Episode # 3- All the Feels

Listen to learn why emotions are important, what emotions are, and how to process them.

 

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Transcript:

This is Betsy Jensen and you are listening to Unstoppable Body and Mind. Episode Three- All the Feels.

 

In this podcast we learn to upgrade our brain and understand the power of our thoughts, to heal and to create the results we want in our life. Become the person in control of your healing and make peace with your life.  Become unstoppable, body and mind. 

 

Hello, this is Episode Three- about our feelings and how to process them. If you've listened to the first two episodes and are joining me now, please take some time, if you would, to leave me a rating or a review and maybe share this with someone. I know it takes some time and effort but it helps this podcast be found by more people. So I appreciate it. 

 

Okay, so to recap from our last episode, Our thoughts create our feelings and feelings are a vibration in our body. So today we're going to talk about feelings. And first of all start by talking about why feelings are so important. 

 

Basically, everything we do or don't do, is because of how we think it's going to make us feel. I'm going to repeat that- everything we do or don't do is because of how we think it's going to make us feel. 

 

So if we want to switch jobs, if we want to be thinner, or look younger, or be richer, if we want to eat something or drink something, if we want to have kids or not. If we want to watch something or read something or buy something, all of those things are because of how we think it will make us feel. 

 

And in fact, our society is based on this in a way, with the marketing system that continually tries to sell us things to make us feel better. While I was preparing for this podcast, I was at the grocery store and literally heard some girls saying, “should we buy a candle for our apartment? Would it make us happy?”   Their thoughts about their candle is what would make them happy, not the candle itself. 

 

But we have a lot of genetics telling us that we want to feel better. We want to seek pleasure and avoid pain. And like I said, the marketing system is designed to show us things that we can buy so that we can feel better. In fact, the whole marketing system would collapse if everyone realized that our feelings come from our thoughts and not from things that we purchase, or things that we acquire. 

 

So we're the ones that control our feelings. This is also called emotional adulthood. When we take the power of owning our emotions and not blaming someone else for how we feel.  No one else can make you feel an emotion. It comes from your thoughts. We don't have to change the circumstances to do it. In fact, we can't change the circumstances a lot of the time.  What we can do though, is change how we think about them. And that's the key to how we feel. 

 

I love this quote, “If you can't learn to find joy in the snow, you have the same amount of snow in your life, but less joy.”

 

It's like we give our power away, blaming the circumstance for our feelings. And then we live a huge part of our life trying to change these circumstances, to seek pleasurable feelings or avoid negative feelings. 

 

But this is normal. Like I said, this is what our body is programmed to do. We want to have pleasure. We want to survive as a species. But in our society now where we're not in mortal danger- being chased by animals, and trying to hunt and gather for food, pleasure is so concentrated. 

 

Instead of eating just berries, we could have candy. And we could buy whatever drinks we want. We could watch Netflix, virtually anything is available by streaming, maybe not anything, but you have a wide array even just compared to 10 or 20 years ago. Social media is another way that sometimes you can escape and have so many pleasures, a hit of dopamine every time someone likes something of yours that you've posted.  Without even having to leave the house.

 

Now emotions are what cause our actions. When I'm feeling bored, I might pull out my phone. When I'm feeling embarrassed. I may say something back that's defensive or mean. Emotions cause our actions and they're also very powerful in creating our memories. Basically, if you think of the things that we remember from our life, it's because we had a huge emotional shift in that moment. So you feel either very strong emotions, or a rapid shift of emotions from what you're used to. 

 

This is why most of us can remember so clearly, when big events like 9/11 happened, or I remember where I was when I found out Princess Diana had died. Now, when we think about our memories in our brain, and remember the events and relive them in a way, in this virtual reality of ours, we create those same chemicals that we had at the time that it was occurring. 

 

So if I continue to think about the regret that I have that I work late and miss my daughter's soccer game, then each time that I have those regretful feelings, I'm creating the same chemicals that are produced in my body and were produced at the time that it occurred. 

 

In fact, I've heard that method actors will use this when they are trying to have a sad scene- they might recollect something in their life that's happened personally that made them sad and recreate those same feelings.

 

Now in episodes one and two, we talked a lot about becoming more aware of our thoughts, and how a lot of our thoughts are unconscious. And we also need to tune into our feelings. Most of us don't ever really pay attention to what we're feeling at any given moment. For example, right now, what are you feeling? What's the emotion that you have right now? wherever you are. 

Many people only think of the very general emotions happy or angry or sad or fearful. But the more specific you can get with describing your emotions, you can see there kind of some nuances in the words.  So maybe angry- you might think is it different to be irritated? or to be annoyed or to be frustrated?, or to be indignant?  

