Uncomfortable Feelings Are Not Your Enemy

Running away from uncomfortable emotions won’t make them disappear. They merely stockpile away, only to be excavated on some future day. Emotions do not like being suppressed and will rear their heads far more viciously and will choose to resurface themselves in far more inconvenient, inopportune manners than before.

It’s better instead to nip your emotions in the bud early on. Pause and take the occasional inventory on your feelings as a way to check in with yourself. The solutions are not outside you. To feel better, you must inquire within and get to the bottom of why this emotional dis-ease has even decided to show up in the first place.

We can all get pretty crafty in the ways we choose to distract ourselves from actually having to confront our emotions.

Most of us are only doing what we’ve been taught since an early age to do: run, duck, hide, suppress, repress and bury away discomforting feelings and emotions.

Alcohol, drugs, sex, racking up your credit cards to buy shit you don’t need…even binge-watching your favorite TV series marathon style day-in and and day-out can all become methods of “fleeing” from your emotions. Taking time out every once in awhile for the occasional positive distraction is healthy, but it’s when these things start preventing you from investigating your true emotions as to why you even feel uncomfortable and feel the need to distract yourself from your emotions is when they become problematic.

In all fairness, most of us have never even really learned how to look within ourselves.

Most of us are only doing what we’ve been taught since an early age to do: run, duck, hide, suppress, repress and bury away discomforting feelings and emotions. Then we hope we’ve conveniently hidden our emotional monsters in the closet for good and they will never come back to haunt us again.

Obviously, the emotional suppression method is not very effective. It’s like choosing to use a band-aid for a serious injury requiring heart surgery, so it should be no surprise something inside is now screaming loud and clear to you that this uncomfortable shit you’re feeling isn’t ever going away until you fully explore what actually caused it to surface in the first place.

It’s time to get to the truth of the matter and discover why you really feel the way you do by digging in at the roots. You have to unearth the cause before you are actually able to weed whatever is ailing you out for good.

Here is one way in how you can begin this process:

Go to a quiet space and close your eyes. You can do this lying down, sitting in a chair or meditative stance. The position is not really important. It’s more about being somewhere where you won’t be distracted and can tune in and listen to yourself with how you’re feeling.

With your eyes closed, take a few minutes to just breathe deeply. One way to this is to count up silently from one to twenty-one on each inhalation and exhalation.

For example: Breathe in, count 1. Breathe out, count 1. Breathe in, count 2. Breathe out, count 2. Repeat this until you reach 21. If you lose your place just start over from one again. This will help your mind become centered in the present moment minimizing distracting thoughts.

Return to normal breathing and begin investigating the way you feel. If something arises that makes you feel uncomfortable, such as painful thought or memory triggering an emotion response, this is good. Don’t push it away.

Notice how it feels to sit with whatever you are feeling without pushing it away…

Now reach out, grab a piece of paper, a pencil and begin writing. Really explore whatever painful memories or emotional thoughts decided to resurface no matter how discomforting they might feel. There is no method to this process. Just write what wants to be written no matter how disturbing, crazy or discomforting the words that want to come out may be. This is about pushing through the pain to discover and express your true feelings. You are finally allowing yourself to FEEL THEM rather than suppress them.

Forgive whatever needs to be forgiven, including yourself. Release the emotional weight by ceremony of fire and burn away what you have written on the paper.

Uncomfortable feelings are not your enemy, it’s time to embrace them by letting them go and moving on.
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