I have been learning to see every emotion as a message about where I am as a small self in
relationship to my higher self. Basically, that the worse I feel, the more distant what I am
thinking is from what is actually true. So if I am feeling despair and I check in with my thoughts,
and I notice that I am thinking about the futility of my life/efforts, or that I am saying something
negative about myself or another person, or the state of the world, I can thank the emotion for
pointing me to the fact that my thoughts are out of alignment with what I need to be thinking if
I want to walk toward what I want for myself and for my world.
DNRS really got me in touch with learning to be the curious observer of myself, which is quite
possibly the best gift I have ever been given. It is certainly right up there. Through my
observation, I have noticed a disconnect, a non-allowance, if you will, of various emotional
states that I have deemed ‘negative’, rather than a validation of self and choice to learn. I am a
firm believer in the idea that everything is always happening FOR us, and nothing ever happens
TO us. It is a perspective shift that has been instrumental in getting me out of my lifelong victim
mindset and moving me into looking for the lesson in every life occurrence rather than shaking
my fist at some imaginary puppeteer pulling strings to mess with me. It has also given me my
own power back and allowed me to forgive everyone around me for not being who I wish they
were. If I really allow this to be true, that everything is happening FOR me, then every emotion
that I feel can be a vital little sign to myself, rather than something negative that I need to fight
against. It takes me from a place of pushing against my emotions to a place of embracing them
as signposts. Yes, at the beginning of our brain retraining journeys, we are often swimming in a
constant state of ‘negative’ emotion, but we are also swimming in constant POPs and thoughts
that are out of alignment with what our inner being/higher self knows to be true, so we are just
continuously on a cycle of thought-emotion that keeps us stuck. In these beginning times, it’s
important to simply and continuously move ourselves away from the thoughts that are creating
these emotional states, because these thoughts-states are what have created dysregulation
and imbalance and (eventual) disease (dis-ease) within the body. As I moved deeper into my
DNRS practice, as my ITs fell away, one by one, I found that immediately redirecting away from
the emotions as they arose wasn’t enough. Now that my body was in a state of more calm and
balance, I felt a call to do a couple things. First, to validate each emotion when it arose, a quick
step prior to redirecting my focus to a new thought. Even simply placing a hand over my heart
and saying to myself/my limbic system ‘of course you feel X right now, anyone would feel that
way’, before choosing a new point of focus that would shift my emotional state, seemed to
resolve persistent POPs that I’d had trouble moving before. Secondly, I began to quickly find the
thought that was triggering the emotional state, so that I could rewrite it in the moment. This
isn’t a rabbit-hole kind of chasing of a thought, but rather a quick check in ‘What would I need
to be believing or thinking in this moment in order to be feeling X?’. This practice led me to the
discovery of many pesky core beliefs that I have been able to slowly start to work with and
shift, having seen them. It also created a relationship with ‘negative’ emotion that I did not
have previously, because I’d spent my whole life viscerally avoiding these emotions (to the
extent of drinking to blackout in order to avoid them for a chunk of my 20s, and using
food/sugar/other substances as Band-Aids after giving up alcohol). If the emotion is happening
FOR me, then I can have a working relationship with it. And this is a beautiful thing.
As I write this, I’ve just finished a book that I’ve just finished a book that triggered a primal
rage-joy that I hadn’t experienced in some time. As I was mid-final-battle, in the last 50 pages, I
had to put the book down to go to yoga and it was a heavy metal beats class, which is
essentially a very intense power flow to heavy metal music at my studio, and I got to physically
channel my rage, and it was literal perfection. It really got me thinking, how sometimes, in this
journey of finding calm and center, I forget what it is to be human and how important it is to
embrace all of the aspects of myself, rage included. To befriend and work with these emotions.
What a delicious step up the ladder from despair rage can be, and how useful a blood curdling
screech into the abyss is, if coupled with motion to propel me further into my life/dreams. To
rage against the machine inside of myself, the core beliefs that keep me small when I
intellectually understand that anything is possible, and the only things that truly hold me back
have been systematically bred into my psyche, is truly delicious and useful. So incredibly useful.
This is one of those places where my intellectual understanding is separate from my felt
experience of reality, because I capitol K know that I create my own reality and that anything is
possible, but I don’t live out my passions because of all of these messages that I’ve internalized
about what is possible from society/parenting etc, and so what I know can just look like
something I am giving lip service to because I’m not living it.
For example, if we asked ourselves, ‘what would I do if I could do anything?’, and we are not
living out our answer, that’s a disconnect. And my god, does that disconnect incite rage within
me. So today, I am grateful for anger, for its ability to propel me forward and to see things that I
need to change. To see the ways that I am holding myself back from my dreams because of my
beliefs and the fears those beliefs create. I am grateful for despair, for showing me that what I
am thinking is not Truth, and that I am out of alignment and need to choose a new thought. I
am grateful for fear, because even though I KNOW fear to be the ultimate liar, it shows me that
I am thinking thoughts that are making me small and keeping me from what is possible. And it
truly points me toward beliefs that I am holding about myself or my health or reality that I need
to shift. I am grateful for the opportunity to continue to learn how to balance and embrace all
bits of my human experience, rather than just the ‘acceptable’ ones, and for the ever-present
consciousness shifting ability of fiction to get me in touch with parts of myself that are still in
chains.
I channeled this beautiful feeling of rage into excitement and used that energy to write this blog
post. And yes, in the beginning of my DNRS journey, when I was constantly stuck in a state of
fight/flight/freeze/fawn, the channeling of and reveling in, and eventual befriending of, the
feeling of rage wasn’t something I had the capacity for, so my job was to continuously reach for
a state of calm or peace or joy or connection through rounds. But with my current capacity, I
am listening to my body’s needs and learning to befriend and work with all of what comes up in
myself and my life. And that’s a beautiful thing.