In this episode, Nicole talks about the importance of sitting with difficult emotions and how doing so helps you welcome the feelings that you do want in your life.

You can find the corresponding Guided Meditation under the Episode Video below!

Check out the embedded video or the links to the episode below!

• Check out some of my free guided meditations on Insight Timer. 

   

• A resource I use personally: Shaking Meditation on YouTube

Please note these transcripts are auto-generated and more than likely contain typos and errors. 

Nicole Beachum (00:01.742)
Welcome! So today’s episode is actually going to be about sitting with difficult emotions. But before we get started with that, let’s go ahead and do a bit of grounding. So I want you to start by taking a big deep breath in through your nose. Make sure that you fill your belly completely up.

and then slowly exhaling through your mouth.

Nicole Beachum (00:34.114)
And let’s do that one more time. In through your nose, filling up your belly, and out through your mouth.

Nicole Beachum (00:48.81)
And now I want you to just notice your body sitting or standing on whatever surface you’re on. You may be sitting in a chair. If so, I want you to focus on where your legs and your butt and your back hit the chair. Or maybe you’re standing. And if so, focus on where your feet meet the floor or meet the ground.

Nicole Beachum (01:18.494)
And just imagine there’s a cord that goes from your spine, the very bottom of your spine, all the way down and to the ground, rooting you into the earth.

Kind of like a tree. So that no matter how the winds blow, or the tree branches sway, it’s still rooted at the core.

Nicole Beachum (01:51.882)
And grounding is incredibly important, especially as we’re diving into a topic about sitting with difficult emotions or difficult feelings. And it’s something that I’ve had to learn along the way in my own journey. And I’m now teaching my child. So my daughter is learning more about grounding and how to let her emotions move through her and why it’s important to feel and to actually feel what we feel.

And so that’s what we’re going to start talking about today as we move into this next chapter of the journey, which I am so excited that you’re all joining me on. But let’s first dive into why exactly are we afraid of difficult emotions. And I think there’s a lot of reasons that you can say. If you were to stop right now, place your hand on your heart, or if you’re driving, just imagine you’re placing your hand on your heart.

And ask yourself that question. Say, why am I afraid of difficult emotions, of hard feelings? It may be anger, it may be sadness, could be frustration, it could be very deep hurt, pain, emotional pain. Could be rage, whatever feelings that you consider to be difficult.

Why are we afraid of feeling those?

Nicole Beachum (03:26.818)
Just sit with that for a minute, because it’s gonna be different for everyone.

Some people may be terrified of expressing anger because maybe they lived in a household where anger was expressed all the time growing up by those around them. And they’re like, no, I don’t want to do that. I don’t want to be that. I’m afraid to express anger. Or maybe it wasn’t emotionally or even physically safe when you were younger to feel anger.

Nicole Beachum (03:57.226)
Regardless of your childhood upbringing and your individual experiences or even your adult experiences in life, we as a society are conditioned to stay so busy that we don’t actually have time to truly feel what we feel. And this tends to show up in just about every aspect of society, whether it’s at school or at work.

or even in the church, we are taught to serve others, to do our work, to make sure we’re task-driven, and deadline-driven, no matter how we feel, we are taught to push aside how we feel and show up to perform the role that we’re supposed to play. And we’re taught that pretty much from the moment we’re born.

So there should be no surprise to you or to anyone else about why, of course, it is hard for us to express and we may even be afraid of difficult emotions. It’s because a lot of us haven’t really sat with difficult emotions in a healthy way.

Not only that, society doesn’t often want us to feel our emotions. When we feel our emotions, we do less shopping, we do less overspending, we eat out less, especially fast food and comfort items, and we use less substances.

Because what happens is when you’re not allowed to feel your feelings, when you’re encouraged not to express them, for whatever reason that may be, we innocently turn to these things to cope, to help us feel better and to not have to deal with those feelings. And the thing about it is I said innocently for a reason, it’s normally not even a conscious choice.

Nicole Beachum (06:08.646)
It is something that operates at the subconscious level and we may immediately go into fight or flight or freeze and we’re just doing whatever we can to survive the moment, to survive the situation. So I think before we talk about why it’s even important to feel our feelings, it’s first just the understanding of a lot of people, if not most people in society.

don’t know what to do with difficult emotions and hard feelings. It’s not like we have a class in grade school, which we should, where we get to go sit down and someone teaches us what it’s like to let feelings move through our body. We don’t have that.

So as we approach this topic, it needs to be with compassion, compassion for yourself, compassion for your parents, your teachers, your kids, everyone in the society who has consciously or unconsciously, mostly unconsciously, bought into this idea that we’re not supposed to experience difficult emotions. And I’ll just go ahead and say the way that this works.

