Hard emotions come up now and then, just like the shiny ones.

What do you do when they arise?

Do you hide and run?
Do you shove them down?
Do you pretend they don’t exist?

If you are doing any of the above, I guarantee it is not going to work out for you in the long term.

The exact opposite approaches—no matter how hard, will work for you in the long run.

Instead of hiding and running, show your full naked self and run to them. Greet them. Date them until you can dump them.

Instead of shoving them down, coax them up through your intestines and use the matter as alchemical material for a better life.

Instead of pretending they don’t exist, give them full attention and recognition.

Hard emotions come up when past experiences arise that have not been processed. As Joe Dispenza says”, a memory without an emotional charge is called ‘wisdom.’”

A memory without an emotional charge is called ‘wisdom.’

-Dr. Joe Dispenza


Just like we must know how to incorporate the masculine elements of structure, intensity, grit, determination, and order as well as the feminine elements of flow, rest, surrender, curiosity, and allowing in our training lives, we must know how to incorporate all emotions.

This primer might be helpful for you:

According to Dispenza, when an emotion lasts more than a few hours, it becomes a mood. When it lasts more than a few days, it becomes a temperament. When it lasts years, it becomes a personality trait. Replacing a negative personality trait with a positive one, then, requires changing the emotions that eventually build to that trait. 

I’m reminded of the great precursor to never beginning a workout program: excuse #1 in the Book of Transformation: “I don’t feel like it.”

“I don’t feel like it” expresses a mood, which is essentially an emotion (a mental reaction) that has stewed for more than a few hours. It’s the degree to which you feel inclined to engage in your life, essentially. Maybe the trigger emotion was Fear. Maybe the trigger emotion was Sadness. Maybe the trigger emotion was Disgust. Only you know.

When the mood curdles in you for more than a few days—it becomes part of your cellular matrix, a temperament.

And when the temperament sticks around for years (gasp!), it becomes a personality trait. Essentially, it becomes the unconscious way you think, feel, and act.

Mr. Dos Equis is a great archetype of the unconscious personality festering to the point of unawareness.

Without getting too off track, I hope you are picking up what I am pointing down to by now.

If we do not address the root of WHY we are how we are and who we are, we cannot possibly transform into who we want to become.

It really is that simple. Not easy, but simple.

To be the hero of your own journey, you must exercise the bravery to excavate your own reality with these questions:

  • Who am I today?

  • How do I tend to behave?

  • Why do I feel this way most of the time?

  • What feeling did this start with?

Following this deep dig sequence, you will get to the root, which is most likely some memory that you never fully processed.

That memory still has an emotional charge, and you can’t possibly incorporate it into your life today as wisdom until you “get good” with it first.

You’ve probably seen this pic in former blog posts of mine. It’s from a practice called “Feeding Your Demons.”

Like most shit, the anticipation of facing it is much worse than actually moving through it.

Which you will.

More than anything, this post is a call to action to explore what’s weighing you down, why you can’t seem to shake the habit of being yourself, and remind you that there is a path to enlightenment through “hard” emotions.

Let Frankie (best show ever) from Grace and Frankie be a model of the sequence you can take: a VERY human sequence I must say.

Some emotions are so hard we first reflexively push them down.
The secret is to maintain compassion for yourself to entertain them for tea and nonjudgmental listening—on your own nervous system timeline’s of readiness, of course.
And then, without letting them overpower you and your personal boundaries, forgive them.

Like the cliché “if you love something, let it go,” even though we may hate the emotional state we have been befriending for years and years, taking care of, enabling…we have to let it go to step into the future awaiting us.

The transformation of your emotions (emotion = the desire to do something, motion = doing something), therefore, is not just a rip and toss like getting your upper lip waxed; it’s more of a investigate, accept, then transmute into something much better.

You can go from Fear to Love.
You can go from Sad to Happy.
You can go from Angry to Grateful.

In Love,

Coach Abby