How to know if you are really feeling your feelings or just "thinking" you are...

You've likely heard how important it is to feel your feelings...

But if you're like me, you may have been trying to go about it all wrong.

The last few years I've been trying to feel my feelings from my mind...

But your mind doesn't feel, your body does.

In this week's episode, I'm going to share what this looks like for me, and give some really big clues on how to know if you're really in your body.

I used to think that creation all started with a thought.

Your thoughts created your feelings, your feelings led to action, and your actions led to your results.

On the surface, this seems to make logical sense. It’s all very linear and tidy and clean. A perfect formula for creating the life you want: simply choose a better thought and the series of events will follow.

This is what all the spiritual teachers were saying, this is what the coaches were saying, the mindset people. The books, the classes, the podcasts...

And the thing is.... it's kind of true and it's kind of not.

Sometimes it works.

And sometimes it doesn't.

It works often enough that I believed it for myself, but all the times it didn't work I thought there must be something wrong with me. I must not have done it right.

Years ago, I developed my own formula for creation:

See--say--feel--do--become.

To see something is visualize it.

To say it I would use affirmations and mantras.

Feelings are then stirred up by these thoughts...

Which leads us to do something in action...

Which leads us to who we become.

This all works.

And sometimes it doesn't.

It's interesting, because looking back, every time I would go through this formula, I would always inwardly pause at the word FEEL....

My intuition was telling me that there was something deeper here than what I was seeing. At the time, I only saw feeling as a byproduct of thoughts... but I kept sensing there was more to it.

Out of those five simple steps, to feel is what felt the hardest for me to access.

Now I know why.

It's because I was trying to feel from my head.

Of course, it's hard to access our feelings from the mind. The mind isn't what feels; the body is!

One of my greatest realizations about how creation works is that it must include the body. We use our bodies to procreate new physical life, and we also must use our bodies to create the life we want to live.

We must use our bodies to heal the past, create the future, and love and accept the present moment.

But if you have never been taught how to do this, you will likely miss it.

Let me rephrase that...I think we are all born knowing exactly how to do this. Little babies and children are all feelers. They feel emotion and express it without judgement.

But as we grow up, we learn to judge our emotions, we learn to suppress, and consequently disconnect from the amazing wisdom and creation that comes from our divine physical body.

So... what actually needs to happen is to UNLEARN all the judgements and habits that have been programmed into our minds in regards to feelings, and return to the innocence we had as a child.

We need to:

"Become as a little child"-as Jesus would say.

Or "have a beginners mind"--as the Buddha would say.

We have to unlearn so much of what our conditioning has taught us.

When I think of all the healing that I have been through the past few years, ALL OF MY HEALING has required some unlearning.

Which is actually quite ironic to me. For years, I have considered myself a truth seeker. I have had an insatiable hunger to go and find the hidden secret knowledge that would give me power over my humanness (my feelings and reactions to feelings). I have been searching for whatever new wisdom would be the silver bullet to finally understand things in a new way that would help me triumph. This was all driven by the mind.

But my healing has not come from knowledge.

Instead, I had to unlearn what was in my brain, because in many ways, it was the knowledge that was causing my distress to begin with!

I had to:

become a little child.

have a beginners mind.

Unlearn all you think you know.

Unlearn all the dogma and the beliefs that prevent you from accessing the wisdom inside you.

We're always looking for wisdom on the outside...and there is wisdom to be found on the outside.

But the most important wisdom is actually found within.

The wisdom is within.

The kingdom of heaven is within you.

All you need to know is already inside of you. That's the great secret. That's where it's hidden.

But you have to unlearn all the things that prevent you from going inward and listen to your own voice. And where do you go to access what is within?

Your body.

Your body holds all the answers. It is the most brilliant, wise, divine resource you will ever have. It doesn't require any special knowledge to operate. It comes programmed, already knowing how to do what you need it to do.

You don't have to think about how to breathe, how to digest your food, how to pump your heart, how to grow, how to heal, how to recover. Yes, you have to take care of your body, but you don't have to learn how to do any of those vital operating things. Your body does it for you. And this brilliance goes far beyond the day-to-day operations of just keeping you alive. The body knows WAY MORE THAN THAT.

But the body doesn't speak in words. The body speaks in sensation. And this language of sensation is where the wisdom is. This communication system is called your nervous system.

Your nervous system is what signals sensations to your mind. Then your mind will put a story on the sensations, and we call that sensational story---emotion.

Sadness is not a sensation. It's a story about a sensation.

A tightness in my chest is a sensation.

Heat in my face is a sensation.

Cold in my hands, clenching of my gut, pounding of my heart, tightness in my throat, expansiveness in my heart, expansive breath flowing through my body, goosebumps, chills, my hair standing on end, tiredness, energy pulsing, tingles, these are all sensations.

