While home renovations are certainly exciting, and I’m looking forward to the end result, I might be a tad tired of the process. It’s been nice to get some fresh air in the basement via the large hole in the wall, but since it’s eleven degrees outside, I wouldn’t mind if it were patched soon. And though I quite like the contractor who is renovating our house, it is starting to feel like he lives with us.

As I searched around the house for a spatula and pan this morning, I will admit to feeling out-of-sorts. Okay, maybe even grumpy. I felt stretched, as though some internal limit had been reached, quite suddenly, and I was very much done with this renovation process.

Except, the renovation process is not yet done.

The handy thing about mind-body skills is that they can be done on the fly. As I rushed around, trying to find kitchen implements and muttering under my breath, I reflected on what my emotions, body, and soul were telling me. Here’s the summary:

Emotions: Anger and Irritation – a limit has been reached.

Body: Tired – it’s time to rest.

Soul: Space is needed now.

I immediately felt better. Understanding what I need solves the stress.

The interesting thing about listening to my needs is that it doesn’t involve any kind of problem-solving or action steps. Instead of trying to solve anything or jump right into “fix” mode (which often just increases stress), I can sit back and listen. First, I listen to what is needed. Then, I listen for the solution.

Amazingly, without any work on my part, the solutions always appear. Whenever I listen for them, they show up. They come as ideas in my own mind, words spoken from someone else, or a phrase in a book. They can be in any form – my job is to recognize them.

Today’s solution came in the form of an email. The contractor wrote to detail out his plan to finalize the kitchen. Order and space arrived out of nowhere. He then reminded me that he will be gone next week – all week. A week in which I will rest, clean sawdust off my countertops, and enjoy the pause before we jump back into the game.

Life itself is pretty much a home renovation process. Just when you think it’s going smoothly, something springs a leak or some such surprise arises. There will be many moments when you are stretched to your limit, ready to snap. When stress happens, it’s time to stop and listen. Your emotions, body, and soul are there to help you navigate. Discover your needs, listen for the solutions, and stop trying to figure it out.

Guess how I came up with that one! Yep, on the massage table.

Obviously, if you hate massages, this tool isn’t for you. If, like me, you adore floating in dreamy relaxation while listening to soft music, then schedule a massage asap.

All joking aside, massage really IS a great self-coaching tool. Our bodies are magical, miraculous things that take care of us in thousands of unnoticed ways, day in and day out, for our entire lives. One of the amazing things our bodies do for us is store emotional energy. When difficult or painful experiences happen in our lives, our bodies help us make it through them.

If you’re in the midst of a trauma or crisis in your life, it is likely that you will feel mentally overwhelmed and unable to deal with every little emotion or issue that arises. For example, I just experienced a loss that involved much grieving. I was able to be present with the emotions of grief, allowing them to flow through my body and release as each wave came through. However, any additional emotional experience on top of that felt impossibly difficult. My mind revolted at dealing with the emotional detritus of everyday life on top of the grieving process.  So, my body helped me out and stored some of it for later.

In times of high stress, this is the body’s gift to us. All we have to do is remain aware that this may be happening, feel the emotions we can handle, stay aware of our bodies, and then help our bodies release stored emotional energy when the time is right. As you may well know from reading past posts, never allowing our bodies to release stored emotional energy results in physical pain – the body’s cry for help.

Like most things in life, the answer is moderation and balance. It’s a difficult task to NEVER store emotional energy in the body, and it’s also painfully difficult to ALWAYS store emotional energy in the body. What works and keeps us healthy is to allow the body to help us when the mind is overwhelmed, and the let the mind help the body when it is able again.

My body kindly stored emotional energy around issues unrelated to the grief I was experiencing. I was grateful, because I needed to focus on the grief. Then, after a couple of weeks, I felt ready to let my body release those held emotions. So, I went to my massage with the intention of both relaxing and feeling.  I sank into the dreamy half-asleep bliss for a full ninety minutes (SO WORTH IT!), and then I came home to feel.

And feel I did. Let me tell you, a good massage does wonders for bringing up whatever is being stored in your body! I let the emotions flow through, and I learned much from them. I felt the gentle re-alignment of body and mind taking place, which often reminds me of coming home from a long vacation. It’s sweet, slightly painful because the vacation is over, and very grounding. I feel settled in my own skin, my own body, and my own inner wisdom again.

