Distractions not working for you?

You've probably heard the saying, "You have to feel it to heal it." After years of struggling to connect with and understand my authentic feelings, I get the value of this wisdom. What a difference it makes in our lives when we can embrace our emotions, honor what's true for us in the moment, heal, and grow on a soul level.

One of the ways we learn to avoid our feelings is by keeping ourselves busy all the time because we're too afraid to feel them. The technical term for this is distracting. Staying overly busy is one form of distracting. We cover several others in my powerful After A Breakup HELP program.

This is also a part of our social conditioning—to be productive in this capitalistic society we live in. Value is placed on how much we produce, how much money we make, and how much we possess. We over-identify with what we do for a living, rather than attending to our genuine character.

In general, we aren't taught about the value of tending to our emotions and our inner world. Many of us have no idea how valuable things like emptiness, presence, and stillness are. This leaves us feeling disconnected from ourselves and disconnected from the rest of life.

Let's all remember to give ourselves the quiet, alone time we need to just sit with ourselves, witness, and embrace what feelings arise. Ignoring and resisting them just adds to our sense of stress, chaos, and discomfort inside. Yet when we honor our deepest truth, we find grounding and a sense of center, and we come home to our deepest integrity.

Being with our emotions may be uncomfortable at first, but it gets easier with practice. In my experience, we come to cherish the quiet, still times we enjoy, and the way the quality of our relationships and our life calms down and deepens as a result.