May 20, 2025 • 34 mins
Research shows that a daily practice of gratitude can make you happier but have you had a time in life when “gratitude” felt impossible? Have you ever felt like “staying positive” might be blocking you from feeling what was true for you that day?
What is the line between “being grateful” and pretending things are different than they actually are?
Is it healthy to pretend you feel differently than you actually do?
If you’ve ever wished you felt grateful but instead you felt sad, depressed, anxious, worried, or even despair, this episode is for you. We’ll dive into the nuance of this topic and I’ll share how I am learning (slowly) to move past positivity and find true joy.
Host: Ally Fallon // @allyfallon // allisonfallon.com
Follow Ally on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/allyfallon/
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
Pick up the pieces of your life, put them back
together with the words you write, all the beauty and
peace and the magic that you'll start too fun when
you write your story. You got the words and said,
don't you think it's down to let them out and
write them down on cold It's all about and write
(00:24):
your story. Write, write your story. Hi, and welcome back
to the Write Your Story Podcast. I'm Ali Fallon, I'm
your host, and on today's episode, I want to talk
about this idea of staying positive when things are hard,
and specifically, I want to talk about toxic positivity. I
know this is a term that's been on the scene
(00:45):
for quite some time, and sometimes I'm kind of late
to talk about stuff. I feel like I'm not, like
always on the cutting edge of talking about what's happening
in popular culture. But there's a reason that I want
to talk about it right now, and it's because my
personal worldview is evolving significantly as we speak, as all
of our worldviews are. But I feel like a lot
(01:05):
of what I've been learning has to do with this
idea of staying positive, toxic positive, whatever you want to
call it. I have been learning so much as it
relates to this concept of thinking positive, staying positive, toxic positivity,
however you want to name it. I've been going through
a lot on this, and I've been learning a lot,
(01:26):
and I just wanted to share with you from my
perspective in case you might find it helpful or in
case you might find that it meets you where you
are in your own personal story. So I'll start here
that I posted something on Instagram a while back. This
was in twenty twenty, kind of like right at the
beginning of the pandemic. I don't remember exactly what month
it was, but I know that my daughter had not
been born yet, so she was born in July of
(01:47):
twenty twenty. Pandemic started in March, so sometime between March
and July of twenty twenty, I posted something on Instagram
that said something like life is too short to be
unhappy or something like that. It was from a of
I had been in a bad mood all day and
I was trying to kind of pull myself out of
this bad mood. I had been feeling like emotional and
(02:08):
frustrated at the current set of circumstances. We were all
in lockdown. I had had a few like big kind
of disappointments that had taken place around where I was
going to be able to give birth and my doula,
and also a couple of work things that had happened,
and I was just finding myself feeling pretty down and
I was trying to pull myself out of it. Which,
(02:30):
to give you some background in history for me, this
is behavior for me that was learned from a very
young age, and that seemed pretty normal to me. In fact,
when I posted that on Instagram, I did not think
I was going to get this severe backlash that I got,
because usually on my Instagram I post stuff that's not
super controversial. I mean, hopefully it's helpful and inspiring, but
(02:53):
it's not usually very controversial. I kind of avoid controversial topics.
I don't really like arguing in general, alone arguing on
the internet. I can enjoy, like a good, happy, positive
argument with a friend or family member if there's a
lot of trust built in the relationship and I feel
safe to do it. But conflict for the sake of
conflict is not my temperament. It's not my personality. So
(03:14):
I tend to kind of steer away from those topics
and tend to be more of an observer when those
topics come up in pop culture or when they come
up online. So I didn't see this coming that when
I posted this, I was going to get like this
crazy backlash of people who I think felt a little
dismissed by what I had posted. Because we're living in
this time of COVID, where, at least in LA at
(03:34):
the time, we were in like total lockdown. We were
not allowed to be out past a certain time at night.
We were on a curfew. We had you know, mask
mandates in every public place, including outdoors. We had mask
mandates in our neighborhoods, and the trails were closed and
the beaches were closed, and people were not able to
go to work. You know, most of my friends at
(03:55):
the time were either working remotely or if they weren't
able to work remotely, we're not working at all. And
so we were taking assistance from we meaning me and
my friends were taking assistance from the government at the time,
taking either unemployment or there were PvP loans. I can't
remember if those were quite around yet, but it felt
like a pretty dark time at least in LA. You know,
(04:16):
I had friends who were hairdressers or who were makeup
artists on set, or who worked in entertainment, or who
were actors and actresses, and everyone was out of work,
and everyone was going like, Okay, when's the next paycheck
going to come? And how are we going to navigate
this period of time that we're in. And it was
a pretty complicated, confusing, and sometimes scary time. Or maybe
(04:37):
even now I'm understating it, it was a pretty scary time.
I will say I looking back now, I can see
how much I was in survival mode and how truly
scared that I was, and how much I was blocking
myself from feeling how scared I was, because to feel
as scared as I actually was felt extremely terrifying. And
if you've been around this show for a while, you've
(04:58):
heard this part of the story. But during this time,
I was, you know, what would it have been like
seven or eight months pregnant. My husband had shut down
his business, so I was the primary breadwinner. We'd had
to pivot in my business because everyone did. It was
a weird time, and things were selling differently, and everyone
was changing the way that they were operating online and
I was having to start to meet with in person
(05:18):
clients over zoom, so that was stressful, and I was
trying to keep I had five employees at the time.
I was trying to keep everyone employed, and it was
extremely stressful. And I remember thinking like, Okay, this baby's
going to be born and then what then, what am
I going to do? So yeah, it was a challenging time,
and yet I was doing the thing that I had
done for all of my life unconsciously that I didn't
(05:41):
realize I was doing, which was trying to pull myself
out of this low mood by saying like, life is
too short to be unhappy, Like let me find something
to be happy about. Let's go get ice cream or
you know, let's whatever, like take the dog for a
drive or or something like that. Just try to find
something to kind of bring myself out of this low mood.
I post this on Instagram. I get this really big backlash.
(06:02):
I think I deleted the post. I can't even remember now,
but I just remember being like, WHOA, I did not
see that coming, and feeling a little bit caught off
guard and maybe almost like attacked by all these people
who were like, that's not really a fair thing to say,
given the period of time that we're in, and now
looking back, I see this all really differently because I've
been in this long season of unraveling those old patterns
(06:25):
and habits and learning a new way of being that
has a lot more space for just all the different
feelings and moods that might come up on any different day,
and sees them more like, as my friend Don Miller
would say, more like weather patterns. It's like they come in,
they leave. We don't have control over them, we don't
(06:46):
need to control them. It's sunny today, it's rainy tomorrow.
That's just how the weather works. And because of my
experiences in the last five years, I've been able to
allow myself more space to move through those moods as
they come. But back then I didn't have the skill
set to do that. I didn't know how to do it.
And even in the last five years, I've moved kind
of in and out of knowing how to do that,
(07:08):
and I have found myself at points latching on to
teachers or ideas that take me back to that old,
familiar way of being. And so I want to talk
about the difference here because there is some nuance like
one teacher that you've probably heard me talk about, and
a book that I've even recommended on one of my
episodes is Esther Hicks, who is someone who's been around
(07:32):
for a long time, since the early two thousands, and
she's written, I don't know, dozens of books, and I
think the one that I recommended was called Money and
the Law of Attraction. But the Law of attraction, that phrase,
it has become kind of part of our regular vernacular,
like we talk about that, least among my group of
friends and people who I'm around, I hear that phrase
(07:52):
thrown around kind of a lot. And then there was
that movie that came out called The Secret and Esther
Hicks was a big part of that. Anyways, she's writ
and dozens of books, including Money in the Law of Attraction.
