As a child, I was a ‘very feeling’ person. I used to laugh, cry, or be freely angry whenever I felt these emotions. To know how to feel feelings came naturally to me!
Over time, with parental teachings, peer pressures, and a general bombardment of ‘right-wrong ideas’, somehow I started suppressing many of my feelings.
It was only later at the time of emotional healing, I understood what are feelings and how to accept them.
If you’ve been searching for how to feel emotions, then this blog will help you to do it.
Why Do We Avoid Feelings?
Before trying to understand how to feel feelings, we must first address a more important question – why the heck we avoid them?
We avoid feelings for the simple reason that it is easy to do so. Truly feeling your emotions actually takes effort and it disturbs the balance.
However, if you keep on ignoring your feelings, they will accumulate over time. Such pent-up will result into the causes of feeling sad for no reason, anxiety, unexplained anger, and even mental disorders.
Psychology practitioners claim that repressed emotions accumulate in your subconscious mind. While, spiritualists believe that such emotions will create blocks in your energy system, thereby preventing the natural energy flow within the body.
How Do We Avoid Feelings?
If you look into it deeply, in most of the moments we actually try to avoid our ‘true feelings’.
We often engage in this avoidance through distractions – by focusing too much on alternate emotions, thoughts, or actions. For instance, a person seeking romance tirelessly, over-helping strangers or planning world change, might actually be running away from chronic loneliness and insecurities.
We also avoid our feelings through non-acknowledgment, procrastination, or understating an emotion subconsciously.
7 Stages of Feeling Your Feelings
Now let’s move to the actual process of exactly how to feel emotions deeply and pass through the stages of emotional healing. To do this you will need to carefully follow the steps below.
- Relax: The first step that you need to do is to relax your mind. Choose a comfortable, isolated, and enclosed place where you feel safe. Now choose an activity that ‘you feel’ will put you at ease. It could be meditating, visualizing, lying down or even dancing without barriers.
- Look into Your Body: Once you’re a bit relaxed, sit down and start looking into your body with awareness. Where do you feel emotions in your body? Try to understand what your ‘body feels to do’. Does it feel like running, crying, laughing, shrinking or shivering? For a while, let it do whatever comes naturally.
- Link Body’s Actions to Emotions: What your body is doing, is a form of emotional energy. Now you will need to give a name to this emotion. For instance, if your entire body feels like shrinking, it might be dread. Or if it feels like burning or hitting at something, most probably it’s anger.
- Link to Immediate Events: Look into your immediate present. What event in your recent present is triggering this emotion? Keep looking at it, without any judgments or overthinking. If you’ve been searching for how to feel feelings again for a recent moment, then this is one way for it.
- Link Past to Present: Now try to link this present event with the events in your past. During which events do you feel this same emotion? Remember to let this emotion drive your thoughts, instead of thoughts driving your emotions. Keep letting your body do what it is doing – crying, shivering, shrinking, burning, or hitting pillows.
- Find Alternate Feelings: During this whole time of letting your emotions go, you will realize that there are also alternate emotions linked to every event. Feel them too. For these emotions also let your body do whatever comes naturally.
- Come Back: Now it is important to achieve certain closure. Once you feel fully drained and tired from your work, you can then come back to the present. Stop thinking or making any further efforts. Just lie down and meditate or sleep for a few minutes.
When you wake up, you will realize that there is something within you that has transformed considerably.
| Note: If thoughts do not work, try writing everything down with free flow. |
Benefits of Feeling Your Emotions Fully
As you might know by now, there are many benefits to fully experiencing your emotions without denial. Knowing these benefits can motivate you to work on yourselves.
Let us look at such benefits:
- Lifting off heaviness and making you feel light.
- Builds better mindful awareness.
- Decreases the suffering, while increasing the feelings of joy and peace.
- Improves physical health significantly. If you were searching for how to feel feelings and why, then this might be the best answer to your question.
- It becomes easy to understand where you feel emotions in your body.
- Creates better ability to manage daily stress and emotional disturbances.
- Increase daily productivity and creativity.
- Significantly improves relationships with others.
- Leads to overall openness and growth in life.
Overall, once you learn how to feel emotions again, it will make you a much more effective and balanced person in life.
Supporting Tips for Feeling Your Feelings
There are some additional tips that can really come in handy while you try to become fully aware of your feelings. Below are some of these tips which you can use:
- Build ‘true acceptance’ by learning to neither downplay nor exaggerate a feeling.
- Learn to have healthy boundaries with others. During healing, it is okay to develop your own cocoon and work on yourself.
- Get away from the societal taboo associated with negative emotions. Also, do not unnecessarily affirm positive emotions, as it will only lead to avoidance of true feelings.
- Give yourself more and more time every day.
- Start to truly love and care for your innermost being.
Further, if you have questions about how to feel your feelings instead of intellectualizing them, then the aids below can guide you in your journey.
Aids to Feeling Your Emotions Fully
Everyone needs some help, right? If you’re searching for how to feel my feelings more deeply, then there are some aids that can assist you in your journey.
Let us look at these aids:
- Fulfilling Sleep: It might look less important, but a fulfilling sleep every day puts your mind at ease. If you’re tired, it will become difficult for you to have an experience of your emotions.
- Exercise: Physical exercises, running, or even yoga will help you release your pent-up physical energy. In turn, it will make it easy for emotional energies to run freely within your energy system.
- Nutritious Diet: Before having a taste of your emotional energies, it is important that the basic needs of your physical body are being met fully.
- Meditation: To learn how to feel your emotions, you will need a certain distance from your mind. Meditation, especially mindfulness, will do that easily for you.
- Journaling: What becomes a bit difficult to achieve from meditation, might be achieved by journaling. Just remember to put aside your conscious mind, and practice free-flow writing.
- Creative Expression: Painting, singing, dancing or pottery offers a different way for emotional release and passing through the spiritual journey stages. Let your brushes breathe, your voice dance, legs flow and hands run in whichever course they feel to.
- Outside Help: Support groups, therapists, and mental health professionals will help you if you think that what you experience is something beyond your control.
Personally, I would suggest you go with the flow! If at any moment you can handle it on your own, you definitely should. But, at some other moments, you might take help from any of the above aids.
PS: If you were searching for “How to not feel feelings?”, then that is not really a choice that you can make.
All in All
If you have been searching for an answer to, “How to feel feelings?”, you can simply do this by letting go of all of your judgments, ego, and restraints.
The best way to do this, is the mindfulness technique of letting all body, mind, and emotional activities flow freely within ourselves.