Filling Your Bucket

Is your emotional bucket low?

Emotional Buckets

When I was in high school, I was blessed to have an amazing English teacher who understood educating teenagers was more than just curriculum, it included understanding ourselves.

She shared the idea of buckets representing our emotional capacity and resilience.  Hurtful words or situations would lower the level in our buckets.  Kindness, laughter, and fun would fill it up.  While she didn’t expand past that, life has taught me that sometimes we can have a leaky bucket (depression, low self-worth), where we may need more going in, or we give a lot of our emotions to others, also leaving us lower.

Our environment can, and often will, also affect our bucket levels, no matter how strong or big our bucket is.  Right now, it feels very much like our buckets are being hit and rocked from many different directions, sloshing our emotions and our energy spilling out, leaving us (literally and figuratively) feeling low/drained.

Filling the Bucket

It definitely helps when you are aware of your own bucket level and how it has been affected. While we can chose our responses (and be prepared for the energy weather – as I describe in Stormy Weather) it also can be helpful to know that we all will sometimes get banged around in environments like our current one.

As I discussed in Mirror of Emotions, we have tools to help us.  Be strong, be aware, and be loving to yourself right now – you’ve got this.

Love and until next time…