Master Your Emotions: Feel Without Getting Lost in the Chaos

Emotions aren’t good or bad—they simply are. By dropping the need to categorize and judge our feelings, we create space for true self-awareness and healing. In this episode, I explore how to recognize emotions as neutral, stop attaching stories to them, and use them as a guide for deeper understanding. Learn how to embrace the full spectrum of emotions without letting them define your identity, and discover the power of radical self-compassion.

Transcript

Hey there and welcome back to the emotional revolution podcast. Today we are diving deep into the world of emotions, kind of what this podcast is about. But let's be honest, emotions can be overwhelming and chaotic. And what happens often times we get caught up in trying to label them as good or bad. But what if I told you that emotions just are?

They don't have to be fixed, they don't have to be judged, and they definitely don't have to be avoided. So in this episode, we're going to explore how to feel your emotions without spiraling into them, and why trying only to experience those good emotions actually keep you stuck, and how to stay grounded and compassionate with yourself through it all. So if you're ready to get real about your feelings, let's do it. So emotions are simply neutral.

And they're not inherently good or bad, but our conditioning tells us that one is more desirable than the other. And when that happens, we start to get a little bit confused with our experience because we're always trying to chase these higher level emotions. And so we think that always being in happiness and bliss is more preferable than having anger or sadness.

And now when we really get down to it, yes, our experience shows that being in happiness and bliss are our more preferred state of being. But let's just kind of break that down of what that looks like because we can always stay in these higher level of emotions. We're only using higher and lower so we can get the visual of what we're talking about and trying to see it.

in our mind's eye and experience it in a different way and start to kind of pull it apart. So what happens is when we're always chasing the happiness and then the moment that sadness or anger or regret or any of these other feelings come up, then we think that we've done something wrong. And now we feel like we have a problem to fix. But when we look at emotions as just allowing them to be and allowing them to just be.

present as they are without trying to change them or make them different, we can just allow them and allow them to pass through. Because the problem with chasing only positive emotions is it leads to resistance and denial of our full human experience. Because we're saying, I can't be this or my life isn't good unless I'm always happy or unless I'm always joyous. And that's just simply not how it works.

They need to break it to you, but if you look at your life, you haven't always just been happy. You haven't always just been in this joyous experience. And so what I always like to tell people to do is look at that neutral space that's right there in the middle of that. If we have a spectrum, we have a scale and like we have what seems to go up as our high level of emotions and then what seems to go down beneath that flat line of what are more of our negative emotions.

then they're really extreme at the top peak and at the bottom peak. You'll know that you always come back to kind of this more neutral state where things are just kind of good, right? There's not nothing much as rock in the boat. It's just a very, very relaxed state of being. And then boom, you have your high peak and boom, you have your low peak and things are fine and we're not judging ourselves because we think we need it to be getting caught up in this really.

imaginary state of just blissed out all the time. There's such a difference between being calm and having a state of peace and being in happiness and bliss all the time and being calm and being in a state of peace and having, you know, anger and depression and regret all the time. And so what I want to walk you through today is looking at how to get back to that more neutral space of that emotional state.

And when we get to that neutral space, it really comes from the importance of not labeling our emotions as bad or unwelcome because that makes them more powerful. So I want you to think about this in your life. So if when you're angry, you say things like, I wish I wasn't angry. I wish I wasn't yelling at my kids. I wish I wasn't mad at my spouse. I wish that this problem wasn't here for me today. I wish I wasn't overreacting.

I wish I wasn't doing this, right? So we have all of these thoughts that now get attached and associated with the feeling. And now what we're doing is we're feeding that feeling. We're giving it food and it's growing and growing and growing and growing. I wish I wasn't angry. I wish I wasn't sad. And all the reasons why you shouldn't be these things. And then even all the reasons how you can not be those things anymore. What you've just done is you've given so much thought.

and attention to that feeling and you have given it so much meaning. You're mad because this happened and so now you're labeling and attaching that emotion to something outside of you to an external event instead of just allowing the feeling to be present. So you understand how that happens when you're angry. Now what about when you're happy? You don't think, oh, I wish I wasn't happy anymore. Gosh, I wish this happiness would just go away. No, you just allow the happiness or the joy.

to be present until it's not anymore. Right? So you're not giving it the level of thought and attention that you do the more unwelcome feelings that you have. And I always like to just look at this because joy and happiness is very fleeting. It just comes right through us and it's because we're not gripping onto it. It's because we're not trying to push it away. We're not trying to make it not present in our life. If anything, we're trying to amplify it.

