Hey everyone, how are you doing? How was Mother’s Day? Bereaved Mother’s Day? All of that for you? Sometimes leading up to it’s the worst. Sometimes the day itself can be hard. Sometimes afterwards you can have like this emotional hangover. And sometimes it’s just fine. Like, it’s okay to be okay. Sometimes I find with my clients that They’re kind of surprised like it was okay.

And when I show them how big of a win that is, they’re like, Oh yeah, being okay. It’s pretty dang cool. So whatever you felt, I want you to know I’m here for you. I was thinking about you and just sending you all my love. Um, I had a pretty good day, pretty okay day. We had some, some fun stuff and some challenging stuff and it, it’s just part of being a human and a mother, um, and all the hats that I wear.

So, um, Really just want to celebrate you though, and celebrate your babies. No matter how many are in your arms, no matter how many people can see you are a mother and I think you are a beautiful mother. Um, I know that because you’re here, because you’re doing the work to try to improve yourself and to find different ways to do this life after loss thing.

And just life in general, because being a human. It’s hard sometimes and we need some help, but it’s also awesome. And I hope that you’re feeling some awesome in your life. But as we’re talking about mother’s day, I was actually able to help some amazing ladies in my free mother’s day coaching sessions.

And what seemed to be a theme there. was there were a lot of emotions being bottled up and pushed aside and pushed down. So many times we think in order to be strong and show up in our jobs, our families, etc. We can’t allow our emotions. In today’s episode, I’m going to share a simple analogy that will help you shift your perspective.

So you stop holding back your emotions and learn to let them flow. This is for all uncomfortable emotions you avoid. We all have our favorites. What is yours? What do you hate feeling? You might not even know what it is because we often cover it up with what we do like.

For example, you might be a punctual person and you can feel proud of that. It’s a good trait in our society. But you might be avoiding an emotion by making sure you’re early to everything. What would you feel if you walked in late? What would you believe about yourself if you were late? Where did those beliefs come from?

Maybe you had a parent who taught you that being early showed respect, and if you’re late, you believe people will think you’re being disrespectful. That is so out of alignment with who you are that it would feel shameful and embarrassing. So you make sure that you’re on time. Can you see how exploring it coming from this angle can be so interesting when you do it with curiosity and compassion?

So just as you’re listening to this, just think, what are those emotions that I don’t like? Those emotions that I avoid? What And if you’re having a hard time coming up with them, just try flipping it like this. Like what emotions do I like? What things do I like? And maybe am I, or what do I believe about myself?

And maybe as part of that me avoiding emotions that I don’t like. I’m going to share this little visualization for you to use when you do notice some stuck emotions that you want to get rid of. Some studies have shown that if you allow an emotion, it only lasts 90 seconds at most before it starts to dissipate.

In grief, I mean, we might be longer than that where we’re feeling, um, a lot of emotions for a longer time. But I’m talking about maybe for the intense, intense emotions, um, you can give yourself space to feel them. You can have a good shower, have a cry in there, whatever, these emotions will not last forever.

All emotions are temporary. This goes for the ones that we like and the ones that we don’t like. A lot of times we wish this wasn’t true, but I’m really grateful that we’re designed this way. We generally wish the good feelings would last forever, and the bad ones, if they come at all, can come for just a minute.

But if that was the case, how would we learn what we needed to learn from all our emotions? I want you to get really good at every single emotion. Once you can do this, you won’t be afraid of anything, not even being afraid. So I want you to notice the energy that comes with wanting to hold onto the good times.

It’s a bit of a scarcity way of thinking and being. Um, Maybe you’re even in the moment living the dream of yours and inside your clench so tightly to not losing it. that it takes away from the moment, right? And we find this a lot after grief when we’re in happiness. It’s like we almost feel guilty or we wonder if it’s going to last or we’re, we’re so afraid that the good things will be taken away from us just like our baby was that it can be a really difficult place to be.

So give yourself lots and lots of love, but also know you don’t have to keep living this way. There is a different way. Or if you’re feeling some uncomfortable emotions and you are doing everything you can to get rid of them, that also feels tight and stiff, like you’re defending yourself.

