Something has gone very wrong. We live in a society that celebrates 'positive' emotions, and either ignores or dramtises 'negative' ones. As a result we are not taught to just feel our emotions and to express them as needed. But that feelings like sad, angry, jealousy and frustration are not allowed. And so we hide them inside, where they ultimately impact out lives either by negatively impacting our health, and/or by creating triggers within. In this episode of the Living Through Heart Podcast I talk iabout what happens when you allow an emotion to run without the narrative attached.
Something has gone very wrong. We live in a society that celebrates 'positive' emotions, and either ignores or dramtises 'negative' ones.
As a result we are not taught to just feel our emotions and to express them as needed. But that feelings like sad, angry, jealousy and frustration are not allowed. And so we hide them inside, where they ultimately impact out lives either by negatively impacting our health, and/or by creating triggers within.
In this episode of the Living Through Heart Podcast I talk iabout what happens when you allow an emotion to run without the narrative attached.
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Welcome to the Living Through Heart Podcast. I'm Donna Joy Usher. And I'm an analytical hypnotherapist, a psychotherapist, a spiritual healer, a magnetic mind coach and a multi award winning Best Selling Author.
I believe that everybody is capable of creating whatever they want, if they can just get out of the beliefs and stories in their head. This podcast is an audio blog of my thoughts as I go on a journey to heal my soul, surrender into my feminine power, and to live from the present moment in heart. I hope you find it amusing, interesting, thought provoking, touching, raw and inspiring.
Hello, and welcome to this 34th episode of the Living through Heart Podcast. I'm Donna Joy Usher. And I want to say how excited I am that you're here listening to my podcast. This is a place where I just share, sometimes I share... I have like structure surrounding it. Sometimes I just share what I'm feeling in the moment. And today is one of those days.
I've just been for a beautiful walk down the river with my dogs. And basically the whole time I was down there, I was feeling sad.
And last night, I was on a course. I'm doing a course at the moment. A psycho spiritual healing course. And we did a hypnotherapy session on each other surrounding, we're looking at astrology. And what came up was a memory that I had not really remembered fully until sort of last year. I was over my sister and she had mentioned and I had kind of remembered the end result of the memory, how it had turned out and where after I had come and kind of conformed, but I hadn't remembered what had happened before that.
Which is basically a big fight with my father. Where I had very excitedly shared what I wanted to be when I grew up, when I was about 15 at the time, which was a fashion designer. I laugh now because anyone who knows me, I'm not really that interested in fashion. So it's quite ironic. Well, not really ironic, I guess it's because of this.
But anyway, I had shared this and I had like thought about it. And I had been so excited. And I joyfully gone to my parents and I had shared this dream of mine, of this creativity, and you know what I wanted, and I was basically squashed.
And, you know, forced in to conforming in a way that took away my dream. Took away me being allowed to actually have my own thing, right and what I wanted, and instead I conformed. I became the good girl who went to uni and got the degree and got the good job, so that I could do what I wanted to do in my spare time. And that's so funny, because the only thing I remembered out of this memory, and this isn't what this whole thing is about, right? But just sharing my thoughts like I'm having coffee with you at the moment. So I hope that's okay.
But what I remembered from this whole thing, right was not the fight. And it was not the feeling of being suppressed. And it was not the agony of having a dream taken away. And then being bereft and left with nothingness, which is what happened, right.
All I remembered was the conversation a few days later, sort of after, like living under the gloomy cloud of oppressive, like anger for a few days. And I remembered the conversation, which basically went along the lines of, go to uni and get a good job and good paying job. And then you can do what you want in your own time.
And I used to spout that bullshit. And I remembered that as a positive thing. I put this positive spin on it and like how wise it was. And I used to say that this is what my dad told me. And I don't think it was a good thing, right. But don't get me wrong, he did tell me some really useful things in life. And from his point of view, this was a useful thing. This was a very important thing.
