Learning to Tolerate Emotions

I have been so absent from my blog! This deep exploration process that I've been doing has been fantastic, and it has consumed my thoughts, energy and time.

And, I really want to share with you what I've learned.

I wrote previously about my limiting belief. The overpowering fear that came with that belief was public humiliation. Not something I think anyone wants to experience, but it also didn't really add up related to what my life is all about.

What I realized is that there was a sticky, gooey, yucky feeling underneath that felt so bad and my fear and belief were actually simply trying to divert me from that feeling. So, the belief in action actually protected me from going deeply into feelings that were hard for me to tolerate.

Ah! I just learned a technique to deal with this. Dave Buck of Coachville calls this 'feeling gym'. Here's how I did it:

• Get into a quiet place - which for me meant my upstairs lanai in the dark.
• Bring the feeling up - I focused on feeling publicly humiliated.
• Locate the feeling in the body - for me it began in my solar plexus and moved up to the bottom of my throat.
• Investigate the body feeling - it was black and gooey and blobbish and seemed to move around and occupy a lot of space
• Stay with the body feeling and go deeply to the core, the central nugget - I just stayed with the feeling and visualized burrowing deeper and deeper into the center. .
• Note what happens - it shifted and moved into several different body parts, like it was trying to escape, but I just followed along. Interestingly,it was not uncomfortable at all to stay there once I got through the intial yuck.
• Repeat this process whenever an uncomfortable feeling comes up - I did this when I would practice speaking my truth and the anxiety came up.

In this way I expanded my ability to tolerate the feeling that came with my limiting belief.

Wow! It's amazing how this belief and the accompanying anxiety and fear is almost eliminated. The way I can tell is that I have had many long years of having trepidation of calling people on the phone. No good reason and kinda weird, but it fit right into this pattern. Now, I pick up the phone easily and call all kinds of folks. Yay!

What types of uncomforatble feelings are your beliefs protecting you from? Try the process above and stick with it until you increase your tolerance. If you need some help, let me know. I'm pretty good at it now!

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