Have you ever felt trapped in a cycle of suppressing your emotions, unsure of how to navigate the whirlpool of your feelings? I was there too until I discovered the healing power of 'heart doodling with Jesus.' Join me on a heartfelt journey as we discuss creating a sanctuary for our emotions, a place where we can unpack the baggage of our past and learn to approach our feelings with kindness and understanding. Through the art of heart doodling, we not only give our emotions a visual form but also find a reflective practice that invites Jesus into the conversation, helping us to better understand our responses to life’s ups and downs, and steer clear of the extremes of emotional outbursts or repression.
In the latest episode, the canvas of our discussion is painted with stories and insights from the monthly 'Heart Doodling with Jesus Workshops.' These workshops are not just about creating art; they're about building a community where individuals come together via Zoom to share, reflect, and grow. We're fostering a support network that extends to one-on-one coaching and group settings, like bible studies or family gatherings, offering a sanctuary for those looking to deepen their emotional intelligence through creativity and faith. And the dream doesn’t stop there – imagine immersing yourself in the tranquility of Alaska on a retreat centered around this transformative practice. If you're curious about bringing this innovative concept into your life or community, this episode is your invitation to embark on a journey of emotional and spiritual discovery.
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I want to talk about creating a safe space for your emotions. If you grew up with emotions being a problem, being a burden, we just want to stuff those and not have them around as much as possible. A safe place emotionally is where you feel understood. You don't feel judged, you don't feel criticized and condemned for simply feeling what you're feeling. If your home environment trained you to treat emotions that way, then that's how you know to treat emotions. So how do you learn to be a safe place where you can feel what you feel? I think people think that when we say it's okay to feel what you feel and all your feelings are valid, that I'm saying you can act emotional, that you can just do anything you want because that's how you feel. That's not what I'm saying. You feel what you feel and you are very responsible for your behavior and the choices that you make. In order for your emotions to give you the good information that they have for you, they need a safe place to show up and be honest and not be shut down and pushed aside. A safe place is non-judgment. There's not like the criticism and the like, the suspicion, that kind of stuff. There's compassion and understanding, for I see what you're feeling. I understand that you're feeling what you're feeling for a reason to be able to say that for yourself to yourself, to be able to say that for yourself to yourself. And the reason that I like the heart doodling with Jesus so much for that is you're literally giving yourself a space on a piece of paper to put your emotions, and when you put emotions on paper, you're also creating space between your emotions. And when you put emotions on paper, you're also creating space between your emotions and yourself. Now, your emotions are in your body. You feel them in your body, but if you're used to stuffing them and ignoring that impact on your body, giving them a separate space on the paper is really helpful to separate them from yourself and to start seeing. This is something I'm experiencing. This is something that's going on in my body. It's not me. I can separate from that and see, based on the information I had or based on the perception of what I thought was going on, these emotions make sense.
Speaker 1:
It doesn't mean, again, that you can act on however you feel, but you have to start with listening before you can make good choices, because letting your emotions be in charge and do whatever you feel like doing is not a good way to go. Equally as bad is stuffing your emotions and always ignoring them and shutting them down because that's not how things were designed to be. So the heart doodling very simply like it literally creates a physical space on the paper that you can put your emotions, and it also creates like a space in time where you're going to allow your emotions to show up and sit with them and listen to them and be curious, rather than I don't like you, go away. You make me uncomfortable. It's not okay for me to feel this way. Those are things that make you feel unsafe and if you're doing that to yourself, then, like you're participating in this war within that doesn't need to be there. So, as you're putting things on paper, just give them permission to come and list as many as come to mind without judgment, just acknowledging okay, this is here, it doesn't need to make sense, it doesn't need to be accurate, it doesn't anything, it's just here. I'm just observing that. This is what's here right now and then validating your emotions in that safe place, saying I see you and, based on your past, based on your experience, based on this information, I can see why you're feeling that way, and that's especially true of things that remind us of things that happened when we were young.
Speaker 1:
Maybe you broke a dish Broken dishes happen, they slip out of little hands and big hands fall on the floor and they break. And maybe your mom had had a really bad day and she exploded at you over the plate and she didn't have the emotional skills to come back and apologize and you could just feel the weight of her being mad at you and like breaking this plate was a huge, huge deal that could come back. You break something now and have all this anger at yourself and then all this fear of being in trouble and as an adult you can be like that doesn't make any sense, like it was just a plate. I can get another one. But that part of you that's reminded of this other experience where it didn't go like that and you weren't treated that way. So from that standpoint it makes sense that you would feel that anxiety and, you know, be afraid of being in trouble and like overreact to breaking a plate. So that's what I mean by like you can validate your emotions and say they make sense, even if from the adult perspective of what happened right now it doesn't make sense. I don't need to have an anxiety attack about breaking a plate now as an adult If I look back and see and I don't think I have that experience but of that example, if we look back and be like, oh okay, that makes sense because this was an overwhelming circumstance where I had this emotion the first time and nobody helped me deal with it.
