Episode 31: How to Feel Your Feelings
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Episode Summary
By and large, most of us are not very good at feeling our feelings. We don't have a lot of practice or skills at feeling, allowing and processing our emotions. Instead and we spend our time and energy avoiding, resisting or reacting to our emotions.
In this episode of the podcast, we'll talk about how avoiding and resisting our feelings won't give us the results we want in our lives. I'll show you how to process any emotion and show you that the better we can get at processing and allowing all our emotions, the more access we will have to
- Discover the thoughts creating our emotions
- Find emotional relief and release
- Doing hard and challenging things in our lives
- Taking responsibility and ownership for our own emotional life.
Learning to process and allow your emotions is a skill that will serve you in every aspect of your life and help you create the results you really want.
Episode Tools and Questions
It is important to allow feelings instead of resisting, reacting, or avoiding them.
RESISTING EMOTIONS:
Resisting an emotion takes a lot of energy. It adds heaviness to our primary emotions.
Resisting an emotion is often compared to trying to hold a beach ball under water. It can be done for a while, but it’s exhausting. Eventually that beach ball is going to come popping up from under thewater with a good deal of force.
REACTING TO EMOTION:
Reacting to a feeling is what we do to release the energy and anxiety we feel when we have an emotion. It is the outward manifestation of our inner feelings.
It’s letting the emotion control our behavior by yelling, slamming doors, or throwing adult tantrums. Reacting is when we push against the emotion, by being dramatic or freaking out.
AVOIDING EMOTIONS:
Avoiding is when we sense the emotion but look to escape or dull it, typically with a buffering behavior like overeating, overdrinking, overworking, shopping, Netflix, social media, porn, and so on.
Most often these buffering behaviors have a net-negative consequence, meaning they cause more harm and more negative emotion in our lives, and ultimately don’t serve our goals.
Most people have never learned how to feel what they are feeling. Learning how to feel, process, and allow any emotion is a skill that will give you freedom and allow you to create the life you want.
HOW TO ALLOW & PROCESS FEELINGS
Feelings are just vibrations in our body, caused by the chemicals the brain releases when we have a thought. When we become curious and willing to experience these vibrations, we typically find that they aren’t such a big deal after all. Here are some ideas to help you process your feelings.
1. Pretend you are describing the experience to a Martian who has never experienced the feeling and write it down. (What does it feel like? Where do you feel it in your body? For example, “To me, anger feels like a fast, quivering buzz in my solar plexus and abdomen. My chest feels tight and cold and shivery.")
2. Become the Watcher—witness yourself experiencing the emotion, seeing the feeling as though you are seeing it from the outside. This will create distance between you and the emotion and help you see that you are not the emotion itself.
3. Hold the feeling in a place of peace. Accept the emotion and be present with it. Allow it to be there. Pretend to hold it in your hand and approach it with child-like curiosity.
4. Open up to the emotion. Allow it in. Move toward it. Lean into it. What if you didn't want this feeling to go away?
Episode Notes
Mentioned in the podcast:
- Jody Moore - Interview on Episode 17 of the 100% Awesome Podcast
- Rainer Marie Rilke poem "Go to the Limits of Your Longing"
Let everything happen to you:
beauty and terror.
Just keep going.
No feeling is final.
- President Russell M. Nelson: "The only way to take sorrow out of death is to take love out of life."
Episode Transcript
To read or download a written transcript of the entire episode, simply click the link below.
