Emotional Regulation and Intelligence For Moms

Title : Emotional Regulation and Intelligence for moms 

Welcome to today’s episode of The Motherhood Mentor Podcast, on today’s episode we are diving into emotional regulation and how we can manage intense emotions. 

Be sure to grab the free workbook HERE 

This podcast introduces you to emotional intelligence through the lens of somatic experiencing and healing- aka how to FEEL your feelings and learn the language of your nervous system. 

Are you wanting to learn to regulate your emotions or help your kids learn more emotional intelligence? Then this podcast episode is for you. 

Today’s episode contains Somatic Practices that for some can feel meditative and are not safe to participate or listen to while driving or doing activities that require your external focus.  

In this episode I normalize the full range of our emotional landscape and give you somatic healing tools and practices to help you learn to use ALL your emotions for good. 

We will deep dive into the holistic somatic perspective, exploring emotions as vital components of our energy and aliveness. 

Here is a breakdown of what we cover:

-Understanding the intelligence of your emotions and triggers. 

-Sensations and building your capacity to feel your feelings. 

-Thought vs emotions and reconnecting our thoughts/stories with our full self, no longer being cut off from our thoughts and mind OR our body. 

-Emotional alchemy and hygiene and the continual work of caring for ourselves and learning to transform our relationship and care of our feelings. 

-Somatic experiences and practices of presence, resourcing the now, body scanning, finding resources, and developing language for sensation. 

Chapters

• 0:05 Emotional Alchemy
• 12:14 Learning to Feel Your Feelings
• 28:36 Exploring Sensations and Emotions in Body
• 34:08 Exploring Emotional Regulation and Alchemy

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:05

Welcome to the Motherhood Mentor Podcast. I'm Becca, a holistic life coach, mom of two, wife and business owner. This is a podcast where we will have conversations and coaching around all things strategy and healing that supports both who you are and what you do. So grab your iced coffee or whatever weird health beverage you are currently into and let's do the damn thing. Welcome to today's episode of the Motherhood Mentor Podcast.

Speaker 1: 0:33

Today we are talking about emotional regulation. Now I'm going to start off by saying I don't love the term emotional regulation anymore, because wherever I see it being used, it seems like I hear people talking about being regulated, as if we could somehow do enough healing work that would create a body, a system that wasn't responsive or reactive. And, to be perfectly honest, I believe our bodies, our emotions, our spirits, ourselves we're supposed to be responsive. We're supposed to react and have a relationship to what's going on outside of us. I don't see emotional regulation as a state we achieve. I don't think you can say like, oh, I'm emotionally regulated. I am someone who feels mostly emotionally regulated and I get dysregulated all the time. I think it just pours into this idea that health or healing is something that's a before and after that we can achieve. I really prefer I've started to use the terms hygiene. I've started to use the terms hygiene, so emotional hygiene, or even emotional alchemy, realizing that your emotions, your feelings, the sensations that come up in you, they have a purpose. We can metabolize them, we can use them to our benefit, to our good, and I believe that our emotions are a powerful form of our intelligence and a powerful form of self that, for quite a while, our culture has really dismissed and we've gotten really, really good at repressing our emotions.

Speaker 1: 2:16

And even now, a lot of the emotional regulation content I see is how we repress our uncomfortable, powerful emotions that we need to be able to use to mobilize ourselves, to mobilize ourselves into action or non-action. But we don't understand these emotions and so we fear them, we repress them, we try to regulate them, and it doesn't actually work, it doesn't actually feel good. It's a great short-term strategy, it's a great band-aid that we often need to have in the moment. But when you're wanting to be someone who can feel intense sensations, feel intense emotions and still be able to feel your sense of choice, feel your sense of you know, not just your emotional intelligence at that moment, but your mental and spiritual and value intelligence to be able to choose your behaviors. I think that's what people are looking for.

