What I Learned from Wearing My Heart Out
We often are shamed for having feelings; sweeping emotions under the rug has always been like a universal pop culture throughout human civilization. Feelings are suppressed as we are told that they are sign of weakness, and it comes with a whopping cost: it constructs a virtual wall between the mind and the soul, disabling our mind to touch the soul through the body. As a result, the soul feels hollow and empty; there is no felt-sense of purpose and meaning.
Why Our Feelings are Often Neglected
The thing that often happens that make people rush into not facing their emotions is the culprit mindset that when we attend to these feelings, we will likely get attached to it. Meanwhile, feelings are ever-changing, just like life in general; one of the core features of life is its transient nature — as long as you have your breath in your body, you are always in flow, every atom cosmically wandering and floating about in space and time. Despite its importance, a feature so profound is often so subtle at the same time — just like the air we breathe deep in our lungs to the bottom of the alveolus.
It is undeniably hard, indeed, to keep in our minds that feelings do come and go. From my experience, it is often the case because we tend to get ourselves in automatic mode, not necessarily giving a pause to rest and reflect. When we keep ourselves in a race with our lives, its ephemeral characteristic will be too hard to grasp — like two chasing cars, which at the same speed, being in one car will feel as if the other is staying still. To see life in motion, we intolerably need to do one thing: slowing down.
Why Slowing Down is Necessary to Feel Our Feelings
When we slow down, we get the opportunity to be mindful. In my personal reality, as much as the concept of mindfulness has always been trying to be incorporated in my life, especially since I began therapy, the practice is another story to tell. Mindfulness — as ironically as it is derived from the word “mind” — is a feeling, nevertheless. Deriving from personal experiences, you can never solely think to be mindful; you also need to feel it in your body, hence you be it in your soul. Mindfulness is something we need to embody; it is what we fathom from the integration of the three cores of a human being: the soul, the mind, and the body. To awaken the soul, the mind need to reach through the body, with one condition: stillness.
It is crucial to emphasize that our feelings or emotions are felt-senses in the body; we don’t just think about being happy, sad, agitated, or angry; we feel them as either it is crushing our hearts when we feel sad and wrenching our guts when we feel anxious, or it is butterflies in our stomachs or buzzes in our ears when we feel elated.
To crack the codes of demolishing the culture of guilt-tripping people for having or showing feelings is inevitably also a road we need to crack in order to be able to embrace emotions, which is the way to find the treasures in our soul. To locate where the soul emerges, we need to track down the pathway leading to it by practising what I would like to emphasize as body-based mindfulness.
For the last few years, I have been trying to bring this body-based mindfulness into practice by learning from a lot of literatures as well as experimenting on different strategies. I tried listening to my needs, including what my body needs, and this approach is what I consider has worked with a significant result so far, comparing to other methods I have tried (which of course, can differ from person to person; thus, I emphasized on learning and experimenting on what works for you individually).
How I Actually Benefit from Feeling My Feelings
I usually start by acknowledging our bodily senses through labelling and still-sitting with them, including our “negative” feelings or emotions, such as sadness, disgust, or anger. This can be done with using The Feelings Wheel, developed by Dr. Gloria Wilcox.
I usually use The Feelings Wheel as a tool when I journal. Journalling has been a really powerful way for me to create some distance between my thoughts, feelings, and body — in a way so that I can be more responsive instead of reactive in handling my situations, most importantly the difficult ones. I do this by regularly checking in with myself through expressing my unfiltered thoughts and feelings into words — basically just jotting everything down in a physical book, as well as the distorted cognitive patterns which led me into those feelings. To do this, I use another method that I learned from therapy, which is part of Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT) — that is recognizing my cognitive distortions.
Often times, we tend to rush when negative feelings are coming toward us, forgetting the origins of their intentions, which is to protect ourselves.
All of our behaviours are rooted from feelings, which are again rooted to our survival.
When we know that all of our feelings serve a purpose that comes to our benefit, no matter how benign, we can start to befriend them. Once the feelings are acknowledge, we will have the opportunity to realize the thought patterns rooting to them, and a pathway to our soul will be created to let us know that everything we experience at the end of the day is a chance for us to feel safe, to survive.
I would like to wrap up this piece with one of my favorite poems by Jalaluddin Rumi:
The Guest House
This being human is a guest house.
Every morning a new arrival.A joy, a depression, a meanness,
some momentary awareness comes
as an unexpected visitor.Welcome and entertain them all!
Even if they’re a crowd of sorrows,
who violently sweep your house
empty of its furniture,
still, treat each guest honorably.
He may be clearing you out
for some new delight.The dark thought, the shame, the malice,
meet them at the door laughing,
and invite them in.Be grateful for whoever comes,
because each has been sent
as a guide from beyond.
So, let’s welcome our feelings by:
🌱 Embracing them with compassion and curiosity, and less judgement; so we can understand where they are coming from, as they are part of our lives as a human.
🌱 Sitting still and attending to them; what do we notice in our body and what are they trying to tell us?
🌱 Giving them space with written expression; jot down in your journal, and use tools and methods such as The Feelings Wheel and CBT to process them.
