What Is It Like To Actually Feel Your Feelings?

I'm a stage three crier, let me tell you!

Over the next month I’m going to give you a flavor of some of the topics I’ll dive more deeply into here on Substack. I’m pivoting and making more space to gather the extra resources for paid subscribers and so from now until the end of November, everyone will get these appetizers before I turn on the option to upgrade to paid for more in depth entrees!

Now I’m a deeply feeling person. If crying were a love language it would be mine. I feel the element of water within me in great depth. For a very long time I felt at the mercy of my feelings, would get stuck feeling them and eventually exhaust myself. I’d get stuck and they would loop and in my body that felt like helplessness and fear and sometimes a desperation to make them stop so that I could get back to feeling, “good
or “normal” or even just “calm.”.

Now, with years of practice and learned skills and tools around emotional intelligence and regulation, I will be honest, I still struggle! I don’t know why that’s still so shocking given that it is my nature and design. It’s not that I hold shame around feeling my feelings, it’s more around feeling genuine surprise at just how deeply they go sometimes.

I know I’m not precious when I say that sometimes I am afraid of my own feelings.

Very meta.

Yet feeling our feelings is the path towards greater healing and wholeness. The feelings themselves are neutrally existing. They are like perfect delivery mechanisms for clarity and insight, if we just allow them to do their thing. Which by the way is ninety seconds, in terms of life cycle.

So what is it actually like to feel your feelings I ask?

Option A: Resist the Feeling

You get a sensation in your chest that feels heavy and constricted. Uh oh, some sadness is visiting. But why am I feeling sad? I shouldn’t be feeling sad, says all the internalized voices channeled into one blanket judgmental voice within you.

Ok, keep going about your business and just forget about this heavy sensation that has now migrated up into your throat and feels like a frog has taken up residence. Uh oh, sadness is still here and it’s migrating up towards my face which means it’s getting closer to my tear ducts! Just keep going, there’s no time to make space for this, I have shit I have to do. Uh oh, I just read something and now I can’t keep it in anymore, cue the waterworks.

This whole internal dialogue and negotiation really uses up vital energy. The body has been firing signals and the mind has been countering all attempts to feel. Muscle tension and mental fatigue. These are just the facts.

When we resist, the entire process of energy in motion, aka emotion, takes a circuitous route through the many dimensions of self and it could have just taken less time, used less resources and already been moving on to the next thing if we had allowed it to be. Ah, so simple. Not always easy.

Remember, self-compassion is always the medicine here. It’s ok to resist feeling your feelings, you’re human. I simply speak from experience about the real drain on resources that resistance creates. This is the real suffering. Not the feeling, the resistance to the feeling.

Option B: Feel the Feeling

You get a sensation in your chest that feels heavy and constricted. Huh, I wonder what that’s about?

You head to the bathroom for a check-in. You look in the mirror, you bring a hand to your heart, maybe close your eyes, and drop your awareness and presence into the space in your body where you are feeling the feeling. Bringing an energy of acceptance and compassion, welcoming its existence, not trying to change it or judge it.

What does this sensation feel like in your body? Is it a bristly cold blue like hardened rock, sitting like a lump on your heart? Is it vibrating or shaking, tender and in need of reassurance? Ah, it feels like you’ve been punched straight in the heart and your body has pulled back and inwards, compressing your ribs, making it hard to breathe. Not enough air, need to cry. Sadness here. Keep going with feeling the sensation with open energy and awareness and noticing what shifts, what insights arise. There are ninety seconds to feel an emotion before it moves through the body. Let your breath move all around the sensations you notice. All sensation, no story.

Sounds easy right?

It’s very human to be afraid to feel your feelings because if you don’t know what it feels like in your body to be with a feeling as it passes through you, riding the proverbial wave and feeling the visceral difference within, you’re likely getting stuck in the story about the emotion. It has begun to loop and if it’s looping, how do you get the loop to end? That feels scary, to get there and not have the tools to navigate your way through.

Having emotional regulation tools and somatic practices is essential for humans.

We’re living through massively turbulent times. So many highs and lows, so much shadow material being uncovered and embodied on a daily basis. Now is the time to learn the skills to find an internal stillpoint, the resolve to show up to what is difficult to feel and the self-compassion to do so.

I’ll share more about what to do when you get stuck in a loop and how to keep showing up for your ever shifting tides of feelings with greater courage and empowerment to feel them. To know the how, now that the why is vividly clear.

I hope you found this helpful. Let me know, I’d love to hear your comments.

Take care,

Britta