Many of us are afraid to feel our feelings. This is more common that we think. The reason we are afraid to feel our feelings is not because we are cowardly, or somehow inadequate but because feelings are sensations in the body. Sometimes the sensations in the body can feel uncomfortable and so we either suppress them or distract ourselves from them. Sometimes we even cover over one feeling with another. Grief and fear can feel intolerable and so we might get angry instead because even though anger can feel intense some of us find that anger is more comfortable than grief or fear.
We aren’t taught what feelings are when we are young. And we aren’t taught how to feel our feelings and what to do with those feelings when we are young either. Our parents weren’t taught and so they don’t teach us. If we put aside the context of a feeling for a moment to see what is actually happening when we feel a feeling we discover that a feeling is a sensation in our body. We call them feelings because we feel them in our bodies. Evidence for this fact comes in the way we talk about our feelings. We might describe depression as a heavy sensation in the body. Apathy might be described as feeling numb. Grief might be described as heartache. Anger might be described as a boiling feeling in our gut.
The sensations that we notice in the body are the result of energies in the body that are amplified enough for us to notice them. Ordinarily we don’t notice energies in the body so it may not make sense to some to think about feelings and their sensations as energies. But if we are not feeling well, if we are feeling sluggish or feeling pain and we go to an acupuncturist, the practitioner is working with the energies in our body. The practitioner is either balancing energies, unblocking energies or redirected energies and the result is we find we feel more energetic or we feel less pain. Feelings are energies that are amplified enough so that we feel sensations that correlate to those feelings.
Once we understand that feelings are essentially sensations in the body we now have the first step towards processing a feeling. Step one is noticing the sensations of the feeling. Noticing the feeling is the same as “welcoming” the feeling. Noticing and welcoming a feeling allows it to be here fully. Noticing and welcoming a feeling gives it room inside to come up so that it can easily be fully experienced and then released. This process gives us the power to have our feelings instead of our feelings having us. We are no longer being controlled by our feelings. Instead we are mastering our feeling experiences.