
Hello amazing one!
We are here - the final post in this incredibly long series 😉
Now if you haven’t already done so, please do read:
Part One
Of this series.
Today, we are looking at the final piece - how to start using your FEELINGS as guides to help you see reality.
We are going to be exploring just how POWERFUL it can be to understand the difference between a ‘yes’ feeling and a ‘no’ feeling - and how we can start to understand how our own bodies/feelings/emotions speak to us, so that we can use them as tools to help us navigate reality.
This is a BIG thing to learn, and it takes TIME. So please go slow with this work and be gentle on yourself.
One step at a time.
Let’s dive in!
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Your Feelings ARE Talking To You - They May Just Be Saying Something You Don’t Understand YET.
The last piece of this emotional mastery puzzle that I want to hand to you, is the piece of using our feelings as guides.
This is the biggest piece, and it’s the piece that’s going to require the longest to understand, settle into and get a feel for.
So please don’t feel like just because you read this article or listened to videos on this topic, that you should now be able to simply perfectly DO this without any effort, time or confusion!
This part of the process is something I want you to consider in terms of years - not months or weeks - in terms of really getting the hang of it.
Learning to slow down, really feel our feelings, understand what those feelings are attempting to communicate and learning how to be balanced in our approach to our feelings is a BIG job - and it’s something that goes deeply against what we are taught in our culture.
So again.
Look at this as a journey you’re going to go on, rather than as a ‘thing’ you’re going to ‘learn’ and then do perfectly forever.
Our feelings are complex, and learning to actually feel them, to actually pick up on their messages, to get past the STORIES we have about them and what we’ve been making them mean for a long time isn’t quick work.
We must assume this is going to take time, and we must approach this with as much compassion, love, patience and understanding as we can muster.
Feelings are complex, learning to see past shame and guilt is complex, learning to feel a feeling without running away is complex, learning to question our narratives about our feelings is complex - it’s all a lot!
So let’s go slow, and take this one step at a time.
Dropping Into The Body
The first step in this process of learning to use our feelings as guides, is to learn to start feeling our feelings!
For most of us again, we are deeply used to THINKING about our feelings, we are used to RESPONDING to our feelings, we are used to telling ourselves STORIES about our feelings - but we aren’t used to actually just FEELING our feelings.
Because a lot of the time, our feelings are uncomfortable. They are unfamiliar. We don’t know what they mean right away and they lead to a lot of narratives that we are out of control, that if we don’t DO something right now we’re going to be stuck in pain forever, that what we are assuming is just RIGHT and TRUE and must be acted upon RIGHT NOW.
All of this is TOTALLY understandable, and of course we want to have nothing but compassion for ourselves that this is our current way of viewing our feelings if it’s our current way of viewing our feelings.
Whether we are coming into this work with lots of resistance, or coming into this work with a little more practice in feeling our feelings - the starting point is the same.
Learning how to simply BE in the body, to EXPERIENCE the feeling, to WITNESS the feeling without RESPONDING to the feeling right away.
What this looks like practically is the following:
No matter the experience you’re having - whether that be one where you are experiencing a big emotion, lots of thoughts, confusion, if you’re in a state of shame, guilt or self blame, if you’re in a state of wanting to fix, change or alter yourself in some way, when you’re having repetitive thoughts about yourself that you know drive you into behaviors that are cyclical but never actually get you the freedom you’re looking for, when you’re in a state of calm and relaxation, when you’re in an outwards state of calm and relaxation but inwardly you are feeling unsettled and uncomfortable - literally ANY time you want to use this work it’s here for you.
Because pretty much no matter what, we are always FEELING something.
The body is always going to be having SOME sort of feedback to what’s going on in our minds and around us, and that is what we are wanting to tap into with this emotional mastery work.
So wherever you are - all you need to do to get this process started is to drop into your BODY.
To do a body scan from feet to head, simply allowing yourself to NOTICE SENSATION as you do this scan.
