What we are feeling

I grew up believing
what was expected of me
was to prove how strong
& violent I could be.

And i've been afraid to admit it
when I'm lonely, scared, or sad.
I thought feelings were weakness
& weakness was bad.

They must enter directly into the process of learning from inside their own bodies. It's this "know how in the bones" that enables each generation to pass special ways of body knowing on to the next, but in a manner quite different from communicating information thru concepts & ideas that our minds can grasp.

The human body has a unique way of felt-knowing which is different from thinking, analyzing & reasoning.

Your body spontaneously recognizes the whole of a situation, a relationship, or an experience, together with the interacting web of complex connections that goes along with each of them.

Your body knows in a great gulp, while your mind must systematically chew its way thru each individual piece.

NAIL IN THE FENCE

Please read all the way down to the last sentence.  
(Most importantly the last sentence)

There once was a little boy who had a bad temper.

His Father gave him a bag of nails & told him that every time he lost his temper,
he must hammer a nail into the back of the fence.

The first day the boy had driven 37 nails into the fence.

Over the next few weeks, as he learned to control his anger, the number of nails hammered daily gradually dwindled down.

He discovered it was easier to hold his temper than to drive those nails into the fence. 

Finally the day came when the boy didn't lose his temper at all. He told his father about it & the father suggested that the boy now pull out one nail for each day that he was able to hold his temper.

The days passed & the young boy was finally able to tell his father that all the nails were gone.

The father took his son by the hand & led him to the fence. He said, "You have done well, my son, but look at the holes in the fence. The fence will never be the same.

When you say things in anger, they leave a scar just like this one. You can put a knife in a man & draw it out.
It won't matter how many times you say "I'm sorry," the wound is still there."

A verbal wound is as bad as a physical one.

Please forgive me if I have ever left a hole.

Author unknown.

Our human species has been blessed with 2 entirely different ways of knowing.

The other 4 pointed to special ways of knowing in the body. This is the world of hunch, intuition, creativity, inspiration, revelation.

Wisdom is always more than information. It's living from inside the actual experience of our body-connections.

Everyday feelings, emotions & physical sensations represent an important 1st step into the world of felt body connections. Such body-links bring their own special meaning into our lives, a meaning that's "felt" rather than "thought."  

ALL FEELINGS, whether positive or negative, are an important part of our body's intelligence because they introduce us to these deeper felt meanings. 

feelings:

• If you know how you feel, let yourself know that this is how you're feeling right now & that's okay.

• You don't have to know where it's coming from.

• You don't even have to know what to name it; you may simply know that you've got pain in your chest.

• Breathe thru it.

• Let your feelings just be there.

• You don't have to do anything with them, just accept that this is how you feel.

why you feel a certain way:

1. Identify the source of your feelings:

• Know that you're not being "silly" or "crazy" for feeling how you feel; your feelings are there for a good reason.

• Turn inward - ask yourself, "what are these feelings connected to?"

• Wait & see what you notice. You might just know, remember something, see an image, hear a sound, notice tension in a particular area of your body.

• Try not to analyze, interpret or judge what comes to you. Be open to what you notice.

• Go deeper. We may think we already know why we're feeling a certain way, but sometimes there's more to it than what we think.

• Being patient & receptive helps us to go deeper.

If nothing comes to you, that's okay, too. It helps to just let yourself feel. What do I do with these feelings?

Express or release feelings

Even if you don't know why you're feeling this way, you can still express yourself in the privacy of your own home.

• Focus on how you feel. Open your mouth & let a sound come from that feeling.

• Move with the feeling. You can dance, stomp around, kick, hit something.

• Scream. If you're worried about the sound, you can scream into a pillow.

• Cry. If you feel like crying, give yourself permission to do this.

• Write or draw from this feeling place. Don't censor yourself, let the feeling do the writing or drawing.

• Say out loud what you need to say to someone.

• Tell someone supportive how you're feeling.

It's too much for me. I can't take it any more. What do I do?

The Importance of Feelings

I feel very strongly about the importance of feelings. I feel passionate about it, in fact. I grew up in a very "intellectual" family. We didn't talk about our feelings. No one ever taught my parents how to talk about their feelings. So, they never taught us. One result was that I've had to go thru a lot of unnecessary financial & emotional pain because of my lack of knowledge & skills when it came both my own feelings & the feelings of others.

