In my work with couples, I am often asked, "Shouldn't I communicate with my partner about this? Shouldn't we talk this over?"

For example, Ginger told me that when her husband, Ron, became demanding sexually or started to complain about not having enough sex, she was sexually turned off. She would become defensive, explaining her feelings to Ron repeatedly, in hopes of getting him to stop. She hoped that if she explained herself enough, he would understand that his demanding and complaining turned her off. Sometimes Ginger thought there was something wrong with her sexually when she was not turned on, and other times she thought that if only Ron would stop demanding and complaining, everything would be okay. Yet nothing changed. No amount of talking or explaining helped.

Today I thought we would talk about feelings … your feelings. Ooh, not a popular subject for many people.

Who wants to feel their feelings?
Do you struggle with allowing yourself to feel your feelings?
Do you know that you’ve got a compartment sitting over there full of feelings that you don’t let come through?

So, let’s talk about that. When you think about feeling your feelings, what comes up for you? What do you recognize? What button gets pushed? What trigger shows up when you think about feeling your feelings?

Each of us will experience loss, and sometimes it’s wrapped up in good news or a happy event. If you, or someone you love is struggling with loss, keep reading. I’m going to share the benefits of embracing your feelings of loss and sadness. Some of them might surprise you.

Loss can be a complicated feeling. It can be found in tragic stories and events, as well as experiences that hold love and good feelings. It arises when we are not completely ready to let go of what we have. Sometimes it lingers from long ago.

How interesting that most of us start life as toddlers singing this song:
If you’re happy and you know it, clap your hands.
If you’re happy and you know it, clap your hands.
If you’re happy and you know it and you really want to show it,
If you’re happy and you know it, clap your hands.

We were not taught to sing about other kinds of feelings: If you’re gloomy and you know it, clap your hands. If you’re angry and you know it, clap your hands. If you’re fearful and you know it, and you really want to show it, if you’re fearful and you know it, clap your hands.

Stephen King once wrote, “The most important things are the hardest things to say.” He also observed that expressing big thoughts and feelings brings them down to size instead of the monsters they often seem when you keep them in your head.

Before I had my first child, I was a very sound sleeper. The phone could ring without waking me up. However, from the moment I came home from the hospital with my first son, that changed. I now heard every little whimper from the bassinet that was next to our bed. My mothering instincts had seemingly automatically clicked on, and I became totally tuned into my baby's feelings and needs.

On the inner level, it was a completely different story. Since my feelings and needs were unimportant to my parents, I had learned to make my own feelings and needs unimportant to me as well. I had learned to tune them out and instead be very tuned into others’ feelings and needs.
 

If you meet someone new and suddenly feel that they are not trustworthy or mean well towards others. This would be an example of your sixth sense giving you information regarding them before any other senses can pick up on it.  

Other examples are if you suddenly become aware of the danger around yourself without knowing where it's coming from. when there's a feeling in the pit of your stomach, or maybe it's just an overwhelming thought about someone who has been on your mind lately. 

These feelings can come from different sources, but they all have in common that they should always be taken into consideration. Another type of message your intuition may send you is through dreams and premonitions; this can happen while sleeping or even during the day when you're wide awake. Your gut will tell you if these things are essential, so don't ignore them. They all mean something for a reason, whether it be good or bad news.

Vent, Reflect, Think Positive, & Resolve for Your Emotional Health

Getting cut off in traffic. Receiving that raging email. None of us like to have things like that happen. But when they do, how do you handle it? Do you smile and hope it all just goes away? While it might blow over sometimes, other times that’s just not enough.

When you are in a highly charged emotional state, you have to express your feelings. Otherwise they will soak into your energy system, causing more problems later and making it tougher to get them out. It’s kind of like spilling red wine on the couch. You better get it up right away or it is most likely never coming out!

Once awake, an essential path of learning is the art of being sensitive. No one quite knows how to do this. And once open to the infinite sensations and enlivening encounters that experience brings, we are often overwhelmed by such aliveness. It is a common malady for the sensitive to become whatever they encounter. Yet though we are enlivened by our feelings, we are not our feelings, just as a tree brought alive by the wind is not the wind.

