Feeling your Feelings

Your feelings are chemical sensations rushing through your body. We often get locked in trying to analyze and argue with our thoughts, but there is another process that be incredibly healing - feeling your feelings.

In this episode, I practice tuning into my body and describing the sensations of my feelings - and in so doing, allow them to process and settle within my system.

As someone used to resisting all her emotions, and always turning to her brain to fix her feelings, this is new territory for me.

I offer it here as an added skill for your toolbox.

The more you can feel your feelings as physical sensations, the more you can drop into your body's incredible, innate creativity. This is the place from which so many of our stories can - and need - to be told.

Pssst.... now you can also watch the episode on YouTube !

Come check out the Hot Mess series on TikTok, and watch as I lose my mind - and find it again - writing, producing, and acting in a show!

#CreatingIsHealing🦋

Transcript

Hi friends, I've missed you. I've been away a few weeks. I've been struggling more with mental health stuff and. Actually added a second antidepressant to what I've been working with. Um, if you go back to my last time I came back to the podcast, I talked about my love for Wellbutrin. I'll talk about the new one in a little bit. I'm still kind of in the process of adjusting to it, but it's made a really big difference and. I want to share about that openly because I think we don't talk enough about how long it can take to figure out what your brain needs in order to. Be a functional human being. 

I have this health coach that I talked to you and she says that we are all just walking chemistry sets and we need to figure out the right balance of water and nutrients and movement and medication that makes our chemistry work and makes us feel alive and functional in the world. And sometimes our brains aren't doing that on their own and. And what's really hard about psychiatric medication is it's so much trial and error. It's so much trial and error. There are so many different kinds of medications. And within those kinds of medications, they're different formulas or more named brands. And one doesn't always do the trick. So sometimes you need to add different ones and see how you're doing, and they take four to six weeks to kick in. So I think this is one of the reasons people have a hard time. Going on medication and asking for help is there is no quick fix. If you're a diabetic and you know you need insulin, you can take insulin and you're good kind of immediately. I mean it's a long term thing to manage, but you can feel the results immediately and. Mental health is not, and when you already feel despairing or deeply anxious or overwhelmed, the idea that it's going to take four to six weeks to feel a little bit better, or you're going to try something and it won't make you feel better, and then go try something else. Can feel like the most impossible thing, and so I'm here to say that it's incredibly worth it. I know I've been really lucky that the first one I went on made such a big difference. For me, that's not always the case. Um, I've tried one before that I had a really bad reaction to and it made me really suicidal and I was aware that was not how I usually think, even my depression and I got off it right away. So there's definitely. You know, it has to be a relationship with your doctor, psychiatrist, to make sure you're checking in, and you know yourself well enough to know if it's making things worse or better. But I just kind of keep on being the poster child for Wellbutrin or antidepressants or whatever help you might need, because it can be a really long road to getting better, and it can feel so impossible that it's hard to reach out once or keep reaching out. And it's incredibly worth it. It's really possible not to feel as bad. And you might be feeling if you are one of those in my situation. Not 

actually what I came to talk about today. I'm just going to keep hitting on that because I think that message needs to be heard. I actually was thinking about as last time when I took a break from the podcast. It was so hard to come back because all of my anxieties about being perfect, about saying the right thing, about having the right topic, about being the most of service to the 12 people. I love you who are listening to this. Was it just it creates a lot of resistance, right? I have so many thoughts about how I don't know what I'm doing. I'm not good enough. I'm not ready. Very normal human thoughts. Even though everyone says they're normal, they feel terrible and they feel like I'm the only one who thinks that, and they feel incredibly true to me. And what I wanted to bring to you guys today is actually not about working on changing your thoughts. I think there's a point you get to in the process where. And I'm not good at this, but where you Start learning that those thoughts will never go away, that they are a feature of our brains. All humans have doubt. All humans have, you know, fear of doing things. And actually it's your lizard brain trying to keep you safe, right? We've got the prefrontal cortex that does all your thinking and your wishing and your goal planning and your imagining of a brilliant future that you want for yourself. And it is on top of the lizard brain that's only job is to keep you alive and it has not evolved to realize we are not being chased by tigers anymore. So what it has done is that when you are doing something that is vulnerable, that is exposing you. To something that feels risky even though there are no physical consequences to creativity. Your lizard brain doesn't know that. It just thinks you know. Vulnerability could mean getting expelled from the tribe, and that means death if you no longer belong, if you do something different, if you do something bad or wrong, you might not belong anymore and you're going to be exiled and you cannot survive on your own. So these are incredibly 