But her main point is that what we think about
is what we manifest. And she's not the only one
who talks about this. There are tons of people out
there who talk about the power of positive thinking and
(08:15):
that if we can kind of set our vision or
set our mindset on something really beautiful and we can
have gratitude and we can focus on what we do want,
that what we do want will grow. And so this
is where my idea had come from, that if I
could pull myself out of this negative mood. If I
could just focus myself on something that was, you know,
(08:35):
more positive, or that brought me a sense of peace
or love or joy or whatever, that maybe I could
move myself out of this quote unquote negative mood and
into a more positive mood. And this idea didn't always
come from Esther Hicks. Ester Hicks didn't come into my
life until much later. But I would imagine that my
upbringing and evangelicalism also played a role in this. And
(08:59):
then also we'll talk of a couple different elements. Let's
start with evangelicalism. So I grew up in evangelicalism, and
if you didn't grow up in evangelicalism, you just it's
kind of it's so funny. I was at dinner the
other night with a couple. Matt and I were at
dinner with a couple friend of ours. So this couple
and Matt and I were chatting, and neither of them
(09:20):
grew up in the evangelical church like Matt and I did.
And so sometimes when we have meals with people like that,
or when we get to chatting with them, we're telling
stories and their jaws are on the floor. Because if
you didn't grow up in in like evangelicalism, especially in
the eighties and nineties, it's such a subculture of its
own that you kind of can't even fathom what it
(09:41):
might have been. Like like if you didn't go to
youth group in the nineties, you just can't believe the
stuff that was done, like purity culture stuff. You know,
my youth pastor put droplets of pea and a water
bottle and asked if we wanted to drink it, and
he said, even the slightest impurity makes the water impure,
and nobody wants to drink it. Matt was telling a
(10:01):
story about how his youth pastor used an old baseball
glove to describe how you don't want to put your
hand into someone else's baseball glove that's formed to their hand,
to describe like why kids shouldn't have sex before they're married.
Wild that that was even allowed, Like wild that like
a twenty year old youth pastor was leading a group
(10:21):
of you know, sixteen to eighteen year old kids, a
male youth faster leading teenage girls, and like so much
about it is just crazy to me. And maybe there
are still churches there probably are where that type of
stuff is still taking place, but it was extremely normal
back in the nineties, and part of evangelical culture, I
think had some element of this sort of stay positive,
(10:44):
like God's got this even on your darkest day. You know,
God is your protector, he's your comfort, or God's going
to take care of this. And here's where things get
really sticky, because my current present day spirituality would still
allow for a statement like God is your comforter. You know,
God can comfort you. So it's not that I think
that that statement is necessarily wrong, but I think that
(11:07):
wrapped up in evangelicalism, it came with kind of this
sense of denihalism, where we're going to turn a blind
eye to anything that doesn't fit the shiny image that
we want to have. We're not going to look at
things that would taint the image of the church. We're
not going to really pay attention to that. We want
(11:27):
to sort of clean up our act and clean up
the scene and clean up the image and clean up
the brand and really keep things kind of like pure
and above board. And because of that, I think that
evangelicalism played a role in this pattern, the patterning that's
laid down in my brain that says, you know, depression
(11:48):
isn't okay, sadness isn't okay, fear isn't okay, feeling low
isn't okay, because God can take care of all of that.
And I know that if you grew up in the
evangelical face like I did, you probably also heard some
version of the rhetoric around anti depressants or anti anxiety
(12:08):
medication or other kind of pharmaceutical drugs. I know that
if you grew up in the evangelical faith like I did,
you probably also heard some version of the rhetoric around
(12:30):
anti depressants or anti anxiety medication or other kind of
pharmaceutical drugs. That this idea that if you needed to
rely on depression medication, or if you needed to rely
on anxiety medication, that you probably needed to do that
because you hadn't trusted God enough, you hadn't trusted Jesus
enough to come and cleanse you from your sins or
cleanse you from your unrighteousness, and you just really needed
(12:53):
more prayer, and you probably needed to come up to
an alter call, and you maybe needed to repent of
the sins in your life, and then you would be
freed of this burden of depression or anxiety. And so
I'm not blaming anyone, and I'm not even I don't
feel like antagonistic necessarily toward any of the people who
believes these things or taught these things. I'm just more
(13:14):
speaking about, like how did the tracks get laid down
in my brain that said, feeling sad is not okay,
Feeling low is not okay, especially in light of a
situation where I'm seven months pregnant. I am, you know,
working my butt off to try to provide for my family.
I'm anticipating the fact that I'm about to have a baby,
and I'm not gonna be able to take a break.
I'm trying to provide for all these employees. I'm worried
(13:36):
about people having to get fired and losing their their
source of income, and so i have every circumstantial reason
to feel the way that I'm feeling. And yet I'm
still going no, no, no, We're not going there. We're gonna
make ourselves feel happy somehow. So again, this conversation is
extremely nuanced because there is an element where what Esther
(14:00):
Hicks has written about has value, has merit is important,
can be useful even the messages of evangelical Church from
my childhood. God is your comfort or God brings you peace.
You know you can pray to God and call out
to Him at any time and He will come and
meet you. And yet there's a small nuance here that
(14:24):
God comes to meet us where we're at, meaning I
don't need to pull myself up to God somehow to
meet God in happiness. It's not like God can only
meet me my happiness. God can't meet me in my depression. Well,
the way I would say it now is that all
of it is God. That God is with you in
(14:45):
your grief. God is with you in your depression. God
is with you in your sadness, in your fear, in
your survival mode. God is there. God is already with
you in it. It is God. It all is God.
The joy is God, the peace is God. All of
it is God. And that God wraps us and envelops
us in all kinds of moments. One of the things
(15:07):
I'm learning is that it is safe to feel exactly
what you feel in any given moment, and you can
give yourself permission to feel it fully and completely without
needing to change it. The analogy of the weather patterns
is such a powerful analogy because imagine how crazy you
would feel if you thought that it was your job
(15:30):
to adjust the patterns of weather. Imagine how absolutely insane
you would feel if you believed that in order to
be close to God, or in order to have a
spirituality or a faith, or in order to be a
good person or to be okay, that you needed to
decide what days it rained and what days it was sunny,
(15:52):
and what days it was cloudy, and what days it
was windy, and you needed to somehow alter or adjust
or manipulate what is what is just true, what is
just there? You would start to feel insane. And so
there's this dichotomy of a culture that says, you know,
in order to be a good person, in order to
be liked by others, in order to you know, get promoted,
(16:14):
in order to have a good life, you need to
kind of see things through this one lens. You need
to like, be happy, be positive, smile more, think about
positive things, be grateful for the things you do have.
I'm not saying that there's anything wrong with being grateful
for the things that you do have, but for someone
who has every circumstantial reason to feel sad or feel low,
(16:37):
or be depressed, or have anxiety or whatever else. It's
an insane thing to ask of them to also be grateful,
or to also be happy, or to also feel joy
in that moment. And here's one of the things that
I've been learning in the last five years, which, in
addition to allowing myself to just feel what it is
(16:58):
that I feel as circumstances unfold in my life, there
are moments where it's totally appropriate to just feel sad,
just feel grief, just feel utter despair, feel hopelessness. For
the first time in my life, in the last five years,
I have allowed myself to feel hopeless. And if you've
been around the show for a while and you've been
listening to this podcast, you know that I've had a
(17:19):
really challenging last five years, and especially in the last year.
