Meeting and holding yourself through feeling
Meeting your emotions is meeting the past versions of yourself. It´s meeting your wounds and your way through them. It will give you a sense of understanding for the being you are today, a sense of the wholeness of you.
We are taught that we ’shouldn´t rely on our feelings’ and instead ’use our head to make smart choices in life’ so it´s not strange that so many of us are detached from our felt experiences, from feeling ourselves and our emotions. But when we feel our emotions we are required to use a different part than the mind. We drop out of our head and into our bodies to sense ourselves.
Practicing to feel your emotions will give you information about what is going on in your life, it will show you repressed emotions, childhood traumas, excitement, and what might be in the way for you to live the life you want.
Meeting your emotions is meeting the past versions of yourself. It´s meeting your wounds and your way through them. It will give you a sense of understanding for the being you are today, a sense of the wholeness of you.
3 common resistances when meeting emotions
In the work I do with my clients there are three resistance that keep showing up when they are about to explore their emotional body;
1. Fear that I won´t feel anything
2. Fear that it will be overwhelming
3. Fear of the consequences of what I´m feeling
These three resistances are connected to each other.
You see, when we are operating from our head and not including our whole being in the decisions of our daily life we are detaching ourselves over and over again from the felt experience and wisdom in our body. The beliefs about ’the mind being in charge of the body’, are separating us from including the body and all the sensations with it. We create a habit of not checking in, feeling, or meeting our emotions and instead enforce; rejection, distraction, or suppression of the sensations our bodies are feeling.
This pattern of detachment from our emotions is also creating a fear of overwhelm when it is time to actually meet our emotions. It´s a mistrust from the mind towards the whole being that it wont be able to meet these parts of ourselves, that it will be so overwhelmed it won´t be able to hold it all. That belief from the mind, that the emotions will ’take over and our common sense will collapse’, is not true. The emotions you have in your body are not dangerous, they can´t hurt you. But because we have detached from our emotions and felt experience it can feel like a whole turmoil of emotions bubbling up when we start to put our attention there. You can support yourself by practicing to meet your feelings in a way that feels safe for you.
The third fear is about the possible consequences we might have to face when we are being honest about the emotions we actually have. Discovering how you are really feeling about a situation, relationship, or your work-life can feel scary to the mind since it implies that now, when you are conscious about it, you will have to do something about it. The mind doesn´t like change, particularly not change that is coming from a desire that the body has. Our mind want´s to distract us from our true feelings, because then it won´t have to face or change anything and the ’potential danger’ to the life we are currently living, is reduced. This fear is commonly combined with a fear of the changes you will have to face within you and how the world around you will react.
Emotions are not leaving until they are felt
The supressed emotions are still alive inside and working on you, whether your mind wants to meet them or not. Emotions are not leaving until they are truly felt. Not meeting and honouring them will lead to a disharmony in your being, energy blockages in your body, and a detachment to a part of yourself. It will prevent you from feeling as one whole being and other sensations from the rejection of your true emotions will occur instead. Now you will not only have the first emotion to meet, you will also have the thoughts, emotions and physical sensations caused by the rejection of the emotion on top of that! It may feel like a shortcut when you are distracting yourself from feeling an emotion, but in reality it is more like that long and winding trail that gets you further and further away from your destination.
’It may feel like a shortcut when you are distracting yourself from feeling an emotion, but in reality it is more like that long and winding trail that gets you further and further away from your destination.’
Resistance of feeling your emotions will create extra tension and other sensations in your body that don´t have to be there when you are feeling emotions. Emotion is an energy moving through you (energy in motion). If you resist it´s natural flow through you, and block its expression, it will get trapped and affect not only your emotional state but also the tissue in your physical body where it´s trapped.
The emotions in our bodies are just energy vibrating in different frequencies. Emotions can be felt, expressed and released without the resistance around them. You can learn how to reconnect and feel your emotions, and feel what kind of support you would like when you are exploring your inner, emotional world.
Exploration
Sensing and meeting your emotions
1. Close your eyes, connect with your breath and how that feels in your body.
2. Put one hand on your heart and connect to your emotional body.
3. Which emotions can you notice in your body right now? Scan your body for emotions.
4. Pause on the emotion that wants your attention the most, the emotion that you feel the most.
5. Where in your body do you feel it? What kind of qualities can you notice? What is happening to the emotion when you are putting your attention there?
6. Let it know that you are feeling it and that this emotion is welcome here. You can hold it.
Let it be there, ang give it space to be felt.
7. If you want to, connect to the emotion by giving it some more space to express itself in. You can ask it if it has something it would like to express to you right now. Listen, without judgement or expectations.
8. Finish by letting it know you will be back to check in with it again. Send your gratitude for what it expressed.
9. Slowly bring yourself back to the room by checking in with your body about how it wants to be woken up. Take your time and come back to the room by opening your eyes.
What was your experience? Journal or share in the comments
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