The bright constellation

Nov 03

How to Feel Your Feelings

Phychology of a teenager. Add comments

Steps

1
Concentrate on the process of 'feeling your feelings'. We all want to have the ‘good’ feelings – happy, upbeat, and confident. We resist feeling sadness, anger, and other ‘bad’ feelings. Our natural, clear state of consciousness is peace, bliss, and gratitude – some very ‘good’ feelings.
- Suppressing feelings is trying to be happy but it just doesn’t work. When we refuse to feel emotions that come up then we are not free in life.
2
Choose freedom. This is an important component of happiness. In order to be free, it's important to grapple with the arguments the mind might be giving to persuade you not to feel your emotions:
- You feel that, if you let the emotion in, it will hurt – and it does. But it also hurts to walk around all day clenching. You don’t avoid hurt by stuffing feelings down; it’s just a different pain.
3
Let your feelings grow. If you let the emotion in, it will grow. We have all experienced letting in a feeling and then it brings in its younger brother and cousin and so on. We can be afraid the line won’t end and there won’t be room for us! That won’t happen. It is true that as you change your approach to feelings from “go away” to “okay, I am listening” there will be a lot more showing up. But you won’t be consumed by it and at any point you can call a time out and come back to it later.
- We feel emotions to some extent and then suppress them (i.e., call a timeout), and then later, sometimes in the middle of the night in a cold sweat, we revisit them. We might as well make this process conscious rather than random.
- Suppressing emotions is working great – The ego or “I Know Mind” wants to keep its job so it reminds of us of how well it is protecting us. We may have hired it back in first grade but it is time for an honest performance evaluation. This suppression strategy has its demerits.
4
Understand that when you resist an emotion, it takes energy. Sadness, fear, anger and upset are going to come up in life and when you resist them you are resisting “what is.” The effort you expend fighting what is, is energy that you don’t have for living life. Your ability to relax, breathe and be present in the moment is diminished by that part of yourself that is holding the lid down so that pesky feeling won’t get out.
5
Realize that you suffer a loss by avoiding feelings. Missing out on life is a big price to pay to avoid a feeling. Practice noticing when you resist a feeling and how it feels as you try to show up in the world in a way different from how you are feeling.