The way that we do this is we try to amplify the happiness by completely omitting the sadness. And I know it's very paradoxical, but we can't do it. That's not how it works. Because the more we focus on omitting and completely dissolving certain emotions in our life, that's what gets our entire attention. And so that's what grows and grows and grows and grows and grows.

And so we have to really understand that where we put our attention is where things grow. And so we don't always just want to put our attention to being happy all the time because we can't always be happy all the time. We live in this world, this reality gives us challenges and we're not always going to be happy about them necessarily, but we can always know that we can handle them. So that's why we come back to this more neutral space of not saying it's good or bad. It's just saying it's not really preferable.

I don't prefer to set in a state of sadness. So I want to, well, I'm going to come back to this neutral space, but I'm going to come back to this neutral space, not by shaming myself about this, this emotion, not by shaming and feeling like it shouldn't be present because that's not helpful. If you look back at your life, you know, it's not gotten you out of anything. Just added to it. And so if you look at it a lot differently and you start to think, how can I come back to this more neutral space?

not doing anything. Now you're like, come on, Kayla, I've listened this long and I don't even know what you're talking about and now you're telling me that I can't do anything. I just have to allow these emotions to be present. And the answer is yes, because judging emotions keeps us trapped in the loop of resistance. And so there's such an important piece when we...

start to really just absorb, observe our emotions without attaching any meaning to them, right? So if you're mad, it's not, I'm mad because my kids aren't listening, or I am so angry because my best friend could care less about what I'm doing and I'm trying to talk to her and all she does is tell me about her own problems and I am drowning.

Right? Or my business. Nobody's looking at my business online. I keep putting it out there and I'm just not good enough and I feel so sad and I feel so X, Y, Z. Right? Now we can go to the other side with happiness. I'm so happy because my spouse is showing me love. I'm so happy because my business is going in the direction that I want it to. I'm here to tell you that either one of these, we cannot attach labels

to the emotions from the outside because nothing is giving us those emotions. Our emotions are generated within us. So let's take a bit of a pause and really start to understand that before we move on because all of your emotions are generated inside of you. Nobody gives you happiness. Nobody gives you anger. Nobody does any of those things. Remember when you were a kid, you were told nobody makes you angry. And then you look around and you're like, but everyone's making everyone angry.

And that comes back to what I like to talk about often, which is our radical responsibility. We're radically responsible for what comes up within us and what comes up within us are these emotions. They are generated inside of us. Happiness is generated in us as a result, oftentimes, of what's happening outside. Anger is generated inside of us as a result of what's happening outside. And so when we change our relationship...

to what's happening outside, we change our relationship with ourselves. And we stop putting that label directly on, oh, I'm happy because this is going well. It's I'm happy because I'm happy. This is happiness. Happiness is present right now. Let me look around and see what may be contributing or mirroring back to me my happiness so I can get some more of that because again, it's the more preferable state of being and you know, just existing.

And then it's also, oh, I'm angry. Anger is happening right now. This is anger. Where is this anger generating from? Not from the outside. Right, that's where it gets really convoluted. We can look at happiness and say, yes, my life is great, all these different things, but we always want to assign blame to sadness and anger because it feels a lot better for it to be somebody else's fault.

then for us to step into a high level of personal responsibility and take responsibility for why anger is present within us. And that's when we have to go through a lot of this non-judgment. So we practice non-judgment with ourselves. We say this is anger. This is sadness. It is present. And I can accept that these emotions are simply just visitors that are passing through. They're not going to always be here. But one thing I really encourage you to do to go beyond that.

So a lot of times when we get into kind of even like spiritual practices, we're asked to be the observer of our life and then separate from that experience and don't go into thought. Don't think about it. Just allow it. And that can becomes really hard to sustain for a lot of my clients because thinking is so relevant. We can't outrun thinking. We can't outrun emotion and we can't outrun thinking. It is ever present.

in our life. And so one way to be able to work through what we're talking about here and not let those emotions of sticky emotions, those chaotic emotions just completely overwhelm and spiral you is to do that, to create the separation. But the way I encourage you to do it is create separation and then use evaluation. So oftentimes we're taught to create the separation and just allow it. We just accept it. We just allow it to be.

But we just keep allowing it to be, yes, it does minimize it, and yes, it does dissolve the corners of it, but it doesn't dissolve it completely because we don't quite understand subconsciously why we keep arising it to the surface and why it keeps becoming present over here and over here and over here, so then more feelings of shame and blame get generated. So one thing that I really encourage you to do is not just simply allow it to be, of course,

I encourage you to accept and allow. And then question everything. That's when we get into this non-judgment questioning. Why is this present in my life? Why am I so angry about this? Why does it make me feel so depleted and worthless whenever somebody doesn't like my post or share my post or say yes to my offers?