Now remember, we are not looking to label our feelings as emotions, we are not looking to label them as right or wrong, nor are we looking for their ‘meaning’ right now.
We are slowing WAY down and starting with just noticing PURE sensation.
What I mean by this is:
Rather than labeling what you’re feeling as an emotion (sadness, anger, guilt) or jumping straight to what you think you need to DO about the feeling (I feel like I need to run, talk to this person, get on the next diet) - we are just going to focus on feeling what we are feeling and describing it as PURE sensation.
Hot.
Cold.
Numb.
Tingling.
Heavy.
Light.
Expanding.
Contracting.
THESE are the kinds of words I want to invite you to use when looking at your feelings.
Taking a moment to feel WHERE you feel the sensation in your body, then taking the time to observe all there is to observe about the sensations that feeling is creating.
For example:
I feel in my chest, a feeling of contracting, heavy, dense, thick energy that feels like sludge or like there is a rock on my chest.
I feel a sensation of butterflies, electrical energy, vibrating in my belly.
I feel tension, sweatiness, chills and pulsing in my palms and hands.
THIS is how we drop into sensation.
WHERE do you feel sensation in your body and WHAT does it feel like?
Then see if you can simply let the feeling exist, without acting on it or making meaning out of it right away. Your mind is going to want to jump in with all sorts of stories about what you need to do and of course there can be a fear that if we don’t DO SOMETHING about it all RIGHT NOW that we are going to be trapped in pain/our lives are going to fall apart.
This is normal.
See if you can simply start to let yourself see what happens when you give yourself space to observe without reacting right away. Promise yourself that you ARE going to act - that you’re not dooming yourself to inaction forever. You’re just doing this to try to get MORE information so that you can take more INTELLIGENT action.
This isn’t about learning to become stoic so that we can just have wild emotions and feelings and act like nothing is happening. We don’t observe it as an END point. This is a STARTING point. Remind yourself of that as often as you need. We’re not going to be in observation forever, and this observation isn’t INSTEAD of intelligent action. This is just doing things in right ORDER.
We stop to observe, to gather more information, to get clearer about what’s going on - THEN we can act.
Also do allow yourself to practice letting the feeling exist and practice noticing the resistance or fear you may have around NOT doing something about it. Observe the stories you may have about what will happen if you don’t DO something about the feeling - if you don’t act to make it go away, if you don’t adjust yourself, if you don’t numb it out - even just for 3-4 minutes.
For a lot of us, learning to FEEL is actually really intense work. It can be really overwhelming and it can lead to a lot of feelings of being stuck, or even like the feeling is going to kill us. It can be really scary to just let a feeling exist and to simply FEEL it.
But part of emotional mastery is slowly working to increase our tolerance for feeling, so that we can spend more time getting information from the feeling. Part of emotional mastery is learning how to feel a feeling without responding, and learning for ourselves through action that feelings don’t actually have the power to hurt or harm us. That we CAN let them exist and that we DON’T have to act on them every time. That we can feel them and be ok - even if they are uncomfortable and intense.
Again, this is really HARD for a lot of us - so be patient with yourself. Go slow. Learn to sit with a feeling for just a minute or two - promising yourself you can act or numb or distract yourself as soon as the minutes are up. Then see if you can slowly start to increase the amount of time you are able to spend with your feelings, until you get to a place where you KNOW you can let a feeling happen and you KNOW it’s not going to kill you or take you down or last forever. Give yourself the chance to experience that a feeling is just a feeling and that it can’t actually hurt you. Through slow and steady practice.
Try this the next time you feel activated in any way - the next time you want to act how you’ve always acted, the next time you are feeling overwhelmed, hurt, scared, lonely or triggered, the next time you notice yourself going into a freeze/fawn state, the next time you are thinking thoughts that you think on a regular basis - take a few minutes to just slow down and notice the sensations you are feeling as this happens.
