Learning to Feel - Part 2

Yesterday I wrote a post about how I’m learning to feel again. This post will make more sense if you read that one first.

Where I am now with learning to feel again. Learning to live in my body again, feeling all that there is and staying present with the current moment.

I have a rich internal world. There is lots going on and I am aware of it.

In this process, I noticed that there was a lot to feel once I started feeling. I had a lot of questions that Google and the people I asked couldn’t answer. Some of those questions were and are:

• Do people feel all the time? Or only sometimes?

• Do people have only one emotion at a time? Or can there be several? Can you feel good and bad at the same time?

• How are people functioning with emotions? I feel them so deeply and I feel so transparent. People know when I’m excited, happy, open, sad, angry. It is so hard for me to hide these and when I do I feel disconnected.

• What sensations and feelings are a result of dealing with pain and which ones are ‘true’ emotions? How can I tell the difference?

When I asked my therapists about it, most of them pointed me to the feelings wheel, which is a great starting point, but didn’t have the answers to my questions.

Diving into my body and learning to feel opened a Pandora’s box of everything that I stored inside me.

During the process I uncovered some beliefs around feelings that I held:

• It’s not safe for me to feel

• In order to survive in the world I need to suppress my feelings and ‘put on a brave face’ (I need to mask what I’m feeling)

• Feeling is bad and wrong

• Feeling is dangerous

• Feeling is risky

In my process I’ve discovered that these beliefs aren’t true. There is a reality, though, that when I truly emote, people around me don’t know what to do with that. Which is okay.

I’ve moved through a lot of this and now I believe that it is safe to feel. That feelings are important and are a large aspect of being human. It’s important to be aware of your own experience with feelings and it’s okay to feel and make space for big emotions.

I wouldn’t say I’m a pro at feeling my emotions, but I’ve come a long way. I would say, it’s been life changing to go through this. It wasn’t always easy. I had many teachers and people along the way who taught me what they knew and supported me in finding my way.

I could also say that I have answers to most of the questions I listed above. I had to go through the journey and experience it to learn what I have.

What comes up for you when I say the word feelings? What questions do you have? What is your relationship to feeling?

I use the words feelings and emotions interchangeably in this post. Both to mean: an experience of physical sensation, paired with thoughts and sometimes behaviour. Behaviour, in my opinion, is the outcome of the experience of sensation in the body.