How to feel to heal?

The number one question people ask me who experience pain is “How do I feel my emotions?”. Feeling your emotions is such an important part of the healing journey. Along with other tools and techniques, scientific studies prove that feeling your emotions alleviates pain. You might be saying to yourself that I express my emotions all the time. Expressing emotions is not the same thing as feeling them. You may be someone who freely shares your emotions with others, and that can be helpful! But, if you haven’t learned how to sit with the sensations of your emotions in your own body, give them permission to be there without resisting them, and describe those sensations for yourself. You’re still not necessarily “feeling” them, even if you are “expressing” them.

What are emotions? Emotions are essentially energy residing within our bodies. To effectively relieve pain, it's crucial to grasp that emotions manifest as tangible, physical energy within the body. Consequently, the means to truly experience them involves recognizing them through physical sensations within your body.  Emotions are complex reactions involving changes in brain chemistry, neural pathways, and the autonomic nervous system, among other factors. These processes result in physical sensations and bodily responses that can feel like a surge of energy or tension in various parts of the body.

Just think about a time you got really excited about something. For example, your child scores a goal in a soccer game or hits the high note in their solo. What do you notice in your body? Your temperature might change. You can feel the muscles of your face constrict to smile or yell and cheer. Your heart might start to beat faster. Your posture might become more erect. All of these happen in the body. Your body is having a somatic experience. Every emotion we feel in life happens in the body as well as in the brain. That is why there is a mind-body connection. So in order to relieve pain, we need to start focusing on the emotional manifestation in the body not your brain.

Sometimes energy gets stuck in our body. When that happens, pain is created. Emotions are meant to flow and move throughout your body. Emotions are intended to be experienced, understood, and eventually released from our body. Imagine that your body is like a super highway with cars that move up and down your body freely getting from one point to another. When the road is open, there is no pain, anxiety, or depression. The cars just flow. Now all of a sudden, suppose the road to get to the lower half of your body is closed. What happens? The cars start to get backed up. If this road stays closed for a long period of time, it is going to cause traffic. The cars will start beeping and the drivers will become loud and angry. It is hard not to be distracted by all of the noise. You're stuck in this traffic jam. But, if the road opens, everyone calms down and goes on to their destination. All the pressure is removed. 

Experiencing emotions involves letting them move freely. When they are in motion, we can truly sense them, and by tuning into their sensations, we keep them flowing. If we go back to our analogy, the first thing we need to do is remove the roadblocks so the traffic can flow.

So if you're having trouble feeling your emotions, start small. Start connecting to your body during the day. We are not robots moving around on this planet. We feel things all the time. So ask yourself “What am I feeling now?” Do this throughout your day, multiple times a day. It is very important you name the emotion. So if you are angry at something, state, ”I am angry.” When we name the emotion, it reduces the activation in the amygdala. The amygdala is the part of your brain heavily involved in the processing of fear and anxiety-related emotions. It assesses potential threats in the environment and can trigger the "fight or flight" response, leading to physiological changes like increased heart rate and heightened alertness. Naming the emotion also helps you focus on the emotion and keeps our awareness there.

After you name the emotion, scan your body for a physical sensation to show up. Look for changes in temperature, tingling, tightness, pulsing, swirling, etc. Describe where the physical sensation shows up. Describe the size, the shape, the color, if it is light or heavy, stagnant or moving. Which way is it moving? Stay with the sensations in your body without judgment or the need to change them. Allow yourself to fully experience the physical sensations associated with your emotions. Use your breath as an anchor. Slow and deep breaths can help you stay connected to your body and emotions. Focus on the rise and fall of your chest or the sensation of the breath moving in and out of your nose. If you start going into the why of the emotion, simply bring yourself back to the feeling in your body.

When you start to do this, you begin to embody your emotions. Your brain realizes that your emotions are safe to feel. The brain initially thinks emotions are dangerous, so this process demonstrates to the brain that they are not. For example, if a person has experienced trauma or a particularly distressing event associated with a certain emotion, their brain may become hypersensitive to that emotion, interpreting it as a potential threat even in non-threatening situations.

The next thing to do is give these emotions a way out: a way to express themselves. You might want to scream, punch a pillow or allow some sort of movement. You can do this in a safe and controlled way.  

So it is really quite simple. We put our attention and our conscious awareness on what we are feeling and notice the physical sensation in our body. Name what you are feeling meaning the actual emotion and the physical sensation with loving and curious awareness by using your breath. It is all about bringing your attention to the sensation in the body, that is it. You do not have to go into the story or the deep rooted reason for why they are happening. Just let them flow. 

One of the other things you might want to try is getting this out on paper. When you journal it is a good idea again to name the emotion and note where you feel it in your body. This will help you make associations with your emotions and your physical manifestations. 

Do not expect to figure this out all at once. Doing this takes practice. But it is like everything else, once you start practicing a skill you get better and better. Becoming more attuned to your body's signals may require some time, yet through consistent practice and a patient approach, you can cultivate a heightened awareness of your emotions and how they manifest physically within you.

You might be experiencing pain right now. You can feel the sadness, anger, guilt without feeling the pain. You do not have to feel both. You have a choice to feel the pain or the emotion. Once you can feel the emotion in your body, the pain will diminish.

Feeling your emotions in your body is an integral part of the healing process. In summary, name the emotions that you are feeling, feel the physical sensation in your body, and let the emotion flow. When we do this, the emotion won’t get stuck in the “traffic” and it will lead to physical and emotional healing.