Episode 76: Divine Discomfort

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 76 of the 100% Awesome Podcast. I'm April Price, and I want to welcome you to the podcast, and I want to tell you that if things are hard right now, nothing has gone wrong. It's kind of nice to know, right? It's supposed to be hard. And today on the podcast my goal, as always, is to help you feel better. So, if things are hard, and you just want to feel better, you are in the right place. I'm going to do my best here, and I don't offer any of this today as a negation of what is, or ignoring the very real challenges that you face, but with a full acknowledgement that indeed things are tough as spiritual beings, living in physical bodies.

There is an inherent difficulty built in, right? Not only from the fall, and being subject to the uncertainty of life, and the continual movement of things towards chaos, and disintegration, but also from our own human brains. From the tendencies, and inclinations of our own natural human brains towards fear, and anxiety, and negativity. I get it, you are up against a lot, I am too. And I hope that the things I share here on the podcast will give you a different perspective today that will help you in real ways, right now in your life.

I got this really sweet message on Facebook this morning from a woman in the branch where my daughter Savannah is serving her mission. And she was telling me about a talk that Savannah gave at church, and she wrote, thank you to you, and her dad for the way you raised her. Thank you for guiding her to pray when things were rough. Thank you for reminding her that life wouldn't be without trials. Now, as you already know I take no credit for raising my children. They have been raising me all along, we know that for sure. And anything that my daughter is, is because of her choices, and who she has become through her own deliberate effort. But I did so appreciate this note, and I especially loved the line, "Thank you for reminding her that life wouldn't be without trials." I don't know if that's a good thing, or a bad thing, but for sure I did let my children know that, right? That life was in fact supposed to have parts that hurt, and parts that are painful, parts even that are excruciating, and admittedly they learned some of that just by having me as their mom, right?

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I'm like a walking object lesson in suffering. But seriously I do think it's important for all of us to remember that, because as soon as we expect anything other than the 50/50, positive negative experience. As soon as we expect that we're supposed to be happy most of the time, or that life is supposed to be certain then predictable, and generally favorable, then we start to feel like something has gone seriously wrong. And that either we did it wrong, or the people we love did it wrong, and that is just not the case. Or rather maybe it is the case, right? We did it all wrong, but that was exactly right. We all did it wrong, and we were supposed to. And the effects of the fall that we have no control over are at work in all of our lives. And even though it seems like things have gone wrong since that moment in the garden, they have all gone exactly right in their wrongness.

There is no way to have an Earth-life experience without all of this wrongness, and even though we all understand that life isn't supposed to be without trials, like intellectually at least, somehow we are still surprised when it happens. We are still surprised by the negative emotion that we have in our lives. Like we are really sold on the idea that we're supposed to be happy most, if not all of the time. So, I want to introduce you to an idea today that I have been thinking about a lot recently. And please know that I do so reverently. I know that some of the things I'm talking about here today are sacred, but these things, these thoughts that I want to share with you have helped me so much, and have contributed to my peace, and I hope that they will contribute to yours. So, I hope you'll bear with me as I share them.

So, because pain, and suffering, and doing it wrong is all part of the plan of heaven, it must be there for a reason, right? And I think that that reason is that feeling, and processing negative emotion is actually a divine attribute, a divine skill, if you will. And that as we get better at feeling our feelings, feeling negative emotion, the more we are following our Savior, and the more we are becoming like him. So, so many times we think about living the gospel in terms of happiness, and unhappiness, right? We sort of buy into the idea that if you live right, and if you obey the commandments, and you live your life according to God's will, then you are going to be happy. And we subscribe to the idea that if you try to be good, you can kind of guarantee good outcomes in your life, right? That if you're trying to be good, you can somehow prevent negative emotion, and negative experiences from happening in your life.

And we even tend to attach morality to our feelings. We unknowingly label positive emotions as good, and negative emotions as bad, and we think that if we are experiencing any of these emotions, then it says something about us, and about whether or not we are good or bad. We have so much morality attached, particularly to negative emotion in fact, that it dramatically increases our resistance, and our defensiveness to feeling negatively. I was talking to my son this week, and he was telling me about an experience he had where he was feeling all this stress, and he just kept telling himself, "It's fine, it's good, I'm doing great, right?" And when people would ask him, "How are you?" He would say, "I'm doing great," right, because there is a certain morality to not being okay, and not doing great. Like if he's not fine, then what does that say about him as a person, and his goodness. He sort of has this feeling that he's a bad person if he feels stressed, or overwhelmed, or at least that he's doing it wrong.