That’s why I say go get a massage. If your body has helped you out by storing some emotional energy, you’ll be able to release it. (This can take several days, so simply get the massage and then wait. Feel whatever comes up, whenever it arises. It’s that simple.) Don’t try to be the perfect mind-body student and never store a darn thing in your body. Instead, recognize that we are all human, and that you need to store emotional energy sometimes. In fact, your body will take over and do it without your awareness in times of need. You’ll know soon enough, because you’ll feel a little tension somewhere. That’s when you pick up the phone, call up your favorite massage therapist, and treat yourself to a little self-coaching, disguised as R and R.

Really, could there be a more enjoyable mind-body tool?

A smart and hardworking client who is a full-time student and almost full-time employee shared this thought recently. A cause of her angst? She took a nap after getting more done in a morning than I do some weeks. It got me thinking about this particularly sneaky form of perfectionism and self-criticism. It’s a crazy-making Catch 22: I’m not doing enough, so I better do more, which still won’t be enough, so I can either continue doing more in an increasing frenzy or get stuck and avoid thinking, feeling, and acting because it all seems like just too much – at the same time it’s not enough. Just perfect. (Pardon the expression).

When I think I’m not doing enough, I often do less. When I believe I’m not doing enough volunteering/donating/ paperwork/exercising/de-cluttering/flossing/?, I can become immobilized or unmotivated. Or I do the opposite: way too much. I overhelp from an anxious, pleaser place, which doesn’t feel good. It’s also annoying to most and under-appreciated by the rest…of those whom I am trying to do more for.

Why do we do this? In my case, I think it goes back to basic human fears: I am not safe; I am not enough. The irony is that self-judgment and perfectionism create conditions for the perfect (!) storm of the fight/flight/freeze response. This creates feelings of being even less safe and less adequate. Closely related to its cousins, “I should be doing more,” “I should be doing it better,” and “I’m not doing it right,” it’s also a setup for distraction and procrastination. Nothing happens, except we get to beat ourselves up for not doing enough (or anything.) Those of us who experience mind/body pain, anxiety, emotional eating, and other symptoms courtesy of the stress trifecta also get an excuse to view our disconnection through the same self-critical lens, and the “beat” goes on.

How to free one’s self from this loop? Here’s the thought I am playing with: maybe it’s all true. Rationally, I know that sometimes what I’m doing is enough and I just need to hold that thought. It may also be true that sometimes doing more would be better, and I’m not doing as much as I could be doing and it’s still enough. It might be what my body, energy, time, and sanity have to give right now, so it’s actually perfect. And some days, doing more is taking a nap.

Wishing you sweet days and dreams,
Ann

This week, I thought you might like to have my latest update of the Free Writing Tool.  Even if you haven’t been utilizing the Healthy Mind Toolbox Audio Course, you might find this tool helps you become aware of emotions you may be inadvertently holding inside your body.  Bringing these emotions into your awareness will give you a chance to release them, release tension in your body, and relax into healing.

Download the Free Writing Tool here.

For the past five weeks, my family and I had a surprise Guest stay with us.   Guest arrived without warning and with no communication when Guest would depart.  Why had Guest decided to visit at this time and what was Guest trying to teach us?

Our questions were left unanswered until around day 21 of Guest’s visit I went for a run and the answer came to the surface.  Guest would stay as long as necessary and not a moment longer.

What the heck did that mean?

I dug deeper into the question.  I asked Guest, “Why would you stay for so long when we are really not very fond of you?  And to top it off we didn’t invite you.”

To which Guest replied, “Oh, but you DID invite me.  You ALL invited me, welcomed me into your bodies, each one of you.”

Allow me to blow Guest’s cover.

Guest started as a little cough and sore throat for a few days then progressed into a chest-rattling, gunk-producing, smoker-hack-sounding cough and none of us ever smoked.  I don’t recall in my life ever having such a cough.  No fever, no aches, no chills.  This Guest set up residence in each one of our lungs and got comfortable.

After using some mind-body tools, I discovered Guest’s purpose was to clean out years of toxins built up in the lungs.  I recently wrote another post about my son Ian, Ian’s Message About Toxins, where I began to put it all together.  He is my nine-year-old son with autism and one of my greatest teachers.

