All the Feels

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about feelings.  About the incredible capacity we, as humans, have to feel a huge spectrum of emotions.  One of the things that I have found to be surprisingly similar in my studies of Buddhism and Tantra is that the ultimate intention is to be able to be incredibly present with ANYthing that arises and embrace and welcome it fully. In Tantra, I have found for myself, there is also an emphasis on being able to fully express these emotions in an embodied and powerful way instead of just simply feeling them and allowing them.  While Tantra and Buddhism are quite fundamentally different in many ways, I appreciate how they connect here - with embracing and allowing every part of our humanness with a sense of curiosity, allowing and care.

I think often about some of the experiences I’ve had in the jungles of Mexico and Bali and Peru where I was in spaces where full embodiment and expression of absolutely any emotion was encouraged and welcomed.  It was normalized and modeled and the spaces were held with such care and encouragement.  

I remember looking into one of my teacher’s eyes in her yoga shala by the river in Bali and feeling so much anger that my body felt like it was on fire, I felt claustrophobic in there.  I felt out of control.  I was judging her and what she was teaching and hated myself for judging.  I was full of irritation and contraction and my tendency was to shove it down deep and be a “good student”.  Be compliant and compassionate and respectful… silent.  She taught me a different way of being a student… she could feel how bound up I was and how stuck.  

She helped me to find my voice, my rage, and the power in my rage - even the beauty in my rage.  Instead of dropping into helplessness and fatigue overwhelmed by emotions I had shame around, I roared.  I shook my body and growled and yelled and pounded my fists and looked right at her with the fiercest angry eyes I’d ever let anyone see in me and she met me right there.  She encouraged it with love and was unwavering. She said yes to it and roared back and sat still and tall and I felt such an incredible permission to do something so different than I ever had before.  The students around me were just as welcoming of what I was expressing - they were unwavering and right there with me as I allowed the raw sensation of my emotions to pour out of me.  I felt freed from my old concepts and ways I kept myself small.  I felt connected to the power of so many of my emotions that I had kept on lock down for so long.  I could see why I had been so tired and so sick for so many years the more experiences I had like this.

These moments were very freeing and also I hesitate to write to you about moments like this because these were the culmination of years of work of learning how to stay in my body first.  I couldn’t have integrated those experiences if I hadn’t first taken time little by little to learn to tolerate that much energy moving through my body.  To feel safe enough in myself that I wouldn't immediately fling back into a contraction built out of a lack of safety and containment.  That took years of mindfully and lovingly coming into presence with myself in the presence of another and creating safety to be with any type of energy that I felt. If I had done that in years prior, I likely would have shot out of my body and re-traumatized myself - becoming disoriented, shut down and afraid.  I had to learn, with the help of my teachers and therapists, that it was safe to express myself and let myself out slowly instead of intensely and because of my sensitive nervous system… the best medicine for that was doing that gently and over a long period of time, and for that I am deeply grateful. 

In Buddhism, suffering is trying to make things different than they are.  Suffering comes through clinging to or pushing away.  For many of us it can look like clinging to emotions like happiness, joy and contentment and pushing away emotions like anger, grief and fear.  When we can find some space and stop trying to control what we’re feeling, this is what can bring us incredible freedom and a deep sense of inner and outer connection.

I see it every day when I’m sitting with clients.  When we can drop into a place of connection and meeting what’s happening right here and right now with kindness, acceptance and curiosity… freedom arises moment to moment.  It’s beautiful and inspiring and palpable.

One of the things I hear MOST often from my coaching and therapy clients is that what they have gotten from our work together is that they can feel (like ACTUALLY feel, in their bodies) a broader range of emotions - more than they could have ever imagined before.  That they can feel more in their body and are less stuck in their minds.  And through that, they’re less numb, less impulsive, less shut down.  They feel more joy, more connection, more fulfilled and more in tune with what they actually want and need moment to moment in their lives.  They feel more and more themselves and truly know who they are and are expressing it more regularly and it brings them so much joy to do so.

The thing is though, that when we open to the possibility of embodying our feelings more… we are often confronted with the feelings we haven’t been able or willing to feel for a long time.  So at first it can feel a little like… “wtf did I sign up for this for?!  All I feel is awful!!!”.  I remember when I first started teaching mindfulness meditation, students would come to me and say things like “I’m noticing SO much and it’s a little uncomfortable.  I’m noticing how insane my mind seems and how mean to myself I am and, how obsessive I can be, etc…. I thought mindfulness was supposed to bring peace and calm!”.  I’d often laugh and say… I need to have people sign a waiver for this work… it’s big and deep and can bring up so much.  It brings up the WHOLE spectrum of what’s possible for us.

It’s a process.  The thing is… when we open to feeling our pain, our grief, our shame, our anger, our resentment, our disappointment, our fear, our sadness… we also open to the same amount of joy, ease, contentment, connection, bliss, pleasure and aliveness.  We are expanding and contracting beings.  That’s what our bodies and nervous systems do all day every day.  So we have to be truly willing to feel it all.  And often, when we have an expansion, we might find ourselves contracting twice as much on the other side… it’s how our systems calibrate and it can be uncomfortable but it can be so worth it to learn how to be in this dance in the name of healing and growth.

The other thing is… that there’s a way to do it that’s much more gentle than a lot of people will lead you to believe.  It doesn’t need to be so uncomfortable that you’re incredibly overwhelmed.  It doesn’t need to feel intense and like you’re pushing…. In fact it really can counteract the whole process when this is the approach.  There is a way to embody our feelings and emotions that can happen little by little… so we can get USED to feeling more incrementally and our systems can learn to tolerate it one breath at a time as I was talking about earlier with my experience.  It needs to happen slowly and with connection and support and care.  This is no small feat… learning how to feel more and to love the hell out of all of our feelings.  To me, it’s one of the most noble and respectable endeavors to venture out on.

We live in a culture of healers and coaches and wellness providers and therapists who tell you they can help you heal but are actually terrified of emotions. For so long, I learned how to be terrified of my emotions by watching how the people in my life responded to me when I was anything other than good, agreeable, nice, fine, etc.  And then I did that to myself over and over again.  Actually feeling our feelings and making space for all emotions is an act of rebellion where many of us grew up in cultures that didn’t model for us that it’s truly safe to feel and express the whole spectrum of our humanness.

When we aren’t able to simply sit and be present with what’s here and we go into fixing, figuring out and tapping into a place where we can honor that it makes sense that these feeling are here… we’re causing harm to ourselves and others and our culture as a whole.  We’re perpetuating shame and disconnection.  My mission is and always has been to help people awaken to all of our incredible capacities for feeling.  That we can find pleasure in pain and ease in challenge and devotion to our wholeness through our willingness to learn to be with what is.  We all of the capacity yet so few make the choice to give themselves this type of freedom.  I’m so curious… if we lived in this way… what might be different in our relationships… our communities… our families and the world?  What might be possible in your life if you could allow this for yourself and those around you?  Let me know.