Allowing Feelings + Emotions

Do you struggle with identifying feelings or experiencing emotions? Maybe it's hard to be happy or impossible to sit with anger or sadness. In this LIVE podcast recording, Lindsay and Annie discuss their experiences with denying or avoiding emotions and then share the tools they're using for identifying, allowing, + tolerating a range of emotions. You're doing a great job being human! 

Transcript

You've arrived at Pretty Spiritual Podcast,

Where we share our spiritual journeys to empower yours.

Come on in.

Yeah,

Okay.

No,

Seriously,

Come in.

Hey,

How are you all?

I'm Annie.

This is Lindsay.

Oh,

It says it's okay.

Yeah,

This is pretty,

We're so pretty.

Excellent.

Love it,

Love it.

I'm so excited.

I'm so excited.

I'm so excited.

I'm so excited.

I'm so excited.

I'm so excited.

I'm so excited.

I'm so excited.

I'm so excited.

Love it.

We're Pretty Spiritual Podcast.

We were frantically to the last minute,

But you would never know because now we're so serene.

We love to do it this way.

We love it.

We're so sort of spiritual.

So this is the live version of our podcast.

And today our episode is about identifying,

Feeling,

And experiencing our feelings and emotions,

Which is really an exciting and fun topic for us.

So maybe it's hard to be happy or impossible to show anger or just not even knowing what's going on,

Maybe like kind of a dissociation.

And we both have tons of experiences in our life in the past and currently that are giving us opportunity to practice with this.

So if you're new to our podcast,

How we typically do this is we both share at the beginning about our experiences with the topic.

And then the second half of the show,

We share the tools and the resources that we're using to try to navigate the topic with some kind of ease and to bring some,

Sometimes they're really practical tools,

Sometimes they're spiritual tools.

It's kind of a mix.

And with these live on Insight Timer,

What we're doing at the end is a Q&A.

So if people have questions at the end,

After we finished with the tools,

You can type in questions to the chat box and we'll have kind of a dialogue going on,

Which is really cool and why we're loving this live version because it creates this community and we get to interact and that's really special.

So we'll start off with Lindsay talking about what's going on for you right now with identifying feelings and emotions and or what was it like in the past?

Hello everyone.

Thank you.

I'm Lindsay Poney and I'm so delighted to be here right now.

I have a bunch of excited energy coming through my body and I'm honoring that right now.

Feelings and emotions.

Well,

It's hilarious that I would be here today talking about feelings and emotions.

I didn't know it,

But at the time I had completely blocked out any type of feelings.

It was a misaligned strategy.

Just a wrong math calculation that I was doing constantly.

And what I gather from is that my historical context going back and uncovering a lot of this,

Which has helped me to see where I've been and where I am and what's going on and how I can help myself.

There really didn't seem to be much room for me to have feelings.

There wasn't room for my feelings.

I got the message of that and I adapted like we do.

And so what I decided,

How my strategy for surviving was to just not have them.

Just completely shut it down.

They're not here.

They don't exist.

I don't know what feelings are.

I don't have them.

And please love me.

That was my math.

What that led to for me is that I was completely numb,

Disassociated because after years of years of doing that,

It's just the automatic pathway now where I don't acknowledge feelings.

I am disassociated from my body.

What that means is I pretty much was living in a very heady,

I call it a walking around torso.

My body was going out around the world and doing things for me,

But I was completely,

I could not touch into and feel my body.

And the thing that I was learning about and that has been helping me so much with this topic is that emotions are vital.

They're natural.

And the difference between feelings and emotions is emotions are the raw data in our body,

The physiological,

The heartbeat going up or down,

Sweating,

Those types of things that are giving us information in real time to let us know how to get our needs met.

And our feelings oftentimes are the stories that accompany the emotions.

What I'm realizing is,

So since I just dismissed any kind of feelings and then I was disassociated from my body,

I wasn't getting any of these internal roadmaps essentially.

That's what I've learned now is that emotions are so important.

They are a compass for me to understand what is going on in real time and how to understand myself and what's going on.

