The first thing you’ll hear is the exercise. Here we go. So you are experiencing an emotion. Let’s check in with your body. Put your hand on your heart. Breathe. What are you feeling in your body? What is the sensation that you’re feeling? Are you feeling tight, heavy? Shaky. And where are you experiencing that? Does your gut feel tight? Does your body feel heavy?

Do your arms feel weak? Scan through your body, noticing the sensation. Once you notice the sensation, try to describe it and identify in what part of your body you’re feeling it. Keep breathing. Allowing your body to experience whatever sensation you have. Can you name that feeling? What is the emotion that you’re experiencing?

I am feeling sad. I’m feeling ashamed. I am anxious. Keep breathing, breathe. Experiencing the sensations, naming the sensations. I feel heat in my chest feels like a wave rising up and falling down. Let’s continue to breathe. Allow that wave to wash over you. Continue to breathe, noticing the sensations in your body.

And by this time, the intensity of the feeling and the emotion should have been significantly less. I’m so proud of you for doing this work. It says, beautiful healing work. You are safe to feel anything. You can experience this, you know how to process this physiological response. 

‌ Well done. I’m so proud of you for processing your emotions. Continue to show your brain. I’m so safe. I can experience emotions. This is my path to freedom. I’m willing to feel any emotion. This last part is totally optional, but if you’d like to learn from your emotions and tune in more to you, then fill out the sheet. It’s in your workbook. It says learning. Learning from it. 

So you’re going to ask yourself, how long did this last? Would have eating been better and resisting it? Would that have been better? Did it last as long as I thought it would? What did I learn from processing this emotion? What do I know now? Or what did this emotion need to teach me? What does God need me to know by having me experience this emotion? 

And finally, what do I want to remember the next time I feel this feeling or this emotion? And that is it. Emotions are physiological responses. There are sensations in our body. They come, they go, they’re like waves. They can be very informative for us and they teach us things.

So next what you’ll hear are my thoughts that I had 30 minutes after processing an emotion, you will hear how excited I am, how free, how uplifted and exhilarated I felt after doing work. So you guys, I wanted to tell you I had one of the most life-giving experiences and probably monumental things that I will remember for. As a turning point in my relationship with the Lord.

And it is the exercise of processing my emotions, and I have practiced many times noticing when I’m in a stress response and calming myself down. But what happened to me today was I kept feeling a heaviness. A heaviness, a sadness. 

And instead of pushing through it and just deciding, I’m gonna keep doing my to-do list or thinking, well, let me just turn to coffee ’cause that’s what I used to do. But the Lord has asked me that he really wants me to decrease my reliance on caffeine. So I’m slowly by slowly reducing that and it isn’t part of the plan time that I would have caffeine. 

So I had to sit with feelings. And there were feelings, and I could have pushed through them. I could have put on a podcast and started cleaning my house or dive into some work or do something, and I didn’t do that today. Today I took out a pen. Today I took out a piece of paper, and today I took out the processing emotions worksheet, and I just did what it said. 

Sat there named the physical sensations. Honestly, you guys, I’ll tell you, I have a lot of experience calming myself down, but I have never just taken out the worksheet and done it the way it says the worksheet that I created, and what I found was that what was underneath my heaviness was I was able to name it as lost. I was feeling lost. 

So I did as the exercise instructs to just let it process through my body to breathe to allow it, I’m feeling lost. It’s safe to feel lost. It’s okay to feel lost. And I just did that and then I did. I answered the questions afterwards, which really, really, really helped me. 

And so I said, I’m having a wave of loss. How long did it last? Three to five minutes. Would have resisting it by eating or pushing it down have been better? No, absolutely not. I said, actually, I was so surprised how. I felt the loss and the intensity of it and how quickly the intensity lessened and the lightness started to take over. It was like it was peeling off a layer where I was like, okay. I was still detecting the sense of feeling that loss and the heaviness in my stomach.

But my eyes started to feel lighter. I could feel clarity. I could feel lightness. That was really interesting to me. Like that whole layer just came off. What did I learn? Oh, processing. This is kind and loving to myself, and it’s okay not to dive into the root or try to do any thought work. It’s just okay to process the emotion, let it run through me.

And I’m safe to feel lost, and that’s when it hit me. Oh my gosh, Denise, you’re going through this transition. You’re probably in withdrawal from caffeine, or at least now without the caffeine. I’m not pushing down that feeling of loss. So that’s just really interesting. I said I also might be learning other things that might be. Being revealed to me is that my body may be grieving that up feeling that go, that motivation.

And it might also be feeling the actual withdrawal of the caffeine, that less dopamine in my brain. Of course, I’m in this transition. And what did God want to reveal to me? Number one, that this works. Oh my gosh, this process works like amazing. I’m recording this like under 30 minutes after I just did the exercise, and then I was like, okay, I feel so good. I really need to just record this. 

Number two, this is showing me that I can trust myself with feelings that I can trust myself to take care of myself. This is wonderful self-care. This is what true, authentic self-care is. I’m also learning, and I think God wanted to reveal that the answer is not caffeine. The answer is not food. The answer is not anything external because the problem isn’t external. 

I can’t reach for an external solution for a problem that’s internal, and I don’t even know if it’s a problem, but the situation is an internal situation and anytime I go outside myself to fix it, I’m not fixing it. I’m just pushing it down. I’m just walking away from it. I’m just distracting myself.

And like this situation is this time. God was not calling me to do that. He revealed to me that he’s really healing me, that I am safe, and I love this question. The next time this happens, what do I want to think? What do I want to remember? And I said, hi love. I’m here for you. You’re feeling lost. I wanna say this to myself. You’re safe. Nothing has gone wrong. God is healing you. Let’s just sit back and breathe through this. 

And then I had a little bit of other writing that I put at the end of my exercise. I said, wow, Jesus lost. You’re really peeling back the onion, another layer of healing, Denise, be tender and gentle with yourself.

And then I thought, you know what? I’m willing to be uncomfortable for deep healing. I’m willing to be uncomfortable and sit with some feelings for deep healing. Because I know the deeper my healing goes, the more united I am with him. The more whole I am, the more men that I am, the more like Jesus I am.

And I love the thought this will all be worth it. And when I’m feeling that loss and that heaviness, which is so hard because I love feeling happy and up, I need to remember sitting in this is worth it. And the truth is it just doesn’t last as long as my brain thinks it’s gonna last when I just process it.

That’s one of the things I love about this whole exercise. I can recognize it’s just a chemical reaction. It is a chemical reaction, nothing to be afraid of. But that doesn’t mean that there isn’t information for me to learn. So it’s safe and it’s stepping into the Lord’s classroom. So I wanted to share that experience with you.

 I hope this has been helpful for you, and I know that this will be a key to you getting to your healthy weight and maintaining it for the rest of your life.