If you haven’t done so already, I highly recommend that you go back and read the Part One of this post before reading this one.
That post will help give you some foundational understandings about your feelings and felt sensations - and how they are there to help you discern reality from stories we are making up about reality.
Today we are going to dive deeper into how we can start to notice in OURSELVES when our bodies are speaking to us, and how we can start to understand and discern the messages our bodies are sending us.
FEELING The Difference Between A TRUE Thought And A False Thought
From here, what we want to start to notice is what it feels like for US specifically when our bodies say yes and when they say no.
Because not all of us are going to experience this in the exact same way.
However there are going to be some common THEMES that arise for all of us when we are tuning into our body sensations and mining them for information.
To put it in the most general of terms, what *most* of us are going to experience when our bodies are letting us know that we have landed on a truth (a true thought, a true belief, a plan that is actually going to work out for us long term, an idea that is really going to take us where we want to go etc) we are going to have a physical experience of feeling openness, relaxation, expansion, grounding, settling - or a RELEASE of a health emotion like sadness, anger, grief, exhaustion, joy, happiness, excitement.
When we are landing in connection with real reality, the body is going to respond in a grounded, open way, and there will be room for PURE emotions to come through to be felt and expressed.
On the other end of the spectrum, when we are thinking thoughts about ourselves, life or where we are headed that aren’t in alignment with reality, when we are catastrophizing, when we are shaming and guilting ourselves, when we are in a place of running a story that is from conditioning and not reality the body is going to respond by contracting, shutting down, feeling ill, feeling unsettled and deeply uncomfortable, feeling buzzy, pain or it’s going to drive us into further thoughts of how we are failing, not good enough or otherwise shameful.
Many of us are going to be surprised to find that even when we are thinking thoughts that we don’t WANT to be true, when we are connecting to a reality that is hard to accept or deeply painful and when we are realizing something that is confronting - there is STILL going to be a sense of relaxation, rightness, groundedness and again, sometimes a release of a pure emotion that goes along with that realization.
We’re going to find that even if we come to accept that someone we loved has passed away, that we’ve lost a relationship, that we are facing a diagnosis or that we have to accept that a path we’ve been walking isn’t right for us - there is STILL going to be a sense of PEACE about this.
On top of that, there’s going to be a sense of feeling like we get some CLARITY on what our next steps are.
This is the most powerful part of coming into alignment with reality and accepting what is.
It doesn’t meant that we are now stuck, that we can’t change anything, that what is is what always has to be.
Rather, when we come into alignment with reality this is where we are going to figure out where we have the POWER to shift things we may not have previously been able to shift. This is where we’re going to come into the awareness that what we may need next is simply to emotionally process before we try to ‘figure out what to do.’ This is where we’re going to get clarity on what’s truly occurring, what it ACTUALLY means for us and thus, where we can start to learn something new or where we can take new steps to alter what we have control over, to express and process what we need to express and process and to learn to accept so we can adjust to what we can’t change.
When we come into alignment with reality, THIS is where we are going to find ALL of the power that we ACTUALLY have.
This sometimes means having to accept that the power we *thought* we had while we were believing in a reality that didn’t exist, also doesn’t exist. We may have to admit to ourselves that the solutions we thought we were going to enact aren’t actual solutions. We may have to accept that a potential future we thought we were headed for or that we really believed we could create isn’t actually possible - and there may be a time where we have to grieve that and process the emotions that go along with losing the hope we had.
This sometimes means have to reorient ourselves to a totally new perspective and this can sometimes bring up feelings of fear and resistance. Learning that we were wrong and feeling like we ‘don’t know’ can be really scary - but again, if we allow ourselves to RELAX into that unknown, if we allow ourselves to open up to the letting go of what we THOUGHT was so that we can then start to see what IS - we will always find that we DO start to have the capacity to see new steps, new direction, new information and new awareness that WILL empower us and give us tools for moving forward.
Coming into alignment with reality takes us out of shame, blame and guilt.
Coming into alignment with reality will help us see WHY we do the things we do, why we are in the situation we’re in, why we’re not bad, wrong or otherwise just messing up our lives.
Coming into alignment with reality will give us access to our TRUE emotions - our anger, sadness, grief, joy, excitement, passion and so on - and those emotions will then help us figure out where we need to process and where we need to make adjustments to our lives to better support ourselves.
Coming into alignment with reality will be clarifying. It may not reveal to us EVERYTHING that’s happening, it may not help us see the WHOLE path forward - but it will always show us what our NEXT steps are. It will show us where we actually are on the map of life, and that is the foundation we need to be able to figure out where our next step is.
Coming into alignment with reality will be grounding. Not always joyful. Not always exciting. Not always what we WANTED it to be. But it will always be settling and empowering.
When we are believing thoughts and following paths that aren’t true, we are always going to feel scattered, we are going to find that no matter how hard we try we can’t make our plans work, we’re going to find that we always truly BELIEVE we are on the ‘right path’ only to end up not making the progress we wanted to make in life or not getting where we wanted to go but instead ending up in similar situations of chaos over and over again.
When we are believing thoughts that aren’t true we are going to see ourselves as broken, shameful, wrong and bad - just making ‘bad choices’ for no reason and as being in need of fixing.