Speaker 1: 3:19

So when we're talking about emotional regulation or and in this podcast I'm going to use more the hygiene or the alchemy emotions or feelings, you can kind of use those interchangeably. We're not going to go into the depth of you know all of the definitions, but essentially it can be really really helpful for you to think of emotions as an energy, emotions as a sensation. Right, this is a somatic, holistic perspective is that your emotions are an energy. They are signs and clues and information. There's an entire intelligence that's happening in your somatic, felt sense of your emotions.

Speaker 1: 4:06

Your emotions are your aliveness, and so if you're repressing or detached from your emotions, you often feel detached from yourself. You know, a comment I hear a lot from moms is I don't feel like myself, and a lot of times they mean a couple different things by that. They mean I literally don't feel me. I have become so attuned and focused energy out that I am paying attention to what everyone wants and needs from me. There's this energy out of everything that I'm doing. I'm aware of what I'm doing and not doing, but I'm completely disconnected to the feeling and the sensation and the experience of being me. They feel other people's emotions or thoughts about them, but they don't feel this sense of self.

Speaker 1: 5:02

The other thing that women often mean when they say I don't feel like myself is they mean I'm having this emotional, sensational experience that I don't recognize or that I was told was wrong. I was taught and told to believe that what I'm currently feeling and experiencing is not good and so I don't feel like myself. Because they have connected their sense of self to being good, to feeling good. And it's really hard with emotions, with experiences, with sensations, because what's happening in our culture right now is that we have developed this language that most of us use of good and bad feelings, and I think we assign good and bad to what feels good and what feels bad, and if it feels good it's good and if it feels bad it's bad. But that's not accurate. A lot of things that are deeply good for us, that are deeply healthy, that are signs of health and aliveness and being in our values and being in our strength, they don't feel good, they don't feel pleasant, and we don't want to feel good about those things, and yet we've assigned this negative connotation. And so even myself I still deal with this because I'm kind of a recovering emotional perfectionist, if you will of.

Speaker 1: 6:20

I went through this season when I was first in the coaching world, like when I was doing coaching myself, like for me, of feeling like I always needed to feel good and think positively in order to be good, and so anything that didn't feel good or wasn't pleasant I associated with bad, and so I really learned how to self-repress. I really learned how to disorient myself from those hard parts of me and it led me to no good, not in my personal health, not in my relational health. It didn't do my family any favors because I became disconnected from parts of myself. Now, emotions, our sensations, our nervous systems are not just responding to the present moment. Our emotions can come from remembered past patterns. Right, this is what a lot of times people call a trigger. These triggers are when your emotions, when your nervous system is responding to something that happened in the past, not something that's happening in the present moment, or your emotions, your sensations, can be coming from thoughts or stories about the expected future.

Speaker 1: 7:43

A lot of times when I'm teaching women this somatic approach to emotions, to emotional hygiene and alchemy, they think I'm telling them to disconnect from their mind, from their thoughts, in order to connect with their bodies. But your mind, your thoughts, are an active part of your somatic body, right, I don't want you to disconnect from your head, but the powerful thing is that you likely haven't learned the language of your intelligence that happens below your neck, that happens below your head. You haven't ever given energy or attention, or even just like power, towards anything that happens below the neck. It's quote unquote mental health, right? No, it's full, whole self. And so today we're going to be talking about the intelligence and the experience that's happening not just in your head. Yes, it's also happening in your head and your thoughts. It's also happening in your head, in your thoughts, but it's also happening in your entire being, in your entire body.

Speaker 1: 8:49

So the first place we start when it comes to alchemy, to this hygiene, is learning to reconnect with your entire interworking self. Being present, being embodied, being quote unquote regulated is not always comfortable and peaceful. Your body is going to have sensations and responses that are reacting to the environment in ways that we need that input. So emotional alchemy is changing the way that we relate to these signs and signals. It's understanding and learning how to feel and relate to these sensations, because I'm never going to be someone who comes in and says you just need to let your feelings guide you. No, like, your feelings are coming from triggers. They're coming from your inner child. They're coming from places that, like, don't have the full information, that don't have the tools that you have currently. But we do need these emotions. We do need this, these sensations, in order to be able to make holistic in integrity choices, and when I say in integrity, I mean that your whole self was online when you made this choice. You weren't disconnected or repressed. You were in your full capacity of self. So we're going to learn how we metabolize and use emotion, because emotion is an energy that moves us. It moves in us and it moves through us.