 

I'm kind of a word person. So I like these little subtleties, like “surprised” versus “startled” or “content” versus “abundant.”  And I like to say those and feel them in my body.  Do they feel a little bit different? 

 

Now, why is it important to label our feelings?  Labeling our feelings activates our prefrontal cortex. So if you remember from Episode One, that's the highest part of our brain. That's the thinking part that is especially developed in humans. Many of our emotions, especially the fight or flight emotions originate in the amygdala. And that is part of the limbic system, which is just below the prefrontal cortex. So the prefrontal cortex has this authoritative power, it's a little higher up. It's a little more advanced. And can actually calm the limbic system, or help with the fight or flight response. 

 

Labeling emotions for other people actually helps calm them down too.  In one of the trainings that I did working with children, we learned that you could say with children, instead of

labeling the emotion that might be a little complex or not age appropriate for them, you could say, “I see you're crossing your hands across your chest.” “I see you're frowning and turning away from me.” Those kinds of things, labeling them can help them get a hold of their emotional system as well. Brene Brown used an example of someone who, when she felt shame, would just label it and say, “shame, shame, shame, shame, shame.”  Brene Brown thought this was brilliant. And now I'm understanding why, learning a little bit more about the brain. It's because it helps calm down that neurological reaction that's so primitive and so reactive. In the amygdala, sometimes our body pains and emotions can be very closely tied.

 

I know for me when I'm having anxiety, or worry, I feel a tightening in my stomach- kind of a turning in my stomach. It feels a lot like I have an upset stomach. So when my daughter has an upset stomach and I'm taking her to school, I'll often ask what's going on with her emotionally, if there are any things at school she's worried about and tell her that sometimes my stomach feels that way when I have the emotion of “worry.”

 

What are we taught to do instead of labeling and recognizing our emotions?  There are three main things. 

 

One is avoiding our emotions. We've already talked about eating something or drinking something or buying something to make ourselves feel better. We could also overwork to escape from our reality or to pay for all the things that we're buying to make us feel better.  We are really taught to avoid in our society. In fact, when someone is having a negative emotion, a lot of times what our first reaction is, is “what will make them feel better?”  In fact, we say, “what's wrong?” if someone's having a negative emotion.

 

We can react to our emotions instead of recognizing them and processing them. So reacting is when we just act something out. So if we're very angry, we might yell, or if we're sad, we might cry. It's like this thing that our bodies do, where we might release, we might feel something. But this is acting out. It's not processing. Processing would be like us sitting in a chair, feeling vibrations in your body, not being angry and yelling at someone to try to get them to change their behavior. 

 

Another way we cope with our emotions is to resist them. It's like we deny that they're even there. Try to repress them. And the analogy I like to use with this is like a beach ball. If you're trying to push a beach ball underwater, you have to use this force and continually push down. And if you don't, then it rebounds up. So the emotion doesn't really ever go away. In fact, sometimes it can get a little bit stronger with all of this resistance that we're adding to it. And this can definitely effect our health when we're resisting our emotions. It's like closing a door, rather than opening the door and letting the emotion pass through us. 

 

A client I was working with is a good example of how resisting an emotion may have caused a physical effect.  She started by telling me that her throat lately had been more closed. And it was in fact impacting sometimes how she could eat food. It was even hard to swallow her food. And then we started talking about what was going on with her emotionally And she was feeling a little bit taken advantage of by her daughter. She was helping her daughter with several things and feeling a little bit victimized that she was so helpful and her daughter wasn't appreciating her. But the thought of saying something to her daughter made her think that she was being disloyal. So she wanted to repress that emotion of feeling victimized, so that she didn't bring up any of these contentions with her daughter. 

 

I started thinking about the throat chakra, and the purpose of the throat, which is to use our voice and to speak up and to say things. And we found it very interesting and found that there was a connection between the fact that she was repressing this emotion of victimization. She was not taking the action of talking to her daughter, and the fact that her throat was closing up. She was not speaking her truth or speaking out and was finding it even difficult to swallow or eat food. 

 

I believe we can use our physical symptoms as barometers or cues to our body that we need to check in with our mind. Byron Katie says that emotional disturbances are clues that we have thoughts that are in contrast with reality. So if we are feeling very sad that someone has died and we don't think that they should have died, then we are automatically generating more sadness and grief for ourselves, just by nature of thinking thoughts that are different than what happened in reality. 

 

Anytime that you have some kind of a “should” statement is usually a clue that you might have an emotion that's going to be painful to you. If you're thinking that, “parents should always be kind to their children,” and you had parents that weren't kind, you'll feel pain. If you're thinking that, “people shouldn't hurt each other,” you'll feel pain because in reality people do. 

 

Another common one I hear is that people should act a certain way for someone to feel loved. But the feeling of “love” is an emotion. It comes from our own thoughts. No matter how someone acts towards us. It cannot give us the feeling of love. It's only our thoughts about their actions. 