normal. They don't sound logical, but they're incredibly normal reactions to when you do something new that you've never done that. Your brain doesn't think. You know. Your brain is programmed to repeat the same thing. You didn't die yesterday not doing this. So why do this today? Because you might die. It's really that simple, and I've spent a lot of years trying to get good at. Um, working with those thoughts and undoing those thoughts and thinking about them differently. And, you know, I always want to be thinking that I am good enough that I am, you know, have something to say like I want, I want to be a positive human being in my own brain. And what I'm here to tell you, which I hate knowing, is that a lot of those things may never go away. And the good news is they don't have to go away for you to show up for yourself the way that you want to. But there has to be an ability to hear them and not spend so much time trying to get rid of them, chasing them away, resisting them, being angry at them, thinking that because they're there, they're ruining your life or they're making it impossible to be creative in the way that you want to be creative. That's a place that I got stuck for a long time, and I think a lot of us. Especially I feel like with the Wellness industry, this idea that like there is a happy Unicorn crystal place where everything is light and bliss and you know, from that places where you make your life happen and all your creativity comes from. I don't actually think that's what it looks like, but I think there's that image of that at least I kind of got that idea of like, OK, I have to fix this, like, nastiness in my brain that's always kind of telling me not to do stuff. And once I do, then I can, you know, do the things I want to do. And really, I think it's about building a muscle to have those things come at you and hear them and go, I hear you. I get that you're worried, and I've got it. Whatever that looks like for you, right? To be able to hold space for your self, flagellation for yourself, doubt for your fear for your unworthiness, feelings 

for all of it, and and have those side by side of doing the thing that you want to do. And. One of the biggest skills or tools for being able to do that, that I'm still learning but I wanted to share, is the ability to. Sit with emotions as sensations and this is something that I'm just learning and I wish we taught in schools because we really don't have facility with naming our emotions and sitting with our emotions and making space and making them OK in our world. So I think anytime we feel something intensely it feels bad and wrong and we want to get rid of it. I certainly come from Waspy parents who did not talk about stuff and don't like to acknowledge emotions. So when I have an emotion I always have this sense of dread. Like nobody wants to know that I'm having an emotion and. I feel things very intensely. So that's always been this battle. I feel things really strongly, but nobody wants to know and I gotta shut it down. The more you shut something down, the more it it pushes against you because it wants to be heard. It's trying to tell you something and you're trying to shut it down. It's trying to tell you something, trying to shut it down, and you're just going to feel hell hellish about it. But what's fascinating is the the feeling of hell is not from the emotion itself. It's from the trying to shut the emotion down. Because emotions are uncomfortable. They, um, but their physical sensations, they are chemical reactions happening in your brain. And So what I wanted to bring to you guys today was like my own. I told myself my goal for this week wasn't actually to record the podcast, but to just sit. And feel and name out loud how I felt when I thought about recording, how I felt when I thought about not knowing the right answer, which is a big trigger for me. I should know how to do this already, and if I don't, then I'm failing. And I feel tightness in my throat. I feel pressure on my chest. I feel my hands are tingly. I feel shortness 

of breath. I feel my stomach kind of hurts and is heavy. Um, there's sort of this. Blue sensation around me, this like bubble that's just pressing in from everywhere and. 