Learning to OBSERVE a feeling without reacting or responding, learning to create space between feeling the feeling and coming up with an action plan, learning to simply and make space for a new story is a MASSIVE step in the direction of TRUE emotional mastery.
So practice this for a while.
Let this step be enough for a while.
Then when you’re ready to add more, move on to step two.
Noticing The Story
From here, when you have taken some time to notice the feeling and be with the sensations in our bodies, and when we’ve practiced simply allowing them to exist and noticing that not acting right away, not doing anything about the sensation and simply letting it rise and fall on its own doesn’t kill us - which can be a really challenging thing to do so please be patient with yourself - we can then start to notice the THOUGHTS we are having and how these THOUGHTS feel.
Thus, as we are observing our body sensations, we can then shift to our minds and notice:
What’s the story that is going through your mind about yourself right now?
What are you telling yourself that this feeling means about you and reality?
What are you telling yourself about what’s wrong with you, what’s shameful about you, and what’s bad about you?
What are you telling yourself is the cause of your pain/habits/feelings/current circumstances?
What are you making your current circumstances MEAN about you and your life?
Can you start to look at the NARRATIVES that are going on in your head and begin to notice how THEY feel in your body?
When you think the thoughts you’re thinking - what SENSATIONS come with those thoughts? Where do you feel the sensations in your body and what do they feel like as a sensation?
This is where the work can start to get tricky.
We are going to want to tell ourselves ‘the thought feels true.’ ‘The thought feels right.’ ‘Look at all the evidence I have to support this thought.’ The more times we’ve thought a thought, the more time we’ve had to look for evidence to support the thought, the more others have played into the thought, the more we have been told by others that what we are thinking is the truth and the more FAMILIAR the thought feels to us - the more inclined we are going to be to believe that our FEELINGS are JUSTIFYING the feeling.
We are going to notice that in a lot of ways, the WORSE a thought feels - the heavier, denser, more guilt inducing and painful a thought is, the more we believe that this makes it TRUE.
We are going to notice again that the longer we have thought a thought, the longer we have had a certain story, the more resistant we are going to be to seeing the thought as anything but obvious truth.
So be prepared for this as you work into the next step, which is:
Notice any thought that feels heavy, dense, harsh, overwhelming, like it’s weighing you down, notice any thought that feels really buzzy, like it’s leading to a manic ‘fight or flight’ state that may sometimes feel like ‘energy’, notice any feeling that makes you feel like you’re sinking into yourself or otherwise like you’re shackled, frozen, stuck or otherwise iced out - and start to bring this idea to it - ‘any thought that feels terrible, dense, heavy or high and buzzy in my body, means that my BODY is telling me that the thought isn’t totally true.’
Any thought that leads to feelings of heaviness, denseness, stuckness, or manic energy is a thought that isn’t totally in alignment with real reality - with what’s actually happening.
The opposite is true as well. Any thought that feels like lightness, freedom, grounded energy, a grounded sense of peace, a settling of the energy, like clean burning fuel - these thoughts ARE in alignment with some aspect of REAL reality.
Now again remember, each thought can have parts that are true and parts that are false - so we don’t want to say ‘if this thought feels bad it means it’s all wrong and it also means that the opposite must therefore be true.’ It’s not that simple. We have to take time to slowly process the thought and the feeling to get to the DETAILS of what’s being communicated.
But generally speaking - anything that feels terrible in the body contains perception and perspectives that aren’t in alignment with reality, and any thought that feels grounded, light, freeing and peaceful in the body contains elements that ARE in alignment with reality.
I know.
This is REALLY hard.
Especially again when we are really USED to thinking our thoughts and we’re USED to using our FEELINGS of heaviness, stuckness, dread, buzzing and manic energy as ‘evidence’ that the thought is true.
But in real reality - this is your BODY speaking to you.
