Being Brave Challenge: Expression

Here’s a story and then your Being Brave Challenge for this coming week.

How do you feel about…FEELING?

• Do you honor your emotions? 
• Or do you squash your feelings down, deep inside?
• Do you carve out time to just be, sitting quietly and journaling?
• Or do you rush through life, never taking time to yourself?

For 3 decades of life, I was an overly anxious person. From ages 17 to 22, I was on depression and anxiety meds, and continued to struggle with the ups and downs after quitting them. My emotions were always stuffed down and life was filled with a busy social life or numbing out with alcohol or tv.

Up until age 31, if you asked me about sitting quietly or reflecting on my emotions, I would have laughed in your face. Sure, learning to meditate was intriguing, but it was much too terrifying to do any internal reflection. Memories were too painful, there was no forgiving myself for my past mistakes, and I was not okay being in a quiet room with only my thoughts. 

Scariest of all was seeing the truth about my current situation, which deep-down I knew but couldn’t admit. 

Can you guess what that truth was?

Misery is company

Despite not meditating or having any sense of self-awareness, at the age of 30, that truth came to me anyway. 

One night, while lying in bed, a vision formed in my head. It was of my heart tied up in knots. In that moment, I realized how miserable I truly was. Where I lived, my relationship, my career, myself in general – I disliked all of it.

Suddenly, the emotional truth wasn’t so scary anymore. What became more terrifying was imagining what my life would be if I stayed put. 

Continuous misery? No way. 

I wanted more for myself, even if that meant uprooting everything.

“I’m not crying, I swear”

Fast forward several months, after leaving the 7-year relationship I’d been in, started making plans to move to Colorado, and was finally taking control of my life. 

Well, sort of.

Reflecting on emotions, giving myself time to grieve, and heal? That wasn’t part of it. I kept squashing it all down and staying as busy as I could.

You won’t be surprised to hear that around this time, my eyes began filling up with tears over the dumbest things. Somebody could even tell a funny story, and I would still tear up. 

My coworker once told me that I “reminded him of his sister because she cried all the time, too.” 

How embarrassing.

Lucky for me and my emotional well-being, my neighbor offered to teach me how to meditate, altering my entire world thereafter.

That life-changing evening, she taught me a simple Grounding Meditation. 

If we were to put my anxiety level on a scale from 1-10 (10 being the worst), it had been at a constant level of 8 for so many years. After doing that meditation, my anxiety went down to 3/10 immediately and lasted well into the next afternoon.

I thought, “If this is how I can feel, I’m doing meditation every day!” And so began my healing journey. 

Facing your fears

By sitting quietly, or working through guided meditations, I finally started confronting my past. This process helps you to forgive yourself for mistakes and understand who you really are inside. Going to therapy helped me immensely, too. 

Not gonna lie – it was terrifying at first. But it got easier and easier with time. The overflowing tears stopped after a while, anxiety and depression were greatly reduced, and life started to feel lighter. 

Sure, it isn’t easy working through the piles of emotions from the past. But the more you do it, the freer and happier you’ll feel. Life starts to be less overwhelming, and love comes easier – for yourself and others. 

This leads us to today’s being brave challenge: Express an emotion.

The Being Brave Challenge – Week 3

Here’s the idea behind expressing an emotion. Pick an experience from your past or your present life (make it an easy to moderate emotion; don’t pick a traumatic one). 

Now choose one of these methods to let out your feelings:

Method 1: Journaling

Using pen and paper, write down how you felt in the moment and how you feel now. Use descriptive words. You can write in first person (I did this, I felt this) or, if that’s too hard, you can write in third person (she did this, she felt this).

Method 2: Recording

Instead of journaling with a pen, record video or audio about your feelings.

Method 3: Scribbling

Using crayons and paper, scribble how you feel. Especially for anger emotions, nothing can be more satisfying than using black, red, and purple to bring out your rage. Visualize each feeling with color. 

Method 4: Quiet Reflecting

Sitting quietly at home or in nature, reflect on how you feel, and let the emotion wash through you. This can be hard, even for me, because you sometimes want to control the emotion. Try to let it come up, cry or scream it out, and then let go.

Method 5: Art Journaling Workshop

If you’re local to Eagle County, come to the Emotional Art Journaling workshop on September 29! Here you’ll get to express your emotions on paper, but also have prompts to give you next steps/more clarity on your path forward. More details below in the events section of this email.

As always, send me your stories about the challenge and how it went!

Contact me here.