Hey friends, how’s it going out there? I hope that you’re having a lovely day and if you’re having a not so lovely day, I hope you’re using the tools that I teach you here to help you to manage your way through it and to take care of yourself. You are doing a great job.

I just got a new book and it is by Allison Faulkner, and it’s called You Are Already Awesome. So I want you to remind yourself what Allison always says, which is you are already awesome. And you were doing a great job. Just keep those on repeat. Now I’ve got something exciting. I may have told you about it before, but in just a few weeks, my daughter is getting married and that’s been a whole lot of fun and some stress as you can imagine.

But we’re really excited for her and this is a great time to reset. School is starting and I am offering. One-on-one coaching is starting in September. I’m gonna get this wedding taken care of, and then I’ll be starting out with some clients. So if you have been thinking about coaching with me and you would like to do it one-on-one, I have a three month program for you.

All you need to do is go in the show notes and hop on a connection call. We’ll see if coaching is a good fit for you and how I can help you. To get what you want. If you just feel stuck, you get to feel unstuck. If you are pregnant after loss and you are terrified, I’m gonna help you manage that anxiety.

If you’re trying to make a decision, I’m gonna help you. If you’re struggling in your relationships, I am there for you. The cool thing about working one-on-one is I do have a program and a lot of tools that I’m gonna teach you, but it’s really custom to you and where you are. So whether you’ve just lost your baby recently, or you’ve been doing this grief thing for a while and you’re ready to move forward and hit some big goals.

I can help you because everything I teach you here on the podcast is even 10 times more powerful when you work with a coach. So I really encourage you to sign up for a consult call. I will be available for those for the next little while, and then we’ll get you all scheduled to start in September. All right.

I wanted to talk today about processing emotions. I was looking back and it was episode 11 where I talked about how to feel your feelings, and now we are on episode 112. I. It’s crazy how fast that has gone. But if you haven’t listened to episode 11, definitely go check that one out. But I do talk a lot about processing emotions and feeling your feelings, and I, I got this question recently and I think it’s a really common one, so I wanted to address it.

Somebody said, Well, how do I process emotions when I’m in the middle of life? I don’t have time to stop and like sit in a lotus pose and put my hands on my heart and breathe and just process emotions, right? Sometimes there’s this idea that, that it takes a lot of time that you need to stop everything and process emotions, and that is just not realistic.

I feel like most people feel pretty busy and sometimes we have that time. And if you do have time and space and you can pull out a journal or you can really sit with your emotions, totally do it. But a lot of times we don’t have that kind of time or space. So today I’m gonna help you really understand how to feel your feelings, how to process through an emotion, even if you just have a little bit of time or you’ve got all kinds of things going on around you.

Emotions are just sensations in our body, so they are. Things that we feel, some of them we like. I call those comfortable emotions, and there are ones that we do not like. I call those uncomfortable emotions. There is no good or positive emotions or bad or negative emotions. There are just sensations in our body, and when we break it down that way, it really helps us get a handle on what’s going on.

And when we’re willing to feel these, we usually find that they’re not as, Scary as we thought they were, especially with grief. Now, when we’re grieving, a lot of times we’re extra sensitive and we’re extra anxious, and we’re afraid that if we give ourselves a space to process emotions, we’re gonna fall into this deep, dark hole that’s filled with tears and tissues and all of that.

But I promise you, if you learn this skill, you will be able to handle your life. So much better. And that is my first point. I really want you to understand. Feeling your feelings is a skill that you can learn. And it’s okay if it’s clumsy at first. It’s okay if it’s awkward. It’s okay if you feel like you’re not doing it right.

That’s okay. That’s part of the process. Anything new that we try is gonna feel awkward at first, but the more you practice, the better you’ll get. And. It is just a skill. I wish we could teach everyone in the world how they could process their emotions instead of reacting, resisting, or avoiding them.

Because I think that’s where so much pain and just heartache comes into life is when people are acting out on their emotions or suppressing their emotions or avoiding their emotions, right? But we wanna learn to allow them. I also was listening to someone, um, teaching who was saying that really if you let yourself process of an emotion, it can take about 90 seconds for it to lessen and dissipate and, and kind of melt away.

And that is the goal, is to let the emotion be there and hopefully just get it to a manageable state so that we can go on with our busy schedules. So here’s a few tips on just feeling those emotions and those sensations in your body. So when I say that, it’s like if you were to describe your experience of an emotion, Could you describe it to a Martian who has never experienced feelings or like a robot?

If you’re like an old-timey Star Trek nerd like I was when I was growing up, think about data on Star Trek. He was this Android who was very human-like. But he did not understand emotions and so he wasn’t able to feel them. So a lot of times they had to describe it to him. So if you know who I’m talking about, pretend you’re describing how you feel to data.

So if I was feeling anxious, I might say my breathing is really shallow and high. My heart seems to be moving faster than usual. I have a heavy feeling in the pit of my stomach. And it moves around and my body feels flushed and hot, right? And so you go through that process and it’s, you can call it like a body scan or just really noticing, again, sometimes that seems like it would take a long time, but it doesn’t.

You just. Sit with it and say, oh, the ends of my fingers are tingling, or I feel heavier, I feel light. Right? Of course, we can do this for positive emotions as well. Sometimes as grievers and as busy humans, we really don’t take the time to process and feel and experience the comfortable, good emotions. We either brush them off.

