Do you Feel Enough of Life?

Despite 2023 being such a huge year of celebrations with my 50th Birthday, my daughter's  18th Birthday and my Grandmother's 100th Birthday this year has been a year filled with many contractions.

When I say contractions I mean those times in life when things just seem so hard and you don’t feel like life is in Flow, you are not feeling your best, you are experiencing many challenges, your energy is low and you feel well - just shit, really.

It started with a very painful and severe eye infection, then I was really sick with a bad and very long lasting flu, then the emotions of losing my husband’s grandmother, supporting my daughter coping with year 12 final end of school exams, as well as the emotions of losing a loved one and a funeral service in the middle and something terrible happened to the Jewish people on 7 October when babies, children, mothers and fathers, grandmothers and grandfathers, women and men were subjected to the most barbaric and horrific terrorist attack and I have never cried more in my life as I have the last 8 weeks. 

What’s helped me during these contractions (when I remember) is knowing that life is a series of contractions followed by expansions.  However, this truth is something I can definitely forget.

Expansions are those times in your life when you feel on top of the world, things are going the way you want, you are feeling really resilient and powerful.  It’s when you feel so inspired, connected, aligned with your purpose and things feel very much in Flow.

Life is very cyclical – the seasons change, our moods change, the tides ebb and flow, day moves into night.  So many things in our lives move in cycles.

And this shift can happen in an instant or feel like it’s going on forever and ever and you don’t feel like you will see light again.

I recall when I was young, I was scared of the dark.  However, at some point I realised after night is day.  And then it’s wasn't as scary anymore.

However, as adults we can still get scared of the way things are.  

That’s when we forget the flow and cycles of life.

With all the contractions I’ve moved through this year and the tragedy in Israel still real I feel compelled to share what helps me to move through the cycles of life with more flow, ease and grace.

I cannot imagine anyone who wouldn’t want to move through life’s ups and downs more with more flow, ease and grace.

Our emotions and feelings significantly influence our life journey at any given moment.

We can be happy, sad, angry, annoyed, frustrated, disappointed and many many many more in fact we experience every gamut of emotion possible as human beings.

And these emotions will then dictate how we feel at any moment and drive our experience of life in any moment.

That is the same for every human being.

I feel that there's a significant piece of information missing from what we were taught during our childhood.

Emotions were often assigned value judgments, such as labelling happiness as good and sadness as bad.

And then our human brains take that one step further and interpret that as - we are good or we are bad for having those emotions.

However this cannot be further from the truth.

What someone forgot to tell us was that we as human beings are supposed to experience every emotion possible. 

That’s the way we were designed.

There is a reason we have a wide range of emotions, it’s because we need them. 

Emotions often act as signals for needed attention or change. Ignoring them can delay our personal growth and hinder the process of healing from challenging experiences.

Emotions help us to communicate with others, such as when we feel sad and need some support. They also can help us to act quickly in important situations. 

Consider when you're about to cross a street and you see a car travelling fast about to hit you - fear instinctively prompts you to jump back onto the curb. Emotions not only guide immediate actions in such crucial moments but also communicate essential information via our "gut feeling" or intuition.

We as human beings have a huge spectrum of emotions and the contrast of these emotions allows us to understand and appreciate a positive or negative emotion.

For example, without experiencing sadness and the feelings that go with that we can’t fully appreciate the beautiful feeling of happiness.

We need that contrast.

Yes, it seems like I am categorising these emotions as good and bad and in a way, I am doing just that.

I mean who would voluntarily ask to feel sad, angry or disappointed?

The acknowledgment of these emotions as undesirable is completely understandable and I would add therapeutic, yet there exists another layer to this emotional landscape.

And that is ACCEPTANCE of all and every single emotion possible.

Emotions are energy in motion, they need to move, to cycle through us and understanding this can transform our relationship with them.

And I believe we all need to transform our relationship with our emotions to truly feel flow, ease and grace through life’s challenges.

All emotions eventually move through us, they never stay forever.

The challenge we face when we label emotions as either good or bad is that this innocently communicates to our nervous system to treat "bad" emotions as an alarm bell.  The alarm bell tells us – don’t accept, in fact resist that emotion and this makes our bodies tense up.  When our bodies tense up our blood circulation is impacted which can lead to various health issues.  Beyond the physical impact, there's a mental strain and a significant impact on how we feel overall.

All of these responses occur in reaction to something that is entirely natural for our bodies to handle.

And another challenge we face is that these moments of negative emotions usually coincide with times when we are already feeling the lows of the contractions of life and possibly feeling quite shit.

The resistance to accepting these emotions makes it significantly harder to move through life with flow, ease and grace.

So, we tend to ignore our negative emotions and hope they will go away.

But it doesn’t really happen like that.

We may think they go away and we try numbing our emotions by engaging in activities that distract us from truly feeling what we are feeling like overeating, overspending, overworking, getting caught up in drama, substance misuse, mindlessly watching TV or scrolling social media.

But numbing doesn’t feel good and is just repressing us from the natural process we are meant to experience as humans in this world.

When we ignore our feelings this creates a “boomerang” effect where the emotions come back later in some way and sometimes even stronger than they were before.

