How to Feel Your Feelings and What That Will Do for Your Life (Everything!)

"You care so much you feel like you're going to bleed until it hurts." ~ UJK Rowling

Sometimes the last thing we want to do is make our feelings. Because hearing can be harmful.

Feeling it can make you cry in the laundry.

Feeling can make your face reddish unattractive in a frozen restaurant.

Feeling we have 'Run out of gas' emotionally is not the best way to spend your time.

If you have been putting your feelings back into your rib cage whenever they are trying to break it down for light, this is especially true. I know, because this is exactly what I have done with my feelings for thirty-three long years.

Oh, those cunning feelings can cause me to break out of prison from time to time, and then vibrate with an anonymous rage that ends in the destruction of cell phones when technology meets a brick wall. Or I was just starting to scream and focus on my clothes - yes, a real tear on the clothes - because the speed of the pain was so hard it could be inside my frame.

My mother likes to say that, for the first few years of my life, she thought she was raising a monster. Like a force in a house where emotions were treated like a troubling bomb, I had feelings for the whole family, and all those feelings were processing through my eyes and my vocal chords.

So I learned to control my emotions and my emotions through well-meaning but misguided efforts to protect those around me. Most of us do.

We learn that emotions are not safe.

We learn that crying is not thankful.

We learn that life goes smoothly when we put our feelings into our brains and forget about them.

It wasn't until Dad arrived in the hospital thirty years later that my emotional apocalypse began.

Locked in a hospital bed, unable to move, all the emotion and sympathy my father had successfully suppressed for 70 years - through work, wine, and science fiction books - stood up and searched for him. He could no longer tolerate being in his body again, so he stopped eating until he was no longer there.

Pressing to play on his favorite John Coltrane track or reading his favorite roles, not sure what he felt about the morphine haze, the intensity of my emotions began to crack.

While we waited for my father's death, I wandered around the hospital halls and spilled coffee on the bathroom floors, feeling like I was going to jump out of my skin. Since writing was the only way I had to deal with emotions at the time, I started recording my experiences on Twitter. I had never experienced so much love and support.

The cracks began to expand.

After his death, my strong but powerful emotional control was carefully revealed.

As I began to rely on emotional purity, instead of running on the opposite side, life began to send me what I needed to learn to cope with the onslaught of emotional attacks.

I learned to greet my feelings as friends rather than as a nameless animal with the intention of ruining my life - or at least in the morning.

I learned where feelings can be hidden in my body, hiding between my ribs or under pressure in my stomach.

I have learned how to allow the actual feelings of my emotions to burn, just by feeling to hear instead of judging or making it mean something.

I learned how important it is to feel through my emotions so that I can communicate with my inner wisdom.

My devotion to thinking about my feelings, rather than letting them build me up, began to change and transform my life.

Depression was a distant memory. I stopped feeling the need to drink, in excess or at all. Quitting sugar was easy, except when I was in the first crisis.

(Any sad process needed to buy me a few months of sugar, low energy and poverty should be discarded. If I am sad, I will have no strength or hope, so I may also eat red velvet cakes.)

When I try to write down exactly how I learned to change and flow with my emotions, instead of tying them to concrete shoes and throwing them in my stomach, here is what comes up:

Every emotion has a message.

Maybe that message is simply a matter of being able to let go of resentment. Perhaps you feel a sense of entitlement.

One time, when my boyfriend and I were talking about living together, fear and anxiety began to fly through my body like pinballs made of cocaine for no reason. In other words, I started to go out, which didn’t make sense, because this was something I had always wanted.

When I first started investigating the attack, I realized that there were serious issues that we needed to consider before taking that step.

If something goes wrong - anger, fear, anxiety - just ask what he wants to tell you. Sit still and let the answer come out. If you feel calm, you have your answer, whether you like it or not.

Processing your feelings gives you access to your inner wisdom and natural art.

When I sit down to write and nothing comes of it, I hunt for any feelings I could have avoided. Sometimes I will have to quit my job to roam the sea crying. Sometimes I will give a feeling of attention for five minutes and then go back to work.

You already have all the answers you will need inside of you - and your emotions are the driving force behind those answers. Learning the language of your emotions will give you your own Sherpa in life.

All of these feelings go unnoticed by you.

Compassionate and compassionate people are proud recipients of a double sword. Not only do you carry your emotions, you also carry the feelings of the people you passed by in the store, the homeless woman you spoke to on the corner two years ago, a friend who revealed last week.

Your emotions may well be filled with the feelings of others you have unwittingly sucked, sometimes just walking past them on the street.