Befriending Our Feelings -Working Wisely With Our Emotions

A track to support you in working in wise ways with your own feelings; including learning a tool for “turning the volume up or down” on your emotions. This track starts with an in-depth, detailed talk on re-owning feelings, then moves into a guided body-based practice; supporting you in becoming your own authority on how to work well with your inner world. We will develop somatic sensitivity, self-support, and personal practice of allowing and accepting whatever is arising within us.

Transcript

So welcome to this meditation on becoming friends with our feelings.

This meditation starts out with a reflection on the benefits of living more in touch with our feelings.

Feeling more alive and how we might befriend our inner world.

It then moves into a meditation to support us in coming into contact with our feelings and learning skillful ways to turn the volume up or down on them according to what we need.

Our feelings are what give life depth and meaning.

We've probably all had those times when we feel disconnected from ourselves.

Like we're dragging ourselves through our days in denial or drudgery.

Like we're just doing the things without being connected into passion or to purpose.

This state of disconnection from ourselves can often mean it's also hard to connect deeply with others around us or to feel in touch with the wonders of life.

As adults we may have this strange sensation that something's missing if we walk through the world trying to figure everything out with our mind.

Never coming into contact with the subtle joys that being in a body brings.

So much of the process of coming to live a more heartful and happier life is informed by the good guidance of our inner world.

We generally do well when we know what's unfolding within us and what we need to do in order to move skillfully with what's happening around us.

Yet so many of us do not know how to feel or to work well with our own feelings.

I know sometimes it feels like our feelings mess us up.

Some days we can't access them at all and other days they seem to take over to sideswipe us.

Some strange landscapes within us arise.

As children we may have not had permission to feel or been told or subtly shown to suppress or repress our feelings.

Some family systems and even entire cultures teach implicitly or explicitly to deny our feelings,

To repress them,

To demand that our inner world is shut down and locked away.

Sometimes it can feel like society frowns on our feelings.

Many of us learn to deny our feelings as we didn't have the support to process them,

So we push them down below the surface and pretended they didn't exist.

Maybe we were brought up to believe that we shouldn't feel the way that we do.

We might even feel that there's something wrong with us if we're sad or that we shouldn't be resentful or that we shouldn't get jealous or yearn for something or feel cross or angry.

In many ways if we didn't have the support as children to feel our feelings then shutting them down was a wise choice.

As little ones we need those around us to mirror our feelings back to us so that we can find a good way through them.

It's really okay if you don't know how to feel or how to feel fully alive or if you feel strangely and sadly disconnected from yourself.

We're mostly not taught to feel in wise ways and want to explicitly say you're not wrong for having feelings or for not knowing how to fathom out what to do with them when they do arise.

Whatever we have been taught it's so natural that when something happens to us we'll be impacted by it.

We will have feelings about it.

We're not bad humans for having feelings.

It simply means that we're like everyone else,

Trying to figure out what on earth is happening inside of us and how we might find good ways through it all.

We don't get to be some kind of better person by forcing down our feelings.

We get to be wise humans by learning to work well with whatever is happening within us.

We get to show up well by not being driven by forces within us that we don't understand.

Self-knowledge is a form of deep information in how we might show up in a good way for ourselves and for others.

When daring to feel fully we can trust that feelings will pass through us.

They will come and they will go.

They will inform our lives,

Give us good information and then go on their way.

We can learn to trust that we can hold them within us without becoming unskillful.

That we can come into right relationship with our own feelings.

As adults we can hold space for ourselves to come into closer contact with our own feelings.

We can get in touch with a rich current of life force energy that comes when we dare to feel.

Coming to feel our feelings is the way that we heal and reclaim our own life energy.

One way of healing trauma is that we learn to tolerate our feelings about what happened bit by bit.

We can absorb them and assimilate what happened to us.

We can find a good way through as we become more skillful at holding our own feelings.

As we come to dare to feel we can reclaim our sense of self,

Our own story,

Turn it into a good way forward.

When we live from our heart and from our feelings there is some aliveness that comes out of us.

People can see it,

People can feel it.

When we are truthful about our inner world we become trustworthy.

It's almost like when we speak up and share our inner world some strange shine comes over us.

When we share our inner world with others we feel closer,

More connected,

More content.

We let ourselves admit how much we've been impacted is the point at which we can heal.

