TTM #14 HOW TO FEEL BAD
You are listening to me talking to myself. Welcome to the podcast where I share useful tools to create more space, more freedom, inner peace, connection, and life on purpose!
It hurts. What should I do? How do I stop it from hurting?
In this episode I will talk about the art of feeling bad. I want to talk about how we can get better at feeling bad. Being alive on the planet, being here on Earth is not about feeling positive emotion all of the time. Frustration, anger, resentment, pain, loneliness, boredom, discomfort. What if you could open your life up to all of it? What if one of the reasons why we are here is to experience every single emotion? No feeling is good or bad, right or wrong, we're just programmed from a very early age to think there is something wrong about feeling negative emotions, that we should try and fix when we feel bad. Or pretend like we do not. You are sad, you're crying - go get ice cream. It will make you feel better.
Negative emotions are not a problem. The actions we take from those emotions are. We want to feel them, but we do not want to react to them. Emotions are simply energy. Energy likes to move. If it does not move, it transforms into something different than when it does move. Trauma is something that is stuck, is unresolved, and undigested.
Emotions are just information about what is going on. negative feelings like disappointment embarrassment, irritation, resentment, anger, jealousy and fear instead of being bad news, are actually very clear messages of what is happening in our mind and body. They ask us to not to look away, but to look closer. They are like messengers that show us where we are stuck every moment of our life. And luckily for us, our emotions are always with us wherever we are.
If you would be happy all of the time, would you even know that you are happy? We need sadness to know what happiness is. We need hunger to know what fullness is. Faith is our ability to believe in something that we doubt. If we don't have doubt, then there is no need for faith. If we are willing to feel disappointment, then our experience of desire, our experience of hope will be intensified. Compassion is so much deeper when we have experienced shame. There is no feeling of success, no feeling of accomplishment if there is no such thing as defeat. We have these contrasting emotions that we want to dismiss and yet they are the ones that are creating the contrast for the ones we most want to feel. Without one we don't have the other.
Life is not about always being happy. We need that contrast that balance of positive and negative emotions. Happiness requires that there is unhappiness, there is no happiness without the other side of it. And even though our thoughts cause our feelings, that does not mean that we want to feel good all of the time. Go to episode 9 and 13 to explore how our thoughts create our feelings.
So what if we are supposed to feel negative emotions? And immediately there is a sense of relaxation and peace not only around you when you think about it, but also around all the other people in our life. It's so easy to expect everyone to be pleasant and happy and in a good mood all of the time. And we get frustrated and upset when they're not. It is just not realistic and nor it is healthy. Having a full healthy life means embracing the contrast in the world. It includes negative emotion as part of that experience. And in fact, negative emotion can be part of our experience of happiness. It can make our happiness even better.
The definition of happiness is not the absence of negative emotion and never experiencing negative emotion and just being in a state of bliss all of the time. One of definitions of happiness is the joy you feel when working towards your potential. And of course when we are working towards our potential, we will be facing a lot of obstacles. Growth and evolvement is uncomfortable. Failing, learning lessons may not feel positive all of the time.
When we are working towards our potential, we will have to overcome all those obstacles in between who we are right now and our potential. And our obstacles between ourselves and our potential is our mind and our emotions. And part of the joy of working towards something that's difficult is facing all of that negative emotion.
We want to be humans. We want to feel the full range of what it is like to be alive which means the full range of emotions.
What is an emotion? An emotion is a vibration in our body. There is a difference between a sensation and a feeling. Sensation is something that starts in your body and travels to your brain. It's something that is involuntary, a physical reaction that you're not able to control. A feeling starts in your brain which is created by a thought and travels to your body. It is a vibration in your body caused by a thought in your mind. Sensations and feelings are connected. Emotions can cause physical pain and physical pain can, of course, cause emotions. But that's a separate conversation. For the purpose of this episode I want to stick with a definition that feelings are vibrations in the body caused by thoughts in the brain.
A vibration in your body can be positive or negative. You can have a positive vibration that feels pleasant and you can have a negative vibration that feels unpleasant. In order to feel a positive emotion, all you need to do is think about something amazing, wonderful, and you will feel that in your body. If you want to experience a negative emotion, think about something terrible, dangerous, painful, and you'll feel that negative emotion. Check out episode 13 on deep dive into how we create emotions.
