Ep.2/ Feeling your feelings.
“Feeling” your feelings Sounds obvious but is a skill in & of itself.
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I want to speak into what it means to "feel your feelings".
Recently I have been struggling with sleep.
Now, I am a sensitive soul, who quickly looses her capacity to moderate her emotional responces when I am tired, hungry, even thirsty.
Sleep has always been something that can prove difficult for me, mostly due to my tendency to ignore my sleepy cues until im over tired. Or due to a lack of routine and appropriate transition time. While I am far better at maintaining my boundaries around this now, and far better at providing myself with the support I need, still sometimes, I find myself lieing awake through the night.
The frustration of this, however unwellcome at the time, has shown me parts of myself and my emotional world that otherwise I have been blind to.
The blessing of being unable to regulate myself, forces my hand in allowing the more difficult, unconscious emotions, stories and identities to surface.
An Initiation of Shaddow Integration.
But this is a topic for another discussion.
As someone who, for a significant proportion of her life, has gotten by through emotional supression,
“feeling my feelings” was an alien idea.
I could interlectually understand the concept but I had no true connection to what a feeling “felt” like for a long time.
I was never taught as a child how to acknowledge, name and let a feeling move through me. My coping mechanism was to internalise, dissasosiate and interlectualise my emotional experiences.
With time, practice and guidance, I am now able to sit within the sensory experience of all kinds of “feelings”. Yet even now I can be guilty of avoidance.
Insomnia always arrives to show me where I have been avoiding some aspect of myself.
Exhausted, I was making breakfast one morning. As I expect many of us do, I was refusing to admit to myself just how horrible I felt.
I spent an excruciating 15 minuets huffing around the kitchen with furrowed brows and heavey shoulders. Unable to make eye contact with my husband and doing my best impression of a grumpy teenager, however unconsciously.
At some point it clicked that, despite the terrible sucess of my plight, I was infact trying really hard to not feel as shit as I did.
Why? It wasn’t working anyway.
So at 7.30am, as I stired my porridge, my face finally turned and bubbly tears welled in my eyes.
As I allowed myself to express the truth of what I was feeling I found myself saying what I had subconsciously been bottleing up.
"I feel so horrible"
"I slept horribly"
"I look horrible"
"So maybe I AM horrible"
"Surely that must mean I’m horrible"
"Why else would I feel horrible?"
After my cry, and In hearing myself say some radiculous things, I could sudenly hear the little baby me begging for some comfort. Unsuprisingly once I had allowed my cry and comforted myself, much of the feeling dissapated.
I was exausted but I was able to continue my day.
It reminded me of the fleeting nature of our emotions.
It reminded me that our triggers can often show us our younger and more vulnerable parts of self that need our care.
It gave me a chance to prove the simplicity of "feeling your feelings" is usually the kindest and simplist way to help yourself feel better.
But it also reminded me the importance of being able to let go.
Recognising when an emotional experience is complete and offering yourself the care and comfort to move forth into your day.
I have noticed that "feeling your feelings" can be an excuse people use to circulate their unpleasent emotional experiences.
While it may seem strange to some, I can personally testify to how good it feels to pick the proverbial scab!
It is somehow satisfying to ruminate, and gossip and play the blame game or circle the victim drain.
We get to feel a sence of entitlement, maybe a sence of community with others who share our plight, while similtaniously avoiding the responsibility of doing anything about our misfortune.
At this stage "feeling your feelings" is no longer useful.
This Is where it becomes important to be able to digest our feelings.
Engaging with the whole alchemical process of an emotional experience is not the same thing as “feeling your feelings”.
To engage with the whole process, we must feel the first stimuli, go through the emotional process, allow the process to complete, provide ourselves with any comfort or suport that we need, reflect on what we have experienced to determine if there is new wisdom available for us and finally take any action that seems necessary in the face of any new wisdom gained.
"Feeling our feelings" as a way to "heal" is only engageing the first part of the process.
My difficulty lie in this first step.
But if you are an emotionally expressed individual, I invite you to reflect on your capacity to digest you experiences.
Because barfing up tears and big emotional responces under the guise of “healing” is not true healing.
And is likely only causing more harm.
From a nervous system perspective circling big emotional experiences can keep us in highly disregulated states, perpetating states of freeze, fight, flight or fawn.
Unfortunately this can be a difficult cycle to break in the face of trauma or a longstanding pattern of behaviour / experience.
Our bodies, often associate regularity with desirability.
This can make new experiences feel very uncomfortable, even if on the surface the “new experience” would seem greatly preferable to the previous.
This is why we can repetedly self-sabotage, form addictions to unhealthy dynamics or relationships and feel “powerless” to change our lives despite our best efforts.
To rearange longstanding paterns of relating, or behaving, or even patterns of experiencing, takes a huge amount of effort and commitment. Not just because of how our bodies process our experiences but also because of the external factors that serve to consolidate them.
When we choose to tackle the internal mechanisms that shape our experiences we must face the discomfort of our emotional world, and wounding, we must face the discomfort of accepting our own toxic dynamics as well as the discomfort of doing things differently, as well as facing the discomfort of disrupting the social order that was built on our previous patterns.
This is the full breadth of healing.
These are the realms I work in.
Its not smooth sailing on easy waters but it is one of the most empowing undertakings.
To take FULL responsibility.
To swallow what life serves, digest it, and turn it into something beautiful.
Join INITIATION. If you are ready.
x mwah x