And you're really starting to get very inquisitive with yourself. You're really starting to open up a dialogue and a conversation with yourself like you haven't before. And so what you're doing is you're not saying, I am so sad and upset because this happened. You're saying, oh, this is, this is me being sad. This is what's happening in my external world.

Why does this happening in my external world lead to sadness? What does that mean about me? What does it, what do I think that that portrays in my life or about me? Where is the story associated with right now? Of course you have to go back into that TRM. And if you're not familiar with that, then I will, as always, I'll have a link in the show notes because I talk about it and reference it all the time. And it's absolutely crucial for this work is because you're starting to work through.

why these emotions are here anyway. And so going back to the, we work through that, and then we go back to the conditioning side of this from our conditioned experience from society that tells us that we have to be happy all the time. You have to be a good, you have to be a good girl, right? Don't rock the boat. Don't make other people upset. Don't do any of those things. So then when you start to get a little bit angry, or you start to feel some of these different emotions that are more.

less desirable than the ones that you've been told not to feel, it starts to get a little heavy because now you're confused. You're like, but I feel this, but I'm going to suppress this, and I'm not going to acknowledge this, and I'm going to judge the hell out of it also along the way because I'm not supposed to be this. I'm supposed to be happy. I'm supposed to be, you know, helpful. I'm supposed to be all these things. But when we stop judging those, those what are more referred as less desirable experiences and emotions, we're

and we just allow them to be, we can step back into those more like happy, joyous experiences much more often. And so you have to also look at your conditioning. Who told me that it was not okay to be angry? Who told me that it was not okay to be this? And who told me it was okay to always be something else? You have to get in relationship with yourself where you are.

questioning everything that's coming up for you. The emotions, the thoughts, how you're associating your thoughts to your emotions. And when you actually practice separation from attaching your thoughts to your emotions, that's when you start your revolution in your life. That's when things completely start to change. That's when all the paradigms that you built for yourself start to shatter because you start to look at things a little more neutral. You start to say, okay.

That can be here and that's okay. And this is what I've always assigned blame to, or I've always labeled this as, when I'm sad and I've always given that power to somebody else because it was somebody else's fault that they made me sad instead of just saying, oh, this is my external mirror that arose sadness within me. And why does that make me sad? Why does that external experience make me sad? Well, it makes me feel like

I am not good enough or reminds me of when I was not seen when I was a small child. That's when you start to do that deeper work of understanding where these things are originated and how our conditioned experiences through life were conditioned not just from other people were conditioned through our life experiences. And that conditioning happens whenever we have an external event happen to us. And guess what we do? We have an emotion and we assign a label to it of meaning.

And so we give these things all of the meaning that they have. And I always laugh because I always say, well, what if my happiness is your anchor? Like, how do we know what that looks like and what the other person experiences? We can only know what that looks like in us, and we can only know how we have assigned our labels to the emotions and the feelings that are arising within us.

And so we can start to change that relationship with it along the way. And so we can start to separate from that attachment to it. And we can just allow it to come through us, right? Then we can get into that space of, oh, this is anger. Oh, this is happiness. These are just clouds floating through. These are just the emotional waves that we naturally go through, right? I can allow them to rise and to fall naturally without attaching to them.

And if you're at that space, wonderful, continue that separation. But make sure you're not doing that at the expense of yourself by suppressing what you really feel. Because if you're suppressing any type of guilt or judgment with your emotions, you're just gonna continue these cycles over and over and over. And that's why it's really important not just to watch these as clouds at the very beginning, but it's to understand them. I think that...

I think that the walls start to dissolve when you understand without judgment. When you can really look at your life and your experiences without judgment and without trying to say it shouldn't be this way because guess what? It is this way. It has been created this way but it doesn't have to be this way for long. You can say, this has been my way of thinking until now or it's always been like that until now and I'm ready to release it. And so,

You're looking at that, but you're being inquisitive. Why is it present to begin with? And so it can be very overwhelming where you're like, Oh my gosh, am I going to be, you know, constantly having a conversation with myself? And I'm going to say, yeah, yeah, you need to be, and you need to be having conversations with yourself because I know you're having them now having that inner war that's already going on. And it's not productive. You have two spaces fighting against each other instead of having two different dialogues in your head that are supporting you.

that are there for understanding, that are there for support, that are there for furtherment of, or betterment of yourself and that experience that you're having that gets you more into that more preferable state more often. And those are really powerful tools that you can use of just asking yourself questions and then answering and doing so without judgment and not labeling every emotion and assigning it.