I lost a baby, I lost my dad, Matt lost
a business, we lost almost our entire life savings. We've
been trying to put the pieces of that back together,
and it's been a really challenging couple of years, and
I have allowed myself in moments to just sink into
utter hopelessness, like this will never get better. It's never
(17:42):
going to change. It's always going to be this way.
And a previous version of me would have thought, no, no, no,
don't let yourself go there. It's not hopeless. Like with God,
there's always hope. And yet I've allowed myself to dissent
into utter hopelessness because the circumstances warrant it allow for it,
and because it's so human and healthy to allow yourself
(18:04):
to experience a passing weather pattern of hopelessness. And what
I've found through that is that when I can allow
myself to experience whatever it is that I'm experiencing in
the moment, that actually, as the weather pattern passes, a
different weather pattern comes in and I get to experience
a deeper, higher, bigger joy, a deeper, higher, bigger gratitude
(18:29):
that isn't forced, that isn't coerced, that isn't manipulated, that's
just is. It's like gratitude just is who I am.
It just is in me in the same way that
hopelessness is there. Hopelessness just moves through, and then gratitude
moves through. And when gratitude moves through, it moves through
in a truer kind of a way. Because I'm not
(18:51):
trying to drum it up out of nowhere. And so
what I want to talk about is the difference between
toxic positivity and joy. They sound so different, and you're like,
of course they're different, but I do think we get
these two things mixed up. We get mixed up with
what we think is joy. We think we have to
(19:12):
drum up joy and control our circumstances in order to
feel joy, and I think we really get it wrong,
and we actually miss out on true joy, because true
joy can flood into your body when you least expect it,
or when it makes no sense to feel joy or
(19:33):
pleasure or peace. True joy and peace can flood into
your body when it makes no sense to feel those things.
And the only way that it can do that is
when we learn to allow these experiences to pass through us,
like weather patterns that we have no control over, the
insanity that we would feel if we were told you
(19:55):
have to control that, you have to feel happy all
the time, you have to feel you have to feel
gratitude every day, we would feel insane. And maybe you
do feel insane. And I think this is particularly true
for anyone who has had really traumatic experiences in their
lives if you have PTSD, if you have a trauma
(20:16):
that's living in your body, the idea that you should
have to feel gratitude at certain moments feels impossible and
feels almost violent against what you're facing, what you're dealing with.
And when I think back to the woman who I
was in twenty twenty standing in my kitchen posting that
quote Instagram, I have a lot of compassion for her,
(20:40):
because you know, it's no fun to feel depressed, it's
no fun to feel hopeless. So I was just really
trying to get myself to a new place. And yet,
and yet, there is a big difference between joy and
toxic positivity. And toxic positivity, drumming up positivity from nowhere
(21:01):
is toxic positivity. My definition for toxic positivity would be
a positivity that you feel you need to manipulate or
control in order to think or feel differently about your
(21:23):
life from how you actually think or feel. So, a
positivity that you need to manipulate or control in order
to feel differently or think differently about your life because
you assume that the way you think or feel about
your life is not okay. And what I want to say,
what I've been learning, And what I would invite you
into is that the way you think and feel about
(21:45):
your life is fine. The way you think about your life,
the way you feel about your life right now is okay.
And you can allow yourself to feel those things and
think those things. And what ends up happening, or at
least what's ended up happening for me, is that I
let go of the need to control how I feel
about a situation, and as I let go of the
(22:06):
need to control the situation itself. Because these are the
two sides of the same coin, right, We either think
I need to control the situation to make it better
so I can feel better, or I need to decide
I'm going to feel differently about this situation. Those are
like our two ways to fix the problem that's happening,
or what we perceive is the problem. But what if
what if it's equally insane to think that I could
(22:27):
control my feelings as it is to think I can
control the situation. So it's like, Okay, I feel depressed.
The two ways to fix this are I change my
circumstances or I change my attitude and think about how
normal this has been for most of us. I assume
it's normal. I grew up in an environment where like
this was also good parenting, you know, like change your attitude,
(22:50):
like get on board with the rest of the family.
We're going on this trip. It's going to be fun.
And I do this to my kids too. It's like
you woke up in a cranky mood, like, hey, let's
turn the frown upside down. Let's have a great day together.
And yet it's insane to think that we could change
our circumstances. Equally is insane to think we could change
how we feel about our circumstances. What if, and here's
(23:11):
what I've been learning. What if we could allow exactly
what is to be what is? And what if that
would give way to something different. Just like the weather changes,
just like today is rainy and tomorrow is sunny. Just
like yesterday was foggy and today is different. Just like
it was windy last week and it's not windy this week.
What if the weather would change, and inevitably we would
(23:33):
experience a little bit of all of it. Inevitably will
experience a little bit of grief. Inevitably will experience a
little bit of fear. Inevitably will experience a little bit
of joy. This is extremely nuanced. I think I've said
that about hundred times in this episode. This is extremely
nuanced because there is a lot of research that shows,
for example, how helpful it can be to mood to
(23:54):
make a gratitude list, just as one example, so making
a gratitude list each day and dramatically improve your mood.
So you might say, well, there you go. See you
can change your mood. You can affect your mood, improve
your mood, alter your mood, manipulate your mood. Okay, yes,
if the things that you're listing that you're grateful for
(24:17):
are things that you're actually grateful for, not things that
you're not grateful for. The reason why, in my opinion,
that a gratitude list would help you to shift out
of a low mood, let's say, is because it provides
extra perspective and it helps you to round out the
perspective that not all is bad. But what I think
(24:40):
a lot of times we do, and what I would
call toxic positivity, is we take a situation that sucks
and you try to make a gratitude out of it,
like I'm so grateful that you know we're in lockdown
right now because it's just giving me extra time to
focus on the things that really matter to me, Like
(25:01):
you know whatever, A lot of us did that during
the lockdown. A lot of us do that. I still
find myself doing that sometimes when I don't want to
feel what it is that I'm feeling. And yet, what
if we could allow ourselves to fully feel whatever it
is that we're feeling. We're terrified of this, like absolutely
(25:21):
petrified to feel what we're actually feeling. What if you
could just ask yourself, what is the thing that I'm
feeling right now, without manipulating, without trying to control it,
without having any agenda, without judging it. What if you
could just let yourself be sad or scared or mad.
(25:43):
That's another hard one, especially as women, we don't let
ourselves be mad. But what if you could just give
yourself permission to just be whatever it is that you
are right now. Maybe you're tired, Maybe things for you
right now feel extremely unfair. What would it look like
to just allow yourself to feel angry that it's unfair,
it is unfair. What if I could validate that it
(26:05):
is unfair. Your circumstances are unfair, This is unfair, And
what has shocked me is that when I allow myself
to feel what is, when I allow myself to accept
and receive what is, it's actually joy that follows. It's
actually gratitude that follows. Gratitude is my nature. Joy is
my nature. And when I allow the other sensations to
(26:28):
move through my body, it's almost like they carve a
deeper rut for the river of joy to run through.
And I recently sent an email to my email list
about suffering and about how much effort we all spend
in our life trying to avoid suffering. And I said,
(26:49):
if we all came together and we were telling stories
around a campfire, we would have a ragtag collection of
stories of all the ways that we've tried to avoid suffering.
