Episode 68: Getting Good at Feeling Bad

Welcome to the 100% Awesome Podcast with April Price. You might not know it but every result in your life is 100% because of the thoughts you think and that my friends is 100% awesome.

Hello podcast universe! Welcome to episode 68 of the 100% Awesome Podcast. I'm April Price and I want to welcome you to the podcast today. I think you are so awesome for showing up here, for subscribing to the podcast, and for sharing it with other people. You guys are amazing! How are you? You have been on my mind a lot lately, and I have tried to answer the question, how can I help my awesome listeners right now? How can I make life a little easier, and a little better, for anyone who hears this episode?

That is what I'm always trying to do, that is always my goal, and so I hope that this will help you in a very real way today. So, yesterday my son was scheduled to fly home for a quick visit to have some dental work done, and to go to the eye doctor. And on his way to the airport he got drowsy and he fell asleep while he was driving, and he ran into the median barrier on the freeway. And he ruined his tire, and he damaged his car pretty good, and thankfully he was alright, but he spent the next few hours waiting for roadside assistance, and a tow truck.

Then he had to find a body shop that was open on Sunday, and get an Uber to the airport, and get a different flight to Phoenix. And when he finally got here, I hugged him and I said, "How are you?" And he said, "I just thought it was going to be easier than that." And I think that statement could be the theme of Earth life, or fate. We all kind of thought it was going to be easier than it is, whether it's because of our own mistakes, or because of the choices of others, or just the result of living in a fallen world where bad things happen. Life is challenging in lots of ways, and it's surprising, because we sort of thought it was going to be easier than it is. I think we all kind of thought that about 2020. It's what I kind of think about marriage, it's what I kind of think about parenting, I thought it was going to be easier than it is. It's what I think about my business, it's what I think about any of the goals in my life. It's what we think about our dreams, and our money, and our physical health, right?

It is really what I kind of think about life in general, I just thought it was going to be easier than it is. And there is a surprising amount of challenge involved for each of us, and often that challenge creates a lot of negative emotion for us. And because Earth life contains a surprising amount of negative emotion, 50% of all our emotions actually, I think it really serves us, and helps us to get good at feeling bad. Our instinct of course as humans is to avoid negative emotion, our desire is to avoid it altogether, or at least as much as possible. But when we do this, I think it 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 can get at experiencing negative emotion the more we can enjoy our entire Earth life experience. I think getting good at feeling bad is a skill set that will bless, and serve us in so many ways. So, that's what I wanted to talk to you about today, how to get good at feeling bad.

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So, let's just start by talking about feelings themselves first, and just so you know in this podcast I'm going to use the words feelings, and emotions interchangeably. They mean the same thing in this podcast. So, the more that I learn about emotions the more amazed I am at how Heavenly Father created each of us. He created our brains to take in the world around us through our senses, right? We see hear, taste, smell, feel, the world around us, and all of that input goes into our brain, where all of that information gets processed, and sorted, and interpreted. And then, the brain needs a way to communicate all this important information to the rest of our body so that we can survive in the world. Like if the brain has the information, but it has no way of communicating that information with our body, then it just doesn't help us, right? We can't take any action, and keep ourselves safe. And so, feelings are the mechanism by which the brain communicates with our bodies, tells them what to do, and how to act. Our feelings are like a chemical bridge, right? This link between our brain, and our body, and our feelings, allow our body to act on the thoughts that our brain thinks, and this all just happens automatically.

We don't even realize what is occurring, but it's kind of miraculous when you think about it. Our brains take words, and turn them into chemical signals that inform the rest of the body how to act, and these chemical signals, or vibrations are called feelings. And admittedly, some of these vibrations in our body feel better than others, right? The chemical vibration of joy, feels better than the one for disappointment. Peace feels better inside our body than grief. But, and this is the first point that I really want to emphasize for you, every emotion whether it's positive, or negative, is part of the human experience. And so, none of our feelings are bad, and none of our feelings make us bad. They are just the chemical reactions, the natural result of thought. When we think words, we feel feelings, and because some emotions make us feel worse inside than others, we sort of think that they are bad.

We tend to attach a certain morality to them, meaning like, I often find that when we feel bad, we think it's because we must be bad or at the very least we think that we've done something bad, or that we're doing it wrong in some way, that we've messed up somehow. This is not the case. You have negative emotion, because that is the nature of the human experience, and feelings aren't created based on your worthiness, or your righteousness, or how well you're living your life. Feelings are created by words in your brain, by the sentences you think, and every one of them is allowed.

