Fearlessness is to Feel the Full Range of Human Emotion

Really what I want to do is just share little thoughts here, maybe an idea that you can carry through for the week. And the first thought that I'm going to share today is a thought and it's about what are we running away from? Okay, what are we all running away from? Now the things that we think we're running away from, we're trying to avoid in life. You know they take a million different shapes and forms. It could be a disaster in my job, it could be a difficult boss I'm dealing with, it could be a relationship breakdown, it could be poor health, it could be financial catastrophe, you name it right. There's a million of these things that we think we're trying to avoid in our life. And I want to kind of simplify it a little bit for us here because I think what we're all really running away from are our own feelings and our own emotions. All those catastrophes will come with an associated emotion, a sensation in our body. So we're running away from our feelings. We have a real preference and we should you know chase joy and chase what makes us feel good in life. But another aspect to our work here can be to look at what I'm trying not to feel. And here's the thing, here's where a profound change can take place with this. What if I started to, instead of run away from those feelings, seek them out proactively and go right into the middle of them, right into the heart of that tornado that I have not been dealing with. When we can do this, I think it's very different because typically you know there's this dynamic of I'm running through my life and I'm trying to stay away from these emotions and I hope that these feelings kind of don't catch up with me and I try to avoid them and run from them. But if we just stop for a moment and we just turn around and go no you know what I'm going to go right into these feelings. And by the way what I'm not talking about here is going out there making things worse for yourself, okay. I think that's simplistic and it involves kind of repressing your feelings really. This is not about repressing my preferences to feel well, feel good. What I'm talking about is something you can bring into your practice, that recurring memory that plagues you, that comes up and invades your life and it just comes out of nowhere when you're having a shower. And it's just this memory from when you were a teenager, okay. And it makes you feel ashamed and embarrassed. What if I was to go directly into that feeling? Now not so much in that moment itself necessarily, but maybe in your practice when you're alone later that day. To sit down, go directly into that feeling and invite it up. And there's deeper work we can do around that but we're actually coming out of our head and directly into the experience of that emotion in our body. Sometimes it can be good to have someone to facilitate you through that type of work. But in general we do a lot of that work by ourselves. It changes the whole dynamic of our lives. We're no longer now trying to run away from things that we find uncomfortable emotionally. Really what we're looking out for is yes those intrusive memories, but any trigger that we've had throughout the week. We now start to get very very interested in these triggers. It's like okay what was that anxiety there? Because in the moment let's say something comes up and you start to feel anxiety. You're in the moment trying to deal with life, right. So in our own practice we can say you know what that that moment of anxiety, can I go back into that moment to close my eyes and just be fully present with that emotion. And see what that emotion really wants to tell me. In this work we're really trying to slow down that moment. In the moment when we're dealing with it, it's all we're pushing through it. We're just trying to deal with things as they are. But in our practice we can just really fully feel that feeling. Proactively go into it. So this is an aspect of work which is a very very deep level. And I personally think it's very very transformative. But in general the the takeaway thing I want you to consider here is what would my life start to look like if I stopped running away from feelings and actually was very very open to all my feelings. Not just the the great ones, the positive ones that we all want. And rightly so. But some of those darker feelings. So it kind of leaves us, if we can take on that mentality, that that principle, we become a lot more fearless. We become a lot more open to the full range of human emotions that we're all capable of feeling. So maybe we'll talk about this more in upcoming videos. But this is an invitation to go deeper. And not to see these triggers as bad things. See them as opportunities to get curious about them. I'll leave it there for now guys. But just that's an idea I want you to sit with for now. And until we talk again, take care of yourself and be well.