From Repression to Expression: A Guide to Feeling Your Emotions

If you would like to listen to this post, press play below:

Stop crying or I’ll give you something to cry about.

Go to your room and don’t come out til you’ve got a smile on your face.

If you don’t have anything “nice” to say, don’t say anything at all.

You’re too emotional. You wear your heart on your sleeve.

These were phrases I heard regularly in my childhood and beyond. Did you hear any of these or phrases similar to these?

We’re in a new era where we’re starting to realize its okay - in fact, it's necessary - to witness, to sit with, and to feel our emotions. Are you noticing that change around you too? People are talking about emotions more. They’re questioning how we’ve lived. They’re seeing things differently. It can be a bit triggering and uncomfortable because it’s new for all of us. But trust me, the true science behind the benefits of feeling our feelings is incredible 🤯

I won’t start citing scientific journals here - I’ll let you go Google those. But I will share it’s something I’ve been learning a lot about. It’s something I’ve been changing in my life and it’s changing me and how I see this World. It’s also something I regret not learning a lot more about sooner for my life and those in my wellness and women’s practices.

Until now we’ve been “living” our lives repressing and depressing our emotions. Tucking them “away” because we don’t know how to feel them and because we were led to believe they were “bad” and so were we if we “expressed” them.

For clarity, there is no blame being thrown around here. I was parented how most were parented then. There wasn’t the knowledge about how detrimental stuffing our emotions, silencing our feelings and stifling our aliveness was. We didn’t know then what we know now. And now that we have more knowledge we can live differently, better.

And that’s what I’m here to share about today so cozy up with a tea and continue on… ☕

It's important to feel ALL emotions, both good AND bad.

Learning to Express Emotions Fully and Freely

A couple of weeks ago I was sharing in my Audacious YOU Facebook Group the favourite ways I’ve learned to process emotions when I’m feeling them. And, if I can’t feel them in that moment, how I pause, come into a soul contract with myself, and set a time to process them later when I can give them the time and attention that they deserve.

And then last week I posted in my social stories about feeling a lot of feelings (because there’s A LOT to feel these days) and just taking the time to sit with those feelings. To witness them. To let them bubble up, be felt and be released. Not silenced, sent to my room or put in a box for another day or another lifetime like in my younger years.

I received SO MANY messages of how important my shares were. How my sharing my truth and experiences with the emotions that were alive in me was helping others acknowledge and sit with their emotions. Of how needed the sitting with our feelings is, but also how hard it is and how unfamiliar and uncomfortable it is to sit with our emotions for ourselves and for those around us.

As a human we are energy, in water, in a meat suit, traveling this Earth journey. We are energy in motion: ⓔ-motion.

As that energy we CAN feel a wide range of ⓔ-motions ALL DAY LONG. You name it, we can feel it.

Joy. Happiness. Sadness. Anger. Frustration. The list is truly endless. But often we don’t because we have been programmed by our past to stifle our emotions. To hush ourselves. To put our feelings in a box. To not feel our feelings because it’s unknown and it’s uncomfortable for us. It was and is also uncomfortable for those around us. Our being quiet, unemotional, and unreactive met the needs of others for normalcy and calm in THEIR life. It’s how we survived and it’s also how we received love. If we emoted we were denied love. If we stifled and hushed ourselves we were loved.

Instead of feeling our feelings we depressed them (= depression🤯) and we lived out of ease (= dis-ease🤯). So here we are, numbed and living in bodies full of depressed emotion and dis-ease.

How do we change that you ask?

📣📣📣 WE HAVE TO BEGIN TO FEEL OUR EMOTIONS to establish mental and physical wellness and ease. We have to let the emotions move through our body while holding love and compassionate space for each one as we feel it.

This is how we were created to live - fully a-live, not numb.

Are you wondering how to begin to feel your emotions?

Here’s what I’ve found to be helpful so I will share that with you:

• Recognizing that you FEEL EMOTIONAL without judging or shaming or creating any story around the emotions. You don’t even have to know or name the emotion, you just have to acknowledge that you are feeling an emotion.
  

• Get QUIET or put on some emotion-evoking music to encourage release of the emotion that can be really helpful. I’ve linked a song here that I find a helpful support for this.
  

• Then SIT WITH the emotion. Perhaps visualizing that the emotion is like sitting with a child or a grandchild and you’re holding a safe space for that emotion.
  

• Perhaps noticing where in your body you may be FEELING it and what it feels like (sensation, vibration, temperature, colour).
  

• HAVE A CONVERSATION. This is a quiet inner exchange. The first words and whispers you hear are your inner voice. Ask what is this emotion? Is there a deeper emotion beneath it? Does it have anything to tell you? How can you support it? Does it desire to be released at this time? And if so, how?
  

• Follow the guidance of the inner wisdom, the inner voice. Build a trusting relationship with it and it will change your life! Treat it with deep respect. Give it space. Let it speak or share in some way. Don’t silence it or shame it or push it back down anymore.
  

We often try to create a story around the emotion we are feeling. We can’t truly know the depth of what it’s linked to so I’ve learned to not even try. When I feel myself wondering “where this emotion coming from” I realize that I’ve left my heart and gone to the mind. That I’m trying to make sense of something that DOES NOT NEED SENSE MADE, IT JUST NEEDS SPACE HELD and TO BE FELT.

To begin feeling our emotions creates dis-comfort (something else we don’t like 😉), but feeling our emotions is also freeing and liberating. It feels so damned good to let these ⓔ-motions out of our body. To let them flow. To feel the energy moving through our magical body and to let it go without any story or guilt or shame for feeling any of them anymore because they are JUST EMOTIONS. They are not wrong or right like we were told when we were kids. They are just energy in motion = ⓔ-motion.

Releasing these ⓔ-motions clears space for newness in our body. New thoughts. New ideas. New ways to see the world and new ways of being a-live in your one audacious life.

Are you here to thrive? To live a-live? Or to continue to numb, depress and live life in dis-ease? You get to choose! That’s the cool thing about this thing we call life! You get to get curious, to learn and then to choose new ways of being alive.

I invite you to try to FEEL YOUR EMOTIONS.

Let me know how it goes!!!

If you’re curious to learn more about what it looks like to process emotions please join my Audacious YOU Facebook group or (if socials aren’t your thing) shoot me an email and I’ll happily get back to you with more tips!

If being intuitively supported and guided on your own awakening and healing journey with custom-curated embodiment tools like breath work, somatic movement, soul work, journaling and so much more is something you’d like to learn more about, reach out and let me know! I have amazing ways I can support you and I can not wait to share them with you!

Til next week, keep feeling the feels…

Audaciously,

Sharon xo