In our lives, we have to deal with a tremendous amount of pain and suffering.
Pain, whether physical or emotional never feels good, so we try to avoid it.
We avoid emotional pain by resisting our feelings that cause us discomfort.
Examples of these feelings are anger, sadness, anxiety and shame.
The message we receive from an early age is that, these feelings are not to be felt! We are told, “stop crying”, “don’t be angry” and you’re too sensitive!
So you see, it’s no surprise that we form the habit of avoidance of “bad “ feelings. We learn that our feelings don’t matter. In the formation of this habit, we train our brain to support us in this avoidance.
Instead of feeling our feelings, we eat the unhealthy food, smoke the cigarettes, drink the alcohol, we over work, we over spend, distract ourselves with television and mobile phones.
Unfortunately, this avoidance comes at a cost to our health. The side effects of too much sugar, alcohol, nicotine or drugs are widely known.
So numbing ourselves may seem like it’s beneficial in short term but running away from what needs to be felt, to be noticed, does not serve us in the long term. The resulting negative self-talk and ultimately stress we encounter as a result of this is far from beneficial to our health!
WHAT IF WE TOOK A DIFFERENT PERSPECTIVE??
What if we looked at our feelings as being neither “good or bad”?
What if our feelings were signals to show us that we are of balance with our thinking and beliefs about ourselves???
What if??
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