Rethinking Feelings: Clarifying Misunderstandings in the Processing of Emotions

00:00 - Speaker 1
feelings. Not only do we feel them all day long, but we've also been inundated with information on what to do with them, and lately I've seen a theme coming up that is actually getting in the way of people processing their feelings in a way that is supportive to expanding their life back out again and, in fact, what I'm seeing is people either receiving incorrect information on what to do with feelings or misunderstanding that information. What it's actually doing is leading to people doing things like inner work, journaling, meditation, in a way that is actually shrinking their life and holding them back. So in this episode today, if you feel like you've been actively engaged in trying to process your feelings through meditations or inner work or journaling or whatever your tool of choice is, but it feels like it's not really helping, or maybe, in fact, the feelings are getting more intense and actually getting more in the way of you living your life, then this episode is for you, and this episode is also for you If you feel like you have big feelings or maybe you have kind of realized you have a lot of numbness and you don't have any feelings and you don't know what to do next and maybe there's like a nervousness and getting started because you're nervous. You're going to be flooded with feelings and emotions and you won't know how to handle them. This episode is absolutely going to be massively useful for you as well. 

01:35
Welcome, welcome, welcome to the Unweaving Chronic Pain Podcast. I'm your host, dr Andrea Moore, founder of the whole self integration method, and I'm here to help you move from a life that feels like it is shrinking and getting smaller or really impacted by chronic physical or emotional pain, to take you to a life that feels expansive, that feels full of vitality, of vibrancy, of an ability to just get up and live the day that you have dreamed of. Maybe it's going for a spontaneous hike, maybe it is getting down on the floor and playing with your kids before you send them off to school in the morning, or maybe it is finally sitting down and starting or scaling that business. Wherever it feels like pain is getting in the way of living your life, I am here to help guide you out of that and help you see where pain can actually be one of the most amazing messengers for a wake up call of our life, for us to return back to our fully aligned, authentic selves. If you want to learn more about how to do that. Great news, because I am hosting a masterclass that is designed to unlock your life. I'm going to show you exactly how to move from a shrink response and I'm going to tell you what that is to a power response. In the masterclass we'll be going into detail. What each of those are is how to recognize when you're in it, because when you stay in the shrink response, it shrinks your life. When you know how to step out of that response and into the power response, that is you stepping into your personal power. When you can do that, not only do you feel more in control of your own life, more at ease, you have an ability to bring in more joy, but pain alleviates in the process. If you want to learn the step by step way to move out of the shrink into the power response and unlock your life that is currently burdened from chronic pain, then make sure you sign up, get in this masterclass and did I mention it is free. You will walk out being able to take it with you right away and be able to take clear, simple action to start breaking free from the cycle of chronic pain. The link is in the show notes, so make sure you get signed up. 

03:58
All right, let's move into today's episode, which is all about feelings. Now, obviously, feelings is a really big topic. I am not getting into every detail or nuance not like I can ever do that so I'm going to be covering two very specific places where I see people misinterpreting or misunderstanding or, just straight up, wrong information being put out there that is getting in the way of people being able to process their feelings in a way that is supportive. Look, the whole reason we do this work is to be able to live a full, rich life, and I am of the belief that part of that is experiencing this wide range and variety of human emotions and sensations. That being said, we don't want them taking over our life or getting in the way of us doing what it is that we want to do in our lives. Right, and in these two things that I'm going to be covering today, I find when people don't understand these things, what happens is then they aren't able to use this work in a way that enhances their personal growth, that takes them along a healing journey and allows them to find freedom from pain. In fact, when people are misusing or misunderstanding these components, it often is leading to more pain, more anxiety, more stuckness, and that is the exact opposite of what we want. We want this exploration of self to feel interesting, even enjoyable at times. Yeah, of course, this work will sometimes feel a little heavy, but that is never meant to be the bulk of it, and if it's been feeling heavy lately, these two reasons are probably why. 

