Episode 7: How To Feel Any Feeling

Hello and Welcome to the Love Your Life Podcast. This is Episode #7- How To Feel Any Feeling. Last Episode I introduced you to the idea that Feelings have two Jobs - 1) to fuel our actions and 2) to deliver messages to us. Brooke Castillo teaches that everything we do or do not do is driven by how we think we will feel. By becoming aware of our feelings and choosing which ones to fuel our actions, we can significantly impact our results in life.. Today I am going to teach you how to feel your feelings. All of them. Any feeling that your brain ever helps you create. This is super useful information because so many of us have practiced every way possible to not feel our feelings. We call this buffering - and I will definitely get to that in future podcasts. For today, you have certainly heard the phrase - bottled up emotions. This means that you’re keeping your emotions inside rather than expressing them or processing them. While it might seem like a way to maintain control, bottling up feelings can lead to emotional overload and sometimes physical symptoms like stress, fatigue, or illnesses. In the long term, finding healthy ways to express and process feelings can lead to better mental well-being and stronger relationships. Learning how to Feel any Feeling - or Process any Emotion - is the way to uncork the bottled up emotions you have inadvertently been hiding from because the feelings are there whether you ignore them or not - but they cannot be released until you listen to them. So listen up! This is important stuff - I am going to teach you how to feel your feelings, also known as releasing them, also known as magic. You laugh now - but wait until you have practiced releasing feelings that you have avoided before and you will think you have a new magic wand. It is that powerful. I give you Six steps to Feel a Feeling: Name it. Stay present and curious enough to name it. A catch phrase found in psychology these days is Name it to tame it. It comes from Dr. Daniel Siegel, a UCLA psychiatry professor and author of The Whole Brain Child, The idea is that naming your feelings can help you feel less overwhelmed and reduce the intensity of the emotion. It can also help you create distance between the emotion and the intense feelings that accompany it. The more descriptive you get on the name the better you will get at releasing the feeling. This means pushing yourself to be more descriptive than just sad, mad, happy, or good. When you are sad, is it more like disappointed or left out? When you are mad, are you actually furious or are you feeling unheard? The better you get at naming it specifically - the sooner you can loosen the feelings grip on you. It really is important - and As a special gift for listening to my podcast today - I have compiled a gorgeous list of feelings that go beyond the basics of sad, mad, and happy that you can download from my website at Rondaloverdge.com - You might be surprised by how many different nuanced names we have in the English language for emotions. Make sure and go get the list for yourself. Step two is to locate it in your body. To do this ask yourself where this feeling is living in your body? Each vibration of feeling tends to stay centered in a specific region of your body. Can you think of where you typically feel stress? A lot of people will feel stress in their shoulders, neck, or head. What about anxiety or worry? You are possibly familiar with a sick feeling in your stomach when you are feeling anxious. Some of these locations are fairly common between us all, but you will find as you pay attention and get curious that there are certain patterns that are unique to you. I had a client once whose arms would go numb when she was driving towards a social gathering when she didn’t know many people there. Her arms would literally stop performing the act of driving her car in an effort to alert her that her thoughts were telling her that this is a bad idea and dangerous even. Another client is a writer by trade and when she experiences a specific kind of anxiety or fear her hands can’t type on her computer - they get tingly and basically freeze. It is like they are saying - hey listen up! You might think you are going to carry on with business as normal, but we are telling you there are more important things to pay attention to- and we won’t do what you say until you pay attention to this dangerous thing we are warning you about. Now that she knows that her hands do this, she is able to be aware of the feelings quicker and deal with the emotions. A good practice for noticing where your feelings are located in your body is to - take a minute to remember one of your very favorite life moments - then notice how you feel while you are picturing it. I have a specific image of my oldest daughter running into my arms when she was 3 years old with her arms reaching for me and pure joy on her face. I felt so much love and joy in that moment that I promised myself I would never forget what it feels like to experience pure joy and happiness. I can remember every detail about the park we were at, the coolness of the shade tree we were under, the sound of her laughter, and the clasping of her little arms around my kneck as I scooped her up. When I put myself back there - I know that this feeling is pure Love - It is living in my throat and behind my eyes - and pours out of me in the