Rise and Shine!

For a long time, I thought I was just lazy. Getting out of bed felt like an enormous task, and I assumed it was some kind of moral failing or character flaw. Getting started with projects felt like agony, even the smallest task met with resistance – everything felt like a struggle, I felt so heavy. But now, I see it differently. I see that it wasn’t laziness. It was the accumulated weight of repressed emotion. It was years of not knowing how to feel, not knowing how to release, and just feeling stuck, and that ‘stuckness’ had a terrible weight of its own.

This blog post, is really about that: the hidden weight of unfelt emotions, how they block our energy, and what starts to happen when we finally let ourselves feel. It’s about emotional fluidity, something I’m only just learning to understand, and more recently, to live.

Over the last while, I’ve been on a journey with feeling, letting go, and healing. I’ve been walking through the teachings of people like David Hawkins (Letting Go), Don Miguel Ruiz (The Four Agreements), and more recently, Joe Hudson, whose work on emotional fluidity has landed with me at just the right time. Hudson teaches that emotions aren’t problems to be managed or suppressed. They’re energy, and if we allow them and feel into them, they move. They move through us and out of us, and on the other side of that is clarity, peace, and sometimes, unexpectedly, joy.

One morning, on waking, I was overcome with the often felt feelings heaviness, oppression and angst. But this time, instead of fleeing from the feeling by diving into my phone; I dropped my chin, dropped into my body, and let myself feel. I asked: What is the shape of this feeling? What color? What texture? Where is it in my body? Slowly, it revealed itself. It was a writhing, agonised black shadowy ghost – it was in my abdomen… it was wailing and tearing at its face. It was an agonising, ancient feeling of worthlessness, it was a very old feeling – this had been writhing within me for most of my life. I sat with it. I didn’t try to fix it. I didn’t deny it, or build a story around it. I just stayed. And slowly, it shrank, and eventually, it left. I knew exactly where this came from – childhood abuse. Since I was tiny, I was treated an object and had been sexually molested on and off for years by various men in various forms, until I fell pregnant and was married off, at the ripe old age of fifteen, to a man seven years older. This was the beginning of finally feeling the emotions around this, and took weeks of feeling into this nightmare – it felt like it was getting worse, but I knew there was a backlog of emotion to feel, years of suppression, and that it would get better. And it has. Is it perfect? No, but at least I can get up in the mornings and get going without feeling like I am stuck in tar – every step taking so much energy, and quite frankly, raw courage (the exhausting kind, not the empowering kind).

This is emotional fluidity. This is what Joe Hudson is talking about. Not bypassing or suppressing or offloading emotions on others, but truly feeling them — seeing them, naming them, letting them pass through like weather. And afterwards, when it passes, I find myself instinctively rubbing my arms or hugging myself, as if to say: I see you. I’m still here. You did well.

It sounds so simple, but it’s profound. Our culture doesn’t teach this. Most of us have spent a lifetime crimping our emotional pipes (so to speak), repressing what’s inconvenient or frightening. But emotions that are repressed don’t go away. They haemorrhage out as rage, defensiveness, depression, procrastination and, in my case a simmering crippling self-loathing and shame. Hudson talks about the difference between a party where you’re welcome and one where you’re not, and how we will show up differently for each one. Our emotions are the same – they show up differently depending on how we greet them. He says something that has stuck with me deeply: Joy is the matriarch of the family of emotions, but she won’t enter your house unless her children are welcome.

In other words, if you’re shutting out anger, fear, sadness, guilt, shame — then you’re also shutting out joy. I’ve lived that all my life. I’m unlearning it now.

Letting go of the emotional weight is having profound and practical consequences. I procrastinate less. I have more energy. My days feel less like a fight. I used to write out little boxes in my diary each day — things I wanted to do — and feel dread or shame that I couldn’t follow through. Now, I write the boxes, and for the most part, I tick them off. I do the things. And when I can’t, I don’t spiral but rather pause, feel and then rest if I need to.

This transformation didn’t come from a productivity hack. It came from feeling into…sitting on the floor and sobbing if I needed to. It came from turning into, not away from; it came from allowing the truth of how I was feeling, without judgment.

This emotional healing work has been tender, and also fierce. I’ve had to look at boundaries — or rather, the lack of them. I’ve had to face the reality that many relationships in my past faltered because I didn’t show up in truth. I was too busy trying to be what I thought the other person needed. I was in servitude, not connection. I was hiding in plain sight, and when the cost became too high, I would leave. Not because the other person was awful, but because I had not been honest from the start.

I’ve changed my set point for nonsense. I don’t tolerate what I used to. And yes, maybe that means I’ll have fewer people in my life. But the ones who stay will know me — the whole me — and I will know them. That’s worth more than all the surface connections in the world.

This practice of feeling one feeling at a time, of letting go, of minimalism on the inside and out — is creating space. In that space, I’m finding joy. I’m finding momentum. I’m finding myself.

So, you’re not broken if you feel stuck, you’re just holding too much. You don’t need to fix it, you just need to feel it…one feeling at a time. Whatever you have through, you are going to be okay, and when you feel something tough, don’t panic, it won’t consume you. It passes, sit with it until it does, deep hurt and grief can sometimes take twenty minutes to dissipate. Ride the storm… because what awaits you is relief, joy, and the ability to step squarely into your next glorious act.

As Proust wrote, the real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes but in having new eyes. That’s where I am now. Seeing it all – life, emotion, even myself – with new eyes.

And from here, it all looks possible.

With love, Michelle

xxx