Hello Love!
I talk a LOT about connecting with our emotions. That our emotions are guides for us. That tuning into our emotional responses to life is incredibly important for figuring out who we are, what we need, what direction we want to go in this life and so on.
I firmly believe that our emotions can't lie to us, that our body sensations can't lie to us, and that when we get good at FEELING we have the ticket OUT of our conditioning and programs and INTO real reality.
But the problem is, most of us have been deeply conditioned to INTERPRET our feelings/emotions in a way that is actually incorrect to the message they're sending.
Most of us are having genuine FEELINGS - reactions to thoughts, beliefs, situations and so on - that we are then believing mean certain things about us, about the world, about what we can and can't do - and these interpretations are actually our conditioning mislabelling, misjudging and misdiagnosing our body sensations.
For example, many of us have a jolt of sensation run through our bodies when we're about to do something we've never done before - we may interpret this feeling to be 'anxiety' and then go on to tell ourselves the story that this is our body telling us NO DON'T GO! When in fact, that is actually our bodies saying 'I'm scared to do this new thing because it may get me rejected' If we were to let go of the initial label 'anxiety' we may find that when we simply FEEL the sensation, what's actually happening is a mix of 'fear' and also 'excitement'. We may find that a new narrative 'I can do this and see how it goes' relaxes the body. In another case, we may think what we're feeling when we tell someone 'no' is 'shame'. We may go on to make this 'shame' mean we did something wrong, and walk back our boundary. When in fact what we were feeling was a mixture of 'fear' and 'groundedness' - with the real message being again 'it's ok to let people down, I'm an adult now who can still survive even if I'm not pleasing - and this boundary feels good to ME even if I know it's going to upset the other person.'
Sometimes an emotion doesn't 'mean' anything - it's simply a natural part of the human experience we just need to move through.
Learning to actually get the messages from our emotions isn't easy - because we have to really go ALL the way back to the BASICS and question our most basic assumptions about what we're feeling and what those feelings mean. At the same time we don't want to get OVERLY attached to 'non-attachment' to our emotions, because that can be equally disempowering.
Today let's explore how this practice of not attaching meaning to our emotions right away can be helpful, a tool to use to help you create some space between your stories and your emotions, and how not to swing too far in the other direction where you RESIST labelling emotions in a way that's equally destabilizing.
