How to Feel Your Feelings: A Starting Point for Positive Change

If you’re reading this article, chances are you’ve heard that in order to process an emotion you need to learn how to feel your feelings. However, while this may make sense intellectually, actually putting it into practice and seeing positive changes in your life can be challenging. 

So, how do you go about feeling your feelings, and why is it so crucial? 

These were questions I had too. I even thought I was pretty good at feeling my feelings. However, it turned out this was not the case. Learning this skill was the real beginning of finally making big changes in my life that would stick. 

It wasn’t until I attended a 10-day Vipassana meditation course while traveling in India, that I gained a strong understanding of this skill. I didn’t go into the retreat with any expectations, but I came out a changed person. 

Years later, back in the real world of a 9-5 job and everyday stressors, I attended a second 10-day Vipassana course. Knowing what to expect the second time, I gained an even greater understanding of how emotions live in our bodies and how feeling them really does allow us to release them. 

I used my vacation time at work to attend this retreat, even though I would have preferred a vacation on a tropical island. However, I also knew that the minute that vacation ended, so would those beautiful vacation feelings. 

Because that’s what happens when you escape or avoid your feelings. They’re still waiting for you when you return to the real world of your life as it is. 

Why You May Not be Aware of Your Emotions

It’s easy to resist or avoid emotions without even realizing it, just like how you feel the need for a vacation to reset and unwind. While a vacation is great, needing it to unwind is not. 

You may feel upset, stressed out, overwhelmed, or helpless at times, and you think you’re feeling the negative emotions. For instance, somebody cuts you off in traffic, you feel pissed, you yell and flip them off, and you understand you’re mad. However, the action of yelling and flipping someone off is actually reacting to and resisting the anger. Your angry outburst is a result of not wanting to feel the anger. 

To truly process the emotion, you need to allow it. Otherwise, it will continue to be there, waiting for the next poor soul who decides to cut you off in traffic. 

And please hear this, it’s human nature to seek pleasure and avoid pain, so don’t beat yourself up about it. This is how we are wired as humans, and knowing this allows you to have compassion as you take the difficult step of feeling uncomfortable feelings. You are normal! Take comfort in that. 

Allowing your feelings is a skill to be practiced, not something some people either have or don’t have. Without conscious effort, we will default to our unconscious pattern of avoiding or resisting uncomfortable emotions. Your brain believes you are safe when you are comfortable, which was important in the primitive days. But today, when you’re uncomfortable, it’s generally not a threat to your survival.

Feel Your Feelings in the Midst of Life’s Distractions

Today’s world offers limitless distractions that are available to you 24/7, and they have the power to immediately take you out of feeling any emotion you don’t want to feel. 

Distractions come in many different forms, such as having a drink to unwind at the end of a long day, eating when you’re not really hungry, scrolling your phone, or watching tv. 

There are also sneaky ways you may avoid emotions, which I am VERY familiar with. These could be things like keeping yourself busy with an endless list of tasks, consuming information you feel is helpful, listening to webinars, working, checking emails, cleaning, working out, or even perfectionism. 

Emotions themselves may also be used as a distraction from an even more uncomfortable emotion your brain wants to protect you from feeling. 

Since some of these things can also be productive or beneficial for you, it’s up to you to build awareness around what you may be distracting yourself with and what you’re doing because you are consciously choosing to.

If you want to achieve the results you want to see in your life, you need to look at what your actions are creating for you and decide whether they’re helping you or holding you back. Sometimes, you truly do just want to have a drink because you want that experience. However, if your actions are costing you the results you want, you’re likely not allowing your emotions. 

Why It’s Important to Be Aware of Your Emotions

Picture a moment in your life right now. 

Where are you distracting yourself? 

Are you reaching for a drink at the end of a long day? Are you keeping yourself busy with endless tasks allowing for no down time? 

Now imagine stopping yourself in that moment, when you’re about to grab a drink or complete your next task, to just sit with yourself. And you don’t have to literally sit or be by yourself to do this, just allow yourself to become aware of the feeling and don’t respond to it. 

