This is one of my all-time favourite topics, firstly because I think it is just so incredible that we as humans who have this beautiful ability to sense the wonders of the world around us purposefully numb ourselves to its beauty so that we can avoid any hint of unpleasantness. I could talk for days about how we are taught to numb ourselves and how society is created on the foundations that in our life we should seek to live a life with only pleasure and any pain is bad and dissonant with our purpose here on earth. But this is not the purpose of this blog post!
You want the action steps right? You want to know how to really get into your feelings. You know you numb yourself. You know that you don’t cry when you’re sad, you don’t speak out when you’re angry, you pretend you’re ok when inside you are slowly shrivelling up silently wishing you could hibernate forever…
So how do we get past this, how do we get into our real feelings?
As a disclaimer, read through the exercise first and if you have never done anything like this before I strongly suggest you do it in the presence of someone you trust, a therapist, coach or close friend or family member. If we have been detached from our feelings for a long time it can sometimes be quite overwhelming when we begin to explore them.
The first thing to know is that feelings are bodily sensations. The way we experience feelings is visceral, it is felt physically. You can’t have an emotion just in your head (I will use the words emotion and feeling interchangeably in this post). If you think you can feel your feelings only in your mind then this is a surefire way to tell you are numbed to or have repressed your own emotions.
Lets take a look at an example. An obvious one we all can identify with…fear. When we feel fear our heart rate increases, our palms get sweaty, we might need to go to the toilet, our hunger evaporates, we may feel our muscles tense and our senses become heightened. This is an extreme bodily response as when we feel fear our body sends around a massive amount of hormones in preparation to take action to save its own life, survival becomes our priority when we feel fear.
What about other more subtle emotions? Every individual will experience their emotions in a way that is unique to them, they will have their own flavour but the way to identify them is the same.
As a human you will have an emotional reaction to pretty much every change in circumstance around you whether you are aware of it or not, for example you will automatically respond when someone has said something kind (or mean) to you, if someone has offered to help you or you have solved a problem you have been working on for a while. In our ever-changing world we are constantly responding to evolving circumstances around us.
In that moment where you sense a change in yourself, or if you don’t sense a change but something has happened and you think you ‘should’ have reacted then take a second to stop. Stay still. Sitting or standing. Close your eyes. Breathe in and out a couple of times. Bring your attention first to the breath coming in through your nose and feel it track down through your windpipe and into your lungs, filling them, then trace the air moving back out, feeling your lungs empty and the air coming out through your nostrils. Once you feel comfortable with this bring your attention to any sensations in your body that are acute, for example any pain, pressure or tightness. Move around your body and explore what is happening. Keep moving your attention around your body remaining curious and non-judgemental the whole time, take a few minutes. As you are doing this you will sense your mind making sense of your bodily sensations and it will start to give you potential answers to what you’re feeling. For example you might close your eyes and breathe and feel your legs become tingly, you might feel a tightness in your chest and the back of your eyes might begin to burn, your mind will spontaneously provide you with answers for how to make sense of what is happening. It might offer you heartache, grief, sorrow. Your intuition will know when you have the right answer. Remember that your body has felt this many many times in your life it is just that you haven’t been aware of what has been going on.
When you first start doing this, especially if you have numbed yourself or repressed your feelings for a long time, the most common responses are likely to be anxiety, fear and emptiness or loneliness. That is ok. Remember we are doing this exercise with no-judgement.
It might take you some practice to get answers on what you’re feeling, to start with you might not be able to tune in to your body. But this is all the more reason to keep trying.
Reconnecting our mind and our body is absolutely vital to improving our well-being, spirit and happiness within ourselves.
The amazing thing is that you have literally hundreds of opportunities to practice this throughout the day as you are constantly responding and reacting to the environment around you. If you are not sure where to start do this exercise in a scenario where you already know the feeling. For example, if you get angry when someone cuts in front of you in a line, next time it happens take a moment to check in with how your body is feeling. By reverse engineering it you will see how your body responds in different scenarios.
At the other end of the spectrum, feeling huge emotions fly through your body taking you on a rollercoaster ride on a daily basis is a very different matter. This often disproportionate emotional response to what is going on around you can signify that there is something deep you are repressing and it is trying to be released any way it can, like a pressure cooker needing to let off steam. The exercise described above can still be very useful as you may notice that your body is actually telling you of the ‘real’ emotion that is lurking beneath the intensity of the one you think is being shown. For example often under intense anger there is actually a lot of pain and sadness
If you would like to explore this exercise or go deeper with me please just book in for a free clarity session where we can discuss how to feel your feelings in more depth, just email me here to book a time.
Lots of love xx