So, I was just talking to one of my darling clients last week and we were talking about this and he said, "Oh my gosh, it's such a relief to know that there's nothing wrong, and that I haven't done anything bad when I feel bad." And I agree with him. Like when I found this out, it was such a relief to me. There is nothing wrong with you, and you haven't done anything wrong. If you are feeling a negative emotion. All of our emotions are actually a vital necessary part of your awesome Earth-life experience, and you need them both, negative and positive.

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The second point I want to make is that you don't have to solve for negative emotion. When you feel bad, you don't have to fix it. You don't have to change it, your emotions are just there to be felt. And of course, because your feelings are created by your thoughts you can change any emotion you want to by changing your thoughts. But I want to caution you to not try to change the thoughts so fast that you're just covering up and stifling, and resisting the emotion underneath it. Our goal isn't to not feel bad, our goal is to feel all of our feelings, and recognize that our own thoughts created them. Not the outside world, not other people, not the pandemic, not an accident, not what someone else did, not what you did, just your thoughts about those things. And you can change any thoughts, but first you need to feel the emotion that the original thought creates. You need to feel that emotion, without judgment, without resistance, and without avoiding it, so that you can start to truly recognize that you created it, and that you have other options.

You can think about it differently, because if you are the source, then of course you can always create something different, but the part that most of us want to skip over is the part we first feel our emotions, right? We need to feel our feelings before we just swap out our thoughts for something else. When we skip feeling the emotion, we are generally trying so hard not to feel bad that we don't give ourselves time to realize that we created the feeling bad in the first place. We end up looking outside of ourselves to put blame for feeling that on other people, or the circumstances outside of us, right? We're always looking outside of us to try to feel better, when you can allow your emotions to be there. It will give you amazing access, to awareness, to truly be able to see how you create your emotions, and that you're not just being acted upon by things outside of you.

Okay so, I want to give you a little example of this and I kind of want to demonstrate what it's like to feel your feelings without resistance and without needing to change them right away. Most of us honestly don't have a lot of experience really feeling our feelings. We've spent most of our lives avoiding our emotions, or pushing them away, or judging ourselves for having them. Telling ourselves we shouldn't be feeling the way we are feeling. So, as I tell you this example I hope that it will be a kind of guide to you on how to open up, and really feel your feelings.

Okay so, you already know that I love going to the gym, right? And the gyms in Arizona have been closed forever. I know, I know, this is the height of tragedy, right? Anyway, the gym's closed in March, for a couple of months, and then they open for a couple of weeks in June, and then they closed again. And they were supposed to open again on August 11th, right? And I had August 11th circled on my calendar, and on August 11th I drove to the gym only to find out it was still closed, and I was the only one who didn't get the memo, and I was the only car in the parking lot. And as I took all that information in, right? I'm sitting in the parking lot taking this information into my brain, and then I turned around, drove back home to do yet another home workout, I felt disappointed. I was so disappointed. Now, I know that my disappointments are small in comparison to many of yours, but I hope that this story will illustrate how to process emotion. And you can do it no matter how big or small the emotion you're experiencing is. So in that moment, of course I'm very disappointed, and it felt like Arizona and the world at large, as it is right now, was making me disappointed, right?

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Now of course, any disappointment that I was feeling was created by my thoughts, but in that moment, it didn't seem like that. I couldn't see it yet. I felt disappointed, and it seemed like someone else, or something else, was to blame and I knew that I wasn't ready to think differently. Because so far, I couldn't see that I was responsible for the feeling of disappointment in my own body. So, instead of trying to avoid the disappointment, and before I just tried to like slap a positive thought on there, and move on, and try to bury my disappointment. I told myself that I could just feel disappointed, and then I allowed myself to feel bad. Disappointed is part of my Earth- life experience, and this year I am getting better, and better at feeling it, right? So, in that moment when I allowed myself to feel disappointment, I got out of my head. My head was spinning with thoughts like, "They said it was going to be open, they should be open. I don't understand why the gym is still closed. This isn't fair. I'm so tired of working out at home. I hate our governor. I think I'm going to become a single-issue voter, right? And just vote on gym policies."

Anyway, to feel my feelings, I first have to get out of my head. Notice how in my head, I'm arguing with the disappointment. I am not wanting to feel disappointed, and so I'm arguing about why I shouldn't be. I'm telling myself in a thousand different ways that I shouldn't be feeling the way I am, and that if the world was different, or better, or the way I think it should be, then I wouldn't be disappointed. Now, of course this is an argument I cannot win, because I'm arguing with reality. So again, to feel my feelings I have to get out of my head. I have to get into my body. Feelings happen in our bodies. The chemical signals the brain sends for disappointment, show up in my body. So, in that moment I ask myself, "Where is disappointment? Where is disappointment in my body? What does disappointment feel like?" And I scanned my body to try to find the feeling for me. Disappointment was a small, hot ball, in the center of my chest. It was hot, and pulsing, which surprised me, right? I didn't know that disappointment was hot.

