Episode 68: Getting Good at Feeling Bad

Because earth life contains a surprising amount of negative emotion (50%!), one of the best skills we can obtain is to get good at feeling bad. In fact, the better we get at feeling bad, the more we can enjoy our entire life experience.

Feeling bad doesn’t come naturally. Most of us try to avoid negative emotion as much as possible, but this is limiting how much we are able to enjoy ALL of our life, and it is also limiting the things we do and try to accomplish during our lives.

In this episode, I share how to process and feel your feelings, so that you have more control over your emotional life and the way you experience your current life, and, more importantly, so you can start doing the things you’ve been too scared to try. Getting good at feeling bad is the key to getting the life you really want.

Because earth life contains a surprising amount of negative emotion (50% of all of our emotions),  it really serves us and helps us to get good at feeling bad.  Our instinct, of course is to avoid negative emotion, but this prevents us from really getting the most out of our earth life experience, because in essence we are avoiding and resisting 50% of the experience.  And the better we get at experiencing negative emotion, the more we can enjoy our entire experience.  

What are feelings?

Our brains that take in the world around us through our senses….we see, hear, taste, smell and feel the world around us and all that input goes into our brain, where all that information gets processed and sorted and interpreted.  And then, the brain needed a way to communicate all this important information to the rest of our body so that we could survive in the world.  Feelings are the mechanism by which the brain communicates with our bodies and tells them what to do and how to act.  

Feelings are just chemical signals by which the brain communicates information to the body and they are felt as physical sensations and vibrations inside our body.  

How Do I Process or Feel Emotion?

1. Relax.  Take a deep breath.  
2. Go into your body.  Get out of your head.  Stop arguing with the thoughts.  Stop telling yourself you shouldn’t be feeling the way you are.  Stop battling with the thoughts and saying things should be different.  Just get in your body.  Feelings happen inside your body.  
3. Scan your body and find the emotion.
4. Get close to the feeling.  Move towards it inside your body.  
5. Describe the feeling to yourself.  Is it big or small? Hot or cold? Is it hard or soft? Does it have a texture? Or a color?  Is it moving?  Where is it in your body?  Is it in your chest, your stomach, your shoulders, your jaw, your limbs?  You want to be so curious.  What does it feel like?
6. Allow the feeling to be there as long as it needs to be there.  Take a deep breath and just watch it inside of you.  Notice how at its worst it is just a vibration.  A physical reaction to a mental thought.  And you are perfectly safe even when emotion is strong.
7. Every time the feeling fades and reappears, go back in your body and repeat the process.
8. Remember this is a completely internal activity.  It happens inside of you.

How Does Processing Emotion Help Me?

1.  It allows you to see why you are feeling the way you are – Once you have processed your emotion as many times as it needs to be there, as many times as your brain needs to give your body information, then you can take a look at the thoughts that created it and decide if you want to keep those thoughts and continue to feel the way you do.
2.  It allows you to be in charge and manage your emotional life – When you learn process your emotions you know that they cannot hurt you.  You stop avoiding them and open up to the experience of your life exactly as it is.  You don’t have to change the world, you just have to allow your experience of it through feeling all of your emotions.
3. When we get good at feeling bad, when we get good at allowing every negative emotion, we also lose our fear of negative emotion.  We don’t have to be scared of feeling anything because we are good at feeling bad.  This allows you to uplevel everything and live bold in your own life.  Getting good at feeling bad is the key to living the life you aren’t yet living. 

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Brooke Castillo 

To read or download a written transcript of the entire episode, simply click the link below.