When we are believing thoughts that aren’t true there may be a ‘buzzy’ feeling, and electrical sensation, a ‘this is going to change my whole life/this is the answer to all of my problems’ feeling that we can mistake for the body saying ‘yes’.
When we are believing thoughts that aren’t true we are often going to be in a state of thinking ‘always’ or ‘never’ thoughts, and this will usually make us feel shut down, trapped and like there’s no way forward.
When we are believing things that aren’t true we’re going to feel scattered and like we can’t find any clarity to help us move forward.
When we’re believing things that aren’t true we won’t have access to our real emotions. We won’t be able to look at systems or the bigger context of our lives and how we got to where we are, but rather we will be looking to simplify everything down to one cause or one flaw in us.
We’re going to feel contracted, constricted, trapped, shameful, guilty and like our bodies are either shutting down or going into hyper-drive to try to get us to MOVE.
We’re going to notice that our thoughts feels FAMILIAR - that we’ve thought these things over and over and over again, and we’ve walked the paths we think we need to walk to ‘fix’ ourselves or our lives over and over again. We may be putting slightly different costumes on our patterns - but if we look close enough we will find that we’ve been doing the same things over and over again to try to move forward because those things feel FAMILIAR - and we are misinterpreting that familiarity with ‘rightness.’
THIS is what we want to start to tune into and become aware of.
Again, this is tough work. Most of us aren’t used to feeling our bodies. We aren’t used to actually interrogating our feelings and questioning what we’re making our feelings mean. We’re not used to questioning thoughts that feel familiar but terrible. We’re not used to holding ourselves back from following paths and thoughts that are buzzy and exciting. We’re not used to questioning our catastrophizing thoughts because most of us don’t recognize them as such but rather believe that we are seeing reality for how it is, and that reality just FEELS really TERRIBLE.
Many of us aren’t used to making room for our true emotions, and don’t know how to process them - so staying stuck in loops of shame and guilt can sometimes feel safer.
So please be gentle on yourself as you start to work with this idea.
Give yourself space to expand into it with practice.
What Am I Making The Truth MEAN
The last thing I want to touch on before I give you some practical practice tools is the idea that many of us are going to realize that when we come into seeing reality for how it is, we aren’t able to just accept it for what it is in the moment.
Rather, we tend to start making up stories about what reality MEANS for us, for our future, how it’s going to work out for us, what’s going to happen as a result of what we’re seeing and we start making up stories about what it means to have lost what we THOUGHT reality was, what this means about us and our intelligence. We are going to find that going into that space of ‘not knowing’ where we have let go of what we used to believe but aren’t quite clear on what the truth that will replace what we believed is yet, is really uncomfortable and in THIS we may start to feel some uncomfortable, painful and contracting feelings again.
This is where a lot of people get tripped up in following their feelings.
Many of us have a hard time really drilling into the difference between seeing reality for what it is and accepting it and embracing it, and making up stories about what that reality MEANS about us, our lives and our future.
Many people believe that coming into alignment with reality is painful and causes a negative physical reaction because what they are ACTUALLY reacting to is their THOUGHT about reality.
For instance, we may come into the reality that we have lost a relationship that we really wanted to work out. That we are not going to be with someone who isn’t right for us, that we need to separate and that that separation is ultimately the best thing long term.
Right on the heels of that we may then start spinning stories about what this breakup MEANS about us and our future.
We may start thinking ‘I always lose the people that I love. I’m clearly not worthy of being loved. This is going to be how it always is for me. They left because I am just not lovable and never will be. I’m going to be alone forever. I’m never going to be chosen and this is just another sign that this is true.’
We may then start to feel a whole bunch of terrible physical sensations.
Many of us would then assume that this is because admitting that we are going through a breakup is the truth but it’s painful and terrible and thus our bodies responding by shutting down and having a lot of pain is a sign that reality is just terrible and our bodies are confirming that with the pain we are in.
But if we dive deeper we are going to see that if we JUST focus on the idea that we are in a breakup, that the relationship didn’t go how we wanted it to and that we now have to embrace that - what we are going to experience again is a sense of peace. There is going to be a sense of accepting this reality - and then perhaps there will be sadness. Maybe some resentment or anger. Maybe there will be a wishing that things could be different. There may be a period of time where we don't feel JOY - but the underlying feeling will still be one of peace and knowing what our next steps are - processing and grieving the loss.
Whereas when we are making the breakup MEAN that we are unlovable, will be alone forever and that we’re deeply shameful and unwanted - THAT is when the real pain occurs.
Our bodies are telling us that we are making up a story about reality that isn’t true - and even though that story may be something we’ve told ourselves over and over and over again, even though it may be familiar, and even though we may feel like we have all the evidence in the world to confirm that that story is true - we’re going to notice that it actually feels like a NO when we tune into our bodies.
It wasn’t the breakup that was shutting us down and making us spiral into shame - but rather the STORIES we were telling ourselves about the breakup.
You see?
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Alright, let’s take one more break here and come back next week to finish up this series!
<3
Want more tools like this?
Check out The Mystery School Here
