Feel Your Feelings
/“Pain is pain. Suffering is optional.” — Paul Selig
Humans are emotional beings. We are meant to express our emotions freely as they arise. Many of us, however, are taught as children to repress our negative emotions. The effects of repressed emotions on the physical body are explained well by Dr. Candace Pert in her groundbreaking research and book, Molecules of Emotion: The Science Behind Mind-Body Medicine. Dr. Pert identified molecules (peptides) in the body that exist for each and every emotional state we experience. These peptides are sent out and attach to receptors on every cell in our body. She says:
“A feeling sparked in our mind or body will translate as a peptide being released somewhere. [Organs, tissues, skin, muscle and endocrine glands], they all have peptide receptors on them and can access and store emotional information. This means the emotional memory is stored in many places in the body, not just (or even primarily) in the brain. You can access emotional memory anywhere in the peptide/receptor network, in any number of ways. I think unexpressed emotions are literally lodged in the body. The real true emotions that need to be expressed are in the body, trying to move up and be expressed and thereby integrated, made whole, and healed.”
When we feel uncomfortable emotions rising, we usually do one of three things:
Stuff them down. Whether we were taught that having negative emotions is bad, makes us unlovable, or because we think we simply don’t have time to feel them, we can push down and deny our emotions with an attitude of “I’m fine” or “I don’t care”, “I’m not mad”.
Escape. I don’t really want to deal with this emotion right now so I will just pour a glass of wine, eat some ice cream, scroll through social media or turn on Netflix. I think we are all familiar with this one as the options for escapism are almost endless today.
Suffer. Instead of processing the emotion fully, we sometimes opt to marinate in the story we are telling ourselves about the feeling. Reliving it over and over in a loop of “I can’t believe she said that to me”, “It’s not fair that this is happening to me”, etc.
When we refuse to process our emotions, they get trapped in our body tissues and organs where they can accumulate, draining our energy and eventually leading to imbalances, inflammation and disease.
But here is the good news! We don’t need years of therapy to do this. Processing emotions does not have to be a top-down verbal analysis of the what, when and why. In fact, language and labels can sometimes keep us in the story of our feelings. When we move to a bottom-up focus on the physical experience of emotions we can process through them relatively quickly and easily. If you allow an emotion to be felt and experienced in the body in the moment, they only last a moment. It is in the holding down and suppressing of emotions that they linger.
Emotions come up and out like a wave. They rise, they crest, and then they fall. And if you focus on just the physical sensation of it without the story attached, the longest it can last is about one minute. So the pain of an emotion can last 60 seconds or 60 years and it is really up to you.
How do we really feel our feelings so that they can come up and out? We return to the senses. The body can process emotions just by becoming aware of the sensations and allowing them to cycle through. Here is what that process might look like:
You feel something uncomfortable coming up, so you stop what you are doing and sit and close your eyes. Whatever it is that you might be feeling, maybe boredom, agitation, sadness, anxiety, maybe just a heaviness, take away the mental interpretation and the label of the experience and simply meet the sensations as they are. Notice where in the body the emotion is being felt. Is it in the stomach? Is it in the chest? Maybe your left knee is hurting or your jaw is tight. Do a scan of the body and ask yourself, “where does this feeling live?”. What do you feel? Do you feel pressure or tingling? Is it hot or cold? Sit with the sensations and feel it as fully as you can. Simply meet the sensations as they are without trying to change anything, without trying to get rid of any sensations. At first you might see yourself as separate from the sensation, you are observing it. See if you can get even closer to the sensation, dropping in to the body fully until you no longer feel a separation between yourself and the feeling. Trying to feel what is here so fully that there is no longer a subject and object, there is only feeling. There is only this present moment and this feeling.
If you are able to experience emotion in this way, fully focused on the sensations of it, the longest it will last is about one minute. If it lasts longer, then you are still stuck in the story of it. Once the sensation has passed, you can then decide if more needs to be done. If there is energy that still needs to be moved you can take a walk, do yoga or put some music on and dance around. You can cry or laugh. If something needs to be said or done, if you need to have a conversation around the situation that has led to the emotion, you will be in a better frame of mind to do that because the emotion has been processed.
This way of processing emotions is probably new to most people. Be compassionate and patient with yourself as you try this. Through practice you will become efficient at feeling your feelings and riding the wave of emotions, leaving your mind/body healthier in the long run.