How to Have Emotional Badassery
Emotions can be hard. Often, the last thing we want to do is experience them. This last week has been tough for me. Tough because I was letting myself actually feel what I was feeling. I wasn’t condemning myself for not being happy and I wasn’t placating myself with happy thoughts. I know there is room for even more improvement, but boy oh boy have I come a long way!
For way too many years I was ashamed of my emotions, denied my emotions, and held my emotions in. The irony is that all those years of suppressed emotional expression culminated into severe anxiety. At that point my body was so filled with toxic and stagnant emotional energy it was making me physically sick.
Today I do it differently. Today, I let myself feel my emotions without judgment. I have learned how to honor the variety of emotions I experience and realize we can allow ourselves to feel emotions with the understanding that we don't have to stay stuck in any one of them. This is what I want for you. I want you to start feeling the freedom of experiencing your emotions. There will be more to learn, but this is an important first step!
When you allow yourself to really feel your emotions (especially those pesky negative ones) you allow yourself to move through them more quickly. It's when you deny yourself the true essence of your emotion that you find yourself stuck and unable to effectively work through them.
photo by nick-scheerbart on unsplash (1)
When you come up against a negative emotion... let's say sadness, your first reaction is to want to stop the emotional flow because you think it will stop the experience of that emotion. But by fighting it or trying to hold it back you are actually denying the natural flow of the emotion and your emotional energy ends up stuck right where it is. The trick is to keep the energy flowing so there is an open invitation for new emotional energy to follow in behind it.
This may be easier to understand if you think of your emotional energy as water in a stream. The natural flow of a stream always has new water replacing the old. It is constantly keeping the water moving and constantly wearing down the silt and sand and rocks and other debris within it. However, if you purposefully try to stop yourself from experiencing the flow of your emotions it would essentially be like stopping that stream dead in its tracks. The stream no longer has the ability to bring new water into the old. It no longer has the ability to carry the silt or sand to new destinations and it definitely does not have the ability to erode the larger rocks and boulders. It upsets the natural balance of the water and the water becomes stagnant. I think you have probably experienced gross, stinky, cloudy and tainted water. And it is NOT pleasant.
Just like that stream, if you try to stop your emotional energy, you essentially do the same thing to your emotional balance. You have no new emotional energy flowing in to replace the old, you have no emotional energy helping move all those little bits and pieces of emotions left behind and you definitely don't have enough emotional energy to help erode the larger chunks of emotions that may have dropped here and there throughout the years. You can’t afford to stop your emotional energy flow, or you risk your emotions becoming stagnant, tainted and cloudy. However, if you allow your emotions to flow through you, it does just that, it flows THROUGH you. It doesn't stick around, which means even the not so pleasant emotions will make their appearance and then be on their merry way.
Next time you are tempted to deny or hold in your emotions remember this little analogy. Practice being the emotional stream. Let the emotion pass through you on its natural course and remind yourself that this allows new, fresh and clear emotions to follow close behind. There is still more work to do, but becoming emotionally aware and allowing yourself to honestly experience your emotions without judgment is a great start to understanding what triggers your emotions and when you are prone to deny them. Get this down and you are definitely on your way to Emotional Badassery! <3