Ignoring our emotions can impact our moods, our relationships with others and our relationship with ourselves and result in anxiety, depression and other mental health issues.

Allowing ourselves to genuinely feel, accept, and not assign any meaning or judgement to them paves the way for our emotions to pass.

And then once they pass we are back feeling the connection to our humanness and the natural ebb and flow of emotions and life.

And again we feel flow, ease and grace.

Life becomes so challenging when we assign meaning to things that just are in life.

And emotions fall into that category – they just are, period.

We don’t have to like every emotion, it would be strange to enjoy feeling sad or angry or disappointed.

When we can accept and make peace with whatever emotions we are feeling in any moment, I promise you, your life will change.

Part of accepting our emotions is to allow ourselves to feel them.

Its so important to Feel all our feelings, to Feel all our emotions.  I don’t just mean expressing your emotions with words but I mean truly feeling and acknowledging all and every emotion mentally and physically.

As humans we struggle to grant ourselves permission to truly feel and accept the full extent of our emotions and feelings. 

The significance of acknowledging and fully feeling all our emotions became clear to me during an interaction with a loved one.

I had a huge realisation about hiding my anger emotion.

They shared some news with me that made me angry and upset.

I found myself trying so hard to understand their perspective but I just got angry and I could feel my body physically tightening up and tensing.

I tried to hide my anger from them.  But I am not very good at hiding my emotions and they could sense it. 

They questioned the validity of my anger and that made me feel even more angry.

But inside all of this I had a tug of war going on. 

I didn’t accept that I could or was allowed to feel angry and when I was asked why I was angry I could feel myself about to lose it. 

Reflecting afterwards I had a profound realisation, I didn’t like people to call me angry. Growing up, I hated it when people were angry and how it made me feel, hence my reluctance to admit my own anger.

I didn’t want to admit that I, Rochelle, could feel angry.

But now I know a few more truths than I did when I was young.

I know that as human beings we experience every gamut of emotion possible – and I mean EVERY SINGLE ONE – at different times and for however long they last but the truth is we can’t escape it.  

There is so much peace from accepting that truth.

There are so many possible reasons that deter us from embracing our feelings, it can be really uncomfortable and the discomfort can make avoidance seem easier. 

Personally, I often grapple with self-judgement and I just don’t think I should feel those feelings.  I think I Should be more evolved and therefore I Should be spared from certain negative feelings and I can’t accept that I feel the way I feel.

(Note that I said that word should and you may recall from my previous newsletter Click Here that should is always a red flag.  Should is an alert that tells me that something my brain is telling me is completely untrue.)

So often I judge myself for feeling certain emotions expecting perfection in every moment, telling myself I should feel only happy thoughts and never feel low or sad or heaven forbid feel angry 😡.

The messages we encounter growing up and in adulthood often emphasise the importance of perpetual happiness and positivity overlooking the complexity in being human.

The barrage of marketing messages for Self-Help amplifies this which promotes an unrealistic expectation of constant positivity and happiness.

And that’s just not always available to us 24/7 nor is it humanly possible nor is it even how we are designed. 

The self-help culture often overlooks or downplays the crucial aspect of embracing the full spectrum of human emotions, neglecting a vital piece of the puzzle in understanding what it truly means to be human.

So eventually in every one of my times of contraction when I forget that I am human, eventually I remember, and then I feel my emotions and I give myself full 100% permission to feel whatever emotion I feel and make peace with what I am experiencing. 

This legitimacy, the acknowledgment of your emotions belonging to you holds such immense power.

Sometimes I write and express the emotions I am feeling.

Sometimes I allow myself to feel the feelings physically in my body which doesn’t always feel so good but is very therapeutic.

Sometimes I express my feelings to a friend or family member or mentor.

Sometimes I just sit and reflect and I get insights that help me grow. 

However I get there, whatever I do the crucial step is actively making myself name my feelings.

I get it, facing and acknowledging your feelings can seem so scary. There's a fear of falling down the rabbit hole, wondering if you might reach a point of no return.

In my experience that couldn't be further from the truth.

Sometimes we only need to feel our feelings for just a few seconds, accept that we have these feelings, they are a natural part of you allows them to transmute.    

Instead of feeling our emotions we often invalidate them.

Have you ever shared your feelings of being upset, disappointed, or sad with someone, only to be told you're overreacting, need to get over it, or should think positively?

I have and I can tell you, it feels Yuk!!

This kind of response is invalidating your emotions and feelings.

It's not that the person intends to be unkind, it's just ingrained in us that we should always be happy and positive.

If we as humans are designed to feel every emotion possible it doesn't make sense to be told by others or even our own brains not to feel or deny the existence of any particular emotion

Instead of invalidating emotions we need to be validating our experience.

This occurs when we communicate to others or to ourselves that someone’s emotions are understandable and then we can find compassion for our own or others' experience.  (for more about the power of compassion please click to read my newsletters here)

And so I am slowly making peace with my emotions – each and every one.

I invite you to be curious …

• How often do you allow yourself to feel your emotions?

• Do you ever get annoyed or judge yourself for feeling certain emotions?

• Do you allow yourself to only feel positive emotions and not negative ones?

• Are you aware of your relationship with your emotions?