Once I found it, I just allowed it to be there inside my chest. I tried to get close to it with my mind, and just observe it, and watch it. There is disappointment, it is small, and hot, and pulsing. It's okay to just let it be there, to just feel it. As I sat there, and felt that, I also noticed a little vibration running up the back of my neck like a little current of electricity. And as I allowed these vibrations to be there, the heat in my chest, and the frisson along the back of my neck and I just opened up to them and relaxed into the feeling of disappointment. The disappointment started to fade, and left. So, at this moment I'm in the middle of driving home, and I got to the end of the street to turn into my neighborhood, I could feel disappointment coming again, right?

Now, notice that as the feeling left me the first time, and I was driving, then my mind, my brain, started up again. It started to have more thoughts, and so the feeling of disappointment returned. And again, I told myself, "Okay, right now we're just going to feel disappointed." I didn't try to argue with it. I didn't try to solve for it. I didn't try to find out exactly what I was thinking in that moment, or purposely try to redirect and think something else. I just went back into my body. I found the feeling again. There it was, hot, and small, and pulsing in my chest. I could feel that fast vibration in my neck going up to the base of my skull, and I just leaned in, and breathe and felt disappointment. And over the next hour or so, the feeling kept coming back like this every few minutes, right? And all through my own workout, as I lifted my weights, whenever disappointment arose again, I just opened up to it, and I stayed inside my body.

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I didn't stop my workout. I didn't get mad at the disappointment. I didn't get mad at myself for feeling it. Every time it came up, I just felt it. I just went in my body, I noticed where it was, I noticed the pulsing, I noticed the heat, I noticed the tension, and the vibration, and that kind of friction feeling along my neck. And I just did it over, and over again as long as I needed to. Now, sometimes we call this a processing our emotions, which just means we let them run through our body. And we allow our body to experience the information from your brain in a physical way. And when you allow your emotions like this, they usually last between 60 and 90 seconds, and then they'll kind of fade, and come back again, and then they'll fade again. They kind of rise and fall, rise and fall, almost like ocean waves, right? And what I found, and what I think you'll find, is that resisting our negative emotions, and not wanting to feel them, is so much harder than actually just opening up, and relaxing, and feeling them.

Your body was designed by Heaven to be able to process emotion while you're here on Earth. That is how we experience the world in a physical body. We experience it physically. Physical sensations in the physical world. That is what it means to be a human. And it's really kind of beautiful. I like to think that it is a privilege to feel, that it is the gift of human life. And we were designed by God to feel the full range of human emotion, that full range is what gives us experience, and learning, and growth. And the most amazing thing about it is that no emotion negative, or positive has the power to harm us. Like physically harm us. Sometimes resisting emotion can have a negative health consequence, right? Like resisting stress, or not trying to feel stress can create physical symptoms like high blood pressure, or ulcers. But allowing stress, and processing the emotion of stress, leaning into it feeling, it allows our body to process it just like any other emotion.

Okay so, let me just kind of walk through that one more time, and recap the way to process emotion. And when I say process, I just mean opening yourself up, and allowing yourself to feel the emotion in your physical body. So first you just want to relax, and take a deep breath, and then, second, you're going to want to go into your body, get out of your head. This isn't a thinking exercise, right? Stop arguing with the thought your brain is offering. Stop telling yourself you shouldn't be feeling the way you are. Stop battling with those thoughts, and saying that things should be different. Just get inside your body, feelings happen inside your body always, and then you can just scan your body, and find the emotion. Where is it in your body? Get close to it, right? Move towards it with your mind, and describe it to yourself. Is it big or small? Is it hot or cold? Is it hard or soft? Does it have a texture? Does it have a color? Is it moving, right? Where is it? Is it in your chest? Is it in your stomach? Is it along your shoulders, your jaw? Is it in your limbs? You just want to be so curious, what does it feel like to experience this emotion?

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Then just allow it to be there as long as it needs to be. Take a deep breath, and just watch it inside of you. Notice how at its very worst it is only a vibration, a physical vibration in your body. It's a physical reaction to a mental thought, and you are perfectly safe. Even when the emotion is its strongest, and then every time it fades, and reappears you just go back in your body, and repeat the process. Once you have processed your emotion as many times as it needs to be there, as many times as your brain needs to give you the information, then you can take a look at the thoughts that created it, and decide if you want to keep those thoughts.

