December 4, 2021 by Molly Patrick

The point of life is not to feel good all the time.
The point of life is to have a human experience.
Sometimes that experience is blissful, sometimes that experience is gut-wrenching.
Most of the time, it’s somewhere in between.

When the experience is blissful, we want to stay there. When it’s gut-wrenching, we want to run away. When it’s somewhere in the middle, we vacillate between wanting it to be blissful and not noticing one way or the other. We just go about our lives, hopefully pausing once in a while to take in the wonder of it all.

We tend to run away from gut-wrenching times because humans are hardwired to avoid uncomfortable feelings. So when challenges come up, we want nothing to do with them. We freak out like a cat in a bathtub, doing whatever it takes to make the uncomfortable feeling go away.

This is when we get into trouble.

This is when we forget that life is not meant to feel good all the time.

When we accept this reality, we’re more likely to feel instead of distract ourselves from our feelings. When we distract ourselves from our feelings, it denies us the opportunity to be present and awake to the full spectrum of the human experience.

When something challenging presents itself, can you pause and sit with whatever feelings arise before doing anything else?

Mad. Sad. Scared. Nervous. Worried. Pissed. Frustrated. Disappointed.

However you feel, can you sit with those emotions for a few minutes, understanding that life is not meant to feel good all the time?

Can you make it a point to do nothing just yet?

Instead of fighting it, can you just be with it?

With a soft, open heart, breathe into what it feels like to be a human experiencing an emotion. Some emotions are positive. Some are negative. The negative ones aren’t bad; they just feel different than the positive ones.

There are plenty of ways to make a negative feeling go away temporarily, but until you process your feelings, they will continue to have a hold on you.

One of the most common ways to buffer our feelings is with food. And I get it! Eating chocolate cake is way more fun than feeling what it feels like to be sad. But allowing yourself to feel sad will benefit you way more in the long run than eating chocolate cake.

Why? Because feeling sad is part of the human experience. Don’t rob yourself of feeling all of it just because it’s uncomfortable.

When we aren’t afraid to feel our emotions, there's nothing we can't do.

You are a spectacular human, capable of feeling ALL the feels. Put that muscle to use and watch your life change.