What You Feel

“White supremacy has used the suppression of feelings to hold down communities.

If you block the pain, you’ll likely block the feelings needed to fight back against oppression.”

—Patrisse Cullors, co-founder of the Black Lives Matter movement

 

Your body is your compass.

I invite you to imagine that you’ve just been dropped into the middle of a vast wilderness.

What do you want to make sure you have in your backpack?

Sure, water, snacks, and bear/snake/tiger repellant would be great, but your number one tool, by far, is a compass. Without it, you’d wander in circles until your supplies ran out.

On the path toward creating a life of justice and joy, there are many moments where we feel like we’ve been unceremoniously dumped in a vast wilderness. Lost. Stuck. Hurting. When the stakes feel high, it can be hard to discern which step to take next, let alone see possible paths forward.

And yet, we each already have an internal compass. Beneath all the swirling thoughts, there is an inner wisdom that can help us discern our next steps even when we don’t know our final destination.

Your body is your compass.

Our bodies are extraordinarily sensitive navigational systems. When we come to a fork in the road on the path through life, our bodies offer sensations that indicate which direction is a yes, which is a no, and which is a maybe. Like tuning forks, our bodies say, “Don’t go that way. Go this way. Turn that way. Yup. Nope. Not yet. We need more information. Nope. Yup. Maybe.”

Although your conscious mind may not know how to explain or justify your body’s signals—and may not yet even be consciously aware of them, your body is nevertheless processing and communicating all sorts of information below your conscious awareness. Every cell in our bodies is continuously tracking what’s happening in its own way and relaying information back to our brains.

But what if you don’t quite trust your body’s signals? What if you feel dread about doing something that you know is good for you? Or what if you know that you need to get more comfortable with discomfort?

Our bodies’ messages are often not simple. Discomfort doesn’t always mean stop. And comfort doesn’t necessarily mean go.

Our sensations and emotions are information.[1] If you feel tension, constriction, or other uncomfortable sensations, your body is trying to tell you something. If you feel excitement, peace, or deep engagement, your body is sending a signal.

Our feelings are like spokespeople for our needs. But it often takes practice to decipher the messages.

Our first task is to notice what we feel without jumping to immediate reactions or conclusions. Then, after we notice we feel a feeling, our next task is to get curious about what we really need, which we’ll focus on in the next episode.

For now, in this episode we’ll focus on how to discern what we feel in the first place and why noticing and discerning what we feel can be so hard.

Why We Might Struggle to Feel & What Happens When We Don’t

Perhaps you learned at an early age to negate your body’s signals. Maybe someone insisted that you stop crying when you felt sad, that you were fine when you felt sick, that you were making things up when you felt grossed out, or that your emotions or desires were destructive or irrational.[2]

To protect yourself from rejection and meet your needs, you may have made unconscious agreements with yourself to not feel certain emotions, to ignore or suppress these feelings if they ever arose, or to believe that some feelings were wrong, weird, meaningless, dirty, excessive, or shameful. As a result, you might say that you’re anxious when you actually feel angry or that you’re frustrated when you actually feel sad.

If your body holds a lot of unhealed trauma, it can feel excruciating to tune in to your body, so you might dissociate and flee to the apparent safety of your brain’s left hemisphere,