Speaker 1: 10:30

What would it be like to give yourself permission for your full expression, your full range of humanity? I'm talking the highest of highs and the lowest of lows. What would it be like for you to feel a capacity and a sense of positive intention towards all of you? This fundamentally for me that, when you look at inner child or shadow work is understanding how to be with and relate to the really uncomfortable, hard, messy parts of you in a way that is conducive to health, in a way that takes things that are hard or messy and upsetting and breathes life and connects you back to the way that you are loving yourself or other people and a lot of this work. I think a lot of people are terrified of this because they think they're just going to become this really overly dramatic, overly emotional person, and what actually happens is you learn how to operate in an entirely new system of communication. You learn how to walk through your life and make choices around your behavior and your relationships and your parenting and your business, with so much less drama, with so much less maladaptive coping and less suppression. So you're no longer playing this game of emotional Tetris where you're supposed to feel a certain way. You can feel any certain way and still be able to use that emotion as a positive thing.

Speaker 1: 12:14

The first way that we do this, the first way that we come into this somatic healing, this way of regulating our emotions through relating to our emotions, is learning how to feel our somatic body, learning how to feel your feelings and not just think about them. So many people have massive skill, including myself, and I can think my way around and through and into feelings all day long, and in fact, I get trapped there a lot. So we're going to talk about how to feel your feelings, how to connect with this intelligence that happens below the head. So the first thing is I'm about to lead you through a more somatic exercise. So, if you are driving, it's not always safe to listen to these while you're driving, because some people find them very meditative and so it can be very relaxing, or you can tend to go so far into your body that you're no longer connected to the world outside of you. So please put safety first, which brings me to my first point of somatic exercises is safety has to matter before regulation.

Speaker 1: 13:29

So if you've parented a toddler or you've parented a teen when they are at their highest emotional state, that is not the time to be practicing these things. You have to create safety for yourself, emotionally, physically, sensationally. So I highly recommend to start doing these when you're at like a level six or below, like, if you look at emotional reactivity, from one to 10, probably practice this at a six or below if you're practicing it by yourself. This is why I personally believe that coaching and therapy are so, so powerful is. They give an intentional container and boundary to be able to resource and access things that are six and above in a way that you don't have to protect other people. You're not practicing this while you're in the middle of parenting. You're not practicing this when you're in that fight with your spouse. You're practicing it in a space and time that gives you an access to this emotion without feeling unsafe with it.

Speaker 1: 14:37

Because so often what happens when we feel unsafe with an emotion, that emotion either comes out, up and out right Anger it almost always comes up and out. But if we're afraid of that anger coming up and out right, a common scenario that moms will bring is I want to stop yelling at my kids, and they oftentimes get a little annoyed. When I don't start helping them stop yelling at their kids, I start asking them where do you feel this in your body before you're yelling at your kids? Because here's the thing if anger is coming up and out and you start repressing that with a hand, you start holding your throat, you start using something else to repress that anger we never get to access. What you're angry about we never get to access. Are you overstimulated? Are you stuck in a system of anger that has nothing to do with what your kid's doing, or is your kid breaking a boundary and you need that anger in order to be able to up and out, set and hold a firm boundary. We have to get to know the anger in order to do that a firm boundary. We have to get to know the anger in order to do that.

Speaker 1: 15:46

And oftentimes, if you haven't learned emotional alchemy, if you have not practiced in your body feeling a feeling without expressing that feeling in a way that's not healthy for you or another person, if you start not feeling safe, if you start trying to repress that which is what a lot of people do with emotional regulation is oh, I need to feel safe, I need to make sure I don't do this behavior we end up not meeting the actual need. We end up repressing the behavior while not addressing what's happening underneath it. So if your behavior is the thing on the surface level, we're playing this whack-a-mole game of this behavior comes up and we smack it down. This behavior comes up and we smack it down. What I'm talking to you about is saying what's the thing that's driving the system? What's the programming happening in the system? Can we develop a new code for what happens in your body when anger comes up. We're going to practice this when we're six and below, and when we're six and above, we're going to think of ourselves as a toddler.

