Are Your Feelings The Truth?
Feelings, what are your thoughts about your feelings? Do you think they’re bad, are you really tuned into yours, do you always do what you feel? I know a lot of us try to suppress them, avoid, run away, drink, smoke, eat, shop them away. We do so much to avoid feeling uncomfortable without sometimes realizing it, aka staying overly busy, jumping from one relationship to the next, even ruminating/worry is a form of distraction that keeps us in our heads and out of our feels.
Recently I started working a lot more and that coupled with the changing fall season, I felt an enormous amount of stress the past 2 weeks. Before I had 3 years of intensive therapy I would have thought that my world was ending and that everything sucked. That would have led to a negative spiral and eventually a self-fulfilling prophecy of everything actually sucking. But this week, I shifted from the Emotional Mind into what my therapist would call the Wise Mind. I noticed that I was having these feelings of anxiety, and just because I felt that everything was scary, intense, and terrible, didn’t mean that it actually was. I consciously decided to focus on my breath, listened to soothing music, focused on what I was grateful for, AND let myself feel the feelings. I told myself a lot that, ‘yes I am feeling anxiety and my feelings are valid, but it’s okay to feel this way. My job is to just feel it, experience it, and not be so afraid of a feeling.’ Another thing that I learned through so much self work and therapy is that in life there are inevitable ups and downs. When I’m feeling down I remind myself that it won’t always be like that. I see it as waves in the ocean, we all love the ocean, it’s beautiful, magical, and there are whales in it (lol). But there are really high waves sometimes and really low peaceful waves sometimes. And I feel like what therapy did for me was it gave me a surfboard. Now I just decide to calmly trust and believe in the process of life as a whole and cruise along on my surfboard knowing it will all be okay.
This way of thinking doesn’t come easily, it doesn’t “just happen” now, it’s something I continually remind myself. When I am having a lot of unpleasant feelings I remind myself, that this is one of those moments and I then sort of step outside of myself and validate my feelings by saying to myself, ‘I am feeling very anxious right now, and it is valid, and it is okay to feel these feelings.’ ‘Just because I feel like everything is horrible doesn’t mean that it actually is’. I focus on my breath and will do 478 Breathing Technique which helps to calm and center.
These techniques have helped me to separate myself from my feelings. In the past I never knew that what I was feeling wasn’t the absolute truth. If I felt like everything was horrible, scary, and out to get me, then that is all I knew to be true. Now I know that I am more than just my thoughts and my feelings. I am the awareness of that fact.