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Join Brooke Snow in the journey of co creating a life from a place of unconditional love.
Hello friends, welcome to the One Heart Podcast, I'm your host brooke snow and I'm so grateful that you are here.
In my journey to embody more love and to live with One Heart, I have discovered that my ability to access love has a lot to do with my relationship to emotions. And truth be told, that relationship can be complicated. I can be all over the place from full out numbing myself from painful feelings, to making my emotions mean something about me or others, to spiritually bypassing anything uncomfortable in effort to be positive or more spiritual and fix myself. I invite you to join me in this new series on the podcast I'm calling Reclamation of Feeling. A reclamation is to reclaim something, and what I'm declaring a reclamation for, is the pure marvel it is to be a human with a body that feels. When we disassociate from our feelings because we are afraid to feel something, whether that feeling is pain or even hope and joy, we narrow our experience of life. Instead of living in a world of full color and vibrancy, we tone it down to a life of gray because it feels safer. But life is meant to lived fully. There is so much depth and richness we miss out on when we limit our experience. And most importantly, in so doing we also limit what its like to fully embody love. If you're ready for your own reclamation, I invite you to join me.
Before we begin, I invite you to join me in a short three breath meditation to connect with your own heart.
Two weeks ago I learned some information that was absolutely devastating in one of my close relationships. It felt like my entire life was turned upside down and I became totally dysfunctional. I couldn't sleep. I couldn't eat. And all I wanted to do was curl up in the fetal position and cry all day long.
And I did.
In some ways it seems like perfect timing to just let myself fall apart.
It was spring break. My son was out of the country on a humanitarian trip, my husband was mostly gone with work and other projects, and so for the entire week, it was just me and my 9 year old daughter home all day. Mostly she spent her spring break on screens all day with me crying in a different room in the background.
Bless her sweet empathic soul. She would regularly come in and rub my back, put her arms around me and just hold me. Here and there she would ask me if I was okay.
I can only imagine what it must feel like to a 9 year old to see her mom so sad. To watch her cry, weep, and rock back and forth with heartbreak...
I couldn't share the adult details with her regarding why I was so sad. Maybe someday when she's older and hindsight has blessed me with the wisdom this experience holds I will be able to share with her.
In the meantime, I also know she empathically holds so much of my emotion inside her. When I'm sad, she aches for me.
Highly charged emotions are like bookmarks on our life. We often vividly remember the details of moments filled with immense feeling. Whether it was the thrill of a first kiss or the devastation of learning about a tragedy. We remember exactly where we were, what we were doing, and it imprints upon us.
I can only imagine the type of imprint my emotional trauma was having upon her. She will likely remember this moment for the rest of her life too, only from a very different perspective.
When she asked me, "Mom are you okay?", I knew that I would need to answer this question with wisdom.
The best I could do was to tell her,
"Sweetie. I want you to know that deep down inside me, my true self is okay. My true self is always at peace and is always whole. My true self is love. And...while our true selves are always okay, we will face challenges in our life where our internal weather changes. Sometimes its sunny. Sometimes it's rainy. Sometimes it's very stormy. It's just weather and it will pass and change. I'm having a storm right now and feel so sad. It's okay to feel sad and I need to let the tears fall like rain."
Since that talk, we've had several other conversations where we have done some internal weather checkins with each other. She's had moments she has told me she feels cloudy or rainy and other moments she feels sunny.
One thing I hope to convey to her is that she can learn to be accepting of the weather and know that it doesn't change her wholeness, worthiness, or peace that always exists at the core of her being. She doesn't have to identify with the weather. It just is. And perhaps most of all, that this too shall pass. The sun will come out again.
I have wanted to do a series of podcast episodes on this idea of Reclamation of Feeling, because I feel like the first 40 years of my life I didn't have a healthy perspective on emotion.
I was conditioned to believe that any time I felt good feelings I was feeling the Holy Spirit.
And any time I felt bad feelings I was being influenced by Satan.
Either way, I was being acted upon.
I either have God's favor, or I have Satans influence.
If I feel anger, jealousy, depression, disappointment, there must be something wrong with me. Good people don't feel those feelings.
Feeling good is evidence that you are doing what God wants you to do.
Feeling bad is evidence that something is wrong with you or that Satan is tempting you.
This is an absolutely victimizing and disempowering belief no matter how you look at it.
And it's false.
It's been really important for me to deconstruct this conditioning and reclaim my feelings as simply a natural part of the human experience. Nobody outside of me is sending me feelings as a reward, as punishment, or as temptation.
Emotions do not mean anything about my worth.
I am not my emotions.
They're just my internal weather.
They come and they go and they add to the richness of the human experience.
I had a coaching session this week with Becky Edwards, whom I adore, and she beautifully held space for me as I navigated the heartbreak I was going through the past few weeks. She walked me through a meditation and invited me to identify the top three emotions I was feeling from this experience.
