Feelings Are There to be Felt!

A few weeks ago, I was sharing with a Psychologist colleague some feelings of deep emotional pain that I’d been experiencing.

I was surprised when he came back with a comment about this being ‘just a set of circumstances and these just a set of feelings’ – and something about my feelings being ‘not the truth on an esoteric level’.

What I say to this is: Get real, not esoteric!

FEELINGS ARE IMPORTANT and they’re the whole truth on an emotional & spiritual level.

As a Coach, I know that each one of us can change the way we feel about most things by choice and almost instantly – we can choose to let go of old, negative feelings and replace them with shiny, new, positive ones, simply by reprogramming our thinking.

So, for example, if I’ve been sitting in a queue of traffic on the M4 for 2 hours and someone overtakes the whole line of cars on the hard shoulder, my first feelings may be anger or frustration. But then, I can choose to feel something else, like compassion for the driver: maybe his wife’s giving birth in the back of the car and he’s desperately trying to get to a hospital? Or maybe his elderly mother is dying in hospital and he’s trying to reach her to give her comfort in her last moments on earth? Or maybe he has a stomach upset and needs to get to a lavatory pronto?

Poor man – no wonder he feels compelled to act so recklessly. (And even if this isn’t the reality of the situation, at least, by using this process, I feel better about it!)

So, we can choose to change these ’surface’, responsive feelings by changing our thoughts – it’s easy to do, with a little practice.

We can even choose, when in deeper emotional pain, to see the bigger picture and to understand its causes. We can choose to see the perspective of, and have compassion for, the person whose words or actions caused us to feel the pain. We can choose to use the experience to write a blog and, hopefully, to help other people who may be in similar pain.

But even then, it doesn’t always make the painful feelings go away. Funny that. Could it be because the feelings are there for a reason?

In my experience, feelings are there for a reason – they’re there to be felt.

Our intuition, or gut instinct, causes us to have feelings of discomfort, unease or pain, to let us know something’s not quite right in our life. Our intuition can also give us feelings of joy, peace and excitement, to reassure us that we’re on the right track.

And sometimes it’s simply that we’ve been wounded – someone or something has touched a very vulnerable part of us – and our intuition tells us, via our feelings, that we need to take time out to heal, regroup and go forward, taking learning and new strength with us.

I say trust yourself and trust your feelings – pay attention to them, because they’re valid and they’re real.

The worst thing we can do, in my view, is to ignore, deny or bury our feelings. Get them out in the open – be with them, feel them, experience them, explore them, understand what they’re trying to tell you, learn, grow & change accordingly and then move forward.

This is the real truth, on every level – according to Jools, anyway!

P.S. I was able to work out what my own pain was truly about and understanidng it has enabled me to free myself from what was a very unhealthy situation. So, what’s your pain/sadness/frustration trying to tell you?