And then to also convey to the people around me where I'm at,

You know,

And what's going on so people can know if I'm really stressed out or if I'm terrified that right now is not a great time for me to like do that thing for you.

So yeah,

It's amazing to be here today and to be able to allow,

Acknowledge,

Allow and accept that emotions are helpful and useful and that I can have them and that feelings can tell me about what type of story I'm connecting with these emotions and maybe for me personally just aren't as helpful but that I can find my way back to the heart of it,

The root of it,

The emotion of what I'm feeling and what type of needs I can meet for myself and that feels good.

I feel like I'm pretty sure yeah that I touched on everything that I wanted to touch on and yeah just to say that I really hardened my heart and myself and I completely numbed myself and I thought that that was going to help me and it just doesn't work anymore.

It's so wonderful that I have found a way to embody and listen and love these things that are going on so that I can be more of a whole human because it was really confusing for me.

We all have kind of our own internal environment or flavor and so getting to know that like I would just stuff and smush all these feelings and then I would just like be really confused a lot of times and it felt like my emotions would rear up and come in and I was the Tasmanian devil okay.

That was like I was so aggressive and would have these huge explosions and then oftentimes I would blame other people for why this happened because I was just so confused about what was going on inside of me and that it was trying to let me know things and that I can listen to that now so there's hope and I'm so glad because I really really needed to learn about this.

Annie I would love to hear about feelings and emotions for you if you have them.

Oh yeah I have them I do.

Pony I love that what you described the difference between feelings and emotions it makes so much sense.

Thank you.

I have so much experience around this topic before I started on this spiritual journey I had huge overwhelming emotions they were usually I was really good at joy and happiness those things I felt great about but there was sadness and anxiety and it would just flood me and overwhelm me and I didn't know how to regulate it basically.

And so I understood and I felt emotions but it wasn't I didn't have any way to navigate them well it was like I just was kind of a passive recipient to however they hit me so if that's it was a good one hooray and if it was a bad one then I'm just washed out to sea with the tidal wave and I'm kind of at the mercy of the ocean until it decides to like shunt me back onto the shore and I'm like beat down like a mermaid or something.

I had so many metaphors going on right there.

I loved them all.

Oh gosh battered mermaid.

And then like Pony said I had a healthy dose of dissociation going on I had some untreated PTSD there was these feelings that would express as anxiety and sadness but there wasn't any understanding of the source or yeah it just I was really struggling with identifying feelings and emotions and experiencing them in a healthy way.

