Last week at a friend’s wedding I found myself literally crying with happiness to be eating a gluten free cupcake. It’s a rare occasion to not feel left out at events when you’re a coeliac.
Also I’d had a lot of champagne.
Everyone laughed at me, but I wasn’t ashamed of my tears, I thought it was hilarious.
Also, champagne.
Later that night I also had another huge crying fit where I cried about how no one ever asks me how my business is going, or anything about Project Self at all lately. It feels very isolating, since it’s my purpose and passion in life – Project Self is kinda like my baby. Imagine that you had a baby and then no one asked you anything about it? I don’t understand it, so I confided in a few friends and then cried a lot.
Though again, champagne.
Afterwards (well, maybe two days after, once the hangover had worn off and I’d eaten many more Burgerfuel chips than my stomach thought wise), I felt a whole heap lighter. Except I was probably heavier from all the chips. In fact, I wondered why it had ever bothered me. I find this is often the case after a meltdown, something gets shifted, and then you feel fine.
Without that meltdown, it probably would have evolved into a repetitive, angry/hurt thought process that would have plagued me for weeks.
These days I actually find crying quite an enjoyable thing in a weird way. It doesn’t usually happen that often (except recently),
and it always makes me feel better afterwards.
I used to hardly ever cry. I didn’t feel much of anything apart from numbness, and maybe a bit of anger or moodiness. I sometimes felt very very sad, but I rarely cried or expressed it to anyone.
I’ve had some pretty traumatic stuff happen in my life, and I mostly just bottled down the emotion unknowingly and felt kinda numb to it. Until I learnt mindfulness and I started to watch my emotions instead of bottling them. And as I practiced more and more, I realised that expressing my emotions just once can save me from days, weeks, months of mind-dwelling.
Because when we don’t express our emotions, they continue doing their thing beneath the surface and it whirls our mind into a tornado of overthinking, which creates far more drama than the initial emotion itself.
The way I see it, emotions are what cause all animals to take action to change things.
If we didn’t have any emotions, we’d all sit around doing nothing, not caring about anything. What would be the point of getting off our ass and changing our life if we felt neutral about everything?
On a basic level, our primary emotions have evolved to keep us safe from all the tigers.
Fear = run for it, anger = fight, loneliness = find a tribe.
So when we ignore them our body thinks that the message hasn’t been received. So it keeps sending the message. So we keep distracting and suppressing. And at some point we instead become numb. We’re still stressed, we’ve just normalised feeling that way.
This is how I used to feel. I felt kind of strong, like a tough nut who doesn’t get upset much (though I did flip out into anger pretty easily I think), but because I was mostly numb, I also didn’t feel much joy or elation either.
These days I frequently feel elated and joyful.
And I also feel waves of sadness and anger, and all sorts of other emotions that I’d never noticed before.
The difference is, I let the emotions come and I observe them with interest. I don’t resist, suppress or distract from them, and so they pass through me quickly, like clouds through the sky, stopping briefly to whisper an important message in my ear, and then sailing by. Except when I get in there and try and meddle with my overthinky mind. That’s when they stick around, which is what has been happening lately.
These days when I’m sad or crying, it doesn’t worry me too much; I know it will pass on once I’ve learnt the lesson I needed to learn.
Emotions are a very useful compass that help us work out what needs to change.
If they keep coming back, we’re probably resisting making the changes or taking the actions we know we need to take.
Emotions keep our lives on the right track, when we let them.
Like it depicts in that awesome mindfulness movie Inside Out, sadness is just as useful as happiness.
We wouldn’t appreciate the sun without the rain, nor the calm without the storm, nor the peace without the war.
Living a bloody good life is about observing our experience with curiosity and interest, the highs and the lows; the whole shemozzle.
