Feeling = Healing

You know how epiphanies just pop out of nowhere and it’s the only way they can happen? Well, that’s what happened with this latest one I had while I was driving to the studio: some random guy honked his horn (at someone else) and I REALLY noticed my anxiety bubble up in my chest. I took a few deep breaths to bring my body back to a regular state and reassured myself that everything was okay, we were safe, supported, etc. It was after/during the parenting that I also had the thought:

Have I always been this sensitive?
Have I always felt anxious?

You would think with all the work that I’ve done on my mindset and what not that I wouldn’t feel things as much -

And that’s when it hit me:

You don’t work on mindset to STOP feeling things,
you work on mindset to help you THROUGH feeling things.

Son of a bitch.
On some level I truly believed that if I just mastered my mind, I would never feel a bad, sad, anxious thing in my life again.
Womp.
This is why they say self growth is painful and there is happiness in ignorance.
The reason why I felt my anxiety so strong is because I am no longer distracting myself from it.
It’s always been there, an undercurrent of my whole life, I just distracted myself from feeling it with achievements, hard work, eating, shopping, drinking for a wee bit, etc.
I also never noticed the fact that if I was dulling those anxious, sad, angry moments - how much joy and love was I dulling as well?
As I come around to this idea that there is no such thing as a good or bad feeling, there is only information I am feeling things more often - kind of like exposing the nerve of a tooth to the air, the hard things hurt like a motherfucker.
But on the flipside, the good things feel extremely good.
And the thing about feelings is that they are one of the gifts we are given with these beautiful bodies of ours, but we’ve created a world that not only represses us from it, but also disconnects us from the very source of those feelings, so just like diet culture, we end up not trusting our own feelings - gaslighting ourselves to make other folks more comfortable.

So, I’m going to challenge myself for the next week to be very aware of all of the feelings I experience and track them. I will also track my coping behavior + my intended coping behavior. Since this is tumultuous time for me, I think this is a great opportunity to feel what I am feeling and not let myself be hijacked by my brain that “everything is fine.” when it clearly isn’t.

I think this is important, because there’s a lot of shit going on in the world right now and there always have been - we’ve just been too numb to do anything about it. What if we start honouring our feelings? What if we start parenting ourselves through it? What if we recognized where fear is driving the ship instead of love?

I can’t wait to report back.