Who would you need to become in order for life to feel easy?
Photo by Liam Macleod on Unsplash
Why does getting in touch with your emotions matter?
Why can’t we just bypass them entirely by wishing love and light on everything we touch and meditating for hours on end or hanging out only with people we like who live exactly how we do and who will never activate us or rationalize our experiences away using sophisticated psychoanalysis or just becoming a damn stoic already?
Because whether you’re willing to acknowledge this fact or not, we are emotionally driven beings. Taking action REQUIRES emotion.
What that means is that while you may not consider yourself emotional, you biologically have to be in order to get out of bed or brush your teeth or feed yourself breakfast or drive to work or watch a movie or go to the gym.
Emotions drive all of that.
Without emotion, you would be dead.
You may not be aware of the emotion driving those things but that does not mean the emotion does not exist, that just means you’re on autopilot and you’re not paying attention to what’s driving your actions.
When you get in touch with your emotions, through monitoring how you feel throughout the day and through learning emotional language at a more granular level in order to more accurately express yourself, what you’re actually doing is bringing what’s already happening INTO YOUR AWARENESS.
Why is this a good thing?
Because when you’re aware of your emotional experience, you have more control over your life (which is to say, more control over your choices and how you respond to your environment).
Let’s imagine for a second that getting out of bed and brushing your teeth and going to work were all being driven by a negative emotion like FEAR (of not being good enough) or DENIAL (of what you really want to do, which is not go to work and instead spend the whole day writing the next blockbuster screenplay).
Fear wreaks havoc on the body. So does denial. It causes us insane amounts of stress and quite literally creates dissonance between the parasympathetic and sympathetic nervous systems. This dissonance leads to — subtle at first, but eventually — severe health problems. Imbalances in the endocrine system, malabsorption of nutrients, poor digestion, diabetes, cancer, heart attacks, stroke, to casually name a few.
What you may eventually feel if you’re running on autopilot long enough without you being aware of it is OVERWHELM or otherwise being totally outside of your own capacity. You may also experience injuries. These are all not-so-subtle clues that your body is sending you that it’s time to get your shit together and start paying attention.
What most people do here is they ignore those clues, they suppress them, they medicate them, they operate on them, or otherwise try to control and intervene their body’s attempt at blatantly communicating to them, all while pretending like everything is in fact really great (when they know it’s actually not).
You, too, could go down that path by continuing to ignore your emotional experience and waiting it out, testing your fate in the hopes of not getting sick or injured. You totally could and you might even successfully outrun it.
OR.
You could take a non-invasive, significantly less expensive (financially, energetically, time), significantly more fulfilling approach by being proactive now.
There is no getting rid of energy. There is only repurposing it. You can literally, consciously, start using your energy on things that serve your growth (which is your birthright as a human being) already now. This is called being energetically efficient.
Being energetically efficient as a human being has massive benefits. You spend less time feeling stuck, less time being sick or battling health issues and injuries, actionable ideas and inspiration come to you more easily, you feel less busy and more present, and most importantly, you stop making choices out of fear (which leaves room to make choices out of love), discover infinitely more connection in your life that fills you up, and experience significantly less overwhelm.
Who would you need to become in order to have life feel this easy?
This is entirely possible and available to you. All you have to do is take action (most likely without knowing the emotion driving it until later 😜).