How many feelings do you block each day?
One of the first and most important aspects to be able to heal an issue or emotional wound is to allow yourself to feel it. If you don’t know what it is or how it feels you cannot address it. And the first step in allowing that feeling to flow is to relax the judgment you hold about that feeling.
It may sound crazy, but so many of us block a lot of feelings with our own inner critic and judgmental thoughts. As we begin to feel something, we may hear an inner voice that says something like, “that’s silly, there’s no reason to feel that” or perhaps, "that's too big and scary, I'm not going there" and we rationalize our way out of the feeling.
In my opinion, this is not helpful. We must allow the movement of the emotion through us, allow it to be felt within if we wish to heal. As I say to clients, this does not mean we will then take action on this feeling. We will not “do” anything with this feeling. We simply need to sit, breathe and experience the movement of anger (or any feeling) through us.
When we do this, we may experience physiological sensations. We may shake, we may get cold or hot, our body may begin to twitch and so on. Allow this to happen, keep breathing and stay with the feeling. Relax any thoughts or judgments about this feeling, relax any stories you begin to create about this feeling, just breathe and feel. If you do this, the emotion you are experiencing will shift at some point, and the next layer of feeling will move through you.
This is the first step in inner processing work. Feel the feeling without judgment. After this step, you can move toward understanding why that feeling got triggered. But before you analyze, rationalize or process anything - let yourself feel.
No action required. Just breathe and feel.