05:49
Now, before we dive in, I want to make note that there's definitely different types of nervous systems that exist, whether those exist from personal experiences, from intergenerational trauma or, just straight up, it's how you were meant to be in this world. I do want to just take a moment to acknowledge this, because here's what I've seen is that there are people in this world who naturally navigate their feelings very seamlessly. Seamlessly, they just understand how to do it intuitively, or maybe it was taught to them or modeled to them in a way that allowed them to pick up on it when they were kids. Again, it doesn't matter. The point is is, if you are an adult and this conversation is like what are people talking about with feelings and having trouble feeling them and navigating them, then maybe this one isn't for you. I understand people like that exist, and here's the thing, chances are. If you're listening to this, you're not one of them, because often chronic pain tends to go with deeply feeling people. 

06:53
Now, deeply feeling does not mean you're empathic or pick up on other people's emotions. It means you're very aware of the different sensations within your own body. I actually think you can be a complete like hard ass and like stone face and have very little like emotionalness to you and be a deeply feeling person. It's just really your awareness of what is happening at a body level and then like how you react to it and how and here's the thing for some of us we are hyper vigilant to our own body sensations because we have built that up and we have taught our brains that that's what we need for survival. So there are actually people who will do this work and when I say this work, I really mean this exploration of themselves, of their own nervous systems and it actually reduces their awareness of their own bodies and of their own body sensations, because there was a hyper vigilance there and there was a hypersensitivity to it. However, there's other people that that won't ever really change much, because that's just part of who they are and that is beautiful. 

08:07
So what we are really looking at ultimately is we want to change our relationship with how we are perceiving the sensations that are occurring within our own body. If that relationship is not currently supporting you, don't worry. If you know you're going to be someone who always has a deeply feeling nervous system, or you know, are you like, is it going to change? That's just going to happen as a side effect. I do not recommend focusing on that or worrying about that at all, because it will only uptick your nervous system, sensitivity, trust. It will happen as a side effect and instead what you want to focus on is what is my relationship with what I'm sensing in my body as I sense it, and what we talk about here today is going to help with that. 

08:54
One last thing on that we need all kinds of people in this world. We need people who are deeply feeling I am one of them and I resisted it for a long time and we also need people who really don't have that trait because they have other gifts to bring to this world. They have other ways they perceive this world and we need it all to have a balanced approach. If we only had one or the other big mass chaos, all right. So, like I said, there are two big things I want to cover about feelings today, and the first one is that feelings are not facts. Yes, it is a fact that you currently have a feeling, but what you're feeling is is not always fact, and the world confusing feelings for facts or how they feel about certain things to be the end all be all of a situation is leading to some insane fuckery on a collective level. That is highly problematic because somehow the mental health movement, which I really feel began with incredibly noble and positive intentions, has really led to a messaging to people that their feelings are facts and that they should act on their feelings. And this is highly problematic because our feelings are massively impacted by what we have been taught, by our view of the world, by our intergenerational trauma, by how hungry you are that day or how much sleep you got or didn't get. Our feelings are very, very dependent on a lot of different things that might be completely unrelated to the thing you are having a feeling about. Where I see this really getting in the way of people progressing on their on their personal growth journey and on their healing chronic pain journey is believing their feelings way too much and using them as like a misguided guidepost. So what does that mean? So let's take it into a really tangible example of exercise. 

11:14
We are often taught that pain means to stop, and there are many cases where it does. If you put your hand on a hot stove, that pain is telling you to stop touching it, to pull your hand away. If, all of a sudden, you twist your ankle really badly and you really sprain it, the pain is going to present for you to stop walking on it and let it rest. In those cases, the feeling that your body is sending is legitimate. It is saying stop for right now, and then it has to be reinterpreted. However, this gets really muddled in a lot of other scenarios with pain. 

11:57
Now we can have feelings about feelings. So, for instance, let's say you sprain your ankle and you stop walking on it, but then your feeling about the situation is this is a sign that I'm getting old, that my balance is bad, that I'm clumsy, that I shouldn't be. Maybe you did it in a CrossFit class and you know you were doing some box jumps and you landed wrong. That I shouldn't be working out so hard, that my body is fragile, that I'm fragile. Those are all feelings and a story about what happened, and I'm for the sake of this podcast. 

