This week I am following up my previous posts on “Feeling the Feels” and “Cultivating Awareness”.

Let’s say you have cultivated an awareness of automatic responses to uncomfortable emotions. You want to change these behaviors but you don’t know where to start.

You may discover your self-soothing behaviors are incredibly powerful. This is because you have been using them automatically for so long.

Last week I discussed the possibility of liberation from conditioned self-soothing behaviors that occur in response to negatively charged emotions.

In my opinion, the first step in learning this process is awareness.

One of my favorite songs in the Broadway musical Book of Mormon is “Turn it Off”. The gist of the song can be wrapped up in the following lyrics:

You say you got a problem?

Well that’s no problem!

It’s super easy not to feel that way!

Today my morning trail run felt different. It was drizzly, the forest felt gray, the vibrant yellow leaves had disappeared from the trees. The woods that had felt like a technicolor dream world now seemed moody and dead.