But for me, really what it did was take away that dream. I mean, look, if I hadn't been supported in that moment, I probably wouldn't have gone on to be a fashion designer. But what it took away from me was the right to have my dreams, right?
And instead, I just had to be the good girl that did everything. And it led to a lifetime. And I was 15. So it's not like this wasn't there already. But this was like a really defining moment in it.
Sometimes when you're dealing with stuff, wounding and trauma, the core wound is the moment of impact, the first time that happened. And sometimes it's later on in life where it's really brought home, it's really pounded in. And sometimes you have to pull a few viewpoints out in time where you've got to go and visit a few different areas of the same belief system, because it's like it's been nailed in in a few different points and really taken on.
So this was one of those moments, right?
So I probably wouldn't have been a fashion designer. But what I got out of it was that I just had to be the good girl and do the right thing. And it led to a life of me, kind of like not having... not feeling that my wants and needs are important. Not even knowing what my wants and needs were because I just had to do what brought me love I had to do the good thing. I had to, you know, accomplish stuff. And I had to be the best. And I had to do all this stuff so that I was perfect. And I was lovable, and I was worthy. And that's basically... and a lot, you know, most of us have this in it. So it's not like I'm saying this because I think I'm unique or unusual that this is, you know, what's there with most of us from our childhood.
But when I look at the patterning that came from there, and the choice of my partners from that moment forth, I was drawn to an energy of people who also did not allow my wants, my needs, were not allowed or not, not celebrated, right? Who I was, was not celebrated. And partly because I didn't know who I was, I didn't know what was important to me, I didn't know what I wanted, I didn't know because it wasn't allowed, right, what I wanted, wasn't allowed.
And so it's like this, this pinpoint moment in time that when it echoes out, it's like a ripple, right, you drop, you drop a stone in a pond, and the ripple ripples out, and it gets bigger and bigger and bigger as it goes. So as these points in time, that might seem just like this little thing is like a little perception shift in that moment. And as it echoes through the timeline, the impact of that moment gets bigger and bigger and bigger.
So who I am at 50 years old, realizing how unimportant I've been to the masculine energies in my life. Sure, they loved me. But they didn't know me, because I didn't know myself, right. And if I hadn't known myself, and if I had have had important once a needs that I was willing to stand by and have boundaries in place, I wouldn't have been in the relationships I was in. And instead, I just folded into these relationships where I ended up being the supporter, the supporting role, and taking on everything and being everything and being all singing and all dancing, I look how amazing I am. And I look at my accomplishments and look how great I am and looking for love through validation.
Until you get to the point where you realize that you're not supported, and that your wants and needs aren't important. And then that's confusing, because you don't know who you are. But all you know is that who you are being is not what you want to be. And then there's a long, painful journey back to self.
And that's the journey I'm on at the moment. And I have been on for a couple of years. And I'm coming into a point now where I mean, the questioning for myself in the last few weeks has been what am I allowed to want to need, like because I haven't had any.
And if you listened to, actually the last podcast episode I did, When Shadow Bites and I talked about how I've been doing a course with Georgia Rose. And we were talking about once a needs and I had this moment where I was not sure if I was dying or not. I laugh because obviously it wasn't dying. But at the time, I was scared and alone and in the middle of the night and I had to call for an ambulance. And I realized that the only way I was allowed to call for help with if I actually thought I was dying. And that was the only time I was allowed to ask for something and everything else I had to give myself.
And then there's the question of well, if I can give myself everything, what am I allowed to ask for in relationship? What am I allowed to need? How much can I lean on the other person. And there's that whole thing of codependency, which I used to think was a beautiful relationship when you relied on each other for all your needs. And the problem was that I was giving and giving and giving but not getting and getting and getting.
And codependency is not healthy, it's not a good thing. And my book on codependency has just shown up from Amazon. So as I read through that, if I get any nuggets of gold, I'll be sharing them with you.