And I know that he is not alone, so many of us feel this way. We feel like we have to be okay, or we are not good, and the problem is that not only is it uncomfortable to feel negative emotion in and of itself, but then we are adding all these layers of judgment for ourselves for feeling bad, and we tell ourselves that we must be doing it wrong, or that we're making a mistake, or that if we feel negative emotion we have lost the spirit somehow. And I would just like to unequivocally say that none of that is true, and none of it is serving you. If you feel bad, if you feel negative emotion, it does not mean you are bad. Negative emotion is an experience that you came to Earth to have, and the better we get at having that experience, the more we emulate the divine beings that we worship. And I kind of want to turn the whole "feeling bad makes you bad," paradigm on its head and say, what if feeling negative emotion, and really acquiring, and honing the skill of feeling bad, could be some of the holiest work we do. And that we are following the path of our savior when we do.

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So, let me explain this a little bit. I believe that the ability to feel negative emotion is a skill, and I believe it is one that Jesus Christ has acquired. So to explain this I want to first remind you that when we experience any feeling, we can either allow the emotion, or we can resist the emotion. Now resisting takes a lot of different forms, and so I want to just quickly review some of the common forms of resistance that we have to feelings. And this is just a fancy word of trying not to feel an emotion. Resistant emotion or trying not to feel it. So, one kind of resistance is when we react to emotion by acting out like we feel the emotion, and we don't know what to do with all that energy, and vibration. An uncomfortable feeling inside of our body, and so we act out we react. We're fighting the feeling, and it's outwardly visible, right?

This is very common in toddlers, they feel frustrated, and then they react. They don't know what to do with all these vibrations that are being created in their body by their brain, and they react, right? They scream, they throw themselves on the ground, right? But it's not just toddlers that do this, I have been known to do this in my life, and it doesn't even happen with negative emotion. I told you about the time when I was really excited about something in my business that I ran through the house screaming, right? That isn't feeling excited, that is reacting to excitement. It's not wanting to feel all that vibrating energy inside my body, and so I react instead. So, if you yell, or slam a door, or scream, or run, you are reacting to the emotion, it's a form of resistance to the emotion you're feeling.

Another way that we resist emotion, is we avoid the emotion, or we try to numb the emotion through a distraction like food, or alcohol, or drugs, or social media, or pornography, or entertainment. We don't want to feel bad, and we attempt to distract our brain with a little dopamine hit from another source. It's all in this misguided attempt to feel better, and avoid the emotion. We don't want to feel anxious, or bored, or scared, or angry, and so we eat, or we scroll, or we distract ourselves on Netflix, right? Again, in those moments we aren't actually feeling our emotions, we are doing everything we can think of to not feel them.

Another form of resistance that I see a lot just looks like a lot of blame, or judgment. When we feel bad, our brain then tries to find the cause of feeling bad, and so it blames, or judges ourselves, or others as a way to stop feeling bad. And when we're resisting in this way, it looks a lot like telling ourselves that we shouldn't feel the way we do, or they shouldn't act that way. We try to talk ourselves out of the way we're feeling. We argue about it in our heads, and we kind of have a ping pong match in our head going round, and round, about why we're upset, and why we shouldn't be, or why they should be different. So, those are some of the most common ways that we resist feeling our emotions.

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Now, in contrast to that there is the skill of allowing our emotions, which means letting the emotions be inside of you, and allowing it to be there without wishing it away, or thinking it shouldn't be there, or needing to change. It without reacting to it, without avoiding it, without judging it, without blaming ourselves, or anyone else. It is just feeling the vibration inside your body, as a physical sensation. I recently heard Krista St. Germain compare it to like if you imagine your feelings as a river that's running downstream, resistance would look like damming up the water, right? Putting rocks, and logs in there, and trying to stop it from running. And imagine doing that with your emotions through resistance, and then that emotion just kind of pools, around you until it spills over. Now, allowing it looks like more like being a screen in the middle of the river, and just allowing that emotion to run through you, without stopping it, or changing it, or diverting it. Just letting the emotion run through your body. Now, if those are options, resisting or allowing, I now want you to think about Jesus Christ, and particularly I want you to think about him in the Garden of Gethsemane. His work as our Savior was to feel all the feelings that we have felt, to feel our sorrows, and our sicknesses, and our infirmities, our heartaches, our sins, our mistakes, all those regrets that we have about them, and the pain that they cause, right?

