There are no good or bad emotions [Self Growth Myths] | ep78
About this episode:
So often we believe that at the end of our self growth journey is a version of life where we never experience bad emotions. Truth is, self-growth is less about getting rid of and more about embracing every emotion that comes our way.
Listen to this episode to find out how to transform your relationship with all of your emotions, even the bad ones…. And find out why there are no bad emotions really.
*LAST CALL! This is the FINAL week to sign up for my FREE week-long masterclass that shows you how to come back to your truest self. It's called... Coming Home and it’s happening Sept 19-24. Click here to sign up!
A quote to take with you:
“It's not about pouring gold on top of the concrete on top of the plaster. It's about slowly removing and chipping away all of that stuff that protected you that we need to honor and thank for protecting us. It’s time we come back to our gold.”
Want to dive deeper through journal prompts?
If you want to be in the know and get each Mindset Monday straight to your inbox complete with journal prompts to take you even further, get on my email list.
About your host, Shirin Eskandani
Hi, love! I’m Shirin.
Coach, speaker, writer, and life alchemist.
I teach you how to trust your intuition again, tune out all the BS, and let your heart lead the way.
Because once you strengthen your inner GPS, decisions become easier, boundaries become clearer, and belly laughs become a daily thing.
A LITTLE BIT ABOUT ME:
I’m a certified life coach (accredited through the International Coach Federation)
My husband and I met on Instagram and we live in Brooklyn, NY with our plant babies
I have a masters degree in Music and was a professional opera singer for twelve years. I worked all over the world singing on stage at Carnegie Hall and the Metropolitan Opera (more on that later…).
I believe in the woo just as much as I do the work (internal and external). No amount of crystals and affirmations will make up for a lack of a healthy mindset and aligned action.
I love all the Real Housewives franchises. Don’t make me choose one… seriously, don’t.
+ Read the episode transcript here
Welcome to Wholehearted Coaching: The Podcast. If you're looking for more purpose, more passion, more joy in your life then you have come to the right place. Let's create your dream life while living your dream life. Okay, love.
Hi love. Welcome to Wholehearted Coaching: The Podcast. This is where we take a deeper dive into my Mindset monday post which you can read on Instagram at @wholeheartedcoaching, or you can get the full post plus my weekly journal prompts when you sign up for my email list, you can do that in the show notes, or you can head to my website, wholehearted-coaching.com.
So this whole month in the month of September, we are talking about common misconceptions about healing and self-growth. And honestly, I actually couldn't have timed this better because this month, September is self-improvement month, which I had no idea about. So this truly is the best time to be talking about what I feel are some of the common myths around what healing is, how it looks like, how it's done, and especially who it is for today.
We're going to be looking at a common, a really big misconception. And it's about what the end result of healing is like what lies at the end of our healing journey? Well, one, there is no real end to our healing journey. And we'll talk about that a little bit in this episode, but I think that many of us, and I'm definitely included in this.
I think that at the end of our healing journey is like this perfect life, right? Where we feel amazing all of the time we make awesome decisions, everything externally and internally is just working along, along. Perfectly. I mean, listen, if I'm being really honest, that's what I thought the end result was going to be.
When I started this journey, I was like, listen, if I am going to be uncovering all of this deep stuff, the end result better be this really perfect life. Okay. I need a really big ROI. Okay. And I was in for a very rude awakening. So in this episode, we're going to talk about the ups and downs of growth and what the result of all of this work that we put in is right.
What is the point of all of this before we get into this week's content, though, I want to remind you that this is the final week to sign up for coming home. If you're listening to this live coming home is a free week-long masterclass with me. And you're going to learn how to come back to your truest self, to your inner goal.
There is going to be three live classes with me. And during those classes, we're going to be doing some of my most favorite, most powerful, most transformative techniques and tools and somatic practices. Honestly, I am going to be talking about things and teaching things that I have never done with the public before, outside of my group containers and with my one-on-one client.
Everything is going to be recorded. If you can't make it live to our calls. And there's also going to be some amazing giveaways. So again, if you're listening live, we start on September 19th. So you have to register before then to join us. You can head to wholehearted-coaching.com/coming dash. I realize that's a lot of slashes and dashes, but it's pretty much my website slash coming dash home.
Okay. So let's get into this week's mindset Monday. It reads we don't heal so that we never feel bad emotions. We heal so we can embrace each and every emotion. In time, you will realize that there is no hierarchy to how you feel. There is no good, and there is no bad love. There is only what is here. Now.
There is only wisdom. So I remember when I embarked on myself, healing self-growth journey. And at the beginning, and if you are on your journey, you know, this is true in the beginning, it's especially difficult, right? You are unpacking so much things that you weren't aware of or things that you were aware of, but were afraid to unpack.
And you really just working through the muck of it. All right. Lots of ugly tears, lots of just like feelings of overwhelm. It's a lot. Right. But then at some point the work actually starts working. Right. You start to feel more happiness and joy and grounded-ness, and I certainly experienced that. Like I was like, hold on.
I'm actually seeing the results of this. I'm feeling better. I'm navigating through challenges in such a more healthy way. I'm having these difficult conversations and it's this incredible feeling, right? I was feeling more joy and happiness than before. And it was a different type of joy and happiness, right.
It was like this real internal present, grounded joy and happiness. And I was like, yes, I've done it. I've done the work. Right. Because I feel great. So a thumbs up on amazing. This is fantastic. And then of course life happened. And I can't tell you what happened, what the circumstance was, but it was kind of that first moment in a while where something happened that made me feel off balanced, overwhelmed.
You know, all of that rootedness and that secureness no, no, no, no. It was all gone. It was just overwhelmed, stress and worry and insecurity all of these feelings that I thought I was getting rid of. Right. I thought, okay, I'm going to do this work. And these feelings are going to be gone. And when they get here, they can instantaneously just disappear because I have all these tools and they didn't.
And so I started to panic. First, this is a disclaimer, and here is something that they do not tell you on your self-growth journey, or if they do, they don't highlight it enough. They don't, you know, repeat it enough. But when you're on the self-growth journey and you're feeling better, right, you're using these tools when you experienced that first circumstance that throws you off kilter, that dip is like lowered feels lower than any dip that you have ever had before.
Right. It's like, you're like, oh my gosh, this is lower. This feeling I'm having, I've never felt this feeling before. It's like more intense than anything you've ever experienced. It's a total shock. And I believe that this is because before we embark on our self work, our healing journey, so many of us are living our lives.
Like there's this dimmer switch on. Right before we embark on healing, a lot of us are living our lives with the dimmer switch at halfway, or maybe even a quarter, right. That quarter point. So if something happens, a challenge happens, something goes left. Well, if you turn off all the lights, it's not such a shock, right?
Because you're going from the halfway or quarter point down to nothing. But when you're engaging in self work, really healing. And you start to slowly move that dimmer switch higher and higher. And it's like to the point where, oh my gosh, the light, the light is so bright and beautiful and everything is illuminated.
And then you hit a challenge and that shock, right. That light going all the way down is really jarring. Right. That beautiful light is gone. It's completely dark. You cannot see. So here I was in the dark feeling so much lower than before, and I had felt that way in the past. You know what I'm saying? But this just felt so much lower because I was coming from a greater high.
And also I just thought I was never going to feel these feelings again. So I was like panicking and I really started to judge myself. And I started to think that, I guess I'm not doing the work right. I'm regressing I'm backtracking because why would I be feeling this way? Why aren't these tools working for me?
Obviously I have no idea what I'm doing, but you see, I had thought that the point of all of the self-growth and healing. Was to feel amazing all the time was to get rid of all of those emotions that life would magically become perfect. And that I would become perfect, that I would no longer feel negative emotions that I would handle every situation just perfectly with all of these perfect tools that I'd cultivated.
So I had created this hierarchy in my head that certain feelings were better than others. And I had created a narrative that if I felt those better feelings, I was doing a great job. I was doing a great job at healing way to go gold star. You're amazing Shirin. And if I felt those other feelings. Then I was failing at my healing journey.
Right? So joy was better than sadness. Happiness was better than anger. Certainty was better than confusion. And when I felt anything that was less than better, I would judge myself and I started to kind of run away from those feelings. I would repress. And I would use all of my new self growth tools to avoid feeling the discomfort, not to process the discomfort, but to avoid feeling it right.
I'd go to my toolbox of self-growth and be like, well, what are the tools here that can make me just like, not feel this feeling right. And I see this happen, what I went through with my clients all of the time, all of this. Right. They're feeling great. The tools are making them feel really good. They feel like they have this really great grasp on mindset, work, how to shift their thoughts.
And this also happens a lot with people who work on manifestation with me. And when moments happen in life, where they feel those uncomfortable feelings, they go straight to the cerebral stuff. How do I change this emotion? This especially happens when people are learning about manifestation, they freak out when they feel those quote unquote lower vibration feelings, because they feel like, oh no.
Oh my gosh, the universe knows. I'm not feeling amazing. It's onto me. Right. Nothing to see here, universe. I'm fine. I'm totally happy. Everything is amazing. Right? Like trying to trick the universe that no, no, no, I'm fine. I'm not feeling discomfort. I'm not feeling sadness. But love. If you have been part of my community for a while, I hope you have heard this before.
We have to feel the feelings. We cannot skip over the feelings. Emotions are feelings are simply energy and motion. I did not come up with that. Someone else did, but I love that reminder of my emotions are just energy and motion. And that energy has to go somewhere when that energy isn't processed or channeled properly, it's going to manifest in really unhealthy ways towards other people.
And more often than not towards ourselves. The key, my love is in the feeling is in the uncomfortable feelings isn't allowing ourselves to process and be with those feelings. There is no damn hierarchy. There is no good or bad feeling. There is just wisdom in each. And every feeling that we have, you know, instead of good and bad, what I've started saying is comfortable and uncomfortable feelings or feelings that cause discomfort, right?
Because I do this too. I do this too in my life where I'm like, oh my gosh, I'm feeling sadness. That's the bad feeling. I'm feeling joy. That's a good feeling. But after years of doing this work, I know that the medicine, the answer, the solution is always in the discomfort is always about getting curious about digging into exploring why that discomfort is there.
And if I thought that a feeling was bad, then I wouldn't want to discover it. Right. And when I felt it, I would think that there's something wrong with me. All right. If anyone is listening to this and is familiar with anti diet culture, it's the same thing that we do with food. It's like, don't label it as good or bad.
It is all just food. And sometimes you're going to want to have this, and sometimes you're going to want to have this. And some foods they make you feel like you have tons of energy and some foods, you know, after about an hour or two, they don't make you feel a lot of energy, but you know what? I do not regret having that Haagen Daz pint.
I do not. Okay. This is off topic. Let's get back to emotions, but. When we don't allow ourselves to feel our feelings instead of healing, we just keep ourselves perpetually trapped in that field. It's constantly simmering, right? It's like, they're in your belly. It's there in your mind. It's like with you all of the time and that dolls our experience of life.
I always tell my clients that you have to embrace the full range of each emotion, because if you set a dial on the bad emotions, right, I'm only going to experience bad emotions to a two. Then you're setting that dial also on the good emotions. And I'm putting quotes around these right. So you're setting a dial on your happiness and that's always going to be at a two too.
So I like to think of this analogy and this is going to come from tick talk. Okay. Tick tock can also be an amazing, wonderful educational tool. But this video popped up for me. And it's this person who mixes colors. Like you can see their palette, their, um, color palette. And they're making all of these beautiful colors, like orange and pink and red, and they show you all of the colors that make that color up.
Right. So, you know, like we know. Red and blue make purple. Um, I'm not even gonna say other colors, cause I do not remember that from elementary school, but you know what I'm talking about, right? Like mixing two colors together, three colors together to create another color. And what's amazing about what this person does is that y'all, if you knew the amount of colors that go into making a beautiful color, a rich, deep, intense, vibrant, Like I watched one video where the end result with it was this beautiful, vibrant turquoise, which I love turquoise and you'd think, okay, well turquoise, like there's probably green in there and blue in there.
No, no, no. Y'all this person put in light green and blue and black and brown and white and cream and orange, and this deep Crimson, like all of these colors and they all resulted in this most viral. Color this most vibrant turquoise that I have ever seen. And that's like our lives. That's like our healing.
It's like all of these colors come together to create the vibrancy and the beauty. It's all of it at the same time. It's all of a concurrently. It's all of it. I once heard a coach say that a full expansive life is going to be 50% amazing and 50% not so amazing. And so as we go on the self-growth journey, we're being given tools to be present when life is wonderful and amazing and savor the crap out of it, right.
That 50% amazing. And we're also being given tools to navigate the moments where it's difficult and hard and overwhelming, right. That other 50%, that's not so amazing. You know, healing is not linear. I set this at the top of the episode that there is no end point and it's not like this journey that continually just goes up, up, up, up, up, up, up.
No, it's a journey with lots of ups and downs, a journey where you're going to revisit so many stories about yourself and so many emotions and so many internalized beliefs. My good friend, Aliyah. Lovely. Who has the podcast? Spiritual. She says that healing is like a circle. You will always come back to so many of the same things.
But when we embark on our self-growth journey, we're gaining more tools, awareness, and reclaiming our wisdom so that when we're back at the same fork in the road, the same mountain on the path, we have tools that allow us to do it differently, to experience it differently, to take that journey differently.
You know, I got a lot of emails from my current clients, from former clients telling me about like these amazing things that are happening in their lives. Partnerships, careers, babies, all of these amazing, amazing things as a result of the work that we have done together. But to this day, one of the best emails I ever received was from someone who had just finished my small group coaching program, whole hearted woman.
And she sent me this email and she said, Sharon, I just had the worst day of my life. I was on my way to a job interview that I was really looking forward to and I got a flat tire. Okay. And I had to wait for the truck to come help me. And it was raining and it was terrible and it was just horrible. And throughout it all.
I was able to be so kind to myself. I didn't make it part of any story about who I was. I was able to process all the feelings that came my way and be able to be present and move through it. That to me is a sign of someone who is doing the work in the most beautiful, genuine way. Love healing does not mean that everything around us and within us.
Is magically fixed forever and it's just going to be perfect. No healing means that when stuff gets difficult, we know how to tend to. Those uncomfortable feelings, love they are worthy and valid of attention. They're not assigned that you're not doing the work properly. They're assigned that you're just living life and engaging in life.
As we all do those uncomfortable feelings, they need to be tended to. And if you are on the self-growth journey, I know with a hundred percent certainty that you have the knowledge and tools to find the wisdom underneath those feelings. And if you've been listening to his podcast for awhile, a lot of those tools are here in these episodes.
So love, tend to the feelings. There is no good or bad. There is just this vibrant color being created in your life. So as we close, I want to remind you to join me on September 19th for coming home. And we're going to be digging into so many of the ideas that we talked about today. So it's one week with me it's free and we're going to be uncovering your inner gold, your most truest self.
It's going to be an incredible experience. You can find more information and sign up at whole hearted-coaching.com/coming-home. Remember all the slashes and dashes my website slash coming dash home until next week. Love I will talk to you. Thank you so much for joining me this week. If you liked this week's episode, please share it with a friend comment and rate this podcast until next week.
See you later. Love.