Go to the Feeling

Transcript

Many times when I ask a client or friend how they are feeling, many are feeling some kind of discomfort, some emotion they weren’t expecting from some situation they weren’t expecting and the faulty understanding that they have causes them to get annoyed at the world and they say to me “I feel irritated, unnerved, disturbed. Im uncomfortable”

I say “Ok, tell me about that feeling”

And sometimes people will jump to tell me about the situation they are in. That’s fine, that’s valid to get a better understanding of the situation and thought process.

Sometimes, many times its valuable to ask once more no actually don’t tell me about the situation. Tell me about the feeling, where is it in your body? Is it in your belly? Do you feel perhaps a type of sickness? What’s the texture of it?

Go directly to the feeling, the feeling is where we want to process. Going to the feeling is where we will process the feeling.

We will not all process the feeling by looking at the situation.

Situations can never be exactly as we expect them to be unless we have such an open mind and are so enlightened that we are ready to accept anything that comes our way.

So often its better not to change the situation first. We can change the situation but first we go to the feeling, go within and find out what is happening.

Perhaps we even notice something about our physiology perhaps we are experiencing tachycardia where our heartbeat is racing.

Perhaps we feel a lack of energy as a result of the emotion. Sometimes in extreme cases people won’t be able to identify the emotion but often they can determine specific tactile or physiological sensations.

If they notice that they have an increased heart rate and their head feels a little hot and they want to move. Maybe they can start to notice, that is anger.

As I have talked about before my friend Luis Fernando Mises mentioned this in an interview with me talked about affect labeling.

So often when we experience an emotion it is in this old part of our brain, this primitive part of our brain. They used to call it the reptilian brain. By naming an emotion, that is anger or irritation or that is joy or jubilation. Whatever it is we start to bring into the Neo cortex and sometimes that can help us indicate positive emotions.

Perhaps it might be better not to name them for awhile if they are emotions we want to experience, we can sit with them we don’t have to name them.

But it is a good thing to name them. Sometimes people say there are more negative emotions than positive emotions.

I don’t think that’s true.

For one thing its kind of a false dichotomy to say emotions are positive or negative. It’s normally like with a drug the dose is set and setting. Those are the things that make it good or bad, the context of it.

But also I think that positive emotions are uncharted territory. Still ready to be explored. Still unmapped and we can begin to discover them exploring within ourselves finding what subtle feelings might exist and come to life.

In fact what emotions we might yet give birth to for which there are no yet names.

We can find that.

Allowing ourselves to receive these new feelings, welcoming them as unusual gifts even if we have the preconception that they are good or bad let’s find out what they are.

Let’s go to the feelings.