042: Feeling the Feeling

Lisa Funk @ 2021-04-19 16:16:50 -0700
It’s time to stop blocking the feelings you’re experiencing, whether good or bad and just sit with them. I want to encourage you to start feeling the feelings.
In this episode, I talk about why we sometimes have the urge to resist certain feelings that come up: fear, worry, grief, sorrow, the list goes on but these are a few that people tend to put on the back burner.
You should begin to embrace all of your feelings, despite whether they are positive or negative because sometimes what we resist, can be exactly what we need.
What you’ll find in this episode:
A segment on our creative community
My thoughts on therapy and a current experience I had
Why you shouldn’t resist your feelings
The ways people avoid feeling a feeling
3 steps to feeling the feeling
Ideas for feelings that you might want to adopt
Read the transcript of the episode below:
 Ep 42: Feeling the Feeling

While there might be many reasons that we give the answer "fine" when someone asks us how we are feeling, it can be really powerful to get in touch with our deeper feelings and process them. This is episode 42: Feeling The Feeling.

Welcome to the Committed to Create Podcast. I'm Lisa Funk, and I am so excited to hang out with you here as we talk about the power of creating with our hands and our minds. I like to keep it real, remind you that you are not alone and share specific ways that creativity and mindfulness can help us live even more meaningful and joyful lives.

I am so glad that you're here.

Hello, my friend. And welcome back. I am so glad that you're here. I'm really excited to have this chat about feelings. You know, some people will say that they don't really like talking about feelings, others of us think that we're more comfortable with it. But when I started diving more deeply into this topic, I realized just how much I still have to learn and to process in this arena.

Before we get started, I wanted to do a segment called Our Creative Community.

I love hearing from all of you through reviews on the podcast, through DMS, on Instagram, through replies to our weekly newsletter. If you are not already getting the newsletter, you're going to want to sign up because we are sending out such great tutorials, infographics of reviews of the podcast, all kinds of goodies in there.

I also just love hearing how you are applying the things that we talk about and how you're using some of the tools and products from the hand letter design shop. So I wanted to share a review today of the podcast from Susan in Rocklin, California.

And she says, "my daughter surprised me with the daily mindful lettering bundle. And my cup is full. I am on day five and I love how easy it has been to incorporate five, or 90, minutes of creating into my day. I love to create while listening to your podcasts. Your wisdom provides great value to all aspects of life. Each day, I am more and more mindful of submitting to the process rather than creating for perfection."

I love that. Okay.

"Thank you, Lisa. I look forward to seeing where this journey takes me."

Susan, oh, thank you for that review. What a gift that is to hear. So thank you for sharing that. And I hope that all of you can be inspired to just get started, to submit to the process instead of creating just for perfection and allow yourself to have some fun.

I think that it's just so easy as adults to forget to have fun. I don't know. Are you guys better at having fun regularly than I am? I don't know. Sometimes I feel like it's just so easy to get into this checklist mentality where we're trying to be productive and we are very responsible, you know, and lots of times we are responsible for other humans and making sure that they get fed and taken care of, and trying to keep a somewhat livable residence.

And so it's easy sometimes to forget to incorporate some fun activities. And I'm just saying it doesn't seem to ruin the rest of our lives if I take some time to have fun creating on my own or together with my kids. I love to do that too.

So. Thank you Susan, for that reminder, send us an email and we would love to gift you a free course for leaving that amazing review.

And that is our segment for today.

So today were talking about feelings. Do you feel like you're laying on the couch at your therapist office? I'm just kidding, I'm not a therapist. I have been to many years of therapy and, it's amazing, by the way, if you have not been to therapy and you've thought about going, I just cannot recommend it enough.

There's not like this threshold with therapy where you need to pass this point of like, feeling really super terrible before you can go. You can be feeling amazing and go to therapy. Did you know that? I just can't say enough good things about it. It helped me so much to process how I was feeling and I still use life coaching and therapy regularly.

I just had an incredible session this week, where I was able to just feel it. I was able to let my feelings come out and I was talking about a certain topic and I just wept. I just cried and I let it come out and I cried hard and I haven't cried for awhile. Like I I've cried, but I just, you know, to have like a good cry, oh man.