Your brain is going to want to resist this idea. It’s going to tell you all sorts of things. It wants you to have that drink or complete that task more than anything because it knows you will feel better in the moment. You will be more comfortable. 

And why sit in discomfort if we have a way to take us out of it?

The answer is to look at what this is creating in your life. When you use your higher brain to think of what you want long-term, not the unconscious survival part, you can see that the action of taking the drink or staying constantly busy is not serving you. It may be leaving you tired, not getting good sleep, and showing up impatient and irritable with the people around you. 

Indulging in this cycle of avoidance and resistance and reaching for distractions will not move you forward. Further, when using your distraction of choice makes you feel more comfortable, you are now not motivated to change anything. You take away your ability to gain awareness of what’s really going on. 

When you allow yourself to feel uncomfortable and open yourself to the reality of your life as it is, now you have something to work with. You will never move past this distraction cycle if you don’t learn how to feel your feelings and allow for them.  

The more you resist or avoid an emotion, the deeper it lives inside of you. Unprocessed emotions will create a denser energy in your body and will lead to more intense negative emotions over time. 

This became abundantly clear to me during my meditation retreat where I experienced emotions in the form of sensations that had been living inside me since childhood. Intense anxiety and panic seemed to come out of nowhere. I had been pushing them down for so long, hiding them, that I wasn’t aware of just how much they had been holding me back. 

You can’t change what you’re not conscious of.

Feel your feelings and get to know them so you can change them.

When you are truly able to process your emotions and let them flow through you, you get to be in the driver’s seat. You get to be in control of your life and how you show up.

Steps on How to Feel Your Feelings

If you want a different result in your life, you need to take a different action. This is where you start. Take the different action of allowing your emotions and learn how to truly feel your feelings instead of avoiding or resisting them.

These steps don’t have to go in a particular order, but each one is important. We all experience our awareness in different ways. If you recognize your emotions through your actions, then start there. If you feel it in your body first, or can name it, let that be your signal to allow for it. Do what makes sense to you! 

Step 1: Identify that you are experiencing an uncomfortable emotion

All you need to do here is bring your awareness to the fact that you are having an emotion. You are always having an emotion whether or not you are conscious of it. The point is to make it conscious. For now, focus on uncomfortable emotions as these are the ones you want to process.

Set the intention to allow for this emotion. 

It’s helpful to identify the current actions you are taking when you experience an emotion you want to process. You can use these actions as a signal to allow the feeling instead of resist, avoid, or react to it. Make a list, write these down. 

When you’re not feeling well, what do you do? How do you show up? Maybe you yell at your kids, or are impatient or irritable with the people around you. Are you indulging in distractions? Do you eat or reach for a drink? Or on the other spectrum, do you work out, clean, or keep yourself busy?

You need to understand you are reacting to or resisting an emotion in order to stop doing it. And then you need to identify the emotion causing your actions, which leads us to our next step. 

Step 2: Name the feeling 

Naming the feeling brings even more awareness to it, which gives you more power and control to change it. 

So what are you feeling? Is it sadness, frustration, worry, anxiety, stress, shame, or something else? 

The more specific you can be, the better. If you don’t have a lot of practice with naming emotions, this can feel difficult at first. You can start more general by labeling it as a pleasant or unpleasant feeling. Then use a feelings wheel or list to get more specific. 

I use the how we feel app and highly recommend this. It helps you identify what you’re feeling by rating the level of pleasantness and energy in your body. It names your emotion and gets you focused on tuning in.  

But if you prefer a more low-tech approach, you can also try journaling or talking to a trusted friend, coach, or therapist about your emotions. The key is to name the feeling and acknowledge it without judgement or resistance. 

Step 3: How does it feel in your body?

You should focus only on the sensations in your body. Keep your narrative and thoughts out of it as best you can. 

Here are some questions to ask yourself to get focused: Is it hot or cold? Do you feel pressure or buzzing? Where in your body are you feeling this? Is it expansive or contractive? Does it feel empty or heavy? Light or full? Is there a color? Note any sensations you can identify.

Allow the feeling for as long as you see necessary. You will notice that the sensations will change along with the intensity. No feeling lasts forever. 