I’ve alluded to this before in a previous episode, is if you imagine a creek or a river flowing. If you put a dam in the middle of it and you say, okay, only part of you is allowed to flow through, you block out not only those negative emotions or you call them negative, they’re just harder emotions on the other side of things. You block out not only those emotions.

but also all the positive ones that you actually want. So if you desire joy, if you desire peace, if you desire happiness, if you desire bliss, excitement, fun, all of those beautiful, beautiful emotions that you want, you can only have them truly when you learn to hold the emotions that you may consider difficult.

Nicole Beachum (08:24.714)
or that you don’t want. And I’m not saying it’s easy, but I’m saying that we can learn to do it. And that makes the beauty that we see, the peace that we feel, all of it so much more powerful because we’re not dampening our emotions in order to protect ourselves. We’re allowing them to flow through us.

So let’s talk a little bit about why it’s essential that we actually feel our feelings. So first and foremost is when we don’t, it makes us sick. And I am talking about actually being physically sick. So this may mean autoimmune diseases develop certain types of cancer in certain places in your body, heart issues, and stroke.

We know that stress in and of itself can lead to medical issues. But a lot, and hear me correctly, I’m not saying all, but a lot of the major illnesses that we deal with as a society and as people is because the energy is getting stuck in us and we’re not letting it flow out of us. And what does our body do when that happens? It keeps screaming louder and louder and louder because it’s trying to get your attention.

is trying to tell you we need you to see us, to hear us, to experience us so we can flow out. So energy gets stuck and we hold on to it because we aren’t letting it go through us, which is the natural process. For our bodies, the natural process is allowing the energy to move through us. If you sit with most emotions or feelings,

I use a bit interchangeably, they’re technically different, but for the sake of this, we’re going to use both. If you sit with most feelings that arise, they will pass within 20 minutes.

Nicole Beachum (10:21.046)
That’s it. It’s that simple. And I’m gonna give you some tips on how to do that because there was a time when I would sit and try to let my feelings come up and arise and I thought I was gonna die, right? Like, it’s like, oh gosh, it’s so much pain. There’s so much intensity. But when you sit with it and you learn to be with it, a little bit at a time, I’m not saying go sit with your feelings for 20 minutes right now, a little bit at a time over time.

as you sit with it, it releases and you get freedom, true freedom that allows you to have the peace you actually are looking for. And all of that is done within yourself. So I wanna give you an example. If you’ve ever seen videos of animals being attacked, like in the wild, for example, what do they do immediately after they survive the attack?

If you watch these videos and they’re all over YouTube, the animal will stand up and it will shake, viscerally shake from head to toe.

Why? To let the energy move through them and release. And we are animals, humans are animals. That’s what we’re supposed to do. We’re supposed to, as things happen to us or around us that we experience, we’re supposed to stop, and sometimes literally let it shake out of us. And I’ll post a video in the show notes to help with that. Stop.

Let it move through us so that it can be released because holding onto it doesn’t help us. It leads to armoring in your shoulders and your back, and pain in your back. It may lead to pain in your legs or a feeling that you need to run, and physically run because maybe that’s the movement at some point in your life that you need to complete. Maybe something happened and you needed to run away but you froze. Your body is asking for you to now run.

Nicole Beachum (12:25.654)
That may look like feeling into that moment, gently, 1% at a time, in your mind, and then literally taking off running, and work out clothes so that people don’t think something’s going on, taking off running down your street, or in the park, or on a sidewalk. Just run. Tap into that feeling gently, easily, momentarily, and then do what needs to be done in order for it to complete.

Nicole Beachum (12:57.922)
So I want to talk about how we can get started with this. And then I’m gonna share a little bit about some of the things that I’ve done to help calm the little girl inside of me. Cuz that’s what we’re doing. We’re basically re-parenting the little kid inside of us that in some way or another didn’t get what they needed. And that’s okay. We all have this experience in some way or another. The thing that’s important to know when getting started is you can start slow. Even if it’s only five minutes a day.

All you have to do is stop, sit down, and place your hand on your heart. And ask yourself how you feel, and then allow whatever comes up to be okay.

So right now I may ask myself, all right, get calm, get quiet, let my mind get quiet, let my body get still. Stillness is so important in this practice.

Nicole Beachum (14:07.81)
Take a couple of centering breaths. Let me be like, what do I feel right now?

A lot of things may come up. Maybe what comes up is you feel excited, maybe you feel overwhelmed, maybe you feel threatened or fearful, maybe you feel anxious, maybe you feel happy. Whatever you feel is okay, just let it come up. Let it come up to be witnessed. That’s all it needs is for you to witness it. And if you have trouble allowing that feeling to come up in a way.

That allows you to witness it without being sucked in by it, then imagine taking that feeling and putting it in a ball in your hand, and you’re looking at the feeling as an observer, so you’re separate from it. And maybe at the beginning, you just start by saying, I see you, pain.

I just want you to know I see you.

And as you do that, what you’re gonna notice is your body is gonna release a little bit of energy. That may come out through a deep breath or a deep sigh. It may come out as a yawn. And again, all you have to do is just say, I see you.

