We often hear how important it is to “feel your feelings” but what does this really mean and how do we better connect to our feelings?
Well to start, feelings give us so much. They can be sources of information helping us to identify our needs, wants and desires. They can be indicators of when something is or isn’t working for us. At the core, feelings are innately human. They exist in all of us and have meaning. Since they are innate, they will continue to try to come up in whichever way they can. This can mean that if we push down what we are truly feeling, it might come up in other, possibly inconvenient times.
The phrase of “feeling your feelings” I think is about allowing whatever is coming up to be acknowledged, felt and moved through. Sometimes a barrier to allowing ourselves to feel whatever might be coming up is judgment about what we might be feeling. It can be difficult to move through our feelings or allow our feelings to come and go, when we have judgements about having feelings.
There’s a Buddhist story that describes how getting struck by an arrow can produce pain but often we shoot the second arrow, which causes suffering. We can think about the second arrow in terms of it being our judgements to what we might be feeling. The meaning being that the suffering can become optional if we recognize that we don’t have to shoot the second arrow.
Often times this requires a level of compassion which can take time and support if this is not the way we are use to connecting with oneself. Part of this process might entail identifying beliefs connected to our judgments about feelings and exploring where those might have arisen from. Curiosity can be a powerful tool in allowing us to get closer to our experience.
If you find that you are someone who struggles with this, it could be helpful to talk about it in therapy. Together, you and your therapist can create a space where you begin to notice and hold curiosity for your feelings and/or barriers to them. Over time, the more you are able to do this, the easier it will become to let feelings flow up and float away. The more our feelings are free to ebb and flow, the less we tend to feel stuck by them.