It’s telling you that even though your MIND is convinced of this reality, it’s not real reality.
I know.
Radical.
This is again going to lead to a place of feeling like ‘if this isn’t reality, then what is? If this isn’t true, how do I figure out what is true? If this feeling is telling me I have to question my thoughts - how the hell am I supposed to know what reality is?!’
This is normal.
This is going to happen and I want you to be prepared for it.
Because from here, you’re just going to take some time to continue to be with the feeling, and to allow the feeling to communicate with you.
Which is not something most of us are used to doing, at all.
Because our feelings aren’t going to communicate directly to us with words and fully formed insights right away. Rather we are going to be with sensation, we are going to observe, we are going to open our minds to questioning that our current narratives may not be true - and we are then going to ALLOW ourselves to be in the UNKNOWN for a while.
From here, I invite you to allow yourself to process the information that is going to come from having felt the feeling and having opened yourself to the idea that there may be more to reality than you are seeing right now through the following steps:
1. Stream Of Consciousness Writing: Over the course of the next few days, give yourself the space to pull out a pen and paper or a word document or even a voice recorder, set a timer for 15-20 minutes and let yourself just write/speak the entire time, with no censoring and no stopping for the entire time. See what comes up when you express about this in the form of writing our speaking, letting everything that’s on the inside come out.
2. Move Your Body: the next thing I highly encourage is to move your body in whatever way feels natural to you. Go for a walk. Take a yoga class. Stretch. Do some breathwork. Give yourself some time and space to PHYSICALLY move the ‘information’ through your vessel. See what insights come to mind when you allow yourself to MOVE the feelings through your body as your mind remains open to the idea that there may be more information for you to see than you are seeing right now.
3. Explore The Fear: From here, give yourself a chance to explore the FEAR of believing that what you’re thinking is true that feels terrible ISN’T true. Write or speak into a voice recorder about all the ‘what if’s’ that come up when you contemplate the idea that reality may be different than you think it is right now. What are you afraid will happen if what you are believing isn’t true? Then what? Then what? Then what? Get yourself to follow the fear all the way to the ROOT fear - the bottom thing that you’re ACTUALLY afraid of if you were to start to take on a new perspective or if you were to stop believing what you think is true right now. See what you’re REALLY afraid of.
4. Start With Compassion: Do a journaling or voice recording exercise where you allow yourself to brainstorm what may be true, if the terrible feeling you’re feeling is indicating that the thoughts you’re thinking AREN’T true. Allow yourself to write or speak at the beginning - if what I’m telling myself/have been told in this situation isn’t true, then what else COULD be true? Can you start to open to the evidence for other realities to exist? Can you make room for other options to start coming into your field of awareness? Can you OPEN UP instead of shutting down and looking for more evidence to support what you already believe? Can you allow yourself to be CURIOUS and OPEN instead of trying to scramble back into what you’ve been believing?
Take your time. Open up. Process. See what insights and awareness comes to you as you continue to give yourself the benefit of the doubt that anything that feels terrible is meant to be questioned and anything that feels good needs to be expanded upon. You may be surprised at how quickly your perception opens up and how much more information you’re able to gather, take in and hold!
Shame, Guilt And Blame:
Finally, the last tool I want to give you in terms of using your FEELINGS to guide you in your life, is to start to question every shame, guilt and blame story you have.
This is going to be the HARDEST step on the emotional mastery path for most of us, but it’s also the most important.
The truth is, in real reality, there is ALWAYS going to be a TRUE feeling that has TRUE guidance for us UNDER all of our shame, blame and guilt stories.
Shame, blame and guilt are actually tools we developed in our childhoods in an attempt to keep ourselves safe.
We believed that our behavior was the one thing we had control over (which it was) and that the one way to get what we wanted and needed was to CONFORM to what we PERCEIVED the expectations of our caregivers were - because their love and acceptance, in our perspective, = getting our needs met and their disapproval = not getting our needs met.
