Feeling our way through
our emotions and our humanity
Let everything happen to you: beauty and terror.
Just keep going. No feeling is final.
Rainer Maria Rilke
Book of Hours, I 59
When we look across each crisis and challenge we face, I keep sensing the same need: we must learn how to feel, allow ourselves to feel it, and then respond with intention.
About a year ago, I had an encounter that really shifted my thoughts on feelings. A fellow parent of young kids was telling me about a difficult moment with their school aged child that morning. The parents had taught this young girl to name her feelings, as so many of us do these days. And that girl sure was naming her feelings - she was sad, mad, and adamant that she didn’t want to go to camp. The problem, of course, was that the parents needed her to go there, so they could get to their commitments. But she wanted to stay home. The parents encouraged her to use her calming techniques and she refused.
I SOO resonated with the parental frustration and the need to keep the trains running. AND. I began to think more deeply about the common paradigm of inviting our kids to name and express their feelings, then respond with “ok, now use one of your calming techniques”. My oldest child hated when we did that. Screamed at us when we suggested he take a deep breath or use the five-fingered breathing technique when he was mad or frustrated. And in the hospital when a kid is going through a difficult procedure, we know to never tell a kid to ‘calm down’. Because lets be honest, who likes to be told to calm down when they are afraid or overwhelmed?
So while intimately understood this parents’ frustration that her daughter wasn’t applying the ‘coping’ techniques she had learned and was instead just feeling and insisting on honoring what she was feeling, listening as an outsider (rather than the parent trying to get to the next thing), shifted my perspective. A small voice in my head said “why do we keep telling children to feel their feelings, but then immediately ask them to calm those feelings away?” Is it a double standard to teach children to feel but not allow them to make choices based on those feelings? And what about us adults? Do we allow ourselves to feel, and what do we do once we let those feelings be here?
While obviously I don’t advocate for us to make reactionary choices on emotional whims, I think that we have often shifted too far the other way.
When we name our feelings
She was a smiling, pleasant, woman physician, and we were meeting for our first coaching call. I could tell from her intake that she was feeling incredibly torn. She know what she loved and wanted out of life, and work felt like a robber, taking precious things from her in the form of her time and energy. Though clients often tell me why they are coming, I always start with curiosity, asking again what brings them to this coaching session. As I asked that of her, she unwound. Tears streamed as she told me, a complete stranger, how hard things felt. She had gone to her boss to ask for what she felt needed to do her job well and not feel so depleted (more support, boundaries) and her boss suggested coaching, rather than resources. She smiled through the tears as she shared wanting to be present for her kids, yet also not wanting to waste the years she spent training for the highly specialized medical practice that could only be done at a small number of institutions. Physically transplanting her family to another institution was not on the table. She felt stuck. So stuck. I continued to gently ask questions. She indirectly eluded to a major fear - if she left academic medicine for private practice, she might be forever closing the door on specialized practice she had worked so hard to learn. Her whole body demonstrated the depth of this fear. Making a change felt permanent. And I simply stated, “it sounds like you are afraid that if you leave you could never go back.”
That client left our first meeting and left her job. Telling the truth about the fear underneath her inaction despite being very unhappy allowed her to see the situation differently. She took a new role, one that met fewer of her professional goals but more of her personal ones. And that was all it took. One meeting. One time to be speak truth to what she felt, seen, witnessed, believed. More than anything, I think it was her courage in telling the truth to herself that propelled her to make the change.
What are feelings?
Sometimes, like that client, our feelings are uncontrollably obvious. They come in the form of tears or yelling. Our body expresses them in all their glory and power. Sometimes, we check in, and have no idea how we are feeling. Often, many of us see our feelings played out our actions before noticing or naming them. We react, then realize we are mad, hungry, or overwhelmed. Feelings can also be deep underneath layers of protection and numbing, hiding out somewhere deep and dark inside us. Sometimes we know this, other times, we have no idea. Instead, we feel neutral, apathetic, or even dead inside. Cut off from feeling. Zombie-like. If any of these descriptions fit you, thats ok too. You’ve done the initial work. You’ve noticed how you feel. Whether angry, sad, anxious, vigilant or neutral. These are all ways to name how you feel.
Feeelings are complicated neurophysiopsychosocialcultural (aka complex!) responses to our experience. Feelings can be a response to the present moment (i.e. I just spilled my coffee and I’m annoyed and worried about my morning caffeine need). Feelings may be more abstract or subtly connected to things not in the present moment. Like a distant tug about something beyond our immediate cognitive awareness. But most simply, feelings are information.
Telling the truth about how we feel
While it isn’t wise to respond reactively to every emotion we have, it is also unwise to ignore emotions and think of them as primitive. Feelings are also energy, felt not just ‘in our head’ but throughout our body. This, too, is why we can’t just think or rationalize our way through feelings, and why telling our 6 year old to ‘calm down’ is ineffective. Feelings are more complicated and do not respond to an on-off switch. They are a core part of our humanity.
“We heal when we can be with what we feel.”
