Sometimes I feel like the most powerful things that I can share with others are the things that I am experiencing in my life that teach me and deepen my personal growth. There is something new that I was able to experience recently that led me to some of that growth.
I had been having some recurring health issues and so I went in to get a few tests done. To do the tests I needed to get my blood drawn and being poked with a needle is really not my favorite thing. In the moment that I was about to get my blood drawn I made a determination to allow whatever happens to happen. I decided that instead of feeling just that pin prick, I was just going to be curious and I was going to let myself fully feel everything.
Am I avoiding feelings or events?
I thought to myself, what am I feeling in the moments leading up to getting my blood drawn? And then, what does it feel like after I have gotten the pin prick? I allowed myself to lean into these different feelings and here is what I noticed. I realized that we spend a lot of time avoiding our feelings, not necessarily avoiding events.
Here is what I mean by that. The pin prick that I received was not even like half of a second. There was a very minimal amount of pain, it really wasn’t that bad. The thing that I was avoiding was the feeling leading up to that event where I would feel badly. I did not want to feel bad, so I was avoiding anything that may be connected with me feeling badly.
There is a ton of time in our lives that we spend avoiding our feelings, and not our circumstances. Now why is that? The reason we do this is because our thoughts create our realities. Our life’s circumstances, the things that we are experiencing in life are a result of things that we first believed into truth. This might sound out there to you, but here is what I really mean by that.
When we say something, or feel something over and over again that creates a belief. This belief is what our mind then automates and in turn produces our feelings. We spend a lot of time thinking thoughts, producing feelings, and then what comes out of those feelings is what we avoid.
So when I was getting my blood drawn, I noticed that I felt a brief second of panic before the nurse placed the needle in my arm. I realized that I was scared of the feeling of panic, I wasn’t really scared of the needle in my arm.
Taking a step back
I think that what you might find if you take a step back and look at your life, there is probably a lot of your life that you are spending avoiding feelings. You may be avoiding feelings of failure, so you are only going to do things that feel successful. But, what if you just accepted how you felt and lean into and got curious about what failure feels like?
What will you find?
Do you know that all you will find is instead of this dread of failure, all that is going to do is to open up so much more opportunity for you because you are going to be open to everything instead of avoiding things and keeping yourself safe. You are choosing your thoughts and that creates a very different reality.
Don’t be afraid to look at yourself
So today, lean in and see what you notice. Do you notice anything that you might be avoiding and then look back a bit. What are you truly avoiding? Are you avoiding the dread before the event or are you avoiding the event itself? In almost every case, it is that you don’t want to feel something.
You do not want to feel bad. You don’t want to feel unwanted. You don’t want to feel like a failure. You don’t want to feel angry. You don’t want to feel frustrated. I could keep going on and on.
The problem is that you don’t want to feel things that lead to avoidance of circumstances. The circumstances were never the problem, feelings are the problem. Our feelings are always simply the result of our thoughts.
So you may be thinking, what is the easy fix that I can start with today? You need to start changing your thinking.
What can you do today?
Today, I would encourage you to take a few steps back, and track whatever your avoiding. Back up what you are avoiding to what you will feel right before the instance that you are avoiding.. Narrow it down to what you don’t want to feel. What is it that you are dreading?
Separating out those things in your life allows you to live in a more detached way, not attaching your energy to things that zap into your energy and leaves you nothing to give to others. This allows you the freedom to experience everything. This leads to a state of allowing. If you want to short circuit the system and jump into a life of abundance, take your thoughts captive and give yourself the opportunity to live life, feeling everything that life brings to you.
Don’t avoid what you are feeling It is time to let things live in you and work themselves out so that you can be a whole person running your business, living your life, being a wife, a sister, a mother and whatever your roles are. You can do it! Start Today!
