Feel It, All of It
The Wisdom of Emotions — And How to Not Die from Them
If you want to find happiness, you have to make friends with unhappiness.
ANONYMOUS
Thank you for all the ways you’ve been saying ‘thank you’ and ‘please’ and cooperating so well, love.”
“You’re welcome, Mama.”
“It is so fun to be in a good mood together, right?”
“Yeah.”
“But you know what? I love your grumpies and angries and sads, too. I love being with you, no matter what mood you are in.”
“Me, too, Mama. I like all the feelings.”
I glance in the rearview mirror at my three-year-old cutie-pie. He is looking content in his car seat, a ruby-lipped, curly-headed cherub flown right off the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, munching brown rice crackers in my backseat.
You like all the feelings?
You. Like. All. The. Feelings?
I imagine his insides, his feelings. The whirlwind of excitement when he shows me a new rocket ship tower he built out of magnetic tiles. The gale of disappointment when I choose the wrong color bowl to hold his snack of snap peas. The crashing waves of sadness when we can’t find his stuffed animal, Lovie. Where did we leave Lovie? We can’t go to sleep without Lovie!
I imagine that many of these times are the first time he has felt this particular emotion in his whole life. Loneliness. Longing. Rage. Grief. Indignation. Injustice. Bliss. Joy. Mischievousness. Contentment. Shame. Pride.
Amazingly, it seems as though he is learning to like and to befriend his feelings, which is pretty much opposite of what most of us learn early on, girls and boys alike. In fact, the arena of emotions — which ones are okay to have and which ones aren’t, how much or how little is okay to express, or having emotions at all — is often a painful initiation in which we learn to constrict our self-expression, feel ashamed about what once felt natural, and secret away (into our shadow) the “unacceptable” parts of ourselves.
We learn things such as, what we feel doesn’t matter. That our feelings disturb others, or are a form of manipulation. That if we have “bad” feelings, then we are “bad.” That, ideally, we should never have any outbursts. That if we don’t want to be left or punished, we’d better calm down — and how exactly do we do that? We shove our intense emotions into the wintery realms of our psyches, sidestep and avoid them wherever possible. We fix them, fade them, lighten them up, reason with them, attack them, or turn and run for our lives. It is a great understatement to say that we develop a limited repertoire in dealing with unwanted feelings in ourselves and in others.
In other words, we learn it is not safe to feel what we feel. One of my clients, Violette, tells me she was barely four years old when she realized that her father would never stop beating her with his leather belt and that, no matter what she felt about it, no one was coming to save her. She clearly remembers that moment as the first one when she sent her soul out of her body.
For Shelley, one of my mentees, there was no physical violence in her family, but she still internalized early on her family’s concerns about what other people thought. She was eight years old when she traded her happy, playful self for a tough girl persona, learning that, in her family’s code, you cover up your vulnerability with judgments and blame. In fact, she learned if you cover up what you are feeling with doing — staying busy, always achieving, and never slowing down — you don’t have to feel at all. To-do lists and high earning became her favorite ways to numb herself.
So as we worked together, bit by bit, Shelley rewrote her inner critic as an inner cheerleader and rewrote her fear of vulnerability as emotional strength. Bit by bit, she eased up her self-punishment and extreme regimentation by re-introducing fun and silliness in her life. As she put it, “I got my childhood back.”
Violette also shared with me that she doesn’t know what to do with the immensity of her empathy and passion. She cares so deeply about the world that her circuitry shuts down until she can’t feel much at all. How else can she make her way through a grocery store or dress her son for school without screaming like her hair is on fire, as she puts it? As is often the case for Violette, not knowing how to express the intense emotions of joy and ecstasy can be as bedeviling as not knowing how to deal with shame or rage. Given the choice between combusting from our intense emotions, or shutting down, most of us choose shutting down.
NAVIGATING EMOTIONAL STORMS
Regardless of our individual childhoods, almost all of us learn that our emotional storms are “tantrums” — irresponsible and immature outbursts that we would be able to manage if we weren’t quite so deficient. We learn to numb to, and become ashamed of, the overwhelming physical sensations and restrictive beliefs that are associated with our emotions. I allow myself to wonder if it might turn out differently for my son — who likes all the feelings. I tear up when I hear him say this, because I myself am only beginning to really, truly, like all the feelings. I am proud that he might just be getting the hang of it some thirty years sooner than I’ve been able to.