Historically the hardest one for me to deal with was anger so I would experience maybe sadness or anxiety as that tidal wave but anger I had no space for so if I had those physiological responses Pony talked about where my heart rate would go up and maybe get like that kind of sense something's you know I'm angry I just would shut it down I had I had it in my head which I guess is the feeling right this story that went along with the physiological response that I'm not allowed to be angry people won't like me if I'm angry and for somehow it's bad like I and no one ever told me that verbally I just created these things in my head and it got to the point with my codependence and all these interesting life strategies I came up with I was almost all apologetic if I was angry so if I finally got pushed to the point where I had to say something you're upsetting me you know Pony stop pulling my hair it's really bothering me but I'm sorry did that upset you that I said don't pull my hair I'm are you okay you know so it was like there was nothing how healthy about it for me as an expression of that emotional experience it doesn't mean that oh I should just revel in my anger and roll around in it but there is actually like Bonnie was saying it's a really normal and healthy human response to get angry sometimes so when we go and talk about the tools I have a really cool tool that's worked for me that's super simple but about navigating anger and then just the last part of my current experience is I shared in the last podcast that my mom about a month ago was diagnosed with stage four cancer and she's quite sick she has tumors throughout her body and when I was this information was shared with me I intellectually I was like well this is sad and but my body went into shock and it was like I had no feelings and what I have learned that's so interesting is that I often take a while to process information and so my wife was like are you okay yes I don't think I know how I feel yet but it is actually I didn't even realize how much because just a month later like it's completely messed with my menstrual cycle my sleep patterns but it's like my body got frozen which makes sense this is big information but I'm having a lot of tools that I'm getting help with that I'll share in our tool section two of like what do I do when I'm actually frozen and I know that there's this feeling or this emotion in of grief and sadness but it's kind of trapped like in an ice block yeah I'll get kind of more into it but those are the things that are happening right now kind of historically than this context of being really sensitive having lots of emotions but just getting hammered by them and then also having this propensity to freezing when it's a super big emotion and I am out of my depth essentially so Pony why don't we talk about the tools because that's so helpful also I just want to say hi to everybody who said hi thank you for chiming in and thank you for the loves we appreciate you all for being here and just interacting with us it means a lot so Pony what are you working on with your tools I think I was going to say something else before tools but I promise I'll get there and I think I wanted to say that that freezing that happens I think is our bodies trying to protect ourselves and it's so great to get the awareness right like that acknowledgement mainly moving into my tools essentially is I have a few things but acknowledge accept and allow and acknowledging really self-awareness is the most important tool in the entire world and if I am not allowing myself to have feelings or if I'm judging my emotions then I'm not able to acknowledge and that's why the except part is so important because I also need to bring into like except oh my God that hurts you know oh I feel sad what's this emotion telling me it's telling me that it hurts when people get sick and to allow it like when I allow like the truth of how big things are and when I allow myself to feel these really large emotions it becomes a more holistic cool experience acknowledging accepting and allowing is a three A's that I try to remember and make sure that I touch into every single one of them when it comes to an emotion so that it really starts providing a lot more information for me acknowledge accept allow so I've got to acknowledge oh there's an emotion here so it's that self-awareness piece that's so important like if I'm just like I'm not feeling anything I'm be distracted I'm have a lot more caffeine I got some shopping to do I got some places to look at I got a test you know I got I go and get some food you know all of the ways that we distract ourselves these are protection mechanisms and they're misaligned it's just a strategy that we had to take care of ourselves and if we can strive for like my I'm just like please when I when I pray to whatever in the world I'm praying to I'm like please give me more self-awareness I swear I you know because I just know if I can't see me if I can't allow to touch into what is here I am gonna just be checked out and disassociated and the best part is once I learned and looked up what disassociated meant I was like oh my god this is a starting point for me I had no idea that I had was just completely locking myself away somewhere else and missing out on the world because I was trying to protect myself from these emotions that I thought were going to wreck me when the emotions are actually again these messengers that bring me closer to figuring out what I want and need and how to get them it's like this full self-service dashboard if I will be willing to acknowledge then accept because a lot of times for me the emotions are hard to accept and then allow them like fully allow so what does that mean a lot of times I've done a lot of heart expansion work because for so long I just hardened my heart I was like I'm be so hard and so aggressive nothing is ever you know I just nothing's gonna touch me but I learned that softening my heart is actually the biggest superpower there is because the heart can never fully be broken and the more that we touch in to how expansive our heart can be it the more that we realize we can handle more than we ever thought we could a big thing that I do and I think is really really important this is from going from being like disassociated to somatic getting into the body and this takes a long time so I'm kind of starting with it's fine with you doing such a great job I'm gonna jump around because that's how my brain