How Do You Really Want To Do Life? | Amber Hawken | Dip. Mindfulness CBT

Learning to feel your feelings (who’d have guessed, right?) and breathe deeply into those parts of yourself you’d rather cover with coffee, wine or a new business venture determines your capacity to grow and accelerate into success in any area of your life.

Life is waiting patiently, beckoning us to open and feel the full spectrum of our emotions and effectively, come to life.

And this is key: Learning to open to life exactly as it is. The good, the bad and the ugly. Whether you’re hurt, angry, sad, afraid, feeling lost or in love, inspired and at peace. The variety of life is a fucking gift that we need to learn to appreciate if we want to be fully alive. If we avoid the darkness, we aren’t able to tap into the light. We dabble a little either side of positive and negative, such dull and meek speckles of what we are capable of experiencing.

Screw regulating your emotions constantly, screw being a consciousness detective, always on the lookout for where you are not being ‘spiritual‘ with your humanness.

News flash: you were born a human to do human things and come back to your light through the process of expression, experience, feeling, surrendering, falling apart and growing.

You are here with a mind, with stories of pain, moments that pushed you to your edge and cracked you apart, thrashed through your boundaries and shattered your esteem so you can figure out you are so much more than your mind. But to get there, you’ve got to go back to basics and appreciate the experience of thoughts, beliefs and fear. Ya wanna do the spiritual sh*t, then ya gotta do the work; the human stuff. Put your feet on the ground, stop dreaming of other universes, manifesting through your energy and meditating your emotions away and start showing up and just being.

As a human, our edge is always and forever going to be opening up when we are walking the tightrope of emotions that we’ve deemed as a culture, aren’t good. Such as sadness, grief, anger, uncertainty and all that jazz that we go to yoga with an intention to move energies through or we sit on our cushions with the hope our mind will become still and we try to control what is not meant to be controlled.

Instead of feeling and releasing, we all too often dissociate from them through statements like, “everything happens for a reason“, “let it go”, or “trust the universe”. Yeh, I trust the universe, I am the effing universe, dude, and I trust that right now I feel sad. Or I feel angry. Or I am afraid. The only way out, my friends, is through.

Let me ask you something; have you ever really felt sadness? I mean really felt it? Have you paused, breathed deeply into your belly, found the centre of it, opened your chest and embodied it and just felt? Let yourself dive into the beauty of that energy and have it dance amongst your cells and ripple through your being. It is damn beautiful. It takes just moments for it to shift. Are there layers? Sure, a lot of the time. Could it be coming from somewhere deeper? Certainly, but the solution is still the same. Sit, observe, be curious, open, get into your body, open to the feeling and FEEL IT.

So we have to make a choice. Do we want to sit comfortably, coping with our distress and shutting down? Or, do we want to lean towards our edge and get familiar, embrace and practiced in discomfort and experiencing freedom, love, joy and evolution?

Each and every single moment we are either closing or opening to life. Feeling OR dissociating through analysis, mental detachment or exaggerated marinating in it (swimming in it, both in the body and adding to it with letting the mind have a field day about it).

How do you want to do life? Run? Cover up? Avoid? Feeling like you need to fix your emotions or fix something to get away from them, or do you want to experience what it is to be completely awake and alive and, feel? Feel, of course, or else you wouldn’t be reading this to the end. You legend. Start with stopping, breathing and getting curious rather and forever being busy, scattered and critical and trying to control. It’s a whole new ball game, I know. But, that’s life 🙂

With love,