As a new mom, however, I admit that I thought the best way to “manage” my son’s toddler tantrums was to try to stop them, shorten them, or make them quieter. I told myself, “Just try not to lose your shit. Hold it all together. Or, just look like you are holding it all together.” Also known as fix it, fade it, lighten it up, attack it, reason with it, or turn and run for your life.
But one afternoon when my two-year-old son exploded into a tantrum when a friend took a toy he was playing with, I tried something different. Instead of keeping my distance from his outburst, I pulled him close and held him, welcoming his feelings. I put on my inner galoshes and reminded myself that, although I might get very wet for the next bit of time, his emotional storm was not a problem.
I told him that I bet he was feeling sad and disappointed and probably angry, too. He looked at me thoughtfully. He pointed to his belly when I asked him where in his body he was feeling those things. When I asked him, “When she took your toy without asking, did it hurt your feelings?” he wailed yes and started crying some more. I didn’t panic. I resisted the doubt that I had somehow made it worse or prolonged his agony. “Keep getting out the sads and the angries. Let the energy out,” I instructed him.
I told him it made sense he was feeling sad, disappointed, angry, and hurt. I confirmed for him what happened: “Your feelings got hurt when she took away the toy you were playing with without asking.” As he nodded, the storm started to downshift.
“You are feeling a lot, love. Feelings are strong. They are so much energy, aren’t they?” Another vigorous nod. “How are you feeling now? Do you want me to dry your tears?”
“Not yet,” he told me. “I want to cry some more.”
And after a few more minutes, he asked me to dry his tears and told me he felt better now.
“Do you want to tell her that it hurt your feelings when she took your toy without asking and that you want her to ask you ‘how many minutes’ next time?” He nodded and went over to his little play pal and let out his truth. She said okay, she would next time. And offered him a turn with the toy.
What I practiced with my son is what I now practice with myself — and is what I wish I had learned when I myself was a girl child. And in a moment, I’ll break down how you can practice it as well, with yourself or others, no matter how old. Tantrums can and must be redefined as intense emotional storms that, while they admittedly do overtake your body, soul, and mind in intense ways, hold important information for you. As Karla McLaren writes in The Language of Emotions, “Emotions are messages from our instinctive selves. . . . If we ignore and repress an emotion, we won’t erase its message — we’ll just shoot the messenger and interfere with an important natural process.”1 As you learn to surf your emotions and not drown in them — or at least when you do drown in them, to breathe underwater — you can then receive the truth that they are trying to deliver.
All faces of the feminine must be revered, without exception — even emotions. When I shared this at one of my retreats, I saw a light bulb turn on over Sian’s head. Sian, a redhead whose presence is at once fiery and laid back, shared what that meant to her. “That means that my anger, my rage, my resentments, my fears, my hope, my passion, my beauty, and my ugly must all be revered — without exception.” Over the course of the retreat, she was able to look at her emotions from this alternate perspective and to feel each part of herself, fully. This Feminine Genius skill teaches us how to feel “it,” all of it, whatever it is, with ever more skill, wild abandon, and grace — and eventually with only intermittent bouts of self-destruction and a minor hemorrhage here and there.
I’ve come to understand that much of our suffering is optional. As I see it, most of our suffering, as women, as humans, stems from our inability to fully feel our feelings without attempting to escape them, numb them, drink them, shop them, eat them, caffeinate them, or smoke them away. When a storm gathers on the horizon, we have two very simple choices: number one, to put on our inner galoshes and feel it, all of it. Or number two, to self-destruct. More on transfiguring number two in the next chapter. More on number one now.
You get to keep all the strength and flexibility you are willing to feel.
DAVID SCHLUSSEL
If you are anything like me or my clients, you also assume that if you fully feel your feelings, horrible, terrifying things will happen. You might actually die. You could be discovered as the fraud you suspect you are. You could be cast out of the family/tribe/group/sisterhood. You could turn to ash from shame. And you could be exposed as weak/not enough/too much. So you think that the more you can resist losing your shit and the more you can hold it all together — or look like you are holding it all together — then you will stop having all these problematic feelings.
But. Until you can again feel what you feel, your life will never be your own.
Sian got more in-the-field practice with what she learned on retreat a few months later when her mother became mentally unstable and her father extremely physically ill. Sian dropped everything to be with them as her father died and it became necessary for her mother to go into a full-time care facility. For months, Sian ignored her feelings, got into adrenaline overdrive and stayed in it, focusing on all the things that needed to be done. But eventually, the tug of constant anxiety, blame, and nightmares got her attention. She realized it was time to feel her feelings, all of them.
