Understanding your feelings
What is your understanding of feelings? Are you aware of what’s happening in your thoughts and of how you are feeling right now or from moment to moment? Have you ever allowed yourself to be connected to a feeling? If you were to know, are you in touch with your feelings or are you detached and separated from your feelings? Have you been so disconnected from yourself that all you feel is numbness or maybe your feelings are frozen in time? You may be asking yourself why you need to have feelings? What good are feelings anyway? Well, Researcher’s Greenberg and Paivio (1997) have captured some main functions of having feelings. For example, your feelings
- Prompt, organize, and prepare you for appropriate action
- Provide for you important information about what’s going on in any given situation
- Are for motivating you
- Are for communicating with others
- Are fundamentally adaptive
In essence, your feelings are your compass and your friend, if you allow them to be. When you face your feelings you learn that you are not your feelings and that your feelings are fluid. Because your feelings are fluid they will pass through you, however; the trick is not stopping the process and the natural evolution of feeling and flow. For example, whenever you ignore, hide, stuff, replace, run from, resist, avoid, escape, fight off, or use mind altering substances you are inhibiting the natural evolution and flow of your feeling process.
Facing yourself and allowing yourself to feel is empowering because the fluidity of your feelings becomes possible. You know that you are allowing the natural flow of your emotions when you can trust them, respect them, express them, feel them, listen to them, process them, accept them, love them, embrace them, acknowledge them, and allow yourself to be with your feelings, completely with out resistance.
I encourage you to allow yourself to feel your feelings and to become re-acquainted with yourself at a new level of understanding, at a feeling level. Your feelings prepare you to act in any given situation. For example, your feelings act as an alarm system by telling you that something is right or wrong. Your feelings are affected by your thoughts, but they aren’t necessarily mediating every emotional response, at least at a conscious level. Therefore, the more consciously aware you can become in regards to your feelings the less you will fear and deny them.
Although you may have previously acknowledged that your feelings help to prepare you for action, help you in gathering information, and help to support in your communication with others. It is important to remember that learning about your feelings and allowing yourself to have your feelings is key in understanding your feelings and the true essence of who you are. It may be helpful to remember that your feelings are your guide, your compass and your friend.
I encourage you to allow yourself to experience your feelings and to feel what it’s really like to feel alive and in touch with yourself at an authentic level of understanding. To feel is to be alive, to be alive is to enjoy life, and to enjoy life is what life is really all about. Treat yourself today with the gift of feeling and through feeling you will find true authentic healing.