Maybe it's addiction, maybe it's control, maybe whatever it is
really religion, Like whatever it is for you, you have
your own way that you've tried to avoid suffering. You've
tried to avoid the part of you that feels sad,
that feels angry, that feels terrified, that feels hopeless, that
(27:10):
feels despair. You're so terrified to feel those feelings. I
am too, So we all have our ways of avoiding
them and yet suffering is a doorway, Suffering is an
invitation to a deeper kind of life. Suffering is inherently human,
and without our suffering, we lose touch with our humanity.
And so we think that we need to be like
(27:31):
the duck on the water, who's you know, like paddling
as hard as they can under the water, but just
looks so peaceful on the surface. And we assume that
we need to move through the world that way. But
what if we're actually doing a disservice not only to ourselves,
but also to other people, because we lose touch with
our humanity, and then they don't see humanity on our
faces and they lose touch with their humanity. And what
(27:54):
if accessing our own humanity is contagious? What if allowing
allowing yourself to feel whatever it is you feel about
your current set of circumstances, or just maybe not even
your current set of circumstances. Maybe what you feel makes
no sense. Maybe you're depressed even though you live in
a beautiful world, Like maybe you're like, why do I
feel so depressed because my life is amazing. Maybe you
(28:17):
feel sad and you don't know why. Maybe you feel
angry and you're not sure what it's connected to, but
maybe you just allow yourself to be in the pattern
of weather that's there right now and allow it to
move through. And if you could do that, if we
could do that and really deeply connect to our humanity,
maybe it would be of service to your community. Maybe
(28:41):
it would be a healing balm that you could offer
to those around you. I taught my first yoga class
a couple of weeks ago, and I was so nervous
to teach the class. And my friend Alissa, who's been
in the training with me, she's also teaching her first
class this upcoming Wednesday, and so we've been in this
together and she's been such a huge support to me
and I've been so thankful for her. Anyway, she asked me,
(29:03):
how did you get through the nerves of your first class?
And I had to think about it for a minute
because I was just like, I don't know, you just
kind of like jump in the deep end and go.
But one of the things that I did. A strategy
that I used was connecting my anxiety to the anxiety
that you feel as a beginner walking into your first
yoga class, because I remember that anxiety so vividly, and
(29:25):
because this class that I'm teaching, which is a free
class at the studio, is a lot of beginners, because
this is how people get introduced to the practice of yoga,
So a lot of people come to this community class.
It's a free class or by donation only, so they're
able to come and just kind of try it out
and see if they like it. So people are coming
for the first time. I remember that feeling of walking
into the yoga room and being like, I have no
(29:47):
idea what I'm doing. So I used my feelings of
fear to connect with other people in the room who
might also be feeling fear, and it made me realize
if I had tried to pretend like, no, no, no, I'm fine,
I'm not nervous, it's totally good. I've got this under control.
If I was faking it until I made it with confidence,
I wouldn't have been able to make that connection to
(30:10):
others in the room who were also feeling what I
was feeling. And so instead we can go yeah, it's
scary to do something new, Yep, I'm right here with you. Yep,
I'm not going anywhere. Yep, I feel it too. One
more example I'll share and then I'll wrap up. We
recently had a week of crazy weather. I think I
talked about it on an episode A Week of Crazy Weather,
(30:31):
where we had tornado sirens go off several times, and
we were racing where our bedrooms downstairs, our kids are upstairs,
racing up to get the kids, getting everybody's stuff, running
over to the tornado shelter which is next door. And
my daughter has been having a lot of fear about tornadoes,
and one of the things I realized that I was
doing was trying to put on a brave face to
(30:52):
help her feel safe. And the thing that has worked
better than anything else. I tried all of the strategies.
I tried, every thing I tried to implement that didn't work.
She was still feeling so afraid, she was having hard
time sleeping. She was really wanting me to help her
fall asleep and fall back asleep when she woke up
in the middle of the night. The one thing that
worked was telling her I feel scared too, and I'm
(31:15):
right here and I'm not going anywhere, and I'm right
here with you. We're in this together. There's something that's
so deeply comforting about that, And I think there are
a lot of reasons why there's a big epidemic of
depression and anxiety that's growing in our culture. Right now,
I'm reading The Anxious Generation, which is a fantastic book
and I would highly recommend. So there's a lot of reasons,
(31:37):
including smartphones and technology, that are causing this epidemic of
anxiety and depression. But one of the reasons I think
we're having such a spike and anxiety and depression is
because it is crazy making to be a human being
in a hurting world and look around and everyone else
seems fine. It's absolute insanity. It feels like I'm losing
(32:01):
my mind. So maybe you feel like that. Maybe you
look around and you see a bunch of kind of
Stepford faces of people who seem like, Yeah, everything's going great,
we're doing good. We're just you know, life is good.
We're going on vacation, we're doing this, we're doing that.
Everything's fine, and you feel like the world is falling apart.
The world is on fire around you, and you can
(32:22):
hardly hold it together, and you don't feel permission to
fall apart because no one else is falling apart, And
it's like the mom who's trying to play it cool
so that her kid doesn't feel safe. But what you
really need is for someone to say, Yep, I feel
it too, Yep. It's a hard time to be alive. Yep. Man,
being a human is really tough. It's been a hard
week for us. You know, we've really been through it.
(32:45):
Maybe if we could all do that, we would feel
a little less alone. We'd feel a little more connected
to ourselves, to our own humanity, to something bigger than us,
to our communities, to people around us, to our families.
So I invite you to unwind and unravel and untravel
(33:07):
the roads in your brain that say you have to
have it all together. You need to stay positive, You
need to find a reason to be grateful. You need
to be grateful for the challenges because they are the
what teach you that is there. Like I am just
now getting to the point five years into this journey
where I'm starting to feel grateful for the challenges that
have brought me here to this moment. But not because
(33:29):
I told myself I had to be grateful, but because
it's a weather pattern that's passing through. It's been five
years of a lot of challenges and just now, because
of my openness, because of my willingness to feel what
I'm feeling, a weather pattern is entering in that's showing
me this is a beautiful thing. This is a beautiful
(33:51):
thing that you've lived through. This is a beautiful thing
that you've witnessed. And I'm getting to see that from
a different vantage point. But not because I told myself
I have to be grateful, not because I'm pulling myself
up in my mootstraps. Only because I'm allowing myself to
feel exactly as anxious, as hopeless, as desperate, as in despair,
as jealous, as whatever, as I have actually felt. So
(34:13):
I invite you into that process with me, and I
invite you to start small and just ask yourself, what
am I feeling right now that I'm scared to feel.
Can I give myself five minutes to just feel it?
