Name Your Feelings

March 26, 2020 paula

My phone has been squawking at me since yesterday. Public service messages, first from Larimer County, and then from the State of Colorado, ordering me to stay at home. My phone has been delivering other messages, too. Emails and texts from friends. Facebook posts. Podcast updates. Virtual workshop offers from a wide variety of practitioners, who like me, are finding new ways to reach out to our clients. I can do without the squawking, but it’s comforting to know that I am connected with community, even as I’m mostly confined to home.

I’ve learned to pay attention when I get messages that come in threes. The importance of naming our feelings is one of those messages. This morning, I clicked on a link to an article in the Harvard Business Review titled That Discomfort You’re Feeling is Grief. The article, featuring David Kessler, describes what we’ve all been feeling in the face of this global pandemic. As the world’s foremost expert on grief. Kessler says it’s important for us to name what we feel.

Image by Pexels from Pixabay

There is something powerful about naming this as grief. It helps us feel what’s inside of us. So many have told me in the past week, “I’m telling my coworkers I’m having a hard time,” or “I cried last night.” When you name it, you feel it and it moves through you. Emotions need motion. It’s important we acknowledge what we go through. One unfortunate byproduct of the self-help movement is we’re the first generation to have feelings about our feelings. We tell ourselves things like, I feel sad, but I shouldn’t feel that; other people have it worse. We can — we should — stop at the first feeling. I feel sad. Let me go for five minutes to feel sad. Your work is to feel your sadness and fear and anger whether or not someone else is feeling something. Fighting it doesn’t help because your body is producing the feeling. If we allow the feelings to happen, they’ll happen in an orderly way, and it empowers us. Then we’re not victims.

David Kessler

I got the same message yesterday, loud and clear, when listening to a podcast called Brene on FFTs by Brene Brown. FFT stands for Fucking First Time. Brown talks about the challenges we face when we are doing things for the first time. There are many firsts for us: first pandemic, first stay-at-home order, first time that stores have been out of toilet paper, first time that schools have been closed indefinitely… Like Kessler, Brown says there is power in naming our experience. Naming something as an FFT creates a pause in the flow of our overwhelming emotions so that we can muster our resources and keep going.

Image by John Hain from Pixabay

Okay, okay. When experts like Kessler and Brown tell me it’s important to name our feelings, I listen. Never mind that I’ve been getting the same insight consistently for the past couple of weeks - ever since the pandemic became front and center - from my own work. With social distancing, I’ve been doing more remote energy healing sessions with my clients. With every session, I have been drawn to my client’s heart center. Their hearts, like mine, have been overflowing with grief. Some clients had awareness of what they were feeling. Others did not.

As an energy healer, for the past twenty years I’ve been learning the language of energy. Our emotions, interestingly, translate to “energy in motion”. When I named the emotion pent up in my clients’ hearts as grief, they were better able to allow the energy to move on through. The imagery that keeps coming to me as I work with clients, is to invite the grief to flow into the earth’s oceans, where it can be honored and transmuted into wisdom.

In many healing traditions, grief is associated with the lungs. And water is symbolic for our emotions. Isn’t it interesting that covid-19 tends to fill the lungs with excess water? Maybe if we all process our grief, we can collectively assist those who are drowning in it?

Image by Dimitris Vetsikas from Pixabay

Strategies for Coping with our Feelings

Here is some good advice, borrowed and paraphrased from Kessler and Brown, and added to by me, to help you deal with the uncertainties we’re all facing, and the accompanying emotions:

Name what you are feeling
Acknowledge that you are in an FFT Yes, the world has changed and we don’t know how that will look.
Normalize your experience by putting it into perspective. Remind yourself that this is temporary. The new normal won’t always be this hard.
Set realistic expectations, not only for yourself, but for everyone. None of us are experts. We all cope in different ways.
Stock up on compassion.
Come back into the present. We experience anticipatory grief when our minds go to worst case scenario. Practice mindfulness and gratitude for what you have.
Stay tuned to your heart center. When you feel overwhelmed, place your hands on your chest and acknowledge the grief you find there. Allow your tears to flow out of your heart and into the sea. There is deeper meaning and wisdom, what Kessler calls the 6th stage of grieving, that will eventually find its way back into our collective hearts and minds.
If you find other emotions within - like fear, anger, annoyance, defiance (that’s me when I’m told by the state that I can’t leave my home) - let those emotions move through you, too. Let them be recycled.