It hurts. What should I do? How do I stop hurting? And that's the kind of assumption that most people have. And the assumption is if I have a negative emotion, the goal is for me to get rid of it, is to stop it, is to make it hurt less. And what I'm suggesting is that actually the opposite is true. When you're feeling a negative emotion when you're creating a negative emotion within your body, the goal is not to retract from it and stop it from happening as quickly as possible. The goal is to let it move through you, let it vibrate through you, so you can release it. So when it hurts, what should I do? - Let it hurt, let it be uncomfortable. Feel what it feels like in your body to stop trying to resist negative emotions, to stop trying to avoid discomfort, but just letting something feel uncomfortable for as long as it needs to feel uncomfortable. Allow pain to be there. And allow it to hurt without reacting, without resisting, without avoiding and escaping.
When you have emotional discomfort it is because you have a thought causing it. So you're thinking a thought and then you're creating a negative emotion. This is different than the thoughts you have about those negative emotions. Your thought creates your feeling, in this case a painful and uncomfortable feeling. It is different from you having thoughts about that painful feeling. And a lot of the unnecessary suffering is caused by thoughts about that negative emotion and not actually thoughts causing it. When we judge our negative emotions, avoid them, resist them, and escape them, and then judge ourselves for doing that, we create unnecessary suffering. When we allow for the negative emotion that is part of our life, we actually reduce our suffering. When we open up to the possibility and let negative emotion be what it is, we reduced our suffering by moving towards it, by facing and welcoming it. And the more we do that, the less power this negative emotion has over us.
So what do you do when feelings hurt? You celebrate that you're alive human being. You allow those emotions to be there. You welcome them, you're curious about them. You do not judge them and yourself for having them. You process them and then you release them. The better you become at processing emotions the better you get at life. Feeling your feelings is one of the most powerful things we can do.
So how do I feel my emotions?
One of the things that is very simple to think about as an idea, is when you start to feel negative emotion, you start feeling a compulsion or an urge to escape it. You notice that urge. For example, you decided not to eat sugar, you feel the urge to eat chocolate. You become aware of that urge. You notice the space between the urge, between the emotion and your reaction. In this case, going to a shop and buying chocolate. Instead you let the emotion be there. Let the urge be there. Let the discomfort be there. Before you make your way to the shop, stop. It will feel very uncomfortable and it will feel like somebody else is moving your legs for you. You feel kind of out of control and it does not feel like you're making a conscious choice.
The art of allowing it, is to be there, is to witness it, to become the observer of it, to watch it from the outside. And one of the ways to do that is by describing it. Because when you go into your intellectual mind to describe an emotion you get relief from that emotion. You detach yourself from that emotion and being part of you. You watch yourself having this experience like zooming out and observing the earth from the moon. You notice yourself experiencing that emotion and it is separate from you. It has no power over you.
Here are some tips: Say ‘this is’ and then name the emotion. You might want to use the emotion list in show notes to help you identify. Look at what is the emotion that you're experiencing, and then just say ‘this is’ and name it. This is an urge. This is rejection. This is restlessness. This is irritation. This is boredom. This is shame. This is frustration. What is the emotion that you're experiencing? Name it.
Then the next step is to describe it as a vibration in your body. Describe it to yourself as you are observing it. Where is it? How does it feel? How does it look? I feel it in my chest. I feel it in my stomach. I feel it in my limbs. I feel it in my heart. I feel it in my throat. I feel it in my face. Where do you feel this emotion? Is it cold? Is it hot? Is it heavy? Is it dark?
And once you've embodied that emotion and you described it, then you can ask yourself, what is the thought causing it? And if you notice that the thought causing it is something that you believe, that is something true, that is a thoughts you want to keep. So for example, if you've lost a pet or a person, you may be feeling grief. You may be feeling sad, and if you realise that the thought is ‘I will miss this pet’ or ‘I will miss this person. I wish they hadn't died.’ Those might be thoughts you want to be having. It is something valid. And in this case, just keep opening yourself up to the emotion.