12:40
While they're not completely interchangeable, I'm going to interchange thoughts and feelings a little bit because they're so closely tied together. Right, we have a thought that creates a feeling in our body, or we have a feeling that creates a thought in our body. I'm just going to interchange them to make things easier. I'm not going to try to pick them apart. Same thing, like emotions can like emotions, thoughts, feelings they all technically have their own role here. However, they're so integrated that, for for the sake of this podcast, I don't really think it matters, because none of them are inherently facts. 

13:11
So let's just use that example of the sprain angle. So you feel weak because of it. Your feeling is, I'm fragile. If you now take action based on that because you're like, well, my feelings matter and I was told my feelings are the most important thing and I should listen to my feelings, that is going to lead you to a life that is shrinking, because that means you're going to be less likely to go for a hike now because, oh, the pavement might be wobbly. Maybe you start wearing really overly supportive shoes that actually decrease your proprioception, which is your ability to kind of actually know where you are in space. It is not great for your feet, it's actually not great for your ankle strength, so it only reinforces the initial belief. You start walking less, you start moving less, so you start hurting more. Maybe it's start and starts impacting you when you want to get down on the floor to play with your kids or grandkids and you're like, oh wait, no, remember, I'm weak, I'm fragile, right, you can see where this just believing your feelings at face value in this case is really harmful. I'm going to give you, give you another scenario that I see a lot in like Facebook groups. Is this really overemphasis on like toxic people or people that are and this can this is I often see in the the context of like, usually in-laws or family members, even husbands, even spouses, or often coworkers. 

14:40
So people will come in, you know, or clients will come with me to this issue where someone does something and their feelings are hurt by it. They take it really personally, they take it to mean something about them. Maybe their mother-in-law brought one set of grandkids, some gifts, and they didn't bring a set of presents to their kids and they take it to be like, oh, my goodness, my mother-in-law is so toxic? Can you see how she's ripping apart the family, and she's doing this on purpose. She's being passive, aggressive, blah, blah, blah. These are all feelings and assumptions, right? 

15:19
Often, what happens is we have hurt feelings about something or we have a reaction. Maybe we're angry about something, or we're sad about something or disappointed about something, and then our thoughts come in to try to make sense of what happened, to make sense of our feelings, and that's why I'm using them interchangeably, because I didn't want to pull that apart too much. But so in this scenario, the person was feeling really hurt that her kids didn't get a gift, and in order to make sense of that hurtness, what happened was she made up the story that it was a personal attack, that her mother-in-law doesn't like her kids as much as she doesn't like her as much that she's doing it passive, aggressively. Now can you see how, by just thinking all of those thoughts, for most people, what that'll do is that'll make them start acting passive, aggressively, right, because they're now acting in response. They feel like they have to retaliate to that. They're going to start being passive, aggressive, they're in laws, are going to pick up on it, and then this just goes back and forth because no one ever talks about it, no one sits down and has a real conversation. And the mother-in-law is probably doing the exact same thing, right? She's having feelings about it and she's like, oh, this, you know, my daughter-in-law is trying to tear apart the family and then they are like mutually, although neither of them might even want it. Maybe they both want a closer relationship, but they are just responding to the other end. 

16:34
Over time that relationship gets broken apart and so often what I see is these responses that will come into the group of like she sounds so toxic, you should just cut her out of your life. And I'm being like slightly dramatic, but not really like. These really are some of the responses that are very common. This is jumping into assumptions of. That person is toxic. You know what you felt in that situation is correct. 

16:56
You should exactly trust your feelings and take it, take a big action based on it. Look, there's going to be times where we just have to act in our feelings, right, a dark alley looks real suspicious. You get a feeling that is like oh, that feels unsafe. Yeah, you should act on that. Trust that right, because when you carry it out of like what are the potential consequences of acting on that or not acting on it? Worst case scenario you don't go down a dark alleyway. Best case scenario you don't die. Right, like that makes sense. Like trust it. In that case, like I am confident that every listener out here is a sovereign adult that can use your own judgment to know that I'm speaking in massive generalities here and there. 

