Welcome to the Bloom Your Mind podcast where we take all of your ideas for what you want and we turn them into real things. I'm your host, certified coach, Marie McDonald. Let's get into it.
Hello, my friends, and welcome to episode twenty of the Bloom Your Mind podcast, in which we will talk about big, big feelings. I've been wondering when I was going to get to this on the podcast. It's been on my podcast bucket list of episode topics for a long time, and I decided that today's the day.
So I am going to share with you some wisdom about feelings that create a lot of relief for my clients. This is unanimous and consistent feedback that I get where clients that come to me are sort of replicating and explaining a lot of the ways that our society and our environments that we grow up in teach us to experience feelings, to process feelings, or not process them, and it's got them in a lot of trouble and most of the time it's got them confused and reactive.
My goal with today's episode is to give you a little bit of relief through some ideas that you can apply right away to your life as you just sort of play around with how you experience feelings and then what you do with them. One of the reasons that feelings are so important to understand is that emotions directly inform how we act. So if we feel really calm or really curious, we will act very differently than if we feel angry or jealous. Understanding where our feelings come from directly informs and changes how we act, which then, of course, changes everything else in our life because how we act gives us the results in the life that we've created and the world that we're experiencing.
So whether you are touchy-feely or woo-woo or super in touch with emotions and super comfortable with them, or whether you're like, "none of that, I'm not a big feeler, this is not for me," I promise you, whoever you are, understanding your feelings will help you to be more effective at getting your ideas out of your head and into the world where they belong and at walking through all of the steps that you will need to take along the way because you'll understand that your feelings aren't happening to you, you're the one that gets to decide what to do with the feelings that you experience in your body.
We learn early on that there are good feelings and bad feelings. We learn this false dichotomy that's similar to the good and bad that we put on everything. There are good people and bad people, villains and good guys, good feelings and bad feelings. There are the ones we want and the ones we want to avoid.
As we learn that and we experience certain vibrations in our bodies, we call them bad. And as we experience bad feelings, then we get to know them and we start to make decisions in our lives to avoid them. So everything that we do in our lives, if you really think about it, is either to chase feeling good and create more feeling good or to avoid feeling bad. And hey, there is nothing wrong with wanting to feel good. Feeling good is awesome. And we can get ourselves into a lot of trouble if that's all we're after in our lives. In some obvious ways, we can get into trouble, and also, if we are always avoiding bad feelings, we really limit what we're capable of doing in the world.
But when we can break down the label of bad and just get curious about what some of those feelings that are more difficult or challenging to experience, what they're like in our bodies, we can open ourselves up to a lot more experiences, a lot more of our own self-expression, just a lot more of the world. And the last thing I just want to say about this philosophically is that we're human beings. We're here in bodies. We can only experience the good feelings because the bad feelings are there. Right?
Like, if we're still using these words "good" and "bad." But what if they're not good and bad, what if they're all just vibrations in our body? And if we can open ourselves up to feeling all of them, to experiencing all of the feelings, that's when we get to fully understand what it is to be human. When we stop shoving them down and we start bravely walking towards the things that we most want to run away from. Like fear, shame, guilt, jealousy. Most of us will just do whatever we can to avoid some of these feelings. And what if we just got curious about what these vibrations are like in our bodies?
I'm going to talk to you about the four ways that we usually deal with big, big feelings and how three of them just get us into a lot of trouble and are very unproductive for us, and how the fourth one can really just open up a whole new world of possibility.
One more thing before we get into these four different ways that we can experience emotions. I just want to say that from a very young age, we are taught that feelings happen to us. He made me feel like this. She made me feel like this. This made me feel like this. Just notice in your language how often you say this made me feel. How often you experience your feelings as things that are happening to you. How often do you let yourself be victimized by your feelings? How often do you think someone's doing it to you?
If you go back a couple episodes and you listen to the tool that changed everything, you follow that logic. You see that we walk through the world and experience all these circumstances. And we have thoughts and feelings about these circumstances, but they're coming from us. Yes, from environments we've grown up in, yes, from things we're hearing other people say, yes from how we've been trained and socialized to be, and no matter where they came from. We get to choose when we begin to slow down and start to choose our thoughts, choose our feelings. The whole world opens up. No one is making your feelings happen to you. Just pause and interrupt that language when you use it. Notice how much more powerful it feels to say, I feel like this, not you're making me feel like this.
Alright, let's talk about the four things that we do with feelings. The first thing that we do with feelings is we stick our fingers in our ears and we say, I don't hear you. We ignore them. We push them down. I have a colleague that describes this like having a beach ball in the water and how you just push it under the water. And what happens when you push a beach ball full of air under the water? You can only push it down so far. Right? And eventually, what happens? You let it go and it explodes up and out of the water, getting water all over everybody that's sitting poolside.
