Chances are you learned from an early age to judge your feelings - and yourself - when expressing a feeling others didn’t like. And without any real education and experience of the value of your feelings, you shut down and began suppressing, repressing and depressing strong emotional reactions and feelings, particularly the ones you judge as not okay, not appropriate, “negative”.
Yet your ability to feel and react emotionally to things is part of being human and, as such, has value and purpose and the power to transform you and your experience of life.
First let go of the old childhood belief: “Some feelings are bad and some feelings are good” and instead adopt the belief: “Feelings are neither bad nor good, they are all just feelings and exist to let me know how I feel about whatever is occurring” .
Then realise your feelings show the stories you make up in your head, the meaning you give to everything that happens, often without checking to see if what you have assumed is actually what is happening. When you decide that what you feel is the truth about whatever is happening, you have just agreed with the story you made up!
You have turned the feeling into a fact - when in fact it is not the truth about the situation or experience, it is simply the truth, the fact of what you are feeling.
Accept that what you are feeling is okay … it has purpose and value and is something you can respond to. Then let yourself acknowledge it fully … which means feel it in your body and let it go … breathe and allow and let it release (Jill Bolte-Taylor says it takes 90 seconds for the energy to move through your body and release). You will discover the freedom that comes from being the cause of your feelings and emotions rather than at their effect.
When you stop turning your feelings into facts, when you stop recycling the old painful movies (and feelings) about your “not good enough" stuff you will free yourself to consciously choose the meaning you put on everything and how you feel.
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"Your feelings exist to be felt,
responded to and released
…not recycled."
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