Inevitably, we all struggle in discerning the truth of the feelings we must follow from the grip of the feelings that oppress us and rule us. I have experienced the truth of feelings when I can face what is mine to face and have been held down in the grip of feelings when I avoid, deny, or run from them.

Lian had been meditating for many years before consulting with me for his depression. He had been part of a spiritual community that encouraged their members to turn to God through prayer and meditation whenever they were feeling any difficult or painful feelings such as anger, hurt, anxiety or depression. He had been taught that Spirit would transmute his feelings for him and bring him the inner peace he sought.

Yet Lian was depressed. "I have faithfully practiced what I've been taught, so why am I still depressed? What am I doing wrong?"

Lian was suffering from what is called "spiritual bypass."

How often have you become irritated or angry, or given yourself up, or started to argue or debate, teach or explain, or withdrew when someone was treating you badly - ordering you around, judging you, blaming you, or dumping their complaints or negativity on you? How often have you behaved in any of these protective, controlling ways when someone is unknowingly interrupting you when you are trying to focus on something or get something done? How do you end up feeling when you behave in any of these ways?

The chances are you end up feeling angry, hurt, anxious, depressed, or numbed out. It is easy to believe that these feelings are coming from the other person's behavior toward you, but this is not the case. Your unhappy feelings are coming from not taking loving care of yourself.

For example...

Madison consulted with me because she was feeling depressed. She and Andrew had been married for 12 years. She loved Andrew and felt that they had a deep soul connection. Yet she was often unhappy around him.

Your feelings are a signal giving you feedback.

They are communicating to you, showing you, what you need to pay attention to.

We are conditioned to only feel what we think of as “positive” feelings. And we tend to do everything to avoid “negative“ feelings.

We must realize that the more we suppress our sadness, the more we limit our capacity to feel joy.

Consider this: Feelings are neither good or bad. These are just labels we place on them as a means of survival.

Feelings are feedback.

Feelings are energy.

I was at a social gathering speaking with Robyn, a woman I had just met. At first, it sounded like she was a very interesting person and a good storyteller, but after a few minutes I noticed that we were not speaking WITH each other – she was speaking AT me.

I also noticed that I was unable to connect with her, and I started to feel very bored. Being used to noticing and acknowledging my feelings, I thanked my inner child for the information she was giving me – my boredom – which was telling me that Robyn was likely addicted to story telling.

Robyn was using story telling as a form of control to capture my attention and drain my energy. She was counting on the fact that she thought I would be too polite to walk away in the middle of her story. She was wrong about my being too polite!

I do try to be polite, but…

Having just lived through one of the most stressful years in history, people are ready to leave the pandemic behind and looking forward to a brighter future. 

Researchers are just beginning to look at the long-term psychological effects of the pandemic, but many people are likely to carry emotional scars from losing loved ones and a year of isolation.

One result is trouble coping with the stressful situations large and small that life inevitably brings. Trapped Emotions, unresolved emotions from difficult or traumatic experiences, may trigger feelings of being stressed out and overwhelmed. This is a potentially damaging pattern that may affect our emotional and physical health. 

When you suffer something traumatic, it can be extremely difficult to confront the resulting feelings. You may feel like doing so would force you to relive what you’ve already endured. 

We can learn to go quiet in the middle of what would ordinarily be a psychological riot going on within us. The frantic search for any answer – being suddenly caught up in a stream of thoughts and feelings trying to figure out what to do with some frustration – turning to those frantic answers, looking for them, is like turning on a fan and hoping to straighten out the papers on your desk.

We mustn’t be afraid to Go Quiet in those moments. In much the same way as we look out and see something beautiful, we can look interiorly and see that inside of us there is a scramble going on for some kind of security, and to know in that moment that it is not who we really are that’s afraid of what’s going on.

Here’s something that’s stunning. I remember the first time I heard it and what it did to me, and how my mind actually went quiet when I heard it. Listen to this idea.