Just let it be okay? Whatever it is. I am
in this with you. I'm feeling it with you. You're not crazy,
you haven't lost your mind. Your perspective is valid. Trust it,
(34:37):
trust yourself, and I'll see you back here next week
on to Write Your Story podcast
Pick up the pieces of your life, put them back
together with the words you write, all the beauty and
peace and the magic that you'll start too fun when
you write your story. You got the words and said,
don't you think it's down to let them out and
write them down on cold It's all about and write
(00:24):
your story. Write, write your story. Hi, and welcome back
to the Write Your Story Podcast. I'm Ali Fallon, I'm
your host, and on today's episode, I want to talk
about this idea of staying positive when things are hard,
and specifically, I want to talk about toxic positivity. I
know this is a term that's been on the scene
(00:45):
for quite some time, and sometimes I'm kind of late
to talk about stuff. I feel like I'm not, like
always on the cutting edge of talking about what's happening
in popular culture. But there's a reason that I want
to talk about it right now, and it's because my
personal worldview is evolving significantly as we speak, as all
of our worldviews are. But I feel like a lot
(01:05):
of what I've been learning has to do with this
idea of staying positive, toxic positive, whatever you want to
call it. I have been learning so much as it
relates to this concept of thinking positive, staying positive, toxic positivity,
however you want to name it. I've been going through
a lot on this, and I've been learning a lot,
(01:26):
and I just wanted to share with you from my
perspective in case you might find it helpful or in
case you might find that it meets you where you
are in your own personal story. So I'll start here
that I posted something on Instagram a while back. This
was in twenty twenty, kind of like right at the
beginning of the pandemic. I don't remember exactly what month
it was, but I know that my daughter had not
been born yet, so she was born in July of
(01:47):
twenty twenty. Pandemic started in March, so sometime between March
and July of twenty twenty, I posted something on Instagram
that said something like life is too short to be
unhappy or something like that. It was from a of
I had been in a bad mood all day and
I was trying to kind of pull myself out of
this bad mood. I had been feeling like emotional and
(02:08):
frustrated at the current set of circumstances. We were all
in lockdown. I had had a few like big kind
of disappointments that had taken place around where I was
going to be able to give birth and my doula,
and also a couple of work things that had happened,
and I was just finding myself feeling pretty down and
I was trying to pull myself out of it. Which,
(02:30):
to give you some background in history for me, this
is behavior for me that was learned from a very
young age, and that seemed pretty normal to me. In fact,
when I posted that on Instagram, I did not think
I was going to get this severe backlash that I got,
because usually on my Instagram I post stuff that's not
super controversial. I mean, hopefully it's helpful and inspiring, but
(02:53):
it's not usually very controversial. I kind of avoid controversial topics.
I don't really like arguing in general, alone arguing on
the internet. I can enjoy, like a good, happy, positive
argument with a friend or family member if there's a
lot of trust built in the relationship and I feel
safe to do it. But conflict for the sake of
conflict is not my temperament. It's not my personality. So
(03:14):
I tend to kind of steer away from those topics
and tend to be more of an observer when those
topics come up in pop culture or when they come
up online. So I didn't see this coming that when
I posted this, I was going to get like this
crazy backlash of people who I think felt a little
dismissed by what I had posted. Because we're living in
this time of COVID, where, at least in LA at
(03:34):
the time, we were in like total lockdown. We were
not allowed to be out past a certain time at night.
We were on a curfew. We had you know, mask
mandates in every public place, including outdoors. We had mask
mandates in our neighborhoods, and the trails were closed and
the beaches were closed, and people were not able to
go to work. You know, most of my friends at
(03:55):
the time were either working remotely or if they weren't
able to work remotely, we're not working at all. And
so we were taking assistance from we meaning me and
my friends were taking assistance from the government at the time,
taking either unemployment or there were PvP loans. I can't
remember if those were quite around yet, but it felt
like a pretty dark time at least in LA. You know,
(04:16):
I had friends who were hairdressers or who were makeup
artists on set, or who worked in entertainment, or who
were actors and actresses, and everyone was out of work,
and everyone was going like, Okay, when's the next paycheck
going to come? And how are we going to navigate
this period of time that we're in. And it was
a pretty complicated, confusing, and sometimes scary time. Or maybe
(04:37):
even now I'm understating it, it was a pretty scary time.
I will say I looking back now, I can see
how much I was in survival mode and how truly
scared that I was, and how much I was blocking
myself from feeling how scared I was, because to feel
as scared as I actually was felt extremely terrifying. And
if you've been around this show for a while, you've
(04:58):
heard this part of the story. But during this time,
I was, you know, what would it have been like
seven or eight months pregnant. My husband had shut down
his business, so I was the primary breadwinner. We'd had
to pivot in my business because everyone did. It was
a weird time, and things were selling differently, and everyone
was changing the way that they were operating online and
I was having to start to meet with in person
(05:18):
clients over zoom, so that was stressful, and I was
trying to keep I had five employees at the time.
I was trying to keep everyone employed, and it was
extremely stressful. And I remember thinking like, Okay, this baby's
going to be born and then what then, what am
I going to do? So yeah, it was a challenging time,
and yet I was doing the thing that I had
done for all of my life unconsciously that I didn't
(05:41):
realize I was doing, which was trying to pull myself
out of this low mood by saying like, life is
too short to be unhappy, Like let me find something
to be happy about. Let's go get ice cream or
you know, let's whatever, like take the dog for a
drive or or something like that. Just try to find
something to kind of bring myself out of this low mood.
I post this on Instagram. I get this really big backlash.
(06:02):
I think I deleted the post. I can't even remember now,
but I just remember being like, WHOA, I did not
see that coming, and feeling a little bit caught off
guard and maybe almost like attacked by all these people
who were like, that's not really a fair thing to say,
given the period of time that we're in, and now
looking back, I see this all really differently because I've
been in this long season of unraveling those old patterns
(06:25):
and habits and learning a new way of being that
has a lot more space for just all the different
feelings and moods that might come up on any different day,
and sees them more like, as my friend Don Miller
would say, more like weather patterns. It's like they come in,
they leave. We don't have control over them, we don't
(06:46):
need to control them. It's sunny today, it's rainy tomorrow.
That's just how the weather works. And because of my
experiences in the last five years, I've been able to
allow myself more space to move through those moods as
they come. But back then I didn't have the skill
set to do that. I didn't know how to do it.
And even in the last five years, I've moved kind
of in and out of knowing how to do that,
(07:08):
and I have found myself at points latching on to
teachers or ideas that take me back to that old,
familiar way of being. And so I want to talk
about the difference here because there is some nuance like
one teacher that you've probably heard me talk about, and
a book that I've even recommended on one of my
episodes is Esther Hicks, who is someone who's been around
(07:32):
for a long time, since the early two thousands, and
she's written, I don't know, dozens of books, and I
think the one that I recommended was called Money and
the Law of Attraction. But the Law of attraction, that phrase,
it has become kind of part of our regular vernacular,
like we talk about that, least among my group of
friends and people who I'm around, I hear that phrase
(07:52):
thrown around kind of a lot. And then there was
that movie that came out called The Secret and Esther
Hicks was a big part of that. Anyways, she's writ
and dozens of books, including Money in the Law of Attraction.
But her main point is that what we think about
is what we manifest. And she's not the only one
who talks about this. There are tons of people out
there who talk about the power of positive thinking and
(08:15):
that if we can kind of set our vision or
set our mindset on something really beautiful and we can
have gratitude and we can focus on what we do want,
that what we do want will grow. And so this
is where my idea had come from, that if I
could pull myself out of this negative mood. If I
could just focus myself on something that was, you know,
(08:35):
more positive, or that brought me a sense of peace
or love or joy or whatever, that maybe I could
move myself out of this quote unquote negative mood and
into a more positive mood. And this idea didn't always
come from Esther Hicks. Ester Hicks didn't come into my
life until much later. But I would imagine that my
upbringing and evangelicalism also played a role in this. And
(08:59):
then also we'll talk of a couple different elements. Let's
start with evangelicalism. So I grew up in evangelicalism, and
if you didn't grow up in evangelicalism, you just it's
kind of it's so funny. I was at dinner the
other night with a couple. Matt and I were at
dinner with a couple friend of ours. So this couple
and Matt and I were chatting, and neither of them
(09:20):
grew up in the evangelical church like Matt and I did.