17:41
I'm actually not talking about that deep, authentic wisdom, gut knowing about a situation. I'm talking about like a feeling or an emotion and a cognitive interpretation of it that is faulty. Trust your gut, trust your knowing. If you know that you are connected to it, then trust it. It can be a whole nother conversation I talk about it in other episodes of a lot of us who do not have that connection. Well, we all have it. We just don't know how to use it or listen to it. But we all can be connected to our wisdoms. Don't get me wrong here. But if you have a history of knowing, you can trust your gut and you know what that feels like. You know it's different than feelings, right, like? A great example of this is maybe your gut says it is time to leave this job. Your feelings in response might be sadness, might be anger, might be fear because it's really scary to leave the job. Or maybe you're angry that you have to change jobs yet again. Or maybe you're really sad because you love your coworkers. So, again, the gut feeling is what you want to act on, not the feelings around it. 

18:59
When we take our feelings to be facts, we often override our gut wisdom because we're trusting our feelings, not our own wisdom. And that is where feelings are not. Facts are so, so important. So what do you do with feelings then? Right, if you shouldn't take them as facts, does that mean just ignore them, shove them aside? Hell, no, that's not what I'm saying. So much of what I teach is how to work with these intense feelings that come up, that are getting in the way of hearing our wisdom or taking action on our wisdom. 

19:33
Now, there are times and I would say the vast majority of feelings and emotions that we experience throughout the day when we just feel them and allow them. They take 90 seconds to move through and they're just gone, like that's it, that's all that had to happen. It's like just just let it out, move through it. You're like, ah man, I'm really disappointed. Right now you fully feel the disappointed and then you just move on Like they're not a big deal. I want you to think of a time where you have done that and sometimes it's so subtle or so natural that you don't even realize you're doing it. 

20:10
And there might be certain emotions you can do it with far better than others. There might be some emotions that you cannot do it with at all and other emotions where it comes super naturally. So see if you can come up with something just to be like yes, okay, I know what it's like to just sit through an emotion and then it moves through. This is true for positive emotions as well, right, and it might even be easier to find a positive emotion that you can do it with, like excitement, joy, even contentness can do and can kind of have this fleetingness to it. Maybe you got presented with a gift you weren't expecting or you got really excited about something you know. You feel that excitement, you fully feel it, and then it just kind of simmers away. I think we all had that experience. That is the natural wave of an emotion. It's kind of exactly what should in quotes should happen when we're fully feeling our emotions in a healthy way. 

21:05
Now what gets complicated is emotions that we might not have space to feel in the moment. Maybe they're so big and so intense that we don't have capacity to feel them in the moment, or we have been taught they are wrong to feel, right. All these things will layer in that make that all much more complicated, which is exactly what my pain to power program breaks down on what to do with all those emotions and how to feel them and how to move through them. It's a little bit bigger than the context of this podcast, but that requires you to know that feelings are not facts, because if your feelings are facts and there's no point of even trying to sit with them and be with them, in fact, interpreting your feelings as a fact is actually this really weird way of bypassing them. Because if you are like, oh yeah, of course this anger is supposed to be here, of course the sadness is here, then actually, weirdly enough, makes it so we don't ever have to explore that and we often like we'll just move past it or it stays present in this like very long, extended way. Right now, the anger stays with you all day long, versus just moving through it in 90 seconds. So feelings are not facts. They're just showing you what's present in the body. There are really natural thing that your body is going to move through. 

22:24
Some of us have far more intense feelings, like I'm one of them. Or maybe you have more sensitivity to your feelings and, again, nothing has gone wrong with that. It's just knowing how to move through them and building the capacity to move through them so they're not getting in the way of you living your life and, in fact, can enhance the way you live your life. And then they can also give you clues about what's in the way of something you might want. So I gave that example of you know, knowing that it's time to leave my job, and then you have all these feelings of sadness or anger or whatever it might be. Those are the things that you might need to move through in order to leave your job. 

23:05
Or maybe there's a lot of fear that comes up when you are trying to get out and walk and that's something you want to do more of, rather than being like, oh, I'm going to trust the fear and say that walking is wrong for me. That would be taking a feeling as a fact, right, and then you can say, ooh, the fear is something I need to learn about, explore, understand how to be with and then go do it anyways. Right, and that's exactly what I teach people how to do. That is exactly how you expand out your life again. You no longer let these feelings get in the way of doing things that you want to do. You don't take them to mean you shouldn't be doing them or that they're wrong for you, or just because you feel uncomfortable putting your business idea out there or sharing your business idea, or maybe someone completely rejected it or rejected you on a date, or whatever it might be. Don't take those feelings as facts or to mean something about you. They're just the next level to move through, to keep going with what you know to be true for yourself. 

