Loving Yourself Through Your Ups and Downs - Ep 28

It's really easy to be on our own side, to approve of ourselves when we are feeling good - when we're seeing things line up, opportunities are flowing into our life and we are feeling the way we want to.

But not every season of life feels this way.

Sometimes we get stuck in feelings of frustration, worry, or stress and others like these.

It's not the feelings themselves that make us feel stuck, it's our response to those feelings.

Inside this episode, I'm discussing:

- How to support yourself when you're moving through a season of feeling low, frustrated or stuck.
- The importance of validation
- What creates a true, authentic "high vibration".
- How to even out your emotional highs and lows.


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Transcript

0:24

Hello and welcome back to the podcast. It's Annabell Matson here. And in this episode we are gonna be talking about loving and supporting yourself through your ups and downs, because it's really easy to be on our own side to love and appreciate ourselves, to approve of ourselves when we are feeling good. So when we're in that space where we are like vibing high, things are lining up, opportunities are flowing into our life. We are feeling the way we want to, things are feeling really good. It's very easy to be on our own side to accept ourselves in those seasons or those moments, but the truth is life is not always like that. We are not always in that space and there are. Moments, there are days, there are seasons, there are weeks that we move through where we don't feel that way at all. And what I find is we can get stuck there when we are in these seasons where things are feeling frustrating or hard or we can't see what's next or things aren't occurring on our timeline or in the way we want them to. If there's healing coming up, some emotions we're having to move through, we can actually feel stuck in these seasons. But the source of our stuckness is. Actually not the feelings and the emotions themselves. It's how we are meeting ourselves in the, in the lows, how we are treating ourselves in the lows that really determines. The stuckness that we feel, or how long we stay stuck in that season. So it's very normal to have ups and downs. No matter how good you are at mindset work, no matter how committed you are to your own self-development and your own growth. And also if you do this for a living, it's very normal to have ups and downs. That's just part of being a human being. So I have days like that too. Sometimes when we're in a period of feeling low, it might be that something feels familiar. It's like the same lesson is showing up for us, but it's a different person, or it's the same pattern showing up for us, but we're in a different month or a different year, and especially if we are committed to growing and developing and healing. It can be a bit of pressure that we put on ourselves. Why is this showing up for me? Haven't I done enough work to clear this? Um, do I need to be doing more work to get over this so I can experience something different? When we're in these seasons, it can put us in a bit of an energy around feeling like we are a constant improvement project. I have to constantly be improving something about myself and. Really what I wanna be offering is that you're allowed to be a human, having human responses to things in your life. You're allowed to have highs and lows. And what's so important is how we meet ourselves, as I said earlier, and how we treat ourselves in those low periods. So one of the first things I wanna say is maybe you are in the space now where you're feeling frustrated. Things aren't lining up. So, Maybe you're feeling like there's some heavy emotions coming up for you, or perhaps you've more than likely can guarantee you've felt some of these things in the past. And some of what we talk about in this episode will be something that you can put in your back pocket and refer to the next time this shows up for you. When you are feeling this way, when things show up in your life, it's important to actually step back and almost depersonalize it and say, you know what? I'm pretty sure other people in my position would be feeling the same way as me. I'm experiencing some stuff that feels hard, that was really challenging and I have feelings around that, and that those feelings actually make a lot of sense. It's a big part of moving ourselves out of the stuckness of the low, is invalidating the feelings that are coming up for us, accepting the feelings that are coming up. Because what I always say to my clients is, we can't shift something if we don't accept it. We resist validating, quote unquote negative feelings. We resist validating these feelings because our mind thinks that if we validate a feeling that's coming up for us, we are letting ourselves off the hook, or we are allowing ourselves to stay in quote unquote negative or lower feelings. But the opposite is actually true. When someone comes to me and they say I'm in a, a place of I'm, something isn't shifting for me, or I'm feeling really stuck in this feeling. A lot of it has got to do with the fact that they're not accepting the feeling, they are resisting the feeling. They're dismissing it, or they're kind of low key judging themselves for having the feeling in the first place. If you've listened to these episodes, you would've heard me talk about my four step process to release emotional stress. It's my self-paced digital course. It's a process I take. Pretty much every single client I work with in a one-to-one setting, I take them through this four step process cuz it's an amazing, quick, simple, easy way to shift heavy feelings and come out the other side of them. So step number two of this four step process is validating. It's so important we heavily validate ourselves when we feel good. But often what happens is, and it would be good to kind of see how, and if this shows up for you, we unconsciously withdraw this approval of ourselves when we feel quote unquote bad, or we are having some kind of negative feeling. A lot of what this is is mirroring some of our early childhood programming, some of the programming that says, You're