Developing Emotional Mobility

Do you have the emotional mobility to experience all the things you want in your life? Are you strong? Are you flexible? Can you move through all the experiences of your life without shutting down or numbing out? 

The past few weeks of preparing for my daughter’s wedding, while also dealing with hard things that have happened to me and people that I love, have been overwhelming at times. 

I’ve found myself thinking, “I can’t feel all this. I can’t feel anything more. This is just too much to hold.” Maybe you’ve been there, too?

So, what do we do when it all feels like too much? In today’s podcast episode, I’m sharing tools to help you develop more emotional mobility so you can have more freedom, peace, and confidence as you experience all the emotions of your life. 

What Is Emotional Mobility?

You may have heard of physical mobility. Here, the goal is to be strong, flexible and agile enough to use your body in any way you like. It allows you to do what you want with your body so that you can have the experiences and quality of life you want. 

We can apply the same idea of mobility to our emotional health, so that you can experience all the things that you want to - love the way you want to, mourn with people, have empathy and compassion, be brave and courageous when things are hard.

And just like physical mobility, emotional mobility is something you can develop and practice.

Resisting Your Emotions Only Makes It Worse

It’s so common for us to try to numb our emotions, to disconnect from ourselves, our feelings and sometimes even other people in our lives. You might find yourself easily frustrated or angered. 

We don’t want to feel negative or painful emotions. But when we resist, avoid or buffer them, those feelings don’t actually go away and we end up feeling worse for longer. When we can move towards and experience the emotion, we can pass through it and get to the other side more quickly.

I believe that one of our purposes in life is to learn to feel and increase our ability to feel without numbing, avoiding or shutting down. 

Emotional mobility can also increase your quality of life because it allows you to have more experiences. When you aren’t scared, defensive or worried, you can open yourself up to everything life has to offer.

How To Develop Emotional Mobility

Here are some lessons I’ve learned during this highly emotional time in my life. I hope they will help you to have the emotional mobility, flexibility and versatility to experience all the highs and lows in your own life, without needing to avoid, change or control them. 

Release the need to control your emotional experience

You might feel the urge sometimes to create a life in which you feel only positive emotions, so that you never feel bad. Not only is this impossible, it can actually end up hurting you. 

When you get caught up in a wave of negative emotion, your instinct might be to push against it, fight it and find a way out. But what if you can just relax and allow yourself to experience it? 

My own coach challenged me with this question recently. I felt like if I couldn’t control the emotion, I wouldn’t survive it. But this is never true. We can experience any emotion and still be okay. I’ve found that the more I can relax into it and allow the experience, the calmer and less trapped I feel. 

Trust your ability to feel anything

You have a body, and that body is the tool of feeling. You have everything you need to be able to experience any emotion that you will feel while you are here on the Earth. 

We start to panic almost immediately when we begin to feel bad. We think, “I can’t do this. I’ve got to fix it or change it.” This is normal. We’ve evolved to keep ourselves alive and safe, to avoid, run or fight what feels dangerous. 

Many of us also have attached morality to our feelings. We think that if we were good people, doing life “right”, we wouldn’t feel bad. 

Your emotions are not your enemy, and you are not doing it wrong. You came to learn how to feel, and you can trust your intrinsic ability as a human to do that. 

Allow yourself the space to practice feeling

Feeling is a skill that you can develop, but most of us have not been taught how to do it. 

Usually, when we experience our emotions, we're doing it in our heads. We're thinking about our feelings. It's a mental experience. When you are actually feeling your feelings, it is a physical experience in your body. 

So practice looks like getting in your body and asking yourself where you're feeling a vibration, tightness, tension, pain, movement, or some other physical sensation of that feeling. You can also try getting curious and asking the feeling some questions or imagining that you are sitting next to the feeling and observing it. 

Our feelings usually do not need to be solved. They need to be witnessed, acknowledged and given space to exist. Sometimes there is nothing to do, there are just things to be felt.

Let it be

Every moment, every experience in your life is going to be born and die. Once that moment passes, it is never coming back. 

I want you to experience all of it authentically and truthfully, because we miss out on our actual lives when we’re caught up in trying to create the life that we think we're supposed to be in. 

Trust God

Everything happens for us. This is one of the most powerful, life-changing thoughts that I ever heard. Even if the things we choose are painful or hard, they are all happening for us. They are all an essential part of our Earth life experience. 

Sometimes we're overly concerned with making sure everything is all good right now and trying to figure out why things are happening. We want to label and categorize things as good or bad. We want to know the meaning of it right when we're in. But this can make us anxious and trigger our need for control.

Can you just trust that all of it is for your good? Your life is supposed to contain all the positive and negative emotions available. That's how God set it up. 

I think when we shut down our negative emotions, it stunts our ability to feel positive emotions, as well. There is opposition in all things. And the better you are at feeling bad, the more capacity you have to feel good. All the highs and lows are what will make your life so awesome. 

You’ll Learn:

• How to deal with emotional overwhelm
• The difference between emotional resilience and emotional mobility
• Why trying to resist or avoid negative emotion doesn’t work
• Questions to ask to help you practice feeling
• Why you never really have to worry