This is what I experienced in my Vipassana course. The main focus was on feeling the sensations in my body. The only difference was that I wasn’t feeling a specific emotion but just my body in general. That certainly didn’t stop the emotions from arising. Years and layers of pushed down emotions started coming to the surface to be released. 

I know from personal experience that it can be challenging to sit with uncomfortable sensations. Initially, I reacted to some of the stronger sensations with fear. I wanted to resist or react to them, but eventually I learned to just sit with them in silence. There was a moment where I felt panic and thought I might have a heart attack. I started getting in my head, but when I took a step back and just allowed the emotion without pushing against it, the intensity decreased and eventually passed. 

It’s not easy, but it’s worth it to allow yourself to feel your feelings and process them. Remember, there is nothing to be afraid of. Just keep focusing on the sensations in your body and allow yourself to feel your feelings. 

Step 4: Be compassionate

Have compassion for yourself in this process. You are never wrong or less than because of the feelings you’re having. There is a reason you’re having these feelings, and a lot of times, it’s from your subconscious thoughts and beliefs you’re holding onto. 

For now, just understand that your brain is always trying to protect you. It was designed to keep you safe from any perceived threats, and it’s been wired since you were very little. The good news is that neuroplasticity shows us that it’s possible to rewire our brains. Awareness is the first step in our ability to change this. 

It’s important to have compassion for yourself because we’re all socialized to avoid emotion and our brains want us to seek pleasure and avoid pain. Many people think that being emotionally strong means not feeling your feelings, which causes them to push them down and resist them. This actually makes a person emotionally weak. 

I experienced this socialization just the other day. I went to the liquor store to buy some wine for a party we were having later in the week. It was supposed to be a quick trip, and I was already in a rush to get home. There was an error with the cash register, and it ended up being a 20-minute ordeal. My kids were becoming restless and starting to get after each other, and I was feeling impatient.

Once everything was sorted out, the cashier apologized for the wait and commented on how I would really need the wine now. I didn’t say anything, but thought to myself, “This is when I absolutely don’t need it. I need it when I want to enjoy it, not when I need to cope from an uncomfortable emotion.” This was a signal for me to look within and understand my impatience and frustration, to process it and let it go instead of pushing it down with a drink so it could continue to cause problems for me. Ultimately, I needed to be okay sitting with it and not needing it to go away. To stay in control.

It’s not easy to overcome your subconscious mind and programming, so have compassion when you don’t do things perfectly. The more you practice feeling your feelings, the more conscious you will become, and the better your life experience here will be. Remember to be kind and patient with yourself as you go through this process. 

Conclusion: Feel Your Feelings, Change Your Life

Everything we do in life is because we want to feel, or not feel, a certain way. It follows then that the worst thing you will ever experience is a feeling, which is simply a sensation in your body. This is why feeling your emotions is so important. When you’re able to sit through any feeling, you will have nothing to be afraid of.  

When you are not fearing your emotions, you are in control of your life. So, if you’ve ever wondered why you can’t stop overeating, reaching for a drink at the end of a long day, checking your phone, or doing anything that is keeping you from creating the life you want, it’s because you’re allowing your emotions to be in control. You are taking actions from a place of wanting them to go away. 

Feeling your emotions is the first step in processing them and creating positive change in your life. Your feelings drive your actions, which ultimately create your experience in this life. This is always happening, whether consciously or unconsciously. So get to know your feelings! You can’t change something you don’t know or understand. 

When we can meet our feelings with understanding, we can acknowledge them and decide if we want to keep them or have a different experience. 

So feel your feelings, and then start to get curious about the thoughts that are creating this feeling for you. Look at the actions you’re taking when you’re experiencing this feeling. How are you distracting yourself? What are those actions creating for you? 

Then you get to decide whether your feelings are serving you and where you want to go from here.

Now get out there and feel your feelings, change your life, and create the experience you want to have!

Looking to go deeper? While feeling your emotions is often enough to process them, sometimes a feeling may pass through only to keep returning. In these cases, we need to take our emotional work further. Feeling your feelings is the crucial first step, but the next stage is to transmute them. If you're interested in learning how to transform your recurring emotions, check out this post for more insights and techniques.