So it's really this coming back to self, coming back to your own person, being able to meet your own needs, but then also feeling safe to ask for things from another person. So it's a real dance, a real dance inside of not being needy, but being allowed needs. And that's something I'm navigating. And I know that until I actually get into relationship again in the future, you know, I can practice is all I want.
It's like, you know, learning music, pretending to have a keyboard in front of me and learning music by doing like a table but not actually on a piano. And you can only get so good right when you when you're just practicing in your head and practicing the finger movements on a table as opposed to a piano until you actually sit down at a piano and hear the music and hear the sound and start to bring in bits of you and your own emotion the way you play it then it doesn't become real.
So me learning all this stuff about myself and how to be... and come in to secure attachment. I know that until I actually get into relationship with somebody else who is in secure attachment and I'm able to start asking for things and analyzing myself and observing myself within this that I you know, there's only so far I can get
But the whole point about this and I know sorry took me a long time to get to this is really about feeling emotions. And the sadness that I was feeling this morning that's already starting to resolve, but it's this deep echoing sadness with inside me and I woke up with it and I've been feeling great for the last week which is for me at the moment is a real record of feeling amazing for a whole week because I've been going through and shifting so much so many layers and doing so much work and going into so much process within myself in so many different modalities, that to get to the point where it actually held for a week was amazing. And I it's I know, it's because I did this massive healing last Friday with one of my mentors, Keith Hodge, which was crazy. And I know that that's holding, and I'm in a better place, but the sadness is echoing inside me.
So the sadness that I experienced today is very different than the sadness I experienced a few years ago. And the difference is that I wasn't making it mean anything, I was just allowing it, I was feeling the vibration of this energy inside me and recognizing that it was nothing to do with that now, and everything to do with the past.
And this is the thing about emotions, you know, something happens, it triggers an emotion inside us. And it's not actually about the now, it's about the past. And it's about something, there's a trigger inside us that gets triggered because it's something that happened to us when we were smaller, or a little child, or maybe even an adult, where we learned something, we learned something that stored an emotion.
And we weren't allowed that emotion, or we didn't know how to deal with that emotion, or it wasn't safe to feel that emotion. And so we held it inside. And instead, we turned it into a meaning we turned it into a belief about ourselves. Like, I'm not important, I'm not worthy, I'm not lovable. The biggest one really underlying all of it is safety, we're not safe, because that's really what the unconscious mind is the most concerned about how safe we are.
So this emotion that I've been feeling this morning with sadness is an echo of the past, leading all the way back through every moment of sadness, about not having a shape or not being allowed, back to the very first moment. And it's been in my body this whole time, this sadness, and it would have... you know, almost like a volcano, sometimes it would erupt, right?
And I would use it as like, I would cling to it and almost like my sadness made me important. And it's just like this feeling inside you, you hang on to it, you cry and you know, you feel it, you're really still controlling and constricting it and keeping it in as opposed to just just opening to the sadness, opening to this emotion and allowing it and observing it as opposed to being it.
And I think that's the difference observing it. And not being it observing it and not having it overwhelm you. And expressing it, you can express it, you can cry, you can allow it. But it's not making it mean something about you. It's just recognizing where it came from.
And so the sadness that was in my body this morning, I was able to hold it with my heart open and allow it to move through me. And it was a really beautiful sensation. It actually felt like a cool crystalline stream of water flowing through me, like, you know, like in a beautiful forest or rain forest where there's no pollution, and there's nothing there and you just these beautiful springs of water. That's what it felt like coming through me.
And, and it was a really beautiful thing. And recognizing and feeling and how it felt in my body as well like feeling it through my whole it's in my chest, but all the way down, you know, down through my my arm or down through my chakras, even into my root chakra, I could feel this vibration inside.
Now, when we're small, we're taught that certain things about about us, certain emotions are bad. And when we cry, it's like, hey, oh, don't cry here have a cookie or he had this or don't be silly. It's not that, you know, that wasn't that bad. And we're taught that sadness is not allowed. And maybe there's some shame around being sad, maybe we're not toughen up, if we're sad. Maybe we need to suck it up princess. You know, it's just a flesh wound, all that sort of stuff rather than being acknowledged, and having the sadness allowed and taught how to feel our emotions that they can so they can shift through us and we can move beyond them right?