works but we're all here together and when I touch into my heart when I another place that I feel emotions like locked up emotions like for my core wounding is in my jaw and it is so intense that it will completely lock to a place where I can feel it in my hip bones it's like so deep and so immense for me swallowing down that unfelt feelings the unexpressed emotions that I clamped down for so long that is still there and when a tight fist or a tight clench has been like this for so long that it gets locked up it's good to learn about that and acknowledge it and have a lot of therapists and to do physical touch physical touch so when my heart when I feel it I touch into my heart and I'm like yes you can grow you can get bigger you can feel this you can handle this when I feel my jaw clench it is a signal to me that reminds me of a part of myself that was not resourced that was thought that that was the best way and maybe was at the time and that now I am a more resourced person that can help kind of release release release you know come to my heart so this is the getting into my body helping myself come into my body when I which has taken a lot of practice and so if you're at the beginning because I did not start here I want to let you know that my it's emotional you're having emotions what a shocker this emotion feeling emotions podcast is emotional there and I tell them right now oh you can be here you can totally be here you're sensitive my sensitivity is my superpower it is totally okay for these to be here let them wash through let them wash through because I get reminded in the beginning of what it was like and where I often step into even though I'm like a practicing person in a different part of the path I it goes really quick you know where I'm like oh just shut down shut off this doesn't exist this isn't here don't look and my body felt really unsafe because I had labeled it I didn't realize I'd always ejected from it so myself got the message that like this is not a place to go and feel and interpret and listen and be with so this first step for me was that I had to figure out what feelings even are what emotions even are and a really big tool that I highly recommend is called nonviolent communication and it is all about self-awareness check-ins and the main reason if for nothing else you go they have a feelings checklist they it's on the internet it's feeling free it yes it's feelings when your needs are met so those are things like affectionate excited joyful peaceful exhilarated engaged and then there are your feelings when your needs are not met so annoyed angry afraid and then it has tons under each one of those and what I would do is I printed off those papers so many times I carried them around with me and I would look and be like what is this in here what is this and I would just go through them and I would be like oh oh okay I'm worried I'm I'm terrified I'm impatient and it helped me to start to be able to again acknowledge accept and then allow and get to know and then the end part of the this self-awareness check-in which is what I've been in a very long-winded way describing is tending right tending to what is this emotion trying to tell me what what is this what's here for me and the tending to is really oftentimes putting my hand on my heart like I was talking about or just saying to myself yeah wow emotions are big and they're fast and it's this whole universe that can feel confusing and scary and like I'm alone and I'm going on this roller coaster ride and I can breathe with it and I can label the intensity from one to ten and I can watch it have its whole life of like a birth a life and a death even with our emotions and then I'm left with this information and yeah I'm living it I am an emotional creature I allow my feelings I notice when I am not allowing my feelings I figure out what is the very next thing I can do to acknowledge that is if you a feeling is here can I accept it maybe I can't accept it sometimes I'm like I can't accept that reject also okay how do we allow how can I allow how can I soften how can how can I be here because this is the number one thing for me and it gets me every time and that is how can I be here with this with myself how can I show up and be with this with my heart with myself and that tending to is really that presence with self has been the biggest thing I thought that I needed other people outside of me I thought I needed the partner to fix this thing I thought that I needed some type of self help or therapist that was gonna but it's really me showing up for me with me and being with what is and of course when it's too heavy and too hard then we use our therapist we use our doctors we use our friends we use our tribe we use our support network we use our tools we're here now doing it I'm trying I love this oh my gosh such good tools and for everyone who's here I do want to say that it is as nice to sit next to Lindsay Pony as it seems she's got great love you're great I'm glad you're my friend so I have some tools to share the one that I hadn't written down but here in pony share it made me realize when you were talking about your jaw if you any of you who listen to our podcast over the last two years the first year I talked all the time about my job because I was working on PTSD and a lot of my emotions etc were stored here and I was cracking teeth through night guards and just so much energy pent up in here and I love what you said at the start that when we're frozen it's often because our body's trying to protect us and so that had actually been my body trying to protect me but it just kind of maladapted over two decades and so to have professional help to untangle that was really instrumental for me so you had mentioned working with a somatic therapist and that person helped me so much she still helps me she's still my therapist to actually just start to identify what was happening in my body I didn't I didn't know how to tell if I was tired I didn't I was like in my 30s I'm like obviously I know these things I didn't I just had so shut off so I couldn't get to things like my emotions if I couldn't even acknowledge basic kind of body cues so having that and I had worked with talk therapists before but for me I needed to connect my intellect with my body and for me a somatic therapist helped do that because it was someone who taught me how to understand the word the body cues like what those mean and how to kind of line them up with information in my brain