This week, I learned a term to describe something many of us feel, but perhaps haven't fully owned yet... emotion phobia. Sometimes this looks like busying ourselves with things to avoid feeling something, or even avoiding love because we're afraid we may later feel a loss. And the sad thing is, while we are avoiding our feelings and compartmentalizing our life, our mind thinks it's doing the right thing, and the result is that our emotions stay trapped in our bodies and create misalignments that we fail to see are impacting our actions. But who can blame us? Feeling unpleasant emotions is, after all, unpleasant. Isn't it? Or is this ever NOT the case? Can feeling unpleasant emotions actually be beautiful? This week on the Wisdom of the Body podcast, I interview AmarAtma Singh, a grief coach and grief recovery specialist with experience as a board-certified chaplain in acute care hospital settings. We dove deep into the topic of grief, and all the magical things that can happen when we face our grief - whether it's from a loss of a person, a relationship, love, money, freedom, functionality, or even losing something that your imagination conjured up. Grief comes in different forms and with different levels of intensity. And the weirdest thing happened as we were talking about grief, and I was running through some weird scenarios in which I personally experience grief... I started to feel more empowered just talking about it. It was like my fear of dealing with my grief was way worse than actually feeling it. And it was really empowering. Our fear of experiencing something can be far more uncomfortable than actually dealing with the thing we are afraid of. This episode reminded me of my very first Wisdom of the Body podcast episode in 2020 with Kristen Ulmer, extreme skier and author of The Art of Fear. When we face our uncomfortable emotions with surrender and grace, even going so far as to willingly invite them in, there's some serious magic that happens. But don't take my word for it. Check out this week's episode with AmarAtma and see if we can collectively learn to rediscover how to grieve again.