Other times you're going to start processing the emotion and observing it and feeling it and you will notice that the thought causing it is not a thought you want to be having. Maybe something like ‘I'm not good enough’ or ‘It will never work’ or ‘I'm failing’. Or a thought that is just not useful, like ‘that person doesn't like me’ or ‘that person doesn't care’ or ‘nobody likes me’. And if you notice that the thought your thinking is not a thought that is serving you, become aware, notice it, do not try and change it right away. Become curious. ‘I wonder why I'm thinking this, this thought is not serving me.’ And once you do, at this point, just say ‘Interesting. This is what my brain offers me as suggestion. This is a thought error.’ That's it. Sometimes you need to communicate with your brain and tell your brain what it should think on purpose or not think. And as you say that it releases and loses its power.
And that emotion that you might be feeling seems to lose all of its intensity. It's just a sentence in your mind causing a vibration in your body. It is a thought error. It's not a thought you want to be having. It's not a thought you believe that is true. It's simply a thought error. That's okay. You can let it go.
One of the reasons why I encourage you to practice this skill of opening up to it, acknowledging it and releasing it is, it will prevent you from reacting to it. Our thoughts create our feelings and our feelings drive our actions that create our results. And if we are having an emotion and we are reacting to that emotion, if we are acting out that emotion that is caused from a thought error, we are going to be creating results we do not want in our lives. We are going to be creating unintentional results that may end up compounding our negative emotions. So creating more of the negative emotion coming from that reaction to this negative feeling. There is a huge difference between allowing yourself to feel a negative emotion and actually reacting to it. In fact, most of the time when we see someone who is in a bad mood, someone who's upset about something it's not because they are truly experiencing negative emotion, it is because they are resisting negative emotions.
The resistance is our inability to accept it. What you resist persists, like holding a beach ball under water. It's hard to do and eventually the ball bursts out of the water flying off in a wild direction. When we try to push down our feelings, they eventually make their way to the surface, in a wild direction.
Experiencing negative emotion does not mean reacting to that negative emotion. That's a very different energy, different action, and different result. When you know you're having a negative emotion instead of pretending like you don't have it and exhausting yourself by pretending, you just allow it without reacting to it. Be with it, notice it with curiosity, and not with judgement. Just be with whatever emotion is here for you right now. The way to enjoy life is not by avoiding or resisting negative emotions. And in fact, it's the opposite. It's by really opening ourselves up to diving into the negative emotion that gives us the full experience of what it means to be alive, and probably, that is ultimate happiness.
Can you give yourself 10 minutes to experience that emotion in its purity and really notice what it feels like and what it's like to experience it? It will not feel great because negative emotions do not feel great. How long does it really last? Do you know how long a negative emotion lasts?
The world of the senses is impermanent. Eventually this uncomfortable sensation will disappear. And sometimes it's just 10 minutes of discomfort that we are so afraid of. But this is something that we are not trained to do. It's not a skill that has been developed or we learn in school. And one of the problems is that there are so many ways to escape. We are always trying to find ways to get more pleasure, all the food and all the social media and all the entertainment is invitations to escape emotions, to repress them, to get away from them. And so we do not learn the skill of actually processing them and opening ourselves up to them, and experiencing them without reacting. ‘Are you said? - go eat something to feel better, or drink something or take something.’ Sounds like a quick solution that works, and why would I be uncomfortable instead? So what is the problem with feeling sad? The problem is that it is unpleasant and requires being present with yourself. Which is also not a skill we learn in school. Because we are programmed to look outside for external things to make us feel better instead of allowing that vibration to be there. The only thing is that that uncomfortable emotion does not go away. The drinking, smoking, eating, overworking will just cover it up for some time, until the next time. So next time instead of eating, drinking smoking, overworking, instead of avoiding, resisting or escaping, practice feeling negative emotion, practice being present with yourself. Sit down and describe that emotion inside your body. What is it I'm trying so hard to escape from? And what's most of us realise is, because we have been resisting our emotions for so long, we do not even know what it's like to experience an emotion. We only know what it's like to resist an emotion and avoid an emotion. So what is it like to actually feel it? If you give yourself time to allow whatever negative emotion that you're feeling to come up and experiencing it flow through you with full acceptance, you will actually learn the skill of how to feel a negative emotion. When you learn how to feel a negative emotion, you also learn how to feel a positive emotion. You're learning how to feel. It's important for us to learn how to process, learn how to feel in a way that serves us and serves our life instead of taking away from our life.