Or we actively push them away, and I don’t want you to do that. I want you to let yourself celebrate you, enjoy your life, and truly like lean into the good parts of life. So this is where if you go to that episode, how to fill your feelings, it’s very much more in depth. I’m not gonna touch on it here cause I wanna keep this brief, but basically you do that, you just go from your head to your toes and describe what sensations you are feeling.

And the funny thing is when we do that and we take a step back, we become the watcher of ourselves. Now, this is an Eckhart Tole, uh, term, but becoming the watcher, you witness yourself experiencing the emotion, seeing yourself, having the feelings as if you’re sitting across the room, so you have a little bit of distance between the emotion and you, and, and that is a beautiful place to be because we’re not deep in it, especially if it’s like you’re feeling overwhelmed or you’re feeling.

Triggered or you’re feeling anything, you just get to notice those sensations and realize, you know what? They’re not as scary as I thought they would be. For example, excited and nervous. Basically feel exactly the same in our body, right? We’ve got the butterflies in the stomach. We’ve got the fast heart rate.

We’re maybe sweating a little, but we like feeling excited if we don’t like feeling nervous. But they’re really the same thing. When you break it down and take a step back. Now the next step is you can hold this feeling in a place of peace, which means you just let it be and, and this is the part that I think when we talk about, I don’t have time to process emotions.

I don’t know how to process emotions. When we say hold it in a place of peace, there’s no time limit on that. It might just be for a minute. It might be while you are doing things. I know for me, with grief, especially early on after Lauren died, it just was always there. Like that heaviness was always there.

The tears were always almost going to fall. I don’t think I wore makeup that entire first year because I just thought, why? I’m, I’m gonna cry. I might cry at any moment, and that’s okay. Now, I really don’t love wearing makeup, so it was easy for me to do that, but really it was just, My heart is heavy. I miss her.

I’m just gonna bring that with me, and I’m gonna be a mom, and I’m gonna serve in church, and I’m gonna talk to people and I’m gonna do the things I need to do, and it’s just going to be there. But I just recognize it and acknowledge it and say, yeah, my heart feels heavy today. And that’s because it’s grief.

And grief is my friend. Grief is not my enemy, and I’m going to allow it to stay there as long as I need to. Right? If you are feeling really stressed, I want you to notice what’s happening in your body. Is your nervous system activated? Is there something you can do to calm that down and then just deal with that emotion on its own?

Right? Can you just hold it and feel it and be like, wow, I can feel that, you know, the tingling, the racing, the whatever the, the sensations are in your body, say, I can feel that, that stress name it. And know why it’s there, and just say, yeah, I’m stressed cuz I’ve got all these things on my list and I’m running behind.

And just let it be right? Breathe into it, lean into it, allow it to stay. I want you to really think about maybe there’s a couple of emotions that you really don’t like that you’re having on a regular basis. Maybe your top two or three emotions that you feel that you wish were different. We need to just lean into those, allow for them and process them.

And that can simply mean you go throughout your day and you just, when you notice it, you acknowledge it, you do a quick body scan, and you just let it be there. And you keep going with your life. You do not have to take a lot of time or a lot of energy on this, but I promise you the return on investment of becoming the watcher of your thoughts and the watcher of your emotions of noticing.

Being curious and loving yourself in your emotions and giving yourself the space to be open to all the emotions. A lot of what we do is spend a huge amount of energy being afraid of emotions, especially grief. Especially like we’re just afraid of emotions. But if you know how to process them, if you know that emotions are just sensations in your body and that you can totally handle them, your life opens up.

So I really, really recommend, especially on those emotions that you notice you’re most afraid of. Maybe you have a due date coming up or a birthday or the holidays. We’ve got October coming up, and that can be really emotional for a lot of baby loss families. If you notice yourself being afraid, just let go of that resistance.

Let yourself process the emotion and do it while you’re living life. One doesn’t cancel out the other. You do not have to stop. Because if that was the case, a lot of us would really have a struggle with that, because I don’t know about you, but I just don’t have a ton of quiet time. I have six living kids.

I’ve got a husband. I, it’s just, it’s busy and I can still take the time to notice. Oh, I’m kind of grief today, or, oh, I am feeling a little bit embarrassed about something I said yesterday. Right. None of that is a problem. I just notice those sensations in my body. I carry them, I process them. I might take a deep breath.

I might do something to calm my nervous system and just ground myself, and I keep going on with my day. This is absolutely doable. I would never teach you something that I didn’t feel like you could master, and that wasn’t worth a little bit of time and a little bit of energy because like I said, the payoff is huge.

When you are not afraid of any emotion, you can do anything you want. You know that you can handle anything, and you have that confidence to tackle life after a loss. This is what I teach all my clients. This is what I want for you. So come and talk to me. Ask me questions. Reach out to me on Instagram or come visit my website, smooth stones coaching.com.

You can do this. You can process emotions with a minimal effort and a minimal time, and just keep building that skill until you feel like, yeah. I have got this even on the days where the emotions get the better of you. You’re gonna process some love for you because you’re a human, and being a human is hard sometimes.

I’ll see you next time. Are you tired of feeling like your baby’s death was somehow your fault? Go tostones coaching.com and get my free mini course. How to Stop Blaming Yourself After Loss.