I’m sure you’ve all experienced guilt.

The guilt that you’re not supporting your friends or family in the way you’d like to due to time or energy constraints.  Or the guilt as a parent that you’ve not done the right thing for your children, or you’ve made mistakes and not parented in the way you wanted to, can grip your heart that you might wonder how you’ll ever let that go.

As we go through our daily lives, events will occur that trigger the same feelings as events that have happened previously. Our body – the map of our unconscious mind which is approximately 93% of our mind, and where all our habits and behaviour patterns are stored – thinks it is re-experiencing the same event and responds in the same way emotionally.

The conscious mind might be in the present moment but the unconscious mind (the body) is in the past and will keep responding to similar events in the same way unless we become aware of it.

We are effectively addicted to the chemical states of the past, unless we become aware of it and recognise that what is happening now, is not the same event that happened previously, so we can consciously choose to practice responding differently.

So how do we do that?  We “lean in” to the emotion and feel the sensations in the physical body.

I often invite clients to put their hand on the part of their body where they’re experiencing the sensations of an emotion and imagine they’re sending their breath there, allowing whatever the feelings and sensations are.

Emotion is energy-in-motion and will move if we allow ourselves to feel it and release it/let it flow.

When we label it as something negative we are likely to want to avoid it and so we attach a narrative to it.  For example, the narrative might be “I don’t want to feel guilty so I’m going to say yes to something I know I haven’t actually got the time and energy to do”.  As a result, we end up neglecting our own needs and wants in an (often unconscious) attempt to avoid feeling something we’ve labelled as negative, rather than having a healthy boundary in place to enable us to show up authentically.

Carl Jung famously wrote “What we resist persists.”

When we resist or avoid feeling a certain emotion because of the story or narrative we are telling ourselves about it, it will stay stuck in our body and cause dis-ease.

Contact me to find out how Transformational Coaching can support you to drop the narrative and feel the feeling so you can live fully in the present moment and break the addiction to the past.

With love as always.

Sarah xx