Wait, but if I'm the one causing it, and I don't want to feel it, I can just change it right now?! And yes, it is possible. But again, sometimes we do not want to feel amazing when somebody dies. So step one, allow the pain. Be with it. Become aware of what it is and how it feels. Then you can access the thought that is causing the pain and then if you want to change it, change it. But do not skip the part where you feel the emotion. Whenever you have that idea of not feeling negative emotions, you will be in a rush to escape it. You can remind yourself that this is part of your human experience. There is nothing wrong with negative emotions. Emotions are just vibrations in our body. It is nothing to be afraid of. No emotion is ever going to harm you if you allow it. And when you really truly understand that your feelings are caused by your thoughts, there is no rush to feel better.
But if you get good at thinking the thoughts, feeling the emotion, letting it go and understanding it, you can always change the thoughts if you want. Many times we do not want to change our thoughts and that's okay. We want to be in grief or we want to be in pain or we want to be in suffering because of something that's happened in our life. And we want to process that through and move to the other side of it. If it doesn't hurt when somebody dies, you're missing the joy of them being a life.
Emotions are energy in motion. If they are not expressed, the energy is repressed. As energy it has to go somewhere. Emotional energy moves us as does all energy. To deny emotion is to deny the ground of vital energy of our life. When we don't allow our feelings to go through us and expire, they compound and they come out in other areas. When you spend time with an emotion, when you spend time with feeling bad on purpose, you start to understand the reasons why it feels bad. What is it exactly about feeling awful that makes us want to avoid it? Is it the tension we create by trying to resist it? Is it the feeling of numbness that we recreate by trying to avoid it? What is the worst part of feeling bad? What am I actually escaping? What is it I do not want to feel?
Emotions and addiction. Addiction is craving a particular sensation. You're not actually craving the object but the sensation. And again, everything we want or do not want in our life is because of that sensation we want or do not want to feel. It's not the substance but the feeling you get from that substance - comfort, relief, escape, feeling better. The reason why you don't want to live your life without those external substances is because you don't want to feel your emotions. We will never have enough of what we don't really need. But the reason you don't want to feel your emotions is because you never learned how. And when you learn how to feel them, what you realise is, they're not that bad.
This is true for food for pleasure, for social media for pleasure, for TV for pleasure, so just be honest with yourself and notice, is this compulsive? Is this an urge? Is this a reaction because I don't want to feel?
When setting goals, the bigger the goals, the more negative thoughts we are going to have, the more doubt, insecurity, shame, rejection we will experience. It is part of the process of growth. The bigger the life, the more negative emotions we will have. So the goal is not to avoid, resist, escape those negative emotions, they are part of the deal. The goal is to become better at embracing that part of being human, become better at welcoming them, being with them and feeling them.
You can't eliminate negative thinking and negative emotions. Our brain is programmed to survive, stay small, so whatever will challenge us, will feel uncomfortable. And if you want to grow, evolve and have a bigger life, you better go and practice feeling emotions.
When you ignore your emotions, when you resist your emotions, you're resisting the very act of being a conscious human being. You miss out on the opportunity to connect to yourself, to your body, to your mind, to your experience on this earth.
So what if I don't experience any negative emotions? - Maybe you're not challenging yourself enough. And maybe you're just not aware. When we are living our lives in a way that is asking us to grow and evolve and to chase our dreams and to get what we want in life, we are going to have challenges that will bring up that negative emotion. Processing feelings is the most courageous thing anyone can do. And when we are willing to feel any emotion, that's when we are going to be willing to take any action, because we won’t to be afraid of the emotion that might accompany it.
