Ep.35 - What No One Ever Taught You About Feelings

Episode Transcript

How we feel

The thing that defines us as humans is how we feel. More so than anything else, how we feel fundamentally changes our experience of life. And yet, for some reason, most of us have no clue what to do with them.

A feeling will arise out of nowhere and we'll panic. We treat it as this foreign entity that has just appeared, and we have to drop everything to deal with it. We treat feelings as something to overcome, something to get over, something to deal with — and only then can you start living your life.

That's just how we were brought up. And when you say it like that, it sounds stupid, because without feelings, we aren't human. Having them can make life really difficult, really annoying, really upsetting. But having them also makes life incredible, and joyful, and worth living.

What if you could master your feelings?

So what if you could master your feelings? Imagine for a second that feelings didn't just come up, that you chose them — that after someone shouts at you, or after you get cut off in traffic, or whatever happens, you could choose in that moment, actually, I don't want to feel that way anymore. Like it's a game and you can just click no, click no, and it goes away.

Imagine what your life would be like if you could master that skill, and therefore choose how you show up with your family, choose how you show up with your partner, with your friends, with your boss. You choose to be the best version of yourself, because you have mastered the only thing that could make you otherwise: how you feel. That's what I want to go into in this episode.

And to be honest, if you can master this, if you can get good at this, you don't need anything else. You don't need my coaching, you don't need any other episode of my podcast or any podcast. Because isn't it true that you could have nothing, absolutely nothing, but if you feel blissful, if you feel at peace, does it really matter?

Imagine a life where that's possible

You've seen those movies where some couple is so wildly in love that one of them says to the other, I'd live in a shoebox with you, I'd live on a bench with you. And you start to realize, wow, our feelings supersede everything — supersede our desire for safety, our desire for control, our desire for approval. But because we haven't been taught how to process feelings or deal with feelings, we use all these other things as comforts, as distractions. Most of us distract ourselves from our feelings. That's what TV is for. That's what music is for, all the time.

So let yourself imagine a life where that's possible. Just for a second, let yourself imagine that you were completely at peace, completely blissful, completely happy all the time. Because of that, you don't really care how much money you have, don't really care how big your house is, don't really care how smart people think you are — because why would you?

At the end of the day, we want those things. We want people to think we're cool or smart or successful because it makes us feel good. And that's it. So if we can feel good ourselves, we can completely skip out the middleman, which is the only smart thing to do, because in real life we can't control how anyone feels about us — and us trying to is what causes so many issues.

The mistakes we make dealing with emotions

So in this episode, I want to get into how you can deal with emotions properly, and what people normally do wrong. I'm not saying to fix these straight away, because it's going to feel impossible, but I want you to become aware of them, because when you are doing these things, there's a good chance you are the only person who can tell that you're avoiding your feelings.

Number one: when we feel something we don't want to feel, we distract ourselves — with TV, with food, with alcohol, with drugs, with sex. And the reason we do it is because it works. In the short term, it works. If these things didn't work, we wouldn't do them, and that's why they're so ingrained in our lives. But we have to ask the question: long term, is it working? Sure, you could feel bad and go watch TV and get some ice cream, and it will make you feel less bad — not because the emotion's gone, but because you're distracting yourself, putting your energy somewhere else. So there is a place for that. But the final tool I want to recommend at the end of this means you no longer have to do that, because you'll have a better way of dealing with emotions that actually serves you long term.

Number two, and definitely the most common for men: when we feel something we don't want to feel, we suppress it. We're very much taught, as a gender, that feelings make us weak — that if you aren't able to make decisions or act properly because you're feeling frustrated or tired, then you have less worth as a man. I'm sure it applies for women too, but I'm speaking from my experience. So what do we do if we feel anything that may get in our way? We bottle it up and put it aside. And again, it works — I'm not trying to shame you by calling you out. But you have to decide long term whether this is going to help you. Because sure, in the short term, you can bottle it up and get on with life, go back to your responsibilities, take action, and it will feel like nothing's wrong.

What we don't realize is that habit disconnects us from our bodies, disconnects us from the feminine, disconnects us from feeling good as well. By bottling up some emotions, you actually have less capacity to feel the other emotions. And more prominently, it will also make you sick — it will give you a disease, because you're storing all that stagnant energy, and it will just keep growing and growing. It's like a little bit of mold in your basement. It doesn't really matter, it's a tiny spot, who cares — you go back upstairs, lock the door, and a few months later you check on it and, okay, it's growing a little bit, but it's not really an issue, I have more important things to do, my job, my responsibilities, my kids. And then you're 50, then you're 60, then you're 70, and you check on that door, and actually you don't have to anymore, because the mold has grown so much it's taken over your downstairs, so now you move upstairs. Just as a last resort, because well, you can still live upstairs. And you see where this is going. But that's how we're taught to deal with emotions. At the end of the day, emotions are energy, and energy can't be destroyed. It will stay there for eternity, locked away, until you deal with it, until you transmute it.

