Process your pain to experience more joy.
Join me as I share my thoughts on mind-body techniques that help us process our thoughts and feelings. If you’d prefer to listen, below is an audio-recording just for you.
Photo by Miguel Chalmers
Our society has the tendency to encourage us to shove down our feelings. We prefer to disregard, ignore, and disassociate from them. We numb our pain with alcohol, food, sex, work, or shopping. When we operate in this manner, we also skip out on feeling joy. We all want to experience more happiness in our lives more often, right? So, how do we shift away from this negative behavior?
Let’s start here.
I believe we avoid the pain we’re feeling because we don’t have the tools available to face what ails us. I know this firsthand. In the past, I used alcohol to relax after a stressful day. I stuffed my face with unhealthy food when I felt shame or guilt for something I had done or said. While going through infertility, I intentionally kept myself distracted with work to avoid my despair.
I’m sure you can relate in your own way.
It wasn’t until I started practicing mindfulness that I reconnected with my emotions. This allowed me to finally be able to identify how I was feeling and what I was thinking.
Here are four tools I found the most helpful and why:
Yoga invites us to tune in, to pay attention to the subtle sensations or cues from our body. When we practice regularly, we start to notice how our external world influences our mind, body, and heart.
Meditation encourages us to get still and observe what arises within us. When we listen to what bubbles up and get curious about what is there, we’re better able to choose how we move forward.
Self-reflection or journaling allows us to get curious about, and process what and how we feel about the events in our lives. It also offers us an opportunity to choose what we do next.
Time spent outside solo or with friends helps create space between the events of our lives and how we’re feeling. Doing so allows us to gain some much-needed clarity.
Other tools you might use are running, walking, hiking, cycling, dancing, cooking, talk therapy, gardening, or something else completely different. Next, I invite you to identify what tools you use to process your thoughts and feelings. Knowing them will help you deploy them the next time you’re facing an obstacle.
Now, ask yourself this question:
How often do you tune into your emotions?
If never, ask yourself why? Get to the root cause for avoiding the pain and ultimately joy in your life.
If occasionally, how might you incorporate opportunities for self-reflection on a more regular basis?
If often, keep it up!
Bringing awareness to your thoughts and feelings will help you consciously choose how you interact with your internal and external worlds moving forward. In the end, you’ll be able to process your pain and embrace your joy. All good things.
If you have unresolved trauma or you’re really good at squirreling away your pain out of fear of what you’ll discover, check out my book Love Thyself, First + Always. It might be exactly what you need to process the unwanted feelings you’re hiding from, accept yourself, and feel more joy. Learn more here.
Take good care of yourself,
~Michelle