Over minutes, days, and eventually months, she leaned in to her feelings rather than numbing them. She welcomed each emotion in turn, and began a dialogue with them, asking what wisdom they might have for her.
She began with the worst she could think of: blame. Sian felt vicious, her judgments of herself, and others, were rapier-sharp. This strange and ugly beast had her in its clutches and wouldn’t let her go. Or, she couldn’t let it go.
So Sian let herself wonder what could possibly be good about blame and the arrows it let her sling. She got curious about what its positive intention could possibly be for her. She nosed out the wisdom contained in blame’s black heart, sure she would find some raw gem there.
She found it.
Blame, it turns out, is anger’s scrappy sidekick. When anger’s fire is too hot to hold, it will consume you, and blame understands this. More of an action than an emotion, blame’s job is to direct some of anger’s firepower out onto others, to buy you time until you can figure out what of that anger is for yourself, and what is truly for another. Blame’s message for you is, I’ll stay with you until you can face the depth of your wounding and rage.
Blame is a cry for help. A cry for help concealed in a battle cry, true, but a cry nonetheless. Sian’s blame knew that if it could point out that it wasn’t all her fault, that she was not alone in her family’s perfect storm, then someone could be in it with her, notice her, notice her pain, come to her aid, and help.
Blame softened. Seen for its heroism rather than its villainy, it morphed. It shone a bit. It gave way to pure anger.
Sian inquired with curiosity into anger, and found that anger’s message was, something you value feels threatened. “Oh. Something I value,” Sian pondered. “Something precious and dear to me is in danger, so anger hands me a sword to protect it.” With this perspective, she felt into the white-hot heart of what she valued: Love, for her own sweet self. Love, for her family. Trust in life, and, if Sian was completely honest, mostly trust in herself.
Clear that Sian was now sharply aware of what she valued, anger happily tossed its mane and trotted off to become remorse. Remorse for losing her trust in herself and in life. Remorse put its arms around Sian, and they sank together into a pillow of sadness. You lost something, something you cared about, the sadness told her. Sian nodded. That is what happened. In sadness’s embrace, she felt blameless in her blame. She felt tenderness for herself instead of anger. She felt pain, and she was exhausted, but she felt free.
As she did with blame and anger, Sian did with each of her dark emotions. She sniffed out each feeling’s funky gifts, if only she would pause to unwrap them. She practiced how to not abandon herself (or self-destruct) at the onset of a storm, but instead, to stay.
Sian’s anxiety, anger, self-doubt, and grief slowly but surely gave way to a sense of how loving, capable, okay, and rather wonderful she was. I see this time and time again: each emotion that is befriended, engaged with, bathed with curiosity, and then fully felt, likes to leave in its wake a side effect of self-esteem and wholeness.
The word demon, as in the monstrous doubts and compulsions we carry inside of us, comes from the word daemon, which means “the voice of your inner knowing.” (Yeah, read that one again). Somewhere along the line, as pagan rites were tweaked by the Christian church, so were many important, sacred words. The word daemon that was known to mean a source of trustable inner guidance got twisted to mean instead the voices of evil inside you, utterly untrustable.
If you let them, your emotions will reveal themselves as daemons, not demons, as friends, not foes, and as guides, not saboteurs. They say, “This: try this. That: that is what is precious to you. There: go that way next.” They will cup your face in their hands and turn you to see the pinhole of light — the proverbial light at the end of the tunnel. They will blow a little wind under your wings as you begin your ascent from the wintery underworld into the bright springtime.
Not quite convinced? As one of my mentors, Carla Camou, likes to remind me, the lifespan of an emotion is only between two to twenty minutes. Often, when you feel it fully and drink in the wisdom it contains, it passes of its own accord. Otherwise, when you deny it, wallow in it, or reacquire it, the emotion can stay dug in for a lifetime. The point of life isn’t to stop having shit happen to you — if you want a life that feels right and true and well-lived and often quite fulfilling, that is. The ups and downs are not problems, nor are they indications you are doing it wrong. Problems will come. Strong, difficult, intense emotions will come. It is how you stay with them that is the key.