And so sometimes when we have meals with people like that,
or when we get to chatting with them, we're telling
stories and their jaws are on the floor. Because if
you didn't grow up in in like evangelicalism, especially in
the eighties and nineties, it's such a subculture of its
own that you kind of can't even fathom what it
(09:41):
might have been. Like like if you didn't go to
youth group in the nineties, you just can't believe the
stuff that was done, like purity culture stuff. You know,
my youth pastor put droplets of pea and a water
bottle and asked if we wanted to drink it, and
he said, even the slightest impurity makes the water impure,
and nobody wants to drink it. Matt was telling a
(10:01):
story about how his youth pastor used an old baseball
glove to describe how you don't want to put your
hand into someone else's baseball glove that's formed to their hand,
to describe like why kids shouldn't have sex before they're married.
Wild that that was even allowed, Like wild that like
a twenty year old youth pastor was leading a group
(10:21):
of you know, sixteen to eighteen year old kids, a
male youth faster leading teenage girls, and like so much
about it is just crazy to me. And maybe there
are still churches there probably are where that type of
stuff is still taking place, but it was extremely normal
back in the nineties, and part of evangelical culture, I
think had some element of this sort of stay positive,
(10:44):
like God's got this even on your darkest day. You know,
God is your protector, he's your comfort, or God's going
to take care of this. And here's where things get
really sticky, because my current present day spirituality would still
allow for a statement like God is your comforter. You know,
God can comfort you. So it's not that I think
that that statement is necessarily wrong, but I think that
(11:07):
wrapped up in evangelicalism, it came with kind of this
sense of denihalism, where we're going to turn a blind
eye to anything that doesn't fit the shiny image that
we want to have. We're not going to look at
things that would taint the image of the church. We're
not going to really pay attention to that. We want
(11:27):
to sort of clean up our act and clean up
the scene and clean up the image and clean up
the brand and really keep things kind of like pure
and above board. And because of that, I think that
evangelicalism played a role in this pattern, the patterning that's
laid down in my brain that says, you know, depression
(11:48):
isn't okay, sadness isn't okay, fear isn't okay, feeling low
isn't okay, because God can take care of all of that.
And I know that if you grew up in the
evangelical face like I did, you probably also heard some
version of the rhetoric around anti depressants or anti anxiety
(12:08):
medication or other kind of pharmaceutical drugs. I know that
if you grew up in the evangelical faith like I did,
you probably also heard some version of the rhetoric around
(12:30):
anti depressants or anti anxiety medication or other kind of
pharmaceutical drugs. That this idea that if you needed to
rely on depression medication, or if you needed to rely
on anxiety medication, that you probably needed to do that
because you hadn't trusted God enough, you hadn't trusted Jesus
enough to come and cleanse you from your sins or
cleanse you from your unrighteousness, and you just really needed
(12:53):
more prayer, and you probably needed to come up to
an alter call, and you maybe needed to repent of
the sins in your life, and then you would be
freed of this burden of depression or anxiety. And so
I'm not blaming anyone, and I'm not even I don't
feel like antagonistic necessarily toward any of the people who
believes these things or taught these things. I'm just more
(13:14):
speaking about, like how did the tracks get laid down
in my brain that said, feeling sad is not okay,
Feeling low is not okay, especially in light of a
situation where I'm seven months pregnant. I am, you know,
working my butt off to try to provide for my family.
I'm anticipating the fact that I'm about to have a baby,
and I'm not gonna be able to take a break.
I'm trying to provide for all these employees. I'm worried
(13:36):
about people having to get fired and losing their their
source of income, and so i have every circumstantial reason
to feel the way that I'm feeling. And yet I'm
still going no, no, no, We're not going there. We're gonna
make ourselves feel happy somehow. So again, this conversation is
extremely nuanced because there is an element where what Esther
(14:00):
Hicks has written about has value, has merit is important,
can be useful even the messages of evangelical Church from
my childhood. God is your comfort or God brings you peace.
You know you can pray to God and call out
to Him at any time and He will come and
meet you. And yet there's a small nuance here that
(14:24):
God comes to meet us where we're at, meaning I
don't need to pull myself up to God somehow to
meet God in happiness. It's not like God can only
meet me my happiness. God can't meet me in my depression. Well,
the way I would say it now is that all
of it is God. That God is with you in
(14:45):
your grief. God is with you in your depression. God
is with you in your sadness, in your fear, in
your survival mode. God is there. God is already with
you in it. It is God. It all is God.
The joy is God, the peace is God. All of
it is God. And that God wraps us and envelops
us in all kinds of moments. One of the things
(15:07):
I'm learning is that it is safe to feel exactly
what you feel in any given moment, and you can
give yourself permission to feel it fully and completely without
needing to change it. The analogy of the weather patterns
is such a powerful analogy because imagine how crazy you
would feel if you thought that it was your job
(15:30):
to adjust the patterns of weather. Imagine how absolutely insane
you would feel if you believed that in order to
be close to God, or in order to have a
spirituality or a faith, or in order to be a
good person or to be okay, that you needed to
decide what days it rained and what days it was sunny,
(15:52):
and what days it was cloudy, and what days it
was windy, and you needed to somehow alter or adjust
or manipulate what is what is just true, what is
just there? You would start to feel insane. And so
there's this dichotomy of a culture that says, you know,
in order to be a good person, in order to
be liked by others, in order to you know, get promoted,
(16:14):
in order to have a good life, you need to
kind of see things through this one lens. You need
to like, be happy, be positive, smile more, think about
positive things, be grateful for the things you do have.
I'm not saying that there's anything wrong with being grateful
for the things that you do have, but for someone
who has every circumstantial reason to feel sad or feel low,
(16:37):
or be depressed, or have anxiety or whatever else. It's
an insane thing to ask of them to also be grateful,
or to also be happy, or to also feel joy
in that moment. And here's one of the things that
I've been learning in the last five years, which, in
addition to allowing myself to just feel what it is
(16:58):
that I feel as circumstances unfold in my life, there
are moments where it's totally appropriate to just feel sad,
just feel grief, just feel utter despair, feel hopelessness. For
the first time in my life, in the last five years,
I have allowed myself to feel hopeless. And if you've
been around the show for a while and you've been
listening to this podcast, you know that I've had a
(17:19):
really challenging last five years, and especially in the last year.
I lost a baby, I lost my dad, Matt lost
a business, we lost almost our entire life savings. We've
been trying to put the pieces of that back together,
and it's been a really challenging couple of years, and
I have allowed myself in moments to just sink into
utter hopelessness, like this will never get better. It's never
(17:42):
going to change. It's always going to be this way.
And a previous version of me would have thought, no, no, no,
don't let yourself go there. It's not hopeless. Like with God,
there's always hope. And yet I've allowed myself to dissent
into utter hopelessness because the circumstances warrant it allow for it,
and because it's so human and healthy to allow yourself
(18:04):
to experience a passing weather pattern of hopelessness. And what
I've found through that is that when I can allow
myself to experience whatever it is that I'm experiencing in
the moment, that actually, as the weather pattern passes, a
different weather pattern comes in and I get to experience
a deeper, higher, bigger joy, a deeper, higher, bigger gratitude
(18:29):
that isn't forced, that isn't coerced, that isn't manipulated, that's
just is. It's like gratitude just is who I am.