so this wasn't this separate entity that had been operating for so long alone up here this like brain just coming and going and making deals and my body's like hey help please listen please please I'm having emotions like shut up so someone who could in a safe environment help me start to learn to connect those two one of my first tools is just like super simple and it is acknowledging part of I am a person that it takes a minute for me to process and understand how I feel so even as I'm on this journey isn't even as I have these new tools just because it takes me a while it doesn't mean there's something wrong with me but it's more like this word acknowledge I have to acknowledge that's how this system operates what I do especially with my wife because she is like oh my gosh her understanding of herself and her emotions is instant and she's like these are the feelings I'm having and I'm gonna talk about them and then I don't and then she's processed them and they're done and I'm like whoa so what I realized we had a disagreement yesterday and she was very clearly letting me know why she was not pleased and I could feel myself doing that kind of shutdown thing that I do where I'm like I'm listening and I'm present but my body's kind of like shutting down and not absorbing and like I just kind of shut off and I was like oh this is Annie this is what you do when you're around someone who's really clear in what they're feeling and you're not clear in what you're feeling but you're feeling at a disadvantage and what I can say is I need some time to think about this I hear what you're saying it's gonna take me a minute to process this and I didn't ever know that I could say those things thought if someone else is really ready to talk about their feelings and emotions then I have to be at that moment too and I don't we don't and so I just practice and sometimes I don't even need to say it out loud so for example yesterday I just thought it to myself I let her share what she needed to share I showed up I kind of let my body loosen up while telling myself oh you're gonna need time to think about this Annie and that's okay because you're not sure how you feel and it was really kind of soothing you know I didn't feel like on edge and like this pressure to perform so I don't know so that was my first tool then this one is for anger for all my fellow anger repressors hey oh as I mentioned I really thought being angry was bad and this is such a silly tool and when I first started using it I was like gosh this is surely too simple I'm way too complex this isn't ever gonna work for me but it works like magic for me so someone's upsetting me and I noticed that I'm angry and before like I said I would have given gone through that whole process of either smushing it down or gotten to that eruption point where I would cry and let them know you're about sent me I'm so sorry are you upset that I'm upset and so now what I do is I take some time alone this totally dovetails with I need some time to think about it and I go somewhere where I can say out loud to myself bathroom is always great because the doors closed I can look in the mirror and I say this makes me angry I'm angry about this and there's something really interesting that happens for me hearing and seeing myself verbally express that I'm angry it's like the physical response in my body has somewhere to go and then often it'll take me another day before I figure out or have room to know how I want to respond but it's like that for me is the key in the lock this makes me angry I'm angry about this I don't know maybe it won't work for you guys it's worked really well for me because I just didn't have room for it before and it's like seeing myself say it like oh yeah I'm a human who's allowed to have this normal reasonable response so then for happiness I know for some people it is hard to feel I'll speak for myself there have been times in my life where I have felt like everything is wonderful and I don't deserve to feel wonderful why do I get to be happy I don't deserve to be happy and something that has really helped me with that is affirmations which can feel really annoying when I'm in that mental space that I don't deserve something or there's a reason that I feel this low self-esteem is because I deserve to and therefore I shouldn't have happiness like you were saying before the math equations they get really really weird they're complicated I so I'll sometimes I'll write affirmations I can leave them by my bedside I really like right now in the morning after I do my morning routine I'll put in my little headphones and on insight timer is this group called theta thoughts t-h-e-t-a theta thoughts and they have all these different affirmation meditations I just put them on super low go about my morning and there's all this good goodness going into my ears as I'm brushing my teeth putting on my clothes like packing up my lunch and so it's like oh yeah I can have I'm allowed to have happiness that's really reasonable okay so that's this that one I just have two more this one is processing emotion processing emotions and it is very relevant to being frozen right now around like sadness and my mom and part of it I love your three A's pony and part of it is just accepting I'm kind of frozen so instead of being like oh I am gonna throw you in a steam bath Annie and I'm gonna scald you until you're not frozen and you are gonna feel all the things right now so I'm like oh but there's this I never had that perspective before that I was frozen and that that's kind of a physiological response that a body can have when it goes into a little bit of shock so I'm like oh you're frozen and it's hard for you to feel what you think you're feeling right now okay and then talking to mental health professionals about it which is also something that I would have not have done in the past and letting them know I'm sad and I don't really know if I know how to feel sad at this level and so they're giving me tools one of the tools is I'm really like checking out by reading super spicy romance novels so I'll just disappear into books for hours and then I'll go right to bed and then I'm having this terrible sleep and it was suggested to me by a mental health professional Annie you're not giving there's all the things that you're checking out from when you go to sleep your body's processing them so you're not giving your mind any space to let some of this stuff out and so at night you're tossing and