Speaker 1: 16:52

When I say six and above, what I mean is have you lost access to feeling like you have a choice? There is usually an urgency. Right, it feels like life or death. If you feel this intense urgency or you feel like you are responding or reacting without choosing, like it just happens, and then all of a sudden you like shake your head after and you're like what just happened, you're probably at a place where you don't have capacity in that moment and one of the best things you can do is take a pause. Take a pause before responding or not responding. Take a pause. Come back to the present moment.

Speaker 1: 17:40

If you have the ability, if you can find in you the capacity to take a pause and look around and witness. Is this urgent? Does this require an urgent response? Because if it does and if it did, you wouldn't be pausing. If your anger was about someone about to attack your kid, you wouldn't be pausing and thinking did I say that nicely? Did I yell too hard or too loud, you would be witnessing. Ah, that was an appropriate reaction for what's happening in the present moment.

Speaker 1: 18:15

But what happens so often is that our emotional responses are not just to the present moment. They're coming from a past, remembered pattern. They're a trauma, they're a trigger that our body has not metabolized yet, and so it's coming up as this pattern. So before we go anywhere into the body, I recommend you actually give yourself permission to witness. I'm not holding capacity for myself, so the first thing you can do is pause, and maybe that pause is a couple seconds, maybe it's a couple breaths. Maybe it's long enough to get a glass of water, maybe it's long enough that you can go for a walk or phone a friend right.

Speaker 1: 18:59

Give yourself a minute if there is an actual urgency, if there is actual urgency. Give yourself a minute if there is an actual urgency. If there is actual urgency, we oftentimes just need to respond the best we can for the moment and then after we can figure out what we do from there. Most women are in a scenario where you are not dealing with something that is actually urgent. You are dealing with something that you can take a hint. You can take a hint of five minutes, five breaths. I'm going to come get a cup of water. Do you want to come with me? We're both really activated. Let's take a break here. Let's go sit outside to talk about this. Let's get a snack. Oh, mommy needs a minute. Give me one second to think about this. Let's get a snack. Oh, mommy needs a minute. Give me one second to think about this.

Speaker 1: 19:44

Or even just breathing in your head, slowing down that urgency, slowing down the intensity and giving yourself permission to start practicing these things when you're at a lower level. And I say practice because this is hygiene, this is work we're always going to be doing, and it's not hard or heavy once you get used to it. When you first start, it can feel really uncomfy and really awkward because what you've been used to is either exploding or constantly repressing, or you're doing a numbing behavior. You're doing something that distracts you, you're overworking, you're constantly staying in your head to avoid what you're feeling in your body, or maybe you're eating or drinking or constantly listening to podcasts. It's a thing I've been in, that space where you're never fully present with yourself. You constantly keep yourself busy so that you never have to be present. It's going to feel really uncomfy at first, give yourself permission to not go all or nothing.

Speaker 1: 20:53

Practice this a little bit, maybe once a day, maybe it's a certain time of day that you're going to. Oh, I'm going to notice how I'm feeling. There's a trigger, there's something that happens. It activates you. Pause, say, hey, do I have like a minute to like check into this exercise we're about to do, or do I need to go get some sunshine or some water or some music and actually resource myself before going inward? I'm going to teach you how to feel your feelings. There's so many things that are like feel your feelings. This is how we do it. Okay, find it in your body. There's going to be a PDF that's included with this podcast. That has some printables of if it's really helpful for you, if picturing it in your head doesn't help, it can be really helpful to print out an image of a body and like color in on that body where you see it. Pick a color, even that feels like the thing you're feeling, but where is it.

