Let the Hard Times Roll....

....and roll...right...on...through.

True confession: sometimes, when I am deep in my own hard times, I can experience a bit of that lousy feeling of “imposter syndrome.” I feel it because I have said “Yes,” again, and again, in answer to the calling to rise up and be a lighthouse for others in their struggles….while simultaneously I am so humbly aware that I am still such a work-in-progress myself, often struggling right alongside all of you. There! I’ve gotten that off my chest. Now, I will get on with the work I have accepted, of rising up and finding words of compassion and inspiration to lift us all up together!

It’s been a notably tough year for me, with many unexpected traumas to navigate. To be sure, it could have been much worse, and I know many people personally for whom it was. But I have learned that comparing my struggles to someone else’s is only potentially helpful in regaining a bit of perspective, when warranted. Ultimately though, it’s generally counterproductive to try and sweep our challenges ‘under the rug,’ by telling ourselves they don’t really matter that much because other people have it worse. The truth is, our personal challenges inform our journey in important ways, and it is of supreme importance that we pay attention to them, and fully acknowledge these events and the emotions they elicit from us.

Emotions are the trickiest part. If we don’t let ourselves feel them when they arise, then we will usually pay a price, sooner or later - either in our body or our psyche. If we do let ourselves fully feel the feelings when they arise, we need to pay close attention to what our mind is doing as the emotions arise. What are we mentally telling ourself about the emotion, or about the situation in which it arose, and how might those inner words influence and alter the natural course of the emotion? In other words, notice the story you are telling yourself as an emotion takes over. Is your story prolonging, shutting down, or somehow twisting your emotional response? (We humans tend to have an addiction to dramatizing our life.) This can happen with positive, high-vibe emotions (such as a story that we don’t deserve to feel joyful), as well as the negative, or low-vibe ones.

This process of catching our thoughts and stories is particularly challenging during a negative emotional response, such as grief or rage. We often unconsciously want to prolong the emotion, and to ‘legitimize’ anger or victimhood (poor me), by inventing a plausible-sounding blame or shame story. We believe in our story (we are ingeniously creative and we make it sound so real that we really convince ourselves!), and we cling fiercely to it. But WHY on earth would we choose to prolong our emotional pain? I think it’s a fascinating question, with multi-layered answers.

One answer may be that on some strange level, it sometimes feels good to hurt. It makes us feel alive, which we may cling to if we don’t otherwise feel passionately, positively alive in our daily lives. I have definitely noticed that when I am generally fully engaged and basically happy in my interests, goals, relationships, and simple PRESENCE, I am more likely to engage a clear mind that will acknowledge emotions for what they are, and then let them move on through so as not to pull me off of my blissful center for long. This is because the passionate tranquility of that sacred center of me has become a more interesting and desirable dwelling-space, than the confusing and exhausting swirl of emotion and story.

Another answer may be that we FEAR an experience of dwelling in our brilliant natural light, with the power and responsibility we know resides there. Yet another answer may be that an event has triggered an extra huge emotional response because it has tapped into a deep reservoir of unfelt emotion from our past traumas.

In an online course, I learned a useful strategy for befriending and learning from emotions, and then letting them go. It is called the NAIME process. It stands for Notice, Accept, Inquire, Meet, Expand.

Notice is the sacred moment when we break out of our unconscious trance and become consciously aware of an emotion arising, and where it is felt in the body. Accept means to fully allow the experience and your awareness of it, to be open to what IS. Inquire means to get curious about it - what message might be there, what is the feeling that really wants to be felt, what needs to be addressed, or what might you need in this moment? Meet means to really meet the emotion - to FEEL it in a full-bodied way. Expand means to allow the release of the healthfully-felt emotion, and to invite a heart-opening into a more expansive state of being. This process is powerful and effective. If you can’t do it in the moment when emotion arises, you can return to the emotion later in a private space, and engage with the NAIME process.

I have had a long personal journey with chronic pain, and uncovering residual grief and rage. I have learned, and seen, that chronic pain - whether it shows up in the physical or the emotional body - usually has a subconscious root of strong ‘unacceptable’ emotions, most often from our childhood. Sometimes we can get to that root and work with it directly, and other times it remains inaccessible, but just knowing it is there (we all have some of it!), and is the root cause of most later chronic pain and other common symptoms, can help empower us to choose to respond rather than react to all our daily dramas and traumas. In other words, often it is enough to simply understand in a general way what is driving our debilitating ‘over-reactions,’ and to start responding from a healthy desire to live now from our naturally grounded spiritual center, rather than be driven forever by buried subconscious emotional wounds from our past.

Become an astute and curious observer, and a finely-tuned instrument of the musical flow of energy. Emotions are simply energy, and energy is dynamic and always in motion, changing all the time. Emotions only become problematic for us when we obstruct their natural flow, creating resistance and unnecessary friction. We do this both by shoving them away as unwanted or unacceptable, and by holding tightly onto them.

In order to compensate for shoving emotions away (now, or in childhood when we didn’t have the capacity to navigate them), we might turn to addictions - over-eating on comfort-foods is the most common one! - or to the self-sabotage of holding onto emotions, fueling them with our stories. A sneaky, insidious form of compensation (or distraction) is to unconsciously develop mysterious chronic physical pains or other symptoms that tend not to resolve well with the usual treatments (due to their emotional roots).

Whatever our personal go-to patterns might be, life becomes sweeter (and healthier) when we accept the fluid nature of emotions, and facilitate their natural ebb and flow. Instead of letting our thinking, and our stories, run the show, we can develop a habit of noticing the energies of what we are feeling moment to moment, and let that guide our personal inquiry and discovery.