With Christmas almost upon us, there’s no better time to talk about….feeeeeelings!
Because if ever there was a time of year to bring up all those buried grievances, anger and grief, it’s the season of goodwill. When we spend more time than usual with our families 🙂
And all of this emotion can take us by surprise. If we’re not prepared for it, we can be thrown completely off course.
“If you think you’re enlightened, go spend a week with your family”
– Ram Dass
I used to be afraid of my feelings.
I never knew what I was supposed do with them. They felt too powerful for me and I feared they might take me down, if I allowed them any space. So best to pretend they weren’t there 🙂
In fact, I would probably still be pretending everything was fine and dandy, if my body hadn’t begun to tell the true story on my behalf. By creating plenty of illness.
In order to heal my body, I had to face all the buried ‘stuff’. And I know I’m not alone. None of us know what to do with our feelings. We’ve never been taught.
It’s taken me many years of struggle to realise this simple truth:
Your deeply buried feelings won’t kill you.
More than that – they’ll probably be your saviours!
This is a biggie.
We don’t realise that our feelings are just messengers. They’re just energy. They’re meant to be felt, then released. We are meant to pay attention to them and then let them go, giving ourselves what we need in order to feel better.
But when we don’t allow our feelings space, they get trapped in our bodies. Causing illness, anxiety, pain and discomfort.
We fear our feelings will suffocate us…but we’re actually suffocating them 🙂
It’s also because we don’t trust what we feel.
Our lovely patriarchal society has an obsession with rational thinking. Reason, we are told, is the only sound means of understanding the world.
Emotions are regarded as primitive, untrustworthy and, let’s face it…female! Women have been ridiculed for centuries for their open expression of upset or anger.
If we want to be taken seriously, we have to make sure we don’t cry or raise our voices when expressing ourselves – especially to men. As soon as our feelings enter the fray, we know we have lost the argument. Everything we say can now be disregarded because it is not coming from a ‘respectable’ and rational place.
So we bury our true expression and distrust the wisdom of our hearts and bodies.
But this message is not true. It’s not true AT ALL.
Your feelings are actually a treasure trove of your truth.
If you’re feeling lost and confused about your purpose, unsure as to how to make the right decisions, miserable or stuck in some aspect of your life…it’s a sure sign that you’re not paying attention to all the signs being given to you – in the guise of your feelings.
How you feel is your path home to yourself. To feeling comfortable with who you are. To claiming your power. To meeting your needs. To feeling free.
Paying attention to and feeling your feelings can help you:
- understand what’s at the bottom of your actions
- nurture yourself, so you feel happier and less frazzled (at the bottom of every wild emotion is a cry for help)
- stand up for yourself
- grow to forgive and love yourself
- heal your body and mind
- express more of who you really are in your relationships and work
- be a better parent – when you are no longer afraid of your own feelings, you can allow your children space to feel theirs too. You won’t get triggered so often by your children’s emotions and you can help them have a better relationship with their feelings than you did. (It’s a pretty big step to creating a better world in the future!)
But how?
Yes, this is the tricky bit. I thought for years that I WAS feeling my feelings. I certainly cried enough for three people! But the trick is to feel everything fully – not just a bit, getting scared when it all comes up to the surface and stuffing it back down again.
Here are some of the tools I use to allow my emotions to move through me and out:
- Journalling
Just free writing without judgement. Write and write and write, until you finally get to the bottom of it all. Don’t edit and dont judge. Eventually, you will have a huge ‘aha’ as you realise you’re writing about what’s at the root of it!
This will spark your creativity and this will help you with some serious healing (and is also kinda fascinating!), if you’re up for it.
- Talk your issues out with someone
An understanding friend or spouse is always good. But a therapist is fantastic when you really need to get to the bottom of things. Sometimes it takes a trained professional to ask the right kind of questions that puzzle it all out.
- Breathe
I spend a lot of time on breathing techniques in my meditation classes, as they’re the fastest way to calming the mind and body and giving you an entirely new perspective on everything. When you feel calmer, you are better able to comfort yourself or act on what you’re feeling, without lashing out.
I’ll be in touch soon with some simple breathing exercises you can do at any time to help navigate stressful situations, but in the meantime, this article is pretty good.
- Meditate
Yes, meditation will bring you inner calm and joy…but first it will bring you face-to-face with some feelings you might want to heal. The beauty of meditation is in learning the difference between you and your thoughts and you and your feelings. So you can observe your feelings, feel them…but not get swallowed up by them. It’s truly a skill for life!
- Do yoga/dance
Yoga amazes me sometimes. You think you’re exercising, but, really, you’re allowing stuck emotions to free themselves. Dance does the same thing. Moving the body moves your emotions too.Â
- Embodiment
This is a technique I teach and it has changed everything for me. It’s the simplest tool in the world, but mind-bogglingly effective! It involves going into the body, identifying the feelings there and then allowing each emotion to be felt.
Each feeling will rise up, reach a crescendo…then leave the body. When all feelings have been felt, you will be at the root of it all…and you will understand what is really going on. Usually it will be a childhood need or memory that was triggered and is asking to be healed.
So you get to heal it. And the results over time are profound.
- Have an intuitive reading
As part of my reiki sessions, I also give detailed intuitive readings. I can sense what is really going on for you and what you need to do to help yourself heal and move through your current challenges.
Sometimes, when you’re really stuck, it takes an outside perspective to really cut through your confusion and help you understand where you’re at…and how to make things better.
So what do you think? Have you tried any of these tools before? How how you found them? Do you have any other tricks up your sleeve that work best for you? I’d love to hear x
Niamh x
P.S. If you would like to receive more information on breathing techniques to calm your mind and body and also two lovely deep relaxation and meditation tracks to use over the Christmas, please do sign up to my mailing list in the box below. Enjoy! x
Or follow along on Facebook and Instagram.
Also: I’m taking bookings now for pre-Christmas energy healing session to help you relax and ground yourself through the festivities. There’ll also be upcoming deep relaxation and meditation classes over the Christmas and New Year to help restore and nurture yourself through the cold and dark.
P.P.S. If you liked this, you’ll enjoy Why Are You Refusing to Rest and 4 Personality Tests that Could Change your Life
