Feeling Your Feelings

Today I thought we would talk about feelings … your feelings. Ooh, not a popular subject for many people.

Who wants to feel their feelings?
Do you struggle with allowing yourself to feel your feelings?
Do you know that you’ve got a compartment sitting over there full of feelings that you don’t let come through?

So, let’s talk about that. When you think about feeling your feelings, what comes up for you? What do you recognize? What button gets pushed? What trigger shows up when you think about feeling your feelings?

I knew this wouldn’t be a real popular topic because a lot of people don’t know how to even deal with their feelings, let alone feel them, right? Dealing with feelings and feeling your feelings … hmmm, that can be what? Painful … Uncomfortable … Scary … Maybe not acceptable. Maybe you weren’t taught that it was okay to have your own feelings, your emotions, right? So, when you think about feeling your feelings, what shows up for you? What does that do to you? Does it feel foreign, or does it feel like, yeah, for sure, no problem – I feel my feelings.

I think a lot of us have from the time we were very young … have just pushed down a lot of our feelings – whether that’s because it didn’t feel safe to share your feelings, whether it was because verbally, you were told not to. (You know: Don’t you cry, or don’t you act that way, or do you want me to give you something to cry about?) My dad used to say that last one to me a lot. So, maybe it’s because of that. Whatever the reason, we’ve learned how to just push them down … stuff them. And so, whether it was the emotion of sadness or happiness, whether it was anger, whether it was fear – the reality of it is, they were only teaching us what they knew, not necessarily what was right or healthy … just what they knew.

What I’m finding is in a lot of conversations with clients, we are discovering that all these feelings that have been buried … that have been pushed down … We really don’t think about the six-year-old, the seven-year-old, the nine-year-old, the 12-year-old, the 14-year-old, the 27-year-old, the 31-year-old, the 38-year-old … We don’t think about all of those feelings that were pushed down then. We don’t recognize them until they get activated by something that’s happening in our now moment. And then we have a reaction that oftentimes doesn’t fit the situation or the circumstance of the present moment experience … and the reason for that is because it just hit a nerve that is connected to all these other feelings stored in this container.

You see, if the container’s full – which if you’ve been stuffing your feelings, it is – then there’s no room for any of the goodness.

There’s no room for any of the goodness.

There’s only room for the energy of what it knows: the pain, the sadness, the loss, the grief, the anger, the not-good-enoughness. There’s no room for anything else. And so, what always gets activated is the pain … because that’s what’s inside of the container. And if I am someone that wants to feel joy, if I want to feel happiness, if I want to feel excitement, if I want to feel passion, then I’ve got to have some of that within to be able to activate it … but there’s no room for it.

So, think about that for a minute. Is there room for the desires that you have and want to create and experience in your life? Is there anything to attract that energy that’s living in your container? And my guess is, for most of us like myself, what we come to the recognition of is … there is not.

And so, then what do we have to do?

Then we have to shift the energy. Then we have to let go of … we have to release … we have to purge… we have to express. We have to acknowledge the energy that’s living inside here – not because we want to sit and think about it or feel about it or bring it up over and over again – but because we’ve got to give it a channel and a way out.

We have to give it a way out.

And if we don’t give it a way out, it will always be in … and there’s no place for it to go.

So, I want you to think about that and think about, okay, how do I experience those feelings? How do I move those feelings? How do I get the feelings out?

How do you get the feelings out so that they don’t manifest into illness and disease? So, they don’t get in that reactive state, where it’s just ego against ego. How do you get the feelings out? How do you begin to start to feel your feelings instead of putting them in their little compartments where they’re safe … instead of pushing them down so far that you can’t find them between all of the other feelings that you have living inside of you? How do you start to feel your feelings and how do you start to channel that energy in a way that releases the pain instead of continues to contain the pain?

How can we do that? Well, there’s lots of modalities. There are many different ways to do it … but one of them is literally to sit with yourself – to sit in your space and to acknowledge and to feel what pain you’re feeling … and to let it move through you, to let the tears come, to let the voice be heard, to let the anger rise, to let the sadness envelop you … and to witness – to just be a witness to that pain. Not so it takes you over, but it just so it moves through you. Not to take you over, just to move through you.

So, sitting in a quiet space and observing it. It’s great sitting in a bathtub or a shower where you can just let that energy move – especially if you have a tendency to be one that holds on to everything and doesn’t want anybody to see you – that’s a great place to do it.

Journaling how you feel – writing it out, as pretty or as ugly as it is – and burning it. That’s really powerful. Crying it out, screaming it out in the pillows or in your car with the windows rolled up, beating the crap out pillows on your bed, using a punching bag to get that energy out. Just letting the energy come up and out begins to create space … and it is new space, because then I can start to focus on the energy that I desire to feel and experience – the energy of love, the energy of joy, the energy of happiness, the energy of peace, the energy of hope. And when I get into those energies, when I tap into those energies, when I feel those energies, it starts to shift the frequency.

And when it shifts my frequency, I have the ability to then attract more of it.

So, then the container becomes a joy container instead of a pain container, right? Because we don’t push it down any longer. We feel it and we move it.

So today, what I want you to take with you is to feel your feelings. And if you’re someone who tends to hold them off – I get holding them if you’re in the middle of work, you can’t just sit and bawl and cry your way through something – you may need to create some space. But make sure you take the time to create that space … later that afternoon, later that evening, put it on your calendar – you know, six o’clock tub time.

I’ve got to feel my feelings because they start to fill up and you can feel yourself. And then what happens is you react in a way that, again, it does not fit the current situation. It fits all of the pain you’ve been storing … vs. if I’m not reacting, then I just respond from the place of presence in the moment, which is what we want to do, right? That’s the healthy choice – to respond from a place of presence in the moment. But instead, we get into this reactionary state, and it’s all of the old pain coming up at once and projecting onto the circumstance that’s in front of you. It has always been my experience that we have to move the energy out of the body.

We have to move the energy out of the body.

And so, if we don’t write, if we don’t talk, if we don’t burn, if we don’t scream, if we don’t get that energy out, it will continue to attract to itself … to the point that – many of you understand this – then we manifest another form of pain in a physical form, in a disease or an illness … and that disease or illness then doesn’t fit in a compartment very well. It continues to yell out. It screams. It gets your attention. It cries and causes you to cry, because of the physical pain. So, a lot of times we’ll manage the emotional pain by pushing it down … the physical pain, you can only push down for so long. Once you’ve gotten a diagnosis … maybe medication or drugs, or what have you can push it down. But it only lasts for so long, and then we have to get real, right? So, the physical pain – believe it or not – is helpful in the healing process, if prior to that we weren’t listening.

So today my friend, the reminder is: You have to feel your feelings. Take time and create some space today – 15 minutes, 20 minutes – and just feel your feelings … feel your sadness, feel your anger, feel your frustration, feel your dis-heartedness, feel whatever it is. You need to feel. Write it out, burn it, draw it, paint it, walk it out, run it out, work it out, punch it out – punching bags or kickboxing – scream it out. Get the energy out of your body and give your body a chance to have space to bring something new in.

… to have space to bring something new in.

So that’s my message for today. I hope that it shifts some energy for you. I wish you tons and tons of love and light over the next few days and make sure that you take care of yourself, my friend. I love you!

I would love to hear how you are moving those feelings out of your container! Please leave me a comment below and let me know your feedback.