It just is in me in the same way that
hopelessness is there. Hopelessness just moves through, and then gratitude
moves through. And when gratitude moves through, it moves through
in a truer kind of a way. Because I'm not
(18:51):
trying to drum it up out of nowhere. And so
what I want to talk about is the difference between
toxic positivity and joy. They sound so different, and you're like,
of course they're different, but I do think we get
these two things mixed up. We get mixed up with
what we think is joy. We think we have to
(19:12):
drum up joy and control our circumstances in order to
feel joy, and I think we really get it wrong,
and we actually miss out on true joy, because true
joy can flood into your body when you least expect it,
or when it makes no sense to feel joy or
(19:33):
pleasure or peace. True joy and peace can flood into
your body when it makes no sense to feel those things.
And the only way that it can do that is
when we learn to allow these experiences to pass through us,
like weather patterns that we have no control over, the
insanity that we would feel if we were told you
(19:55):
have to control that, you have to feel happy all
the time, you have to feel you have to feel
gratitude every day, we would feel insane. And maybe you
do feel insane. And I think this is particularly true
for anyone who has had really traumatic experiences in their
lives if you have PTSD, if you have a trauma
(20:16):
that's living in your body, the idea that you should
have to feel gratitude at certain moments feels impossible and
feels almost violent against what you're facing, what you're dealing with.
And when I think back to the woman who I
was in twenty twenty standing in my kitchen posting that
quote Instagram, I have a lot of compassion for her,
(20:40):
because you know, it's no fun to feel depressed, it's
no fun to feel hopeless. So I was just really
trying to get myself to a new place. And yet,
and yet, there is a big difference between joy and
toxic positivity. And toxic positivity, drumming up positivity from nowhere
(21:01):
is toxic positivity. My definition for toxic positivity would be
a positivity that you feel you need to manipulate or
control in order to think or feel differently about your
(21:23):
life from how you actually think or feel. So, a
positivity that you need to manipulate or control in order
to feel differently or think differently about your life because
you assume that the way you think or feel about
your life is not okay. And what I want to say,
what I've been learning, And what I would invite you
into is that the way you think and feel about
(21:45):
your life is fine. The way you think about your life,
the way you feel about your life right now is okay.
And you can allow yourself to feel those things and
think those things. And what ends up happening, or at
least what's ended up happening for me, is that I
let go of the need to control how I feel
about a situation, and as I let go of the
(22:06):
need to control the situation itself. Because these are the
two sides of the same coin, right, We either think
I need to control the situation to make it better
so I can feel better, or I need to decide
I'm going to feel differently about this situation. Those are
like our two ways to fix the problem that's happening,
or what we perceive is the problem. But what if
what if it's equally insane to think that I could
(22:27):
control my feelings as it is to think I can
control the situation. So it's like, Okay, I feel depressed.
The two ways to fix this are I change my
circumstances or I change my attitude and think about how
normal this has been for most of us. I assume
it's normal. I grew up in an environment where like
this was also good parenting, you know, like change your attitude,
(22:50):
like get on board with the rest of the family.
We're going on this trip. It's going to be fun.
And I do this to my kids too. It's like
you woke up in a cranky mood, like, hey, let's
turn the frown upside down. Let's have a great day together.
And yet it's insane to think that we could change
our circumstances. Equally is insane to think we could change
how we feel about our circumstances. What if, and here's
(23:11):
what I've been learning. What if we could allow exactly
what is to be what is? And what if that
would give way to something different. Just like the weather changes,
just like today is rainy and tomorrow is sunny. Just
like yesterday was foggy and today is different. Just like
it was windy last week and it's not windy this week.
What if the weather would change, and inevitably we would
(23:33):
experience a little bit of all of it. Inevitably will
experience a little bit of grief. Inevitably will experience a
little bit of fear. Inevitably will experience a little bit
of joy. This is extremely nuanced. I think I've said
that about hundred times in this episode. This is extremely
nuanced because there is a lot of research that shows,
for example, how helpful it can be to mood to
(23:54):
make a gratitude list, just as one example, so making
a gratitude list each day and dramatically improve your mood.
So you might say, well, there you go. See you
can change your mood. You can affect your mood, improve
your mood, alter your mood, manipulate your mood. Okay, yes,
if the things that you're listing that you're grateful for
(24:17):
are things that you're actually grateful for, not things that
you're not grateful for. The reason why, in my opinion,
that a gratitude list would help you to shift out
of a low mood, let's say, is because it provides
extra perspective and it helps you to round out the
perspective that not all is bad. But what I think
(24:40):
a lot of times we do, and what I would
call toxic positivity, is we take a situation that sucks
and you try to make a gratitude out of it,
like I'm so grateful that you know we're in lockdown
right now because it's just giving me extra time to
focus on the things that really matter to me, Like
(25:01):
you know whatever, A lot of us did that during
the lockdown. A lot of us do that. I still
find myself doing that sometimes when I don't want to
feel what it is that I'm feeling. And yet, what
if we could allow ourselves to fully feel whatever it
is that we're feeling. We're terrified of this, like absolutely
(25:21):
petrified to feel what we're actually feeling. What if you
could just ask yourself, what is the thing that I'm
feeling right now, without manipulating, without trying to control it,
without having any agenda, without judging it. What if you
could just let yourself be sad or scared or mad.
(25:43):
That's another hard one, especially as women, we don't let
ourselves be mad. But what if you could just give
yourself permission to just be whatever it is that you
are right now. Maybe you're tired, Maybe things for you
right now feel extremely unfair. What would it look like
to just allow yourself to feel angry that it's unfair,
it is unfair. What if I could validate that it
(26:05):
is unfair. Your circumstances are unfair, This is unfair, And
what has shocked me is that when I allow myself
to feel what is, when I allow myself to accept
and receive what is, it's actually joy that follows. It's
actually gratitude that follows. Gratitude is my nature. Joy is
my nature. And when I allow the other sensations to
(26:28):
move through my body, it's almost like they carve a
deeper rut for the river of joy to run through.
And I recently sent an email to my email list
about suffering and about how much effort we all spend
in our life trying to avoid suffering. And I said,
(26:49):
if we all came together and we were telling stories
around a campfire, we would have a ragtag collection of
stories of all the ways that we've tried to avoid suffering.
Maybe it's addiction, maybe it's control, maybe whatever it is
really religion, Like whatever it is for you, you have
your own way that you've tried to avoid suffering. You've
tried to avoid the part of you that feels sad,
that feels angry, that feels terrified, that feels hopeless, that
(27:10):
feels despair. You're so terrified to feel those feelings. I
am too, So we all have our ways of avoiding
them and yet suffering is a doorway, Suffering is an
invitation to a deeper kind of life. Suffering is inherently human,
and without our suffering, we lose touch with our humanity.
