Stop Letting Your Funk Punk You

Why is it that a funk can grip you like some buff, bad guy in a movie who’s doing the one-arm choke and lift move on a civilian? Seriously, when is that poor civilian going to be able to save themselves rather than wait for the superhero character to come and say something like, “Put her down you monster!”

I don’t know about you, but I’m fucking tired of waiting to be saved. It’s time to learn how to save ourselves before we’re dangling helplessly in the air.

What is a funk?

I define a funk as a temporary period of time when one experiences feelings of sadness, demotivation, helplessness, confusion, irritation, anger, or stagnancy of the mind and body sometimes caused by an event, but can also arise in a cyclical manner for no apparent reason other than one’s own negative thought patterns.

Whether it’s your boyfriend not giving you the attention that you want, the out-of-your-control roadblocks you face at work, the concert you can’t go to now because every outfit makes you feel fat, or the fact that you haven’t been to the gym in weeks, but you still don’t have time because of everything else you have to do — life will put you through constant emotional roller coaster rides that no one really teaches us how to deal with.

We’ve had to learn the hard way of feeling like shit, being irritated at everything and everyone, and being so unbelievably unproductive you actually lie about how long you’ve been sitting on the couch binge-watching Netflix shows or hiding in your room scrolling on Instagram because it’s fucking embarrassing.

Why isn’t what I’m doing working?

Because numbing your emotions isn’t the answer, period.

In a world that’s told females that we’re too emotional and males that they’re not supposed to have emotions, we’ve arrived at a place much darker and unknown than the ocean itself. A bottomless pit that drags us down deeper and deeper while we silently scream for someone, anyone to notice and pull us back up to the surface.

We’ve coined the term for this feeling, and it’s since become an epidemic in the U.S. — it’s called depression. According to the National Network of Depression Centers, it’s now the leading cause of disability among people ages 15–44, and among the 17.3M adults who had at least one major depressive episode, two-thirds of those people won’t seek or receive proper treatment.

We don’t know what to do with the pain that sits at the very core of our being, behind walls we’ve built, under things we accumulated, and beneath the smile and makeup we wear in the pretty photo we posted on Instagram.

It took me a total of 3 weeks to finish my first blog post, and less than 24 hours to write the final draft, from scratch, that I actually published. Why? Because I was caught in my own self-deprecating cycle for the majority of those 3 weeks until I finally pulled my ass out of it. ‘I don’t know how to write a blog.’ ‘I can’t even read it anymore, let alone finish it.’ ‘I should scrap the whole thing.’ ‘Where is this even going?’ ‘No one really cares about what you have to say, Keani.’ ‘You never even follow through with what you say you’re going to do anyway.’

Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah — the shit continues to shit on you. And before you know it, you’re dangling in the air, caught in a one-armed chokehold by this big, bad, buff guy, trying to scream for help but can’t say anything because only horse shit is coming out of your mouth.

Except guess what — this entire situation is made up. It’s fake. It’s like a scene from the movie, Inception, where you quite literally don’t know what dimension you’re living in, and the layers of realities only get deeper and more dangerous until you realize that the bad guy incapacitating you, really isn’t there — he’s a figment of your imagination because it’s all in your mind! As a fellow writer, Niklas Göke, put it, “You’re tripping over invisible obstacles in your head — and sometimes without ever moving at all.” I can’t tell you how much this resonates with me, and I can bet it hits home for a lot of you too. We need to let our invisible barriers crumble down, or imagine Genie granting your wish to make the chains on your wrists disappear and *poof* off they come no longer holding you down.

It can be that mind-blowingly simple, we just make it more complicated than it needs to be.

So how do we Punk our Funk?

My boyfriend was telling me one day about how he deals with what he calls his good wolf and his bad wolf — something I just recognize as his Gemini traits putting my love for him to the test. But it truly caught my attention because I’ve tried and tried to cut off my negative spirals, and while I’ve definitely gotten better, I still struggle so much.

So as I grappled with trying to finish my first piece of writing, I caught a whiff of the funk coming back for me again, like the bully it is, never knowing when enough is enough. Only this time, I brought a can of pepper spray and a mean front kick to the junk.

Step 1: Recognize the negative emotion as it arises

This is what we call practicing mindfulness or self-awareness. It does not matter if it’s fear, guilt, or anxiety, you acknowledge it without judgment and accept the emotion as it is.