And what's incredible? Is once I'm able to say that it releases. I don't know the science behind that, but that **** is magic. And so this is the thing that I wanted to bring you guys today and that I want to invite you to do is when you feel yourself wanting to do something. And resisting it, for whatever reason. Fear, doubt. You know there's so many. Rather than maybe trying to work on arguing with your fear or your doubt, your unworthiness. Practice. Doing the thing, start sitting with like I'm working on a TV pilot and this comes up to you. I'm like I should know the answer and if I don't know the answer of how to solve this story that I'm failing. And so there's this loop of like why can't figure out until I try stuff. But like I should know already. So then I don't start and I get really stuck. Paralyzed by my own need to like know how to do things and not mess up. And So what I've been doing is just sit with the script and like go to start working when I feel that incredible surge of whatever choking, you know, panic that I feel, name it, call it out. What is a sensation? How is it in your hands? How is in your thighs? How is it in your stomach? Is there a color? Is there a texture? Is it moving? Is it pulsing? Is it hot? Is it cold? These are incredible ways to tap into your body. That a mean. That the. Part of what's complicated and tricky about feelings is that we think them through, right? We put words to them, and then we want to process them in our brains. And yes, they have something to tell us and teach us, and so it's good to be able to hear what your brain is telling you. But when you are in your head 

trying to solve them, they're actually happening in your body. And so there's a disconnect between you've left your body to try to solve the thing in your head that your head is telling you and what it really requires, or the easiest, quickest solution, though not. Comfortable is to drop into your body and feel your sensations and by naming them it allows you to. To connect and to be here and to have the feeling of it, and I don't know why, but when you're able to fully experience the sensations, the physical sensations of an emotion, it moves on. It might change or might become something else. I know a lot of them like grief, we know is not a one time thing. It's. It's a wave crashing in. It's not linear. I know resistance will probably be back tomorrow when I start working on my script, or maybe when I go to post this podcast, right? These things aren't over. But in this moment, having spent that very little amount of time naming and really just, yeah, there's something about naming it, like allowed my body to be heard, allowed my body to be seen by me. And that brought so much integrity and alignment and peace. 

And and I just don't feel resistant anymore. Um. Again, I don't know how this **** works. It's just something I have been taught and it's very new to me and I keep forgetting to practice it because I like being in my head and I like thinking about things and it's hard for me to remember that is not the solution to most of our problems. So I just want to invite you to, you know, you can start small, you can, you can start maybe when you're walking or something like that and just check in with how you're feeling. And there's you know, physical sensations of like it's really cold out here. So my ears were really cold when I was walking earlier and that's a different thing but but start maybe doing once a day kind of a check in of like where my. And my heart and my cold is my sensation outside of me. Is it inside of me, um. It could be like a really fascinating, fascinating game. And there's actually a teacher that I worked with, Josh Hayes, who teaches the committed impulse, and his entire thing is creativity comes from that place of being connected to all of your sensations. Like your body speaks. The place where you're acting is the best and probably any art form is where you're unself conscious and you're tapped into your own wisdom, your own divine creativity, and you're just producing and so much of the brain stuff. Was trying to protect us from being vulnerable from being. 

What was I going to say? The perfectionism is like afraid to love that I'm so afraid to say the thing, it left my head right away. Afraid of of letting go, of not being, of not controlling right. That control feels safe. It feels like I'm protecting myself by always managing how I'm thinking about stuff when I'm creating. But it blocks the creativity and so this practice of getting into your body so that you write your play from the body, you write your novel from how your body is from maybe the blue weird sensation in your hip, and then start writing from there. Maybe you paint from the yellow pressure that is on your shoulder. Um, this is kind of a fascinating way to live. And I think part of what's really missing in our culture and kind of are very, you know, modern Western culture is we prize the brain so much and our ability to think and it's marvelous ability. We were just incredibly innovative people. Humans are incredibly innovative as a species and that's a blessing and hopefully will save us in the future. But it's not all that we are we're a body and a brain and a spirit and whatever you might think that some kind of magic that we don't know electricity that keeps us all alive and moving. And and I think that the way to peace in the world. Peace within yourself. Peace within community, peace with how we process emotions and and and processing emotions is sort of the key to life because if you can't process emotions then then you're constantly jumping out of your. Experience of being alive. You're constantly jumping out of your life because it's not something you know how to be inside of. So. It brings you peace in your life. It brings you into your life and also creates peace in the world. Is this rejoining of our very smart, very fast brains and our body? And this is 1 practice you can do but also can really serve the creativity that you want to be sharing with the world. 

That's it for me, my friends. Have a wonderful week.