Feel your Feels

In my learning and growing over the last couple of years, I have come across this concept over and over again, but sometimes it takes really experiencing something for me to understand it fully. I’m stubborn like that.

Anyone who’s anyone in the self-growth world will tell you just how important it is to honor the way you feel, no matter what you’re feeling, and to really feel the emotion or sensation completely so that it can move through you and eventually be let go. If we don’t do so, these ‘trapped’ emotions can lead to all sorts of nastiness from spontaneous outbursts of rage, all the way to physical disease as severe as cancer.

I’m sure this is not the first time you’ve heard this. So why am I telling you again? Because hopefully it won’t take you as long as it did for me to really start to incorporate this practice into your daily life. If you’re not sure how to do this, how to feel your feelings, spend a bit of time watching kids, especially under the age of 5. If something pisses them off or makes them sad, they immediately burst into tears, or have a two minute temper tantrum. After the two minutes, it’s over. Done. They pick up their sandy popsicle and carry on hitting the dog with it. They don’t think about whether it’s socially acceptable to cry in public, or judge themselves about not being tough enough or brave enough or confident enough. They just let the emotion come, they feel it fully and then they move on. We really have a lot to learn from these little ones.

I had an experience recently that really drove this all home for me. I was in Colombia visiting my sister who is on a 6-month journey backpacking around South America. This was by no means my first trip away from home. I have done my fair share of travelling but never without some measure of fear. I guess a little bit of fear is healthy, keeps you safe and everything, but this wasn’t a little bit of fear. This was sitting down to dinner with my sister, talking about making my way back from Palomino (about seven hours north of Cartagena) to Bogota by myself and bursting into tears in public fear.

For some reason, I’ve felt the need to carry this fear of travelling by myself around for the last 10 years without even really noticing it was there. Until this day, when I decided that I was going to be kind to myself and accept the fact that I was afraid and just feel it for a minute. And really, that’s all it was. A minute of feeling scared, and it literally lifted fully from that moment and I didn’t feel afraid for the rest of my trip. Hopefully, I’ll never feel afraid to travel by myself again.

So my challenge to you is this: the next time you feel something you would rather not feel, instead of distracting or ignoring or shoving into the depths, honor yourself by feeling it for a minute, or four, or twenty if that’s how long it takes to lift. And notice the profound shift it makes.