MODULE 4: How to Feel Better
We Aren’t Taught How to Feel
Most people are unaware of their feelings a lot of the time and have trouble labelling them. If you want to change your life, you must become aware of what you are feeling in the present moment. Remember, feelings drive all actions. EVERYTHING you do is because of how you feel. No exceptions. The ability to feel emotions is an important skill to develop. But because most of us haven’t learned how to feel, we don’t understand our emotions as they arise, and we often feel like we don’t have control over them.
Body Sensations and Negative Emotions
The bodily sensations that help us know what we are feeling emotionally are often at the core of what makes it so difficult to experience these feelings. Negative emotions can feel very uncomfortable. It is not that you don’t want to feel your feelings. Instead, you want to separate yourself from the physical sensations associated with the feelings.
Emotions in the Body
Research in the field of neuroscience suggests that when an emotion is triggered, chemicals are released by your brain and surge through your body. These chemicals activate body sensations, some of which may feel terrible. For example, you may feel flushing, a rapid heartbeat, sweaty palms, heaviness in the chest, burning ears. These chemicals are flushed out of your bloodstream within about 1-2 minutes.
Negative Emotion Cannot Hurt You
Even though we know that negative emotion is normal, we can still be caught off guard by how uncomfortable it feels. We tend to think that negative emotion hurts. But think about why it hurts. Think about the worst emotion you can imagine. Let’s use humiliation for example. Physically, how does this feel? You may experience flushing in your face. You may feel shaky. You may feel a quickening in your heart and sweaty palms. This is not the end of the world. It can’t harm you.
But what can make our suffering so much worse is resisting our emotion.
Think about reacting to an emotion and compounding it by panicking about it. When you push against the emotion and dramatize it, or make it mean something wrong about you, you create more suffering. Remember that feelings are simply vibrations and chemical reactions in our bodies, and nothing more
What We Usually Do with Negative Emotions
First, we tend to resist painful feelings. Resisting an emotion is like trying to hold a beachball under the water. It can be done for a while, but it is exhausting. It can feel productive in the moment, but resistance just creates more tension, and perpetuates the emotion.
Secondly, we may react to our emotions. This happens when we let our emotions control our behavior. Think of yelling at someone, crying, throwing objects, or sending an angry text message. Reacting is when we act out our emotions. We may think we are feeling, but often, we are just acting them out and not processing them at all.
Lastly, we may avoid our emotions. Avoiding is when we sense the emotion but look to escape or dull it, typically with a buffering behavior like overeating, overdrinking, overworking, shopping, Netflix, social media, and so on. Most often these buffering behaviors have a net negative consequence and don’t serve our goals. Most people aren’t even aware that they are avoiding emotions because most of the time, we are completely unaware of what we are feeling in the first place.
The Skill to Master: Allowing Emotions
When we can allow negative emotions from a place of compassion, we gain authority over them. We reduce our suffering by allowing ourselves to feel.
Allowing emotion is a skill you must learn and practice.
It’s different from reacting to an emotion.
It’s different from resisting.
It’s different from pretending you don’t feel this way.
Feelings can be felt without doing anything at all.
How to Allow and Process Feelings
It is so important to understand that there is no way around a negative emotion. We must learn to process the emotion. As they say, “the only way around is through.” When we become curious and willing to experience these vibrations and reactions inside our body, we typically find that they aren’t such a big deal after all.
There are several practical things we can do to allow and process a feeling:
1. Awareness is the First Step. Make the decision to allow yourself to feel. Choose awareness. It may feel awkward at first, and it may not come easily. It may even be hard for you to identify what you’re feeling. That’s ok. This is normal. Keep practicing. Check in with yourself from a compassionate and mindful place.
2. Tune In. When you notice a feeling, tune in. We might notice a feeling before a thought. We tend to identify what we feel emotionally based on our bodily experience first. What this means is, you may be aware of your feelings in your body first, before you can describe them with words (example, angry, frustrated).
3. Describe the Emotion in Details. Close your eyes. Breathe. What does this emotion feel like? Where in your body do you experience it? What color is the emotion? Is it hot or cold? Does it travel? How do I know that I am a feeling this emotion and not another? It may help to write it down. For example, “to me, anger feels like a warmth in my chest that rises into my neck. It is fast, and red. My heart beats fast. My cheeks feel warm.”
4. Accept the Emotion. Hold the feeling. Breathe it in. Allow it to be there. Move toward it. Often, you will notice your body wanting to tighten up against it. That’s ok – just release it. Let the emotion be what it is. I find it helpful to name the emotion and say it aloud. For example, “This is sadness. This is what sadness feels like”. As soon as you’re observing and describing the emotion, you will feel yourself soften.
5. Become the Watcher. Witness yourself having the emotion. See yourself having the feelings as though you are sitting across the room. This will create some distance between you and the experience, including the thought you are having and the feeling it is creating. Notice what you do when you are having this feeling. Notice what you feel compelled to do, or what you do. Do you withdraw or shut down? Do you escape by distracting yourself with social media, shopping, or food?
This skill of allowing emotion is one of the most important you will ever learn. Once you are good at it, it can completely change your relationship with yourself and all the people you encounter because you won’t be reactive, but rather the compassionate observer. When you can tolerate and move through your negative emotions, you are on your way to emotional strength, confidence, and resiliency.
In Summary: Ride Feelings as If They Are Waves
If you have ever watched the waves as they land on a beach, you have seen that some are large, and aggressive, crashing harshly into the shore. Others are gentle, and softly rolling onto the sand. You will have noticed that no matter how the wave washes up onto the beach, it will only linger for a few moments before it rolls away, back into the ocean. The waves always subside.
Our emotions are like this too. Our feelings, experienced as vibrations in our bodies, ebb and flow. They rise within us just like waves on the shorelines. They can be intense, or subtle, but they always subside. The most effective strategy for experiencing and moving through difficult and uncomfortable emotions, is to simply ride the waves of emotion and watch as they eventually go away. In other words, allow the emotions to be there. Allow them to move through your body. Notice it, feel it, and then watch as is dissipates. Another wave of emotion may soon follow. This is completely ok. Lean in, let them run their course.
The key to “riding the waves of emotions” and especially, negative emotions, is to tolerate the bodily sensations and vibrations that accompany those feelings. Most often, the intense emotional and physical response will pass in minutes. Remind yourself of this analogy the next time you are experiencing a particularly painful emotion. It may help to visualize the waves crashing. Label the waves as “anger”, or “disappointment”. Watch as they wash away