Hi,
I'm Catherine Liggett.
And I am here to help you feel your feelings.
Even though it might be very strange to say that,
Right?
Because we think of feeling as just simply what moves through our body.
I use feeling and emotion interchangeably,
Not everyone does,
But the reason I do it is because I want to meet you where you are.
And the way that feeling and emotion shows up for us is simply.
As the fluid subjective experience of being consciousness in a body.
Feeling and emotion are a life moving through us.
And so it doesn't serve us,
I don't think,
To stop and be like,
Well,
Hmm,
Is that a feeling or an emotion?
Emotional health.
Is defined as I've come to see it.
By our freedom to allow the full spectrum of feeling.
Through our bodies without holding back.
And that doesn't mean that we're going to be full of feeling all the time in all kinds of situations and relationships where it might not serve us or other people,
Right?
That's not what I mean.
I mean that you have the freedom to do so when it's the right time,
When it's time to get angry.
About something,
When something you value is really in jeopardy,
You have the capacity to say no.
That's not okay,
And here's why.
You have the capacity to allow it to course through you and to run its full cycle,
Its full wave.
And the reason I'm passionate about helping people to feel their feelings,
To feel all of our feelings,
Especially the ones we don't want to.
Is because All of us.
Have internalized.
Suppression of feeling and that's costing us enormously.
We have learned through Western culture over many centuries.
That are worth needs to be earned.
That we need to prove ourselves worthy in order to belong.
Which is so destructive and I could go on.
But what this means for our feelings is that all of us feel this immense internal pressure at all times to not be too much.
Whatever that means based on our gendering and the cultures that we live in or were raised in.
We all have our own way of fearing being too much.
And in the culture of the privatization of pain.
And the expectation that somehow we're going to get our stuff together and feel our feelings behind closed doors and then come back and be presentable and under control,
Right?
It marbles emotion with shame.
So we're ashamed,
We feel like we should hide.
Our emotions when they're intense.
And what that does is a number of things.
So as we know now from science,
Not woo woo,
From science.
Emotions are,
They come from our nervous system,
Right?
You could think about emotions,
Feelings.
As responses of our body to our environment,
To things that are happening.
In our lives,
Either within us or outside of us.
And it's our nervous system that's responding,
Right?
It's the way that we respond to the world.
Many of our feelings come from.
Sympathetic nervous system response.
And what that means is our body's threat detection system.
And I'll just take two examples because they're the most common and they're the ones that we most often repress.
And cause problems for us.
So one of these sympathetic responses,
So sympathetic nervous system is our fight or flight.
Safety,
It's our survival system that's on board.
We're not choosing to feel these feelings,
It's our body's instinctual response to what's happening in the moment.
One of these is flight,
Right,
Where our body mobilizes in order to run away from something and this is where we feel fear and all of the related emotions to fear.
Panic.
Insecurity,
Anxiety,
Terror,
Horror,
All of these feelings.
Related to fear,
What this is doing is our body is preparing to run away and escape.
So our lower extremities are often,
They get energy pumped into them,
Right?
Run away,
Run away.
Our heart beats super fast.
We retract.
So the fight response,
The other part of our sympathetic nervous system response is when our body makes the call completely without our conscious attention,
That our best chance of survival is to approach the threat,
And then that's when we feel angry,
We blame,
And our upper extremities get the energy in them,
And we might feel tension in our shoulders and our jaw clenches.
This is where we feel anger,
Right?
So imagine.
What's happening in your body when these impulses that are completely natural,
Completely not under your conscious control are arising.
For you either to run or to fight.
Imagine what's happening when Your mind is saying no.
Clamp it down.
Brace against it.
We can't feel that right now.
Can you feel the pressure?
One thing that shows up for us if we have flight response,
The fear.
That doesn't run its course in our body,
That we clamp down.
One thing that happens is anxiety.
Where the fear gets stuck and it's this low grade hum in the background that's always anticipating danger and always afraid and never quite able to open into our lives.
