Here’s a question for you – what’s your emotional landscape like?
Do your emotions come, have their say, and go away again, naturally, like the natural life-cycle of a flower? Blossoming and then receding?
Do listen to each emotion and let them teach you exactly which action you need to take? For example, knowing that anger is there to right an injustice? And anxiety tells you something is not quite right and you might need to look into it?
Do you experience the whole rich tapestry of all 80+ emotions, and can name them all when they arise?
Do you experience both the joy AND the sadness?
Do you cultivate and enjoy pleasant emotions regularly? And teach this to your kids, too?
Are you feeling enough? Could you be a little on the numb side?! What are you missing out on?
Are you at the whim of your own reactions, getting triggered by others and outside things and then those feelings dictate the rest of your day/week?
Are you out of control with your anxiety or stress, or anger? Like literally feel like you have no control?
Do you dumb down your emotional experiences because you’re scared that feelings might overwhelm you? And then you’d never recover?
Are you frequently engaged in numbing behaviours to avoid your emotions? Scrolling for hours, drinking too much, over-eating, over-socialising, online shopping, etc. etc. etc.?
Without judging yourself, where are you actually at on the old emotional metre? What’s this part of your life like? What could be different?
When I had been a parent for about 2 years, I’d been working one-day a week in town with 1:1 clients. I got the opportunity to train in mBraining – or mBit (see previous blog for definition). I was having an issue. Due to my rough start with post-natal anxiety and depression, I was having difficulty FEELING those loving feelings towards my first child. Although I’d recovered and for all intents and purposes I was well, every time I held my child I’d experience a “loving feeling” coming up which I immediately pushed down again (not consciously). I was getting concerned! Needless to say my own personal development while doing this intense training was on the comfort of experiencing loving feelings, allowing them and enjoying them. It was a very worthwhile outcome!
It’s likely that you’d fall into one of the categories other than the first five, too. The first five are mostly what I’m coaching people towards and are not usually people’s default experience of the emotional landscape, for various reasons, upbringing, trauma, etc..
When you’re numbing or dumbing down and not allowing yourself to feel, remember you can’t selectively numb: numbing sadness or fear will numb joy and happiness.
If you’re at the whim of, or mostly experiencing stressful emotions, then life is going to feel pretty tough. Perhaps you have tears that you can’t control, and this causes some secondary issues for you, like embarrassment.
Is it time for a change?
What if you could change just ONE aspect of your emotional life? What would you change? What would that be like?
In the Use Your Body To Solve A Problem workshop, we begin to connect into the body-brains in the heart and gut. One of the competencies of the heart-brain specifically is emoting. If we’re cut off from our hearts and are mostly head-brain dominant (see previous blog) we are not experiencing – or, importantly, regulating – the rich tapestry of our emotions. We aren’t living and experiencing fully.
We are aiming for both emotional literacy AND emotional regulation. This will take focus and work, and won’t be achieved in one workshop of course, but it is a start on the journey at least! Would you like to start?
Want to go deeper and more personal? Fill in an application for therapeutic life coaching here.