THE ART OF FEELING
Quotation of healing to feel safe and peaceful
Experiences of emotions vs experiencing emotions
Emotional intelligence is the ability and capacity to perceive, access and manage emotions. And this is something that is modeled and learned. It is not something we are born knowing how to do. We are born defenseless and our main way of communicating discomfort is to cry. As we age and attain more of our bodies physical capabilities, and autonomy, we gain more ways of emotional expression of discomfort such as: flailing about, stomping, throwing things, crying, and yelling.
Many of these options not only express discomfort, but also overstimulation, joy and excitement. And based on our caregivers' responses, we learn what is an acceptable form of emoting, vs. what is not.
You may have been punished for emoting by being yelled at. You may have been physically assaulted (spanked), in order to comply. You may have been sent away to isolation to sit alone with your big feelings. And oftentimes you may have been explicitly told: “Don’t cry” or worse yet: “I’ll give you something to cry about.”
And as you observed the adults around you, you saw how they emoted, or didn’t. How they responded to challenging experiences and discomfort. Did they fly off the rails? Go silent and stonewall? Disconnect, and compartmentalize? On top of that many people are abused under the guise of emotions, such as anger. When emotions are weaponized and used against you, you learn to stay away from those feelings, to avoid being like the people that hurt you in the name of that emotion.
From those early experiences, you likely weren’t able to learn how to emote in a healthy manner, if it wasn’t modeled around you, and/or you were punished or shut down from feeling. Furthermore based on how you were raised, there is a good chance you continued a similar pattern of relationships in life and partnered up in either friendship and/or romantic partnerships that mimicked your guardians emotional intelligence, or lack thereof.
It is also important to mention that as children, once we enter the school system, we are taught to ‘be quiet and sit still’. There is not a lot of room for feelings in the school system, mainly because of the sheer number of students. If many kids are crying, stomping, and yelling, it would be utter chaos. So we are trained as children to contain critical parts of ourselves in order to be compliant to the school system. We learn to hold it all in, and shove it all down, so that we can become socially acceptable adults that sit still, and be compliant to our jobs.
So young humans grow up to be adult humans that believe emotions are 1.Unimportant 2.Unhealthy 3.Cannot be trusted 4. Are afraid of them altogether.
And it is worthwhile to note that emotions can be unhealthy. Particularly if they are weaponized; such as anger used in an abusive manner.. Or getting stuck in deep grief for years, leading to depression.
But the truth is, feelings are a beautiful thing. They are a roadmap to your inner landscape. They show you where you are in, or out of alignment in your life. They let you know when an injustice has been served. They express joy and excitement, sorrow and despair. They create connections with other people.
Emotions are energy within our body that need to be felt, moved through, and released. They are meant to be felt fully and completely without shame or embarrassment. Sometimes they are a quick experience, other times they take awhile to get through. Emotions are not a linear experience and nobody gets to tell you how or how long you get to feel your feelings. Grief is an example of an emotion that comes and goes, has highs and lows, dips into the deepest heartache, while at the same time can be an explosion of the sweetest heartache at loving memories. Grief can last a lifetime, but if honored and validated, can be a healthy part of the experience of loss and tragedy.
When emotions are stuffed down and become trapped in our body, it creates dis-ease. It manifests as illness, autoimmune disorders, and a dysregulated nervous system. When we are in a hyperarousal state of the nervous system, we operate out of defenses and reactions, instead of rest and responses. We become either hypervigilant of danger, and/or our responses shut down and we become frozen.
When we ignore emotions, it shuts us off from being heart centered and disconnects us from others because we don’t trust anyone, instead we fear their responses. It creates a lack of compassion and empathy towards ourselves and others.
And right now, humans are at an all time high of fear and disconnection from self and others. The design to keep us disconnected from one another, and isolated in our pain and suffering, has created a huge divide amongst humans. We’ve become a culture of us vs. them, as opposed to a collective that can support and care for one another. When so many humans are operating out of our fight or flight system, we REACT to everything, instead of taking a pause, listening to our bodies wisdom of feelings, and RESPONDING with kindness. Not only do we need to learn to tap into our emotions for our own health and wellness, but also so the human collective can heal and come back together in the form of community.
The really great news is that it is never too late to learn how to feel your feelings,and honor them as an important part of your human experience. In fact, emotions are a part of what makes us uniquely human.
Anger to Peace: a spectrum of emotions
One emotion that people find particularly troubling is Anger. I believe anger to be one of the most misunderstood and misused emotions. The first thing to understand about anger is that it is a valuable and valid emotion when harnessed in a healthy manner. You read that right- anger can be healthy. At its core, anger is a sign of an injustice being served. It’s letting you know where boundaries are being crossed. It is also the feeling that can help keep you safe, and protect you in situations where that is truly warranted.
Anger is easy to access because we know how to feel angry and we know how to express it- yell, throw, punch, break things. Of course those methods are only healthy in controlled situations and never when used on another person. But punching and yelling into a pillow is extremely cathartic. Parking your car in an empty lot, or by a field and screaming in your car is an excellent way to relieve some anger. Hard exercising can be an anger release. Clenching and relaxing body parts can move anger through the body. Anger is fuel for the confidence to protect, stand up for rights, and motivate you towards change.
Unfortunately anger has been misused for millennia as a form of fear based control. When someone hits you and screams at you, they are using anger to overpower you. This misuse of anger often turns a person into someone that refuses to feel anger themselves because they don’t trust it, nor want to be like the person that used it against them. Anger becomes an emotion to avoid at all costs, not only internally, but in a desperate attempt not to trigger anger in others.