form of tears. What is an experience you can go back to where you were overwhelmed with a positive emotion? Name that feeling - then notice where that feeling is living in your body. Sit with it for a minute and enjoy this good feeling - After all it is not just negative feelings that produce sensations in our bodies - Sadly when we get used to ignoring our negative feelings, we also numb ourselves to feeling our positive emotions. To practice with the good is to expand the breadth and depth of your human experience - and you definitely want more of that in your life when you are building a life you love. Step 3 - is to describe the feeling. Namely, shape, size, color, and movement - not everyone can come up with all of these things, look for what is intuitive to you. Is anxiety dark, heavy and slowly throbbing - or is it orange,fast, and bouncing all around or something else entirely? Is fear tight and restricting in your throat with heat - or is it dark, sticky, and cold in the pit of your stoma, or something else for you? I once had a client describe the feeling of doom as dark black and foggy that was filling up their entire brain and was also loud and screaming. He described it so clearly that I could see it with him as he sat with his eyes closed and visited it. Know that It doesn’t matter how your emotion presents itself - what matters is that you close your eyes and get yourself in your body. Climb down some ladders from your head down to wherever it is located, turn on your flashlight, and take a good long look at the feeling. Send your little thinking brain self right up to it and get curious. As you look at it describe it out loud - I see you worry - you are dark and shifty and heavy hiding in the corner of my lungs - Then you are ready for step four, which is to talk to it. I think of it as pulling up a chair next to the feeling and keep that flashlight shining on it and really get comfortable and curious with it. You are looking at it and seeing it now - you can ask it what it wants to tell you. Oh, hey there Anxiety, I see you here in my stomach, all hot and red and pulsing quickly. What is it that you want me to know? Then you wait and let it speak to you. You will be surprised how clearly it can communicate to you when you talk to it. Remembering that feelings are messengers helps you open up to listening for one. Step 5- is to tend it and time it. In other words, you babysit the feeling until it is ready to go. Don’t leave it alone now that you have gone down where it is and turned the lights on and learned what it wants you to know. Once you have the message you can decide if you believe it or not. Whether you believe it or not, the feeling will release once it is soothed. We try to teach our babies to self-soothe when we teach them to go to sleep on their own, this is very similar to that. You are now in the realm of self-soothing instead of running to change a circumstance - you are sitting with the feeling and communicating to it that you hear it and that everything is ok because now that you have received the message, you will take care of things. Soothe the feeling like you would a little toddler that you love. And Step 6 is to time it- Just settle into your imaginary chair - be patient and turn your timer on on your phone. I mean it. You are going to time how long the feeling stays in that shape and form and sensation. Be patient. You are not in a hurry. You are conducting an experiment - and it is important data to collect. I have seen people go from panic attacks that take them out for days - to sitting with the feelings for ten minutes - and then the feelings stay for less time each time they go through these steps until things that once caused panic now only stay for seconds until they are noticed, heard, and released. I had a feeling that woke me up in the middle of the night for years. It was a familiar feeling that my entire adult life I had interpreted as hunger. But this time as I got up to go eat something, I remembered what I had learned about feelings and I stopped and asked myself if it was possible that I wasn’t hungry, but was actually feeling something? I discovered very quickly that the feeling was worry. I honestly didn’t know what I could even be worried about right then, but I followed this process and realized that I was actually truly concerned about one of my children. My wonderful brain was so concerned that it woke me up in the middle of the night to deliver the message that I needed to protect my child. Once I realized what it was, and assured myself and my brain that my child was safe, I got the timer and proceeded through this process. This feeling stayed for 3 minutes- and then it kind of floated out the top of my head. I sat there in awe - I had literally experienced this feeling off and on for 25 years and never actually learned what it was, a feeling of worry delivering warnings. How could this be possible that I could release it so quickly? It did come back minutes later - delivered the same message, I tended to it with my six steps, it left again after staying 1 minute - then the feeling came back - again 10 minutes later and only stayed for 10 seconds. I think of feelings like waves of the sea - they come in and they go out - and they come back- but the better I get at processing them, or feeling them, - the longer it goes between their return and the shorter the stay. They might start as