The Tsunami-ed Life (Part 4)

Grief and sorrow, anger and rage, joy and love, disbelief and denial, relaxation and relief, all emotions that can come as a result of a tsunami (yes, joy and love because even the birth of your first child is a tsunami). Emotion is the foundation of the tsunami-ed life actually, the reason you experience what you experience. And they will arrive in a wide range of experiences and on a schedule that is utterly their own. You have no say, no control as to when they arrive (or leave), you can only respond when they show up however they choose to.

And how you respond matters. Not to your family or friends, or work colleagues or society (all though each will have an opinion on what is the appropriate response) but it matters to you, to your heart, your soul, your body. It matters to who you are now post-tsunami. It matters to who you are becoming. The new you, the forged in fire you.

Now depending on who you are, you probably process emotion in a variety of ways with possibilities ranging from putting them in a steel box and welding the lid shut to wearing them on your sleeve 100% of the time for the whole world to see. And truthfully there is no right way of processing your emotion… provided you are actually processing them. And what I mean is you are acknowledging that they exist, that you feel them, that you feel something.

Because you are human, and humans feel things. They have emotions and the longer you deny them the harder it will get to ignore them. And I know this because I tried to ignore mine. I tried for two years. I tried to ignore my rage, to ignore my sorrow, to deny my loneliness. And I got pretty good at it, or so I thought. I got good at it because all I was doing was doing… keeping myself so physically busy with work, with family and friends, with downsizing my life to that of the single person, with launching my coaching business that I was able to keep my emotions in a steel box. And it felt easy, so easy in fact that I thought I was over it, that I had moved on and was ready to start my new life.

But the truth is I wasn’t evening f$cking close. In all my doing, I had neglected to remember that life is a balance of doing as well as being. And for almost two years I have been neglecting the “being” part of myself. And on that fateful day of Process weekend when I was physically forced to stop and just be, be present to who I was in the moment, be present to what I was feeling in the moment and be present to what emotions I couldn’t be with in that moment, the lid to the steel box that I thought was welded shut blew off and all of the emotions I had been holding onto came flooding out all at once. There were tears; big, ugly, mascara-ruining tears. There were tissues, boxes of them. There was even a moment a dramatic collapse as I visualised the dark well where my heart had been residing.

And it didn’t stop at the end of the training course. The truth was the lid of the box hadn’t just come off, it had disintegrated and there was no way for me to put I my emotions back in that box. The box no longer exist and I was forced to do what I should have done a long time ago, process my emotion. All the rage, all the grief, all the fear, all the loneliness was still there, hiding inside me. I didn’t know it at the time, but I had been experiencing my emotions as shallow breathing, tight shoulders, restless sleep and an easily distracted mind. I just hadn’t associated the physical symptoms with the unprocessed emotion.

And for nearly a month I felt like my emotions controlled me not the other way around. I felt like a kayaker who had come out my kayak in the midst of a category five rapid. There were days I felt like I wasn’t even wearing the lifejacket. But in the same way a hurricane doesn’t last forever and begins to weaken as it hits land, my emotional storm began to brighten and the sun began to shine.

And that’s how it happens, one day the emotional turmoil subsides. One day you wake up and you feel… just lighter and somehow stronger. And you’re ready, ready to build your new life, ready to discover the new you, ready to look at the world through new eyes. This is the beginning of you rebuilding after the tsunami-ed life.