24:05
Okay, so that was number one. That was a big one. I probably could like rant about that one in a way different way too, but I'm going to keep it at that. So what is number two? This gets into the processing of feelings. This one is so important, especially if you're someone who has a lot of hesitation to get into this work, or maybe you're like, oh, this work is not for me, I'm scared that if I start to feel my feelings, I will just cry forever Like it'll be an endless waterfall and I don't know how to stop it. Or you are someone who is like I am feeling my feelings all day long and my pain's not going away, and both of these. If you are in either one of these camps, this is for you, or really anywhere in between. 

24:51
We need boundaries around feeling our feelings. I constantly am teaching people how to be with and feel the discomfort of different emotions or sensations in a way that builds their capacity, builds the nervous system, safety around it and therefore builds their resilience as a human and allows them to get out and do the things that they want to be able to do. One of the biggest tools is being able to feel what needs to be felt and to move through it, and that happens in many different ways with different nuances to it that I'm not going to get into here, and it's all different things I teach with them, paid in power right. When it's feelings around ancestral trauma that aren't truly yours, you're going to feel those a little differently versus something that's happening in an acute moment, versus something that's from your childhood. There are different ways that are going to be most supportive to feeling the intensity of those different emotions. 

25:53
But for the sake of this podcast, here's what I want to get at is creating boundaries around feeling it all and this might be a controversial statement for whatever reason, but I do not think we should be walking around feeling our feelings all day long. That's a recipe for disaster. It's a recipe for walking around thinking about yourself all day long, being hyper vigilant to your own feelings and your own body sensations. That's only going to lead to more hyper awareness of it, more sensitization and potentially even more pain. So what the heck? Those things might sound super paradoxical, but they're really not. Just like when you eat, you eat three meals a day or whatever. I don't care what the heck you eat, whatever right, you're not eating literally all day long. You don't sleep all day long. You don't exercise all day long. 

26:52
Just because feeling your feelings is really important doesn't mean you should do it all day long. In fact, we need boundaries around it, or else I think we would go insane, especially deeply feeling people or people who have a lot of emotions, like myself. If I tried to make room for all of my feelings, I would never do anything else. There are so many fucking feelings up in here. I've tried. It doesn't work and it does not benefit me at all. It crushes me and I see the same thing happening to others. How does one feel their feelings all day long and be a part of society? It doesn't work. It doesn't make sense. And here's what we know without a doubt from the research Having healthy relationships and being part of a social group, whatever that might be or look like for you, is one of the most important things for health and wellness and longevity. 

27:51
To be real blunt, I think we all know that person who is feeling their feelings all day long and is obsessed with their own feelings and never wondering or asking about or inquiring about how everyone else is doing or it's making them, making it about them all the time. Maybe you've all shown up to set up something for your kids. Play right Like there's a job to do and there's the mom that is going off about her hard times, her feelings, as valid as they might be. You're not going to want to be friends with that person. That might sound really harsh, but it is true. In a group of people that you don't even know, why would you be sharing your deepest feelings, the most vulnerable parts about yourself. I'm not talking about sharing your feelings in a space of people who love you, who have set aside time to hear them, who are open to hearing them. Of course, we all deserve that and we all need that. I'm not talking about that. It's boundary, though Right. 

28:55
If I have some big emotions to share, I usually call my sister because she's my person, or a friend or whomever it might be, and it's like a hey, do you have time to listen to me? I ask for permission, because the worst feeling in the world is to spill your guts, to get vulnerable, to share these big feelings and to not have them be heard. That says nothing about the person listening. I mean, it could obviously right, but most of the time if you're just dumping on someone without permission, without ensuring they have the capacity or the time or the space, that's plain rude and not saying anyone who's listening is doing this. I'm like taking it to the extreme. But I'm sure we've all done it to someone before, please, and we've all been the receiver. I know I've done it to people. There's no judgment of that. It's just. 

