How We Feel Better by Owning Our Shadow Without Playing the Victim #185

Jerry Banfield

How does owning our story of why we feel bad and what's going on with us, and sharing those feelings that we want to keep inside actually help us to feel happy more often? Thank you for reading about day 185 of Happier People Podcast and I hope you enjoy it! New episodes of #happierpeople podcast are published first at https://dsound.audio/#!/@jerrybanfield Listen to this on @dsound at https://dsound.audio/#/@jerrybanfield/how-we-feel-better-by-owning-our-shadow-without-playing-the-victim-185 or read the edited transcript below? How We Feel Better by Owning Our Shadow Without Playing the Victim If that didn't make sense let's put it another way. When we are struggling internally with things like fear, anger, frustration and resentment, but we think that we are doing well presenting to the world a "I'm fine" or "I'm good" face, meanwhile our thoughts are constantly plagued by fear and frustration, how can we actually get our thoughts out in a way that allows us to get back to being happy faster? For example, today I got a bit frustrated at my limitations. I wanted to go out and do a video showing my garden, at the same time feeling my body, it feels like it is wanting to rest a bit more and to just sit around on the couch. Now, if I try to just put on a happy face and act like everything is cool and that it doesn't bother me at all, then ironically I get even more frustrated. What helps me is to own how I'm feeling right at the moment, like my brother called last night and asked, "How are you doing?" I replied, "Well, here's how I'm doing. I'm tired. I'm annoyed. I'm irritated. I'm not sure what's going on with my body. I'm afraid I'm getting sick and I'm not sure what to do about all of it, and that's how I'm feeling right this moment, and there's no reason, there's no cause outside of that in my life." Now, guess what happened? I owned how I felt with my brother right away instead of lying or acting like, "Oh, I'm good. I'm good. I'm good." Doesn't it pain you? It pains me to see someone who obviously is just wrecked with pain. Their whole body and face look tense, they look miserable and we ask, "How are you doing?" and what are we hearing back? "Good! I'm good." That's called a lie. A lie is when we have a clear truth that's alive in us such as feeling angry, miserable, frustrated, whatever we are thinking about and feeling, and then we communicate something else. I've been a big fat liar my whole life who consistently responded to, "How are you doing?" with "I'm great. Wonderful. Happy. Lovely. Joyful. Beautiful day today." I rarely would ever open up about what was really going on, which is what was alive inside me right that moment. Jerry Banfield Like when my brother called last night, that was really opening up about what was going on at the moment, and what also helps is to separate out the rest of the world from having caused that, to realize it's not the world that causes how I feel, it's how I react to what I'm seeing. Now, sometimes my reactions might be tied into something I saw and sometimes it can help to understand how I reacted to a certain stimulus, but most of the time it just comes down to how I reacted. Sure, my wife and I were looking at maybe buying a house yesterday and that didn't work out, but that did not cause me to feel tired, frustrated and aggravated. That had nothing to do with me feeling how I felt. What I chose to act upon and react upon, and which thoughts I chose to believe, my choices left me feeling how I felt, and the irony is in order to get through some of the feelings in my life that are challenging, I end up needing to actually go deeper into them first. I think there is something, it was in the book "Tao Te Ching" by Laozi. It says that if you want to make something better, often it helps to make it worse. That's some kind of a paraphrase. The main idea is, if we want something to go away, often we need to dive into