How to Safely Feel Your Feelings

There’s a lot of advice floating around that in order to move past stuck places or move through hard times you must feel your feelings.

There is some truth to that.

Stuck emotion is problematic. it can leave stress-energy stuck in your nervous system which has been shown to cause many health conditions, physical and mental.

Autoimmune
Migraines
Digestive problems
Chronic Pain
Anxiety
Depression
PTSD
Chronic Dizziness or Nausea

While you don’t want your feelings to stay stuck, it is important that you take into account the state your nervous system is in when you’re feeling your feelings. If you are in a state of overwhelm, anxiety or feeling stressed out, this is not the time to “feel your feelings” in the way of a huge rage where you beat your bed with your pillow or screaming and crying your head off for hours. These types of practices are clearing, but they can also be extremely re-traumatizing not to mention exhausting. If your nervous system hasn’t built up enough regulation to handle that incredibly powerful force of your anger or sadness, it will only leave you depleted and wasted where you may need days, weeks, even months of recovery time.

Interestingly, this is also true for enjoyable feelings. If your nervous system is already holding a lot of stuck emotional stress, having a huge amount of joy, connection, touch or sexual experiences can also feel like too much, causing you to check out or feel triggered in other ways.

In Somatic Experiencing, we start the work of “feeling your feelings” by learning to feel good or neutral. This is a process of listening to the physiological sensations of good and neutral in your body. Certain exercises or tools can evoke a feeling of safety and your body will give you specific spontaneous signs that you’re settling into feeling good again. Being able to marinate in these neutral or good sensations is a big piece of the work. As you FEEL into feeling good, you build your ability to handle more. We work on this quite a bit in the Settle Your sh*t workshops because this is the foundation of clearing stuck emotions. (Next workshop is this Saturday, Feb 27th)

Here’s what’s super interesting about this step. As the nervous system starts to feel safe and good again, your old defenses start to go down and the old emotions surface. That’s why it’s so hard to meditate, be still or relax. All the old stuck stress shit from your childhood and past experiences comes up because now there’s room for it to move. It’s at this time that it’s safe to feel those feelings BUT… only a little bit at a time. In a similar way you slowly build up to more weight at the gym to get stronger, we will slowly and gently release emotion.

When you follow your body’s lead with this and go slower, you are able to move through old stuff with ease and reclaim your life energy, your health, and your humanness. Over time it’s easier to feel your feelings because your nervous system is primed and strong enough to do so. You won’t have to work so hard at changing habits because your nervous system patterns are different. Lots of stuff gets easier including moving through intense or subtle emotions when they arise.

Ready to heal at the foundational level of your nervous system?

Connect with me for a complimentary 30-minute chat

Register for an online Somatic Movement Class

Come to the next Settle Your Sh*t workshop

V-day got me thinking...

Plant: Hoya Hearts or Hoya Kerrii

Hope you had a lovely holiday weekend.

Valentine’s day got me thinking….

What are the conditions needed for love to exist?
What are the qualities of a healthy living relationship?

This weekend’s Settle Your Sh*t workshop participants came up with this list

Compassion
Warmth
Kindness
Availability
Trust
Empathy

I’ll add listening and honesty.

Now, let’s flip it by turning these qualities inward. Partnered or single, practice the qualities that help you to FEEL love in your body, your thoughts, your emotions. Practice that love inside yourself.

How can you let yourself know that you appreciate and love YOU?
What actions can you take to show empathy, trust, listening, honesty and courage?

Somatic therapy is a practice of self-love. It goes deeper than understanding your history, changing your diet, and deep breathing. It addresses the things we didn’t get from our caregivers as kids. It gives you a chance to be seen and heard beyond words. A chance to feel as though you belong here just as you are. That’s when your sh*t starts to settle and patterns start to change.

Unfortunately, this wasn’t taught to us by our caregivers, it wasn’t modeled for us at home or in our culture. Let’s change the patterning now for ourselves and for the little people in your life to grow up with these skills.