29:46
I'm really trying to amplify this so you can understand where it's like it's an absolute nonsense to be feeling your feelings all day. How do you going to go to the grocery store when you're angry? You're not going to be rude to the cash register. That's just fucking rude. She didn't do anything to deserve that. Because then if you get to feel your feelings all day and that's right for you then she gets to feel her feelings all day and she's going to just take it right back on you and the next customer and can you see how real quickly it makes the world a shitty ass place. 

30:13
This is going into a little bit of event, but I got to do it because I really feel like some of the advice out there makes it seem that to be in a healthy relationship with your own body, to be connected with your own body, it requires feeling your feelings in the moment. And I think this advice is one of the most narcissistic things that I have ever heard and again, I see it all the time Like I see people misinterpreting this and I want to send them so much love because I understand that it was coming from this really good intention place of they're trying to just heal their own pain. They're trying to connect with their own bodies and that's what they were told Feel your feelings. You got to feel your feelings. But if you're doing it in a way that is at an utter disregard for the fact that there are other humans going through their own things who are also feeling their own feelings, who might also have a lot of really hard things going on and you make everything about you, I don't know what's more narcissistic than that. Maybe you haven't been exposed to those things, so if you really don't know what I'm talking about, just ignore me. It's a little bit of a rant because I have just been seeing it more and more, for whatever reason, so I just had to throw it in there but to bring it back. So what would boundaries look like? Here's what they look like for me and what I recommend for my clients. 

31:33
Depending on what you're working through and what you're working with and what your capacity is to set aside very specific times to feel and work through your emotions or your feelings. Maybe that is setting aside 20 minutes first thing in the morning to journal or to meditate or to feel into it, or, within my pain, to power program. I have guided processes that really help you feel what needs to be felt that way. There's a start and that's guidance and then an end. It is boundary. It is here. I get to feel this in this particular segment of time. To me, that is the way to work with things that are about childhood trauma or maybe that are more chronic issues or chronic emotions or chronic feelings. You want to boundary them. I'm going to be setting aside this time and maybe, if it's something really big and you have more spaciousness, you do set aside more time, or you set aside way less time. If you don't have it, maybe you set aside five minutes, one minute, or maybe you're like I get to angry, scream on my car ride and then putting it away for the rest of the day so it's not coming out in inappropriate places where I don't want it to come out, because it doesn't serve me to get angry at my boss or my kid. 

32:55
Now, caveat being, we're also all going to have just emotions that come up during the day and there's going to be times where they just spill out and we feel them right, or we have an emotional reaction to something, and obviously that's going to happen. I'm not saying you should be perfectly like, only feeling things during certain times. Right, it is. What is the appropriateness of the emotion to feel at different times? Let's use excitement, right. If someone presents something exciting to you, I'm not saying, oh, you shouldn't feel it. Then wait to the other, you know, wait to this time to feel it. No, obviously feel excitement because it's appropriate for it. Someone shares really sad news and it brings you to tears, cry. Right, if that's what's coming up. Someone's sharing something angry and you get angry with them. You get to, you know, match their emotion and feel it right. 

33:43
What I'm talking about boundarying is feelings that aren't appropriate for the situation. Maybe you have intense grief over the loss of a loved one, but you are at work and you need to show up professionally. Maybe you're like me and you see clients. Feeling your grief in the middle of a client session is inappropriate and it's, frankly, disrespectful for the client, right, that's what I'm talking about, like the mismatch of it. Maybe you're in a meeting with your boss and you have a really intense reaction and you're like, not quite sure what to do with it yet. Right, I'm sure we've all felt that. We're like, if I start talking now, I'm gonna drop some f-bombs, I'm gonna say some shit that I might regret, right, like that's. Like this intense emotion is coming through and we're adults, Like part of being an adult is emotional regulation. 

