For about fourteen years, I have made a habit of feeling all my feelings every morning as I have tea. As I walk into the kitchen, my ritual is to check in on what I am feeling. My morning tea is a time of meditation. After a long night of dreams, whether remembered or not, this is a time of clearing.
The first feelings that come up are usually so subtle they are hard to define, they just don’t rise to the level of joy. If I am not at least feeling joy—the lowest emotion on the love side of the love/fear equation—I am definitely feeling/releasing fear-based emotions. Then frustrations, irritations and about a half-hour to an hour’s worth of feelings that are all over the fear spectrum come up and release.
With dozens of negative feelings gone, it’s like I’ve taken all the trash out of my house. The noise and pain in my bodymind are gone. Instead of all those unpleasant feelings forcing my brain to generate thousands of toxic thoughts, I go to work happy, my day full of promise.
Some of you may be more evening orientated. Reviewing your whole day—while feeling all the feelings in those moments—just before going to sleep unencumbers your dreams of the past day’s noise. This frees up your dream world to be more creative, less reactive.
Most people don’t actually feel their feelings. They only think about the feelings, which further builds emotional pressure. Most of our pain comes from built-up emotional pressure. The internal pressure that builds up in our bodymind from just one unfelt feeling forces our brain to generate thousands of toxic thoughts. And all those thoughts are past/future orientated.
When our brain is left in charge of our consciousness, its thoughts from the past drag heavy chains of guilt, shame and missed opportunities; whereas its thoughts of the future are loaded with fear, worry, anxiety and other less-than-wonderful projections.
As a result, the average person—based on large studies of pet scans—thinks 70,000 thoughts per day. Almost all of those thoughts are past/future orientated. And most of them are thematically similar to the thoughts they thought yesterday. There is a better way.
When we walk into a room full of people or any new situation, feeling all the feelings that come up frees us from our unconscious response patterns, frees us to be our authentic selves.
When we make a practice of feeling all our feelings, we often go for long periods without a single thought. We float along in the childlike joy of the moment. In those moments, peace of mind and the blessings our spirit would like to bestow on us naturally float up into our awareness.