For the past six weeks, I’ve done a TON of work to clean out the toxic thoughts in my mind; clearing out painful, stressful thoughts using The Work by Byron Katie and Abigail’s mind-body tools.

What I’ve learned through my training as a mind-body coach and working with clients struggling with physical pain is that when you shift your mind, the body follows.  Sometimes that means there is quite a mess and that is just as much a part of the process of healing as any other part.  In my case, a four-week Guest setting up camp in my lungs.

Here are two additional golden nuggets.  Your thoughts create your reality meaning your view of life all begins with thought and according to quantum physics and string theory we are all connected on an energetic level.  Check out physicist Brian Greene’s TedTalk from 2005 on string theory.

So, it made perfect sense to me that as I cleaned out a Mack-truck load of toxic thoughts, my body would follow and rid itself of toxins as well as my family to whom I’m deeply connected.

I put out the welcome mat.

For my final week of “clearing”, rather than curse Guest I welcomed Guest with open arms and accepted the gift that my body invited.  My oldest son welcomed Guest two weeks after me so he continues to rattle and cough but I find it so fascinating that he’s not unhappy about it.  When he has trouble breathing, we do a breathing treatment and then he’s back to being happy.  He lives in the present moment, unencumbered by stressful thoughts about the past or the future.  And as I let go of the painful thoughts and release them from my body something amazing happens.  Not only does MY body heal but HIS body heals.  His healing has actually accelerated over the past year.

I share this story with you to invite you to consider the power of your thoughts and how they are connected to the health and healing of your body and even possibly your loved ones near you.  The power of thought continues to amaze and awe me.

I leave you with this thought.  At the core of every human being is love.  Some of us just have thicker layers of painful, stressful thoughts shrouding the view.  Let love and acceptance blow the view wide open.

Have you ever felt like your body was filled with lead and actually doing the items on your list was harder than pushing a boulder uphill?

Have you ever forced yourself to do them all anyway, and ended up feeling exhausted, doing less-than-awesome work, and feeling downright horrible?

Nah. That’s probably never happened to you.

It has, however, happened to me! At least a few times each month, I experience this phenomenon we call resistance.

I used to beat myself up and feel guilt for even experiencing it, and then push myself through to the finish line with dogged determination. I used to think that if I forced myself to work through resistance, I’d get over it. I used to completely ignore my body whenever it had the lead-filled feeling.

It’s REALLY hard to ignore your body when your hoo-ha is on fire, your bladder is spasming, you have terrible gas all the time, and your knees throb.

Which is, of course, the point.

My body got seriously tired of me ignoring it. And after several years of learning how to listen to it, I now have a different reaction to the lead-filled feeling. I realize it means I need to stop. Now. Check-in. Breathe. Ask my body what it needs. Listen. Obey.

Resistance tells us to stop. If we honor that, we learn something important.

Like: It’s time to rest. I need more singing in my life. My body wants to sleep more this week. I feel like taking up dancing. I never did write that book I meant to write. I need to connect with a friend. This project is big, and I need help. I need to learn to delegate. That idea isn’t right for this project/moment/year. I need a date with my spouse. I need to play in the park with my kids. Time to shift my priorities. Today is not a creative day. Today is not a working day. I need to breathe deeply more often. Etc.

Whatever the message is, it’s something we need to hear. So resistance comes up to make us stop, listen, and learn. Which is why overriding the resistance is not helpful. It’s okay if it doesn’t all get done today. It’s okay if it’s not perfect. It’s just plain okay.

Stop.

This week I’d like to share a post with you from my good friend and fellow coach Bridgette Boudreau.  As soon as I read this, I realized I couldn’t say it better, so I’m bringing her words directly to you.  Bridgette and I have been coaching each other recently on allowing emotions, and I think you’ll benefit from her excellent summary of this important life skill.  Enjoy!

I’ve been at war with my emotions. I’ve spent my whole life trying to stuff them down, or my more recent nuance, trying to shift the bad ones away and create the good ones. I didn’t want to feel negative emotions because I believed I’m supposed to feel good–that feeling happy was the end goal–and if I wasn’t happy I should be actively finding my way back to happy. What I ended up believing was that something was wrong with me. And thinking something is wrong with me–which creates alternating feelings of anger, fear and sadness–was not something I wanted to think or feel either. So I distracted myself with overeating, over-Facebooking, overanalyzing, overtv-ing, over-you-name-it. This was not happening in the distant past, I was doing all these things NOW. And sometimes still do.

