Hey,
Creatoholics.
I want to talk about emotions for a second.
I grew up and believed that everything needed to be okay all the time,
And you weren't allowed to feel certain things,
And everything's fine,
Everything's fine,
Everything's fine.
And it wasn't until my late 30s that I started realizing that sometimes everything's not fine.
And I remember going to a retreat,
And I realized that I had really moved into a space of understanding that emotions are just emotions.
There's no good or bad emotions.
And what they tell us,
These emotions,
Is they tell us how we've reacted in the past,
Or how we haven't reacted in the past,
Or how we're feeling about the situation.
And there's a lot that goes into that that I won't get into.
But one of the things that struck me is they pulled up the famous emotional wheel,
And it's got all your staple emotions and how they kind of show up.
They already have it in a sense that I don't love,
Where the quote-unquote emotions that you might think are bad,
Like sadness,
Anger,
Stuff like that,
Are in red,
And then happy and other stuff is in green.
So they've already set you up to be like,
Okay,
So anger's bad,
Subconsciously you're seeing the colors.
And I remember being in this particular retreat,
And they were explaining the emotions.
And they didn't say it in so many words,
But they insinuated that the ones in red were not that great.
And somebody put up their hand,
And they were very kind of flustered.
And they said,
Wait a minute.
So if I'm angry,
That's bad?
And I could see in this person's face that there was some shame there around it.
And it really got me.
And I'm working on this four-step ladder to life.
And it really hit me that particular moment,
Because I put up my hand,
And I remember reading a book called The Way of the Peaceful Warrior.
And it's a great book if you've never read it.
And it was a kind of a gateway for me to this work.
And in the book,
There's this gentleman named Socrates who is helping this young gymnast kind of awaken him,
So to speak.
Like,
You know,
He's a perfectionist,
He works hard,
He's,
You know,
All these different things that society tells you you should be,
He's trying to be those things.
And he came in one time,
And he was really angry at Socrates,
Who was his teacher.
And Socrates looked at him,
And he goes,
Great,
Keep going,
Keep going.
And he said,
Isn't this bad?
If I'm angry,
I shouldn't be angry.
And he said,
No,
Anger is beautiful.
And it stopped him in his tracks.
And I cited this when I put up my hand to try to put this person at peace.
Now,
I wasn't teaching.
I was just there,
You know.
And I felt called from reading this book to say,
I said,
Anger actually is really beautiful because anger means movement.
Apathy means no movement,
And you're stuck.
But anger means you can move from one place to the other.
If something makes you angry,
It means that you're paying attention,
You care,
And you can move.
If somebody is sad,
It's sad,
Yes,
But it honors the emotion that you're feeling at the time.
And sadness is okay.
Sadness is a deep,
Deep part of our grieving process.
And it tells us that something isn't right.
If we didn't have sadness,
We wouldn't know what was right and what was wrong.
Or that we didn't love somebody.
When you're sad about losing somebody,
It's because you love them.
And it's because you cared about them.
If you're sad after a breakup,
It's because it meant something to you.
It's not bad,
And it needs to be felt.
Would it be great if we were just happy all the time?
I don't think so.
I just don't think so.
I think that we have to de-stigmatize these emotions as good and bad.
And we can't continue to try to chase happy.
We have to just accept where we're at in that moment,
And that moment shall pass.
This too shall pass.
So if there's times where you're angry,
Be angry.
I mean,
Don't hurt anybody,
And don't do anything crazy,
But just allow yourself to feel it and ask,
Why are you angry?
Why are you sad?
Why are you happy?
Why do you feel stuck?
Why are you apathetic?
And as you go through these different emotions and ask yourself questions,
You can start moving what I'm going to call up the four ladders of emotional intelligence and working yourself to a place where you feel so much gratitude for even the sadness and gratitude even for the anger.
But know that anger is a part of the ladder.
Anger is a part that gets you to move.
Sadness is a part to know that you care about something.
And those are good things.
Those are good things.
And let's sit back and just accept our emotions,
There's no need to depress them into our being,
Turn them into disease,
Turn them into things,
You need to feel them.
If it's tears,
It's tears.
If it's screaming into a pillow,
It's screaming into a pillow.
I've done it before.
And I'm gonna do it again.
I remember being at a retreat here in Nashville and they have this really beautiful place they've built called the well and the walls are all made out of earth and it's this beautiful circle and when you walk into it,
It's just energetically you can feel something special because it's been there since I believe the 70s.
And I remember the person that runs this retreat,
She said,
You're here,
You know,
You're here on your own for the next few days.
And,
You know,
You have all 300 acres to yourself.
And just so you know,
If you go into the well,
You can cry,
You can scream,
You can yell,
Nobody's gonna hear you and the walls are made of earth and it's just gonna absorb it.
And you know what I did?
I went in there and I screamed at the top of my lungs and I let it out.
And I did it a couple times,
Even in the middle of the night,
I was just called to just release that anger and release the suppressed anger that I've had all my life and realizing that it's okay.
And it was really beautiful that she said that because it really was a moment of,
Yeah,
It's okay.
It's just gonna be okay.
And as Charlotte Joko Beck says,
One of my favorite quotes,
You're doing fine.
You're doing fine.
Peace and love.