Interestingly enough, the first emotion I acknowledged felt like a contraction.
I told her I felt numbness.
As you know, to be numb is to not be able to feel. The numbness was a protection mechanism for me to shield from the pain. Probably like me putting up an umbrella and building a shelter so I wouldn't have to actually be in the storm and feel the fierce wind and cold and hail stones pelting my body. Stormy emotions hurt. And it's easy to want to block ourselves from feeling it. Enter numbness.
I'm going to dedicate an entire separate episode to why we numb, or bury our feelings. In the meantime, what I want to focus on in this episode is what is more constant than the weather...
I want to set the foundation of this series by focusing on that ever present truth that at your core, you are safe and you are okay. Believing this has helped me navigate some really hard things the past few years. That no matter what you are going through, no matter the existential crisis, no matter the emotions, the drama, the trauma, or the world around you, the core of your being is okay. Who you are will always be okay. Who you are is constant and impenetrable by any thought or action.
Someone asked me this week what love really is.
It's an interesting question. I'm sure there are infinite answers. I'll offer what feels useful in this context.
I think most often we think of love as an emotion.
But love is actually more than emotion.
Just like the weather comes and goes, our emotions have a beginning and they have an end. They are fleeting.
Love is more than emotion. There is no beginning and end. Love is eternal and enduring. It cannot be destroyed. We can close off to love through our judgements and stories and fears, but love is the essence of who we are. It is the life force energy that animates all living things.
When you begin to see love as more than emotion, and see love as who you are, you also begin to see that love is who all people are--at the core. Love is in all living things. It is the earth, the trees, the waters, the animals, the mountains, the oceans, the flowers...it is the people of all nations in all shapes and sizes and color. When you see love as more than emotion you see that it is the spark of life itself, you then tap into the infinite connection of all things. You tap into oneness. You connect to God.
When Jesus spoke of loving God as the most important commandment and loving your neighbor as yourself, he prefaced this by first drawing attention to Oneness.
I love this whole scene in the New Testament. In Mark 12, the text reads:
28 One of the teachers of the law came and heard them debating. Noticing that Jesus had given them a good answer, he asked him, “Of all the commandments, which is the most important?”
29 “The most important one,” answered Jesus, “is this: ‘Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God, the Lord is one.
He draws their attention to oneness. It sets up the rest of what he will teach.
The Lord our God, the Lord is one.[e] 30 Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength.’[f] 31 The second is this: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’[g] There is no commandment greater than these.”
I've heard sermons where the preacher divides these two commandments like they're separate actions. Loving God is totally separate from loving your neighbor and yourself. I don't think that's the point at all. Jesus is teaching the principle in layers, not teaching it as separate actions.
When I truly love God with all my soul, I do this by loving myself and loving my neighbor. It's so connected. To love God is to love God's creations. God created you and your neighbor and all living things. We are all part of God just like the rays of the sun are part of the sun.
God is love.
And if God is love, it means we are love.
Love is our essence. This is how we are one, because we are all made from the same stuff.
We are the rays of the sun.
And the sun shines it light eternally. It is constant.
Mother Nature teaches us this same principle so beautifully.
The sun is the center of our universe. It's light is constant and unwavering.
Because our earth rotates and naturally turns away from the sun we experience darkness. We call this night. But just because you are experiencing the darkness of night, you can be assured that somewhere on earth it's daytime and if you wait for the darkness to pass you will experience the sun once again.
Even if you are feeling the darkness of night, or you're experiencing a storm, or your weather is cloudy or rainy....
Deep down you are still okay and you are still love.
The sun is at the center of the universe and God's love is at the center of your soul.
Dear ones, your emotions are fleeting. They are just the weather. And if you can remember that at your core, who you are is love, you can have faith to make it through.
Yes, love is an emotion. It is something you can feel just as the sun is something you can feel.
And love is more.
Just as the sun is more than something you feel.
The sun brings light and life and nourishment and holds the whole universe together. It is the center. It is life force energy.
So it is with love.
You are love.
It is who you are.
And no matter the internal weather you may be feeling in the moment, no matter if you can currently feel love or not, remember that it is more than a feeling. Just as somewhere on earth the sun is always shining, somewhere within you, love is always there. It is who you are. You are love.
The light in me honors the light in you.
Namaste
take the time to rate, review, and subscribe or share it with a friend. This is a brand new podcast and this does so much for helping this podcast to grow and reach more people.
As a thank you, I have also created a free "I love and accept you" meditation for you to practice unconditional love for yourself. Meditation is my favorite tool for unlearning our judgements and returning to unconditional love. Simply download the Co Create app from your App Store and you'll find it waiting for you in the Free Meditations on the app along with an amazing community You can find it in theapple or google app stores that I will link in the shownotes. You are love. Namaste.