While I intellectually understand the concept of feeling my feelings, I didn’t understand the true nature of my emotions and how to feel them. I remember asking my coach years ago how to feel my feelings and she said just lean into them. That sounded sage and true, but it took me a year of practicing feeling my feelings before I deeply understood what she meant. This instruction was not specific enough for me to understand how to feel my emotions. I always say the weight loss gurus tell us to “eat less and move more” and that if it were that simple to put those concepts into practice, I would be out of business. The same applies for “Feel your feelings!” Sure! I’ll just feel my feelings after spending my whole life reflexively repressing them. I’ll get right on that. I needed more specifics on how this whole feelings-thing works.

I’ve been looking back over my blog posts for the last year and seeing how most of them are about some flavor of how to feel, live with or shift your feelings. Basically it’s been me trying to figure out my own emotional life. In the background I continued to struggle with allowing my own emotions to flow. I didn’t tune out emotionally anymore only to check back in six months later, but I still beat myself up for not being a happier person. (Which is funny since I’m a pretty happy person–I didn’t say my beliefs were logical!) I didn’t fog out by eating whole plates of nachos anymore, but I would eat just a little bit too much at dinner to try to keep that fear of uncertainty at bay. Things began to shift for me as I became willing to delve deeply into my emotional life. Here’s what I’ve learned so far.

It’s not about Fun, Happiness or even Delight
Yeek! Did you think I just took a Debbie Downer pill? Fear not my friends for I am a big fan of fun, hilarity, and happiness in all its forms. I’m just going to stop chasing it. Happiness in its healthy state is a passing emotion. Its role is to show us when a particular thing or event is joyful and then it passes. Happiness is not intended to be a static state. Shifting my emotional quest from fun to delight as I talked about in this blog post was getting warmer, but what I’m really looking for is the state of peace. And this to me is great news. I no longer have to try to create an emotional state I’m not experiencing.

I can feel fearful and peaceful.
I can feel insecure and peaceful.
I can feel resistant and peaceful.
I can feel decidedly unpeaceful and peaceful.
I can feel angry and peaceful.
And, oddly enough, I can feel happy and peaceful.

Because now I know if I’m not feeling HAPPY! or JOYFUL! or GRATEFUL!, there’s nothing wrong with me. When I feel happy or joyful, I can relish that moment, knowing it too shall pass and that I don’t have to freak out and chase it when it does. Each of my emotions (even the “negative” ones) are here to help me. All I have to do is listen.

(Hang in there, I’ll tell you how to listen below.)

It IS about Peace, Groundedness and Flow
I now have a deeper understanding of The River of Your (and My) Emotional Life. I still think of our emotions as a river, and now I know that underlying that river is the foundation of peace and groundedness. Our emotional river is meant to flow, yet we try to dam it up by repressing our emotions and/or expressing our emotions in unhealthy ways. When the river is backed up, it floods over our peace and groundedness, making our foundation hard to perceive. The foundation is still there–it always is, we just have this little flood situation to deal with now. In my previous blog post I said it was things like overeating, overshooting, over-anything that causes the river to dam up. This is true, but we distract ourselves with these things because we are resisting some emotion. The other thing we do is try to constrict the river when we feel strong emotions–we try to squish our anger, fear or sadness into the narrowest stream possible in hopes it will go away. But you’ve seen what happens to large volume of water in a tight channel right? Raging rapids and flooding! The counterintuitive thing to do is to make your channel wider–allow more room for those swift emotional waters to flow.

Emotions are Here to Help
I thought I understood how emotions are here to help, but I was missing the boat. I understood that our “negative” emotions alert us to something that needs to be attended to. But REALLY deep inside I believed they were something to be banished as soon as possible and preferably avoided. After all, they don’t call them negative emotions for nothing. Except they aren’t negative. Again, I probably read that in some self-help book somewhere and said to myself, “Yeah, yeah, nothing’s negative, it’s all for the good. Blah, blah blah.” But I didn’t really get it. Now I look it is this way–strong emotions are there to get my attention, and each emotion has a specific useful purpose that helps me deal. I’ve been reading a book recommended to me by my fabulous friend and fellow coach, Abigail Steidley, called “The Language of Emotions” by Karla McLaren. I’m not sure I buy everything McLaren says, but she sure knows her shit when it comes to emotions. Here’s what she says about the so-called “negative” ones:

“I can also see quite clearly that happiness and joy can become dangerous if they are trumpeted as the only emotions any of us should ever feel. I’ve seen so many people whole lives imploded after they disallowed the protection of anger, the intuition of fear, the rejuvenation of sadness, and the ingenuity of depression in order to feel only joy. In short, throughout my life I’ve found that what we’re taught about emotions is not only wrong, it’s often dead wrong.”