And to have someone so compassionate and so loving to listen and to encourage me, I just. It felt so good to feel. And just because I got these feelings out, it's not like I solved every issue or figure it out exactly what to do moving forward in my life with certain topics, but it really just felt so healing and so therapeutic.

And I was thinking about how those feelings were there. They weren't new. It's not like they just came up that day. Those feelings and emotions were inside of me and it felt so wonderful to allow them to be there and to process them. And I was thinking about how that only happened because I intentionally took the time to allow them to be there and to express them.

And I was thinking about how I definitely have distracted myself from processing and allowing them, I have resisted those feelings. And I think that that is more common for a lot of us to resist and to distract or to kind of act out on certain emotions in ways that aren't helpful. I think that it can be more common to do those things than to feel the feeling.

So in the new book that is going to come out, now, I know I said last week, I was hoping it was going to come out the 21st, but we talked with our printer and the perfect day for this book to come out is April 26th. So mark your calendars for the next volume of Daily Mindful Lettering, it is going to be all about peace and calm.

So many of us struggle with anxiety and stress, and I got an overwhelming response for the topic of this next book to be in response to that and to be about living with peace and calm. And those are amazing feelings to have.

Part of having a life where we can live with peace is not that we don't ever feel negative emotion. It's not that we don't ever feel sad or upset, but that we learn how to be at peace with being human and being a human means that we feel negative and positive emotions.

So for those of you who are familiar with the Daily Mindful Lettering books, they include 30 days of lettering affirmations on a specific topic. So for this next book, that's about peace and calm. One of the affirmations is: "I allow myself to feel."

And for each of the days of lettering, I share a little blurb, a little bit of encouragement for this affirmation. I say in the book, "just because I love talking about mindset, work does not mean that I think we should ignore or skip over our feelings. No way. That would not lead anywhere. I allow myself to feel all the feels positive or negative."

And that is part of how we can live a full life. Being in touch with all of the experiences that we're having instead of pushing them away, distracting ourselves so that we don't even realize how we feel.

So I want to talk for a second about the ways that we resist these feelings and one super common ways to resist.

And my life coach often talks about this like you're trying to hold a beach ball under the water. Have you ever tried to do this as a kid? Like I'm going to push this ball under the water and it just is really hard to do. And before you know it, you lose your grip and that ball flies out of the water.

It's like, we're trying to keep our feelings from being seen by us and by the world. And so we try to just resist them and push them down and they're going to come out eventually. And if we just hold them gently in our hands and allow them to be there, it's much different than resisting, resisting, resisting, and pushing them down until, before you know it, they fly out in a way that we may not really prefer and that isn't beneficial to us or to our families, the people around us as well.

Now I am someone who is a recovering people pleaser. So I'm always also thinking about the effects of what I do on the people around me. And maybe that is something you can relate to as well, I don't know, but it is really common for us to resist negative emotions because we're afraid and uncertain of what it's going to feel like. We are sometimes doing this subconsciously, but we think that maybe that feeling is going to last forever. We're not sure how that experience is going to be. Maybe we've never really been taught how to feel our feelings and allow them so that they don't get buried so that they don't come out in some different form where we're lashing out.

And one major reason that I believe we resist that I have just touched on is that we have been taught to believe that it's bad or wrong to feel negative emotion. So we tried to resist.

I have a little spoiler alert. Life is about feelings and we cannot resist them forever. Our feelings are actually so crucial to our experience. They are what drive us to take action. They affect us so deeply. And so greatly that trying to just ignore that feelings are there and to avoid having any negative feeling is not actually helpful because we need to understand what we're feeling, what we want to be feeling, because truthfully, the reason why we take action in our lives is often because we are chasing a feeling we want to have.

Yes, we would love for our children to behave perfectly all the time. Why? Because we want to feel calm and peaceful. We do not want to feel worried about how they're going to turn out. We don't want to feel stressed about their behavior. We want to feel calm and happy. Is that too much to ask for? But often we want to avoid certain outcomes because of the uncomfortable feelings and there's nothing wrong with that.

