On navigating big emotions & life transitions
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It’s 10:21 am and I’m sitting on the couch in my friend’s NYC apartment. I can hear the city outside, cars and people rushing by, hurrying to their next destination. The sun is shining through the southeast-facing window to my left, my friend’s cat curled up on a chair to my right. I’m packed and ready to head to the airport in a few hours for the final leg of my journey home to Belgrade.
It’s been a wonderful 6-week trip in Seattle, California and New York with a lot of activity and emotion. I’ve been reflecting a lot over the last month on how we understand and cope with life’s interruptions. How we hold space for big emotions and life transitions, and navigate real-time decision-making, especially when we feel a strong sense of uncertainty and lack of control.
There are a lot of things we learn over the course of our lives, in a traditional format through school, courses, and programs, and through lived experience.
One thing we often learn through social and cultural conditioning is that big emotions are scary, dramatic, unsavory, and better to be avoided. We learn to run from our pain, discomfort and suffering, to numb it, invalidate it, project it on others. We learn to push our feelings aside or rely on other people (or material things) to calm ourselves down and regain a sense of equilibrium when thrown off balance.
What we rarely learn is how to self regulate.
How to sit with big emotions and body sensations in times of stress, crisis, overwhelm.
How to listen to the messages our emotions and body send us.
How to hold space for our feelings and those of others.
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Learning to sit with big emotions and navigate change and uncertainty with present moment awareness and self-compassion has been instrumental in my own life. Not fixing it, not pushing it away, but learning to sit with it. To know that what I feel is impermanent, it will pass. To know that the more I judge and fight it, the more I judge and fight myself, and the more I feel stuck.
What I’ve also learned is that healing is a different and unique process for everyone. It takes time, unlearning deep rooted behaviors, patterns, ways of being. It takes time, grieving what you’ve lost and making space for what’s to come. It takes time, shifting how you see yourself, others, and the world. It takes time, understanding how these default lenses affect what you see as possible or not possible, how you choose to move through life. It takes time, adjusting to a new way of being and living in the world.
And, amidst all of this, you’re face to face with big emotions and often mental and physical discomfort. You may try to avoid or numb the pain with work, food, social media, Netflix, alcohol, but it’s still there. You can’t hide from it or outrun it.
What you can do is learn to sit with it. What you can do is learn to feel your feelings, connect with your body and breath, self soothe, self regulate. I’m not claiming it’s quick or easy, it’s not, but it’s possible.
What’s helped me, my clients and others in my life the most in navigating big emotions is acknowledging and holding space for real suffering in the moment. Setting aside self-judgement or criticism and instead simply letting yourself feel. And beyond that, being curious and taking a moment to pause, notice and name what you feel (anger, disbelief, confusion, fear, sadness, anxiety, betrayal). To remind yourself that emotions are a part of being human, even if you don’t like them, and that they are in motion and moving through you. To know and trust that they won’t be there forever, that you will feel grounded and find peace again.
What changes or transitions are you currently experiencing in your life? What big emotions are at play and how might you create a little more space to be present with them in the moment?
If nothing else, let this be a reminder that you are not alone in navigating change, pain and uncertainty in today’s chaotic world and that you will move through it in time.
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