She goes on to explain how anger allows us to determine what is acceptable to us and what is not.
Fear activates your focus and intuition.
Sadness allows us to release that which isn’t serving us.

Pretty frickin’ cool.

When you allow these emotions to free-flow, they deliver important messages into your consciousness and move on.

How to Feel Your Feelings
Here’s where we get down to it.

I was onto it with this blog post, but I’ve got better tools now.

Use the below questions to keep your emotional river flowing–check in with yourself several times a day. (Another shout-out to Abigail for sharing these great questions!) This allows you to build your emotional-acceptance muscles and create that feeling of any-emotion+ peace. I’ve been keeping an emotion journal to help me keep close to my emotional ebbs and flows. I’ve noticed that by doing this I don’t feel the need to overindulge in food or engage in as many distractions.

Question 1: What emotion am I feeling right now?
Build the habit of naming it. I like to try to boil it down to one of these four basic emotions: mad, glad, sad or scared. Don’t get all rule-bound about it, but see if you can capture it in one word. Then write down anything else that occurs to you about this emotion such as:
Where you feel it in your body
Details on what it feels like (hot/cold, spiky/smooth, dull/sharp, etc…)
Ranting about the emotion or the circumstance (It’s ok to rant! Ranting helps the emotions to flow.)
Thoughts related to the emotion

Writing anything beyond the emotion is optional, the main thing is to keep this simple so you keep doing it. If you forget to do it, no problem, don’t make it a thing–that only causes more resistance.

2. Can I accept whatever I’m feeling right now without judgment?
The answer is yes or no, but either answer is correct. The idea is to explore why you can’t accept the emotion and find out what you can accept about it.
If you can’t accept it, can you accept your resistance of it? Great! Start there.
Can you accept that you’re pissed that you’re angry? Awesome.
Can you accept that you’re sad that you’re afraid? Excellent.
Can you accept that you can’t accept any of it? Aha! That’s perfect too.

Here’s another little tool to use here. I want you to try it on yourself real quick:
– Think back to the last time you felt anger, anxiety or fear.
– Notice if there’s any tightening in your body. Usually there is because we’re taught to try to suppress the emotion, hence the tightening.
– Imagine a container around the emotion.
– Now make that container bigger, bigger, bigger, bigger.
Did the sensation of the emotion change?
Most people report still feeling the emotion, but that it is more manageable. This is the sensation of allowing the emotion to flow. It’s still there, but now you can again sense the peace and groundedness underneath.

Neat, huh?

3. Ask the emotion what message it has for you.
Seriously. Say, “<Emotion name here> what message do you have for me?”
Then listen.
The message will be in the small quiet voice that speaks to you right before your mind tells you what you should think about this emotion and a few other things while it has your attention.
Tune out the mind and put down whatever pops into your head from the small voice no matter how trivial, weird, ridiculous it seems.

That’s it.

There’s nothing to resolve, nothing to “work” on. This is simply you feeling your feelings, creating peace and accepting your full human nature.

I can tell you that I feel much more peaceful now that I’ve let myself off the hook for being happy all the time.

“Angels can fly because they can take themselves lightly.” G. K. Chesterton

“Once you accept the fact that you’re not perfect, then you develop some confidence.” Rosalyn Carter

“The thing that is really hard, and really amazing, is giving up on being perfect and beginning the work of becoming yourself.” Anna Quindlen

“There is a crack in everything. That’s how the light gets in.” Leonard Cohen

“Breathe.” Abigail Steidley

I  love pearls of wisdom and have never met a pun that I didn’t like, so it was natural to be thinking of favorite adages as I looked for inspiration for this week’s blog.  The sayings above, which came immediately to mind, share a common theme: living in self-acceptance, ease, and authenticity.

