Feelings, nothing more than feelings….

Nothing more than feelings?

EVERYTHING is feeling!

And yet we avoid, avoid, AVOID feeling. We’ll do anything to numb ourselves.

We eat too much, we drink too much, we watch too much tv, we scroll on social media too much, we go out of our way to self destruct with poor habitual behaviours, and some are a slow path to a mindless death as above and some are a faster highway to that same destination.

And yet feeling is everything and you can’t feel the good stuff if you’ve cut yourself off from the bad.

And life is all about feeling.

What we’re searching for in life is all about how we feel.

When we want more money in our lives; its not about the money, its not even about the things we can buy with the money, its about how having that money makes us feel. And you might want to feel safe, secure, protected and think having more money will give you that, or you might want to feel validated and appreciated because look what you’ve achieved.

Its all valid because its what you want to feel!

But instead of allowing ourselves to feel what we want to feel, we stop it and numb ourselves.

I was lying on my Shakti mat – honestly I love this to deepen my meditation – and I was thinking about being interviewed by Russell Brand for his podcast – obviously I brought myself back to my mantra once I realised that I’d drifted into daydreaming – but Russell and I were discussing recovery and personal development and I was talking about my personal transformation point.

And I started going into how I’d numbed myself for years with alcohol, food, and just detached from the world around me for years and years, keeping love, health, success – all the things I want out.

What turned it around was I finally realised that my unhappiness, my unhealthiness, my loneliness, my lack of success was caused by me cutting myself off from feeling.

And feeling is amazing. Waking up in the morning in a fresh, clean bed, feeling the sheets against my skin, noticing Amelia curled up warm and soft against my hip, feeling good and looking forward to the day ahead.

And feeling the pain I’d avoided for years was fantastic too. Sure it was awful, I sobbed, I screamed, I was pulled apart by grief, anger, despair and it was glorious. I was feeling it and no longer numb. No longer scared of it, no longer eating, drinking, doing whatever to avoid it.

Because our feelings are unavoidable. If you don’t notice the sensations as they arise in your body, if you have a habit as I did, from childhood of stuffing your feelings down because it wasn’t safe to express them, then they will show up somehow, somewhere in your mental, emotional, spiritual and physical bodies. Feelings will be heard, they will demand it.

If you’ve been avoiding them for years, its scary to stand in the face of the oncoming tsunami and feel like you can withstand the onslaught. But you can.

There is nothing within you that you cannot deal with. It helps to have a guide to support you in this journey and that’s what I do for my clients, but you can do it on your own, I did. Well, some of the time, other times I had therapists, coaches and friends help me through.

When you feeling the stuff that leaves you raw, you’re wide open to feel the amazing soothing effect of other feelings. You can’t have one without the other. Without sorrow there is no joy.

Feeling your feelings and then choosing how you feel about your feelings.

As I said above, finally feeling the pent up agony of years of feeling alone, worthless, unloved, useless, was amazing. Even though the pain I could feel laughter as freedom started to bubble up. All that sh!t I’d been holding in wasn’t true, it was a story I had learned in childhood and had repeated over and over until it was my world.

Once I opened myself up and felt it, faced it, it faded away, and surprisingly quickly too..

And I was then free to choose how I feel. I choose to feel warm, safe, nurtured, protected, taken care of.

Think of how that feels in the body, its so far away from being numb and disconnected, its a whole other world.

And that’s what I’m creating by choosing how I think and feel, I’m creating my world and it is very different to the one I grew up in and lived in for so long.

I have a place where I belong, and its me. I belong to myself. Home is within.

The problem for many people is we’ve been numbing ourselves for so long that its completely alien to us to allow ourselves to feel, we try and try and nothing happens.

This is a process of self exploration. You start by reading material to make you think and this may be out of your comfort zone. Listen to people who will ask you to go inside and dig around in there and release yourself from a prison of your own making.

Two practices I recommend you start immediately are journaling and meditation. And exercise in nature, walks, runs, just sitting in nature will do but be alone, quiet and still with your thoughts whilst in a beautiful natural place.

Journaling and meditation are both like tin openers for your mind. In journaling you can ask self explorative questions and then write your answers directly from your subconscious.

In meditation you learn to become the observer of your thoughts and you became aware of how you think, the things you think about and you’ll start to question why you think that way.

Learn self hypnosis, that’s another great tool to help you release blocks to feeling and move into a place of accepting what you feel and releasing it as it arises. I teach every client this skill so they can do it for themselves.

One of the things I did recently was write an autobiography of painful events and memories and it helped me see just how much I’d been through, how much I’d suffered, how much I’d survived. And that helped me feel the pain I’d been holding back, something about seeing it stark on the page made it so real, and brought all the feelings I’d been holding back home.

Like I said harrowing and at the same time cathartic and freeing .I felt so much lighter once I was done.

We are so used to dismissing how we feel, sensing someone doesn’t like us or intends us harm and we dismiss it as ‘just a feeling.’

Feelings are our powerful inner guidance, a huge part of how we create a life we love. Trust them.

Trust yourself to know how you feel by learning more feeling words, give yourself the vocabulary to be able to identify your feelings and you’ll be able to feel them more clearly.

There are loads on online feeling vocabularies – Google it.

Here’s a quick summary of everything I’ve said: Feelings are good. We should feel our feelings. Feelings will guide us to a life worth living.

Slow down, feel what your feeling, trust your gut, go within and ask does this feel right?

If not, don’t do it. No matter the evidence, no matter what everyone else is saying/doing. If it doesn’t feel right, then its not for you.

Caveat to the above statement: make sure you are listening to the voice of inspiration and knowing that is your all knowing Higher Self and that you’re not listening to the critical, hopeless voice of fear which will always stop you stepping up to meet the path of growth and blessings.

Once you’ve released all the old pent up feelings, its so much easier to feel your feelings in the moment, name them, accept them and then choose something that feels better.

So feel, feel everything. That’s what you are here for.

Love,

Cynthia xx

PS. Please like, comment and share below is this message connected with you. I love to hear how my work lands with people. And also, stop messing around! If you’re reading this, you need me. Email or message me to see how best we can work together to give you what you need. It might be a list of free resources I offer, it might be a program or course that’s not too expensive or you might want to jump right in and fully commit to yourself with a personal 1:1 hypnotherapycoaching program. Whatever you need, I’ll work with you to guide you to gaining it all. That’s a promise xx