How to release any feeling.
Strength explains how our feelings are the admission ticket to everything we want.
Learning how to actually feel has been the most important skill I’ve ever learned.
It’s what I credit to the alignment, fulfillment, and creative, spiritual, and personal growth I’ve experienced in every facet of my life over the past five years. Because when you learn to feel you trust intuition, you trust yourself. When you learn how to feel anything and everything you can handle the feelings that come with moving past your comfort zone into a new version of yourself. You take risks and bet on yourself because you know you’ll be able to handle any outcome.
Learning how to feel isn’t just recognizing you feel something. It means knowing how to tune into that feeling and fully move through it so you can release it from your body.
I spent 35 years not knowing what it meant to feel a feeling. I thought feelings were for actors and people who were weak, unhinged, or dramatic. Whenever an uncomfortable thought or feeling would pop up I’d say to myself lalala I’m not thinking about this and quickly change the channel in my mind.
This “worked” for me for 35 years.
By “worked” I mean I was successful on paper. I went to an Ivy League school. Then I worked in marketing and advertising for massive brands like Chelsea Football Club and The Economist. I rose quickly through the ranks at the best ad agency in London. I had a thriving social life in my 20s. I had a number of kind, interesting boyfriends. I did a top tier MBA program between France and Singapore. Then I got recruited into the tech world in New York.
You can accomplish a lot that looks great on paper without feeling.
But without feeling it’s hard to align. So there were many things that weren’t working. I was miserable in my tech career. I had no connection to my intuition and internal compass. I needed to feel in control at all time to mitigate my anxiety. I smoked too much weed. I struggled to choose boyfriends I really liked, and trust when things felt off. I struggled to remake a new social life in New York.
Solving all these blocks required learning how to feel.
People are making billions of dollars off of your inability to feel your feelings.
You have countless options that will serve you a reliable hit of dopamine whenever you are feeling something that is uncomfortable. Which, if you don’t know how to feel, will be pretty much all the time.
You can eat highly processed food that’s designed to be addictive. You can reach for alcohol or for a hit of a joint to take the edge off. You can lose yourself in a doom scroll. You can numb out with a Netflix binge. You can buy something. You can pop a Xanax. You can throw yourself into work, the most socially acceptable numbing behavior there is.
If you don’t know how to feel, these habits you’re subconsciously using for emotional suppression can easily become high functioning addictions - or full blown, life destroying addictions. Because when you don’t feel your feelings they don’t go away. They stack up in your body and create anxiety and insecurity. Your nervous system becomes so stuffed with unprocessed feelings that you have no additional capacity to hold the ambiguity, uncertainty, and fear that comes with stepping outside your comfort zone and doing something new. When you constantly buffer over your feelings with external stimulus you lose connection to your internal compass, meaning you do not trust yourself. Not to mention the health impacts - elevated cortisol suppresses your immune function and increases inflammation. This might show up for you as digestion issues, skin issues, chronic back pain, migraines, heart disease… just to name a few of the most well documented.
Not feeling your feelings is costing you your life.
Ok then, so how do you actually feel?
Feeling, is actually pretty simple. You can follow the step by step process I outline below. Or listen to the recording. When done right, it’s ultimately less painful than suppressing your feelings.
This is one of the very first things I teach anyone who works with me, because learning how to feel is required if you’re going to be able to follow the sparkle. And you need to be able to follow the sparkle if you’re going to align and become the artist of your life.
