How many times have you caught yourself chasing the illusion of “happiness”?
Have you noticed that we have been trained to believe that happiness is what we should be feeling all of the time in order to be “successful” in life?
I would like to challenge this thought and belief.
It’s not that I don’t believe happiness is a great option or a worthy emotion to be feeling. Quite the contrary.
I 100% support happiness in life and frequently describe myself as a happy person.
What I would like to offer is that it isn’t realistic or emotionally healthy to try to force yourself into happiness if that isn’t what you are currently feeling.
Life is a series of ups and downs; wins and losses; successes and failures and a HUGE range of emotions through all of them. And I think it’s meant to be that way.
I would just like to say, if you are not happy all of the time, or even the majority of the time, you are completely normal. Life isn’t meant to be lived in a single emotional state. We are not robots. We are living, breathing, FEELING, humans. That means we have a variety of emotions and I would encourage you to allow yourself to feel them all.
I believe it is the “downs” in life, the negative emotions, and even the neutral emotions that help us more fully appreciate the happy, positive, filling ones.
I feel like we have been trained to label negative emotions such as mad, sad, depression, frustration, scared, etc as “bad” emotions that we shouldn’t feel.
But I would like to offer that resisting these emotions is exactly what leads to their growth in our lives. If we would simply allow ourselves to FEEL them when they arise instead of pushing them away, I think we would have greater peace in our lives.
You see, when we have these emotions, we frequently feel like we’ve done something wrong or that we ourselves are wrong, and then we feel shame, guilt, embarrassment, etc. on top of them.
Why do we think this is a good idea???
Have you ever felt better for shaming yourself for being upset? I’m going to go ahead and take a leap here and say probably not.
I am going to give you permission right here and now to just let yourself feel all the feels all the time. Happy. Sad. Scared. Anger. Hurt. Embarrassment. Shame. Guilt.
There is no right or wrong emotion to have.
There is no emotion that is better or worse than another.
There just is you. And you, my friend, are 100% enough–just as you are.
