Episode 50 - Pain vs Suffering
Episode 50 - Pain vs Suffering
Welcome to the Seasons of Joy Podcast.
This is episode 50 entitled Pain vs. Suffering.
Year ago, my family and I were on a backpacking trip.
As I have mentioned before, my husband and I have 3 sons and 2 daughters.
On this particular trip, my older 4 children were with us and my youngest daughter was staying with my parents because she was too little to come with us.
My husband and I, and my two older boys carried most of the gear while the younger two, my 8 year old daughter and 5 year old boy, had small packs with mostly just their clothes in them.
We had a fun trip camping, hiking, and fishing.
When it was time to leave, we packed our bags and began hiking.
We hadn’t gone very far and my 8 year old daughter started complaining about how heavy her backpack was.
She kept stopping to rest.
We were feeling frustrated and it seemed weird because, like I mentioned in the beginning, the only thing she would have in her back was her clothes.
After this went on for a little while, we stopped and took her pack from her.
We couldn’t believe how heavy it was.
I remember unzipping the pack and inside was a bunch of rocks.
No wonder it was so heavy.
Asking her why she was carrying all these rocks, she said she wanted to take them home because they were pretty.
Needless to say, we left the rocks behind.
Sometimes we do this with our emotions.
We resist our emotions by shoving them in our backpack.
Our pack becomes heavier and heavier because we don’t deal with or process the emotions.
We just carry our emotional rocks around and suffer.
Reacting to emotion and compounding it by freaking out.
Pushing against an emotion.
Dramatizing it.
Creating suffering.
The truth is, suffering is totally optional.
Pain is part of being human but suffering doesn’t have to be.
When we can learn to not be afraid of our emotions and actually embrace them, we can grow and thrive.
We can become emotionally mature and resilient.
We become the creator of our earthly experience instead of the victim of our circumstances.
As members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, we believe that we came to earth to experience opposition in all things.
Negative and positive emotions are part of the plan.
The contrast of life makes joy possible.
Sad makes happy exist.
Hate makes love exist.
Without the negative emotions we wouldn’t know the positive emotions.
Abundance feels so amazing because we know what scarcity feels like.
Negative emotion lets us know what we don’t want, and when we know what we don’t want, then we more easily can find out what we do want.
As humans we experience 50% negative emotion.
This is normal.
But, just like my daughter carrying that heavy backpack of rocks, not processing our emotions fills our packs and weighs us down, limiting our progress.
We have a false belief that we shouldn’t experience negative emotions and if we do we are doing life wrong.
We then make it so much harder than it needs to be.
The better we get at processing negative emotion, the more space we create in our emotional backpack for positive emotion.
Creating more freedom for ourselves.
Negative emotion won’t hurt us.
It is what makes positive emotion even possible.
An emotion or feeling is a vibration in our bodies.
Even the worst emotion you can think of will not be that awful physically.
We can handle it.
I want you to imagine that I could inject an emotion into you.
I would tell you that I was going to inject grief into and it would be vibrating in your body for 60 seconds.
You may feel a tightness and a heaviness in your chest but you would be able to handle it.
It wouldn’t feel great but it also wouldn’t be the end of the world.
I have come to believe that the skill of processing our emotions is one of the most important skills we can learn.
It can become your superpower.
Once you are good at it, it can completely change your relationship with yourself, with others and with God.
This is because you won’t react to your emotions.
You won’t resist your emotions.
You won’t buffer away from your emotions with overindulgent behaviors that won’t serve you in the long run like overeating, pornography, or overspending.
You will be a compassionate observer understanding that all emotions are normal and natural.
Shoving your emotions in your backpack prevents you from progressing, evolving, and becoming.
Before I learned the skill of processing my emotions, I was afraid of them.
I believed that if I allowed myself to feel them then I would feel out of control.
I thought that being emotionally mature meant not feeling.
Falsely believing I need to put my big girl panties on and ignore them.
Doing all I could to avoid the discomfort.
But lugging around my emotional rocks only created suffering.
There are two skills of emotional maturity I would like to share with you today that will help you move away from emotional suffering.
The first skill is being willing and allowing all emotion.
This means embracing the uncomfortable and eliminating the behaviors that you use to avoid feeling an emotion.
Also, understanding that you don’t need to escape your emotions.
