TT #16

​
​What I know now,
​that I didn't know before:​​​

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The darkness is where the light gets in.

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testimonial Tuesday #16

​"You cannot selectively numb. 
When you numb out in one area of your life, you numb in all areas of your life.  This numbs the good along with the bad". ​

-Brené Brown
LMSW, PhD
Speaker, Author, Steward of Brilliance

​I love Brené Brown.  And I LOVE that quote.  I have carried it with me ever since the first time I heard her say it. The idea -to me- is pretty obvious, however, it came up in my recent session with Rachael in a way that I had yet to fully understand.
Recently, I have been grappling with the idea that ‘to feel good and light and buoyant in my life makes me naive and ungrounded'.  Furthermore, I have held a strong idea that if I continue to invest in those aspects of myself, I will eventually float away into lala land where nothing is serious and where everything is sunshine and rainbows, and consequently, not real.  Rachael and I discussed this in our work last Friday; that I LIKE feeling joyful and buoyant, but that I fear it will pull me away from the things that are keeping me grounded.  The things that are keeping me ‘real’ and helping me to feel tethered to reality. 

…Tethered to reality? 

Does anyone ever associate being ‘tethered to something’ with being a joyful experience?  Just saying the word makes my chest tighten.  However, as Rachael and I worked though these ideas, a new thought dawned on me:

“With upwards expansion also comes great room for depth”.  ​

​This is where the Brene Brown quote comes in.  When she speaks of selective numbing, she is addressing the fact that our positive emotions dwell from the same place within us as our negative ones.  That we do not have a ‘sad’ box and a ‘happy’ box so to speak, and, likewise, we cannot turn one off and one on or one down and one up. ​​ ​If we really want to experience happy, then we must really be willing to experience sorrow and anger and confusion and all the other emotions to the same depths…for they all come from the same ocean.  So, while I fear that feeling good will pull me out of reality -you know, the one I have created for myself that says that all things worth anything must be hard and painful- the REALITY is the that the greater my depth for feeling GOOD, the greater my DEPTH. 

The stronger and deeper I allow myself to feel any ONE emotion will be the strength and depth at which I am able to feel anything/everything else.
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Intimidating? A little. 
Setting myself up for emotional overwhelm? Possible. 
​But if that is the case, than it is nothing that has not been waiting patiently beneath the surface for me to feel anyway.

Deeper capacity for joy=deeper capacity for love=deeper capacity for self assertion and so on. 

Elevated levels of awareness=deeper levels of awareness.
Elevation=depth. 
It all happens at the same time, all the time, whether we are aware of it or not.

Suddenly, I’m aware, and I begin to wonder; how much color has been missing from my life, for the simple fact that I have not wanted to muddy the waters with the colors I don’t enjoy as much as some of the other ones?


ie: how much brighter might I be, if I truly let myself experience darkness once in a while?
Perhaps it's time to celebrate the dark, for it is from darkness that the light is born.


How about you?
What light is hiding in your darkness?

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What do YOU know now,
​that you didn't know before?

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