turning wake up I'm like clamped my hands are sore my muscles are sore because I'm just cold and so she suggested and I am going to take this suggestion that yes I do all my reading but right before bed I will journal say what has reading for three hours straight allowed me not to feel and I'm really uncomfortable with with not having any control over my mom's health yeah it really is overwhelming and so even if that's just a three minute exercise there's this something that acknowledgement right like it's come it's we're letting something out and then the last one is having a baby cry and I don't mean I'm talking about babies I mean the duration of like usually when I am that bottled up if I just sit still for one minute and write that three minute journaling there'll be like a little sob that will come up and out and it's just this emotion that's been stored in my body and when I give it room it'll come out and I'll to be like and then and I feel better and maybe I'll have a couple of those little baby cries but they're very soothing I'm always like gosh what was I fighting so hard why was I avoiding that so those are the mishmash of tools that I am using it I also from what I believe is that emotion is energy in motion oh I love that and so it makes a lot of sense when we stuff and smush of why things explode or get locked up because the energy is not in motion and that's what we want to do we want to create the space here and within us to be able to heal because we really do our bodies are amazing our whole system is amazing and they want to work together to get back to homeostasis they're so good at it we just kind of get in the way so having that self awareness to see where we're getting in the way and then also being really compassionate and loving with ourselves because this is really big deep work to be doing we're going to read some of the comments now yeah well and this so that's the that is our episode hey hey and then we can segue into these questions and answers but maybe before we do I just want to say if you are new to our podcast we'd love it if you subscribe if you would like to donate we this is a passion project we do it entirely of our own resources we would be so grateful bony do you have anything you want to add to that just want to congratulate all of you for showing up for yourself in this way it's such a big deal it is a big deal we're on a journey of self exploration and we're here we're on the path so let's we'll keep going keep on and then we'll do so if anyone has any questions we did this last time it was really fun just type it into the chat I love to be together and we love to hear from all of you because honestly that is where we learn and grow the most is from each other so please share if you like I need my readers no problem I'll get up there I've my my my phone wrote any tips on identifying the need so when you were talking pony about your nonviolent communication oh yeah so also I think what that would be is the hierarchy of needs so getting to figure out what needs even are is all humans need shelter we need food and water we need companionship I think there's five I will look that up and I suggest that you do too because it's all there and it's really good information we should all be taught this when we're like from the beginning of time so that we know that it's okay that we have these needs and what they even are yeah and I think just in the more emotional sense of it for example if I have anger come up if I journal for example about it I can get under the to what need isn't being met oh I'm not being heard I would my need to be really to be heard to be loved to be respected right respect what are my values but for me it's sometimes going having that learning to identify the actual physical response that's happening in my body naming it and then journaling or talking with someone about it using some of these tools so then I can start to get under what isn't what is the need that is not being met why am I sad why is this keep coming up and then I can go about learning how to either self soothe and fill the need for myself or ask for it in a relationship or start to understand like our last episode was about untangling codependency like is is this relationship a healthy relationship if I continue to not have my needs met nits says how long did it take for you to embody the things once you figured them out or got the tools ongoing ongoing it is a practice what a practice means is is we put it into practice we try again and again we forget and then we remember so I have little ways of reminding myself I have I write stuff on my mirror with a dry erase marker because I'm just going in and out of consciousness you know like and I need the things that are really important and what I'm focusing on I have to have them there for me so that and I change it all the time and I meditate and I have a daily practice and that helps me to set my intention so that I know what I'm doing throughout the day not about what work needs to be done but my spiritual intentions what am I focusing on right now and how am I going to try and remember to wake up during the day so that I can practice these things because I make it like a game in my life and I use each moment to be able to check in with myself because it's all it's all here at any time so you can always use like teeth brushing little markers where you know you're going to the bathroom the most spiritual place in the entire house and we're always in there crying or figuring something out or telling ourselves the feelings okay I love the bathroom so anyway it's a good marker for to practice to try to remember that you're on the path and now is a great time to see what's going on how am I feeling honestly there is no accelerant for healing when we talk about feelings and being frozen what it takes to thaw just think about that thawing is a whole process and we cannot accelerate our healing we're here we're doing enough we are enough and it's all going to unfold is emotional intelligent an oxymoron do pure feelings peace and love exist and arise before and beyond our emotional states this is a great Neil what a insightful question do pure feelings peace and love exist and arise before and beyond our emotional states there is so much really fascinating research on this everyone from Darwin to people you don't even know have done studies to see what when where and how and they're all conflicting and I highly recommend I love reading about those and