So what if I don't have time for feelings? Then probably you're not going to be as successful as you could be. Feelings will always hold us back from opening ourselves up to a full life because we will be afraid of experiencing negative emotions. We're always going to be in pain that we can't control the universe, that we can't make other people behave the way we want, that we can't have other people get the success that we want for them, the happiness we want them to have. It will feel painful to watch people do things we don't want them to do, to watch people hurt themselves when we don't want them to. We will always feel in pain. And we want to change other people, so we can feel better. Changing other people is not possible. So we might also learn how to be with that discomfort. We want other people to be happy so they don't suffer, which is nice. So we protect and try not to hurt their feelings. However, the ability to deal with negative emotion is going to come from experiencing negative emotion. And if we are constantly trying to dismiss negative emotion or control somebody's life in a way that they won't ever experience negative emotion, they will never learn this skill. I do not have children myself, but I think this would be a very useful skill to teach them.
Emotions and meditation. Our unconscious mind is constantly feeling sensations in the body and reacting to those sensations. If it feels a pleasant sensation, it will start craving. If it feels an unpleasant sensation, it will start hating. All negative emotions feel unpleasant. That's why we unconsciously do not want to feel them and find all possible ways to not to, because our brain is programmed for survival - moving towards pleasure, escaping pain, and not exert any energy. So we are reacting to those sensations instead of being uncomfortable. The world of the senses is impermanent and whatever is impermanent is suffering. So meditation, where we observe our sensations without reacting to them, is a practice of being present with those vibrations, being the watcher without judging them and reacting to them. When we feel anger, we experience an unpleasant sensation in our body. So if we do not practice to be with a sensation to observe it and feel it, our unconscious mind starts reacting to that unpleasant sensation with more anger. Maybe you noticed if something goes wrong, you instantly see all the areas in your life that are not going right. So you multiply that anger and this is the unconscious pattern of the mind. So the practice of meditation creates awareness that this is what's happening. I have a thought that creates a negative emotion that causes an unpleasant sensation in my body. I do not need to react to this sensation. I can be with it. I can observe it and after some time it will go away because everything is impermanent. The awareness interrupts that cycle, without reacting we just observe. It is a practice. The more you practice, the quicker you notice your unconscious mind. And the quicker you can interrupt the cycle. And the good news is, you have the power to be in control of your negative emotions and how they drive your actions. You are the one responsible for your negative emotions. You're also the one in power to respond to them on purpose. Do not be a prisoner of your own behaviour patterns. Do not be a victim of your emotions. Check out my meditation on sensations, episode five.
Emotions and breath. Every emotion we experience has its own breath pattern. Negative emotions have an immediate effect on breathing. Depending on the emotion we may breathe faster, we sigh, or even stop breathing. We need to know our breath patterns, our natural flow of the breath, so we can use it as an indicator of what we are experiencing, what emotion we are experiencing, and also as a tool to process emotions. Check out my meditation on breath awareness, episode three.
Emotions and Asana, physical practice of yoga. Whatever we experience in our life, our physical body remembers everything. When we don't give ourselves the opportunity to release emotional energy, it often manifests itself in other ways like anxiety, depression, anger, ADHD, headaches, difficulty sleeping. Emotions are energy in motion. We need to move our body to release that energy. Yoga is one of the tools to release emotional tension in the body and to experience the healing that comes with this release. When practising, we release emotions by breaking up energy blocks. These energy blocks often come from emotions, traumas and memories we have suppressed over time, even those we may not be aware of. You might have experienced yourself or witness somebody else crying in a yoga class, not knowing where it even comes from. In yoga, we use movement and breath to release that physical tension and stuck energy, and create awareness of our body, our sensations, our mind, our thoughts.
The more we practice feeling and processing, the better we become at feeling and processing. The more we practice resisting, avoiding, and escaping, the better we become at not feeling. Every emotion we experience is a vibration in our body. The more we practice, the better we become in processing emotions. Whatever we do or do not do in our life is because of the feeling we think we will have when we get it. We are either moving towards something we want or we are moving away from something we do not want to feel. The worst thing that can happen is an emotion. Emotions are harmless. They're just vibrations in our body. It is not a big deal. If we learn how to process emotions, there is nothing we would not be willing to do. 10 minutes of discomfort, and this is what we're afraid of?
Learn the skill. Practice the art of feeling bad.
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