So, in my case I processed disappointment for an hour or two, and then I was able to look at that thought. "The gym should be open." That was my thought, and I asked myself if I wanted to keep thinking it. In this case, I didn't, right? I could see that it was a thought that wouldn't give me the results I wanted, because when I think the gym should be open, I close myself off to the reality of my current life. I close myself off to what is, and then I'm not open to experience what my life is offering me right now. The lessons my life is offering me right now. But notice that in that moment I could see that I was creating my disappointment, because I allowed myself to feel disappointed by allowing it. It allowed me to see that I was creating that feeling, not the state of Arizona, right? And then, I was finally in a position to give up my current thought, and think something else. But if I had tried to do that without first processing the disappointment, it would have been like trying to like paste a new thought over the old emotion, and my brain would have just kept arguing, and looping on itself, right?

The new thought would not have been effective, because there would have been all this unresolved emotion underneath it. Brooke Castillo always says, "It's like putting a throw pillow on a pile of garbage." She's like, "You're covering it up, but you can still smell it." It's still under there, bothering you, and so then the throw pillow isn't working at making things beautiful, right? It's still the whole thing just stinks. So, if you ever find a new thought that just won't stick, it's usually because you haven't processed the emotion that was created by the old thought first, and you're just using the new thought to not feel to avoid that emotion and that just doesn't work.

Okay, now let me just speak to one other aspect when it comes to feeling negative emotion. When I teach my clients how to open up, and process their emotions, the biggest concern that I get most often is that they're worried that they're going to end up out of control. They're scared that if they really feel their emotions, instead of avoiding them, or bottling them up, then they're going to lose control, right? For example, people will say, "But if I just get angry I'm going to scare my kids, I'm going to be yelling, and screaming, and I'm not going to show up the way I want to. Don't I need to control my feelings?" And what I want to tell you is that feeling our feelings, really feeling our feelings inside of our body, is a completely internal activity. It is happening 100% inside our bodies, and in most cases, no one outside of you will even know you are processing an emotion, right?

I can process emotions in the car, or at the gym, or when I'm cooking dinner, or on a walk, and no one will know, because processing emotions is simply about going inside your body, and observing, and describing the emotion, and allowing it to be there. It isn't about acting out. Acting out is actually just another way we're avoiding our feelings. So, for example, if I feel angry, I start yelling, and slamming things when I don't want to feel that feeling. Like I don't like the feeling of anger inside me, and so I start yelling, and stomping to get a release from the feeling, or get other people to change so I don't have to feel this feeling, right? Reacting to emotion is just another form of resisting the emotion, of not trying to feel it. It's a way of avoiding processing, and feeling my emotion, like to feel anger inside of me, it feels like hot lava in my veins, right? It feels fast, and hot, and urgent, my chest has this large hot heat inside of it. There's a vibration at my neck, and along my jaw, this is anger. Not yelling, not slamming doors, not screaming, right?

Anger is just a hot, urgent vibration inside of me, and if I'm willing to feel the feeling, just feel it, and allow it without trying to avoid it, no one even has to know that I'm feeling it. Acting out isn't processing emotion, it's avoiding it. And the more willing you are to actually feel your emotions inside your body, the more control you have. It's the same with anxiety, right? My daughter told me once that she can't allow herself to feel anxious, because then it's just gonna get bigger, and bigger, and bigger, and she'll have a panic attack. But resisting the anxiety, and not wanting to feel the anxiety, is making the panic worse, it's exacerbating the anxiety so that it becomes a full-fledged panic attack. The more you can open up to the first signs of anxiety, and figure out where it is, what does it feel like, observe it, get close to it, not need it to go away, but instead let it rise and fall as you watch it. Then it doesn't have to ramp up in order to give you the information the brain has for your body, right?

When we resist our feelings, we are in a sense, ignoring the information the brain has for the body, and so then the feelings intensify. The brain sends more signals, right? We get more frustrated, we get more anxious, we get more angry, we get more disappointed, right? The brain just keeps sending the signal it sends more chemical messengers, because it thinks it's vital that your body have this information. And so, it just ramps up the signals. When it comes down to it, the brain has information that it wants to pass onto the body, and it just won't stop until it passes that information on, right? Until it gets heard. And when we resist our emotions, and our feelings, our brain just works all the harder to get the message to us. So, getting good at feeling bad, and by that I mean, really feeling our negative emotion inside our body, means that we actually gain more control over our feelings, because we can allow them without needing to avoid them.