pondering it myself which it sounds like you're doing it seems like love is a pure emotion to me that's just my thought that came that arose yeah I I I think about what goes on in this spiritual space is so big and so infinite and is happening all the time and in so many different fractals and that we get these bodies in this one life to kind of bring it into the physical realm and experience it all is how I like to think of it it makes it fun how can I tell the difference between a gut feeling and one that is more fear based it's such a good question I would say for me it has taken practice and I really needed help personally this is just me I needed help with working with a therapist because I was so disconnected and had not trusted my body for so long so that gut instinct that you're talking about kind of our intuition and that kind of core body knowledge I had shut it down for so long that it was mine was pretty warped and so and it was very woven in with fear because I had a lot of fear in me and so it took practice and tools with a professional for me to start to untangle those things and see where I had this old residual fear that wasn't based in present tense anymore versus learning also to just trust myself learning to say oh this is how I feel right this how my body feels when this person talks to me like this and I can trust it instead of saying oh shushing any that's not really how you feel this is fine they're they're not being rude or you don't feel that way and but it's like pony was saying about practice like it takes practice it takes talking about it with you guys takes talking about it with my friends it takes journaling about it takes self-awareness self-awareness meditation is really great because I can start to create a little bit of room in my brain so that I can start to parse out like is this just one of my consistent thinking patterns or is this coming from this place of kind of clarity and truth inside of me for me what I've realized is that I have been stuck in survival mode and I am terrified at all times and I think that I am going to die and so my fear and being terrified is there it's already there at any moment I'm hyper vigilant to and catastrophizing it what's the worst thing that's going to happen because it it's my self and my old parts of my my brain thinking that it's going to help me predict the worst thing that's possibly going to happen and I need to survive right now and I have to remind myself and take the time and practice that we live in a modern world I'm taken care of I'm resourced I'm capable the past is over I can take care of myself now for me recognizing that my old set point is absolute terror and fear honestly on a daily moment to moment basis I don't even care I've just been telling people lately I'm like whatever I'm terrified all the time because once I acknowledge that accept that and have awareness I'd like allow that then I get to get under that and go to what is my gut actually telling me right now oh yeah that's my old stuff going on right now oh I'm concerned about the future what here's what I can do to make sure that I'm prepared nine day unbelievable the like terror that I was living in and all times and then being able to listen to what's actually going on so it's been a lot of learning about myself and helping myself to practice again and again over and over many many many many many many many rounds mm-hmm Stacey asked any tips for helping someone you love experience their emotions if they are hesitant to do so yes I have a great suggestion and what helps me is me being comfortable and practicing not having to let someone else have other experiences or emotions and they're having which is incredibly hard for me because I feel best when I think other people are feeling good and so this is a constant practice for me is letting somebody else be stuck or what I perceive as stuck that's just my perception and I can ask questions like it seems like that might upset you is that the case or how does that make you feel and sometimes there's a total shutdown and it doesn't lead to a productive conversation sometimes it does but in any case then if it doesn't get the resolution that I want which is always like epiphany and then everybody's happy and total freedom for me then I get to practice being uncomfortable with being uncomfortable which is really hard for me right like we are this whole show is we don't want to be uncomfortable we're all learning about how to build our tolerance to being uncomfortable and for me remembering that I'm already going into this maybe with an expectation I want this person to be able to experience their emotions I want them to feel the full I want them to be okay I want I have to recognize what my expectations are for this person and then always always is the being the example so what that means is being my partner did this for me which is where he would say what he was feeling he'd also like sometimes he'd be he'd says how does that make you feel and I would be like first of all rude don't make me angry if I'm angry felt I was just like also what that helped me so much was that I realized this story that went on when he said that was I'm not allowed to have feelings right now why is this person asking me this so it's so helpful to realize that and that he actually cared about me but so it's being the example and so what I would notice is he would he started being like oh I feel sad or I feel at any time during the day and he was this example that made me realize that this was a normal thing and that you could do it I hope that was helpful and yeah you know more love and more gentleness and more acceptance in any situation is like the go to and one of my spiritual mentors always says and you remember that the other person no matter what they're experiencing going through have going on their whole capable and resource that's right and I love what you said about modeling so I can model from a place of not sometimes I'll do that with my wife and it's like sneaky modeling like I'm obviously in the superior position here and I'm showcasing the appropriate way to behave and that for me isn't coming from a place of like true and positive motivation so I get to prep work on that for myself but yeah just remembering for myself when I'm dealing with someone who is in a place that I think is stuck their whole capable and resourceful which sometimes is hard for me because I think that I know what is best for other people quite frankly practice.

