Finding a way out of Hopelessness

Hello beautiful,

To be human is to have our heart hurt in multiple ways over our lifetime. The obvious heartbreaks of losing a loved one or experiencing injustice. To the more subtle ones, like the ache of the heart as our child leaves home, the hurt we feel when we sense we don’t belong, the heart-sting of hearing bad news.

How do we navigate a world where it feels there is so much out there to hurt us – how do we navigate a world of bad news + injustice, sorrow + pain? How do we navigate this ache and not become hardened to the world?  And to be able to have a heart that still loves deeply, can be open and vulnerable with our loved ones, and can experience the thrill & beauty of life?

Because if we try to dampen the pain by closing our hearts, we are dampening our ability to feel all of the delicious and delightful things that are available to us humans. 

When we keep our heart open we can also see beyond the emotional swirl all around us. It is easier to not catch the emotional pain that gets thrown up by others when we are connected to ourselves and the truth within our hearts. 

Our modern culture has a way of loading us full-to-bursting with bad news, gossip, strong opinions and endless facts – but it doesn’t seem to acknowledge the stress & emotional load that that creates. 

By not acknowledging the deep impact all of this swirl of emotion-activating activity has on us, our human being, our human body, our emotions continue to sit within us, growing and unprocessed. 

We can’t mentally bathe in so many stress-inducing, emotion-activating things at once. It disrupts our carefully tuned internal balance. Our body can have stressful experiences but then they must be released from the body. 

We can’t just go into stress – we must also come out of it. 

The news or information that we obsess over, turn over in our minds or try desperately to push out of our minds. 

The emotions of powerlessness, despair or desperation.

The angry-making or sad-making, grief-inducing.

We can’t be regularly bathed in all this without it affecting us, loading onto our bodies what can feel like giant pieces of heavy emotion. 

Then ribbons of despair start curling around our hearts, gently squeezing it so it tightens, constricts. Hurts even. 

So how do we regain access to our big beautiful heart, that is full of strength and wisdom? How to access what will help us process this vast world of emotional-stuff? 

It is to start by fully acknowledging what we’ve been carrying. 

Because I feel when we don’t acknowledge what we’re carrying, what is deeply and profoundly affecting us, when we don’t acknowledge where we are hurting, it’s like we are pulling a truck behind us, full of this emotional weight, pushing ever forward, white-knuckling our way through life. 

We aren’t seeing this emotional load, but instead looking to the world ahead of us. We are wanting the world or the people in it to change so that this weight can get lighter. Or we are trying to change ourselves or our circumstances. 

Maybe we are secretly hoping in our hearts that someone will come along and take this all away, to make our lives different.

But what our bodies are calling for is to actually stop and look behind us. To acknowledge this vast load of what we are carrying. To acknowledge with compassion and love:

Oh love, look – this is why my heart has been hurting…

I feel the weight of other people’s pain in the pit of my stomach…

I can’t shake the feeling of despair, and that’s so hard…

The ever present bad-news is creating terror in my heart….

To hold ourselves. 

To offer gentle, kind, loving compassion.

To see what we’ve been pulling with us relentlessly. 

To see ourselves as we are – beautiful people struggling under the weight of so much unprocessed emotion & stress. 

And when we see, Oh this! This is what is happening for me…

When we fully acknowledge and witness despair or sadness or pain… 

And we offer ourselves deep compassion for what it is we are holding…

To say to ourselves 

Oh wow, this is a lot. 

This is hard.

I feel this so deeply. So deeply in my being.

We then drop into our bodies and notice where all of this shows up.  Since it’s in the body that all of this lodges itself, it becomes a weight, a strain in our body and it’s here we need to unearth it. 

And we start this by stepping back from our thoughts about ‘why’ it’s happening. Or the judgements we hold about it.  The stories that are looping in our mind. Because we can’t think our way out of feeling. We need to feel our way through feelings. 

Of course it’s impossible to stop thinking. And we’re not trying to make thinking wrong. We are just observing that we have thoughts, but we are taking our attention away from them and moving it to the body.

Noticing the sensations of the emotions.

Breathing into them – with long slow exhales to activate the calming mechanism in our body. 

Offering some compassionate loving touch to ourselves – by giving ourselves a hug, or gently rubbing our faces.

To fully see, feel and hold it. Because it’s by fully feeling the sensations of this heaviness and emotional load, not as a mental process but as a body-lead process, that we have the chance of releasing it from our body.

To not judge it or analyze it as information, to not add to the stories that are going around and around in our minds. But to fully feel it in our body as an energy, a sensation. That’s what it’s looking for. 

When we feel our feelings all the way through that’s when we get access to what we yearn for – the delightful feeling of hope, the deeply nourishing feeling of love, an awakening of possibility and a confidence in ourselves.

It’s pretty incredible what acknowledging and tending to our emotions does to bring us into more empowering states of being.

And to support you in this process I would love to share a free guided workshop to help you tend to what you’ve been carrying and open up to the beauty and strength of your heart.