Imagine a woman who knows how to feel it, all of it, rather than shove her finger down her throat to stay thin, or have sex before she wants to in order to feel a facsimile of love. Imagine a woman who is in direct conversation with the sacred messages from All That Is. She isn’t having tantrums, she is feeling her feelings — also known as her truths, her values, her wants, her boundaries, her warning signals, and her fierce and tender loves.
Imagine a woman who knows that her feelings are the fiery, intense, wildly human reconfirmation of her divinity. Imagine a woman who no longer believes she is too much or not enough, but is just right. Imagine a woman who doesn’t stop at, “I think, therefore I am” (thanks, Descartes), but continues on to, as my friend Annie Lalla likes to say, “I feel, therefore I am.”
I have heard that our greatest fear as humans is a fear of death, but I don’t completely agree. I think our greatest fear isn’t just of dying, but also of being fully in life with all its ups and downs and unknowns and (seemingly) unbearables. We fear being too much, unloved, outcast, not enough, sick, insane, a burden, heartbroken, and abandoned, and we think that the problem with these fears is that we could die from — or keep having to live with — the physical and emotional pain of them.
What do we humans know of actual death? We can only know death when we die, and then it is (probably) too late to report back. We only know life; and in life, we fear change, intensity, chaos, uncertainty, loss, shock, surprise, shame, and even our huge swells of rapture and power. We even fear garden-variety contentment, especially if it lasts too long and makes us forget our to-do lists. We fear what we feel.
One of our greatest tasks then becomes to gaze at each bedeviling feeling right in its bedeviling little eye and say, “Take me. I’m yours.”
Emotions aren’t a bug in the programming, something left over from your malfunctioning lizard brain or incomplete childhood. You do not have these weird, unwieldy emotions that happen mysteriously to you, and you simply need to tolerate them, like that crazy uncle you have to sit next to at Thanksgiving dinner. Your emotions aren’t a mistake; they are some of the best parts of you. Feelings aren’t a design flaw; they are divine in origin. You are not a weakling because you have intense emotions; your ability to feel them fortifies your inner knowing and strengthens your physical body as you walk the often-intense path of Feminine Genius.
And here is how you welcome in each wily comrade and practice feeling it — all of it.
FEELING PRACTICE FEEL IT, ALL OF IT
1 Welcome each emotion.
2 Let it pierce you to your bones.
3 Wait.
4 Mine for the gem of wisdom in each emotion.
Let me say more about each step.
Welcome each emotion. By welcome, I mean that you take on the stance of inviting rather than resisting your emotions — as though you were saying, “Come in, you are welcome here.”
Welcoming each emotion is an attitude, a stance. If ordinarily you tense up and feel dread at the onset of an emotion, see if you can instead open your mind and heart and body to it. When you find yourself reaching to drink, shop, purge, eat, cut, smoke, drug, whatever — pull back your urge and stay put. Invite each emotion to sit with you in your inner salon as a welcome guest.
Strong, intense, and “negative” emotions are part of life. Stuff that you don’t want to happen, happens. To everyone. It always will. And while this might indicate something is “wrong” or misaligned in your life, it never indicates that something is wrong with you.
Let it pierce you to your bones. I first heard the phrase “Let it pierce you to your heart” from the Buddhist nun Pema Chödrön, who was speaking about navigating scary, hard stuff. Let the emotion — and all the bodily sensations that it rides in on — pierce you to the very epicenter of your breastbone. Instead of damming up your feelings or collapsing your chest, take down the levee and let the emotion flood through your body and bones, absolutely and completely. Let it do its thing.
Breathing is good. Crying is good. Shaking is great. Swearing, sweating, pacing, yelling, panting, dancing, lying face down on the cold floor — all superb.
Get the grumpies and the angries and the sads out. Let them have their way with you and let them be through with you when they are through with you. Grumpies and angries and sads like completing their natural cycle, and they will mess with you big time if you rush them. The more you relax, the more you lean in and open to the feeling rather than contracting, panicking, or running the other way, the more you let it get all the way into each nerve fiber of your body, the sooner it will release you. Counterintuitive, but true. Remember, the lifespan of any emotion is anywhere between two to twenty minutes. Just that.
This bone-piercing step is here to remind you to simply stop yourself from automatically running away from unwanted emotions, however intense it is to let them course through your body and being. As you let the arrows of your feelings burst your breastbone, I suggest you ask yourself and your body questions like, “What am I feeling? What sensations? Where in my body am I feeling them? Tell me more. What is this like for me? What’s important about it? Tell me more.”