― Hillary L. McBride, The Wisdom of Your Body: Finding Healing, Wholeness, and Connection through Embodied Living
It also takes a lot of effort to resist our feelings, and this process can disconnect us from what we really care about. When tended to (more on this below) our feelings can be fuel, a energy toward positive change. We see that we can often feel more than one thing at a time: grief + love, despair+hope, fear+courage. Joanna Macy, who created the Work that Reconnects, encourages that feeling emotions even as difficult as despair is critical to our humanity.
“The refusal to feel takes a heavy toll. Not only is there an impoverishment of our emotional and sensory life, flowers are dimmer and less fragrant, our loves less ecstatic, but this psychic numbing also impedes our capacity to process and respond to information. The energy expended in pushing down despair is diverted from more creative uses, depleting the resilience and imagination needed for fresh visions and strategies. ”
― Joanna Macy
In my experience, a critical first step in cultivating an inner compass, more aliveness and engagement in the world, is to start telling the truth about how we feel. Even if it is just to ourselves. To sense into those spaces where we are stuck or ignoring an emotion or feeling that keeps nudging us. Its scary, certainly, to be in the vulnerability of being honest, even if it is just to ourselves. But in doing so, we are taking the first step toward being able to act with integrity. As Martha Beck writes: “In this rush to conform, we often end up ignoring or overruling our genuine feelings - even intense ones, like longing or anguish - to please our cultures. At that point, we're divided against ourselves. We aren't in integrity (one thing) but in duplicity (two things). Or we may try to fit in with a number of different groups, living in multiplicity (multiple things).” The experience of duplicity can be painful and is certainly exhausting.
Feeling our feelings can be scary. They sometimes tell us to change something that we aren’t sure we are ready to change. But when the tight grip of the status quo shuts down feelings that are inconvenient, this becomes not only an individual problem, but a cultural one. What if our feelings are actually trying to help us create a better world?
Tending to our feelings
Once we are willing to look truthfully at how we feel, what comes next? Learning about emotions and how to respond to them has been an embodied practice for me over several years. In my 20’s and 30’s I only felt my feelings in glimpses, often when they poured out like an overfilled cup. I didn’t know what to do once feelings were acknowledged, so not feeling them seemed easier.
Like so many, I was taught that feelings are meant to be calmed, tamed, and regulated.1 But I have come to doubt the wisdom of this approach and wonder if instead, we need to actually create space for feelings to be felt and tended to, rather than regulated.
Tending makes me think of the garden and how growing food is relational - me, the plants, water, soil, the microbiome in that soil. I’m not forcing the plants to do anything, and cannot exert my will on them other than sowing the seed or destroying the plan. How they grow and produce, that is something I can tend to, but not control.
I was reminded of this as an approach to emotions in 2024 when Holly Truhlar posted something similar on Instagram. She stated “Only whiteness could come up with the term '“regulate” for something as intimate as tending to our personal and collective nervous systems”. This stood out to me, because I had recently read Permission to Feel by Dr. Mark Brackett. While I appreciated the book and the authors’ interest in improving our emotional vocabulary and feeling or feelings, I found myself disagreeing with the thesis that strong emotional skills including regulating our emotions.
When I think of the work regulate, I get images of control and trying to achieve a certain standard. And I think many of us approach our feelings this way. We are told to do this. “Manage your stress!”. “Calm your anxiety!”. “Don’t appear angry!”. We imagine there is a right way to feel and to respond to each feeling.
Tending, on the other hand, invites us to respond to our emotions differently. Like the garden, tending is filled with observation, care, and attention. Its a relational approach. Tending does not suggest that we must change our emotions. We can appreciate that our emotions have information, tend to the energy they carry, and perhaps feel more alive and engaged in life than when we cut ourselves off from feeling. Our feelings can remind us what we care about and that we are interconnected. We can recognize that under fear, there is often a desire for safety, underneath anger might be love or a passion for justice. This knowing can be painful, but also inspiring, motivating, and energizing. Feeling is also very human. Don’t we need more humanity these days?
If you’ve gotten this far, thank you. I hope you have found something helpful here today. For the practical among you, I offer some steps to apply this work into your life right now.
Reflections for you:
What messages in my body tell me that there might be something I need to feel? Common symptoms include neck or jaw tension, stomach unease, or headaches.
When might I find time this week to feel these feelings, even if it is just 5-10 minutes?
What actions might help me express or process these feelings? For ideas, look here:
Complete your stress cycle through actions like crying, singing, or moving your body
Art: drawing, painting, pottery music
What would it look like and feel like to tend to these feelings with love and care?
Where and with who can I share my emotions and be witnessed?
Wishing you the space and courage to truth about how you feel and tend to those feelings. I hope you feel held by our collective care.
Sarah
There is still room to join my (free) Inner Compass Jumpstart workshop this Thursday at noon CST. We will be doing various exercises to feel into what matters most so you can define your core values. I would love to have you there!
Permission to Feel by Marc Brackett, PhD