I am learning how to squish shame into oblivion so that it just doesn’t exist at all.
I want to share a new practice of genuinely changing the experience of negative emotion - not ignoring it, but finding the pleasure in it.
Recently I’ve written about splitting hairs around memories - how I realized I would suck the blood out of any happy memory by immediately smashing it under the boot of
“It’s a shame that will never happen again…”
Or some similar reason to be sad before the happiness even had a chance to be felt by over 90% of me.
The discovery? That through noticing that these were two separate experiences of feeling, I could choose to stay longer, to build my tolerance to sitting in the positive. I did not have to let the second emotion steal my joy.
What I’m here to tell you, instead, is that it may be possible to also find the joy in the negative emotion - that there is in fact joy in all of it.
For many people that have less practice in total acceptance of things this will sound utterly, entirely impossible and possibly even disgusting. I’m going to walk you through these preliminary stages and give you a chance to explore it for yourself, with a special 24-hour challenge at the end of this newsletter and $5 off my Body Awareness course for being a paid subscriber, good for the next 24 hours.
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