Instead of using your mind and thoughts to talk yourself out of whatever you are feeling and into a cigarette, a joint, a latte, a shopping trip, or binge-watching Netflix, use your mind to catalogue the sensations and locations of the feelings. Rather than using your mind to escape as quickly as possible, use your mind and thoughts to be there along with your feelings. Do something revolutionary: partner up these often-warring parts of yourself — your body, your feelings, and your mind.
Resist the urge to panic if your emotion swells instead of ebbs. Resist the urge to believe you have made it worse by leaning in. Often, when you are “freaking out” or “triggered” or “looping endlessly” on a big emotion, you have “age regressed.” Meaning, it is as though you have gone back in time to when you were three or four years old, or younger. You are literally re-experiencing your feelings from when you were about my son’s age, or Violette’s age when she sent her soul away, or Shelley’s age when she traded her happy girl self for her tough girl self.
This whole step allows you to take yourself into your own arms, cradle yourself, and go absolutely nowhere. It offers you peace with yourself and with life, and has nothing to do with transcending or sanitizing anything. I mean, in the next moment of your life, there is just as likely to be a joy storm as a shit storm. This kind of peace has everything to do with the kind of radiant self-acceptance that is emergent when we don’t run from whatever it is that we feel.
Wait. A deep inhalation. The calm of the storm pausing or stopping: wait for this.
Wait means you need to stay put until the moment your system shifts from I’m-freaking-out mode to I-am-okay mode. Perhaps there will be a physical sign like the impulse to take a deep breath (as my son did after his storm downshifted), or an intuitive sense that something has completed. It is important to remember that emotions have a natural life cycle. If you wait, your emotions can surge, ebb, and then naturally complete. This is the most respectful way I know of to calm down.
So, wait for it.
Mine for the gem of wisdom in each emotion. This step might come in the short lull directly after the storm of feelings, or later in the day or week. I suggest you mine for the gem of wisdom in the emotion by asking, “What are you trying to tell me?” Pretty straightforward.
Even if you have felt deep shame for your feelings, you can develop an outright reverence for all emotions. I think of them as message-bringers from your soul’s headquarters. Each one is a bearer of a truth — a gift — that you are apparently now ready to unwrap. But you have to unwrap it. Emotions are gems of wisdom encased in wild and wooly packaging. It takes something to stay lucid long enough to get under their tough skin to their rich interiors. In order not to spontaneously combust from the heat of your emotions, you must develop the unwavering belief that each is wise, not flawed.
So, ask each emotion what its message is, ask each feeling what its wisdom is. And then listen. Try, “Hello, emotion. What is the wisdom you are bringing? What is the core message you are trying to convey to me?”
Use the Core Messages of Emotions table on the previous page, inspired by my mentor Carla Camou, as a guide to help you mine the wisdom waiting for you at the epicenter of your emotions. This list is guidance, not gospel. It is not complete, but has some of the biggies. It might be spot on for you, or way off base. Ultimately, go with what you hear within yourself.
Asking each emotion what its message is will also help you get clear on what happened. Simply naming what happened can help the storm subside, as it did for my son. It can help a part of you feel heard, seen, acknowledged, and understood, as it did for Sian. Take note that this step is not about why what happened, happened. Asking why is generally counterproductive, often whips up new emotional storms, and usually diverts your attention from the wisdom within your original emotion. Stay with: Yes, that is what happened. Yes, what happened was witnessed.
Once you begin to unwrap the anger, the grief, the fear, or the envy, you can begin to see what is so valuable to you that you would protect it ruthlessly from threat (anger’s message), what it is that you have loved and lost (grief), where you are smelling potential danger (fear), and what that something is that you dearly want for yourself (envy).
This process of self-inquiry must come first. After you open the gift of the emotion, eventually, it will become clear what you want to express about these feelings you felt, these discoveries you made, these truths that revealed themselves to you. Self-inquiry fist, expression second. (And expression practices are coming up in part four.)
Each emotion comes to show you your next step on the path. Inspired by my friend Annie “I-feel-therefore-I-am” Lalla, I see your feelings as angelic messengers sent from the other world into your world, telegrams from your future self to your current self. But because feelings come before language and before reason, and because they communicate through sensation, you must practice decoding each emotion with curiosity, kindness, and tenacity.
Then feelings as tough as rage, blame, depression, and grief can open their shells and reveal the pearls inside.
feel it, all of it,
or you will miss your life