The same with anger, we're not allowed to have anger. Oh my god, if you have anger as a small child, you are sometimes punished for it. So isn't that interesting? Our anger is punished with anger, like someone else's anger gets to punish our anger. And we have to force it inside and we're not allowed to be angry. So many of my clients I work with, and even myself, it took me years to get to the point where I could express my anger because it just was not allowed and it would come up and it would like hit this like wall inside me. And and I just couldn't express that. It's like nah, can't do it and a lot.
And then one day I was working with my girlfriend and mentor, Charlotte and she was just like really going up me to come and express it and I was just do a little scream just to shut her up right? Just make her happy. And there's one little scream turned into like two hours of like a scene of me just expressing this anger that had been inside me all this time.
Now this anger was inside me, the energy of it lived in me, in my cells. And it was impacting me. It's almost like you know, when you have a photo, I don't If you've worked in any graphic software stuff like Canva, and you have a photo, and then you put a filter over it, and you might like, dial it down, so you can put different font on it. So it'll show up. It's kind of like that happens with your life, right? Yeah, there's amazing, sparkling, beautiful life that we can exist in, in bliss. But then we put these filters over it that we're viewing it through, and anger is there, when it's inside us all the time.
It puts this filter over our life, and we see through this filter, and it really impacts us the same with sadness, it's trapped inside. The same with jealousy, the same with grief, but also happiness as well, right.
So, if you cling to your emotions, if you're not allowed your emotions, if you've pushed them down, and there a part of you that's not allowed, then that becomes what we call your shadow. And I will talk about shadow more in later podcasts. And people talk about your shadow, like it's this bad thing like this dark part of you, but it's not. It's just the part of you you're not allowing, and sometimes beautiful parts of you in your shadow.
Like, you know, you might have learned that it's not safe to be attractive or pretty. So you don't see yourself as attractive or pretty or smart. Or do you mean sometimes we we relegate these things that other people might see as good within us, we stick them into a shadow because of what we learned when we were when we were small.
So shadow is not a bad thing. Shadow is just the part of us that is not loud. It's stuck in the unconscious. And basically, when I'm doing analytical hypnotherapy with people, I'm basically doing shadow work continuously. Because we're diving into these moments in time, when they learn things about themselves, and they patch certain parts of themselves away, and we're changing their perception and bringing back into their body what is allowed.
So, just as you know, these negative emotions of sadness and anger, and maybe, you know, jealousy and things like that, we were taught, we're bad, were negative, right? And then we're taught things like joy and happiness and bliss are good, right? They're not, they're just all emotions. And we live in a duality world, right? We live in a world where things are relegated to good or bad, so we can kind of understand and we can learn how to stay safe, we can have some control in the world, right? But if in this culture, are good and bad, is not the same as in a different culture than what's real, what is good, what is bad, right?
If, you know I can find joy in something that brings somebody else sadness, and what is it? Is it good or bad? And the truth is, it's neither, it's neither good nor bad. And we live in this world. And we create these filters. And we see the world through these filters. And we relegate things to good and bad, to black and white so that we can understand them, and we can control them. But the truth is, they just are, they're just there. And if we weren't here to judge them, then they would still just exist and just be.
So that's non duality. And that's a concept that I was only introduced to a couple of years ago. So you know, and it may be, so maybe something you've never heard of before. But being able to move into a space of non duality in life, when you're able to see things is neither good nor bad, but just existing. And that's where freedom starts to come from. Because the thing about duality is that it allows us to experience you know, humanity through the right and the wrong, the good and the bad. But it also takes away from pure joy in life. Because when we live in duality, it's really a fear based world, and a control based world that we live in, where, where it's like, we're allowing ourselves to have the good in them, but not the bad. And then the bad stuff we're trying to control and trying to force away. And then we're trying to stop, you know, control things so that we don't feel pain, right.
