Have you spent your whole life avoiding negative emotions?  Do you stuff them down or resist them at all costs?  Chances are you were never taught how to identify and process emotions.  On today’s podcast I will teach you in 5 steps how to identify and process your emotions so that you can live the life you were meant to!     Show Summary   So today we are talking about identifying and processing emotions.  What is an emotion?  When we think thoughts, our brains send a chemical reaction to our body which is what we know as emotions.  Sometimes our emotions can seem overwhelming and we can’t handle them.  We are actually conditioned from very early on in our life to resist emotions that are painful.  As mother’s we teach our children not be angry, or sad.  We do everything in our power to help our children not experience anything painful.  But what we should be teaching them (and what I wish someone had taught me) was HOW to deal with them.  Not resist them.  Not push them deep down and pretend they are not there.  Not do something to avoid them.  We need to learn how to identify our emotions, how to feel them, and how to process them.  Because, they are just chemicals in our body.  They can’t actually hurt us.  And resisting them actually makes them worse.   In the LDS church, we are taught that when Adam & Eve partook of the fruit from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil - it brought an awareness to them so that they could experience opposition in all things.  This was a crucial part of the Plan of Happiness.  We are supposed to experience hurt, and and frustration, and sadness.  This is NOT weakness.  This is being HUMAN.  This life is not meant to be happy 100% of the time.  I think for people who would say they are truly happy, they still experience negative emotion 50% of the time.  That’s normal.     Do you remember that movie Inside Out that came out about 3 years ago?  I absolutely LOVED that movie because I think it brought the topic of emotions to the forefront.  So if you have NOT seen that move, it’s a movie about a girl whose family moves across the country and she has to deal with a lot of new challenges.  But the movie is mostly from the perspective of these characters that live in her head that represent her emotions - Joy, Anger, Sadness, Fear, and Disgust.  And what I loved about this movie is that it showed how the emotions controlled this girl by putting thoughts into her head about her situation or about memories she had.  It also showed us that these are our 5 main emotions and other emotions that we have are kind of “sub-emotions” of those main 5.   Have you guys ever seen that poster with all the different cartoon faces that represent all different emotions?  There is a HUGE range of emotions and sometimes it can take a while to figure out WHAT we are actually feeling.  And because I don’t think most of us were ever TAUGHT to identify and deal with our emotions properly, We often mis-identify what we are actually feeling.  For example - I hear all the time from people how ANGRY they are about this and that.  And what they are probably feeling is more fear, frustration, disgust, or disappointment.     So today, I want to give you 5 steps to identifying and processing your emotions.  This is especially helpful if you are dealing with an emotion that is overwhelming or painful.     So the first thing is to identify the emotion that you are actually feeling.  Sit with it.  Call it by name.  This is FEAR.  I am DISAPPOINTED.  I am FRUSTRATED.     The second thing is to ALLOW the emotion.  Let it move through you.   Now, remember what I said earlier that EVERY emotion you feel is caused by a thought or belief in your brain.  When you believe something, then your brain sends a chemical reaction to your body and that is what your emotion is.  So as strong and powerful as that emotion is - it can’t hurt you!  So don’t resist it.  The more you resist it, the more it will stick with you an