When we put a story on the sensation, we call it emotion.

Flutters in the gut we call nervousness.

Or...flutters in the gut could be called excitement. Depends on what story you tell.

And it turns out that the stories we tell are nearly always influenced by our past experience. What was the story we told about this sensation last time we felt it? The mind will recycle the same story to save energy.

I've really tried the past several years to feel my feelings more. I know they hold wisdom. But laughably, I have tried feeling my feelings by talking about them. I've tried feeling my feelings from my mind.

One of the practices I learned from Buddhism was the simple awareness practice of naming my emotions.

I feel sadness.

I feel peace.

I feel disappointment.

I feel joy.

I feel gratitude.

I would label it all.

This was a really helpful step in the right direction.

You see, the mind's stories have a lot of words.

But if we leave the mental level and go one layer deeper to the emotional level, we reduce the story to one word. Already, we will feel some relief in the mind, simply because the amount of words changed. But there's still one layer deeper. And it's the layer that has no words.

We need to move from the emotional layer to the physical. To the physical body. And this is the level of no words. Instead, the body speaks in sensations. The relationship between the sensations and the story we tell is complex.

I'll never forget a profound experience I had while attending a 4-day Silent Meditation retreat a few years ago. I came into the retreat in the height of some trauma. My nervous system was in a chronic state of fight and flight and my mind was on loop with judgements and thoughts that would trigger this survival state.

For four days, we had no connection to the outside world. We gave up our phones, we were in nature all day long, and we spent about 12 hours a day in sitting or walking meditation. And my oh my oh my how I got to confront all the stories in my mind.

My experience would be on loop, and it went something like this...

...dramatic sensation in the body, instant recall of a traumatic memory...

Or maybe I'd have the recall of the memory first, and then I'd feel the dramatic sensation.

Over and over again, one or the other would trigger the loop.

By day two, after so much detox, being in nature and having no contact with the outside world, and spending so much time in meditation, my nervous system was regulating in a way that I hadn't felt in several months. Maybe even years. At this point, I noticed that the traumatic memories stopped surfacing, but the bodily sensations still came. But now I didn't feel the need to attach the sensations to a story any longer. I didn't automatically go into my mind to recall a memory and repeat the story of why I must be feeling xyz sensation.

By the final day, I was feeling so peaceful and alive. I felt so empty in the best way. Empty of the endless mental chatter. It was so refreshing. I remember looking out among the beautiful trees and saw a hawk flying in the sky, and I thought to myself, "I am so grateful for this moment."

Suddenly, with this thought of gratitude, my entire body was flooded with dramatic sensation. It was the same dramatic woosh through the body I had been feeling for months and always associating with my trauma. But this time, the same sensation is what happened in response to my thought of gratitude.

I was shocked.

I was blown away that this same sensation that had overcome my body with the story of gratitude was what I had experienced with my stories of judgement and fear. The sensations were the same. But my story was different.

Our bodies absolutely respond to our thoughts.

And...our thoughts respond to our bodies.

And when our thoughts respond to the body, the mind will always prioritize past experience when it tells the story of what you are feeling. EVEN IF IT ISN'T THE SAME TYPE OF EXPERIENCE.

This is why understanding that a thought is not always the origin of emotion is important.

I am finding for myself, that more often than expected, my feelings are the origin. My mind is just trying to be efficient.

As I said earlier, in my quest to feel my feelings more, I have attempted to feel my feelings through my mind.

Either by labeling the emotions, or by talking about how I feel.

But this is still trying to process emotion from the mind.

And when I'm trying to do this from the mind, guess what else happens?

I try to outsmart my body.

I get all strategic about how I'm going to get rid of my emotions by feeling them.

"Hmmm. I'm feeling sadness. Okay, I need to process this..."

Notice my agenda is not actually to feel, but to process---which for me is sneaky language from my ego that my agenda is actually to get rid of the feeling. I tell myself I'll dedicate the 90 seconds that researchers say it takes to feel, and then I can be done with it and get back to my life. So sneaky smart of me. I'll just call it something nicer. I'll call it processing, but really my agenda is about getting rid of it so I don't have to feel it more than the 90 seconds.

Last week, I had a great learning experience that showed me how this exact scenario was playing out for me.

I received an unexpected voice message from a friend asking me to do something that felt invalidating to me. She was actually sincere and really happy in the message, but something she said made me feel taken advantage of, and underneath that emotion was a lot of anger I was suppressing because I was trying really hard to be non-judgemental about her innocent message. I also tend to judge myself pretty harshly when I feel anger because I make the anger mean something about me being a bad person. So I definitely didn't want to feel that. So I repressed.

Instead of responding back, I decided I needed some time and space and went on a walk outside.

