Spam Filter For Your Brain - Episode 107
Something that I hear quite a lot in coaching circles. And the way that I was trained in this kind of thing is to teach people "how to feel their emotions".
And sometimes you can hear or read things on the Internet about needing to feel your emotions. And I'm sure that quite a lot of you come up with the idea of, or have the phrase of, "I don't want to feel my emotions. I've got quite enough of them already, thank you. I want to feel less emotional". And actually, I think the way that we talk about it for ourselves is more along the lines of, "I don't want to feel like this. This is too much. I hate what's going on here. I want to feel differently. Why can't I just be happy?" And sometimes that can come out in more sort of self-critical ways of, "I know better than this. Why am I still repeating this old habit? I have loads of things going on in my life. Why aren't I more grateful?"
And I would love to just invite you this week to just pause and notice when you're having an emotion that you don't like where you have almost misallocated in a way. It isn't that. It's the emotion that you don't like. It's actually that you're having an emotion, and then you slap a whole load of judgment on top of it.
So it is, "I don't want to feel like this because I know better" "things are okay. Other people have it worse", that kind of thing. And actually, the unpleasant sensations that you are dealing with are the resistance to the emotion rather than to the emotion itself. And sometimes, when we can complete our sentences, like, "I don't want to be feeling like this, because..." that leads us to sort of highlighting for ourselves where we're treating ourselves with less respect than we might do for somebody else, there's probably if someone else is feeling really angry about being wronged or being misrepresented or feeling disappointed that they didn't get something that they'd worked really hard for, or they're feeling sad that something that was promised didn't arrive. These kind of emotions, rather than the way that we often treat ourselves, which is, "this shouldn't be happening. I hate feeling like this", just pausing and going, "oh, I don't want to be feeling like this because...", "well, there are other opportunities coming up...", or, "I know better than that..." Or "I subscribe to enough inspirational Instagram feeds that I should be over this kind of thing by now..." "I read enough self help books that this stuff should be just running in my veins...", whatever it is for you, just notice where those sort of becauses are really steeped in judgment.
Because when we can notice that, we can kind of take a little step back and go, actually it's really normal that when we are trying to resist something, our brain processes that as dangerous. We become our own tormentor. We become the danger that we're trying to avoid rather than the emotion itself. And it's really hard to get away from ourselves. So when we can just sort of step away from that terrorising of ourselves and just take it down to that basic level of humanity, we can stop the criticism and get away from that danger point and get more towards a place of gentle protection, of allowing ourselves the humanity, of having the responses that we do to human things.
Humanising our reactions is always going to get you closer and quicker to a place where you can create more compassion and more kindness for yourself, irrespective of the emotions you're feeling. And that way, that path gently leads to allowing emotions to exist rather than exhausting yourself on energy or trying to avoid a whole load of life experiences because you're not willing to feel a feeling. It is a practice, and it's something that you're not going to learn here and manage in one fell swoop.
But the more you do it, the more that you're able to just pause and breathe, look at what's going on for you and start noticing the stories that we're telling ourselves in our head. And from there, hopefully, we start to build, layer by incremental layer, a little bit more kindness into our lives and just a little bit of gentle building towards a more compassionate life that we want to be living.
I hope that the next time that you have a big feeling that you're not really enjoying very much, you're able to sit there for a moment and go; this is a human reaction. I'm allowed to have feelings and this is all part of this big old game called life, and nothing's gone wrong here. The more you do that, the more you're going to teach your brain that being you is a safe thing to be. I hope that this adds a little bit more kindness into your life. And I'll speak to you next week.
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