34:37
Maybe you don't want to say that in front of your boss, maybe you want to have some spaciousness to sit with it, to be with it, to formulate a response, and then you get to go back and say it and it gets to have the appropriate amount of emotion behind it. What often happens is an over-coupling reaction, which I have a whole episode on so you can go back and listen to the over-coupling reaction, right. But maybe your boss says something that makes you angry and what's coming in is all this anger that never got felt from other instances, and now it's like trying to push out through this anger. So you want to go feel all that anger on your own, not around your boss, and that way, when you talk to your boss, the anger that is appropriate gets to come out, right, the anger that was just about that situation, that your spillover from something else that your boss had nothing to do with. So boundary those emotions and Again, reinforcing we're not looking at perfectionism my emotions spill over, I react when I don't mean to you repair. 

35:36
So just wanna bring in this reminder. If you're someone who's like, okay, yeah, I can see we're maybe a trauma dumped all over someone or got really angry at someone, and now I can see that maybe that wasn't the best time, lots of love, repair, repair, repair, repair. We forget that repair can happen. We say I'm sorry, we explain what happened, really sorry. I understand that I got super emotional early. That wasn't about you, that was about something else I was bringing in. Or you can be like no, it was about you and I. That still wasn't. You know what I said really wasn't kind. 

36:15
So wrapping this all up, remembering that feeling are feelings, our emotions, processing them through our body, on one hand, is one of the most beneficial things that we can do for healing. When we release what is stored in our nervous system, it literally transforms our life and can transform our pain. But we do need to know and understand how to do it. And if you're someone who feels like what you're doing is working for you, again, some people do this intuitively and even they don't understand how they do it and so don't worry about it. Right, this is all about what is working for you. But if you're someone who, like, god damn it. It feels like I've been, you know, trying to feel my grief about this thing or trying to feel my anger about this thing, and it is not working. See, if one of these two things is part of it. Now again, there could be other things to troubleshoot as well. 

37:09
I bring that into the Paint to Power program a lot, because, especially if it's emotions that are passed down or picked up from someone else, we can't process it through our own bodies because it's not ours to process, but that's a different topic. It still, though, is incredibly, even more important than to be boundarying those and ensuring that those feelings are not facts and that we're not interpreting them as such right, because if our anger or our fear about something isn't even ours to begin with, then we definitely don't wanna be taking it as fact. I'm gonna give one quick example of that, and use this example before, but it's such a good one. It's. 

37:48
If you feel like you have this fear of swimming, for instance, of like a fear of drowning, if you take it as fact of like, yes, water is scary, that is the sign that I am not made to swim, I'm not made to get in the water Again, you can see how that's gonna shrink your life, shrink your opportunities. You don't get to go on your friend's boat when they invited you to go. Maybe you limits where you get to go on vacation, you know all kinds of things, but when you recognize that that fear is not even yours but it's actually your grandmoms, because her younger sister drowned and she had to witness it as a horrific and all of a sudden you're like, oh, it's not even mine, I don't even need to be feeling that fear, I can let it go. Again, we have processes that can help you do that. 

38:33
If just knowing that's not enough. But it's so important that we are not always trusting our feelings as facts, that we are always running things through our wisdom and going through our wisdom guided direction, not being directed by our feelings. And then, secondly, when you are processing your feelings and you are really giving time and space to them, make sure it has boundaries around it. That way you're not feeling like, oh, my goodness, if I start crying, I'm gonna cry forever. It's like no, you can like literally tell your body we're gonna cry for 20 minutes right now and you have, you know, a guided process. And again, that's why I have guided processes, because they bring it into a completion and then you get to just set it aside and feel it more the next day or whenever you're ready again. All right, that is what I have for you today. 

39:20
When I really understood those things, it completely changed the way I approached my own personal journey, helped it 100%, played a massive role in my ability to alleviate to alleviate my post-concussive syndrome and my chronic pain issues when I was able to understand these basic principles and use them with the tools that I teach within my pain to power program that let you know how to process feelings in a way that move them out of your body so they do not stay trapped in your nervous system and no longer keep manifesting as pain. 

39:53
If you wanna learn more about how to do that, you can either reach me directly or sign up for the Unlock your Life Masterclass Don't forget the link is in the show notes that is coming up next week, so you do not wanna miss that and I'm gonna show you exactly how to move from shrinking your life to expanding it out again by stepping into the power response. I cannot wait to see you there, and if you know anybody who might be interested in joining as well, or you can think of someone who this would be beneficial for. Please let them know and share it as well. All right until next time. Bye.