My mind was going in a million directions. I felt an urgency to figure out a solution immediately...How could I possibly turn down her request in a way that wouldn't hurt her feelings but also honor mine? It really felt like I either had to sacrifice myself to preserve her feelings or speak up for myself and make her feel bad. I was in polarity.

I knew I needed to feel my feelings... but I can't do that until I know what they are.

So I decided to name my emotions....

I feel....

Unwanted.

Unseen.

Taken advantage of.

Undervalued.

And yes...I feel anger.

I had discovered the emotions. But without even realizing it, I immediately jumped back into my mind. My mind wanted to review our entire friendship history and all the other times she had made me feel this way. I told myself that I was really feeling my feelings now....Remember when she made me feel unwanted this other time, and she totally took advantage of me when she did xyz two years ago, and this is not the first time I have felt this. She's never valued me. She's actually never really seen me. I've been taken advantage of so many times, and I'm finally really seeing it. I've been angry so many other times, but just haven't seen it! Well, now I see it! I see all of it! Now I'm really feeling my feelings.

Dear Listener....

This is not feeling your feelings.

This is getting worked up, telling the story in your head. You don't feel with your head.

You feel with your body.

Remember, if you're overthinking, you are under feeling.

If you are overthinking, you are underfeeling.

This phrase kept ringing in my brain and I realized that I was absolutely overthinking this. I was fooling myself that I was feeling. I was trying to outsmart my body by talking about the feelings rather than actually feeling them.

So I paused.

I found a tree to sit by, and I took some deep breaths and decided to go inward and feel the sensations.

Tightness in my throat.

Tightness in my chest.

Flushed in my face.

No story, just sensations.

To feel your feelings, you need to be in the body. And the body speaks in the language of sensation. There are no words here.

I brought awareness to the tightness. I breathed into those places.

And then this next step was super important.

I didn't make the sensations wrong.

I didn't tell it to go away.

I just sat with it.

No judgement.

And No agenda.

No 90-second stopwatch.

I just let it be there. I made space for it. I didn't expect it to leave.

I didn't make it wrong to feel anger. To feel unseen, unvalued, and taken advantage of. I imagined the part of me feeling all of these sensations, and just sent her love and acceptance.

Something quite marvelous happened after that.

My mind calmed waaaaaayyyyyy down. And so did my body.

If you're overthinking, then you're underfeeling.

So the opposite is true as well.

As you feel more, your mind will obsess less.

Just making space to feel and be with what was arising changed the experience.

The circumstances didn't change (I still had an awkward message to respond to.) But my relationship to the circumstance changed.

I felt so calm. I stood up and walked the rest of the way home, enjoying nature. Instead of my mind freaking out like it had minutes before, I had this powerful clarity. Without even trying, there were words that came into my mind of how to handle the situation and what to say.

When I went back to my phone, I saw another message had come through while I was away. It was an apology. She had come to the realization on her own that she had overstepped. And of course, maybe my delayed response gave her a moment of reflection...regardless, it beautifully opened up a conversation that allowed me to be authentic and share my own experience without sacrificing myself. It was a calm and expansive conversation.

I'm just so amazed at the power of listening to our bodies. The power of dropping the story of the mind and really going inward to presence and learn from the language of the body. The sensations.

If I were to sum up this process, it would be a series of simplifying.

Stage One would include lots of stories in my mind. So many words.

Stage Two would be to drop from the mental level into the emotional. Ask myself what emotion am I feeling? Now the story is simplified into one word.

Stage Three would be to drop into the body and bring awareness to what I am feeling. At this level, there are no words. Only sensations.

The reason the mind calms down is because you have gone from the mental to the emotional to the physical. And you have honored all of it.

Next time you find your mind in a frenzy, do this.

Pause all the many words, drop into the one word emotion and then drop into no words of the physical body and allow yourself to feel from here. Without judgement, and welcome it with acceptance. See what happens.

I'm 44 years old. I really wish I would have learned how to do this decades ago. I wish I would have learned how my body speaks, how to listen, how to communicate, how to integrate the wisdom it holds. I wish I would have known how to feel my feelings from the body, and not just think about my feelings. Better late than never.

The amazing thing is that every one of us has a body that holds this same wisdom. Everyone. The creator of the universe is so wise and benevolent to provide every human with access to exactly what we need in the treasure within.

The body is amazing.

The law of creation begins with feeling.

Feel, be, see, say, and do.

This is how we heal the past, create the future, and love and accept the present moment.

Feel, be, see, say, and do.

The light in me honors the light in you.

Namaste.

If this episode resonated with you, I’d love to hear about your experience. You can leave a comment on YouTube or share this episode with someone who might benefit from these insights. And if you're ready to feel and express your deep feelings in a safe container, I would love to invite you to attend my next LIVE online breathwork session. You can check the dates for the next one at brookesnow.com/events or click the link in the shownotes. You are a creator. Now go co-create something great.