a good girl when you're behaving the way I want you to. There's a very real part of us that just wants to be loved and wants to be recognized for having the feelings that we're having, positive or negative, and we don't wanna feel like this part of us is feeling like she has to like earn our love and approval by feeling good because the rest of the world is often asking that of us. The rest of the world is saying. In millions of small ways and big ways be this way, be pleasing to me. Say yes to me, show up in this way, and then I'll approve of you. We don't wanna internalize that and hold ourselves to that because it's very traumatizing and hard for that little kid, that inner child within us When quote unquote, negative feelings are coming up, or you are moving through a season where things are feeling hard or frustrating, it's important to understand you're not taking steps backwards. I see this come a lot up a lot in my work. Clients feeling like I've moved through all of this stuff and then this familiar pattern is showing up, or I'm feeling I'm, I've got this familiar feeling coming up again. It must mean that I'm moving backwards. And there's often a bit of a fear around going back to where they were. So I really wanna say that when this stuff comes up, you aren't taking step backwards. A very early mentor of mine, Way back before I started my business, she said to me, when you open the door, you can't walk back out of it. Once you've walked through the door, you might turn around in the room, you might walk sideways in the room, but you'll never walk out the door again. You don't unlearn the awarenesses that you gained through your self-development work, so you're not taking steps backwards if you notice a passion showing up or a familiar feeling or emotion showing up. What I wanna offer you is what if whatever is coming up for you in this moment or another moment in the future, what if whatever is coming up for you is part of the process, that it's actually what is guiding you to your next level. It's actually part of the upleveling process, the ascension process. Another mentor of mine, Aaron Rose, he said something once and I've never forgotten it. And I always remember it for myself when I find myself giving myself a hard time about being in a familiar place or having a familiar feeling coming up and feeling like I should be past it and I offer it to my clients as well. And he said, allow yourself the dignity of your own process. Allow yourself the dignity of your own process. I feel that so profound, so healing and so compassionate and what we really need in these moments. So what if this is the process of moving through it, of moving to a new level? There's not like a set time that it takes for us to move through something or move beyond it. There's just our process and our timing, so we don't need to compare ourselves to some kind of arbitrary timeline or timeframe that the mind has made up. It's allowing ourselves to have our own process to move through things when we are judging ourselves about something coming up. We are really in resistance to it. So we're not allowing ourselves to have our, our own process around it. When we are in resistance to an emotion or a feeling, we're gonna keep circling in it. As I said earlier, if someone comes to me and says, like, I've got. This familiar feeling that keeps coming up for me. Why can't I move past it? Almost always it's because they're in resistance to that feeling. They're not allowing themselves to really sit in it and accept it. And so that feeling, that emotion, that pattern or almost becomes, it's like it's waving at you saying, Hey, I'm over here. And it's waiting for your full attention. It's waiting for you to validate it, to bring it closer, cuz it's very hard to move beyond something when we're in many ways judging ourselves for having that feeling or that response or that reaction. We just wanna really get to the good feelings, don't we? We just wanna be past all the old stuff so that we can feel better. I know how that feels. But the only way you get to feeling better is through. And it's through sitting with the feelings that are coming up for you. It's sitting with the frustration, the fear, the worry, the stuckness, and processing that. The only way to feeling better is through those feelings. We can't jump over them, we can't move around them. We have to go through them. If you are feeling stuck and you are not feeling like you're moving past a feeling, Of stuckness. It's, it's almost always because you're trying to go around the feeling or you're trying to jump over it. You've got to go through what's coming up for you and, and in that, to go through it, we have to accept it. So you've got to be able to bring whatever feeling is coming up for you. The frustration, the fear, the worry, the anger, the guilt, whatever it might be. You've gotta bring it closer and you have to allow yourself to feel what's coming up and not see it as negative or bad. It's just what's here. I really resist using the terms positive feelings or, or negative feelings. They're just all feelings and it's. It's about just accepting what is in front of you and not making whatever feeling you're having mean anything about where you are on your self-development journey. Not making it mean anything about your ability to receive more of what you want. From here, it's sitting with what's in front of you. It's sitting with the feelings that come up when you're in a, a season or a period a day, an hour of feeling low and going, okay. This is coming up for me. This is here, and I must need something from this, this fe, or, or probably more accurately, this feeling must need something from me. And so much of what that feeling is needing is your attention, your presence, your love, and your acceptance of it. So loving ourselves through our ups and downs is about accepting the feelings that come with our down periods. It's about validating them. It's not making them wrong, it's accepting them, and it's bringing them closer, and it does the opposite of what you think it will do. So many people think by validating their feelings, the quote unquote negative ones, they think that it means that they will