Hi beautiful friends!

Can we talk about some awesome uncomfortable emotions?  How about discouragement, defeat & not feeling “good enough”.

Before we dive in, I want to remind you that our emotions are for feeling. Feelings are great ways to understand ourselves & being human means we are here to experience about 50% positive emotions & about 50% negative emotions. 

We can argue on the percentages & that’s totally OK. You can pick your percentage. 

But what I want to illustrate with these percentages is the basic concept that we need to have a balance of “positive” and “negative” emotions to be able to discern one from the other, to be able to learn. And to be a human being means we will have a mix of emotions & we are supposed to. If we were always 100% joyously happy all the time, not only would that be strange, but would we want to be 100% joyously happy when someone died? Both “positive” & “negative” emotions can be GREAT TEACHERS for us if we let them.

The challenge can be that when we experience a “negative” emotion, or one that feels uncomfortable physically in our bodies, our instinct usually pulls out the “negativity bias” and starts looking for what is wrong about that feeling. In other words, our brains will often instinctively want to judge us for having a “negative” feeling & tell us that it is “wrong” to have a negative feeling.

What if it wasn’t wrong? What if if was just human? Could we give ourselves a little more grace & compassion & allow ourselves to just be human. To just look at the feeling & ask ourselves what we could learn from looking at it instead of telling ourselves there is something “wrong” with us because we have a “negative” or uncomfortable feeling?

With that said I’d like to share about some wonderfully uncomfortable feelings I’ve been having the past few days. 

I started the next phases of a project I’ve been working on & all these awesome feelings of defeat, discouragement & “not good enough” started to come up. 

I knew that they were being caused by the thoughts I was having about the progress of the project & I knew that it was inevitable that these feelings would show up. 

I was expecting them. I chose not to make them wrong. In fact, a couple days ago, the thoughts & feelings wanted to beat me over the head & heart & I was able to choose a different way:

I welcomed them. I literally said in my mind, hello discouragement & defeat, I’ve been expecting you!  Welcome. Come on in. I’m so grateful to have you be a teacher for me today.

OK, you may be thinking, you’re crazy Candy. And that’s TOTALLY OK WITH ME.

You may not be thinking I’m crazy. Doesn’t matter either way :). 

What happened next is something I’d like to offer you.

I felt the feeling appear, I acknowledged it & I felt it go out of my body in about 1-2 minutes. And then I felt peace shortly thereafter with actually a little bit of a joy pop. I didn’t go to beating myself up, I just let the emotion process through. Will this always happen, this quickly, no, but it is possible to acknowledge, feel & process our emotions more effectively (and often times much more quickly) than just our instinct the instinctive/survival parts of our brain would have us do.  

This is how we take our brain to the gym. We let ourselves feel our all feelings & not make them wrong. (And feel doesn’t mean take them out on things or people, it means, experience it, let yourself feel it in your body, etc.)

When we welcome an uncomfortable feeling & expect uncomfortable feelings on our path to change & growth instead of judging them or making them wrong or making it mean that there is something wrong with us, we work with how our brain is wired & it calms our brain down emotionally.

It’s like doing some deep breathing or mini-meditation or essentially giving ourselves brain break to and not go down the emotional-hijacking spiral of self-berating/self-shame etc.

You’ve probably heard “WHAT YOU RESIST PERSISTS”. Well, when we tell ourselves even instinctively, that it’s not OK to have an uncomfortable or “negative” feeling, THAT’S RESISTING. 

It’s resisting and telling ourselves that “we shouldn’t have negative emotions”.

WHAT IF WE SHOULD HAVE THEM? 

WHAT IF IT’S OK? 

WHAT IF WE WON’T DIE IF WE HAVE AN UNCOMFORTABLE / “NEGATIVE” EMOTION”?

WHAT IF WE COULD LEARN HOW TO PROCESS THEM IN EFFECTIVE WAYS TO SUPPORT US ON OUR PATH TO THE BEST VERSION OF OURSELVES?

WHAT IF WE COULD LEARN TO PROCESS THEM WITHOUT USING FOOD? 

THIS IS TOTALLY POSSIBLE!!