Also, they were the arbiters of reality - we had no way of knowing that what they were teaching us wasn’t the only way to see/do things, we had no idea that there were other ways of viewing the world, that there were other ways of being, that there was a whole big world out there of people who may totally love and accept who and what we are even if our caregivers didn’t. All we knew in this very delicate time of our lives was that doing what our caregivers and other authority figures told us to do was the ‘right’ thing and everything else was ‘wrong.’
Meaning, if something felt GOOD to us, but got us rejected, denied, punished or abandoned - even if our behavior wasn’t even the cause for these outcomes but if this is what we perceived - we learned to use shame, blame and guilt to stop ourselves from being/doing/expressing/feeling our innate humanity in order that we fit in better with the conditioning we were handing.
Shame, blame and guilt were tools we used to SHUT DOWN what we were actually feeling, what we actually wanted to do and be, what felt good to us and essentially to shut down our own inner guidance so that we could follow along with what we were being told.
If something felt terrible to us but it was something we were being TOLD was the truth (you deserve to be treated this way because there’s something wrong with YOU, you aren’t good enough, you have to change, how you are isn’t ok), or if something felt terrible for us to do but we were being conditioned that it was what we HAD to do and be in order to fit in - again we were going to develop shame, blame and guilt to cover up our TRUE emotions (the anger we felt at being treated poorly, the happiness we felt at expressing or doing what felt true to us and so on).
We learned to blame, shame and guilt ourselves as a way of fitting into conditioning and as a way of convincing ourselves of what we were being told even when it totally went against how we actually FELT.
This is why learning to dig into our blame, shame and guilt stories to what we are ACTUALLY feeling and ACTUALLY thinking under them is SO important for helping us to SEE REALITY.
Oftentimes what we are ACTUALLY feeling when we think we’re feeling shame, is anger, sadness, an unmet need, a way of life that hurts - that we have been trained to suppress, deny and avoid via telling ourselves that WE are the problem, that we deserve the pain, that we are the cause of how others are treating us and so on. And we have little to no capacity to really QUESTION these stories because we are so afraid that if we stop blaming ourselves and stop trying to fix ourselves that we will be stuck in pain forever.
Our hands are on the burner. We are in pain. But we believe that pain is a sign that WE are broken, wrong and shameful, and that the only way to make the pain stop is to figure out what’s wrong with US to make the pain go away.
When we start to dig PAST the shame, blame and guilt, we can finally get to our TRUE emotions, what we need to process and also to our TRUE feelings that will guide us in the direction of what we actually want and need.
THIS is the BIGGEST ticket to freedom that the emotional mastery path gives us.
Shame, blame and guilt are always lies, and there’s always more to the story.
Check out this video for more on this as well.
So What Do We Do With The Shame Blame And Guilt?
First, you now have your tools of self compassion, curiosity, being able to pause and feel and you have the tool of learning to question anything that feels terrible inside your body as possibly being something that isn’t in alignment with real reality.
THIS is a LOT - and now you are ready to put it into practice in the most radical way.
You are now ready to look at ANY shame, blame and guilt story you have about yourself, your personality, the way you behave, the way you think, the way you respond to life - and to use all of these tools to help you dive PAST shame and guilt into what you’re ACTUALLY feeling/wanting/needing.
For the next week (and of course beyond if you find this practice helpful!) I want to invite you to practice the following technique:
Next time you’re feeling shame, blame or guilt - when you are telling yourself that who and what you are is wrong, bad, shameful, broken or otherwise not ok, when you are telling yourself that if you don’t change you are going to destroy your whole life, when you are believing a narrative that’s telling you that you aren’t good enough and that you have to be different, when you are in a spiral of blaming yourself for your life and where you are, when you are in pain and looking for how it’s your fault, when you want or desire something and feel like this makes you wrong, bad or sinful, when you are engaging in your coping, numbing and self sabotage, when you are struggling in relationships and looking for what’s wrong with you, when you’re feeling like there is something DEEPLY not ok about who and what you are or when you are feeling like the way others are treating you that hurts is something you deserve because you are unworthy of love/respect - this is when you can take a step back and put all your tools into practice.
