Coaching Journey – The only way out is through

I noticed that throughout my coaching journey I have been so focused on being positive and repeating positive affirmations that I have been dismissing any type of negative emotion, acknowledging and dealing with it. Ironically awareness is the basis of coaching and I have learned the hard way that attracting abundance and positive things into our lives does not mean ignoring and dismissing our pains or hurts.

Yesterday I had an incredible EFT session with a great coaching colleague. With Emotional Freedom Technique, we have to repeat the negative emotions we feel out loud and say: “even though I feel (so and so) I still accept and love myself unconditionally” repeating how I felt out loud while tapping on certain points allowed me to confront my true raw emotions, and although heavy memories would come up for me, I found myself feeling lighter with every round. I realised that I have been so immersed in putting up a front to the world (that I am happy, that I am okay, that everything is perfect) completely dismissing the painful emotions I felt and carried with me. When we don’t confront our feelings even negative ones they build up inside and show up as pain or pressure in our bodies.

Funnily enough I have been reading many books about awareness and being in the present moment, about how powerful our thoughts are in terms of what we attract into our lives. I have been so adamant about positive thinking and realised I have been ignoring any type of pain I have experienced. Pain is not bad, we need to remove that notion from our minds. We are human after all, and we are not perfect beings or creatures. If that were the case then so many injustices wouldn’t be happening right now. Human beings unfortunately too many times have used violence to treat violence. I feel wiser today than I did yesterday.

At first I was somewhat surprised when I had to repeat the truth of my pain aloud to myself, allowing my mind and body to acknowledge my emotions felt liberating, felt authentic and felt real. I thought to myself how in life it is always much easier to help others rather than ourselves. In everything, from relationship advice, to work advice, etc. Funny how we see things so clearly when it comes to others but when we are in the centre of it all we get lost in our story. I am here to reclaim my story. I realised that acknowledging pain and sadness and suffering is the most essential step to healing. I have been putting up an act for too long and didn’t even notice.

Now I truly understand the meaning of blindness in the context of lack of awareness. By dismissing any negative thought and feeling I was only making it worse for myself. I had to leave my session a bit earlier that I would have liked, but I truly appreciated this new-found knowledge and awareness that came to me in less than an hour. If we think of darkness as absence of light, and we are in a dark room, instead of being afraid let us use our other senses to find our way.

Our senses are there for a reason, we forget how instinctual we are at times as we live life on auto pilot losing our connection with our self and with our senses. So in the absence of happiness there is sadness, in the absence of peace there is fear, anger or chaos, in the absence of gratitude there is resentment. When we find ourselves in the absence of the opposite positive emotion, let us acknowledge it and accept it with openness, let us use our senses to understand why we are feeling that way, and in that moment of intuitive connection which is far deeper and greater than any other type of connection we are able to heal, move on and prosper.

I finally understand that to be positive and think positive does not mean to ignore our pains, we have to learn to recognise it, accept it and coexist with it. After all, there is no happiness without sorrow, and no justice without injustice. I see clearly the Yin and Yang in life and how in negative thoughts/ emotion there is a dot of light and we can bring ourselves out, it’s just a matter of undoing our blind fold, while at the same time in positive thoughts/emotion there is a dot of darkness, and if we are dismissing our negative thoughts/emotions that come up then we allow the dot to expand into a bigger circle until we are on the dark side, unable to see. The famous saying “there is a light at the end of the tunnel” never felt more powerful.

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