His work was to feel all of that, all of our pain, and suffering. His work was not to resist it. He needed to allow for the pain, and feel it all, so that he could sucker us. He couldn't resist it, and have it work. He didn't react to the pain. He didn't avoid it. He didn't resist it, and say that he shouldn't be feeling it. He didn't blame us, or his Father. He didn't argue with it, right? He allowed it all to be there. He felt the full weight of human suffering, and he had to feel all of it in order to make the Atonement effective. So, Stephen Robinson wrote about this, and he said, “In that infinite Gethsemane experience, the meridian of time, the center of eternity, he lived a billion, billion lifetimes of sin, pain, disease, and sorrow. God uses no magic wand to simply wave bad things into nonexistence. The since that he remits, he remits by making them his own and suffering them. The pain and heartaches that he relieves, he relieves by suffering them himself. These things can be shared and absorbed but the cannot be simply wished or waved away. They must be suffered.”


So, do you see resisting wouldn't have worked. All of those things that Christ felt, had to be felt, and born, and carried, by this one perfect being in order to work on our behalf. He had to have the experience of each negative emotion, and that work was the holiest work that has ever been done. And in fact, that experience was so intense that the scriptures record that he bled from every pore. He wasn't avoiding, or reacting, or resisting the emotion, he was feeling in the deepest sense of the word. Feeling so deeply that the pressure that caused him to bleed. As Malcolm Muggeridge so beautifully wrote, "Every vice was torn with anguish out of God's heart." And that is why I think Christ had to have the skill of being able to allow negative emotion. He had to be good at feeling bad. He had to be good at feeling all of his feelings. At processing them, and allowing them, and to do that, he had to have experience with all emotions, without resisting them, or he could not have performed the Atonement at all.

He wouldn't have had the capacity to do it. And I think this is part of the work that each of us came to Earth to do. To gain the skill of feeling, our feelings, especially our negative emotions. He didn't want us to come, and never feel bad, right? That would not be following him, and it would not prepare us to be more like him. He didn't want us to come, and only experience positive emotion. Our experience on Earth would have been wasted if that was the case, and that is why I say, what if we have it all backwards, and that in our quest to become holier, and in our efforts to follow Christ, what if the way is through negative emotion, not avoiding it.

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So, for example, let's say you struggle with anxiety. I know a lot of people who think I shouldn't have anxiety, this shouldn't be a problem in my life, right? If I just had a better perspective, if I could just think positively, I wouldn't be anxious, and if I could just do better in some way then I would have less anxiety. And we sort of think that having anxiety is a reflection on the amount of faith we have, or it means that we're doing it wrong in some way. A lot of us think we have created a problem that we shouldn't have, or that our brain is just the problem, but what if you came to learn how to feel anxious. How to feel stress, how to feel overwhelmed, how to suffer? Not to resist it, or wish it away. Not to avoid it, or react to it, but just to feel it in your body. What if your work involves allowing it to flow through you, so that you can have the experience of anxiety? What if it is just there to give you the skill of feeling anxious? What I am trying to offer you is the idea that we don't have to solve for our negative emotion, it isn't something that needs to be fixed or solved for.

Feelings are not problems, they are experiences. Experiences through which we gain skills, and perhaps the only real way to gain the skill of feeling, is by feeling. Which is a skill we are going to need if we are trying to follow Christ. Reyna Alburto wrote, "Learning to identify and value our emotions can help us use them constructively to become more like our savior Jesus Christ."

Okay, now all of our negative emotion of course is created by our human brain, right? Totally! That is true, that has not changed, right? We have thoughts, that create feelings, but that doesn't mean that we shouldn't be having them. It doesn't mean that we shouldn't be having negative emotion. Exercising your agency doesn't mean avoiding negative emotion from your life altogether, right? Negative emotion is necessary for your internal development. We came to feel bad, and to learn how to feel bad. Christ had to learn to feel bad enough, that he could feel bad enough for all of us. That is an amazing amount of tolerance for negative emotion! What if every experience with negative emotion in your life is there to build your ability, and your skill to feel bad, and to gain divine characteristics? Every prophet, every holy person who has ever lived, has experienced negative emotion. They have as Paul said, "Fought the great fight of affliction." And every experience we have with negative emotion, is a necessary part of our own learning, and growth.