What I want to encourage you to do is to get into the flow of your emotions. Let them not be permanent. Allow them to come and to go. Welcome them all. So here’s the picture I want you to paint in your mind, or if you’ve been to a place you can like remember, but what this is like when we allow our emotions to get stuck, when we push them down, when we don’t want them, it’s like we start a log jam inside of ourselves.

So a picture, a river, a stream, whatever it is, um, Let’s say a middle sized creek, but logs start piling up, and these are the emotions. So something stops. There’s a log. Then things start building up, right? The water keeps flowing because the water’s gonna flow, but this log is in the way. Well, soon enough, there’s a lot of garbage.

There’s more sticks. There’s twigs. There’s, you know, all the things that are in a creek. that are going to build up behind this and almost make like a little dam. And it’s going to continue to get worse and worse. Now once there’s kind of this wall of debris and logs and sticks and garbage and whatever it is, behind it there’s all this yucky churning water.

Have you ever seen this? It’s like the things behind get stuck. The water isn’t clear anymore. Um, you can’t see the bottom. You’ve just got this, this stuff that just keeps going around and around. Sometimes it’ll even make this like little whirlpool, you know, if it’s by the edge of the bank and there’s a log jam and sometimes there’s that foam that builds up in streams and it’s just kind of gross.

Then there’s a lot of pressure pushing on this pile, like it’s building and building, but there’s all this pressure coming from behind and pushing on it. And this can be kind of overwhelming to this little log jam. And what sometimes happens is it will burst, right? Maybe just something comes along and It just bursts out and it kind of destroys what’s downstream, right?

It, you know, everything goes at once, all the yucky water. I’m sure whatever little fishies are in there, they’re not very happy. Have you ever had that happen? So again, this is an analogy for emotion. So have you ever had it where you’re like resisting the emotion, resisting it, resisting it, pushing it down, pushing it down, holding it back, holding it back that energy.

Right, and then boom, like one thing happens and you unleash and so many of us feel so terrible, um, especially if you are a parent to living kids, or you have a significant other, sometimes the people around us, the people closest to us, they’re those people downstream of our just dam bursting and they get the brunt of all of that.

And it’s not very fun and we usually feel so much shame after it happens and it’s just awful. Um, we feel terrible, right? Because we like, didn’t mean to. We didn’t know that our dam was gonna burst right at that moment. But it happens. And the thing is, eventually, you got a couple of choices, right? Either it’s gonna burst or Maybe just everything behind it is going to die.

Maybe it just dries up. The water goes a different way and you end up being numb and lifeless and there’s nothing anymore, but I want to give you a different option. So again, we’re thinking of this visual. We’re thinking of this, these emotions at being like a log, getting stuck in a log jam, um, everything churning around, churning around and building pressure.

I want to show you a different way. So, what we can do, instead of allowing this to happen, and some of us, we’re in this constant cycle. It’s like, hold it back, hold it back, build it up, build it up, build it up, burst. And then over and over and over again. And we can’t figure out why we can’t get out of this cycle.

Have you ever felt like that? Well, here’s what you do. You can clean this stream of yours, this stream of emotions out regularly, right? If we can just get the debris, if we can make sure stuff keeps moving, if we notice anything coming down the, the, um, water there, anything coming up, we’re just going to move it to the side, right?

We’re just going to grab it. It’s not a big deal. So we’re going to clean it out regularly. Another thing we can do is not be afraid of what comes down the stream, right? There’s all kinds of stuff that can come down a stream. We never know, but we don’t need to be afraid of it. And I think so many of us, especially after loss, we are just afraid of the emotions.

We’re afraid of feeling terrible. We’re afraid of so many things. And legitimately, we’ve probably been traumatized. Most of us have, so we have a reason, but that doesn’t give you an excuse to not work on this because you absolutely can heal after trauma. You can learn to allow emotions and not be afraid of them.

Totally 100 percent possible. And that is what I want for you. And I can talk about it a lot here on the podcast coaching with me. We’re going to go way, way deeper and apply this. So if this is resonating with you and you’re like, Oh my gosh, I need to deal with this and I need to learn how to let my emotions flow instead of being all jammed up.

