I have found a common pattern in a lot of my thoughts lately.
And that’s this concept of neutrality within our thoughts, feelings and emotions.
This concept of neutral thoughts and feelings has been on my mind a lot and it made me realize that I’ve been beating myself up for thinking or feeling certain things.
Even though I coach women on this exact topic and I teach it regularly, I still struggle with it.
Up until this point, I hadn’t fully internalized or processed the concept.
We get to this place where we give everyone else the human pass. “Oh, they’re human, it’s okay, no big deal.”
But we’re not allowed to have that. We’re superhuman, we are above the standard of everybody else. The standard that other people have? That’s, that’s reachable for them, that’s fine. But no, we have to be way up above everyone else. It’s not even humanly possible to achieve it but I’m going to be the one to show that it’s possible.
This has got to stop.
This exact thought process is holding you back from the true progress and growth that you’re wanting.
When I was thinking this through and trying to get to the root problem, I realized that this all comes from the fact that we think that we shouldn’t be thinking or feeling certain things. Or that we should be thinking or feeling certain things.
That’s just not true, especially when it comes to thoughts, feelings and emotions.
Thoughts are neutral
There are no good or bad feelings or emotions. There are no good or bad thoughts.
Also, just because you have a thought does not mean you have to act on it. For example, there are a lot of really horrible people in the world. I know a handful of them personally. And I’ll be honest, there are times where I have wished not great things on these horrible people, or things have crossed my mind. And I’m like, “oh, man, I didn’t even didn’t even know my brain could go there.”
Then I would start to feel guilty overthinking these things
But what I realized is that I thought that thing didn’t act on it. I didn’t do anything with it. And I’m not saying that you should sit there and stew over negative things all the time as long as you never act on it. That’s not good for you either.
But what I am saying is that you are human and you’re allowed to have human emotions, human thoughts, human feelings. As humans, we’re gonna have human moments. Those human moments include sometimes not thinking great things about people. Sometimes it’s not thinking great things of ourselves and we have to get a whole lot more comfortable with sitting in that and allowing it to be okay.
I was coaching my friend Gemma on Instagram Live last week and she really struggles with self love.
She doesn’t feel like she always deserve self love and true confidence.
And I asked her, “What if that was okay? What if it’s okay that we feel those things?”
Her immediate response was, “well, it doesn’t feel good? I don’t like it. It’s uncomfortable.”
I didn’t think of this until later, but I realized that she’s feeling those feelings anyway. Whether she likes them or not, they’re there.
They’re only being amplified by the fact that she’s resisting them. She doesn’t want to feel them and therefore beats herself up about it, only making those feelings that she doesn’t want even worse.
Whether we want to accept it or resist it, we feel that way anyway. In so what if? What if the reason we feel this way so much and so often because we haven’t actually allowed ourselves to sit with a thought. And because we haven’t allowed ourselves to sit with a thought, it just kind of sits there at the back door knocking, begging to be let in.
If we let that voice come in and just chill for a bit, eventually it’ll leave.
What if a major part of the healing journey is letting yourself feel whatever it is you’re feeling without guilt or suppression?
We’re capable of feeling thousands of different emotions, suppressing any of them isn’t healthy.
So I’m not saying to build a house and live there. But if you need to pitch a tent and hang out for a bit, that’s totally ok.
It’s important to include positivity in your life. Say your affirmations and do your gratitude journal. Continue to live in the mindset of abundance. But you can’t do any of those things to the fullest unless you let yourself experience your entire range of emotions, including the ones that might not be so comfy.
I know that this can seem scary because we’ve climbed out of that dark place and we’re afraid to go back. We’re scared that if we truly let ourselves feel, that we’ll end up stuck in that place.
But the reason we were stuck in that place is because we weren’t letting ourselves fully live the human experience. We suppressed the ‘positive’ emotions and got stuck in the dark.
It’s important to recognize, though, that if you never go clean out the cobwebs out of the dark spaces, you’ll end up with a bigger mess than you even realized.
So what if, what if you allow those feelings to set for a second? What if instead of saying I shouldn’t be angry at myself? What if instead of saying I shouldn’t feel guilty, that you just let yourself you let yourself feel guilty, you let yourself feel angry, feel sad, you let yourself have a little pity party, you let yourself reach that place of sometimes really not liking yourself?
One of the greatest things that I’ve learned is that we are resilient. As survivors, we have so much strength because of what we’ve been through. And I realize that if I am capable of getting out of the abusive relationship cycle, I am capable of pulling myself out of that dark place.
So instead of resisting it, sometimes I just let the darkness be. Sometimes I cry and sometimes I get angry. And sometimes I get numb and I stare at the ceiling.
But even though it’s not easy every time I’ve allowed myself to truly experience emotion, the freedom I feel after is unreal.
It’s only after those moments that I’ve truly experienced peace.
On a neurological level, we beat ourselves up all the time and we constantly tell our brains, they’re wrong and that it needs to start thinking positively and it needs to start thinking leading in the positive way with affirmations and all the other work we’re doing.
But if we suppress emotions, we’re still telling our brain it’s wrong.
Can you imagine our poor brain’s confusion? “You’re telling me that it’s okay to feel strong, but it’s wrong to feel weak? What am I supposed to do with this? I thought you said it was okay to feel?”
Accepting your humanness is nothing to be ashamed of. It’s actually really freaking beautiful.
Journal on this.
What comes to mind when I say that it’s okay to feel negatively about yourself? How does that feel? What comes up for you? What fears do you have? What’s your biggest resistance to that?
You need to figure out what you need, what your body needs and what your soul needs.
Sometimes your soul just needs you to collapse on the ground and cry your eyes out. Then once it’s out, you can get back up and keep going.
Even when that moment is a second, week, month, or year, let yourself have your moment.
You are so beautiful in your humanness. It’s time to let yourself embrace it and truly feel.
You deserve that, boo. You’ve got this.
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