SUMMARY
Are you trying to push away your social anxiety?
Push away any and all emotions just to stay…
…calm, cool, and collected?
Instead of suppressing your emotions, tune into them to gain inner peace, love, connection and power.
Hear this powerful excerpt from Jeff Foster’s ‘The Joy of True Meditation’.
FULL TRANSCRIPTION
Sebastiaan: Hello, how’s it going? This is Sebastiaan from social-anxiety-solutions.com. I am a former social anxiety disorder sufferer and a social confidence coach. I help people feel calm relax and at ease in social situations.
I’ve been doing that since October 2009 or at least I’ve been coaching since that long. My website is actually a little bit older. But today or rather and today what I’m going to do is I want to talk to you about your emotions, your feelings and what healthy ways of thinking about them and addressing them.
I’m going to read to you something pretty cool. Alright, so let’s start with a personal story:
When I found EFT tapping, I thought, “Great, I’m going to tap away all of my negative emotions so that I have no negative emotions anymore and I’m only going to be happy and confident and strong and joyful and whatever”. Name all the positive emotions.
And I thought I would never feel any negative emotions ever again because I was afraid of feeling shame, I was afraid of being seen, I was afraid of feeling my anxiety. I was afraid of being seen anxious. I was fearing becoming embarrassed. I was afraid of so many of my emotions. I didn’t want to be angry. I wanted to be calm and collected.
But I had all of these strong emotions that I had repressed inside of myself and as a result they came up whenever I did not want them to come up the most. So, I would blush in really inappropriate moments. Have you ever been there? It’s just not cool, right? It’s not fun.
So, what I’ve since come to learn is that we want to accept and embrace all of our emotions. There is a tremendous freedom within that. What I mean by that is you accept your anxiety, you accept your shame, you accept your guilt, you accept your anger and you accept that you’re a person that feels anxiety.
You accept that you’re a person that feels shame. You accept that you have all of the emotions mentioned before and all of the ones that you can imagine. Especially the ones that you don’t want to feel and you’re not judging yourself for having these emotions.
Now that’s very difficult because this is a lot easier to do accepting all of your emotions when you don’t have any excessive emotions that are way out of whack. When you have a panic attack it’s very hard to accept in that panic.
When you have like a strong 10 out of 10 anxiety response because something triggers you and your brain sees a threat and you feel super anxious you can’t talk and you can’t socialize and you just become this “boring” person that can’t say anything, can’t contribute it’s really challenging to then just accept and allow your anxiety. Or when you blush at a really inappropriate moment it’s really difficult to deal with that strong sense of shame.
But that’s the way out and luckily you can do that within coaching sessions and you can do that by applying a tapping in the right way. But I’m not talking about how today, I do that in many other videos and I guide you through that in my some of my videos and many of my products but that’s a different story. What I’m talking about today is the mindset, the mindset that you want to have towards your emotions.
You want to accept and allow all of your emotions because if you repress them if you push them down it’s going to bother you, it’s going to haunt you because what you resist persists and what you accept you gain power over. At least it doesn’t bother you so much anymore.
When you repress a lot of emotions you become very rigid and you’ll start to have it show up in your body. You have a lot of tightness in your body. Maybe in your back and your whole system is tight. Maybe you clench your jaws like crazy. I still do it. I’m still recovering from years and years of repression. That’s what you don’t want to do.
The mental and emotional health a big part of it comes from being okay with whatever and having proportionate emotional responses to whatever is going on. If someone cuts you off in traffic it’s normal that that’s going to piss you off a bit. It’s not normal and I’m using this example I think Gene Monterastelli came up with the example. One of the very talented tapping experts who does also a podcast called The Tapping Q&A Podcast.
Anyway, he says I think it was him and I’m kind of paraphrasing but proportionate is to you’re getting cut off in traffic and you get a bit angry but then the anger fades disproportionate is chasing after the guy and wanting to beat him up. That’s an excessive emotional response. Same goes for a feeling embarrassment for example. You might feel a bit embarrassed at a particular situation where you do something awkward or whatever and you might get a bit of a blush. But then it goes away at these proportionate responses you blush a little bit and then you become massively ashamed about it and it overtakes you when you have to go home.
Those excessive emotional responses are actually the result of you reliving feelings from way back when. When I would blush, I would actually tune into the time when I was seven years old and I was ridiculed by my mom or whatever it was. I was reliving the feelings from seven-year-old Sebastiaan and so that’s what this scenario is for you as well and in therapy you can address that. With coaching and tapping you can address that and release that. When you release the trauma, the traumatic emotions from the younger use and you let go of that then you no longer deal with that excessive negative emotion.
Anyway, again I’m going into what I didn’t want to talk about per se. I can’t help myself.
