How To Feel

I can feel the irritation creep in. It hits near my collarbone; that’s where I feel irritation in my body. For me, it’s tense and I feel my skin start to heat up. But I don’t try to push it away; I let it be there because I know it won’t last forever. I know it’s there because of a thought in my mind. “I cannot believe those kids are fighting again; that’s enough!” Most of you have no idea how to actually feel your feelings but there’s power in it. When you feel your feelings, you gain power over them. Emotions are our guidance system and the reason we do or don’t do everything.
There are four options when it comes to feeling a feeling.

The first thing most do is resist the feeling, resist the experience of it. You fight it. You try to hold it in. You do that because you are associating the feeling with the experience you have AFTER you’ve resisted it, when it explodes. Resistance just creates more tension and perpetuates the emotion.

The second thing you can do with an emotion is react to it and act out. When you react to the emotion, you’re not really experiencing the emotion. This is an important distinction. Reacting to and experiencing the emotion are two very different things. Yelling, screaming or crying is not the same as feeling.

The third option you have is to distract yourself from the emotion. You overeat, overdrink, overwork, over-socialize, shop online with no intention to buy- only to distract. All these things are just a way of distracting yourself from an emotion but distracting yourself doesn’t mean the emotion isn’t there.

The last option is to actually feel the emotion.  The first step to feeling any emotion is to simply allow the emotion to be there without judging it. If you start judging your emtions, telling yourself you shouldn’t be angry or irritated, you will not allow yourself to feel them.

The second step is to allow it to be there. You open yourself up to it and breathe. You stay present with it.
The next step is to describe the emotion in detail. This allows you to notice and understand that you are not the emotion. It lets you to be a compassionate observer. You can experience the emotion and observe it at the same time. Describe what’s happening inside your body when you’re experiencing the emotion. Where do you feel it in your body? Is it sharp or dull? Is it heavy or light?

Then you want to name the emotion. Being able to name the emotion is very powerful. It takes you to a higher level of emotional intelligence and helps you become an expert of your own emotional experience in the world.
When I learned how to feel, I realized the worst that could happen to me was an uncomfortable emotion. It couldn’t physically hurt me, I wasn’t going to die. I was just going to be temporarily uncomfortable. And I can do uncomfortable because that’s when I show up fully in my life.