Speaker 1: 21:56

Scan your body and I'm going to lead you through a body scan. And again, please don't listen to this if you're driving, because it can be very meditative and very relaxing, but I want to encourage you as we do this body scan. Don't try to change anything, just see if you can notice what you're feeling and experiencing and sensing. What is the sensation that you notice and what stories come up when you notice that sensation. I'm also going to include a list of sensations. But think high, low, fast, slow, urgent, sluggish, tight, bracing, free, open. Is it hard, is it heavy? Is it fast, is it? Is it fast and slow? It feels like I'm running through mud. There you can often feel multiple emotions at once or simultaneously, like one after another after, and it's normal for energy to move up and out or down and low. See if you can notice the sensations as we scan your body.

Speaker 1: 23:15

So, starting with before we scan your body, noticing the room that you're in, noticing the room that you're in, maybe even look left to right, up and down, noticing where am I and what am I doing. Am I in the kitchen washing the dishes? Are you at your desk working? Notice your location, notice the weather, the date, even notice your current age. Where are you, what are you doing? And notice where your body is, because part of somatic healing, part of being embodied, is that you are a body that is moving through an environment. The environment impacts your body and your body can impact the environment, and so it's not just always about going inward, it's about recognizing the relationship between outer and inner. So notice your location. Are you sitting? Are you standing? See if you can feel if you're sitting, see if you can feel yourself pressing into the chair, if you can notice that gravity is holding you to the ground. See what that feels like to notice it. And now, noticing your skin, the outer layer of your body, this boundary of me not me outside of this skin, not you inside of this skin.

Speaker 1: 25:14

You Feeling from the top of your scalp, your hair or your skin, and feeling the top of your scalp. Feeling down into your forehead Is tension? Is there tightness? Your eyebrows, your eyes, behind your eyes, is there tiredness? Is there tightness? Is there tension? Feeling down into your jaw what does that feel like into your jaw? What does that feel like in your jaw, into your neck and your throat. Feeling the base of your skull and where it connects to your backbone.

Speaker 1: 26:13

Feeling into the front of your chest, your lungs. Picturing the three dimensional full cavity the front, the back, the side to side of your whole rib cage. See if you can feel how much space is there? Can I take a full breath? Was I breathing? Does it feel like something's stuck in my throat? Does it feel like I'm breathing really fast or really slow? Can I feel my heart? Does my heart ache does? Does it feel heavy? Does it feel tired? Does it feel light? Does it feel joyful?

Speaker 1: 26:50

Feeling into your shoulders, shrugging them up to your ears if it feels good and then letting them drop, letting them come all the way down them come all the way down. Feeling into your muscles of your shoulders and then the bones of your shoulders, seeing if you can feel your spine holding, even if you're not the one doing the lifting. Can you feel your arms, your elbows, your wrists, your fingers, maybe even wiggle your fingers, looking at your hands Traveling back up into the stomach, your belly, your belly, the softness, the outward belly, but also the inward belly inside of you, deep in where all of your organs are held, noticing can you feel the back of your body? So many of us we're so focused on outward and only seeing what we see with our eyes and forgetting that we have this entire back body. Can you feel your backbone, the back of your neck, the back of your shoulders, your spine, how it's strong, how it's flexible, your spine, how it's strong, how it's flexible. See if you can feel where your back is touching. See if you can lean back into the back of your body and notice as we go through your body.

Speaker 1: 28:36

Where do you feel strength? Where do you feel sustenance, capacity, space, where do you feel sturdy and flexible? Where do you feel neutral? Where do you feel desire or hunger, noticing all of the fullness of your sensations. Notice what comes alive. Do you notice aliveness anywhere, something that lights up. Maybe it lights up like a warning light, or maybe it lights up like this warm energy from the sun. Noticing your pelvis, picturing your pelvic bowl, your hips, the fronts of your hips, the backs of your hips. Noticing your glutes, your thighs, your knees, your shins, your calves, your feet, your toes. Notice your whole body, your whole being. Where do you feel? Where do you feel? Where do you notice?

Speaker 1: 30:05

If you noticed a sensation, maybe in your chest or your shoulders, maybe in your throat, what was the sensation of it. See if you can be present with it for a moment. Sometimes it can help to put a hand on it. Maybe you need to just pause the podcast. Maybe you need to write, maybe you need to draw.

