The Importance of Feeling our Feelings

Why are emotions called feelings?

Because we feel emotions, physically, in our bodies.  Human beings experience emotions as a specific set of physical sensations. 
For example when I feel grief, my body feels deeply weighted and lethargic.  When I feel joy, my heart feels light, as if filled with helium, and I have a humming vibration along my skin.  Self-doubt feels like my body is contracting inward away from the world, and confidence feels expansive, light, and powerful.

Our emotions are simply vibrations that we feel in our body, and are part of our human experience.  In and of themselves, these vibrations cannot harm us!  

Emotions are vibrations that we experience as completely harmless physical sensations.  

So if the vibrations can’t harm us, why do so many people go to such extraordinary lengths to avoid what we perceive as negative emotions?

That’s what’s happening if my lover leaves me and I eat a gallon of ice cream.  I’m trying to avoid feeling the pain of my emotions.  Same thing with drugs and alcohol.  People are drawn to using these substances to numb our ‘hard’ emotions, the sadness, frustration, anger, disappointment, fear, or worry that crop up in our lives.

And who would blame us?  There are situations and circumstances in this lifetime where every one of us can relate to why THAT emotion might hurt too much to feel, and why someone might choose to numb the pain.  It’s sort of like if you break your leg, that HURTS.  No one is going to bat an eye if you take some pain killers for that.  So if someone is going through emotional pain, it’s understandable that we might want some pain killers for that, too.

The broken leg eventually heals, our pain subsides, and our use of pain killers ceases. Emotional pain eventually heals, too but not until we allow ourselves to transform the pain, and transforming the pain requires allowing ourselves to FEEL the emotion.

This is where it can get a bit tricky, because we feel the pain and want to numb it to avoid it, so we do (normal). 

But if we do not stop numbing the emotional pain and allow ourselves to feel it, to move through it, we can get stuck in the cycle of continuously numbing that pain to not feel it, then feeling it and numbing it, feel the pain then numb the pain.  Unlike the broken leg,
it’s not going to heal until you allow yourself to feel your feelings.  If we attempt to push our emotions away, they keep coming back.  We cannot resist our emotions. 

If we wish to get past our challenging emotions, we must allow the experience by being present with the emotion.

I remember the first time my coach suggested this to me I thought she was mad. I had been avoiding hard emotions for decades with booze and sugar, and she wanted me to sit with those feelings?! 

The idea positively made my skin crawl!

Then she taught me the most amazing technique. I learned to objectively describe the emotion as the physical sensations I experienced in my body – without attaching my story to it,
and without wallowing in the emotion.

When we experience the physical vibration of the emotion without attaching a story to it, we can simply observe the experience of emotion, rather than becoming the emotion.

“I am experiencing anger,” has a much different energy than,
“I am angry.”  Feel the difference?

Physical description: the anger feels physically like a kick in my gut.  My face is hot and red and my heart is beating faster than normal. 
I can feel my pulse through my whole body.

Description with our story attached might look like this:  I am so PISSED that person did XYZ to me!  What is wrong with them? 
Were they raised by wolves?  Who acts that way?  This will never work!  I won’t stand for it!  I have every right to be furious about this!

Which description drains more energy?

When we attach a story to the emotion, we attach ourselves to it.

Our emotions do not define us.  They are not who we are.  They are simply indicators of where we are at any given moment.

Reach for a better feeling thought.

As a core energy coach, I help clients shift perspective to find a vibration that allows greater success in their lives.  Sometimes people get the wrong idea and think that we are supposed to push away bad feeling emotions and strive to feel only positive ones, and that is NOT the case at all.

We absolutely want to trade up the emotional ladder, to feel better and better and better about ourselves and our lives, but we can’t do that by only experiencing our positive emotions and repressing those we don’t enjoy as much. 

If we take a few moments to actually be present with our hard emotions (describe them physically), then we are able to move through the emotion and beyond it to a better feeling vibration and not just pushing it away hoping it won’t pop up again.

The human experience is a kaleidoscope of emotions, each color adding depth and meaning to the overall picture.  The more colors we integrate, the more rich and beautiful our lives become.

We gotta feel ALL our feels.

Grow on!

What physical sensations do you experience when you feel angry?
Sad?
Anxious?
Shame?
Guilt?
Peace?
Confidence?
Hopeful?
Inspired?
Joyous?

Which emotions do you try not to feel?
Which emotion is your least fave?
Describe that emotion physically and allow yourself to observe it.