Until I was about 35 whenever someone would ask how I felt, I would tell them what I thought. I didn't know the difference between thoughts & feelings. Now I've learned the language of feelings (see Emotional Literacy). I want to help you avoid some of the pain that I've suffered from my ignorance of the importance of feelings.

I also want to help you avoid being abused as I was when I was 18. I believe the main reason I was abused is that I was unable to express my feelings & act upon them.. I was unable to do this because partly because I wasn't taught to & partly because I didn't have self-confidence to even say when I felt uncomfortable.

One reason I didn't have self-confidence was because because my parents & family didn't accept me & my feelings. (See my abuse story to see how not being able to express my feelings & act upon them contributed to my being sexually abused.)

We live in an "intellectual" society. We're surrounded by textbooks, exams, grades, test scores & achievement tests. If you're "smart," you're encouraged to make good grades so you can go to college or university where more demands will be made on the intellectual part of your brain.

This comes will come at the expense of the emotional part of your brain. I believe that higher education is toxic to emotional development. I sometimes say a Ph.D. is the kiss of emotional death.

New brain research is giving us more information about our "emotional brain." I believe the new information is some of the most important information you'll ever come across in your life, if you do happen to come across it.

But so far not much of it has been added to school or university lessons. Some places are including a little study of emotional intelligence, but unfortunately most of what's being taught is based on the misleading work of Daniel Goleman.

Still there seem to be a few people around the world who are discovering the importance of our individual emotions & the importance of what emotional intelligence really is. Some people are realizing that it takes more than being "smart" & "successful" to be happy. It takes more than money, status & fame. It takes more than material possessions. (For more on the importance of emotions & feelings see this link.)

I encourage you to make time to identify your feelings & to study everything I've written on my eqi.org site. I really believe the time you spend on reading it & thinking about it will be one of the best investments you can make for your own personal happiness.

Getting in Touch with Feelings

Why it's important to be in touch with your feelings

• Become a more real & authentic person.

• Become more honest with yourself about who you are, where you've come from & where you're going.

• Begin to be more willing to take risks & become more vulnerable & intimate in interpersonal relationships.

• Cease being in denial about what's really happening in your life.

• No longer pull in & hide so that you become invisible to yourself & others.

• Take the risk of no longer disassociating or becoming numb when things are going on in your life which are negative or overwhelming.

• Make yourself stay conscious to the reality of your life so that you're able to recall or remember it in the future rather than to have no memory of it.

• Push yourself to have a broadened or enriched emotional vocabulary to describe the experiences of your life.

• Cease viewing life from a black or white perspective & become more willing to take the gray into account.

• Open yourself up to grieve the losses in your life so that you no longer use denial, repression, suppression, or delusion to describe your life the way you wanted it to be but rather describe your life the way it really was.

• Allow yourself to become a congruent healthy human being who uses rational, reality-based thinking to assist your feelings to become rational & reality-based so that the actions & behaviors which follow are also rational & reality-based.

• Are open to the spirit of your inner child in your soul who allows you to enjoy your life to the fullest without the constraints or restrictions of how you "should'' think, feel or act.

• Live life moment to moment, day to day & become reasonably happy realizing that feelings are a natural, human process.

• Begin to accept that feeling all feelings is OK & that there's no right or wrong feeling.

• Become open to experience the full continuum of emotions from the most painfully negative to the most exhilaratingly positive.

• Grow in the ability to listen, understand & be empathetic to others' verbal & nonverbal expressions of feelings & emotions.

Causes for your being out of touch with your feelings

There are 3 major reasons why you may currently be out of touch with your own feelings.

They're:

• Nonfeeling personality pattern

This behavioral pattern is described in Laying the Foundation (below). This pattern is also known as Alexathemia, the absence of feeling, emotionally laden vocabulary & experience.

• Pulling-in personality pattern

This behavioral pattern is described in Laying the Foundation (below).  This is a withdrawal pattern in which you resort to a low profile or invisibility to hold in emotions in order to avoid being dragged into the conflicts & troubles going on around you in life.

Disassociation

This is a survival pattern of becoming numb or disconnected from the emotions that accompany an event which is unpleasant, threatening, abusive, violent, uncomfortable, or challenging to you. This pattern enables you to terminate an association with the event so as to survive the event & get on with your life. (also see survival behaviors by clicking here)