Sometimes when we immerse ourselves in the spiritual and personal development world, we can find ourselves jumping onto the trend of trying to think away or dance away or visualize away our feelings.
There’s nothing wrong with consciously choosing your thoughts — actually, this is the foundation of everything I teach my clients.
There’s nothing wrong with dancing as a way to process our feelings — indeed, Gabrielle Roth’s 5Rhythms dancing was one of the sparks for my own spiritual transformation.
There’s nothing wrong with using visualization to focus your energy on what you want — this is a powerful technique that I always incorporate in my coaching.
However, there is something very wrong when we decide to use these techniques as a means to run away from our feelings.
There is something very wrong if we do these things because we think our “negative” feelings are unacceptable and should be escaped as quickly as possible.
This is a recipe for suffering.
Because if you run away from your feelings, you are running away from yourself.
And we can only hide from our real selves for so long before one or more of these things happens:
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- We take out our self-loathing on ourselves,
- We take it out on someone else,
- We take it out through a food or shopping addiction,
- We take it out by means of a separate personality and can no longer function in normal society.
Bottom line? What’s inside of you WILL find a way out.
You can’t stuff it down. You can’t force it to disappear.
Sooner or later, you have to allow yourself to FEEL.
Always remember that you are a human being and are meant to experience a whole range of emotions. Happy, sad. Excited, angry. Peaceful, jealous.
It’s OK to feel the way you do.
Feelings are the most painful when we try to resist them.
In fact, I believe that the intensity and length of any period of emotional suffering is directly related to how much you’re trying to ignore, suppress, or escape from your feelings.
We can’t snap our fingers and change our emotions — it just doesn’t work. This fact often makes us feel trapped and discouraged, and we dig ourselves an even deeper hole.
The fastest way to change your emotions is to allow yourself to feel them first.
The problem with many spiritual and self-help teachings is that they lead people away from their true feelings rather than into them.
Try allowing all of your feelings right now.
There’s nothing wrong with feeling the way you do.
Your feelings are telling you something important.
Listen to the message your soul is sending you.
Listen.
Feel.
Then, and only then, does the space open up to CHANGE your feelings.