Oriana said I didn't realize that my nervous system is so dysregulated that I feel uncomfortable when things are going normally or too calm and yeah boy do I know I've got to watch my mind when things are I had to like do a whole new set point for when things aren't pure chaos because I could even watch my mind here's what's going to happen here's what's going to be next and it's like acknowledging and allowing and remind myself it's okay that things are calm yes things can be good right now the other shoe is not going to drop and letting all of that feeling of calmness and things being okay come into every single cell of my body is a practice I do all the time because I need every part of myself to feel and know that it's okay and then to not bring the judgment in because a lot of times is all flip back around and be like other people do not have that you know and it's just like another way for me to not feel calm.

I'm so sneaky.

What are your experiences with the feeling we call courage?

Are they positive,

Terrifying,

Easy peasy,

Something else?

Think there's this really interesting definition for courage of that it's not the alternative or the antonym to fear but it is the willingness to move forward in spite of fear so for me maybe courage encompasses all of those things right it's positive emotion or feeling it's terrifying it's everything but it's for me I guess the biggest underlying part of courage is willingness willing to try even if I'm scared even if I'm hopeful even if whatever and I think that's the key and then sometimes for me willingness I can't get on my own when I'm really scared so I call on a higher power and I can pray or I can meditate or I can think about tapping into something bigger than myself and that is often where I find courage when I don't have it or I don't even have the willingness to look for it and I just say wow it's not just me against everything and I what if there's more resources available to me that will provide me this courage that's beyond me that I don't have the capacity to resource on my own.

Yeah and often times when I'm feeling stuck or low I realize that courage is something that I could use to really really help me like the courage to change things to be courageous in my own life in these ways instead of just being stuck or irritated or cranky courage is often times like the touch point for change.

Well we're coming up on our time if anybody has a last question throw it in there.

Looks like what's the next step to go from understanding myself and feeling balanced to thriving?

I mean I feel like understanding myself and feeling balanced is thriving.

It sounds pretty thrive-alicious.

Wow I love that.

Thank you so much for that question and yeah I just my main thing is I need to recognize when I am just merely on a one-track mind to surviving because that is when I'm living from a very small space of like do whatever get whatever it's not a more expansive thriving is a place where there's enough space to take my time and listen think about like the world around me and not just me mine I'm gonna get it so we're thriving.

We're practicing thriving.

We're trying and we just keep pointing ourselves hopefully forward.

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