There's nothing wrong with not wanting to feel discomfort. I don't think it's common for people to say, oh, I can't wait to feel upset later. That's going to feel so great. I'm not saying that we should just be so excited to feel annoyed and frustrated and disappointed. However, I do think that we often push these feelings down and try to avoid them at all costs. And we fail to accept them as part of the human experience. And we fail to allow and to feel the feelings all the way through, even when they're uncomfortable.

And what's so interesting is that it's really true that saying that says what we resist persists when we refuse to feel the feeling or avoid it, it's still there. It's going to stay there. It's going to be buried in there somewhere and until we allow it, it's not going to be able to pass through.

So this is similar, very similar to the episode where I talked about anxiety and how powerful it is to allow the feeling of anxiety, the sensations, the vibration, to pass. And it seems counterintuitive to focus on allowing it and being present with it, but it passes so much faster that way than when we resist and fight against it and freak out about it.

Another really interesting way to avoid feeling a feeling is when we act out on a feeling. So let's use anger, for example. If I'm really angry, I think that that looks like yelling and screaming, but it doesn't have to. I can feel angry and be present with it. Now I'm not talking about bottling it up and becoming passive aggressive and hiding my true feelings when I should be sharing them. I'm talking about what does it feel like to feel angry, and does that mean I need to act out on that anger? I don't think that it does.

I think that, you know, it's human nature to act out. It's not like there's something wrong with us. If we act out on our feeling or react to our feeling, but sometimes by doing that, it's a way to mask. It's a way to avoid being present and sitting with the feeling ourselves.

And then a little bit, I'm going to talk about how to sit with a feeling.

Another thing that we do is distract ourselves from feeling. This can be through numbing out in many different ways. We can do that through working, scrolling, social media, shopping, there are so many ways to distract ourselves from feeling. It's helpful to pay attention to what the things are that you turn to throughout the day, especially if you're starting to kind of get agitated or frustrated or sad, or you're starting to feel a negative emotion coming on, what do you do instead? What is the thing that you turn to instead of allowing that feeling to be there? And just pay attention to it and notice when you turn to it. And can you start to sit with the feeling instead, and that's what we're going to go over next.

So this last option that we have is the best one, in my opinion, which is to feel the feeling and to allow it.

So the first thing that you want to do is really pay attention to that judgment that wants to come up. We've been conditioned to believe that it's bad and wrong to feel angry, that it's not good to feel sad, so we avoid it. And so in order to feel it, we need to withhold that judgment. We need to resist labeling these feelings as good or bad. We need to resist believing that we should or shouldn't feel that way.

And I like to use the analogy of when I'm feeling tired, which to me is a sensation. I don't relate it as a feeling as much. I think of feelings as vibrations that we experience in our body, but that mostly come from our mind and our thinking. And I think of sensations as biological vibrations that we experience because of our biology. So that might be something like feeling tired.

And I just have had this experience so many times where, when I'm tired, I talk about how confused I am that I'm tired and that I shouldn't be tired because I got enough sleep last night and that it doesn't make sense. And this really isn't convenient because I have things I'd like to do. And I'm so frustrated that I'm feeling tired. And I have this dialogue where I talk about being tired. I use the should word that I shouldn't be tired and what's wrong with me. I make it mean something about myself that I shouldn't be tired because I can't figure out where the tiredness is coming from.

But the truth of the matter is that I am tired. I can talk around the issue all I want, but in the end I'm still tired. And so once I accept the fact that I'm tired, that it's not bad or wrong, that I'm tired, that I haven't made any mistakes that have caused me to feel tired. I can just allow it and accept it without judging it.

And I can just say, huh, I feel tired. And if I want to get curious about it, I can say, huh, that's interesting. I wonder why I'm tired, but not in an angry way. Not in a judgemental way, not in a way where I'm shaming myself, because let's just be honest, that never helps anything. And it definitely doesn't give me more energy to think that way.

So if I am open to feeling any feeling it's going to show up more easily and I'm going to be able to process it more easily. Just like I did this week, where I had that session and I was able to just open up my feelings and feel sad and cry and feel it, it felt so good. I really do believe that being fully alive means that we accept feeling the positive and the negative.

