Each Spring we clear out our closets and open our windows to clean the air and refresh our homes. But did you know you can take this time to air out your emotional baggage and chuck the useless ideas and thoughts that aren’t serving you anymore? We talk about all this and more in today’s podcast on spring cleaning your emotional closet.
Episode Highlights:
01:14 In the same way that I would vacuum my bedroom and clean up the bathroom, I like to occasionally sort through my feelings and see what comes up.
01:45 Have you ever thought it’s an option to decide there are emotions you are going to face and let go?
02:04 For a long time in my life I thought all of my emotions were permanent.
02:45 Your emotions make up the ingredients that can create a life full of complex and delicious recipes or they can become tired, tasteless, and dreaded meals.
04:05 We sometimes assign a lot of meaning to passing emotions and then they become the moldy leftover container in the refrigerator of our thoughts and feelings.
05:01 Is there something I need to do to let this frozen emotion go?
05:06 There’s something about the energy of Spring that makes it easier to let things move and let them go.
05:36 Maybe being nervous is completely normal and natural.
06:15 Noticing how an emotion physically feels pulls us away from over-assigning meaning to a passing feeling.
06:35 Naming my feelings sometimes amps me up and makes me more upset than if I simply experience them as sensations. They become overthought and inflated.
06:56 Some emotions that arise in me are feelings from days or weeks ago or even years ago that I just never finished processing, and once I feel them, they disappear.
07:20 You’re allowed to have feelings about your feelings.
08:20 Adding in extra feelings of judgment about old feelings can result in creating negative beliefs about ourselves and how we handle the world.
09:03 What does my body want to do about this feeling and can I give it an outlet to express itself?
10:20 I want to use up and move through emotions so they aren’t just lurking and waiting for me all the time. I want them to actually move on so I can move on, too.
10:25 We have an ability to move through and beyond emotional clutter, and using our physical bodies to move through and beyond stagnant emotions is liberating.
10:44 Looking at our emotions takes bravery, and we don’t have to like it.
11:00 Getting the message from an emotion doesn’t have to be a profound insight about your life, it can be as simple as noticing your body wants to get up and walk around, or that you want to cry, and that’s OK.
11:40 Because my feelings are in my body, I can let my body handle them with me instead of trying to make my feelings into abstract meaning generators.
13:00 This practice helps me realize there’s nothing wrong with me for having suppressed or forgotten feelings, and that they can be felt and managed even if it’s been a lifetime.
14:28 There’s something that feels good and comforting about allowing my grief to move through my eyes as tears.
15:36 At the end of feeling any huge emotion there is often pleasant exhaustion and emptiness.
16:30 Ask, “What does my body want to do about this?” wh
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Thanks for listening!
