Hey mama. Welcome to the Inside Out Mamas podcast. I'm Brittany Turley, mom of six, and I know what it's like to feel stuck and overwhelmed trying to be the perfect mom, but everything changed for me when I learned that small changes on the inside can bring big results on the outside. Each week I will share simple, yet powerful inside shifts or outside tips that can transform your approach to mothering, helping you thrive from the inside out. Ready to ditch the mom guilt and enjoy this season of life. You are in the right place. This week for part five of our summer series, we're gonna talk about why negative emotions are essential. What would life look like if you felt less, but also loved less? Laughed less and cared less. In part three of my summer series, I mentioned the book, the Giver by Lois Lowry, and just in case you didn't hear that one, it's a fiction book that's set in a future society and they've decided that they're going to eliminate all pain, suffering, war, and. Enforce the rule of sameness. So there's no colors, no music, no deep feelings, and no memories of the past. They live in this really controlled society. when they reach the age of 16, everyone's given a role to do and they just carry out their life and they don't have to think much and they don't feel hardly anything. When the main character Jonas turns 16, he's selected to be the next receiver of memory. So he is the one person entrusted to hold all the past memories. And his mentor was the giver, transfers these memories to Jonas through touch and as Jonas. Begins to feel for the first time. And spoiler alert for the book as he goes through this transformation of becoming the next giver and receiving all of these memories and feeling all of these emotions, he realizes what they have sacrificed in the name of peace. And he chooses to risk everything to bring the feelings back to the community. And that means that he has to escape the community, um, and go into the real world. And as he begins to escape, he starts to experience what real life feels like. He starts to feel hunger and cold and tired, but at the same time, he also experiences hope. And beauty and love, this book really demonstrates the importance of feeling all of the emotions. Our society. We kind of label emotions as positive emotions and negative emotions, and I think that's mostly because when we feel a so-called negative emotion, it's a signal that we need to stop doing that something or get away from that thing or. To change course. And when we feel the so-called positive emotions, it encourages us to go towards something, but if we only had these positive emotions, we wouldn't really even know we were having a positive emotion because. What makes the positive emotions feel so amazing is that we have felt the negative ones. When we have felt scared and then come around to feeling peace again. That peace feels so much better and more full than it did before because we now have this scared moment to compare it to. We know how good abundance feels when we have been lacking and felt scarcity. So it's the contrast of emotions that really help us understand and feel the so-called positive emotions. Negative emotion also serves another purpose. When we feel negative emotion, we know that that's not something that we want and that gives us good information to help us figure out what we do want. Now because I believe small changes on the inside bring big results on the outside. Each week I'm going to give you a small change challenge, something small you can do throughout the week if you choose, that could end up bringing big results to your life. So the small change challenge for this week is to answer this question for yourself. What would my life look like if I felt less, but also loved less, laughed less and cared less? And really think about what your life would look like. What thinking about this question has done for me, has helped me realize how important negative emotions really are because when I'm feeling that negative emotion and then I come around and feel the positive emotion, I appreciate it so much more because of the contrast. Now I named this podcast why Negative Emotions are Essential and a pause because this will be my last podcast for a little while. I will be taking a pause for a season. I've decided that I need to have a pause right now to focus on other areas. I hope that you enjoy the rest of your summer and remember small changes on the inside, bring big results on the outside. Thank you for joining me for another episode of Inside Out Mamas. My hope is that our time together inspires more feelings of peace, confidence, and joy in your mama journey. Thanks for listening. And remember, small changes on the inside, bring big results on the outside.