At the same time, the painful condition of anxiety was popping up in various aspects of my personal life like mushrooms in my yard after a rainy week.

A coincidence?  I think not.  My Inner Wisdom was tapping me on the shoulder, helping me notice that my intention of living in that place of ease, lightness, and love was being undermined by anxiety.  Interestingly, the usual suspects of fear, anger, or shame, which usually disguise themselves as anxiety, were fueled this time by a deeper layer of pain in the form of perfectionism. (Me?! A perfectionist?! The woman with the cozily messy desk, the person who suffers no embarrassment when obviously directionally challenged in exercise classes, the book group member comfortable having literally lost the plot and her words in discussions?)

Well, yes. My thoughts had started to skew towards unconscious perfectionism. I was laughing less and obsessing more. I realized that I was attacking myself with “shoulds” disguised as “wants”.  Wanting not to worry, to finish a project, to generally “get it”, to be a better coach/student/teacher/family member, to be understood and loved, were actually self-judgments. I was coming up short and it was bringing me down.

This friction between these edicts and my essential self is a setup for anxiety and a ticket into fight or flight. The accompanying freeze results in procrastination and the exhaustion of being revved up with the mental brakes on, particularly unpleasant to someone who is a doer by nature.

It’s not fun and definitely not peaceful, as anyone who experiences this cycle of spinning thoughts and feelings on a regular basis knows. Right now I am consciously embracing my messy learning curve of life as, dare I say,  “perfect”, and questioning what I can learn, why I have to get it right, who I need to be perfect for, and what the heck is perfect and who made that rule, anyhow?

Since anxiety is a common factor in the physical pain of mind/body syndrome, emotional eating, and the straight-up, free-floating , whack-a-mole variety of suppressive suffering, I offer the specifics of the practice that I am playing with as return to living light, with hopes that parts might be useful to you, whether or not perfectionism appears when anxiety rears it’s unpleasant and informative little head:

1) Breathe – mindfully, slowly, often (being present and in fight/flight/freeze are mutually exclusive)

2) Notice the feeling of “anxious” and lovingly, gently, and thoroughly dig beneath it.  Find and greet the underlying emotions and experience them as physical sensations.  Or just choose to notice those feelings instead of focusing on Anxiety. Breathe. If thoughts or other feelings arise, notice them and work them if it feels right. Or just be aware of them as thoughts and feelings – not The Truth or the Essential Me – or You.

3) Practice taking a bird’s eye or long view.  Notice that what is a world of pain to you about your perceived inadequacies or less than perfect (fill in the blank) is just a blip on the radar of others’ awareness – they are busy worrying about how they appear or what is going on in their own worlds. (It’s not about you, even when it seems to be, which is great news unless you are a flaming narcissist.  Which you are not. If you were, you wouldn’t be anxious.)

4) If others do judge, in the grand scheme of things, who cares?!  Why do you?? Seriously.  Who made them emperor?

5) If you still care, go back to 2) and practice taking the long view. Another term that’s a useful reminder for me is “perspective” – like zooming out on Google maps – where did those houses go, anyway?

6) Practice smiling (the action affects your brain in a good way) and laughing gently at the “Wow” aspects of the world, yourself, others, or at a bad pun or funny story. (It’s impossible to sincerely laugh and be in anxious fight/flight/freeze mode simultaneously – see #1.)

7) Decide to lightly jump (or take little steps) back into living your life in the moment for just this moment.

8) And finally, here’s my not totally enlightened but sometimes helpful starter thought to get out of my lizardy and self-critical be-more/better mindset, courtesy of Bette Midler:

“_____ ‘em if they can’t take a joke.”

If your thoughts are a little higher on the food chain of empowerment, “Hug ‘em” might feel good and true, too.

May your heart and flight be light,

Ann

What comes to mind when you think about emotional suppression?

Being a mind body coach trained by our very own Abigail Steidley and a long-time master at emotional suppression*, I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about, discussing and experiencing emotional suppression. But I didn’t realize until today that when I think about emotional suppression, I only think about suppressing the…shall we say, slightly less comfortable emotions…

I’m guessing you know exactly what I mean by slightly less comfortable emotions, but just in case you need to be hit on the head (gently, of course, with a silk pillow or an oh so soft stuffed pig named Twinkletoes), here’s what I mean:

Slightly less comfortable emotions = anger, sadness, rage, frustration, shame, irritability, fear, boredom, anxiety, desperation, loneliness, fill in your favorite here ___________

While you may derive a sort of dark pleasure from referring to these emotions as crappy, yucky, sucky, or anything your creative self wants to dream up, they in fact, like all emotions, are energy in the body and are inherently neither positive nor negative. However, the story we tell about our emotions and the way that we express them will create experiences that may feel pleasurable, highly unpleasant, and anything in between.