Step One: Notice where you feel these thoughts in your BODY. Do you feel these thoughts in your chest? Your belly? Hands? Face? What area of the body is ‘lighting up’ with sensation or lack of sensation? (Remember, numb is a feeling).
Step Two: What’s the sensation? Practice what you’ve been practicing in terms of just FEELING the sensation as a sensation - is it light? Heavy? Expanding? Contracting? Shooting? Spinning? See how deeply you can BE with the FEELING.
Step Three: Is it a YES feeling or a No feeling? From here, using the tool of ‘if it feels like shit in my body it’s not true - even if it feels FAMILIAR and even if it ‘feels true’ in the sense that I have thought this thought a million times and collected lots of evidence for its truth - and if it feels like lightness, groundedness and expansion then it IS true’ to really ASSESS if your BODY is telling you that this thought is really true or not.
Step Four: Assuming the best about yourself: From here, if it feels terrible, I invite you to consider - what might I NEED right now that I’m not getting? What am I REALLY feeling if I’m NOT feeling guilt, shame and blame? What if I am not the problem here - then what? What emotions may be lurking UNDER this shame? Am I angry? Sad? Disgusted? Am I rejecting something that I actually don’t like? Am I wanting something I’m not supposed to have? Am I craving something I don’t know how to give myself? If I am not to blame (which doesn’t mean I don’t have power or that I can’t take steps to change things, it just means I’m going to find where I am GOOD and what I NEED before I figure out what my actions steps are) what is REALLY going on for me? Let yourself explore what you may be feeling if blame, shame and guilt AREN’T the actual feelings that are occurring for you. Can you give yourself the benefit of the doubt? Can you assume that you are doing the behaviors you are for a GOOD reason, and ask what the positive intentions are in them? Can you make room for your TRUE emotions? Can you let yourself admit to yourself what you are ACTUALLY feeling/wanting/what hurts/what feels good? Make space for this and go slow - this is going to be challenging and will often take SEVERAL attempts and tries. Stick with it.
Step Five: Exploring what you need: From here, can you start to get CURIOUS about what would feel SUPPORTIVE for you in this moment? Can you ask yourself if you need some space to GRIEVE the pain you’ve been through? Do you need to realize that others were WRONG about you and what you needed? Can you get angry? Can you allow yourself to NOT want what you don’t want? Can you start to see why you may be doing the things you are from a place of not having any other tools to try to get your needs met? Can you start to open to the idea that you don’t need to be FIXED, but you need to be understood and allowed to process your feelings? Can you make space to be angry, sad, disgusted or otherwise upset without needing to have the answers or solutions right now? Can you allow yourself to want what you want even if you don’t know how you’re going to get it? Can you let yourself be upset about what happened to you? Can you make space to just OWN your humanity for a while? What would feel MOST supportive for you in this moment, and how can you give yourself that to the best of your ability?
THIS is the process.
We aren’t going to get all of our answers all at once. This is a STARTING POINT not an end point.
This work can lead us into getting other support like therapy and other guidance. It can lead us to other work, books, resources and supports. It can help us start the process of processing our past and starting to see where our conditioning has led us down a path that isn’t working.
THIS work of learning how to use our feelings to guide us to what we are REALLY feeling, wanting and needing IS the path of emotional mastery.
Using the FEELINGS to guide our actions - then using the mind to figure out what those feelings mean and how to use them.
One step at a time.
I hope this exploration has given you a map to try.
And of course there’s lots more about this on my youtube channel, and this is the main work we do in the Aliyah Mystery School if you ever want to explore that!
With that, I will leave you.
Onwards!
<3
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