The Power of Feeling Your Feelings | by Kirsti Pratt | August 2024
There is a lot of information that we can get for free on the internet when it comes to health and wellness, including which foods to eat, water intake, movement, breath work, mindset, and meditations. However, one thing I see missing or slowing coming up in the view is feelings. For most people, we have been taught that “you are too emotional,” “men don’t cry,” “there is no reason to get upset,” etc., teaching us that our feelings are invalid.
However, in my personal experience and my experience with clients, our emotions and feelings play a powerful role in our health and wellness. Just as it is important to workout, it is important to feel your feelings. As we know, energy can’t be created nor destroyed, only transformed. When we have an experience in our life that brings up feelings of sadness, grief, anger, and frustration, most of us have gotten really good at stuffing them down due to the invalidation we got as children.
The issue with this is the more we build, the more likely we are to explode… almost like an over-pumped tire that just gets one too much intake of air. What happens when we are doing this, though, is it feeds into the rest of our body when we do not feel our emotions. This leads to all sorts of diseases in the body, from anxiety, depression, weight gain, addictions, bodily aches, and pain, and really the list goes on. So you may be doing all the “right” lifestyle habits but missing the mark of feeling your emotions.
To support you in going deeper I tell my clients a few things.
Sometimes, feelings don’t need fixing; they need to be felt. This means actively creating space in your schedule for you to be with you and authentically process what is coming up. If it's grief, allow yourself to cry. If it's anger, allow yourself to scream into a pillow. If it's guilt, judgment, or shame, allow yourself to step in to hold and reassure yourself and be the parent you wish you had as a child.
Once you feel the feelings, follow up with self-care. This may involve taking a walk in nature, stretching, mobilizing, sauna, taking a bath, getting a massage, painting, drawing, or expressing your creativity in a unique way. Anything that authentically feeds into YOU!