Step 2: Merge with this feeling

In other words, become one with it. Give your emotion a name and ask it in a friendly way, “How are you doing, (insert name that you’ve chosen)?” “What do you have to teach me today, (name)?” The main idea here is to nourish mindfulness with your conscious breathing as you are bringing mindfulness to your thoughts. You slowly then begin to diffuse your negative emotion with mindfulness.

Step 3: Calm the feeling

Think to yourself or say the mantras out loud. As you are breathing in, “I am calm.” Breathing out, “I calm my (insert negative emotion).”

Step 4: Let it go

This step is all about releasing and letting it go. This is where transformation happens. Imagine your thoughts and emotion like a storm cloud passing by, going away with each breath you take. As you breathe out, you push the cloud further and further from you until it’s no longer raining on you.

Step 5: Dig deeper to the root

This last step is probably the most important. It is meant for you to look deeper so that you can uncover the root cause of why you are feeling what you’re feeling. As soon as you work to understand the causes and nature of your feelings, the transformation becomes much more like an evolution; where you can debunk the lies you’re telling yourself and replace them with seeds of love for yourself.

So that the next time your funk tries to f**k with you, and f**k with you it will, the seeds will have become sprouts, and those sprouts with conscious energy that you give to it, or rather, water and sunlight in plant terms, become a seedling armored with a few leaves of protection. And now, rather than facing the funk with nothing standing between you, you’ve built a shield of armor deflecting it’s funkiness.

And we all know that every time the environment stresses a living thing, it adapts and evolves to become stronger, to withstand harsh beatings, and to survive — because that is what the strong do. We survive.

I admit that that storm cloud rained on me for maybe two hours after I tried this method, but it was my first time! Granted, I combined this method with talking it out with my boyfriend, but I shook that shit off faster than I probably would’ve otherwise.

And as we continue to practice to be mindful, working it out and strengthening this muscle — because that’s what mindfulness is, it’s a muscle — it’ll get easier and easier, until the cycle shortens from a few days to 24 hours, 24 hours to 2 hours, 2 hours to 1 hour, 1 hour to 15 minutes, and eventually to a few seconds! Yes, it’s possible.

What if I can’t sit quietly and meditate?

This method is of course not the only method to punk our funks. Mindfulness and meditation by sitting quietly aren’t for everyone — and as you just learned, it is something I’m just starting to practice myself. Meditating is simply being present in the moment.

Other methods are talking with friends, working out, listening to music, walking in a peaceful place outside, dancing, singing, eating, therapeutic art, journaling, cleaning (yes, some people do this as a stress reliever), playing with puppies, smoking weed, taking a “spirit trip”, or maybe something lighter like the newest craze — goat yoga!

In conclusion

Whatever it is that allows you to work through these negative emotions, do it, but it’s essential to accept that it’s okay to struggle and that it’s actually the most necessary thing next to breathing.

It’s not that you have to see your struggle as the glass half full or half empty, but to realize that there’s always a pitcher somewhere nearby to fill your cup back up.

Thich Nhat Hanh, a global spiritual leader, poet and peace activist, said in an interview with Oprah,

“Happiness and suffering support each other. They inter-are, like left and right. You cannot have one without the other.”

You need dirt to grow a flower. Suffering is the dirt in which you need to grow and blossom into the flower that you are.

We need to love on our process. Rather than numbing our pain or running from it, we should be running straight towards it and feeling deeper into it because right on the other side of it, is our rising.

We need to learn how to thank our pain, and feel gratitude for the challenges we face and the emotions we get to feel because without them we’d remain stagnant in complacency and never know growth.

As Glennon Doyle, author, activist, philanthropist, and non-profit executive said,

“It’s not the pain we should be watching out for — it’s the easy buttons. They’re everywhere — the pills we take, the food we overeat, the alcohol we abuse, the shows we binge, the posts we scroll through.”

Life takes us on a wild ride constantly ebbing and flowing between all of our emotions. I had to accept that I was going to suck at writing my first blog post because our first everything is going to suck. But I dare you to keep practicing, I dare you to stay committed, I dare you to seek failure and see if you get better.

So when you begin to feel those negative emotions coming back, and you get uncomfortable with whatever your present moment is, remember that it’s trying to tell you something. And that it’s your cue to listen deeper, to feel deeper, and only then will you be able to understand it and then be able to overcome it.