The third way, and this one is also good depending on how you use it, is we express. Other than suppress, we express, and that could be very healthy. This is the healthiest, apart from the last one, because you can express things in a way that transmutes the energy, that allows it to come out and frees you of it. But depending on how much energy is there, and how you express it, it could make life worse. How many times have you had a conversation with someone, made a random comment, and they blow up — the response so disproportionate to what you said — and that causes issues in itself? The reason is they're not responding to you, they're responding to years of energy that you've just accidentally poked, so they blow up, lash out, or they hurt someone, or they kill someone. That one expression lands you 20 years in prison. So there are ways of doing it that will make your life better, and ways that will make your life worse.

Expression and suppression have a very interesting relationship, because even when we're expressing something, how many times have you been in a conversation where you have to hold back, where you fully want to have a go at them because of what they're saying, and you have to hold back? So there's this fine line, this balance between expression and suppression, of what's appropriate to express and what's not. The best way of understanding that is having a healthy way to express — martial arts, painting, dancing, whatever way you want. Literally think of it as you having this battery of energy in your body, that whenever you feel upset or get angry, it charges up, it feeds off all the bad things happening in your life. And if you don't deal with it, the battery will explode, like a light bulb, and something happens. You have to use that battery — the same way mice or rats have to chew things, because if they don't, their teeth just keep growing. So decide to process or transmute that energy in a way that will serve you, and you may have to play around with that to understand how much it helps. But it isn't the final answer, because if that were the case, everyone would take up art or dancing and we'd have a peaceful world.

How can we release the energy?

And so this goes really nicely into our last item on the list, because if emotion is energy, the question is: how can we release the energy as efficiently and effectively as possible? Expression, to some degree, does do that, because you literally transmute it into what you're doing — but is there a better way? Is there a way that allows you to release everything?

I imagine you've had this experience where you felt a certain way for God knows how long — maybe resentful towards your parents or an ex-partner — and this goes on for months, years, decades, and one day you're just like, I've had enough, I can't keep holding onto this emotion, this event happened two decades ago, and you decide in that moment, I'm going to let this go. And by some miracle, it just goes. You can feel it leave, and the next day you feel better, you feel like that anger's gone. It could happen in a big way or a small way, but either way you managed, in that moment, to release the energy without doing martial arts or some other form of expression — you were able to let it out of your system without essentially doing anything.

So my question is, how can you do that more often? I've had that experience where there's this emotion that's been there so long — maybe hurt from a relationship, or from someone saying something when you were in school — and it has no logical purpose of being there, doesn't teach you anything, doesn't help you day to day, it's just there. Whenever you think about it you get upset, frustrated, and you run it through your head over and over again, and maybe one day you have that experience of, I'm just going to let this go, I'm done with it. Maybe it doesn't all go then, but you can feel lighter, feel like a good amount of it's gone. I've heard some people have that experience through journaling too — they're journaling and letting out the emotion without crying, without shouting, without some other form of expression, and it's just leaving them.

That's a really interesting idea. If that's true — and maybe you've had the experience to prove it's true, because I don't want you taking anything I say at face value, my answers may not be your answers, so question this for yourself in your own experience — is this true? In which case, what happened there? What possessed you to somehow gain control of this emotion and let it go?

And the key word is let it go. Because if you're the one letting it go, by definition, you are the one holding onto it. So what if all emotion wants to leave, but we're the ones holding onto it? We're the ones saying no to it leaving? Imagine this: we've all had the experience of being rejected, by someone, by a job, whatever. What happens when you get rejected? All it is, is something or someone saying no to you — nope, I don't want you, go away. What if we're doing that to all our emotions? Like we're at the gate, and the emotion's coming up, wanting to leave, and we're like, nope, I don't want you, go away.

Feelings are people

And so if that's the case, to release it, to let it go, to open that door and let it go, you have to do the opposite of reject it — you have to accept it. And that sounds really vague and unhelpful, I know, but I'll make it practical. Every single time you have an emotion — let's say you feel sad, or tired — and you start thinking, I can't feel tired, I'm being lazy, I have stuff to do, people are going to think I'm a waste, I can't do anything — every single negative thought you have about that emotion is you rejecting it. Sit with that for a second.

