If feeling feelings is new to you, or if you tend toward dramatic self-involvement (like me!) I recommend time-limiting your purposeful feeling experience. Give it ten minutes a day. Set a timer.

This is about being in your body, by the way — you may need an initial thought to get the feeling flowing, but following that it's body time. Try not to get swept up in the drama of tears and sad thoughts -- these too are a buffer against the feeling itself, the ego's way of protecting us from the feeling.

But the feeling is just an energy — transient and brief and quite manageable in the body when we take our thoughts out of the equation.

If feeling seems difficult, keep going and trust the process. Energy follows intention, and an honest effort will yield results in time. Baby steps 🙂

NB: not all feelings; not all people. If you have trauma to move through it might benefit you to do this work with a professional therapist, trauma-informed or otherwise. Self-directed shadow work is not for everyone, nor every feeling.

You might make an honest effort and still feel blocked — that's okay. Your mind and body is trying to protect you from pain. If you want to move forward through it, professional guidance through your psychosomatic blocks might be helpful.

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Feeling is work. Being present in your body is work. Be reasonable and compassionate with your expectations of yourself, and be gentle throughout. Have supports in place, internal and external, to help your process.

If you want to feel the big feelings of love and connection, you'll have to feel most of the other things too.

What do you want to feel?

❤️
- S