Most of us come to mind body healing not purely for the joy of feeling emotions that we may have worked hard (albeit subconsciously) to suppress since Lincoln was in office, but rather to find relief from our pain. We embark on this journey with the hope that if we do this challenging, unappealing (at least at first), often unfamiliar work, we’ll get a result we dearly want.

If we stay with the work—which may involve stopping and starting, moving forward and backward, and innumerable retreats into the comfort of our familiar patterns and habits—we eventually find what we’ve really been looking for all along. We find ourselves.

If you’d told me a few years ago—heck, maybe even a few months ago—that taking this path would lead me to more of the self I already was, I might have run screaming in the other direction. I didn’t want to be more of myself unless it involved being a happier, fitter, more together, cellulite free, incredibly stylish, and professionally successful version of me (just for starters).

But along the way something started to change. I’m still undergoing this process, but I’m at the point where more of me doesn’t sound like such a bad idea anymore, and I can definitely see how more of you would definitely be a welcome addition to this world. I used to hate it when other people wrote things like that. How could they know that I had a light inside me if I sure as heck couldn’t see it? They didn’t know me. And I may or may not have met you. But I do know that everyone, including you, whether you believe me or not, is welcome and wanted in this world. And I’m talking about the you that you are today—high energy or low energy, natural weight or more or less, disconnected or connected—you name it.

So what does this have to do with emotional suppression?

As my coach friend lovingly helped me to realize yesterday, when we suppress, it’s not only the so-called negative emotions that we’re suppressing. We suppress the whole kit and caboodle, including laughter, playfulness, joy, power and more. Our emotions come as a package deal.

And when we suppress emotion, we’re containing the expression of ourselves: our innate wisdom, energy, vitality, the expression of our individual uniqueness and brilliance and so much more. Whether we know it consciously or not, there is something within all of us that’s yearning to be expressed. As we learn to allow our emotions to move through us in the moment, we learn to experience and express the grace of who we are.

Suppression is most definitely not “bad”—we learn to contain our emotions as a creative response to what’s happening in our environment. And unlearning suppression, if we choose to do so, takes time and commitment. But if you ever need some extra motivation or inspiration when you’re feeling discouraged, remember that when you’re ready, in your time, the universe is waiting with open arms for more you.

* Here’s the short story of emotional suppression in case you’re new to mind body healing…because you’re human (at least I’m assuming you are if you’re reading this), you feel. It just happens, the way rain falls and the wind blows. But sometimes for a wide variety of reasons, we learn that some, or even most, emotions are not okay to feel. So we work very hard to keep from feeling these emotions—or even knowing that we have them at all—by tensing our muscles and creating distractions in our minds and in our lives. This is the short story of emotional suppression—if you’d like to learn more, you’ll find lots of great tools and resources on Abigail’s blog.

Am I imposing a rule on myself right now?

By rule, I mean any edict from your inner critic/slave driver.  Rules are easy to spot, because they contain words like:

Should

Shouldn’t

Have-to

Need-to

Must

A rule might be something like, “I have to get all my emails answered every day.”  Or, “I shouldn’t weigh over X pounds.”  If you look closely, you’ll find little rules running nearly every action you take throughout the day.  These things are like weeds, so you’ll have to do some serious mental pruning to catch them all.  However, it’s worth every moment spent in your mental garden.

Every time you follow one of these unconscious rules, (or more accurately, try to follow one) your body reacts with tension.  Your body knows that the rules are unrealistic and create traps.  They’re usually very rigid and involve a lot of guilt and self-flagellation when broken.  (Which is an excellent way to distract yourself from feeling emotions, by the way!)

Take a rule inventory today.  Ask yourself if this rule is serving you or creating stress.  Then ditch the stress-creating rules and see how light you feel as a result.  Try it out, notice what happens, and then tune in next week for more on how to work your way out of rule prison.