Feeling Good: A Revolution
I came up hard today against a cultural belief on steroids that I had internalized as my own.
The flash of insight that took me over dissolved a lifetime of limitation in the blink of an eye.
Then over the next few hours a dissolution of many old unwanted behaviours and beliefs that I had hidden away effortlessly dropped. ALL OF IT. Like a sandcastle melting in the waves, it crumbled. Like a smoke ring that takes a seeming form for as long as it lasts, it was never really there. The ease at which all these many unwanted and real feeling emotions and patterns of behaviour evaporated was shocking.
Even when I've seen that this is how we work as humans. It's how we are designed to work. Change happens when we see what is not real.
What was the cultural belief on steroids??!!?? I can hear you wondering.
The entirely made-up idea that feeling good is not to be trusted or is somehow actually bad.
Whether or not we are churchgoers, the idea of Original Sin is pervasive in Western culture. The idea that we are fundamentally bad or broken and have to continually make up for it by showing what a good person we are.
There are a lot of sayings we grow up with that point to not trusting good feelings. It's "too good to be true", "lead you down the primrose path", the idea that you have to feel bad or stressed to be motivated to get anything done, "every rose has its thorn", "Don't get your hopes up". It's the idea that if you feel too good, let your guard down too much, then bad things will happen or you won't be able to notice when real danger happens.
One of the fundamental misconceptions that I see when working with transformational coaching clients is the belief that feeling good is actually a bad thing. "But I'll be unmotivated, I'll lose my edge, I'll sit on the couch all day eating potato chips and get fat".
I can tell you from personal experience and having worked with many clients for years, that isn't true.
When we feel good, life gets so much easier. We no longer have to psych ourselves up to get things done. We just get things done that we want to do. Managing negative emotions is gone. We have so much more energy to use however we want. We may choose to rest for a while but our natural zest for life kicks in relatively quickly.
Every spiritual tradition speaks about peace. Inner peace, the peace of God, peace of mind. And they point to this peace as being at the core of who we are. We forget the absolute vastness and purity of love that we are born into and never lose. We just forget.
If you've ever looked into a newborn's eyes, you'll know what I mean when I say you can see the whole Universe. They know who they are.
Many psychology researchers like Viktor Frankel or Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, author of "Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience", point to this effortless base state that feels amazing where we can flow and create and get things done without a lot on our minds.
Looking at my copy of Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience, I noticed a review on the back of the book from the Los Angeles Times that says it all.
"Csikszentmihalyi arrives at an insight that many of us can intuitively grasp, despite our insistent (and culturally supported) denial of this truth. That is, it is not what happens to us that determines our happiness, but the manner in which we make sense of that reality."
I would go further in saying that we are the creators of our experience of reality. We get to write the book or paint the feeling-scape of our lived experience. We exist before thought, before feeling, and before sense-making. We can make sense of it or not. We flow with life separately from the unending parade of happenings. When we look to life itself and fall into fascination with life, we gravitate towards our innate peace, our innate happiness, our innate feeling of being alive. Like a magnet, we are drawn into deeper feelings of stillness, inherent joy, foundational peace.
Somewhere along the line, I picked up the idea that I was foundationally a bad person and that I had to hide it at all costs. This might sound funny in that I'm aware that I don't particularly come off as a "bad person". But the life-changing relief when I saw that it wasn't ever real. It wasn't even my thought. I can feel good all I want. I don't deserve to feel bad. My jaw unwound. A lot of habitual tension fell out of my body.
We all deserve to feel good. It's not actually bad to feel good.
There's a song I really like these days. "For Real" by JoyBird. If you love feeling good and aren't afraid to show it, give it a listen. https://open.spotify.com/track/2ga7od2er6gFvwJ8D2DuDI?si=43bb8c771aa344d7
With Love,
Sara Joy
Feeling Good: A Revolution