All right so, how do we get better at feeling bad? First, I think you don't make negative emotion mean anything negative about you. You are not bad, because you feel bad, you feel bad because you're a human being, and that's what you came to learn to do. Second, I think the best "Q" that I can give you, and that I give myself repeatedly in these moments, is I tell myself feeling happens in my body, and not in my head. So, so many times when we think we're feeling our emotions, we are actually just resisting them. And it looks like this kind of spinning in our heads. We go back, and forth between our thoughts, trying to feel better, trying to talk ourselves into believing something else. Trying to tell ourselves not to believe our brain when it offers us a negative thought. And we get caught up in our own heads. This isn't feeling our feelings, this is just resisting the feeling. Feeling always happens in the body. You have to leave your head, and find the feeling in your body. Remember feelings are just chemical signals sent from the brain to the body. It's the way the brain communicates with the body. And so, feelings are felt in our body. You have to get out of your head, and into your body. When I find myself fighting shame, or anxiety, or fear, or insecurity, or whatever the feeling is, I tell myself, "Feelings happen in the body." And then I ask myself, "Where am I feeling this feeling in my body?"

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I find it there, I name it, I describe it. I get as close as I can to it mentally, and then I just breathe, and I let it be there. All the while what saying it, and describing it to myself, noticing the vibration, noticing the currents, noticing the heat, and the cold, and the physical reaction inside my body. And that's all there is to it. If you do that, if you allow the feeling in your body, it will last between 60 and 90 seconds. It just wants to be felt. The feeling wants to be acknowledged in your body, so that your brain knows you got the message. So, when you're feeling a negative emotion, get out of your head, and get into your body, and ask yourself where is it? What does it feel like? An experience it inside your body. Now, I want to end today by offering you one other thought, and I know at first this might seem sort of contradictory to everything that has gone before it. But I want you to stay with me, and kind of hold, and allow these two ideas to be in your mind at the same time.

So, while we are here to have the experience of feeling, and we can develop the skill of feeling in our bodies, those vibrations, and sensations associated with negative emotion, we also always have the capacity to choose another way. Now, we make this choice, not to avoid the experience of feeling bad, but to answer it. Meaning there is nothing wrong with feeling bad, right? It's just an experience that we want to get good at. But there are also other options, and we don't have to stay permanently entrenched in the negative thoughts offered to us by our brain. We are in charge. Your brain is powerful, and so is the adversary, but you are more powerful, and you have been given the capacity to choose the light. Believe in the good. Trust in the truth, and to redirect your mind. And after you have felt that feeling in your body, then you can redirect your mind. So, in a talk given a number of years ago at Brigham Young University, Jeffrey R. Holland said "Face your doubts, master your fears, cast not away therefore your confidence. Stay the course, and see the beauty of life unfold for you."

Notice that he didn't say, don't have doubts, and don't have fear. You're doing it wrong if you can't see the beauty of life unfold for you. He said to master it, to face the doubts, to turn your mind on purpose, to see the beauty of your life even amidst the doubt, and fears. So, many times we feel like we aren't supposed to feel bad, we aren't supposed to feel anxiety, or fear, disappointment, and discouragement, or shame, right? We take it as a sign that we did something wrong. But what if that is not the case. Moses had fear when God called him. All he had was self-doubt, and insecurity, and anxiety, right? He was like, "No! Not me." And he had a million reasons why not him. But then, he moved forward anyway, he decided to believe anyway. And he was not alone. The scriptures are full of examples of human people with human brains, that wrestled with their own doubts, and insecurities, and negative emotion, and chose to think that they could do hard things. And Christ was the greatest of all of them.

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So, we do this in our own lives with the thoughts we choose to believe, and put our energy, and attention on with the thoughts that we choose to keep believing. You get to believe in your capacity to change, and grow, and succeed. You get to believe in good things to come, and you have the ability to overcome negativity, and pessimism, and discouragement, as many times as your brain offers it to you. There's not a problem with it offering it. So, Elder Holland went on to say, "Fighting through darkness, and despair, and pleading for the light is what opened this dispensation. It is what keeps it going, and it is what will keep you going."