Reply to this email for me for private therapy
Scroll down for somatic movement classes and upcoming workshops

I love you, do you?

Carve out space to develop a connection to yourself this week.

Ready for 1 on 1 work? Connect with me for a complimentary 30-minute chat

Register for an online Somatic Movement Class

Come to the next Settle Your Sh*t workshop

How to Feel Empowered When You're Triggered - For Highly Sensitive People (HSP)

Do you identify as an HSP (highly sensitive person) or do you feel like you are super sensitive to other people's energy, get easily annoyed, triggered, or exhausted from your environment? Have you ever felt these things? Yeah, Me too.

This is for you.

Your body home is taking in and digesting all of the experiences it has. Just like your digestive system digests the food you eat, your nervous system digests experiences, sights, sounds, sensations, memories, thoughts, experiences that are soothing, and those that are jarring or intense. Ideally, these experiences are fully digested, assimilated, and completed. If they aren't, they get stored as energies inside your body home that are trying to complete, but can't. Similar to when you eat way too much at a meal and there isn't enough room in your belly to move the food around. You've probably experienced this. It’s much harder for your belly to fully digest what you put in because there isn't enough space for the digestive juices to churn and it all breaks down. All of your body's life energy goes to digest that packed in pooch, making you tired and needing to rest until the food is a bit digested and your energy comes back into the rest of your body.

When your nervous system doesn't digest or complete its experiences, they settle inside your bodyhome. Over time, we collect them and as your body container fills up with more and more old uncompleted experiences, two things happen.

1. Your container is full of these old experiences

2. Your body is using a lot of your life force to manage all of that old energy

Circling back around to the HSP. If you find yourself super sensitivo, it's likely that your nervous system belly is full at that moment. This can make you feel irritable, annoyed, frustrated, and even angry when seemingly small insignificant things happen. The lights become too bright, the sound is too loud, people are annoying. It’s also common that those sensitivities come with aches, pains, and other health problems like migraines and stomach issues.

So, how do you change this pattern and feel empowered when you’re sensitive and triggered?

1. Mindset

   When I hear people say "I'm an HSP", I cringe a little bit. Labeling yourself as a certain "type" of person is a limiting perspective in terms of human growth and healing. And we know from neuroscience that your brain (which is your brain in your head and your body brain aka. your nervous system) can grow and change through neuroplasticity. So, if you find yourself saying you're an HSP and want to become more resilient to your surroundings and others, your first step is to see yourself as a human having inner experiences that can change over time.

2. Shift your attention away from the story

   Learn HOW to complete your experiences and emotions. This is actually supernatural but we have been cultured out of it and most of the humans I know weren't taught or modeled this way of being by their caregivers growing up. This completion happens in your body physiology, not in your head. This is why talking about what someone did that was so annoying isn't always enough to change the way you react to it.

3. Shift your attention to your body and your surroundings

   Becoming aware of your body and bringing your senses into your experience can help to shift your body into more of a regulated state which will help your nervous system settle a bit, creating a feeling of calm awake and a little more openness.

4. Process the energy of emotion

   This is not what you might think. Processing the irritation, frustration, or reaction to the trigger happens in your physiology, not in your head. All triggers and emotions have a body experience to them. Leaning in and getting to know that experience in a regulated way will help your nervous system digest, metabolize and complete these responses. Which will in turn create more space in your body container. The good news is, you don't always have to know why you are having the experiences you are having. You can complete them without it. Although I find with myself and with my clients that meaning comes from actually moving the energy through the body, not the other way around.

5. Ride the waves

   As you continue to regulate and process the energy of emotion in your body, you will find that you experience waves of emotion that come and go. Learning to ride these waves makes you more resilient and more able to handle what you couldn't before.

Are you ready to become more resilient?

• Join a Somatic Yoga class

• Come to the next Settle Your Sh*t workshop

• Contact me for a 1 on 1 Somatic Experiencing therapy session

with LOVE and Regulation
Dorie