We can start to feel like we're living fully alive.

So when I talk about becoming friends with our feelings I'm not talking about some highly cathartic process here,

Baseball bats and pillows and screaming and shouting.

The 1960s had that catharsis culture and there is much good that can be done in that way.

And also today's psychology is working in more subtle ways,

Teaching us to self-regulate,

To self-soothe and to come into right relationship with the world around us.

To absorb and assimilate our feelings rather than regurgitate them or throw them out of us.

So today we're going to practice a simple meditation in showing up for ourselves and befriending our feelings.

As we do this meditation I want to give you permission to move your body if you need to.

The place we can become most aware of our feelings is by feeling them of sensations inside our own body.

And for sure there's great merit in sitting meditation practice where we learn to stay still with what arises and yet sometimes we can find ourselves rigid holding a position forcing our way through our practice.

So today as we sit explore the fine line between moving out of a habit and moving as a way to become more comfortable with what is arising within us.

As a way to support ourselves,

To bring kindness to our experience,

To cultivate what's most loving for our own practice.

So begin with a breath.

Deep breath in and a deep sigh out.

And take another.

And a third deep slow breath.

Breathing slowly and freely is a way we can support our own nervous system to self-regulate.

Stretch if you need to.

And then settle your body some.

Just down into this room,

Into this moment,

Into this practice period.

We're going to scan through our body as a way to touch into ourselves and to land into this present moment.

And to listen in.

So feel whichever part of your body is touching the chair or the ground or the bed.

Feel your legs making contact with the ground.

The soles of your feet.

The weight of your calves.

Your knees and your thighs.

Feel your pelvis and the base of the spine.

And the front of the torso.

Your lower belly.

Right deep into the belly.

Feel your mid-belly,

The solar plexus where the diaphragm moves up and down as we breathe.

Sometimes it can be hard to feel the subtleties of these areas.

Feel the side of your ribcage.

It's not an area we pay much attention to.

The front of the chest.

The collarbones.

And the back of the chest.

Your shoulder blades almost like wings on the back of the body.

And feel the big muscles of your shoulders where they go into your neck.

Feel your neck move your head a little if you need to.

Let your jaw soften.

And the centreline of the face,

The forehead.

Lower your gaze or let your eyes close if that feels comfortable.

Take a deepening breath.

See if you can let the body soften some.

Feel the top of the shoulders,

The top of the arms.

Your lower arms and your hands,

Your hands holding tension.

Getting a sense of friendliness to these investigations.

We're not looking at ourselves under a microscope and forcing ourselves to feel here.

We're creating a kind space for our feelings to come forth into.

We're learning to show up for ourselves,

To see what is so within us.

We're looking to become friends with our feelings,

Friends with our body,

Friends with what is true for us.

To find some inner sense of I got you,

I got you,

I'm here with you,

Here for you.

To come into right relationship with ourselves,

With our feelings.

Having scanned through the whole body,

Notice which areas have most sensation arising and see if you can stay with that,

With the physical sensations.

Maybe it's a hip or your shoulders or a feeling around your chest.

Sometimes our feelings are strong in the body like hardness or tightness,

A crunch in the shoulders.

Sometimes they're very subtle,

Maybe like a shaky sensation around the belly or a faint flutter in the upper chest.

Realizing what it's like to be with the sensations inside the body.

Come in close to it.

Is it hard or soft?

Is it rigid or buzzing?

Does it feel full of aliveness,

Sensation or is it dead and heavy,

Lethargic?

Don't go into a story about what it is or why it's there or what it means about your past or your history.

We'll look for some strategy to fix it in the future.

We're not fixing our feelings.

We're not broken for having them.

We're befriending them,

Staying with them,

Staying close to them.

Coming in contact with the sensations in the body,

Right here,

Right now.

Coming into contact with a life force within you.

Keep breathing deeper.

Notice if your breath has got caught.

Notice you can stay still with it.

Little bit by little bit,

You're feeling your feelings or feeling the numbness around your feelings.

That's information too if there's nothing else there.

It may be new.

It may feel odd,

But you're learning to do this,

To come back into contact with what is within you,

To listen into your body with love.

Often when we meet a strong sensation or feeling in the body,

Then as an automatic habit pattern,

Our energy will zoom back up to our mind.

We'll go into story or strategy.