So as a spiritual being having a human experience, I believe that this means that you are going to feel insecure, and anxious, and scared, and lost, and hopeless, and disappointed, and heartbroken, and all the things. You are supposed to feel, all these things. And all of these things will give you experience, and are for your good. There are lessons in all of it, and none more important than learning to feel, and allow negative emotion in your life, without making it mean that all is lost, or that you are lost, or that you're doing it wrong, or that you just don't have the spirit, or enough faith to make it. You are supposed to feel all these things, and it doesn't mean you're doing it wrong, but also as a spiritual being having a human experience you are an agent that acts. You get to decide what you believe. You get to decide to believe that you are enough, that you are doing it right, that God loves you, that he's giving you endless capacity to change. That there is no such thing as failure.

And as you learn to master your own thoughts, and fight through the darkness, and despair, that is the work, the exact work, that you came to Earth to learn to get better at. Now, notice as Elder Holland says, "Fight through the darkness and despair." And I just love that he doesn't say fight the darkness, and despair, right? Like we aren't supposed to fight the emotions we aren't fighting that we have the emotions, or that our brain naturally offers thoughts that create them. We aren't fighting the experience. We are fighting through them. Like they get to be here. Those negative emotions get to be here, they are part of the experience. But we get to fight through them, we get to persist our way towards the light as we experience them. We continue to fight through seeking, and choosing the thoughts that produce faith, through the darkness, and despair.

And I think this is so critical to understand. We don't need to resist the experience we are having, and tell ourselves that we're bad, or unworthy for feeling bad, for having the experience of despair. We just get to learn how to feel those feelings, and then continue forward in faith, to choose other thoughts. We get to fight to think that it's working for us. We get to fight to think that we are enough. We get to fight to think that love is always an option. And fight to think that we were always worthy, and 100% likeable, and right on track. We get to fight to think that we are beloved, and that God approves of us. So, what I'm saying is, feel your feelings, they are there for your experience, and your learning.

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But don't believe your brain. Feel the feelings, and then choose. Choose to overcome your own brain. Not to feel better, or to avoid feeling bad, but to allow that higher, holier part of you to get it's say, right? To exercise your power to get the life you want. Despite all the pain, and discouragement, and despair, your brain wants to offer you, I want you to know that you get to choose faith even when it feels impossible, right? Without evidence. You get to choose to believe in the things your brain cannot see, but which in fact are real. In so many ways, the thoughts that create our negative emotions, are just part of the human experience. They are offered to us by our brain, and then exaggerated by the adversary.

It is not a problem that you have the thoughts. Christ's human brain offered him similar thoughts, and we worship him because he felt all the feelings, not because he didn't. He felt them all, and he stood his ground amidst the feelings. He continued to believe, and trust, and love, while feeling bad. He fought through the darkness, but he didn't try to avoid, or resist feeling that darkness, feeling the negative feelings. He prevailed, and overcame, while feeling every negative emotion we will ever feel. And those of us who choose to follow him, this is our work, this is how we follow him. He says, "Come follow me." Following means becoming better at feeling bad.

Stop telling ourselves that we're doing it wrong when we are just having a human experience that was designed to include suffering, and pain. And that just because our brain created it doesn't mean it shouldn't be there. And following him is recognizing that even then, even when we feel scared, and anxious, and discouraged, and despondent, and all the negative emotions that we will feel, that we can still choose what we will believe. And what we will continue to think about, and where we will put our focus.

We get to choose the way we think about ourselves, about our lives, about our capacity, about our destiny. But we aren't going to make that choice once and have it done. We aren't going to choose to think powerful thoughts about us, and our abilities, and be done, right? Like Moses had to choose it at the bush, and then he had to choose it in front of Pharaoh, and then he had to choose it at the Red Sea. And he had to choose it, and choose it, and choose it. We are going to have to choose it again, and again, and again, as we fight through the darkness. The darkness created by the fall, and by the instincts of our own human brains. And yes, by the adversary. All of those things are powerful. Your brain is powerful, but none of them are more powerful than you, and your ability to choose. 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 I've talked about and apply them in your life so that you can love your Earth-life experience. Sign up for a free coaching session at aprilpricecoaching.com This is where the real magic happens and your life starts to change forever as your coach. I'll show you that believing your life is 100% awesome is totally available to every one of us. The way things are is not the way things have to stay. And that my friends is 100% awesome!