Facing and Feeling your Feelings
Posted by learning | Filed under Emotional Healing, Empowerment, Enlightenment, Spiritual Growth
From LTF Newsletter – September 5th, 2009
Greetings from Learning To Flow!
I had planned to talk about “Being in the Now” this week, but pretty much as soon as I wrote that, I started getting messages that the first topic needed to be about “Feeling Your Feelings.” And then to drive that point home with me, I was forced to feel my feelings all week long even those I didn’t want to feel.
In working again this week with my coach, she helped me peel back the layers on a core belief that had been manifesting more and more painful results throughout my life. The more I encountered the situation, the more energy I repressed that attracted it in the first place. The more energy I repressed, the worse the situation was when it happened again. Over time, this drove me to isolate myself from others because I did not feel safe to be around some without my boundaries being violated.
I realized this week that I had a core belief that I brought into this world to heal. In forgiving those that reflected it back to me, I was able to finally able to let these feelings go and embrace the energy of acceptance of who I am.
As we progress throughout the seven steps of a sustainable spiritual practice, you will find that to do any of it…you must be able to truly feel your feelings…for as it says in “Conversations with God”…’”feelings are the language of the soul.”‘
Namaste
Jeff Scholl
Quote of the Week:
“To be angry with someone is easy; but to be angry with the right person, at the right time, for the right reason and to the correct degree…that is difficult.” Aristotle – paraphrased
Facing and Feeling your Feelings
I notice that when I feel angry, my mind wants to play the situation that triggered it over and over in my mind to convince me that I have a right to feel angry. What it has taken me a long time to realize is that my mind does this because unconsciously, I had a belief that it was not safe to feel or express my anger. So in just being able to accept that it is normal for me to feel angry when my boundaries have been violated, I can then feel the energy of my anger in my being, breathe into it and release it.
One of the things prevented me from doing this is because for a long time, I had repressed so much anger that when I felt anger, I did not just feel the anger of the moment; I felt the energy of all of the anger I had repressed. I had forgiven people, but had mostly only done so from a conceptual perspective. I had not actually released all of the energy from that moment. So I was unconsciously repressing all that I had not released. My mind told me that I had handled that situation so it didn’t make sense to go back and feel those feelings again. In fact, because my mind did not want to experience those feelings again, I rationalized that I had “put it behind me.”
What I didn’t realize is that this is impossible. I am a being of energy and whatever I do not release, I hold onto. Whatever I hold onto becomes a part of my energetic signal.
To understand why this is important, we have to examine who and what we are. We are not our physical bodies and we know this. We are not our mind. We are spiritual beings. We are beings of energy that use our minds and bodies to express who and what we are in this world. We are essentially energy and we have been evolving for a long time throughout several lives.
For many of us in this lifetime, we brought all that we had not transcended into this life in order to heal it. The energies we brought in form layers of perceptions that color how we view the world. Our perception of the world is not simply affected by our childhood environment. Our childhood environment provides a stage for the energies we brought into this world. Our environment was selected by our soul to support what we wanted to experience and transcend in this lifetime. Our lives are an ongoing experiment in which we are learning how to allow energy to flow freely through us.
Our minds tell us that if we let go of the anger or the fear or the shame, that we will not have “learned our lesson.” We tell ourselves that only through guilt can we ensure we do not repeat our “transgressions.” But it actually works the opposite of this, for as long as we hold onto the energy we are attracting similar experiences into our lives again and again. It is only when we allow ourselves to let go of the energies we have repressed that we “learn” what that experience was there to teach us.
For me, I had to learn how to feel my feelings, so it was only in allowing myself to fully feel the energy in each moment that I have been able to release repressed energy from my past. It was easy for me to think about my feelings, to keep running events over and over in my mind thereby justifying my right to feel angry, fearful, sad, disappointed, hurt, etc.
I could not understand why I kept experiencing the same types of relationships, career struggles and even traffic incidents over and over until I understood why those experiences kept showing up in my life. They were there to show me what I had repressed. In many cases, it was only when the feeling overwhelmed me that I became aware of how much energy I had repressed for a particular emotion. Once I became aware of it, I was able to start feeling and releasing it.
Along the way, I have learned many methods of releasing this energy proactively rather than reactively and we will be covering many of these over the course of the next several weeks. But none of these methods were effective for me until I learned to feel my feelings. Because in each method, these emotions start floating to the surface. If my mind does not understand what is happening, it distracts me from allowing this energy to be released through the action of just allowing it to BE and feeling it. My mind focuses on things I need to do in the future, things I should have done in the past, things I need to be doing right now…anything to keep me from just feeling what I am feeling.
Once I learned to just allow it to be, breathe into it, feel it and allow it to leave…only then did I learn what it was there to teach me.
Learning to feel your feelings IS scary at first if you are not accustomed to feeling them at all, especially for men. It is much like an undiscovered country waiting to be explored. Our emotions are designed to be taken in, felt and processed out…much like our food.
This week, allow yourself to either start this exploration of your feelings…or to deepen it.
Namaste
Jeff
There are many feelings exercises out there. One of the best I have found and what I use when I do not have a coach who can guide me through this is “Yoga for Emotional Flow” by Stephen Cope.
This is a two CD set in which the author provides some valuable information on how important it is to feel our feelings and why. On the second CD, he provides three meditations in which he will guide you through both how to clear your emotions on a daily basis and how to release them when you are feeling particularly turbulent emotions. In the “Riding the Wave” meditation, he provides a simple, yet repeatable process that you can learn and master.
Note: I am not connected to Stephen Cope in any way. As with all of the resources I recommend in my books, articles and newsletters, this is simply the most effective methods I have found in my research.
To practice feeling the subtle energies of your feelings this week, get a deep tissue massage. When your therapist finds a knot and presses into, allow yourself to face the pain, breathe into it and release it. The more you become comfortable in facing any pain, the easier it is to feel your feelings when they happen.
“Feelings are not right, wrong, good or bad…they just are!” – Hu Dalconzo
© 2009-2010, Jeffrey L. Scholl. Learning to Flow
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