Anyway, that’s a little pre-frame and then now I’m going to read to you something that was read to me a couple of days ago and I thought it was perfect. So, I went to Amsterdam and when I was in Amsterdam I thought “Okay, yeah, I’m going to do a yoga class”.
I looked up yoga classes near me and I went to this class and I wanted to have a chill class so I did yin yoga. It was the first time I ever did yin yoga. You come in and you get your yoga mat and you get a couple of things that you can chill on and then you’re in particular poses for a long time. So, it might be like alright so sit up straight, have this pillow in front of you and then lie to the front and chill out on that pillow and stretch this thing or that thing or whatever. And so, you’re stretching your body and you are kind of lengthening your muscles and you’re activating the relaxation response in your body. Quite nice.
The lady had little background music and she was saying capital T-truths while that class was going on and at some point, she said I want to read something to you guys and then she read to us something that I’m going to read to you now. Because afterwards I went to her like, “Hey, can I take some pictures of what you read to us because that really is helpful for the people that I’m going to say to”. She’s like, “Yeah, sure”. Now, unfortunately I forgot to take a picture of the outside of the book so I don’t know what book it is from so I can’t contribute it to. I can’t give praise for the person that wrote the book but hey whatever.
All right, so here we go. Here we go, the wild Buddha.
You can let the image of the “perfectly peaceful stone Buddha” burn on the fire. It is a terrible lie. It is healthy to sob, to scream, to moan, to sigh, to laugh hysterically, to tremble, to feel fear, anger, profound sorrow, ecstatic joy, deep and powerful desires and longings. There is a wild Buddha in all of us and she will not be tamed. The more you try to suppress her, the louder she gets. The more you try to shame her, try to make her feel crazy, ‘irrational’ or ‘overly emotional’, the angrier and more powerful she gets. The more you run from her, the more she runs after you. She will not be defeated with clever words and sophisticated philosophies. She will not be silenced; you will not be able to escape her, for you are only trying to escape yourself. We all must eventually turn to face the Wild One inside, become curious about our natural feelings, urges and impulses, both pleasurable and painful…both gentle and intense, give them the gift of our mindful attention and breath…give them our love and understanding, give them a permanent home in ourselves, a place to roam freely. When we befriend our own wildness, we can befriend it in others. When we no longer fear our feelings, we will no longer – in vain – try to control the feelings of others…and we will have much compassion for our wild playmates. We will sob, scream, moan, sigh, laugh hysterically, tremble, feel fear, anger, profound sorrow, ecstatic joy, deep and powerful desires and longings together…and we will celebrate all of these as divine expressions. The Buddha sobbed like a baby sometimes…felt righteous anger at the injustice and abuse in the world…feared death but stood fearlessly at the heart of that fear. Here was the source of the Buddha’s power – an infinite and unbreakable love for the wildness inside. – Jeff Foster, ‘The Joy of True Meditation’
Don’t you just love that? How cool is that? Basically, what that author is saying is accept your feelings. Befriend your feelings. Become okay with your feelings because if not you’re in trouble. If you run from your feelings they’re going to run after you. If you hide them, they’re going to knock on the door.
So, I guess my message is this – “Learn to accept them, befriend your feelings. Become okay with them. Allow those emotions to complete their cycle”. A lot of emotions that we have early on in life, we have traumatic experiences or we have really difficult experiences and we have a really strong emotions and we kind of repress them or push them away. And sometimes that’s also the result of living in a house where emotions are not okay or where you can’t cry or you always have to look good or whatever.
There are many causes for why we repress. Maybe go into that at some other video but anyway the pushing away or the repressing of the emotions what that does is it stops the cycle from completing. Emotions have a particular cycle. The cycle eventually completes itself. So, an emotional shitstorm if you will, have an ending.
Emotions are kind of like waves on the ocean. When a big wave comes in it goes up and at the peak the surfers go up but it peaks somewhere and then it peaks and then it drops and it falls back and then it goes to shore. Emotions are the same. They come in, they peak and they fall down.
Now if you repress them, emotions come up, boom, and you push them down. But they go back and they come boom. To come boom is that you don’t want it. And what you want to do is you want to allow them to complete their cycle. So, a lot of problems that we have in our day-to-day lives is because we haven’t completed those emotional cycles. So, you want to you want to start doing that and tapping is a fantastic way to do that in a gentle and efficient and powerful way.
So, I hope this has been helpful. This is Sebastiaan from social-anxiety-solutions.com. Subscribe here, tell your friends about these videos. Share it anywhere, it can be helpful and subscribe here. I’ll talk to you soon. Bye for now.
If you experience Social Anxiety, click below to receive the FREE “7 Secrets to Social Confidence” Mini Course!
- How To Stop Worrying - January 17, 2024
- How to Reduce Facial Blushing with EFT Tapping? - June 29, 2023
- Are You Scared to Get Anxious? Here’s how to fix it! - June 16, 2023