That's anxiety.
Unfelt fear.
One thing that happens when we have anger that doesn't complete,
That doesn't run its cycle,
That stays within,
Because we're like,
No,
I can't get angry,
It's bad,
Or it's unspiritual to get angry.
Do you do that to yourself?
It's unspiritual to be angry.
When it clamps down.
It creates corrosion and it tanks our nervous system.
We can feel depressed.
We can shut down when the anger turns inward toward ourselves.
And all kinds of terrible things can happen.
Some people like Dr.
Gabor Mate.
Say things like disease come from that,
Right?
When we clamp down on our survival emotions.
Bad things happen.
We get stuck.
We burn out.
When we have this habit of suppression.
We just don't feel alive.
We feel numb.
Life does not move through us.
We can't flow with what's coming.
We are not resilient.
When we're doing that,
We don't practice building capacity because most of us didn't practice building that capacity as children because we were called or told something like,
Stop crying or I'll give you something to cry about,
Right?
Our intense feelings were often put in a box,
Often because we were raised by one or two adults.
And honestly,
That's not enough.
Those aren't enough eyes and arms and ears to hold a child.
As a mother in a nuclear family,
I feel this intensely,
Right?
So even in the best case scenario,
We weren't raised by enough people for us to feel genuinely like we could be our biggest selves.
We had to become manageable.
For our small family.
It's not our parents' fault.
It's not their parents' fault.
It's just the way society is.
Has become.
And because of this familial and relational impoverishment,
We had to become small.
And so now we get as adults.
This chance to build resilience,
To build capacity,
But in order to do that.
We need to learn skills right we need to learn how to feel how do we allow these feelings to move through our bodies and move with them in a way.
That we can be safe with ourselves.
In a way where we're not clamping down,
In a way where we're not trying to fix and control the feelings away.
And this takes a radical unlearning.
Of our instant oftentimes.
Instinct to suppress.
So I'm here with you.
I've got your back.
I teach these skills.
You can find them on my courses and meditations on Insight Timer and My Lives.
So I've got your back,
We're gonna learn this together.
It is an imperfect process.
It takes patience with ourselves and it's.
Totally pays off.
And what it looks like when it pays off.
Is you feel vibrantly alive.
You feel connected to yourself.
You're not at war with yourself anymore.
You're not judging.
The natural flow of life that's moving through you that often is not in your conscious control.
It's our body feeling these things.
And we can learn how to allow instead of fix.
We can learn how to see and hold ourselves with the eyes of care.
And an embrace.
Instead of with the eyes of control with a whip.
As most of us learn to do.
So I'm here with you.
I'm here for you.
So just take a breath right now with me.
And sense how all of this is landing with you.
How does it feel to imagine the possibility?
Of feeling your feelings without holding back.
And being safe with yourself as you do that.
Of holding yourself with love.
As you let life move through you and learn how to trust it.
As you learn that when we let life move through us,
It doesn't mean we're going to be out of control and dangerous.
It means we're going to be fully alive and able to connect with ourselves and thus other people.
In the way that we long to.
Because that's why we're here.
We're here to connect.
Just put your hand on your heart and feel whatever is moving through you right now.
Feel into the fact that you have a body that is full of life.
And see if you can breathe softness toward yourself.
Then of course.
It's hard to let this life move through and trust it.
Of course it's hard.
And there is a small.
Version of you inside yourself.
Perhaps a child part of yourself that's there right now.
That is scared.
And who have lungs.
To be held in your loving arms.
They feel so much of this world.
And they've been told from the very beginning.
That they are too much when they feel.
And I am here with you.
And you are here with you.
To show them that it's okay.
A little bit at a time.
It's okay to feel what's here.
It's okay to feel this.
Thank you so much for being present with me today for this short talk and know that this is just the very tip of the iceberg.
You know where to find me.
You know where to find my courses and my meditations.
I love each of you.
And I wish you radical love.
For all the feelings within you.
Bye for now.
