Out of the Frying Pan and into Freedom

We all have the emotions that drive us to action, or cause us to be inactive.

Even keeled, hey, life’s journey becomes a smooth sail on a crystal clear ship. But life isn’t always like that. Sometimes we capsize, and it’s often during those overwhelming times that opportunities are closest within reach to change our reality to how we see fit.

When we learn to navigate emotional waves beyond the reactionary cycle, we can streamline that momentum to passionately boost our efforts into whatever area we’re drawn. Career, hobbies, relationships, personal projects and dreams realized are a few examples.

Grieve gracefully; find the Joy that is both openly enthusiastic and quietly contented; see anxiety and fear slip into excitement and welcoming anticipation. Wading our feet entirely in the emotional ocean, or spectrum if you will, while staying afloat translates to being buoyant in the heart with a head above water.

Walk on water, you say? Consider it a figurative playfulness for learning how to surf your soul’s vibrant sense of living without being pulled under by the crash of emotionally charged life experiences. The highs and lows will still be there enticing our curiosity, assisting as reference points and leading us to find what we truly want to create in life.

The difference is knowing your emotions like a close friend and how each one can help you or what they’re telling you in their own way. Struggle dissolves, solutions arise, and opportunities arrive in perfect timing. Freedom, like you’ve never experienced before in the true sense of the word, becomes the backdrop of life.

Developing Your Emotional Game

Adding Sheila Applegate’s 20ish Life Hacks of being Consciously Awesome to your daily game plan will help you to Discover Your Brilliance! It facilitates movement in mind and body, freeing up the stiff parts of these faculties of ours, making more room for us to consciously and confidently make choices that are in our highest interest and most beneficial.

The emails and exercises of these 20ish Life Hacks will assist you to bring fun into all areas of your life and the best part is the ‘learning by doing,’ so engaging in them feels more like play than anything else.

You can learn to integrate this attitude into everything you do, ultimately freeing you from any idea of ever having had to struggle. Our lives harmonize with the flux of the tides, and we become fluid, flexible, and capable in those areas where we might have felt reluctant, resistant or stuck before.

Emotions are to us like the ocean is to fish – we’re constantly swimming in them whether we’re aware of them or not. They stay within us until we acknowledge them, allow ourselves to feel them, express them, and then based on how we express them, either constructively or not, they are allowed to pass through us and we can move on.

Ipso facto, we have to deal with emotions and the effect they have in our decision making, health and sense of well-being whether we want to or not. We weren’t taught how to process our emotions in school, and only at home perhaps if our parents or guardians were in tune with their own.   There is no ‘one way’ to go about doing it as everyone has their own response and processes differently. However, there are some basic guidelines to emotional processing that will assure you the health of your relationships and most importantly, the health within you.

Here is a step-by-step offering that may serve as a guideline process if you are just getting in tune with your emotions or if you ever may feel overwhelmed by them.

Step 1 – Acknowledge any emotions in the moment.

Step 2 – Assess whether you are capable of remaining present in the situation/environment from a calm, centered state of mind; If so, go to Step 3. If not, go to Step 4

Step 3 - From your well-founded center, use your communication skills to flesh out the situation into one of understanding as best you can and then let go – you have done your part and can allow yourself to feel good about it, nurtured by your healthy, centered heart via Self-Love & state of mind.

Step 4 - If you feel overwhelmed by your emotions in a particular situation/environment, remove yourself from it until you can process those emotions in whatever way you see fit that allows you to actually get them out. You wouldn’t feel comfortable remaining in a situation that might cause you react in a way you’d regret later, so make sure you aren’t brooding over the situation by yourself either.

Step 5 – Once you have processed those emotions and reached a level of understanding (accepting the situation or agreeing to disagree/let go) within yourself, relocate that sense of Self-Love and centeredness within you which is your personal foundation. The situation has passed, and so now you can confidently move on. There are so many other aspects of Life to involve yourself with, no need to dwell on past events. By this time you have done the work that will see you grow into a fuller you.

In that way, if a similar situation occurs again that caused the reactionary emotional distress, it may be the opportunity to confirm for yourself that you indeed have learned the lesson, which adds to your sense of confidence and spiritual strength. Or the recurring situation may show that you have more work to do if you feel your emotions knock you out of alignment with your center again: if the situation causes you to feel distress. If the latter is the case, repeat the process from Step 1 again. And this time, try to have FUN with it!

Coasting with your emotions and others’, learning to work with and work out the deals you’re allotted in life from that buoyant, fluid and flexible space is what provides that freedom of ‘happiness’ that we’re all looking for. It doesn’t mean that we’ll be happy all the time, for how can we know happiness without sadness, joy without grief, and love without fear?

We can feel the consistency and groundedness of contentment no matter the emotion, however, by remaining centered in our personal truth. If there’s one thing to take from this little excerpt, know the reserve of power that our emotions contain can propel us to do marvelous things when we embrace and train them creatively.