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Okay, here at the end I want to talk about why this is so valuable to us, why feeling our feelings is so valuable, and how allowing our emotions gives us more control over our whole lives. So, what I see so often is people not living their dreams, not going after the life they really want, because they're scared of failing, or they're scared of being disappointed, or they're scared of being visible, or being rejected, or they're scared to be vulnerable. Notice that what we are scared of is negative emotion. Emotions like failure, and disappointment, and vulnerability, and rejection, and shame. And so, when we start to get good at feeling bad, when we get good at allowing every negative emotion, we also lose our fear of experiencing negative emotion. We don't have to be scared of feeling anything anymore, because we are good at feeling bad. And this is one of the reasons that I think getting good at feeling bad can be so powerful for us. Not only does it allow us to have awareness of the experience that we are creating for ourselves with our thoughts. And not only does it allow us to manage, and control our emotional lives. The skill of feeling bad also allows you to do anything you want in the world. It allows you to up level everything, and live bold in your own life.

In so many ways I think getting good at feeling bad is the key to living the life that you are living right now. Like notice right now, that there are things that you want to do, right? There are changes that you want to make in your life. But notice right now that you are avoiding doing those things because of how you think it will make you feel, right? Like you think of course your life will be better if you did that thing, but also, it's going to be hard, and there's going to be a lot of a negative emotion as well, and avoiding that negative emotion is making you avoid doing what you really want to do with your life. And if you were good at feeling bad you could do anything you wanted. If you are willing to feel anything there is nothing you can't do, because suddenly there is nothing to be scared up.

So, think about anything you want to do. I might give you a little example but this applies to anything that you want to do in your life. So, for example, let's take getting up early, you want to get up early, right? You want to, you think it's going to give you time to think, and exercise, and get organized for the day. But notice the negative emotion you will have to feel in order to do it. You might have to feel dread when your alarm goes off, you might have to feel tired, or deprived, or irritated. And when we aren't good at feeling bad, we tend to want to avoid all this negative emotion, and so, then we don't get up. But if we're good at feeling bad, we could just allow ourselves to feel the dread, feel the tired, feel deprived, feel irritated, and get up, and notice how if we are willing to do that, if we are willing to feel any emotion, how much other positive emotions suddenly becomes available to us.

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So, when I first started my coaching business, I had just finished coach certification, and I was signing my first clients, and that required me to feel a lot of negative emotion, right? My brain had all kinds of thoughts about me starting this business, and being a coach. And those thoughts created a lot of negative feelings inside of me. I felt shame, and self-doubt, and confusion, and overwhelm, and inadequacy, and fear. Every morning as these feelings washed over me, as I was standing in the shower, my brain would say, "Okay, let's not do this, why are we doing this? We don't have to do this, we can just figure out something else to do with our time, right? We can take it easy, right? We can read more books, or get back into quilting. We can figure out something else to do with our life that doesn't involve so much negative emotion." But I knew that if I could just open up, and be willing to feel all the negative feelings my brain was creating. If I could just get really good at feeling bad, then a whole new world of possibility, and contribution would open up to me. I knew that on the other side of all this negative emotion there were some amazingly positive, powerful feelings waiting for me as well. And so I just let myself feel all of it.

And of course, my brain was creating it, but it was okay to just feel the negative emotions. And as I stood there in the shower morning, after morning, feeling scared, and ashamed, terrified, and confused, and overwhelmed, at all this stuff, right? I I just let myself feel this was part of it. This is what it meant to make a contribution in the world, and I was willing to feel all the feelings, and because I did that I also got to feel successful, and fulfilled, and lucky, and humbled, and amazed, and confident, and sometimes even awestruck. All my life I had been trying to avoid negative emotion, and resist feeling bad, and the whole time the key was to lean into it, to get good at feeling bad, and to allow the full spectrum of human emotion while I'm here on Earth. Getting good at feeling bad was the key to all of it.

That is what allowed me to change my life more than anything else, and it is the key to your dreams as well. It is the key to loving your life, and accepting it as it is, and opening up to your human experience, and whatever God has intended for you. And it is also the key to getting the most out of your time here as well, and doing the work you came to do. The goal isn't to not feel bad, the goal is to get good at feeling bad, because if you are willing to feel any feeling there is nothing you can't have, or try, or experience, or create for yourself. And that my friends is 100% awesome! I love you for listening and I'll see you next week.

Thanks so much for joining me on the podcast today! If you want to take the things that I've talked about and apply them to your life sign up for a free coaching session at aprilpricecoaching.com. This is where the real magic happens and your life starts to change forever believing your life is 100% awesome is totally available to every one of us. And as your coach. I'll show you exactly how to do that so that you can truly love your Earth life experience the way things are is not the way things have to stay and that my friends is 100% awesome!