And to make it even more real for you, treat it as a relationship to another human being. Imagine you're going up to someone and they say, nope, I don't want you, your hair's weird, you have wonky eyes, you're dressed like a homeless person, and they reject you. How do you feel? Do you feel better or do you feel worse? It sounds simple, but I know these patterns of judging are so ingrained in us that it's just normal. Catch yourself next time you feel a certain way, because feelings aren't good or bad inherently, it's what we make of them.

If we feel sad, or grief-stricken, or tired, and then we say to ourselves, nope, I can't feel this way, I'm lazy, I'm a waste of space, I can't do anything, we're the ones telling our mind this emotion is bad, keep it away, put it back in the box. And the box can only hold so much before it explodes and you get sick. So the first step of practicing this tool is understanding our judgments around emotion. Because when you had that experience of letting go, in a big way you surrendered. You were so tired of judging the emotion, so tired of pushing it down. Get to the point where an emotion can come up and you can hold space for it — the same way you would if a friend came to you feeling really upset, you'd hold space for them, you'd listen to them.

So feelings are really simple — feelings are people. Put it that way. If someone came to you really upset, would you just say fuck off? No. Even if someone was angry and shouting at you, yes, you may leave — that could work if it was someone you might not see again — but you know this person is going to be following you around for the rest of your life. So saying no and rejecting them isn't going to work. Your only option is to listen and to hold space. Because under all anger is sadness. Everything is either love or a cry for love. And when you think of it that way, you lose the edge, you lose the sharpness of this emotion is good and this one is bad. If you can hold space for it, if you can sit with that emotion, if you can be okay with it being there, it's the equivalent of saying, I love you if you stay, and I love you if you go. Only then can you open the gates and let it out and literally feel it go.

How do I build more space?

So the final technique, and it's a skill because it's not something you can just know how to do straight away, you have to practice it. You have to practice being bigger than your emotions, and it won't work for the big ones straight away. It won't work for how you feel about your ex-partner or your boss or your parents, not straight away, because that emotion is so all-consuming you can't create space for it. In your mind that emotion is bigger than you, so how can you create space for something that's bigger than you? Your only job to practice is: how do I build more space?

That comes with accepting stuff more and more. It comes with feeling something small — someone looking at you weird as you're walking down the street, small thing. Okay, I feel this way, cool, just feel it, sit there, stand there and feel it in your body, feel the edges and accept it. If rejecting someone is saying no, I don't want you, then by definition, accepting someone or something is saying yes, it's okay for you to be here. Just say that to the emotion and mean it — you may not mean it to start with, because the emotion can feel triggering, which is why you start with small emotions — but you sit there, this is okay, truly it's okay. And that practice allows you to build and build space, to the point where you can allow those bigger emotions in.

Imagine Tom and Jerry — Jerry has this little house in the wall and this tiny little door, only a few things can fit through that door, Tom can't fit through it, it's just too small. But the more you practice, the bigger your door gets, and you can fit more and more things in. And when you practice creating space for these emotions, you'll feel it straight away — you'll feel the sharpness of the emotion fade, like suddenly it's okay, more okay, because you're bigger than it, by definition. If you can create space for it, you are bigger than it. So what do you have to fear?

They're just hobbits

I think that's the main reason why we do all of these things — distract ourselves, express ourselves, suppress things — because we're scared of the emotions. When we don't look at it — if you've seen Lord of the Rings, and I really hope you have, there's a scene right at the end where Sam is in Mordor, in one of the orc towers, coming up the spiral staircase. He knows there are some orcs at the top, so as he's walking up, he's making these noises and grunting, trying to make himself seem scarier, and because of the echo of the stone staircase it bellows. The orcs at the top hear this and think, oh my god, what monster is down there? And they're scared. The more he comes up the stairs, the louder it gets, and the shadow — you can see the shadow come up slowly, and it looks like the shadow of this huge monster — until right at the end he finally comes into view, and these orcs that were terrified of what was to come, realize, oh, it's just this little hobbit.

That's what emotions are. Emotions look so scary when you're looking at their shadow, but as soon as you deal with them, as soon as you have the courage — and it is courage, in every sense of the word — when you have the courage to face them head on, you realize they're hobbits.

I couldn't think of a better way of ending this episode than that. If you have any questions, if you feel like this explanation is still a bit vague to practice, feel free to DM me, and I can give some exact steps and help you practice it in your own life.