But the thing about pain is that the pain itself is not, it's not optional, right? It's going to happen. What is optional is the suffering that comes with the pain. And when we force it down inside, we will deny it and we pretend it's not there, that it turns into suffering. But when something comes up, and you allow it in your body, and you breathe through it, and you allow it to express and you stay with it, you observe it and you don't make it mean anything about you or anything about the world or anything about anybody else. Other than that it's there in your body right now the vibration is there, and realize that it's actually just something from the past. Then you have freedom, because you're no longer scared. And you realize that you are safe no matter what. It's safe to be in this body, it's safe to feel emotions, and you are safe and you can be what you want to be right.
So just as we resist feeling, anger, pain, you know a pain, painful things right anger, sadness, things that we talked about. We also then the flip side of that is we hang on to things that are positive. So when we meet somebody in our life and they make us feel good about ourselves, we cling on to them, we hold on to them, and we cling on to moments in time. And I know my girlfriends used to bring me... like when my ex husband used to say nice things about me to them because he wasn't really you know, good with the compliments to me.
But he would tell them nice things about me or compliment me to them. And they knew that he didn't say these things to me. So they would collect them for me and bring them to me and offer them and tell me about them. And I would hold on to those things. And they were often what sustained me within relationship that that's, I knew that that's what he really thought, right? And I would cling on to these things, and I would collect them, like maybe like a magpie with shiny objects, right, or a squirrel with an acorn. And I would get them and I would look at them. And when I felt sad, I would pull them out. And I would look at them and they what kept me going, right.
But these things were just crumbs. And I was being sustained by these crumbs in this relationships, and I was turning them into polishing them up and making them into gold and putting them on a mantelpiece and staying with them and holding on to them, right.
So just as we should not resist negative things, and we should just allow them to move through us, we should not hold on to positive things, we should just allow them to move through us. So happiness, joy, bliss, you know, love, we experience them, we let them vibrate within us, we let them move through us. And by doing that, we're real, we're true.
Like, if I hadn't been doing that, if I hadn't been allowing the sadness to vibrate within me, and then allowing the happiness to come and go, I would have probably left a lot earlier, because I would have realized that what I had was a whole pile of sadness inside. And not a lot of happiness. And the reason I left in the end was because I realized I was cut off from joy. I couldn't touch joy anymore because of the sadness. And I didn't want to live a life without joy. I couldn't touch joy.
And it's taken me years to get back to the point where I wake up in the morning. And when I asked myself what I feel inside, it's joy. It's not there every day. And it won't be there every day, because I'm allowing to move through me stuff. But what will happen is, the more I shift, this trapped emotion, this trapped energy inside me and the more I allow things to move through me, the clearer a channel I will become, and the more joy will just exist, the more bliss will just be there. And I'll start to move into just a state of being love, a feeling love because that really is the energy of the universe, right? That is love.
So I think I've gone round in circles. I'm sorry, if I confused you. The whole point of this podcast episode was just to talk to you about the importance of just allowing, breathing through emotions and to know that they're not a bad thing, not to hold on to them, not to trap them inside, not to make them mean something about you, not to be a dam, but to be a bridge that allows things to come and allow things to go.
And when you can do that, when you can move from that place, then you can flow through life, in freedom and love and joy, but also in sadness and anger and grief. And you can be who you really are. You can show up in the world as you and you can be allowed.
So I hope you got something out of this and I will see you in the next podcast. I think I'm going to, I'm planning to talk about wants and needs in the next podcast, but who knows. Something else might come up between now and then. So have an amazing week and I just you know practiced allowing your emotions and see how that goes for you.
I hope you enjoyed this episode of the Living Through Heart Podcast. To find out more about me and Living through Heart, check out donnajoyusher.com and livingthroughheart.com. There you'll find links to everything you need, including some free tools to help you and ways you can work with me on your own soul healing journey.
Transcribed by https://otter.ai