Feeling the Feels

Feelings. They can fill you with warm fuzzies and warm your heart. They can also be hard, uncomfortable and tempting avoid…especially if you’ve been grieving. Sometimes it’s easy to discount them as trivial or invalid.  But they are yours and you are entitled to each and every one of them. 

Once you embrace and come to terms with your true emotions and hold them as valid, your job is to feel the feels. 

Do you know how you feel right now? Would you be willing to take a moment and figure it out? Are you happy, content, frustrated, confused, worried about the long to do list you’re ignoring while reading this post and doing the activity below?

When I first tried this activity I was surprised at how difficult it was for me to identify my feelings. I’d been unconsciously walking around numb for so long. I get why I’d defaulted to the seemingly safe space of numbness. I’d gone through so much heartbreak and pain over the years that not feeling, or more correctly, not allowing myself to touch the feelings got me through some pretty rough days in the beginning.

But at some point this numbness no longer served me. It was not only insulating me from pain and heartbreak, it was also keeping me from joy, connection, and vibrancy. My first step back into being fully present in my life was the simple, yet sometimes difficult practice of awareness of my emotions. Just for today can you pause every couple of hours, checking in with yourself to see how you feel?

This is such a powerful practice because when you know how you actually feel in the present you can start impacting your future present moments.