Feel the elusive feelings

I’ve been experiencing a strange phenomenon since starting the work on leaning into and feeling my feelings. When I experience a feeling come up, I turn away from the thoughts that created the feeling and towards the physical sensation. However, when I do this, my feelings become almost like an elusive rabbit being hunted – they jump out of my grasp and the sensation halts in my body. I am beginning to feel slight concern about this as I don’t want to experience getting stuck and not letting an emotion physically finish it’s processing through and out of my body, but I also don’t want to get stuck existentially by feeding the emotion additional thoughts. they do not feel like they are changing our processing, but rather like they are vanishing.

I would love some guidance on ways that I can turn towards my feelings, experience them, name them, let them process, and let them go without them running off like a frightened prey. Thank you!

 

 

Answer:

You have some great awareness here. I would offer to you to notice what’s happening but take the story away. The description of your emotions being like a scared bunny paints a picture that doesn’t seem to be serving you.  You can always take the same circumstances and look at them a different way. Questioning our thoughts with compassion and curiosity opens up to seeing things in a new light.

Let’s put this in a model.

C: processing emotions

T: my feelings become almost like an elusive rabbit being hunted

F: concerned

A: worry, get stuck in all or nothing thinking, look to outside sources for answers, believe my own story

R: I am chasing something I can’t catch

Humans always want to know the “how” of something, the right way to do it that will make the process easier. We first need to look at the way we are thinking because then we can make real progress without knowing the how.

Try on some of these thoughts and come up with some of your own:

C: processing emotions

T: I’m right where I need to be

T:  this is all part of the process

T: I notice I keep thinking something is going wrong, and that’s ok

T: I notice that when I experience sensations in my body they don’t last long, and that’s ok.

Setting a goal like this will help take some pressure off of you as well.

R: I am becoming a person who processes their emotions.

Visualize that sweet fluffy bunny sitting in your lap as you pet its silky fur. You’ve got this, friend.

Episode 42 of the Period Power Podcast might be a helpful place to start.