So, when we ignore our feelings, it makes them bigger. It makes them explode out either because we lock them down into our bodies somewhere and store them in our bodies, and it comes out in discomfort or disease or injury of some kind, or later on, it comes out more explosively, or it comes out in depression, or it comes out in us just avoiding things that we want to do. But when we ignore our feelings and push them down, it just makes them bigger. And there's a lot of feelings that we do this with. So that's the first thing that we do with feelings. So just notice. Throughout your week. When are you pushing the feelings down, pretending like they're not there? Like a big old beach ball. Alright? That's the first thing.
So the second thing that we do with feelings can be called buffering. We layer something else on top of it. We, like, smear icing all over it, so we don't have to see it. You pretend that it's not there. We layer things on top of it so we don't have to feel the feeling. This comes in the form of comfort eating, drinking, taking drugs, over exercising, Working, sex, Netflix, scrolling on Instagram, listening to podcasts, doing all kinds of things, anything. It can even be taking a bath.
Even self care can be buffering. If you're using it to avoid acknowledging a feeling that you have. Self care is wonderful. But it's only really helpful if it's done in partnership with feeling our feelings. So whenever we're buffering, we're doing the beach balling again. When we're ignoring a feeling, we're pushing it down, it makes it bigger and better and worse. When we buffer and layer something else on top of a feeling, we're still gonna make it come back, bigger, and better, and more extreme. So neither one of these two things work. They give us this temporary fix that ultimately creates a net negative experience in our life where the problem gets worse.
The third thing that we do is we act out our feelings. So you know when you, like, drive by somebody on the freeway and there's two cars and they're parked and they're yelling at each other. One of the subtle ways I found in myself for acting out my feelings, I was kinda telling myself that I was feeling them because I was thinking about them.
I was considering why I was feeling the ways that I was feeling or I was considering all of the reasons and the story and explaining and chatting through what had happened and what the reasons were. I I was overthinking the feelings, but I was not actually feeling them. So some of the ways that we act out our feelings, actually sort of hide behind the guys of being really helpful, but they're just acting them out. And that one as well, my friends, the big old beach ball. When we act out our feelings, we're just gonna push them down and make them explode out twice as big and bad.
Which brings me to our last option, which is to experience our feelings. To allow them. And this is what it's like. It's just pausing for a moment. And touching the feeling. Feelings just want to be touched. They are vibrations in our bodies.
When we allow a feeling, we can just get curious and ask ourselves what is this like for me. Can I name it? What is this feeling? Where is it in my body? We can even ask what color is it? What shape is it? Is it moving? Is it still? Is it heavy or light? Is it fast or slow? Is it sharp or dull? Is it a swarm of bees? Is it a bag of rocks? What is it? And then we can just walk towards it. And ask, what does it have to tell me? What does it need? What's going on? Ironically, walking towards an emotion with curiosity.
Acknowledging the emotion instead of resisting it is the one thing that we can do that will not make it bigger and worse. Like so many other things in life when we stop resisting it, it kinda goes away. So ironically, when we embrace the emotions we most wanna run from, they lose their power over us. When we say, I am Marie, I can do shame. Use your own name. Okay?
When we say, what is this vibration like in my body? What's up with it? What's it got to say? Is it changing? What does it need? What need is it serving? And we allow it to be there instead of trying to push it away. You're acting it out or buffering or ignoring it, then it becomes a deep wisdom. And when we can allow shame or guilt or jealousy or fear instead of pushing them away or acting them out or buffering?
We can do anything because we stop making decisions in our life in order to avoid feeling things. And instead, we can make decisions because they're what we want. We stop running away from things. We stop avoiding. And it feels so good. If you Google hierarchy of emotions, you'll notice that there are feelings like joy, inhalation at the top, and feelings like shame and guilt at the bottom.
Shame is usually the hardest one to feel. When we can do shame, we can do anything. What is this feeling like for me? Where is it in my body? I can do shame. It can't actually hurt me. It's just a vibration. What's it got to say? What up with it? What does it need? Alright, my friends.
So those are the four things that we do with emotions. We ignore them, we buffer them, we act them out, or we allow them. Try it out this week. Just notice, just notice.
All week long. What you're doing with those emotions that are vibrating through you. And play with them. Have some fun with it, and let me know how it goes.
That's what I've got for you today, and I will see you next. Week.
Thanks for hanging out with me friends. If you like today's episode and you want more of them, please take two minutes right now to subscribe and give me a five star review. On Apple Podcasts. Then send this episode to a friend. See you next time.
