When life gives you lemons - how to handle big emotions
Emotions are like lemons.
They hurtle into your life, bouncing into you in a yellow flash, and sometimes we can make something sweet out of them, and sometimes they just leave us with a bitter and sour taste of resentment, overwhelm, and defeat.
I asked for some guidance as to what to write about today and Lo and behold I was delivered the line ‘when life gives you lemons’ and I think I know what this is about.
I’ve recently been going through a big state of emotional turmoil that’s had me riding the waves, clinging onto the life raft of my sanity for dear life as I’ve been tossed into the pits of despair and back into the sunlight dancing on the water. It’s been intense to say the least and I’ve got motion sickness from the absolute highs and worrying lows of these past few months.
Perhaps you’ve also been going through something similar. Maybe it’s been even more extreme, or maybe it’s been a little gentler. Either way, you’re not alone.
There’s something in the air, or perhaps in the stars, that’s causing all sorts of big shifts within me and within so many others that I’m close with. When you’re going through it you can feel so alone, like you’ve been abandoned and have no map to guide you back into the simplicity of your life before.
But you’re not alone, and you’re definitely not designed to go backwards. I know how comforting the past can feel. This is because it’s familiar. We can see clearly what’s happened, thus we feel in complete control of those memories.
It’s the future that’s so unsettling for us, especially when we’re going through emotional turmoil that feels like it’ll never end, because we can’t anticipate the outcome, we don’t know what’s going to happen and we can’t prepare ourselves for it.
Letting go of the fear of change
As I’ve written many times before, mainly for myself to hopefully learn through repetition, change is an inevitable part of our human existence and without it there would be no life. Yet it is so scary for our ego-mind to allow us to step so naively and so unprepared into a future of unknowns.
In the past, where we like to hang out, we are always safe and in control, yet this future is a strange void that has no form.
At the crux of it all, it all comes down to a fear of whether we’ll be able to handle what happens. Whether we have a fear of failure, a fear of judgement, a fear of loss or a fear of visibility, the fear is always rooted in the same core emotional self-esteem wound; trusting our ability to handle whatever comes our way.
And this void; the bleak future of muted colours and shapes that we can’t yet give form to, is something we fear, yet it holds all the possibilities of what we are truly capable of.
Remember, the future is formless; however, the more thought we give it, the more form it takes. So, as always, we must be careful of the thoughts that permeate our mind, and allow ourselves to imagine the best for our future realities, rather than just anticipating the worst.
We all fall into the trap of speculating and mind-mapping the ‘what-if’s’ that causes us to stagnate and procrastinate. What if it doesn’t work, what if I look stupid, what if I can’t do it and fall flat on my face, what if I end up on the streets, what if, what if, what if.
I know these well, as I’ve thought about them many times and have often gotten lost in the labyrinth of my mind trying to analyse, rationalise, map, control, formulate, and plan my way in all possibilities.
If you do the same, please let go of all judgement you may hold on yourself and the way your mind works. This is just the ego in its element, doing what it does best; trying to keep you safe, small and limited.
Inviting self-compassion in to ease your judgement
One of the best things I’ve ever learnt about the way our minds work, especially in relation to the subconscious programming that keeps us living in limitation and lower consciousness, is that the more judgement we hold on ourselves and the way we are, the more these programmes stick in place.
Yes, I am well aware that my fear of judgement and being seen affects my ability to grow myself and my business, but I also hold great compassion for myself and have come to a greater understanding of why I am the way I am.
My story that makes me who I am is fascinating, and I’m sure yours is too.
There is always a backstory to who we are. The mind makes us believe that we’re in some way two dimensional with only the past to guide us forwards. Yet, our lives are far richer than that. We have lived many lifetimes, in many dimensions, realities and timelines, all coming together to form the perfection of our lives right now.
Your life is an ever-unfolding story of beauty and wonder. Do not limit yourself to the mind’s conditioning that tricks you into believing you are less than a miracle of life.
The more highly we hold ourselves in regards, the more capable we become of truly sharing ourselves and our gifts out into the world. Yet, one of the most powerful forces that stop us is our ego’s thoughts and fears, freezing us in a place of judgement that can sometimes be totally uncontrollable.
If you’ve ever found yourself in a storm of negative emotions, spiralling into self-judgement where you abandon yourself and give way to the thoughts of a construct designed to imprison your greatness, then you’re not alone, and there are ways to bring yourself back into a place of stillness and calm.
Opening back up to your greatness
We are all a bundle of cells, filled with information that creates our reality on an ongoing basis.
We are the product of our parents, our ancestors, our soul’s story, traumas, wounding and life experiences. All of these subtly form us into the very beings that we are, controlling us in ways and means that most of us never become conscious of.
Our subconscious programming is what runs our lives. It’s the voice in our head telling us we can’t do something, it’s the self-sabotage keeping us playing small, it’s the argument that always wins and causes us to lose sight of the things we were once so passionate about. It’s what keeps us so often stuck in our circumstances.
Imagine an ocean, that you are sailing on. You may think that you are steering the course of your direction, but it is actually the deep currents underneath that are carrying you through life.
Most of us never go swimming. We don’t want to dive too deep and risk finding something unpleasant and uncomfortable, so we stay on the surface. Yet, some of us have no choice. Life throws us a storm and all we can do is face it head on, so we can come face to face with what’s really going on.
If you are in the storm of emotions it can feel unsettling and wildly out of control, but this is your invitation to go deeper, to find out the truth, and get to the core of the programming that has been keeping you stuck, powerless and out of alignment in your life.
As I wrote earlier, I had this storm not too long ago, and it was brutal. At its core were some deeply-rooted beliefs around money, survival and worthiness to receive; all tied up in one big beautiful bundle.
If I had stayed in the emotional chaos I would have slipped into a state of fear and panic that would have blinded me to the real root cause of the emotional upset (and many times I did slip into this state for brief periods of time). Yet, the invitation to go deeper was where I found my answers.
Finding stillness in the storm
If you are in a storm the key is to find your stillness. The stiller you are, the more you can connect to the truth of what’s really going on. This is making lemonade from lemons.
Imagine thrashing about in a pool of water. You’re churning it up so much that it becomes cloudy, making it hard to see and dirty. Now imagine if you stayed still, letting the storm rage around you. Then you look down into the still pool of water and see what lies on the bottom.
What’s lying there is the programme, the fear or the belief that has been encoded into your subconscious and is ready and waiting to be plucked out and alchemised into gold.
This is the gift of big emotional turmoil; the invitation to make alchemy and turn pain into gold.
The most annoying phrase of all is that life never gives you more than you can handle. Some people are given far too much grief, pain and suffering for me to ever be fully on board with that statement but here’s what I’ll take out of it; you can handle this storm, and you can find the gold within it to change your life.
All it takes is compassion, letting go of the judgement you hold on yourself, and giving yourself the time, space, and love to allow those waters to clear. And if I can do it then you can definitely do it.
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