As I was walking to the coffee shop this afternoon, I engaged in an exercise that I do every so often. I call it an emotional stability exercise (the opposite of an emotional mobility exercise). What I did was try to stay in a state of feeling “strong.” I kept saying in my head over and over again the word “strong” and trying to evoke that response from my body.
It actually went quite well, and it surprised me. Living at home with my parents, at age 34, with little money to my name, there aren’t many things that make me feel strong these days, at least from the external sense of strength. I haven’t exercised as much as I have wanted to do so, so my body doesn’t even have the physical strength that it once had.
I then switched to a different emotional stability exercise, one that, instead of continuously saying the word “strong” in my head, I asked myself a series of questions: “What is one thing that currently makes me feel strong?” And then after answering that, I continue with, “What is another thing that currently makes me feel strong?” I felt disappointed that I couldn’t answer. I had no answer for even the first question. I can’t remember exactly what I said but it was something that was in the negative form and didn’t feel strong when saying it. I felt stuck. I switched back to the first stability drill and I started to feel strong again, yet, I lingered with the uncertainty about why I got stuck on the second drill.
I think what happens so often in our lives is that we get stuck in certain emotional patterns, or cycles if you will. We feel X, Y, and Z, and forget about A, B, and C. I have seen this with myself and I have seen it while running workshops with others. I remember I ran a workshop with a man who was struggling with his marriage. I asked him a series of questions, “How do you feel when you think about ___,” rotating the blanks. He pretty much answered “weak” and “unconfident” for most of the questions. When I switched it and asked, “How do you imagine your wife might feel when she thinks about ___,” he mostly answered the opposite: “strong” and “confident”.
I think we still feel the other emotions, they may just not be strong enough to gain our attention. Perhaps at times they have a weak signal, and it doesn’t rise to our awareness. Or when it does arise, we squash it because we don’t think it’s OK for us to feel it.
I write this to remind you and myself that it’s OK to feel all those feelings and if we aren’t feeling them at the moment, that’s OK too—I believe they are still there, just buried, and may just require a little seeking to bring them out of hiding 😀