And so we think that we need to be like
(27:31):
the duck on the water, who's you know, like paddling
as hard as they can under the water, but just
looks so peaceful on the surface. And we assume that
we need to move through the world that way. But
what if we're actually doing a disservice not only to ourselves,
but also to other people, because we lose touch with
our humanity, and then they don't see humanity on our
faces and they lose touch with their humanity. And what
(27:54):
if accessing our own humanity is contagious? What if allowing
allowing yourself to feel whatever it is you feel about
your current set of circumstances, or just maybe not even
your current set of circumstances. Maybe what you feel makes
no sense. Maybe you're depressed even though you live in
a beautiful world, Like maybe you're like, why do I
feel so depressed because my life is amazing. Maybe you
(28:17):
feel sad and you don't know why. Maybe you feel
angry and you're not sure what it's connected to, but
maybe you just allow yourself to be in the pattern
of weather that's there right now and allow it to
move through. And if you could do that, if we
could do that and really deeply connect to our humanity,
maybe it would be of service to your community. Maybe
(28:41):
it would be a healing balm that you could offer
to those around you. I taught my first yoga class
a couple of weeks ago, and I was so nervous
to teach the class. And my friend Alissa, who's been
in the training with me, she's also teaching her first
class this upcoming Wednesday, and so we've been in this
together and she's been such a huge support to me
and I've been so thankful for her. Anyway, she asked me,
(29:03):
how did you get through the nerves of your first class?
And I had to think about it for a minute
because I was just like, I don't know, you just
kind of like jump in the deep end and go.
But one of the things that I did. A strategy
that I used was connecting my anxiety to the anxiety
that you feel as a beginner walking into your first
yoga class, because I remember that anxiety so vividly, and
(29:25):
because this class that I'm teaching, which is a free
class at the studio, is a lot of beginners, because
this is how people get introduced to the practice of yoga,
So a lot of people come to this community class.
It's a free class or by donation only, so they're
able to come and just kind of try it out
and see if they like it. So people are coming
for the first time. I remember that feeling of walking
into the yoga room and being like, I have no
(29:47):
idea what I'm doing. So I used my feelings of
fear to connect with other people in the room who
might also be feeling fear, and it made me realize
if I had tried to pretend like, no, no, no, I'm fine,
I'm not nervous, it's totally good. I've got this under control.
If I was faking it until I made it with confidence,
I wouldn't have been able to make that connection to
(30:10):
others in the room who were also feeling what I
was feeling. And so instead we can go yeah, it's
scary to do something new, Yep, I'm right here with you. Yep,
I'm not going anywhere. Yep, I feel it too. One
more example I'll share and then I'll wrap up. We
recently had a week of crazy weather. I think I
talked about it on an episode A Week of Crazy Weather,
(30:31):
where we had tornado sirens go off several times, and
we were racing where our bedrooms downstairs, our kids are upstairs,
racing up to get the kids, getting everybody's stuff, running
over to the tornado shelter which is next door. And
my daughter has been having a lot of fear about tornadoes,
and one of the things I realized that I was
doing was trying to put on a brave face to
(30:52):
help her feel safe. And the thing that has worked
better than anything else. I tried all of the strategies.
I tried, every thing I tried to implement that didn't work.
She was still feeling so afraid, she was having hard
time sleeping. She was really wanting me to help her
fall asleep and fall back asleep when she woke up
in the middle of the night. The one thing that
worked was telling her I feel scared too, and I'm
(31:15):
right here and I'm not going anywhere, and I'm right
here with you. We're in this together. There's something that's
so deeply comforting about that, And I think there are
a lot of reasons why there's a big epidemic of
depression and anxiety that's growing in our culture. Right now,
I'm reading The Anxious Generation, which is a fantastic book
and I would highly recommend. So there's a lot of reasons,
(31:37):
including smartphones and technology, that are causing this epidemic of
anxiety and depression. But one of the reasons I think
we're having such a spike and anxiety and depression is
because it is crazy making to be a human being
in a hurting world and look around and everyone else
seems fine. It's absolute insanity. It feels like I'm losing
(32:01):
my mind. So maybe you feel like that. Maybe you
look around and you see a bunch of kind of
Stepford faces of people who seem like, Yeah, everything's going great,
we're doing good. We're just you know, life is good.
We're going on vacation, we're doing this, we're doing that.
Everything's fine, and you feel like the world is falling apart.
The world is on fire around you, and you can
(32:22):
hardly hold it together, and you don't feel permission to
fall apart because no one else is falling apart, And
it's like the mom who's trying to play it cool
so that her kid doesn't feel safe. But what you
really need is for someone to say, Yep, I feel
it too, Yep. It's a hard time to be alive. Yep. Man,
being a human is really tough. It's been a hard
week for us. You know, we've really been through it.
(32:45):
Maybe if we could all do that, we would feel
a little less alone. We'd feel a little more connected
to ourselves, to our own humanity, to something bigger than us,
to our communities, to people around us, to our families.
So I invite you to unwind and unravel and untravel
(33:07):
the roads in your brain that say you have to
have it all together. You need to stay positive, You
need to find a reason to be grateful. You need
to be grateful for the challenges because they are the
what teach you that is there. Like I am just
now getting to the point five years into this journey
where I'm starting to feel grateful for the challenges that
have brought me here to this moment. But not because
(33:29):
I told myself I had to be grateful, but because
it's a weather pattern that's passing through. It's been five
years of a lot of challenges and just now, because
of my openness, because of my willingness to feel what
I'm feeling, a weather pattern is entering in that's showing
me this is a beautiful thing. This is a beautiful
(33:51):
thing that you've lived through. This is a beautiful thing
that you've witnessed. And I'm getting to see that from
a different vantage point. But not because I told myself
I have to be grateful, not because I'm pulling myself
up in my mootstraps. Only because I'm allowing myself to
feel exactly as anxious, as hopeless, as desperate, as in despair,
as jealous, as whatever, as I have actually felt. So
(34:13):
I invite you into that process with me, and I
invite you to start small and just ask yourself, what
am I feeling right now that I'm scared to feel.
Can I give myself five minutes to just feel it?
Just let it be okay? Whatever it is. I am
in this with you. I'm feeling it with you. You're not crazy,
you haven't lost your mind. Your perspective is valid. Trust it,
(34:37):
trust yourself, and I'll see you back here next week
on to Write Your Story podcast
Popular Podcasts
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
I’m Jay Shetty host of On Purpose the worlds #1 Mental Health podcast and I’m so grateful you found us. I started this podcast 5 years ago to invite you into conversations and workshops that are designed to help make you happier, healthier and more healed. I believe that when you (yes you) feel seen, heard and understood you’re able to deal with relationship struggles, work challenges and life’s ups and downs with more ease and grace. I interview experts, celebrities, thought leaders and athletes so that we can grow our mindset, build better habits and uncover a side of them we’ve never seen before. New episodes every Monday and Friday. Your support means the world to me and I don’t take it for granted — click the follow button and leave a review to help us spread the love with On Purpose. I can’t wait for you to listen to your first or 500th episode!
Crime Junkie
Does hearing about a true crime case always leave you scouring the internet for the truth behind the story? Dive into your next mystery with Crime Junkie. Every Monday, join your host Ashley Flowers as she unravels all the details of infamous and underreported true crime cases with her best friend Brit Prawat. From cold cases to missing persons and heroes in our community who seek justice, Crime Junkie is your destination for theories and stories you won’t hear anywhere else. Whether you're a seasoned true crime enthusiast or new to the genre, you'll find yourself on the edge of your seat awaiting a new episode every Monday. If you can never get enough true crime... Congratulations, you’ve found your people. Follow to join a community of Crime Junkies! Crime Junkie is presented by audiochuck Media Company.
Ridiculous History
History is beautiful, brutal and, often, ridiculous. Join Ben Bowlin and Noel Brown as they dive into some of the weirdest stories from across the span of human civilization in Ridiculous History, a podcast by iHeartRadio.