So. The second step to allowing our feelings is to just open ourselves up to it, breathe into it and be present and to not rush through it. We can notice our desire to resist it. We can notice our desire to grab our phone or find another way to distract ourselves from the feeling. But we can then notice that desire to leave the feeling and remind ourselves to come back, that it's safe to do so, and that we can feel the feeling. Like the lettering affirmation in the new book, I allow myself to feel.

So the third step here is to describe it. So ask yourself a list of questions. And this list I got from my coaching training, and it's been so helpful, especially with kids. I find that they're really good at answering these questions. The key is to not think too much about it.

So the first would be, what are you feeling right now? And challenge yourself to go deeper than just fine or horrible, good or bad. Challenge yourself to really dig into what is the feeling that you're having. The more specific that we can be, the more in touch with our feelings we can be. And the more we can understand what specific feelings feel like in our body.

So the next question is, where is the feeling in your body? What we want to do is just keep everything vague and be like, I don't know, cause we're resisting it. So why would we think about it if we're resisting it?

But what we're going to do is say, where is it in your body? Is it in your stomach? Where it's your stomach is turning? Is it kind of like a tightness in your chest? Could you feel your shoulders coming up, you know, do you feel some tingling in your arms? Where is it in your body?

The next question is, does it have a temperature? Is it hot? Is it cold?

And then what color is this feeling? And this is a really fun question for kids. I find that they are able to just name it. So don't think too much about it. Just go with what color it feels like it is to you.

And then ask yourself, is it hard or soft? Is it moving throughout your body? Is it fast or slow? And then, how often am I feeling this way? Is this something that I'm feeling often?

And then how do I want to react? Because reacting to a feeling can be different than just feeling it. We can choose to just sit with it and be present with it, or we can react, act on it, do something, say something, you know, respond to someone in a certain way. How do we want to act when we have the experience of this feeling and just get curious without judgment.

And I like to breathe into it. So I imagine where it is in my body and I take deep breaths and kind of imagine that breath going to that feeling, going to the tightness or the churning in my stomach or the pain that might, I might feel somewhere and just breathe into it. And remember that you are not the feeling, the feeling is separate.

You don't have to identify with that feeling. And remind yourself that you are safe, which is another affirmation from the new book. It can be really liberating to separate yourself from this feeling and explain it to yourself as if you would explain it to someone who has never felt the feeling before.

So imagine you have young child and you tell them that you're feeling anxious and they say, what's anxious? What are you mean? How does that feel? And instead of saying, oh, it just feels terrible and it's awful, because that is the resistance to the anxiety. If you take the time to answer those questions and you say, oh, well, you know what, it's just kind of a tightness in my chest or it just, you know, my shoulders raise a little bit. The child might be like, oh, what's the big deal. Sometimes our foot falls asleep. Right? And we're like, oh, my foot fell asleep. It feels tingley. And I need to wake it up now. I'm not saying I enjoy that feeling. It's not my favorite feeling, but what's interesting is that's a feeling in my body as well. But I don't have an emotion attached to it.

I don't freak out about that vibration or, or a sensation in my body because I don't believe that when my foot falls asleep, that isn't assigned to me that I'm angry or anxious or upset. So what if we could describe the physical sensations we experience with other emotions, the same way we would describe our foot falling asleep. It kind of feels like pins and needles. It feels kind of cold and that we need to, you know, get some warmth and feeling back into our foot. And when I try to step on it, it feels like I don't quite know. I can't quite feel get my foot.

What if we were to describe this physical sensations of other emotions in this same way? I think that it can kind of take the power, the vagueness, that resistance out of the experience and helps us to sit with it and be present for that emotion and to process it all the way through. We're not in a rush, we're not afraid we're not resistant. And that is the power of sitting with an emotion and processing it. And then we find that it's not so scary after all.

And then we also find that we're not as likely to turn to all of those numbing behaviors to avoid the feeling because we become more comfortable being uncomfortable and we don't allow ourselves to just fight it and resist it and tense up against it. We breathe into it. We explain it. We describe it. And we sit with. As we start to become more in tune with how we're feeling.

