Give Yourself Permission to Feel Your Feelings: Part 1 of 2

This is the image of a young girl in sunlight holding her cat with open arms

© Vinogradov Illya/shutterstock.com

 

We all experience different versions of pain in our lives.  Whether it is the pain that comes from a broken relationship with a friend or family member, the ex for whom we still long, the death of a loved one, or the physical pain of trauma, illness, and disease, negative feelings are a natural part of life.

 

While we do not always get to choose the particular painful experiences we have, HOW we manage these situations is a choice.  Perhaps this is the meaning of the saying, “Pain is inevitable, suffering is optional.”

 

Most of us tend to deal with pain primarily with our minds.  The mind’s typical response when faced with pain is to immediately focus on fixing the problem.  When we do this, we use our energy to resist the unpleasant thoughts, feelings and sensations of grief, hostility, frustration, anxiety, depression, guilt, and resentment that naturally accompany painful situations.  What we resist persists, so many times our attempts to bypass the feelings that we are having will actually intensify the pain.  This is because we have overlooked an extremely important step in our healing process – we need to FEEL our emotions with our hearts before we can effectively deal with them on a mental level.

 

Simply stated, when we avoid expressing our feelings, we are not honoring our Whole Self – body, mind, and soul.  Our bodies physically register the ease and dis-ease within our lives in a very apparent way.  Feelings are energy, and energy is constant movement.  Therefore, if we do not EXpress our negative feelings, the energy of pain will IMpress itself into some part of our bodies.  For example, if you continue to stuff feelings of being heartbroken, you may eventually develop a heart disease.  If you take on other people’s burdens without appropriately expressing your own feelings, you may constantly have pain in your shoulders.

 

Repressing our feelings also has a negative impact on our minds.  Without a constructive outlet to express our feelings, the mind will recycle the problem over and over without coming up with an effective resolution.  While you may be dealing with only a few problems, the constant mental repetition will cause you to feel like you are dealing with a thousand problems.  To complicate matters, we then tend to become even more mentally overwhelmed because we begin to judge ourselves for even having the emotions.

 

Our feelings are an essential aspect of our human experience.  Emotions are the barometer that measures the “distance” between the quality of life we really want to live vs. the experiences we are actually having.  For example, if we are attracting a lot of abusive people into our relationships and we want to experience a loving relationship, the emotions we feel will be very painful.  Another example is that we may be longing for abundance, yet our actual experiences are indicative of lack.  Again, our feelings will register the discrepancy between what we really desire vs. what we are physically experiencing.

 

You have the power to expand your present life experiences to match with the quality of life you choose to live.  In next weeks’s blog, Part Two, we will discuss how to constructively express your negative feelings rather than avoid them.  We will also review how you can develop the perceptions that will guide you to the actual experience of living the quality of life you choose.

 

Remember, BE KIND TO YOURSELF!

 

Love and Light,

 

Sandra

 

A portion of this message is an excerpt from the book, The Power of Oneness, Live the Life You Choose.  To learn more about how you can align your life with spiritual truth, order the book at http://www.thepowerofoneness.com/products/