Have you ever noticed that when you’re under the cloud of some negative state, what you do to try to “make things better” actually makes the situation worse? Struggling to free yourself from your own negative reactions is a bit like throwing gasoline onto a fire, isn’t it? 

Recognizing that you get trapped in this pattern of taking action that neither relieves nor rescues you from negative states  actually opens up the possibility of another kind of action based on higher self-knowledge.

Following are three new actions – the fundamental “ABC’s” – that can start you on the path to breaking free from negative thoughts and feelings: 

Avoid nothing.

In the moment when suddenly you are carried away in a river of negative thoughts and feelings, does it not seem as if the first thing to do is to, at all costs, avoid? Not just the states themselves, but to try to correct or reconcile the situation that these suffering thoughts and feeling are based in? 

Your thoughts, feelings, and beliefs create the landscape in your mind that you call “here.” The challenging element is that it’s not fixed. Even while you inhabit it, it is changing based on your perception. 

Your inner landscape reflects your feelings and the thoughts that are connected to them. 

Two people can encounter the same situation and have completely different reactions based on their own history and stories. For instance, one person sees a picture of the Eiffel Tower and feels excitement and romance because it’s where their partner proposed. Another sees the same picture and feels sick to their stomach because it reminds them of the trip to France that led to a romantic breakup. Same photo, two very different responses rooted in their own individual experiences. 

The ground beneath you, the atmosphere around you, and the energy within you can all shift in an instant as you react to what you perceive as happening in your life. 

Past or Present? It’s Hard to Tell…

Self-Abandonment Is Handed Down Through Families

Lauren, a client of mine, has been practicing Inner Bonding for a number of years but she was still resistant to taking emotional responsibility for herself. She thought she was taking care of herself because she treated herself to massages, got places on time, exercised regularly, was kind to people and mostly took care of money matters. But when it came to her painful feelings, she abandoned herself by projecting on to others and blaming them when they didn’t do what she wanted, and pulling on them for attention. She also avoided responsibility for her feelings by eating junk food.

It became apparent when working with her that she was addicted to others validating her and making her feel special because she rejected and abandoned herself – her inner child – when she was in pain. She would do anything to avoid feeling her painful feelings and learning how she was causing them. Unable to compassionately manage the inevitable pain of life, she stayed focused in her mind rather than her body where her feelings are. Judging her feelings as wrong, she turned to various addictions, and she made others responsible for her feelings – rejecting herself in all of the four major ways we abandon ourselves.

Coping with Emotions from Pandemic and the Past

Identify and let go of emotional baggage from difficult times

Life is full of emotional ups and downs. Sometimes the hardships we experience can be so overwhelming that they leave us stuck with feelings that can hamper our happiness or even harm our health and well-being.

The impact of negative emotions from traumatic and difficult events is a growing concern during the challenging times we now face. One new study, for instance, finds the emotional well-being of most American adults has been “broadly and substantially affected by COVID-19 and the related changes in life and society.”

Emotional distress related to COVID-19 is associated with higher frequency of clinical levels of anxiety, depression, and general life stress, along with lower reported levels of overall happiness, according to the U.S. National Pandemic Emotional Impact Report from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and Harvard Medical School.

Prolonged and/or intense negative feelings can have effects long after the events that precipitate them. They can take a toll on emotional, mental, and physical health and compel people to behave in ways that damage their relationships or impact their ability to have healthy, long-lasting bonds.

Welcome Joy

What’s the spark and what’s the fuel?

The Practice:
Welcome joy.

Why?

Positive emotions – such as feelings of gratitude, love, and confidence – strengthen the immune system, protect the heart against loss and trauma, build relationships, increase resilience, and promote success. Based on studies that have already been done, if a drug company could patent a happiness pill, we’d be seeing ads for it every night on TV.

Technically, emotions can be organized along two dimensions: intensity (how strong they are) and hedonic valence (how good they feel). Tranquility, for example, has low intensity but can feel really really good, a profound inner peace.