waves that are minutes apart, and then go hours, and then days, and then weeks, months, to years. I’ve been hit by the feeling of loss so hard that it takes my breath away and makes my legs weak. I have to bend over to breathe - but even as I stoop there in the pain of that moment, I can say to myself - this is loss - this is loss - this is loss - of course you are devastated. You are believing you have lost something that you will never get back. When I acknowledge that this is true on some level, I am able to then remember that there will be new things that fill in the spaces of what is now gone, and if I am patient and brave, I will find something that is also beautiful, even though it will never be the same. And then I stay there with loss until it is sure I have heard how bad the situation is and it verifies that I will pay attention and it departs - my brain needs someone in charge to step up and manage what has gone wrong. I have found that there is no better person for that job than the owner of the thoughts, which in my case is me, and of course in your case will be you. As a recap - here are the steps - Name it Locate it Describe it Talk to it Tend it Time it Remember that there is no right or wrong way to experience a feeling. They are vibrations in our bodies. We do not have to be scared of them. They have messages to deliver, and the messages can be true or false. No matter what the message is, they need to be heard. Bottling the feelings by buffering and ignoring them only makes them stronger and more intense and will eventually blow out of the strongest resistance sideways and create results that will not be pleasant. There is literally nothing gone wrong when you feel a feeling. It is the mind body connection working in its finest calibration when we do. The sooner you recognize it and allow it - the sooner you can let it move through you. Tears, weak limbs, breathlessness, ringing in your ears, and many other expressions of a particular feeling, are all part of the deal. They can come at inconvenient times, but the sooner you can excuse yourself and go sit with them, the better off you will be. If all you can manage to do is to name it - start there - but if you are feeling big emotions - you will want to try to make it through this entire process to free yourself from their intensity. This is a fantastic piece of knowledge to deliver to your smaller children. With kids under 12- I mostly stick to helping them name the feeling and then sit as patiently as I can with them while they are acting out the energy of the feeling. Even kids as young as 3 can grasp the idea of naming the feeling. Are you sad? Yes, sweetie - you are sad because you can’t have icecream for breakfast? I’m sorry you are sad. It’s that simple. When I stay present and curious with anyone who is having feelings, I can almost always help them identify what it is they are feeling, whether we are in a coaching container or not. Truly, just helping someone you care about name it and find out they are heard as they name it lessens the energy of most feelings. This is a skill that I teach in all of my coaching containers, whether you work with me 1:1 or in my Love Your Life Lab, we practice this as often as we can and learn how to apply it to big and little feelings. The better you get at feeling a feeling - the more emotionally regulated and mature your responses are to your life’s circumstances. The lab is starting back up in December, and Our first monthly topic will be managing our feelings during the holidays. The topic will be delivered on the First Tuesday of December, which is December 3rd, 11:00 am Central Time on zoom and then recorded and kept in the membership library app - it will followed by group coaching calls each week that give you the opportunity to be coached and have follow up on the homework for the month. January we will be launching in depth into the way our thoughts create our results - and how to start thinking intentionally to create new results in 2025. Membership to the Lab is a great gift to ask for yourself for Christmas, At only 39$ a month, it is less than taking someone to dinner, but will impact every relationship in your life in an incredible way. Don’t forget to consider gifting it to your best friend, sister, daughter or mom to come with you as you learn principles like these and many more. You can find me at Ronda Loveridge.com R O N D A L O V E R I D G E .COM to sign up for the Lab or to download your free list of emotions that will help you get more specific naming your feelings and fast track you towards taming them. If you are interested in creating a gift for someone you love I can custom make pre paid memberships for you - email me at [email protected] for that - that is R O N D A L O V E R I D G E @gmail.com If you learned something new and valuable today, or even if you were reminded of something you hadn’t thought about for a while, and find value in that - I would appreciate it if you would like, comment, and then share this episode with someone you care about. Talking about what you are learning here with the people in your circles will help me serve my mission of bringing these principles to everyoneEve I can possibly reach. Every human is worthy of the gift of understanding the power of their thoughts as they create their lives daily. I personally believe we are all worthy of loving our lives as much as possible too!