Feelings...

Feelings are very strange. They seem to have no apparent logic. They seem to arrive without any notice(unwanted guests!) and are mostly dependent on what other people say or do. You have no control over your feelings. You can stuff them in 'after' they come up . Only if you are very aware,living in the moment, then may be you can watch them coming and feel them completely and let them go. Otherwise what we (me and most of my clients) do mostly with feelings is that when they suddenly descend upon us, if we like the feeling we enjoy it , and when we don't like the feeling, we try to resist it and like all things we try to resist, it persists.

The more I say, 'why am I feeling this way, I don't want to feel this way',.. the more intensely I feel more of the same. Law of Attraction at work! The more I focus on what I don't want, the more i will get of what i don't want.. the Universe operates on key words and my feelings associated with it.

I realised after many years of self help practice that my main problem (and that of many others) is that i almost never allowed myself to feel anything completely. I was afraid of feeling and as a consequence suppressed most of my feelings. Many times because I thought it was wrong to feel anger, jealousy, resentment, envy and so on.. I thought i was this 'nice', 'good' girl who is never any of these things and if I feel and if I admit that i have these 'bad' or 'negative' feelings then what will people think about me.. the image so painstakingly(literally, because the suppressed emotions cause a lot of pain) built will be shattered. People won't like me anymore, i won't have friends...

So what happened was whenever I felt any of those 'negative' feelings, I told myself I should not be feeling them and tried to suppress them . Sometimes I succeeded and sometimes I didn't.When I suppressed them, they only appeared with more intensity with the smallest trigger. When I didn't , I hated myself for being the person I was. Pretending to be something and actually feeling something totally different. And therefore, i remained stuck. Unable to speak, unable to work productively, unable to connect with anyone or anything... I had lost myself.

Now I realise that i am a human being and my main job in this world is to feel and experience different feelings, some more than others. Those that I feel more often and for totally illogical reasons are the one's I need to pay attention to and may be do a radical forgiveness process on( or something else) to release the pattern.

I feel that feelings are something that we need to feel intensely in the moment, and allow them to pass..not suppress them, not dwell on them for too long... not easy to do, but practice helps. And never to criticize yourself for whatever you feel. And gently try to shift to a better feeling... through music, dance, good memories , whatever makes you feel better...in a healthy way... not addictions!

you'll here more on this topic, because my book is going to talk about feelings big time and this is just a start!