One of the beautiful things about being an adult is that we can (generally) do what we want, when we want to. We can have that larger-than-we-should snack and completely ruin our supper. We can not show up at the company Christmas dinner because we think it'll be too boring. We can even turn on Netflix and watch until our eyes are red with exhaustion.
As you can imagine, there are downfalls to this. We get so caught up in our “freedoms” that we don’t even realize that we’re actually harming ourselves in the process, and we become complacent. We start to live out that old saying - The devil you know is better than the devil you don’t.
As we discussed last week, this is one of the important reasons to stop. Stopping gives us the chance to breathe, rest, and take stock of what is happening in our lives and the emotions that are present. In other words, stopping allows us to start to notice.
Let me give you an example; a few years ago, my wife and I decided to do Lent for the first time. For those of you who aren’t aware, Lent is the 40(ish) days that lead up to Easter. It’s a time when many will give something up that they value or add something to their daily lives to focus their attention on the Easter season.
In my infinite wisdom, I decided that I was going to give up gluten for Lent. *Cue the audible gasp!* Now, I don't know about you, but it was a pretty big (and some might say...stupid) decision. I mean, I don't want to get up on my soapbox here, but gluten is in all of my favourite foods AND drinks! To be honest, gluten may be proof that there is a Creator that loves us very deeply…
Anyways…I gave up gluten for 40 days, and wouldn’t you know it, after the first week - I started to feel a little bit better. Fast forward a few weeks, and I felt like a completely different person. Turns out, I have a gluten intolerance, and I didn’t even realize how uncomfortable I felt.
The moral of my story here is not that gluten is evil (as some may surmise) but rather that I had lived with these uncomfortable feelings for so long that it became my new normal. I was so used to the discomfort and pain that I regularly experienced that I didn't even realize it was a problem.
So first, we stop. Then we notice. We notice what is happening within us (like the gluten), and we can start noticing what’s happening around us (like a pandemic, perhaps?).
I remember the first time my wife saw the mountains. We were in Alberta, driving towards Jasper after landing in Edmonton, and the closer we got, the larger those mountains got, the more excited my wife was. We stopped at one of the lookouts, got out, took pictures with our phones, and then just stared. After a while of silence, my wife said, “Doesn’t it make you feel so insignificant?”
We are but little pieces in a larger puzzle. We are ants in a world of giants. There are so many things that are happening around us that are out of our control (which makes the things we can control that much more important at times). And there is something beautiful about that.
There are some things that we can control, and there are many things that we can not. We’re simply not that powerful (and let’s be real honest here…that’s probably a good thing!). It reminds me of a quote from one of my favourite books, Man's Search For Meaning:
“When we are no longer able to change a situation, we are challenged to change ourselves.” ~Viktor Frankl
I can already hear you groaning over here; Ugh, Jason! Why do I always have to be the person who does all the work? Why do I have to do the hard work of introspection? This is hard shit!
Yeah, I feel that with every ounce of my body. I have the same thoughts often. So, let me just tell you - You don’t have to do the work. You don’t have to be the person who does all the work…AND there are benefits:
It's healthier physically/intellectually/emotionally/spiritually. Remember our conversation about the link between stuffing our emotions and things like depression, heart disease, anxiety, digestive problems, etc.? (Read it here) Or maybe you'll recall the conversation we had about not stopping?
You are a better problem solver. When our stresses and anxieties build up, we are less able to make good decisions, especially if those stresses send us into our fight-or-flight responses.
It's contagious. Believe it or not, you have a sphere of influence around you. When we start to change our approach to those external (and internal) situations, the folks around us notice, and it has an impact on them. It's like priming a water pump. When we pour a little water on it and start pumping, more comes out.
There are more reasons than this, but let me say this - when we loosen our grip on things that we are clinging to, we become more able to notice what needs healing.
Feel
So first, we stop. Then we notice. Only then can we start to feel so that we can heal.
We previously talked about stuffing our emotions, and we learned that the only way to heal is to feel. We can't go around, over, beside, or under those feelings. The only way to process and heal is to go through. For this, we need to learn how to sit with our feelings and thoughts.
Whenever I talk with my grief coaching clients about this idea of sitting with our feelings, I always get the question, “Sooooo….how do I do that?” Imagine with me for a moment back to your youth when you took swimming lessons for the first time. If you’re like most, you didn’t start by jumping into the deep end without a floatie or any life preserver. You likely started on a little table in the water, in the shallow end. There you got used to the water and learned a healthy fear of it. You learned the dangers of it, and you learned how to blow bubbles 😎. Other than the bubbles, what's one of the first things they teach you? How to float. Your teacher put their hands under the small of your back to keep your hips up, and boom, you were floating!
The same is with sitting with our emotions. Before we jump right into the deep end, we want to start smaller. We want to start on the table in the shallow end and then learn how to float. Floating, in this case, are those tools that will help breathe new life into you when you start getting tired or feel like your body is getting heavy. It’s those things like gratitude lists, physical exercise, meditation, comedy sketches, (dare I say) journaling, brain dumps, thoughts of happy places, or mantras. Basically, what are those things that allow you to return to your baseline so that when things get difficult or too hard, you can take a moment and float to the surface?
But we don’t start in the deep end. We start in the shallow waters because if we haven’t quite figured out how to float yet, and it feels like we’re going under, we can stand up. Whether that’s on the little table in the shallow end or maybe we’re “big” enough to stand in the shallow end unassisted. Once we figure out how to float, then we can start to realize that floating in the shallow end looks very similar to floating in the deep end. So we begin our journey into those deep waters. The waters that hold the really tough and difficult moments and thoughts, where the true healing and freedom are unlocked.
Act
Years ago, I talked to my spiritual advisor about the anxiety I was experiencing, and she asked me, “What’s your anxiety inviting you to consider?”
Said differently - what is that emotion asking you to do?
First, we stop. Then we notice. Then we feel. And then it’s time to put those feelings/reflections/invitations back into action. It’s a gift to stop, and it’s necessary, AND we continue to move forward.
I spoke at an event recently and was talking about this idea of Notice/Feel/Act, and on stage, I asked a couple of questions:
What is the invitation of the emotion that you’re feeling?
What is the gift that emotion is giving you?
What are those emotions inviting you into?
When I got off the stage, a (new) friend of mine said that the question that flowed through his mind was:
What are these emotions inviting us to become?
I love that.
Next week we're going to wrap up this series on How Can We Process A Pandemic? If you missed Part One, you can find it here. Part Two, you can find here. Next week we're going to finish with how community can help us process ALL THE THINGS! Until then, life is brutal; life is beautiful. We're in this together.