Speaker 1: 30:31

Give yourself permission to process that thing you're feeling, but see if you can just let it be there and see if it moves, see if there's a knowing or an intelligence that comes up from it. Give that sensation, give that emotional intelligence coming up in you permission. Allow yourself to feel it without taking action. You can also allow the emotion to move. Is there something that I want to say? Is there something my hands want to do? Does it move from your chest to your arms, to your fist? Does it move from your chest to your arms to your fist? Does it move from your chest to your throat of? There's something I want to say, but I feel like I can't say it. Notice the way that it moves and where the movement gets stopped, where there's bracing, where there's a story, give yourself permission to remove the pressure of needing to fix or change, or feel this in the right way or do this in the right way.

Speaker 1: 31:55

Get comfortable with the fact that this is your ugly, messy, true range of your humanity and you will find the most empowerment, you will find the most strength and health when you can be curious and attuned to this part of you Locked into these sensations. Locked into your body is not just your trauma. Your body does not just hold traumas and triggers. It also holds the medicine and the balm that those things are needing. It holds powerful information and energy that will move you. So, when it comes to if you're still in a trance, if you're still in a meditative state, take a moment and wiggle your toes, wiggle your fingers, look around the room In a moment where you're listening to a podcast or where you're specifically practicing feeling something in your body. The exercise we just did was barely a couple minutes. You can do this while you're driving, while you're in the kitchen, while you're talking, while staying aware of the outside world.

Speaker 1: 33:20

But noticing where in my body do I feel this? Starting with where is so, so powerful, and then, from there, noticing what is the sensation of it. Does it feel like butterflies in your stomach or bees in your chest? Does it feel like you're trying to run through mud? If you had to give a sensation, an experience, some language, give some language to your experience that is so powerful and starting to shape it. And it's so powerful when we start describing emotion as sensation and not just story. Story is often the thoughts of why you're feeling what you're feeling. But when we start with explanation, we often end up trying to excuse or justify.

Speaker 1: 34:08

But if we can move into sensation and curiosity first, we'll often move directly toward the need, directly toward the response that we need. So, noticing it in your body and then giving language to the experience, to the sensation of it, and then allow it to move, notice what it needs, what is it trying to tell you See, if you can listen below the head, to what? To your intelligence, to your knowing, to what? To your intelligence, to your knowing, so you're not bypassing anymore. So often we bypass and we repress where we focus on avoidance and numbing and distracting. We try to rationalize or intellectualize, and when we do this, it prevents. Do this, it prevents us from learning, it prevents us from being present in the moment and it prevents us from having access to our sense of depth and capacity.

Speaker 1: 35:20

And so one of the reasons that we start with feeling, when we start with sensing, is that it gives us the time and space to pause and acknowledge and alchemize the thing that we're feeling. It allows us to ground into the present, current self and have some boundary, some space in your body and some resource so that you can respond in a way that's not just helpful in the present moment, but helpful long term. That's what I think of when I think of emotional hygiene or emotional regulation or emotional alchemy, is understanding that every emotion that comes up, whether it's anger or rage, or disappointment, or desire unanswered desire when we build capacity for these uncomfortable emotions, we're also building capacity for joy, for pleasure, for connection, connection is an emotional experience, not a logical one. All of these things are energy moving in us and through us, and the way that we do that is by giving back energy and power to our emotions, without letting them be the only power. I'm going to talk in the next podcast about emotional boundaries and how we have a right relationship to our emotions and to our sensation. Which I think is essential when you're talking about emotional regulation is how do I listen and learn from my emotions without also letting my emotions always be the thing that drives my behavior?