Speaker 1:
Nobody helped me name it, nobody helped me release it, nobody affirmed me separate from the behavior and the emotion and all those things and the other part of those things that happen when we're young. Not only are our parents imperfect and often not equipped with all of the emotional tools that they needed, but the enemy is always right there to jump on those opportunities to lie to us, to tell us that we can't trust God, that we can't trust our parents, we can't trust ourselves Very twisted things when we get them on paper of like you can only trust yourself, you can't trust anybody else, you can't trust God or your parents or anything. You need to do everything on your own because you can't trust anybody and at the same time, you can't trust you because you're just this worthless worm. But we buy it and we don't even recognize it because he's whispering those things so consistently and when we are too young to recognize it, especially if our parents aren't in tuned to be able to help us. See like seems like you might be believing a lie. Right now Seems like you might be hearing something different. When my daughter is overreacting to something, I will ask her what she's thinking, what she's feeling and what she's hearing, because I've been asking her those questions for a long time and so when she slows down to pay attention, she can identify oh, the enemy is telling me that I need to be afraid, or that this isn't fair or whatever.
Speaker 1:
The heart doodling with Jesus gives you the space on the paper, or that this isn't fair or whatever. The heart doodling with Jesus gives you the space on the paper. It gives you that physical space and time and it gives you practice, when there's like no pressure on, to sit down and be curious and to let an emotion come up and see what it is. And if all you can do is see like, oh, I see, that's there, I don't know what to do with that. That's a start and it's okay to start in small steps. We learn everything a little bit at a time.
Speaker 1:
Ideally we would have learned to process our emotions a little bit at a time over the years as we were growing up. If you're doing it now, that's okay. So that safe space might be a very short time to be like okay, I see you there and I'm not sure what to do with you. So I'm going to leave you with Jesus and go back to being an adult and then next time you come back, maybe you can sit with it a little longer. Or, if you find that like no, these are just way too overwhelming for me to sit with by myself, a trusted friend, you can reach out to me or another professional to be able to have someone else help hold space and know that you're going to be okay, no matter how big and scary these emotions seem. Because, again, ideally that's what your parents should have done for you is to be like okay, I see that's a big, scary emotion and it's really hard for you right now, but I can handle it. And too often we saw parents that were like I can't handle that. Shut, that it's bad, get that away from me. Their parents didn't have the tools either. So we're not blaming or criticizing, we're just. I'm just saying that's how it happened. That's how we got where we are and we can't go back and fix the past. But we also can't move forward to a new direction very well if we don't have a good idea of where we're at right now.
Speaker 1:
So the heart doodling gives a place to practice. Bringing up an emotion, see what it feels like in your body, think about how you would like to respond when you feel this way. You can do all of this in a safe place and be practicing so that when the emotion comes up in real life, eventually it doesn't blindside you, eventually it doesn't take you out. Because you've practiced sitting with sadness or sitting with anger, sitting with grief, sitting with frustration, sitting with joy. You can practice. This is how I would like to respond to this emotion. This is what's happening right now, that I like or don't like, and setting aside the time to do the heart doodling and to let those emotions come up and really pay attention to how they feel and what they're telling you, gives you that practice for when you need to deal with those things in everyday life. And I think that's part of the beautiful power of the safe space of Heart Doodling with Jesus.
Speaker 1:
There is a monthly Heart Doodling with Jesus membership, where I do a live workshop once a month. So you can join me on Zoom. You have your supplies in your space and I have my supplies in my space and I talk you through and I doodle. At exactly the same time I'm processing real life stuff for me on the call and you can process your stuff on the other end and I pause the recording so you can share. You can ask questions. We do those once a month.
Speaker 1:
Then I also am doing heart doodling in my one-on-one coaching and experimenting with how to best incorporate that, because it's been such a powerful tool for me Having an outside perspective, having someone else hold the space and be able to reflect back and give feedback on yes, you're doing well, this is how change happens. These things make sense. You know, modeling being a safe place all those things that you don't know how to do is extremely powerful. Using it in conjunction with heart doodling, you're learning to do that for yourself in a very simple but intentional, powerful way.
Speaker 1:
So if you're interested in any of those ways and also if you have a bible study group or a church or a family group or anything that you would like to do heart doodling with jesus, with. I would love to talk to you about that. I'm doing in-person workshops here in alaska. Um, I have a friend that's putting together a group over Zoom. I'm dreaming about how to do retreats where we could spend some focused time over a period of a few days to just really dive in and see what God can do with that. So if any of those things are of interest to you or like to collaborate in any way, reach out, let me know.