wallow in them forever. And that they'll spend the rest of their week, the rest of their day, the rest of their month feeling the same way. But actually that's what happens when you don't feel your feelings, when you don't validate them. It Stretches out this period of stuckness far longer than than it needs to be. If we can take a moment to bring those feelings closer, to accept them, to give them the presence, the love, the compassion that they're asking for, that's what allows us to move past them much more quickly. And ultimately this is actually what raises our vibration. I don't know about you, but back when I first started to learn about the law of attraction and the power of our thoughts and our energy, I was actually using affirmations almost in a toxic, positivity way. So I would feel down about something and I would mask that feeling with a positive affirmation. I'd quickly say an affirmation and not really allow myself to feel the fear or the worry that was coming up. I would quickly try and get out of it and think more positively and say an affirmation to get myself more aligned or to raise my vibration. It's actually almost traumatizing for that inner self, the inner child within us. When that part of us, our inner self, is bringing up these feelings to be felt and we are constantly just throwing an affirmation over them and almost telling ourselves, get on with it. just think positively. What happens is when we approach it in this way, we never really create a true, authentic. Higher vibration. It's a masked higher vibration. How we actually create, a true higher vibration is through feeling our feelings. By going through the fear, the worry, the doubt, bringing it closer, accepting it, processing it, moving through it. By going through it, we actually come out the other side and naturally our vibration increases, and through doing that, we actually stay in that higher vibration for longer because we don't have all this other static sitting below the surface, underneath the affirmation that's interfering with it. Does that make sense? So if you're wanting to live from a more high vibrational state, the best piece of advice I can give you is to feel your feelings, is to let yourself feel the stuff that's coming up. That's how we stretch out these periods of feeling good cuz we feel that that stuff, we shift the static and then naturally it's almost like a cork that just bobs up to the surface in water. We develop, more resilience. We feel like we're on more of an even kill when we are. supporting ourselves and the feelings that come up in these lower periods will feel much less like we are on an emotional rollercoaster, where some days we feel really high vibe and then other days we feel really low. I know for myself, before I really. tuned into more of this emotional processing work. That's how my life felt a lot, a lot of the time. Big highs and equally bigger lows. And what happens is when we get good at feeling our feelings, we get good at supporting ourselves in lower periods. We feel more resilient. We feel like we're on more of an even keel, that things are a lot more stable and a lot more even so naturally, you create a higher vibration through that. It's a vibration that you can hold and sustain for longer periods of time. So I hope that's been helpful. Either will be helpful for you. Now if you're in a period of feeling a bit stuck and frustrated, or a lower period, whether that be just a day where you're feeling a bit off, or you've been noticing that these feelings have been. Sitting around for a while. The way to move past them is to bring them closer, to move through them. That's the only, we can't go up. We can't go down. We can't go around. We've got to go through the feelings. So, I hope this serves you. If this is where you're at at the moment, or keep it in your back pocket for another time in the future, when you may need it. I also have something really exciting that's coming, that I'm launching next week. It's my brand new offering. It's my mastermind program. I've been hinting about it. A couple of times on the podcast, if you follow me on social media or you receive my emails, you've probably seen me talk a little bit about it as well. I'm working with a small group of women from the end of July, over three months, and what we are doing together is we are creating the next level of success in an entirely new way. So what this program is about is about learning how to work towards your goals, your next level of success in a way that feels. Light on your body and your nervous system. It's learning how to draw in and create opportunities. Allow them to flow into your life by doing less and not pressuring yourself with more. So we're coming out of hustle mode and we are prioritizing rest and self nourishment. We are gonna be learning how to stand in greater self-belief and confidence and trust in yourself and your abilities. And we are doing a lot of this exciting. Magnetic conscious thought work to bring in and draw in the opportunities that probably have felt like a someday we're bringing them into your life and your work now. So it's gonna be a really expansive experience. I can feel the energy of this program is really calling me higher and I know that the, the woman that joined me in the program, will really feel that as well. So keep an eye out for that. That's my mastermind program that is opening up. Probably in the next couple of days, actually by the time I get this episode up. There'll be details on the podcast as well. So I hope this episode has served you. Please do share it with a friend if you know someone who may need this. Go and check out some other, episodes on the podcast. Cast your eye across the list, see what's jumping out at you. And if you enjoyed this, if you got something from it, I always love hearing from you. Reach out to me on Instagram at Annabelle matson. Contact me via my website and if you wanna check out how we can work together, I'll leave some links below. The four step process to release emotional stress. My self-paced digital course would really help you with a lot of what we've talked about in this episode as well. So take care and I will chat to you in our next episode.