But anger is sacred, just as the other emotions. And avoiding it, only means it’s been pushed down, and unresolved. Wherein without the release, it gets stored in your tissues and cells, waiting to surface. I have many clients that once they began their mind-body-spirit healing journey, they have periods of feeling so angry, but they aren’t sure why, or what to do about it. So it sits, bubbling below the surface, causing a lot of discomfort as it waits to be released. What you may not know is that feeling anger is one of the stages of healing. I call it the sacred rage stage.
The good news is, that you can learn how to harness sacred rage, and feel it, direct it and release it, without harm to yourself or others.
On the other spectrum of anger is PEACE. Reading that word, likely caused you to take a cleansing breath, and your mind relaxed a bit for making it through the part about anger, which likely triggered some things in you. Peace sounds lovely and is another feeling that can be easy to identify. The word alone might elicit thoughts of time in nature, time alone, reading a book, a vacation. Peace is a state of tranquility and harmony, free from hostility. Peace is when your body relaxes its tensed positioning. It’s when your mind releases ruminating worrisome thoughts. Peace is a feeling that ‘everything is okay.’ Peace comes with safety.
Peace sounds lovely and easy, doesn’t it?
And yet it’s not easy for many. The idea of it seems easy, but for those that have grown up in chaos, currently live in extreme stress, or are in crises, peace does not come easily. Peace can be just as elusive as anger. Once again, when we revisit the nervous system experience, people operating from their sympathetic nervous system response: fight/flight/freeze or fawn, are people not in a space to access peace. We may numb out through intoxicants, scrolling on our phones, sleeping, food and other such things. But dissociating and numbness are not peace. Those are techniques for avoiding feeling anything.
We can also struggle to feel peace because our brain gets trained by our feelings. So when we are used to chaos and our body has stayed consistently on alert for danger, there are chemical experiences that are happening in our brain and body that we become accustomed to. For example, when your brain is hardwired for trauma and stress, you will have an excessive amount of adrenaline that runs through your body to keep you alert, ready to fight or flight. And in fact the saying goes: “ You are not healing to learn how to experience stress and trauma. You are already well equipped to deal with that because you’ve been dealing with that for a long time. Rather, you are healing to learn how to feel safe and peaceful.”
And when you begin to have periods of a restful nervous system, and peaceful times, that can eventually activate a feeling of danger. When your body is not accustomed to peace, it can feel uncomfortable because you’re simply ‘waiting for the other shoe to drop,’ as it becomes desperate for the adrenaline dump it’s so used to. This is often where self-sabotaging can come in. When your body and mind search for what it’s used to, in order to feel normal.
So like anger, peace is a feeling that many people need to learn how to feel and lean into deeply, without it sending them into alert mode.
Somatic healing: Healing emotions through our body
It is incredibly important to me to teach humans how to experience their emotions fully and in healthy ways. I believe the world would be a better place if everyone understood and valued their emotions. If more people were operating from a space of feeling safe within themselves, then as a collective, we could move together as a safer space for one another. On an individual level, your life can only improve when you harness the power and energy of your emotions as an intelligence. As its own system of messaging for you. Instead of fearing or avoiding any emotion, you let it teach you something. You receive its message as proof that you are in or out of alignment somewhere in your life and then you respond accordingly.
I love guiding people into their emotional landscape, including their sacred anger and their peace. There are so many beautiful and powerful ways to tap into any emotion.
And so I’m creating a sacred emotion container along with Amanda Kennedy of Flourish Art studio and Classroom, to explore emotions. We will be teaching a series of feeling workshops, and retreats.
The first one is a one day mini-retreat in which we will explore both anger, and peace through breath, movement, music, and art.
Somatic healing processes involve listening to your body and allowing it to express itself through movement. Art provides a non-verbal outlet for expressing complex emotions. When words are insufficient or unavailable, creating art allows individuals to communicate feelings through visual or tactile means, offering a release and helping to externalize internal experiences.
We may stomp, shake, ball our fists and growl. We will breathe to activate our cells that hold the memories and experiences of anger and we will release it with intention.
Amanda will then take us through the process of creating a mosaic from broken porcelain plates. You will get to break the plate first as an expression of anger, and then put the pieces back together into a lovely take home project to remind you that you are not broken, you are a beautiful mosaic of experiences, and emotional expression.
We will also be exploring the feeling of peace at this all day event. I, Jamie Roth, will guide you on a meditation journey to explore how to hold peace in your mind-body-spirit. Amanda will guide you through a peaceful watercoloring experience. It's important to note that Amanda intentionally leads art processes, with the intention being the process, not the outcome. You do not have to have any experience in art, or even feel like you are creative. Art processing is a healing experience when you free your mind from the final outcome, to embrace the brush on the canvas and the colors melding together in magical ways. This is not an art class, this is healing through feeling and art.
This intentional day begins with a heart-centered cacao ceremony to bring the group together. You will be completely cared for during this event, including being fed a nourishing lunch (GF and vegan option provided), as well as time to rest, and reflect throughout the day. And as an added bonus, both Jamie and Amanda are Reiki attuned and will be offering short Reiki sessions, during reflection and journaling time. We will end the day with some soothing blue lotus tea and sharing circle.
Myself and Amanda are deeply invested in creating a sacred emotional container as a powerful way to foster deep, trusting, and supportive connections to help guide you into your internal emotional landscape. You will learn so much about yourself and be better equipped at feeling your emotions in a way that feels safe and healthy.
You can read more about THE ART OF FEELING RETREAT, and sign up here:
