Turn pain into possibility

So many of us get stuck when we feel anger, pain, frustration and bitterness.

Last week, I wrote about why it’s important to fully feel and release difficult emotions, and shared ways to do that so you can move forward. If you missed it, you may want to check out those tips.

Today we’ll dive into what to do once you have released the hold of the emotions, so that you can move ahead when you feel freer.

It’s time to take a new approach

Now that you feel free of the grip of bitterness/anger/disappointment, you have an opportunity to more clearly consider the dynamic that set off the reaction.

If what bothered you was something fleeting, like a remark from a rude stranger, it may have been easy to move on once you let yourself go all the way into your feelings and release them.

But what if you are faced with a situation that’s a recurring challenge — say, someone at work or in your family who behaves in ways that trouble you, or sees things differently than you do?

Nearly everyone experiences this kind of thing.

You may find it helpful to see this as an opportunity. I know that may sound crazy, but hear me out.

Consider these new ways of moving forward:

• You have an opportunity to calmly state your case or express your point of view or suggested next steps. This may call on you to have a conversation in a different way than in the past. Get help if you need it, to be able to show up calmly and speak your truth.

• You can set new boundaries with that person, to minimize the likelihood of repeats in the future. This can mean minimizing contact with that person or setting conditions for ways you will interact.

• You can set new energetic boundaries for yourself when you decide not let someone else’s actions cause you pain. To do this, you might try seeing the other person operating the best they can, with limitations or different standards than yours. See if you can take it less personally. You might also feel compassion for them and send them love. 

• Let go of doubt. It may feel odd to approach things in a new way, but with practice you will get better and better at using these tools and finding your strength in situations that are hard for you now.

• Do not rehash. It is easy to replay and ruminate in the pain, which makes it hard to let go of the pain. Having taken good steps forward, do your best not to talk and think about it.

You have the opportunity to create rather than react

Yes, rather than reacting to things that sting on the fly, you always have the opportunity to create new ways of responding and moving forward in your life.

And, in this case, when you start with expressive creativity (to feel the emotions and move them through you), and follow that step with creating new ways to approach challenges in the future, you are creating the best possible conditions to support your wellbeing. 

With practice this process gets easier

Depending on the painful situations you face, the methods described last week and here may work perfectly the first time, or they may take ongoing practice — as has been my experience. 

If you keep in mind that your objective is to protect and strengthen your energy, and support your wellbeing so that you can bring all of your power into everything you do, you will find these approaches easier to master.

If you’d like support with any of this work, email me and we'll make a date to talk.

How to loosen the grip of painful feelings

It’s easy to get derailed by interactions and events that feel upsetting.

Whether it is in a moment when someone cuts you off in traffic, or when you interact with a person you know well who says or does something hurtful (often repeating a pattern of behaviour that has hurt before) it is easy to feel angry, bitter, shaken, wounded.

And while those feelings are valid and not to be brushed aside, there are ways to process the emotions to move forward feeling lighter and better, that you may not have considered.

Today I will share some first steps you can take when you are faced with upsetting emotions.

And next week, I will provide additional guidance to help you move forward once the grip of the emotion is released.

Feel your feelings — and then release them

It is important to acknowledge and feel what you feel. It is also important to learn how to transform the challenging emotion at hand, so you can move forward free of it.

It can be tempting to brush painful feelings aside, assuming they will simply dissipate. But that’s actually an illusion. Troubled emotions that we do not honor and work through inevitably show up in ways that have a negative impact. 

Or, you may tightly hold on to tough emotions.

Perhaps the pain and anger you feel in a relationship with someone, or another ongoing situation, are so ingrained that those emotions pop up automatically at the smallest provocation.

Emotions like these need to be released so you can begin to disrupt the pattern.

Try using some or many of these tips and see what happens. 

Ways to process and release painful feelings

To feel the feelings, and fully express them to wring them out, you might:

• Sit and free-write in a journal.

• Go for a long walk in nature, or go for a run, if that's how you like to move energy. 

• Scream into a pillow, like a friend of mine recommends.

• Stand in the shower and scream or cry out the emotions you feel. 

• Slam a stuffed doll at a table — over and over and over. 

• Crank up loud music and dance the emotions out.

• Make a series of hideously ugly drawings to wring out all the painful emotions. (This is one of my favorite techniques!)

It is important to let yourself go all the way into the emotions and use the way or ways that work best for you to let as much of it go as possible.

The process takes practice to master

You may find yourself needing to do multiple rounds, or trying multiple approaches, until you feel you have worked through and emptied as much of the unpleasant emotion as possible.

Situations that ignite difficult emotions can come at us unexpectedly. When they do pop up, be patient with yourself. Building awareness and carving out space to address those powerful emotions will help you feel better and think more clearly.

Next week, I will share approaches you can take that will build on this foundation of releasing the emotional charge.

Until then, have a great week.

(And if you’re ready to live your biggest, best life, you can book a quick call with me to talk about what that can look like.)

Love is often complicated

Remembering a very happy Father’s Day in 2019, With my grandson and my parents

Lots of people find Father’s Day and Mother’s Day to be contrived, as the holidays were created for commercial opportunity. After all, they contend, every day should be a day to think about and express love to our parents.

And while I appreciate that the greeting card and gift sales, and restaurant meals consumed to note the day, can be a turn-off for some, I find it lovely to set aside two special days to really focus on one’s parents.

Much like a birthday celebration, putting someone you love in the spotlight feels wonderful. And it makes them feel wonderful. What’s the downside to making these joy-filled, love-filled days?

And it can be complicated…

Mother’s Day this year tugged at my heart. While I was delighted to be the focus of loving attention from my family — including a special brunch on a sunny patio with my children and my two precious grandchildren joyfully dashing around, this was the first Mother’s Day since I lost my mother in August.

I longed for the sweet days of years past, when I’d call her, send flowers and gifts, and tell her how much I loved her. The last time I got to do that was on Zoom last year.

As you can imagine, Father’s Day on Sunday was especially dear for me. Having just returned home from a second hospitalization in just a few weeks, my dad is slowly recuperating.

We drove to Philadelphia for the weekend and I was so grateful to be with him. The fact that Father’s Day fell on the weekend we were visiting made it even more special.

I treasure my father. I treasure having had this time with him in person, and surrounding him with love. It was a treat for both of us.

And yes, we brought him a big bouquet of flowers on Sunday morning, that I hope will brighten his days and remind him, for many days to come, of how much we all love him.

Today is also my mother’s birthday

My mother would have been 92 today. A year ago she was quite ill, and her birthday was celebrated on Zoom. She was happy that we could “be together” virtually. The flowers and gifts we’d sent were there. It was the best we could do.

Today my heart is sore. I hear her voice, but only in my memory of it. And I am doing my best to stay focused on celebrating her life.

My dad and I have a date for a Zoom dinner together, to reminisce and share stories about her magic. He loves to tell me about how he was smitten by her from the first moment he saw her, how beautiful she was, and how much he loved their 70 years together.

I am focused on savoring the joy

I realized this morning that it was Father’s Day two years ago that my parents were in Boston with us, just a month after the birth of my granddaughter — their second great-grandchild.

They were both vibrantly healthy and filled with delight to meet Aria and be with all of us.

I cherish these sweet memories, and so many more. I savor the joy of my weekend visit with my father. All of the precious times I hold in my heart serve as a counterbalance to the sadness at losing my mother, and the concerns I have as I watch my father slowly rebuild his strength and health.

We need to feel it all

It’s great to feel happy. It is hard to grieve, to long, to feel worry or pain.

Many people push away the hard emotions, which is understandable. But we need to feel it all.

Feeling the emotions connects us to our heart. And spending some time there can open us up.

One great path to moving through the hard emotions (and elevating great ones) is to use the emotion as “fuel” for something creative.

For me that is often writing or making art. For others it can be time digging in a garden, or moving to music, or playing an instrument, or making something with their hands.

Today I will cook something my mother loved to make, as cooking was one of her favorite ways to create — she was renowned for the food she lovingly prepared and served on gorgeous tables for family and friends.

And I have a date to create with a small group of artists with whom I have met regularly for over a decade. It feels perfect that our time together fell on my mother’s birthday, as my mother was a great artist in addition to a great cook.

I invite you to express yourself in a creative way any time you have emotions to transform or elevate. Maybe you’ll decide to do that today — our emotions are always there to one degree or another, always ready to be put to use in a creative way.

If you have never tried it, give it a go. It always works for me.

Stay safe and well, and keep creating.

The big mindset lesson I did not see coming

Our mindset is always crucially important, and it’s never been more important than it is now.

If you’ve been here for a while, you know that I advocate for creating as a key way to live well. My mission is to help people to adopt the mindset of being creators in their lives, rather than letting life happen to them.

And, I advocate for the benefits of finding ways to create expressively. When you express yourself through any creative effort, you can “offload” troubling emotion, get into a state of flow and positivity, and elevate great emotions.

My original plan for this article was to talk about how you can tune in to your intuition, and why that’s something valuable to learn and practice now.

But I am taking a detour.

I want to share something personal, that has proven to be big for me this week. 

In this time of living through major disruption, when so much has shifted and so many are struggling, my creative practice has amazed me. I have loved the time I’ve set aside to paint the last four years. But in the last two months it has become more important than I ever expected.

I want to share what’s happened in my life in the last weeks.

I have been studying painting at the SMFA since 2016. I take one class each semester, on Monday nights. And, I nearly always spend a couple of hours painting on the Sunday before my class.

It’s a relatively small time commitment, but it’s been a meaningful and important part of my life.

And then the pandemic hit.

Tufts closed and we shifted to online classes — which is super-challenging for a studio class! Fortunately, I had set up a dedicated small painting studio in my home last summer, so I had a place for all of my materials and the canvases that had been at school.

And, my life got busier than ever in the last eight weeks. I was no longer making time on Sundays to paint. But I did paint on Monday evenings, and what started to happen in that time has been more profound than I ever could have imagined.

The world changed and my art changed.

My abstract paintings have always been rooted in emotion, in making visual what I am feeling. And while I have been safe, healthy and secure, and gratified to be able to support so many people during this stressful time, I thought I was pretty grounded. 

But I can see now that I was unaware of how my mindset was being tested.

Standing in front of my easel these last weeks, and letting all of my emotion come forward, has connected me to a lot of tough stuff that I’d had glimpses of, but had not fully acknowledged. And that unacknowledged deep emotion was interfering with my well-being.

I am concerned about my elderly parents. I am concerned about family members in frail health. I am concerned about policy makers who have increased the scope and danger of the epidemic for our society and continue to fail us in so many ways. I am disturbed by how many people are in peril — front-line workers, those who are ill with the virus, people who are in dire financial straits, people around the world who were in peril before all of this, and are in greater danger now. I could go on and on. 

That deep emotion sat like an undercurrent, disturbing my sleep, my digestion and making me feel subtly uneasy. It would not sit quietly under the surface when I was in the studio. It insisted on being fully felt. And I let it be the fuel for my work.

I am letting myself feel it all.  

Each time I have painted over the last weeks has been wrenching. Something inside has opened up each time I’ve stepped into my studio — my sacred space for feeling it all.

My heart has ached. Tears have run down my face. In fact, just writing this is making me emotional. 

And I let it all come, without trying to make “beautiful paintings.” My amazing teacher, Elaine Spatz-Rabinowitz, and my dear classmates (all on Zoom now) have been remarkably supportive. Yes, they said — make it ugly. Yes, be raw.

And magic has happened. 

It has felt so liberating to allow myself to paint the ugly and raw emotions that have been sitting just under the surface. And, remarkably, what has come through me onto the canvas is one painting in particular, titled In the Unknown, that I completed last Monday. I have never painted anything like this before. My feelings are coming through in new and different ways.

I have lightened the burden on my heart through the process of creating, each time I show up in my studio. And, I hope that my expressions of this deep emotion will touch someone, somewhere, and help them to feel what they may have bottled up or pushed aside.

This time will not last forever. We will move forward.

Some things will be the same after this. Many things will have shifted. And we will adapt and adjust.

But what I have learned in my studio will stay with me. I will hold the knowing that when I create, I connect to all of myself and I give myself these two big gifts — the gift of awareness, and the gift of using and releasing the pain in my heart as I make it visible. 

Some people do this when they create with words. Some do it with dance. Some do it with music. Some do it with food, or fabrics, or sculpting, or building, or transforming their gardens, or enlightening those around them. Some turn to bright color and uplifting sounds and forms. Some need to be with their pain.

All who create give themselves a tremendous gift. 

I invite you explore this territory. 

I am here to support you.

The Thriving Now page on my website has a growing list of resources that can  can help you do just that — thrive. The tools and ideas have been shared in my ongoing, weekly Zoom calls.  

My next Creating Our Way Forward Zoom call will be on Saturday, May 2 at 3:00pm eastern. Women from all over the country have been coming to connect, share, learn new ways to navigate in these challenging times, and stay inspired. 

There’s a link to register for the call on the Thriving Now page, or you can register here for the call.

If you want some one-on-one support, I have 1 more spot on my calendar for this week for free 30-minute Creating My Way coaching calls, and 2 spots are available next week. Access my calendar to schedule a session.*

And, for deeper support — to blast through a personal or business matter you are facing — I have created special Create Your Way Forward Sprint Sessions. This deeply focused support can propel you forward, on an issue that you want to address now. I’d be glad to share the details with you. 

Stay safe and well, and keep creating.