Feel your Feelings

I hope you all had a nice weekend. It was great to be back teaching at Dandelight Studio last week.

This practice is so much about noticing what is going on in the mind and from there we can often find an understanding and hopefully a softening. This was my experience last week as I was processing the pain of someone close to me. I noticed my first reaction was anger at the person who caused the pain. However anger is really just a shield we put up to avoid touching the deeper feelings of hurt, sadness and disappointment. These emotions are more complex than anger and they wait for us until we put down the protective shield.  They wait in the deeper recesses of the mind and they also wait for us in the body. They do not move through until we process them. 

Last week I shared this passage with students as we worked together to allow our feelings. 

Feeling Your Feelings, Mark Nepo

The fastest way to freedom is to feel your feelings. – Gita Bellin

This sounds pretty simple, but though it’s easy to know their weight and agitation and and suddenness of mood, it is another, more subtle matter to feel them– that is, to let them penetrate your being the way wind snaps through a flag. 
This is necessary because if we don’t feel our feelings all the way through, they never leave us, and then we do all kinds of unusual things to get out from under them. This is the cause of many an addiction. 
I’ve diverted myself many times by becoming involved with what surrounds my pain or sadness, while never feeling the thing itself. So when someone asks me how I feel, I wind up retelling the circumstances of the pain, but not feeling it. Or strategizing what to do next, but not feeling it. Or anticipating reactions, but not feeling what is mine to feel. Or swimming in the anger but not diving through the wound. 
Though we fear it, feeling our feelings is the only clear and direct way to free our hearts of pain. 

After twenty years of exploring mindfulness it still amazes me how powerful this understanding is in shifting the mindset. I teach these concepts all the time however, just like you, I am practicing, and sometimes it takes me a little time to notice my unhelpful thoughts and my shields. Once I do, I can almost see the wall crumbling around the deeper emotions that are hard to touch. From there, the heaviness of the shield is lifted and while the suffering may take time to move through, once it does we really can find freedom.