Nicole Beachum (15:30.722)
Five minutes a day. Even that little bit can help calm your nervous system a little bit around whatever you’re feeling. And then over time, you can add up to the point where you can see that feeling, you can understand it, you can send it love, you can thank it for the ways that it served you and probably help keep you alive. But for now, all you have to do is look at it. Separate from it, name it.

I see you, anxiety. I see you. I see you and I feel where you’re coming up in my body. I see you. And it’s okay. You’re allowed to be there.

That can literally work miracles when it comes to helping that energy start to move through you.

There are several things similar to this that I’ve done to help the little girl inside of me or when difficult emotions and feelings come up. And sometimes it really just depends upon where I am in the moment, right? So something may come up and all I may need to do is go outside, take my shoes off, put my bare feet on the ground, take some deep breaths, and just imagine the heaviness of whatever I’m feeling.

being released into the earth below me, where it can be held and recycled for good, for the good of everyone in society.

Nicole Beachum (17:05.03)
And at other times it may literally look like getting in the rocking chair that I have in my room, wrapping up in a blanket and just crying and letting that be okay. It’s like, and if I can only handle that for five minutes, maybe I set an alarm on my phone. I’m like, all right, I’m going to sit with this feeling for five minutes. And I just sit there and I let it be okay. And I rock.

And then I take a deep breath and I realize that some energy moves.

And this one time I may have shared before on a different episode, the little girl inside of me was freaking out. And I was like, all right, what do you need? And she wanted a teddy bear. So I went to TJ Maxx, which is a discount store. And I’m like, all right, you pick out whatever teddy bear you want. And I came home with a teddy bear. And that teddy bear is still on my bed today. So allow yourself the permission and creativity to ask.

I watched calming nursery rhyme videos on YouTube one night just to get the little girl inside of me to calm because I felt like she just needed rocked or soothed. You know, I’ve had clients basically start painting. They just felt like the little girl inside of them wanted to paint or wanted to color. Sometimes it’s dance. Like, I just want to dance. It doesn’t have to be a professional dance. You just shake.

Allow your body to move, whatever it is, may you provide that gentleness to yourself and provide that safe space to start allowing those difficult emotions to start to move through you, to allow them to be so that they can move through you. So it’s all about reparenting the little one inside of you who needs to be reminded that she or he is safe and loved.

Nicole Beachum (19:06.954)
and can feel what they need to be feeling at the same time.

Nicole Beachum (19:14.626)
What they feel is okay. How they feel is okay. It is all okay. And as you make space for that, you’ll be amazed to see over time how doing that allows you to move through stagnant energy that’s been there for a very long time.

Nicole Beachum (19:38.85)
So before we close, I want to talk a little bit about the misconceptions about feeling difficult emotions. And the first one is, no, you’re not going to die. And I say that because there was a part of me that thought if I allowed in the fullness of how this feels, I am going to die. And that’s not what happens. That doesn’t happen. So that’s not going to happen.

Second, is feeling what you feel is not a weakness. It is not. That is one of the biggest lies that we’ve been told. It takes strength and it takes courage. And when you do that, you truly, truly are on the journey back to your true self, who you really are, the calm within, the wisdom within.

And for a while, if you need somebody to sit through you as you’re sitting through your difficult emotions, then get a therapist, call on a best friend, or ask a parent or a sibling. That is fine. It’s totally fine and understandable and okay. I definitely needed someone to sit with me through my difficult feelings and emotions when I started my journey and stay with it. And over time, you’ll be amazed to see how far you go.

And the other thing I wanted to share about the misconceptions is when we fill what we fill, we actually are able to take our power back. So sometimes we think, well, if I fill what I fill, then I’m going to lose control and I’m not going to have my power anymore. And it’s the exact opposite. As you fill what you fill, you gain the ability to take your power back.

from others that you’ve innocently given it away to. It’s a true factual statement. I’m here to attest to it. And it does take some time. It takes some time and consistency as with any practice along your journey.

Nicole Beachum (21:47.046)
So, get a quick little update for those of you who may not know yet. The Energetic Pathway website has been updated. I would love for you to go check it out. So now you’re going to find a lot more things there besides just the podcast. You’re going to see that I’m offering some energy healing services and there’s a lot of information online about what that is. I’m doing that both in person in Birmingham, Alabama or the surrounding areas as well as virtually via Zoom.

So feel free to go check that out. I’d be curious to know what you all think. Also as always, make sure you check out the show notes for some resources and a guided meditation that I’m gonna create to help you sit with difficult emotions, to lead you through the process. And I’m gonna make that pretty short. So like five to seven minutes where you can just start learning to sit with those difficult emotions. I am so glad I was able to be with you guys today and share on this very, very important

difficult topic about emotions, those hard ones that are hard for us to sit with. And I hope that it proves to be helpful for you all on your journeys. And please do not forget to subscribe to the Energetic Pathway Podcast on your favorite podcast player. Thank you for listening and I will see you next time.