Have you ever found yourself feeling flooded by emotions? To me, it feels like a giant wave crashing over me, sometimes without any sort of notice whatsoever. I'll be going about my day when all of a sudden, I just start to feel different. It's confusing because I'm starting to really question my role in this experience. For example, I am sitting at a coffee shop. It's 5:18 PM on a Friday afternoon, and I was just hit with one of these waves. I tried to write, and couldn't. I tried to pull clips for our podcast, and I couldn't. I felt like I couldn't do anything, and all I wanted to do was cry. I felt frustrated that I couldn't do what I wanted to do, and then dark thoughts started escalating in my mind. I noticed the sabotaging thoughts arising, like "I hate this." and "What even is the purpose?" I even noticed myself wanting to continue making things worse. Weird, right?
In the past, I probably would've continued to perpetuate these thoughts by getting mad and annoyed. And trust me, I really wanted to do that, but I decided to just take out a napkin and start writing whatever came to my mind.
As I'm writing this, I'm starting to feel that resistance come up again. It's like this feeling of frustration that I don't know what to write. It's so confusing. I feel like I've felt this feeling for much of my life. I used to experience so much anxiety around work and school. I think it started when I was younger. I specifically remember being in high school and feeling really anxious around my reading assignments because I just didn't know how to keep up. There were a lot of things happening in my life at this point, and I didn't know how to handle my emotions, so I think it was hard for me to focus. At least, that's what my 30-year-old mind is telling me now because the reality of it is, I have no idea what actually unfolded. That's the crazy thing about memory and hindsight - we never really know what actually happened... and we never really know what's happening? I put a question mark because I'm thinking this one through.
It's hard to know what's happening when I am so caught up in my damn mind, reacting, taking my thoughts as serious. It's harder when that wave of emotion arises, but still, in that instance, I know that I am still getting in the way of reality unfolding as it's meant to. So when I say we never really know what's happening, I guess I mean that we never really know how the current experience that we are experiencing will impact our life, whether that's in the next five minutes or in a year. It's the whole thing of if your grandparents' lives didn't unfold exactly as they did, then you wouldn't be here - that kind of thing.
So, going back to feeling frustrated and annoyed, being on the brink of sabotaging earlier, I am really seeing the importance of allowing the wave of our emotions to crash as hard as they need to, and even when we feel really scared because we feel like we can't handle the wave, we can. We always know how to swim.
It's crazy how much we resist in life. I never really knew what this meant, but now I have a deeper understanding of how I've essentially resisted nearly everything throughout my life. I'm trying to think of the best way to explain this. I think it's like, life unfolds, right? All this stuff happens, like giant tidal waves of emotions flooding our experience. And when this happens, we have two choices. We can let the wave crash, trusting in our ability to ride the wave, or we can sit there, throw our surfboard in the air, and panic that we are scared of the wave. In this scenario, it's clear that it is of no practical use to panic, and the logical thing to do is to get up on your board and ride the wave. But when it comes to life unfolding, we tend to do the opposite. When that giant wave of anger comes over us, we resist it, and it is this resistance that feeds the feelings, making them grow bigger and bigger, and slowly, we drown. We drown in the anger, we drown in the sadness, we drown in the pain.
Until we realize, that there is another option to take. And even when we already feel like we are drowning, we can still find the space for the insight to find its way back in, reminding us that there is another way <3.
Man, life is wild. Emotions are wild. This is so insane. I don't think any of us will ever find an answer, but what I do know is that allowing myself to feel always helps me find my way back home. Allowing myself to feel whatever is arising, no matter how big those waves are, I will always find my way back home.
If you are interested in conversation on our thoughts, emotions, and the intricacies of this human experience, I think you will enjoy podcast “Life Unpotted”