Our job is to practice staying in touch with what's happening within us.

Becoming friends with our feelings is a practice of coming down and in.

By down and in,

I mean into our experience,

Into our inner world,

Into the felt sense of this moment.

So often we go up and out.

By that I mean up to our mind or out to the world around us to avoid feeling our feelings.

We try and work them out,

Work them through,

See the story,

Fix it,

Blame,

Get baffled by it.

Today we're practicing coming down and in closer to ourselves.

We're settling our nervous system.

We're softening.

We're self-soothing.

We're coming in close to our feelings.

In this body,

In this moment,

In this meditation.

Take another breath as we sit still together,

Coming in close to the subtle sensations of having a body.

This is it.

This is life.

To be here alive,

Feeling impacted,

In touch with the world.

And I want to teach a key technique for working with our feelings.

As you sit,

Notice you can change the amount of attention that you bring to your inner world.

If your inner world is feeling very chaotic,

If you feel like you're feeling too much,

It's too much to be with,

It's whirling,

It's swirling,

It's uncomfortable,

Then bring your awareness more towards the literal surface of the body.

By that I mean the skin,

The fingers,

The toes,

The outer parts of the body.

Feel where your skin meets your clothing,

What your fingers are feeling.

Maybe open your eyes,

See what you can see or hear.

Come towards the place where your body meets the outer world.

It's called titration.

We can turn down or up the amount that we're feeling.

And if you feel disconnected and in the muddle of your mind and you're not feeling anything in your body,

Then come back more towards the core of the body.

Bring your attention towards your belly,

The breath deep in the belly.

The way the rib cage moves,

Perhaps the feeling of your hips on the chair.

Your lower spine,

Come right into the core and listen in more to that part of the body.

Dive a little deeper into the heart of the thing.

Titration is a key skill in feeling our feelings.

It lets us know that we can work well with them,

That we're not at the mercy of them when they arise,

That we can turn the volume up or down on our feelings.

We can go at our own rate as we assimilate them.

It's a really important part of befriending our feelings,

Knowing that we can have some way of working with strong feelings when they arise.

Play with these practices,

Make them your own.

Breath by breath,

Practice by practice,

We're making space for ourselves.

The relationship with ourself is key here.

It may take a while until our nervous system trashes that we've created a safe space to let ourselves feel again.

As we learn to befriend our feelings,

To reclaim them,

To re-own them,

We don't have to be at the mercy of them.

We can titrate,

We can place our attention elsewhere so we don't get swamped by them.

We're learning to let ourselves feel the field so that we come into aliveness,

So that we come into pleasure,

So that we come into contact with life.

There's no perfect way to do this.

We're all human here,

Learning to love our feelings as best we can.

Bit by bit learning to feel,

To work wisely with our inner world.

Once again invite the spirit of kindness into your practice.

Practice accepting whatever you find,

Allowing it.

If we weren't brought up with our feelings being warmly welcomed,

We're going to have to do some inner work about coming to love them,

To accept them,

To give ourselves the attention that we're craving.

So as we finish today place one hand on your heart and one hand on your belly.

It can be soothing to say some kind words to yourself.

Something reassuring,

Maybe something like,

I got you,

Or I'm here for you,

Or I'm here with you,

Or thank you for telling me how you feel.

Find the words that you need to hear,

The ones that soothe you,

That work for you personally.

This is our personal practice.

We're finding wise ways to work with ourselves,

That you're cultivating kindness and friendliness towards your feelings.

I trust that the rewards of feeling are rich,

That they bring goodness and depth to our lives,

That they bring nuances and heartfulness,

Meaning to our days.

So thank you for taking the time to practice.

I bow to your bravery,

To your willingness to sit and stay with them,

To be a heartful human.

Thank you for that.

May you be well.

May you be happy.

So well.

Reviews

I’m on a Tess streak. Loving how you make me feel.

One of the great meditations of all time. I got to depths and honesty and love I've never really felt before. The truest place I've ever been. Deep resonance.

A gentle message of the need to connect with our inner selves and allow ourselves to feel with the physical body.

Thanks so much for this meditation 🕊️🙏🏻 It’s very helpful

Very insightful. Well spoken and paced, soothing voice. I found this at a time when I’m finally able to hear it. I cried, I heard it and I felt it. Thank you