Trusting Yourself by M. J. Ryan

Author:M. J. Ryan
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781609258382
Publisher: Red Wheel Weiser

Feelings Are Natural

Our feelings are our most genuine paths to knowledge.

—Audre Lorde

I once knew a person who told me point-blank that she would never fall in love again because she was afraid to go through the hurt if the relationship ended. While I empathized with her pain, I felt so sad that she was cutting herself off from the possibility of love in order to avoid going through grief that might never come.

This woman's stance is an example of one of the prime challenges to self-trust: we're afraid of our feelings. We treat them like terrorists coming out of nowhere to blow up our lives. We're convinced they are bad—we shouldn't be feeling the way we do—and we're convinced we couldn't possibly survive going through the experience of actually feeling them. So we do everything we possibly can to avoid them—overwork, overeat, overdrink, oversleep.

However, the problems we create by avoiding our feelings are almost always worse than facing and feeling them. But because we don't trust ourselves to experience them and live through it, we continue to avoid and deny them. Then they spurt out anyway—in anger toward a loved one, in bitterness at work, in worry that wakes us in the middle of the night.

It's not our fault that we're this way. We haven't had good training in feelings. In our culture, we're taught either to suppress or deny them (stiff upper lip and all that), to feel guilty about them (at age eight or so, I was dragged to confession that very minute for saying I hated my brother), or to vent them in full view no matter the damage to self or others because we feel like it (à la TV talk shows). Or we had such horrifically painful experiences of abuse as children that we avoid our feelings because we don't want to relive the pain.

If you've been abused, you may need professional support in learning to be with your feelings. But the rest of us can begin to tune in to our feelings, experience them without being swept away with them, and act on the messages they are giving us if appropriate.

It starts with understanding that feelings are natural. In fact, we have both a feeling brain (centered in the amygdala) and a “gut brain” that together are producing sensations all the time. Recent research has discovered that more neurons exist in the gut—about hundred million—than in the entire spinal column. As yoga teacher Cyndi Lee wrote recently, “If you are alive, there's no way you're not feeling something.”

It also helps to understand that what we label feelings are actually sensations—the sensation of energy moving through the body. These sensations are born in thoughts—I'm afraid that she will hurt me; I am mad because my boundaries have been violated; I'm sad that my husband forgot out anniversary. The more we focus on the actual sensations without labeling, the easier it is to befriend our own experience, particularly when the emotions are strong. Where is the

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