Aw stahhhp it, wise teabag. Really? You fit that much wisdom on a tiny tag of paper? This calls for a celebratory tale.
As you may or may not know, my gut operates like a super-awesome barometer for how I’m sitting emotionally. Most of you know that I’m a huge believer in the mind-body connection. The fact that we feel grief or anger or sadness is our body’s way of saying: “That was pretty tough. Please take a moment to feel it properly, because I’m an emotional life sponge, and I can’t help but be affected by life”.
If we don’t feel our emotions, we shove it down, take a shaky, deep breath, roll our shoulders back and step back into life- the unprocessed emotion, floundering like a black, dying log abandoned in a lush and otherwise vital forest. Pretty soon, the black logs build up and infiltrate the lush forest, and before you know it, you’ve got rheumatoid arthritis or stomach ulcers or awful back and neck tension stops you from sleeping at night.
Whenever I shove my emotions down (hey, I’m Asian- it’s how we’re made), my gut goes weird, I get really HUGE pimples and then I’m like “Ay? What’s wrong?”, at which point some tiny voice tells me some emotional home truth that I parcelled away in special brown paper and string because I was just too busy being busy.
The more you notice your reactions, the more you feel your emotions, the more you understand yourself and others—that’s when you start to hear your own inner voice that knows best and you can totally own how frigging awesome you actually are—just the way you are.