something that's happening in the external world, just allow it to be present and then ask yourself why it's there. What is generating that emotion within you? And if it's something you want to continue to recreate, how could you get more of it, right? Not more of this to have less of that because now we're generating from a place of lack if we do that and we're not gonna get very far in that way. And so it's how do I generate more feelings of

appreciation for myself. What would that look like? It's not, oh, I need to stop, you know, not appreciating myself. It's just saying how can I find more ways to appreciate me? How can I find more ways to be happy and content in my everyday life without anything changing? So what you're doing is you're changing that dialogue also in your head. So you're not just always trying to

change or remove something in your life, you're looking for what's already present. And so you're starting to train your mind to see things in a much different, more neutral space of what's already here without shaming different aspects of you without wishing that it wasn't there. And so I'm going to give you a couple of tangible exercises that you can use to really ground yourself into this and notice it. So

What will happen often is like, well, how do I notice when I start to spiral? So I want you to really think about in your life when you start to spiral in a direction that you feel is not supported for you, right? When you start to a second guess, when you start to shame and blame yourself and criticize yourself. And then in those moments, you that's your immediate awareness. Okay. This is here. Now what? Right now, what do I do with this? Well, now

What am I really feeling and why am I feeling that? What is that attached to? What story have I assigned to this feeling? And then of course you have to ask yourself, what do I gain? What's my payoff from continually staying in this feeling? What do I gain from blaming somebody else in return? And if that's a bit confusing, again, download the TRM resource and it'll help you understand this aspect of payoff.

It's really important to ground yourself in it. And now what's true, then what can I release? How can I move through this emotion without attaching to it? And now it be coming my entire freaking identity of sadness or even happiness, because I know a lot of people whose identity is happiness, right? They have to be happy all the time. And those people who have to be happy all the time, I'm here to break it to you, are not happy all the time. They're living in a state of constant perfection and constant trying to make

everyone around them happy, but they are breaking inside. So we're not trying to become this or become that because neither of these emotions are good or bad. They just are, emotions just are. They're just things that arise within us and move through us. So allow them to move through you. Allow your anger to move through you just like you allow happiness to move through you. Without.

tightening your grip on it so hard that it doesn't have anywhere to go except for stay stuck. And so when we embrace this full spectrum of emotions, it really comes down to there's usually a purpose or a message behind the emotions, right? So we're using emotions as a guide for that deeper self-awareness and healing. You understand that everything that we've talked about today has led us to understanding that it's trying to signal us to look at something.

Right? I'm angry because not because this person did something to me, but because I feel anger at the result of somebody else's actions. And why do I feel that? What does that mean about me? What is the story that I've attached to that? What is the identity or the beliefs that are associated with that feeling associated with that action? So it's not about changing the other person's actions. It's about understanding why you feel the way you feel as a result of

XYZ. And there's so much freedom that comes from accepting emotions as they are rather than constantly trying to change or judge them or making your experience be anything other than what it is. You're just allowing that state to be and then deepening your understanding. You're using the world around you as a way to go deeper inward to understand yourself, to change that relationship with yourself, to then change your experience.

to have that more preferable experience, to be in that more neutral state, to allow the big peaks and the big drops, if you will, to just be those without consuming you and becoming your entire identity. And so it's really this beautiful space of this give and take and this really neutral space that we're looking for when we just stop judging our emotions and we use them as a guide for deeper self-awareness and healing, things really do start to change.

So I really encourage you to give yourself a bit of a break. Don't be so hard on yourself, right? When these emotions come, just know that they're natural. If you've been working through some of these things for a while and they're still present, that's okay, right? That's okay. You don't have to dissolve all of it at one time. And just because it comes back, it means that there's a little bit more you need to see. It means that there's a deeper level of understanding you need to have about either the situation or the emotion that's arising.

when the story that you're attaching to that emotion. So really powerful when we step into this space of full radical responsibility, because we take acceptance for our life and we take that responsibility and things can really start to change. Then we can actually change our external world. All right, so just remember that emotions aren't meant to be managed or categorized as good or bad. They're just meant to be experienced. And by allowing yourself to feel that without judgment, you open up space for true healing.

and true self discovery. And that's a really powerful aspect that I really want you to set into. And I really want you to believe for yourself. So if today's episode resonated with you, don't forget to share it, leave a review, make a comment. And really, I encourage you to subscribe for more meaningful conversations. And remember that emotions are just energy. They're moving through you. And you have the power to be compassionate and to witness your own experience without judging yourself.

So see you next time on the emotional revolution.