Speaker 1: 36:59

You cannot selectively numb what emotions you feel or don't feel, and so when you start creating capacity, when you start creating a ability to be with and feel all of these things, the full range of your human experience you're also giving yourself presence, to all of the ones that you really want and like being embodied, being present, being emotionally regulated. These things are not synonymous with never, always, or I should say they're not synonymous with always feeling good. It does not always feel good to be in a body, it doesn't always feel good to be present, and, and when you are present, you're not just aware of and sensing a sensation, you're not just sensing the hard things, you're also sensing and aware of the magic. You're also sensing and aware of the bodies in the room. You stop feeling like you are watching your life happen to you. You stop being this person who's going through a checklist and checking things off but like never really being present or never fully enjoying them. It's not always pleasant to be present, and when you're being present, you get the opportunity to experience those amazing things like celebration or connection or joy or play or fun.

Speaker 1: 38:34

All of these happen in presence, with being aware of your experience. That is the act of humanity, that is your aliveness, your emotions, your feelings. That is your aliveness, it's your essence, it's your medicine, and we're so afraid of and bypassing and repressing these things that we miss out on the way that they can enhance our lives, and not just our lives in a singular, individualistic sense, I mean communally, as mothers, as women, as people. When we are disconnected from our anger, we are disconnected and unable to set boundaries. When we're disconnected from our rage, we are unable to make massive, substantial change. When we are disconnected from our discomfort, we're also going to be disconnected from our play, from our sense of fun. When we are disconnected from our disappointment, we're also disconnected from our desire. Those things are all synonymous. It's our full range of human experience, and so, instead of trying to distill and purify out into only being these perfectionistic, only happy, grateful, blessed, always positive women, what would it look like to be a full range, dynamic, full of life, human with all of her parts online. Human with all of her parts online and not all of her parts online, as in? She is just ramming, raging around, letting all of her emotions go out on other people, but a woman fully in touch with her emotions, who's also taking responsibility for her emotions, for her needs, who's also taking action because she's connected to her sense of energy.

Speaker 1: 40:30

When you're disconnected from your emotions, you are blocked off from your energy and your capacity to be responsible with your behaviors. Your behaviors are being driven by your emotions, whether you think you're an emotional person or not. A lot of times when we are feeling numb or disassociated, it's because we were feeling so much and we thought it was wrong to feel, and so we shut it down. Because it's so much sensation, or all at once, because we haven't developed this capacity or this language of being able to feel all of it, and sometimes all at once, or sometimes from moment to moment to moment changing. But you were made to do this. This is what you were made to do. This is what emotions were here for.

Speaker 1: 41:21

So emotional regulation, this emotional alchemy and this hygiene, is not about ridding yourself of uncomfortable emotions or quote unquote bad emotions. It's building a capacity and a practice of how do I feel this and communicate about it or take action upon my needs, or how do I feel this and allow it to metabolize and move through me so I don't carry it with me forever. Because if you can do that, emotions stop being so complicated, they stop being so overwhelming because you become familiar with the language of your experience that's happening below the neck. If you are only connected to the thoughts and the stories around your emotions, you are cut off from an entire level of intelligence that you need to be your full self, to feel fully like you. It's not always going to feel good, but even when it doesn't feel good, you don't have to suffer it anymore because you understand it, because there is a relationship to it where you can care for it.

Speaker 1: 42:34

I hope that this podcast gave you new permission and hopefully, some new somatic tools on feeling your feelings. I would love to hear from you any questions or any big aha moments or, especially, I'm curious, what emotions, what sensations are hardest for you to feel or experience. What are you experiencing right now that I can speak to in the upcoming podcast when we talk a little bit more about our emotional health as mothers? I would love to hear from you. You can DM me, you can send me an email. All of the information is linked in the podcast information.

Speaker 1: 43:20

I hope you have an incredible day and I hope you give yourself some permission to take up space when it comes to not just looking outward at what you're doing, but turning some energy and attention inward so you can notice how you are feeling, so that you can reconnect to your full self, so that you can reconnect to your full intelligence and power. You are phenomenal. Have an awesome day. You are phenomenal. Have an awesome day. Thanks for hanging out today on the motherhood mentor podcast. If you loved today's episode, share it with a friend or tag me in your stories on instagram so that we can connect. Take up audacious space in your life and I'll see you next time.