 

What should we do with our emotions instead of avoiding reacting or resisting them? as Robert Frost said, “the only way out is through.” 

 

We have to process our emotions. So what does that look like? Well, emotions are just vibrations in our body. And one thing we have to realize is that we don't need to be scared of feeling any emotion. So we can feel negative emotions, we can even feel very devastating emotions and still physically be okay. 

 

But if you're like me, you may be thinking, Wait, I don't want to feel negative emotion. In fact, when I learned about David Hawkins’ Map of Consciousness, and that the emotions below 200 were negative and destructive, I thought immediately, I never want to feel those emotions!

 

But feeling those emotions is actually part of the human experience. We are made to feel all emotions, and we're very capable of feeling them all. In fact, if we didn't have negative emotions, we wouldn't even know that there was such a thing as positive emotions. We would never know what it's like to be peaceful if we hadn't had contention in our life. We wouldn't know what it's like to be healthy unless we knew what it's like to not have health in our life.  We might have taken it for granted. 

 

I used to think that there was something wrong with me, because I was just not a happy person. I just wasn't happy all the time. And I thought I should be.  But if you think about it, would you really want to feel happy when you hear that someone has died? Or that someone has been abused? Would you really want to feel comfortable and peaceful and relaxed if you're trying to start a business?

 

Negative emotions can teach us and motivate us. Some of the greatest advances in society have come from negative emotions. You can see this with artists and musicians. Sometimes they've struggled in their lives, and they've created masterpieces out of their despair. 

 

But what if you could find out that the worst that could happen to you from trying something or from putting yourself out there was a feeling, and that you can feel any feeling? It's not going to physically hurt you.  What can we accomplish if we had that belief, and we had the mastery of our emotions to know that we can feel any feeling? 

 

Allowing an emotion is a skill you have to learn how to do it. And practice it. It's not the same as reacting or resisting, or avoiding. So if you're feeling angry, for example, you would notice that you're feeling angry, and you would observe it with compassion. You might describe the emotion. Try to describe it in as much detail as you can. What am I feeling? Where is it in my body? Is it a tightness in my chest or my shoulders? Is it a knot in my stomach? Is it a lump in my throat? Is it a flushing in my face? How do I know I'm feeling this feeling instead of another emotion? What is specific about this emotion? 

 

Question how you're feeling.  Instead of trying to get rid of the feeling or tightening up, lean into it. Breathe in to the vibration and the feeling. Be curious. Like you're studying it for an acting part. What is anger? How does it feel in my body? Open up to it and move towards it. And know that you can handle it. It's just a vibration in your body. Let it be heavy, or uncomfortable, or dark or agitated. But let it be there without suffering without judgment. Just like you're observing it for a science experiment, and describing it as objectively as you can. 

 

So maybe the emotion is fear because I'm going to go teach a class in front of a bunch of new people. And I feel a tightening in my stomach and in my chest. And I know that it's fear. And I can start to accept that it would be normal to feel fear in this situation. And I can describe what the fear feels like in my body, maybe even what color it has. Maybe it's a dark green. And I can start to see if there's ways I can release that fear or soften into it. I could question the fear- why it's there?  The fear might be there because I'm worried about being embarrassed or worrying about people not liking me. 

 

As I dig deeper, I can ask why that's there. I'm trying to get my approval from outside sources, from how people react to what I teach them. When I dig deeper, I remember that my approval and my worthiness comes from me, and not from outside circumstances or people. So I may start to soften in this process to where the fear is not as great, or has subsided. 

 

Now, sometimes you may have emotions that last quite a while. And so it's like carrying this “heavy purse” with you. My teacher Brooke Castillo calls anxiety her heavy purse and I feel like this a lot of times when I wake up with anxiety.  My brain is already going, worrying about things. And instead of resisting that emotion and saying, “everything's fine,” or avoiding that emotion and trying to not think about it, or reacting to the emotion and staying stuck in an anxious place without being able to move on, I pick up my heavy purse and I go throughout my day. And usually what I find is as I get busy working on something, if I have some goals that I'm working on, or helping people, that anxiety, that heavy purse that I'm carrying, starts to feel a little lighter naturally. But some of these emotions you may have to carry around until you're done with them. Just observe and be compassionate. 

 

So that's a little bit more information about emotions, how they occur in our body, what they are and how to process them. 

 

I want to challenge you to become more aware of your emotions.  What are the main three emotions that you feel on a consistent basis? What are your top three? And what top three feelings would you want to feel?

Thank you so much for listening. I hope you learned a little bit about your brain today that helps you in your life like it helped me. Please be sure and subscribe and leave a review. And of course, be sure and share this podcast with someone you know that wants an Unstoppable Body and Mind.