How to feel more yourself

I’m running a 90 day program on cultivating co-creative relationships and some of the participants, when asked about what results they’d like to see, mentioned they’d like to feel more themselves. I know that feeling. Strange how we can ‘not feel ourself’, hate who we’ve become, feel disconnected from ourselves.

I’m such an emotions nerd…

I contemplate how I work, how the world works, how my clients work and reflect on things that have been said. I go for my walks where insights drop in and in those moments I sometimes see things with such clarity I am compelled to share it. 

Of course we don’t feel ourselves.

Because we have been taught not to feel. We think. We have a feeling, jump into our head and try to fix, analyse, find a solution. Quickly. The LAST thing we want to do is feel. It’s more than a tad abhorrent to us. It can be so uncomfortable, right? What I am noticing more and more is that the real me IS a feeling. My mind has created a concept of me, an identity it madly defends and protects, trying to keep in place at the expense of relationships and self worth. Which makes sense to me, how can I feel self value if I am a feeling and I’m doing everything I can not to feel. I’m not valuing me, the real me, the me that is living an experience (which has to be a feeling otherwise it wouldn’t be an experience). 

I want to make this simple. Sometimes I get lost in it as feelings are not concepts, so trying to clarify something that is fluid and dynamic can get challenging! The more I feel, the more I listen to how I feel and be with it, the more self-empowered I feel. The more self esteem I naturally have and the more confidence that seems to spring from me without me trying. This seems to be an organic process. Having everything to do with how I feel, not what information or even action I’m taking. In spite of my best thinking, I’ve come to greater feelings of self-empowerment.

Becoming a little more controversial than this already is (aargh!).

My daughter told me she read that feelings came from our thinking. Yes on one level that is true. For reactionary feeling. What I’ve observed is that when I discover how to cease reactive feeling and use what I feel to activate greater creative power, to open up more of me in this moment, my feeling purifies. It becomes a reliable source of ‘information’ that fills my whole body and can have me feeling totally satisfied with the present moment – regardless of who’s in it and how they’re turning up.

If I’m activated and feel unsupported,

I return to my feeling state (the real me) and focus on it. I do things that make me FEEL supported. I’m generating the opposite feeling and so I feel whole, full and present. I’m being me, without any hangups, attachments, needs or resentments. That’s pretty freeing for me and for anyone else in the room. We all get to emerge and grow into the next moment without pressure. No emotional obligation or codependent threads placing unseen stress on either of us.

This is the space where magic happens …

and new solutions appear. I got out of my own way by getting out of my head and thinking, and activated my heart, my true state, by feeling. And there in the field of the problem I was facing, was the solution for that very problem. I had to stop trying to fix or resist the problem (that’s what my mind does using thoughts) so I could see the whole picture.  I had to be in the WHOLE of me to see all the parts. 

Such an uncomfortable paradox.

To find my greatest power, I have to feel my most powerless.  It does get easier the more you practice. Strange to say it but feeling is a skill we have to relearn. Our education and culture has shut down our hearts and lauded our heads. It’s mechanical to jump straight into the head when we feel. Not natural, but normal. 

Feel. 

Lisa x