6 years ago, I couldn’t stand being sober.
Because normal life came with a ton of insecurities, fears, and anxiety.
Weed was the only thing that made me feel good.
Over time even weed couldn’t help me to feel good. It just amplified my anxiety.
I couldn’t find an escape from my normal miserable state.
I was pulled into this dark black hole filled with terrible anxiety and fear for about 7 to 8 months.
I went through the metaphorical “Dark night of the soul” where life felt so dull and painful.
Slowly I was able to see the sunshine again when I learned to distance myself from my mind with meditation.
I joined a men’s circle a year ago, to deepen my healing practices. And I realized a deeper truth about myself in our weekly sessions:
“Even though my mind was more calm and peaceful because of daily meditation, I was completely disconnected from my emotions which kept me from experiencing real bliss and joy that was always available.”
Inside the men’s circle sessions, I cried and released a ton of stuck emotions and slowly started to reconnect with my feelings.
Now I’m at a place where I’ve healed most of my addictions. I feel naturally at bliss most of the time. Work feels like play. Life feels much more effortless.
It’s very much possible to fall in love with life again. 90% of the work is creating a healthy relationship with your emotions.
The societal trap: Chasing happiness
Are you constantly chasing happiness in the outside world?
Trying to find it in
- a big beautiful house.
- a lovely partner.
- a fat paycheck.
You might feel fulfilled for a minute when you finally achieve those desires.
But that high will soon wear off and you will fall back to your old miserable self again, if you are still the anxious unhappy person inside who finds it very hard to be present to enjoy the fruits of his pursuit.
97% of people live life following this broken happiness equation.
They chase the next goal and the next, thinking that they will find happiness and fulfillment someday. And they won’t ever get there.
It’s not their fault because they don’t know any better.
No matter what you achieve externally, happiness and joy come from within your being. It’s YOU who feels.
It’s just that you give yourself permission to let loose and feel good temporarily when you achieve your desires.
After that temporary high, you will again get sucked into the painful patterns of your anxious mind.
So here I’m inviting you to explore a more holistic path to lifelong happiness and fulfillment.
Drinking from the Inner fountain of happiness:
“When you change the way you look at things, the things you look at change”
– Wayne Dyer
Real happiness comes from within. It’s natural to you.
That’s why kids are always happy without needing anything externally.
But to invite this innocent happy self into your life, you have to reconnect with your emotions no matter how painful they seem initially.
Then only it’s possible to cleanse your being of all the suppressed emotional pain clouding your perspective, so happiness and joy naturally flow through you like when you were a kid.
Hearing that might bring up some confusion for you like “If I allow myself to feel sad, won’t I get stuck feeling sad all the time?”
Nope.
You will allow the sadness that was stuck within your being this entire time to flow out through you. So you clear up space for happiness again.
A good analogy for this cleansing process is beautifying your home:
“First you have to remove all the furniture and stuff that’s creating clutter. Then only you can add elegant furniture and stuff that beautifies your living space.”
By learning to release your stuck emotions, you will fall in love with life again, having infinite energy and inspiration to create epic stuff in the world your soul really feels called to.
But before we get there, let’s look into the harmful ways by which you resist feeling emotional pain and amplify your suffering.
3 ways humans cope with painful emotions:
“Trauma is not what happens to you. Trauma is what happens inside you as a result of what happens to you”
– Gabor mate
Experiencing trauma is a natural part of growing up unless you were born into an enlightened family.
Hearing that you might think to yourself “But I don’t have any childhood trauma!”
A trauma for a kid can be as simple as parents leaving you alone for 5 minutes (or) your school friends making fun of you. It doesn’t have to be life-threatening.
Those experiences create a surge of heavy emotions inside you like fear, shame, etc.
But instead of feeling and releasing them fully, you suppress those emotions deep inside your subconscious. Because you felt unsafe as a kid to process those emotions fully.
This resistance to feeling your emotions is what creates all your mental suffering.
In order to function normally in society and not deal with those suppressed emotions, we unconsciously create 3 coping mechanisms.
Let’s explore each one of them(you might be using one or more):
1. Escapism:
With escapism, you try to escape your emotional pain with all kinds of things.
Escapism is what I was a master at. I only realized it later on my healing journey.
The most common ways of escaping pain are porn, social media, drugs, and overthinking.
Escapism is temporary. As the high wears off you will start feeling miserable again.
This is how addictions get severe as you need more intense external stimuli to cope with your pain over time.
2. Unconscious Expression:
With unconscious expression, you throw curses and blame people/situations for triggering your pain.
People throwing F-word at each other in traffic are a good example of this.
Doing this, you might feel temporary relief from your emotional pain.
But what usually happens is you worsen the situation by triggering other people’s pain and even amplifying the situation into a possible fight.
You won’t heal your emotional trauma with this, because the root cause of your suffering still remains intact inside you.
3. Numbing:
Here you try to numb your emotional pain so you don’t feel anything.
The common ways of numbing pain are binge eating and alcohol.
You might temporarily shut off your brain from feeling pain, but the pain comes back 10 folds when you stop numbing yourself.
Become aware of your coping mechanisms. So you can catch yourself when you are escaping your emotions.
All these coping mechanisms won’t help you heal your emotional pain because they come from a paradigm of getting rid of emotional triggers(the symptoms), not healing the root cause which is the emotional trauma.
To truly free yourself and be at peace for life, you must get to the root causes of your emotional suffering and release them. That’s what we are going to explore now.
Make feeling good natural: The “High on life” process
These are 3 steps I created from my healing journey that you can practice daily to realize your natural state of happiness and joy.
Step 1: Slow down
As humans, we get lost in the details of a busy lifestyle, creating overwhelm and burnout.
Remind yourself to take intentional pauses every now and then by setting timers on your phone.
Connect back to your breath. Breathe deeply and slowly.
Look at your surroundings. If you can, find things to be grateful for in your life as it is now.
Step 2: Connect to your emotions
If you can’t be grateful, it’s okay.
Close your eyes and notice how you feel.
Even if you don’t feel anything, sit with that feeling of numbness.
Be okay with feeling uncomfortable. Be okay with the resistance to feel emotions.
Slowly your emotions will start to unfold with time.
Treat every emotion gently and lovingly like a loved one visiting your home.
Welcome all emotions. Don’t try to fix, change, or get rid of them.
Let them wash out through you. And they will if you offer them space to come and go.
I know this step is not easy. It takes time, be patient with the process.
You have to pay the price of feeling and releasing pain temporarily to free yourself permanently.
Step 3: Reconnect back to presence
When you practice experiencing your emotions as mentioned in step 2, you will slowly reconnect with presence.
Your mental chatter will become less intense over time, as almost all of your mental chatter was to cope with your painful suppressed emotions.
Presence is your true essence. It is the space where clarity and joy emerge naturally.
Life starts to become much more effortless and peaceful.
All you have to increase your natural capacity to feel good is to change your relationship with all your emotions into a more loving one. Simple but not easy.
That internal shift is what you will slowly birth with practice.
This is how you create a really good fulfilling life.
P.S. If you want 1-1 guidance from me to heal your anxiety and reconnect with your care-free authentic self within 8 weeks, learn more about my modern mystic guidance program here.