Come and talk to me. There’s a link in the show notes. Okay, but yeah, don’t be afraid of what’s coming down. It’s all good. Another way we avoid and clear these log jams regularly is, don’t expect the stream to stay the same. Nothing in nature stays the same. I don’t know why we think that our emotions should be always the same.

They’re not going to be. It’s okay that we have good days and bad days and blah days and like awesome days and all of it in between. It’s not supposed to be the same. Literally if all of us would just stop thinking that we should feel the same thing about stuff always, uh, there would be a lot less suffering in our brains and in our hearts.

So another thing I want to say is that stagnant water. It’s kind of gross, right? It’s gross and it builds up and it festers and it like grows on itself. And it kind of attracts that yuckiness. So again, we want to not allow it to get yucky and stagnant in there. Right? We want water to flow. If you’ve ever been to like some gross mosquito pond, or I don’t know, when I was growing up, it was always like old tires.

I don’t know why there were so many old tires in the eighties and nineties, but there’d be like old tires laying around and it would rain and there’d get watered them and they’d get full of bugs and you know, just yucky slimy things that nobody wants to deal with. Right. But that’s kind of what we think.

We think I want everything to stay the same. I want things to stop flowing. I want things to stop changing. I want. my water to be stagnant, but we actually don’t want that. We don’t want the yucky stagnant still water. We want to let things flow.

And with that a little bit, like I said before, we want to allow for seasons. A stream in the woods might freeze in the winter. might freeze on the top and be flowing underneath, might be drier in August, might be deeper in spring. There’s all these changes. It might, it moves within its banks. It changes, it diverts it.

It really is a heart of an ecosystem.

So in your life, how can you let your emotions go in seasons? Maybe there’s times where things are slower, where things are cooler, Or where things are really rushing down. Can you just let it be what it is? Can you allow for those seasons in your life? And again, understanding seasons never stop changing.

Seasons don’t hold still. Seasons aren’t supposed to be, it’s funny cause we just, we fight with the weather so much as humans too. It’s a little bit of the same. We want the, the spring to be consistently like, Cooler than, warmer than, warmer than, warmer than, warmer than, get hot into summer, right? And yet we know in spring, like, the weather is all over the place.

And so we spend a lot of time complaining about that. But let’s allow for it. Let’s allow that to be. Let’s allow being a human, being a part of nature. Nature does its own thing. And it shifts and it changes. And it’s beautiful. Okay, so, don’t forget you are part of nature. That’s how it’s supposed to be.

Streams are my favorite place. Like literally I love to go in the mountains and play in the water. I love sending little pine cones or sticks down the stream to race with my kids. I love just listening to the water bounce over the rocks and putting my feet in the and just cooling off in the summer and my kids love building little dams and little things and playing in the water.

It’s awesome. If you’re feeling stuck in emotion. I want to challenge you to let it flow. Literally just remember this in your mind, write it down on a post it. Just say, Amy said, let my emotions flow. Nothing is permanent. No emotion is permanent and they are not supposed to be. They are supposed to be ever moving and twinkling and like rippling down through our lives.

It’s all part of who we are. what it is to be alive. This is living. Let’s have more life in our living. Let’s stop holding back and building dams and building this pressure and doing these cycles where we burst and then build it back up and burst and build it back up. Let’s just let it flow. That’s what I hope for you.

If you have any questions, you can always reach out to me. I’m over on Instagram at amy. smoothstonescoaching. And if you want a little more help, come and talk to me about joining my LIFT program, my pregnancy after last peace program, or something I really want to recommend as we go into summer and schedules are busy and we’ve, we’re kind of all over the place, I’ve got peace in my pocket.

It is. On demand coaching through an app called Voxer. It’s just voice or text messaging that goes back and forth. We will meet. We will talk. We will have one full session to get you all set up with your goals. And then you can just reach out to me anytime you want on demand in the moment to talk through what you have going on and ask me any questions, get coaching.

It’s like having a wise really good friend. in your pocket at all times. And just knowing that I’m there, it’s going to bring you a ton of peace. So, uh, go to smoothstonescoaching. com forward slash peace. And I will see you next time.