Are you feeling down?

A couple of days ago, I met up with a friend, who was not feeling her normal positive self.  She had a couple of nerve-racking events coming up, but she seemed very flustered generally.  She said she felt heavy and seemed to lack her normal confidence.

So I thought I'd write a little article about why this happens and how we can get ourselves out of it.

Firstly, I'd like to say that this is a pretty normal reaction to the stresses and strains of every day life.  From time to time we're bound to slip off the positivity plateau that I'm sure all my readers frequent on a regular basis.  Oh, you don't?  Well read on...

There's a big difference between falling off this plateau and staying down.  The second state is one which hopefully you can avoid.

Our emotional state is one which will always fluctuate.  The word emotion can be broken down into e-motion.  The "e" stands for energy, so emotions are energy in motion.  Hence they are designed to move, ie fluctuate.  There is no problem with feeling anything in life.  The problems come when you get stuck there, as anything which is stuck can't move.

The other point to recognise is that this movement is in a vibratory pattern.  How fast or slow these emotions vibrate depends on how positive or negative they are to us.  In simple terms, the closer they are to love or fear - love being the most positive and fear being the most negative.  Try it out for yourself: what order would you put the following: contentment, anger, frustration, bliss?

The next thing is what to do about it.  Well there are a few options.   The easiest and quickest is to use your self-talk to boost your emotional vibration.  Your what, I hear you cry?  Your self-talk - the little voice inside your head which, if you're feeling negative, is probably saying ridiculously untrue things like "I'll never do it", "I'm not good enough" and often gets worse and worse as we spiral downwards.

For some reason us humans find this state quite sticky.  We can very easily get immersed in such a state, but we do ourselves great harm with negative self-talk.

So the obvious solution is to monitor what we're thinking and change it for the opposite.  So if we find ourselves saying "I'll never do it", immediately change this to "I'll easily do it".  You may not believe it straight away, but if you keep replacing the negative statements with positive ones, then you'll soon start to. You only believe the negative ones because you've repeated them so much.

This works very well for sudden emotion drops, when they are a temporary state.  For more long term states of low emotion, we often need to do a bit more.  It's still worth replacing your self-talk, but often we find it harder, or the results come more slowly, which can discourage us.  It might be worth interrogating the emotions (gently) to find out where they came from.  We might recognise them as the voice of a parent or teacher from when we were younger and that might be enough for us to disown them and replace them with a new positive voice of our own.

If we're still not getting the results we want, chatting to a friend can help.  Remember, it's great to talk to someone who can empathise with the fact you're having a hard time, but not someone who's going to agree with you that life sucks, unless you really want to remain stuck in a low vibration.

And if none of this is helping, it might be worth getting some professional help.  I can help you find the root cause of the negative emotions and help you transform them in to positive ones.  There's no need to stay down.

The Process of Process

Process is a word that comes up a lot in healing circles.  People talk about being in process or processing stuff, but what does it actually mean and how does it work?

When something changes in our life - circumstances, or our feelings about something - we go through a period of transformation.  Sometimes that's quite smooth and quick, but at other times it can be quite challenging.

Take, for example, moving house.  When moved from my last house to my present one, both of which I liked, there was a period where I felt uncomfortable in the new house.  I hadn't yet got to the point where I felt at home there, but I'd already left the last place, so I couldn't return there either.  Eventually I made the new place home and things became more comfortable, but the period of adjustment is what we know as the process.

One thing that can come up during a process is uncertainty.  That may be one of the reasons I found it hard to adjust my new home - it was all new and unfamiliar.

However process happens with other types of change too.  It might be that an organisation or group you're involved in wants to change something.  The tendency is often to resist the change or take it as a personal criticism, but it might be that the change will result in something even better.  We might want to resolve everything very quickly so we know where we stand, but we will probably have to go through a period of process.  If a large number of people are involved then they will need to have their views heard and they may change their views during the process.  The uncertainty can feel uncomfortable until a new equilibrium is found.

In the same way, when we go through therapeutic healing, whether we do this by ourselves or with a professional therapist, we are also going through a change. We're changing from the person we were to the person we are becoming.  Although this will be a positive change, the unknown element can make it feel a bit strange for a while.  As unresolved issues come to the surface, we can feel uncomfortable.  As we let go of the old, we can feel a bit empty.  As we take a new step into the unknown, we can feel vulnerable.

The key to all this is patience and trust.  An awareness of what process is can make it easier for us. Rather than panicking that we're somehow going mad or that a decision feels wrong, we can ride it out calmly.  It is also important to let others go through their own process.  By recognising this, we can give them space and respect until they have found their new balance.

So I wish you the best for your next process.  Enjoy.