A Guide to the Emotions of Any Performer

How to Be with Any Emotion?

This post is about dealing with the so-called "unpleasant" emotions—anger, fear, anxiety, sadness—that often get a bad reputation. Let's be drastically honest: emotions like joy, love, and peace rarely shake us, but why is it so difficult to just be with the challenging ones without trying to fix it or to find a solution to end it?

In general, we think of these emotions as "bad." Our conditioning teaches us to resist, deny, repress, numb, or even bypass them. We often seek solutions to avoid dealing with such feelings because we label them as “wrong.” Even in fields like performance and personal development, there’s often a misconception that we must always be in control or focused on "positive" emotions to succeed. This mindset, known as emotional bypassing, only deflects the problem, preventing us from experiencing genuine love and compassion within ourselves.

What if Your Emotions Are for You, not Against You?

This small shift in perspective can change everything. Life isn’t about what happens to us; it’s about the meaning we attach to those experiences. That’s why two people can face the same situation and have completely different outcomes.

It all starts with your mindset. The way you perceive emotions shapes the way you live with them. So, let’s begin by reflecting on the meaning you attach to “unpleasant” emotions:

● What does it mean to you to feel angry, sad, afraid, or anxious?

● Do you judge these feelings as bad or as something you should avoid?

● Do you hold subconscious beliefs like, "I can't manifest my goals if I’m sad," or "I can't perform well if I’m anxious"?

● How do you typically respond when these emotions arise?

● Can you separate the emotions from the story that triggered them?

Gaining awareness of your relationship with emotions is crucial. For instance, if you saw anxiety before a big game as a normal defense mechanism, a messenger that needs your attention, it would not overwhelm you, it would just be that, a sensation and maybe something that can give you insight.

Key Insights for Being with Every Emotion

1. Emotions Aren’t “Bad”

No emotion is inherently bad. Anger, fear, and anxiety might be unpleasant or challenging, but they aren’t wrong. These feelings often arise as defense mechanisms, shaped by past experiences. For example, if you grew up associating anger with harmful outbursts from a parent, you might have learned to see anger as dangerous or unacceptable. However, the problem isn’t the emotion itself, but by how the emotions were expressed by the parent. Beating someone, screaming at someone, throwing the fuc..in dishes over the wall has nothing to do with anger. Anger can be processed in a way that is safe for anyone and that can be “healing” instead of harmful and destructive. Be careful of the association you make in your head and the meaning you attach to the emotion.

2. You Are Not Your Emotions

Emotions may feel all-consuming, but they don’t define you. Feeling sad doesn’t make you a weak man. Feeling angry doesn’t make you a bad woman. You can see energy as just an energy carrying a frequency(information) in motion (e-motion=energy in motions).

If you resist these energies, they’ll persist, much like trying to block an ocean current. Instead, create space between yourself and the emotion. This space is your power—it allows you to process, learn, and grow.

3. Emotions Are Opportunities for Insight

When you allow emotions to exist without judgment, you create the space to learn from them. After fully experiencing the sensations, ask yourself:

● What triggered this emotion?

● What does it need?

● What is it trying to teach me?

For example, anger often signals a boundary violation. By processing it, you might uncover areas where you haven’t respected your limits and can take steps to change that.

The Miracle on the Other Side

Repressing emotions only leads to more situations where those feelings demand to be acknowledged. For example, if you’ve always suppressed hopelessness because you equate it with weakness, life might send you experiences—like injury or setbacks—that force you to confront it.

Why? Because these emotions are pathways to healing. When you stop resisting and allow yourself to feel, you make space for greater intelligence to guide and transform you. Acceptance is pure power, while resistance only perpetuates the struggle.

A Process for Navigating Emotions

Here’s a simple framework for working through emotions:

1. Allow and Acknowledge

Give the emotion permission to exist. Don’t judge it, let it be. Acknowledge it by naming it: “Hello, anger,” or “Hi, anxiety.”

2. Feel

Focus on the physical sensations in your body, not the story in your mind. Stay with the feeling rather than analyzing it.

3. Breathe and Release

Use your breath to move the energy. Allow sound or sighs to help release the emotion.

4. Pair with Movement

Move intuitively (stretch, shake, or even scream if you feel the call to). Just make sure you are in a safe place and you won’t be hurting anyone.

5. Inquire

After processing the emotion, reflect through meditation or journaling. Ask: What triggered this? What does this emotion need from me?

6. Detach, Let Go, Act, and Trust

Detach from the story, release the emotion, act from a place of alignment, and trust that everything is happening for your highest good.

But what if you don’t have the time to process the emotions like in a basketball game, for example?

Great question! This is where you allow detachment and mindfulness to rise. To take the basketball as an example, consider the two next following examples :

1- You are on the free throws, there are only 30 seconds left in the game, you are losing by two and you witness that your heart is pumping like never, that you feel the shake and that you start trembling. There are many ways to look at it, but let’s consider these two scenarios:

a) You start judging what your body is experiencing. On top of the pressure to succeed, you add pressure on yourself to cope with the anxiety rising in your body. You think it’s not supposed to be there, that it’s bad, and you believe it will make you miss your shot. Then the spiral begins: you’ll lose the game, your coach will be mad, everyone will laugh at you, and you’ll be seen as a failure, never succeeding in basketball.

b) Your brain scrambles for a quick solution: affirmations. You start repeating to yourself, “I am not stressed. I am not stressed. I am not stressed.”

Let’s observe this a little bit: Now you are more focused on your “unpleasant” experience in your body than you are where the ball should be: in the net. you put your focus—therefore, your energy— into something that you have labeled as “ not supposed to be”. this creates resistance, your body gets tenser, you have less fluidity, your movement will be less precise, and, on a metaphysical level, you are putting your attention on something you don’t want, so guess what, because of ‘’the observer effect’’ you will just emphasize what you don’t want creating more tension, more anxiety and probably, PROBABLY(there is way more factor that needs to be taken in consideration) miss the shot. But what if you are used to being with every emotion, it can look more like this (SIMPLIFY EXAMPLE) :

A) You feel all the sensations of anxiety, but you don’t attach yourself to it. It means nothing as long as you don’t put a meaning to it. You say “Hello” to the sensation in your body and you allow it to be there because you chose that it just means that you care about the team and your success. Instead of focusing on pushing the sensations away, you get curious: hhhhhmm, that is special, I feel tingling in my hands and a ball in my gut, it is a big ball, I wonder If it is more of a lacrosse ball than a tennis ball. Anyway, it does not matter because I have a bigger, more interesting ball in my hand. Now you feel the ball in your hand, your ear the sounds in the arena and you look at the basket. You take a breath, you put your focus on where you want to put the balls and you envision it going perfectly in the net because you have trust in the work you have put in and then you ask yourself one last question: how would it feel to put the game-winning shot? You feel, you trust and you shot the freakin ball in the net.

What happened here? Mindfulness, presence, acceptance, detachment and choosing to focus on what matters. You decide to be at peace with the sensation and accept it as it is instead of assuming you are not supposed to feel like that to make a game-winning shot. There are a lot of factors that can come into play for this, but talking about feeling and emotions, meeting them as they are with detachment, love, acceptance and mindfulness is the key to reaching your peak potential in a given time where feeling or emotions arise. You cannot choose the bodily sensations, but you get to chose the meaning you put on it. The only difference between the two? MINDSET

Peace be with you,

Mikaël Lavallée-Gravel

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