How to Feel Great in Challenging Times

This is a Feel-Good Friday post with a twist. If you want to feel good, you have to feel everything.

If you felt a lot of emotion coming up this week in particular, you’re not alone. Full moons have a tendency to amplify the emotions we feel. Our primal nature instinctively wants to howl into the wind, like coyotes do at the full moon.

But maybe you kept your emotions bottled up, and didn’t howl at the moon.

My Conditioning Around Emotions

I was conditioned to believe that I was too sensitive. That crying is a sign of weakness or emotional fragility.

I was conditioned to believe that allowing your strong emotions to move through you — by shaking your body or fidgeting or screaming or crying or kicking things or punching a pillow — that you’re out of control, that something is wrong with you.

I was conditioned that everything in life and in our world needs to be controlled. Measured. Put in its proper place. You need to control yourself and your emotions.

I was conditioned to believe that the only way to deal with unpleasant emotions is to suppress them or compartmentalize them.

Check in with yourself: What is your conditioning regarding emotions and expressing your emotions? What beliefs do you hold?

These beliefs and attitudes are lies that do not serve me or anyone else.

Our Cultural Conditioning Around Grief

We live in a culture that doesn’t create space for emotions like grief and sorrow. And right now, in this slower time, we can’t distract with our usual distractions. Many people are lost, unequipped with the tools, processes, and rituals to work with what’s coming up.

We often feel shame for feeling and expressing our grief and sorrow; we may feel like we are deficient or damaged if we dare to cry or express our emotion.

There’s a lot of sorrow and grief in the world right now. And even if you don’t think you’re feeling it; you are.

Here’s why it’s so important to discuss this openly:

If you want to feel great, you have to feel. You don’t get to choose to feel only the “good” and not the “bad.” That’s not how it works.

Grief Work is Essential Work

This week I took a class on grief work with Katya Lovejoy, one of the space-holders I turn to for guidance in these practices. Katya is a trauma healer and yogi who I met last year in San Diego.

As Katya said,

Grief work is essential work. It is our access point to more life.

If we want to feel joy, we must also feel grief; they are on the same spectrum.

Here are some of my key takeaways from Katya’s class, mixed with some of my own insights from doing grief work over the years.

Emotions are just like food: we need to process and release them

If you didn’t process and eliminate food after you eat, it would sit heavily in you. In fact, if you didn’t process and eliminate it you would think something was wrong with you. You’d go to the doctor wondering what organ or system was wrong. Perhaps you would look for what medicine you could take to move the food through you and eliminate the waste.

Emotions work the same way. If we suppress them or keep them bottled up inside of us they weigh heavy on us. They push us down; they depress us.

The cause of depression is not grief, sorrow, fear, or anger. The cause is our unwillingness to face those emotions so we can move them though us and release them.

In western culture we try to treat everything with medication. Pharmaceuticals. But pharmaceutical anti-depressant medications like Xanax are numbing agents. They contribute to the problem by preventing you from feeling the pain.

This clogs up your system and leads to dis-ease.

Emotions = Energy in Motion

Grief, sorrow and depression have a physiology associated with them. You know what a depressed person looks like. Slumped shoulders, hunched back. Things get stuck.

Emotions are energy in motion. They need to move through. If you don’t move the emotions through you, they create blocks, and then breath — and oxygen — cannot get to your organs, tissues, and muscles. Eventually your life force systems get clogged.

How do you expect the air you breathe to travel into the lungs and through your system? How do you expect fresh oxygen to get into your blood stream, and that blood to travel through to your organs and extremities?

Many of us, especially women, learned to suck in our tummies all the time, which prevents us from using our diaphragm properly to allow the lungs to fully inflate. A “tight core” is often a weak core, because it cannot be inflated with air.

When the body is clinging to a way of being is it not free to move. Breath cannot flow through you when your insides are clenched, gripping tight to avoid letting out what you’re holding in.

If you want to move with greater ease and flow you need to move the energy through you.

It begins with allowing what you’re feeling, no matter how painful.

Reframe the sensation: the pain let’s you know you’re alive. If you’re numbed out on drugs you’re not alive. If you’re drowning the emotions with more food or alcohol you’re not alive. If you’re escaping in television, movies, news, social media, you’re not alive.

We all escape sometimes. But we also need to do the work of processing what we feel.

Grief Lives in the Lungs

A related point to this that is so relevant to this time: In Chinese Medicine, grief is associated with the lungs.

What does it say about this time we are in, where the pandemic afflicting the world is targeting the lungs?

As many of my teachers have pointed out, this is not a coincidence. There’s a message here about the space we hold for grief.

Related: Why Ungrieved Loss is the Ultimate Productivity Killer

You are a channel, not a container

This concept that Katya shared is one I’ve heard from other teachers as well:

You are a channel, not a container.

What this means is that the emotions need to move through you, not stay in you.

Feeling and processing our emotions, moving them through us, helps us expand our capacity to hold our emotions.

But we don’t want to hold onto them. There’s a difference between holding on to emotions and holding space for emotion.

It’s vital to our health and wellbeing to move the emotions through us, to keep them in motion so that they don’t block us from feeling our best.