I think it's really valuable to ask yourself, what are the feelings I feel most often, what feelings did I feel yesterday? What feelings have I felt so far today? Do I believe that it's okay and acceptable to feel all feelings? Do I know that I am just as worthy and amazing, no matter what feelings I experience? Can I remind myself of that? That it's okay to feel whatever I'm feeling.

I really think it's interesting to take a look at what are the top three feelings that you experienced most often, whether positive or negative, and then ask yourself, what are the three feelings that you would like to feel. Most often, and it may be tempting to just list three positive feelings, but in order to accomplish a lot of the things we want to accomplish, we often are more motivated by feeling that actually is not on the positive feelings list.

And that's okay. So. Take some time to think about that. And I also want to encourage you to increase your vocabulary around feelings. You can do a quick Google search to come up with several different feelings, lists or feelings, wheels. And I think it's really powerful to become more comfortable using different words to describe how you're feeling.

So I'm going to just. Share a bunch of different feelings to give you an idea and to get you started to thinking about expanding your feelings vocabulary. So here's some that we may not use as regularly, but that may be more accurate for how we're feeling. I have a very long list, but I'm just going to go through and share some of them and they are in alphabetical order.

Absorbed, accepting, adaptable, alarmed, amused, annoyed, appalled, argumentative, at ease, attacked, awkward, balanced, belittled, blindsided, bored, brave, burdened, carefree, certain, childlike combative, comparing, complete, confident, conscientious, controlling, cranky, crushed, defensive, demanding, diminished, disgusted, disoriented, doubtful, dynamic, earnest easygoing, embarrassed, empty, energized, enthusiastic, envious, exuberant, fatigued, fidgety, forgiving, frenzied, fulfilled, gentle, gloomy, graceful, grieved, guilty, harmonious, hesitant hopeless, hotheaded, impatient, competent, incompetent, insecure, intrigued, jittery, lighthearted, lousy, mellow, motivated, neglectful, obsessive, offended, overjoyed, panicked, perplexed, preoccupied, quiet, rebellious, relaxed, reserved, restless, self-conscious, sensitive, shy, sluggish, spiteful, stuck, suspicious, tenacious, territorial, timid, truthful, understanding, unworthy, upbeat, victimized, vulnerable, wary, and welcoming.

There are so many more feelings on this list, but I hope that by listening to those, it gives you just an idea of how expanding our vocabulary around feelings can help us to hone in on exactly how we're feeling and what that feels like in our body.

That we don't need to be afraid of it, that we can sit with it and that it will be a greater experience of being alive when we are not afraid to feel, but that we sit with our feelings that we're present with them and we allow ourselves to be human.

I hope that this episode has helped you to feel less alone, to feel maybe excited as you try some of these tips in your effort to feel the feelings. We allow all of the feelings here. Everything's accepted and okay, and you are not your feelings, but your feelings are acceptable. And you are good no matter what.

So I hope that this is helpful in helping to talk through what it's like to identify our feelings and to allow them, to sit with them, and how powerful and healthy it can be to do this.

This isn't something that I learned growing up that anybody taught me how to do. Sometimes it comes naturally for some of us or at different times it can come more naturally. But what a powerful thing for us to not only experience ourselves, but to model for our children and to teach them about as well. That they don't need to stuff their feelings down, that they are not bad because they have negative emotion.

And that when we allow ourselves to experience the feeling that we are not going to find ourselves reacting and acting out as much and stuffing those feelings down.

I am so excited about the new volume of Daily Mindful Lettering that is going to include 30 days of lettering affirmations for peace and calm. I think it might be my favorite thing that I have come out with so far. I know you're going to love it.

It's going to be available April 26th, and I want you to be the first to know about it and to get your hands on it. It's going to come with two pens that you're going to love. I'm going to be sharing sneak peaks over on Instagram and through our newsletter, so definitely sign up for that.

You can do that at handlettereddesign.com/join to get emails when it's available, so you don't forget. And I think it's going to be a great option for Mother's Day, I think it's going to just be a great tool in your tool belt to have in your life for a mindful practice.

And I'm just so grateful that you're here. I love chatting with you every week and I can't wait to talk to you again.
Links:
Daily Mindful Lettering
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