You can handle any emotion with courage because they won’t hurt you.
Now it is important to also understand that allowing is not reacting and feeling is not displaying.
One of the emotions that I have learned to allow is anxiety.
I know what it feels like for me in my body.
It is a tightness and a heaviness in my chest.
My heartbeat quickens.
My mind races.
It is a dark blue mass and it doesn’t move.
I observe myself feeling this emotion and I am open to it because I know it won’t hurt me.
This is what anxiety feels like to me.
The worst thing that is going to happen in that moment is that I am going to feel the vibration and discomfort of anxiety.
I don’t react to it.
I don’t resist or fight it.
I don’t do anything with it.
I just watch and wait for it to move through me while reminding myself I am feeling anxious because of sentences in my brain.
For me, the anxiety softens in about 90 seconds.
It doesn’t totally go away but processing it allows me to take action and move forward.
And as time goes by, the anxiety dissipates.
Practicing the skill of being willing and allowing all emotion has empowered me to set down my emotional rocks of suffering and to create space for the emotions I want more of which leads me to the second skill.
Creating wanted and needed emotion.
This is done by deliberate thought.
Intentionally creating the emotion that fuels desired action and this in turn creates momentum.
This takes practice, believing, and commitment.
I had a coach explain it this way.
Imagine a platter of emotions–all the emotions.
Which ones do you want to choose?
What are you currently choosing?
Is it time to choose something different?
Emotions drive every action we take.
Think about this like a car.
Good fuel makes the car run well.
No fuel stops the car.
I remember once I accidently put diesel fuel in our car that required unleaded.
It was not good.
We had to drain the tank because it would have ruined the engine.
This is the same with us.
We need the proper fuel to get us where we want to go.
To grow and become the person we want to be.
To put good into the world.
To connect with ourselves, with others, and with God.
So where do we get fuel?
Think about this.
Most of us do it very haphazardly.
We wait and see what comes along.
We wait for inspiration, motivation, and excitement to come upon us before we get to work.
With our cars, we go and get fuel.
We are even willing to pay for it.
We make sure it is high quality and we have plenty of it.
We need to take the same responsibility for the emotional fuel we use for our lives.
It is a choice and suffering is optional.
When you learn how to feel emotions as a skill, then you can use them as tools to create
whatever it is you want in your life.
The way we learn to feel is by calling on the thoughts we believe that create these emotions.
I invite you to consider a result in your life that you love.
What emotion created that?
Think of it as currency that you can use towards getting what you want and need.
1. What does this emotion feel like?
2. What do I need to think?
3. How can I commit to feeling this way today?
4. How will I act when I feel this way?
5. How can I get back on track if I notice I am not using/generating this emotion?
Make a plan and then practice.
As I have been working on my coaching business, I have leaned into the uncomfortable.
The technology, the marketing, and the articulating have not come easy to me.
In the beginning there was a lot of doubt, insecurity, and fear.
But I needed to change my emotional fuel to curiosity, commitment, and love.
Practicing thoughts that created this fuel.
Thoughts like:
This is going to be fun to see how it all works out.
I am not sure how but it is going to be fun to figure it out.
I love this work and I believe it can make a difference so let’s do this.
It's going to be worth it.
I’ve got this.
I can do hard things.
It’s going to be amazing.
With God, anything is possible.
Now does it mean I never feel doubt, insecurity, or fear?
No.
I still do but I don’t live there.
I acknowledge and allow those emotions but I don't fill my tank with them.
I invite you to look at the emotional fuel you are using for your earthly journey.
Is it time to choose better fuel?
Going back to my original metaphor of the rocks in the backpack.
Sometimes, we keep these emotional rocks in our pack because we are afraid to pull them out.
We leave them in our packs because it feels safer but then we suffer.
If you feel weighed down but your emotional rocks, I invite you to unzip your backpack and start pulling them out one by one.
Hold them.
Acknowledge them.
Allow them and then set them down.
Here is the Process Emotions N.O.W. pdf to help you walk through the process along your way to creating more of what you want in your life.
Thank you for listening and have a joyful week.
Click on the link below to learn more about Seasons Coaching and my Seasons of Joy Community Facebook Group.
To contact me about speaking to your group or business, email me at jill@seasons-coaching.com.
