Want More Emotional Clarity?
View yourself like a garbage truck
“It’s as if you are a garbage truck.” My therapist sputtered.
Stopping in the middle of her sentence, realizing she just called me a garbage truck.
She quickly corrected herself, “I should’ve said a recycling truck to be more mindful. We can use recycling truck instead…”
“Let’s stick with garbage truck for accuracy.” — I smiled, picturing myself as an overused New York City truck with a smoker’s cough and dodging the rats. Begrudgingly circling around the city collecting the waste of its citizens.
Her metaphor equated to: just like how a garbage truck goes around all day picking up trash, we’re doing the same thing as people. We are going around picking crap up all day and carrying it around in our mind and body (our truck).
The trash we pick up can come in many forms:
- A news article we read about another terrible injustice in our country
- A tension filled conversation with our partner
- Our mother’s irrational anxiety inducing phone call
- Our own anxiety about a past event or a future possibility
- A meeting with our shitty, insensitive, egomaniac boss
- Our kids' overreaction to wanting a strawberry Pop-Tart when there were only cinnamon one’s left
- The exhaustion of going into month who-can-count-anymore of a global pandemic
- And on, and on, and on. Trash and more trash.
The instances that occur throughout our day, our interactions with others, and what we ingest seeps into our brain. Where they swirl around for a bit, seeking a release.
Our garbage truck will continue on. Collecting crap and adding it to our consciousness.
It’s hard to create distance from our thoughts. They’re there. Constantly poking around in our brain. Pulling us in this direction and that direction. At first, begging for attention and then demanding it.
We can try to avoid or ignore them, but they’re still in us. They move from our brain and then continue to exist in our body.
We can go our entire day picking up fresh pieces of thought garbage, which can turn into a feeling. And then become a heaping pile of feelings garbage. We can carry it all day until we lay our head upon our pillows and drift off in slumber. We will wake up the next day, still full of garbage, and go on. Continuing to pick up more.
We will overflow with trash. Wanting to combust and light it all on fire. Which usually equates to a mental or emotional breakdown.
We need to create a mental landfill for ourselves. And we need to make frequent visits there.
We need to take moments to get in touch with our bodies and dump this crap off. The thoughts, the feelings, and the meaning we give them.
We need to ground ourselves, breathe deep, and see where this shit is existing inside of us. We need to investigate if there’s any truth to it. Not the truth that our mind tries to convince us is there, but the actual truth that exists in our body.
It’s why the age-old notion of “trust your gut” exists.
Our thoughts are not always trusty companions, but our bodies always are.
Create a landfill for yourself. Whether you visit it once a week, or once a day, you need to visit your landfill and get rid of your garbage.
Ways to Create Your Landfill
1.) An Easy, Grounding Meditation
You can engage in a short guided, or self-guided, meditation. My therapist encourages this, and from my experience, I find it works well.
Plant your feet firmly on the ground and get into a comfortable position. If you have a yoga mat, laying on the ground works just as well.
Breathe in for the count of four. Hold your breath for the count of four. Release your breath to the count of four.
Once you feel calm and connected to your breath, you can release the counting and return to your normal breathing.
Let your mind choose a category of thoughts (A fight you had with your partner, a sad news article, etc;) and explore how you feel about them. Notice what you are feeling in your body as you sift through these thoughts and feelings.
Are your shoulders tensing up? Is your chest heavy? Is your heart hurting? Are your hands clenched into fists? Start sending breath and awareness to those areas of your body and release the feeling that’s attached to it.
This will connect you to where the thought or feeling lives in your body and help you release what you’re holding in you. You will dump your trash at your landfill. Where it belongs.
2.) An Intentional Walk
If you don’t like to sit still and would rather walk it out, go on with your bad self. Some people process much better through movement. Head outside without headphones to distract yourself. Take in what’s around you. Notice the sounds that you’re hearing. The complexity of the colors that you’re seeing. Focus on your breathing.
Walking can be extremely therapeutic and grounding if you take the time to be fully present to what’s around you and notice what’s going on inside of you. You can perform the same mediation listed above, but on a walk instead.
3.) Do a Journal Dump
I start every single morning with morning pages. I do three pages of freehand writing. Whatever comes to my mind, I dump out. Feelings that come up I throw onto the page. Negative “blurts” that I have about myself and the world around me, get written fearlessly.
Words have always had a huge effect on me. What I hear and ingest and how it’s delivered to me has a massive impact on my emotional wellbeing.
Being able to turn to my notebook every morning and dump words upon words onto the page grounds me. A sense of freedom washes over me like a waterfall as I finish the third and final page of my practice and close the notebook. My words, thoughts, and emotions vanish outside of me and get dumped elsewhere.
Sometimes before I’ll start, I’ll close my eyes and breathe, seeing comes up I feel needs to be worked through. Even if I end up writing about similar content a few days in a row, it all still gets dumped in my landfill.
Take-Away
Every piece of garbage you collect throughout your day is a piece of data in your life.
It is not meant to become a part of you. It’s meant to exist outside of you.
You will always keep collecting garbage. It might only exist as a thought. Or it might move on and become a feeling.
Clear your mind and body of the garbage you pick up.
Create your own landfill. And dump all your trash there regularly. This practice will help you stay mindful, be more present and connected to your body.
Get in touch with your gut. You don’t want to sift through mountains of garbage just to access it. Give it a fighting chance to be your trusty companion.
Maddie is a writer, voice-over artist and certified life coach. Self-declared boxed wine aficionado. She’d love to hear all your thoughts at [email protected]