressed all the time growing up by those around them and they're like,
No,
I don't want to do that.
I don't want to be that I'm afraid to express anger.
Or maybe it wasn't emotionally or even physically safe when you were younger to feel anger.
Regardless of your childhood upbringing,
And your individual experiences,
Or even your adult experiences in life.
We as a society are conditioned to stay so busy that we don't actually have time to truly feel what we feel.
And this tends to show up in just about every aspect of society.
Whether it's at school,
Or at work,
Or even in the church.
We are taught to serve others,
To do our work,
To make sure we're task driven,
Deadline driven.
No matter how we feel,
We are taught to push aside how we feel and show up to perform the role that we're supposed to play.
And we're taught that pretty much from the moment we're born.
So there should be no surprise to you or to anyone else about why,
Of course,
It is hard for us to express and we may even be afraid of difficult emotions is because a lot of us haven't really sat with difficult emotions in a healthy way.
Not only that,
The society doesn't often want us to feel our emotions.
Because when we feel our emotions,
We do less shopping.
We do less overspending.
We eat out less,
Especially fast food and comfort items.
We use less substances.
Because what happens is when you're not allowed to feel your feelings when you're encouraged not to express them,
For whatever reason that may be.
We innocently turn to these things to cope,
To help us feel better and to not have to deal with those feelings.
And the thing about it is I said innocently for a reason is normally not even a conscious choice.
It is something that operates at the subconscious level.
And we may immediately go into fight or flight or freeze.
And we're just doing whatever we can to survive the moment to survive the situation.
So I think before we talk about why it's even important to feel our feelings,
It's first just understanding of a lot of people,
If not most people in society don't know what to do with difficult emotions and hard feelings.
It's not like we have a class in grade school,
Which we should,
Where we get to go sit down.
And someone teaches us what it's like to let feelings move through our body.
We don't have that.
So as we approach this topic,
It needs to be with compassion,
Compassion for yourself,
Compassion for your parents,
Your teachers,
Your kids,
Everyone in the society,
Who has consciously or unconsciously,
Mostly unconsciously,
Bought into this idea that we're not supposed to experience difficult emotions.
And I'll just go ahead and say the way that this works.
And I've alluded to this before in a previous episode,
Is if you imagine a creek or a river flowing,
If you put a dam in the middle of it,
And you say,
Okay,
Only part of you are allowed to flow through,
You block out not only those negative emotions,
Or you call them negative,
They're just harder emotion on the other side of things,
You block out not only those emotions,
But also all the positive ones that you actually want.
So if you desire joy,
If you desire peace,
If you desire happiness,
If you desire,
Bliss,
Excitement,
Fun,
All those beautiful,
Beautiful emotions that you want,
You can only have them truly,
When you learn to hold the emotions that you may consider difficult or that you don't want.
And I'm not saying it's easy,
But I'm saying that we can learn to do it.
And that makes the beauty that we see the peace that we feel all of it so much more powerful.
Because we're not dampening our emotions in order to protect ourselves,
We're allowing them to flow through us.
