Katey On: feelings
When I was growing up in the 80s and 90s, feelings were unwelcome. I’m generalizing but you could feel proud of yourself if you did something great (athletics, usually) but otherwise feelings were seen as a major inconvenience, a total drag. Of course this mentality was dismissive of our full humanity and pretty much anything that stifles our full humanity is a disaster.
Feelings are our biologic inheritance. Our animal feelings stretch back about 500 million years. Feelings are the way by which we process vital physical information. Feelings are natural, essential, and inevitable. It was a mistake to deny emotions in the 80s and 90s and it is a mistake to deny them today.
Feelings are one of our five senses. We have historically referred to this sense as “touch,” but please take a moment and imagine life without the sense of “touch.” It is not simply the fact you’d reach out to pick up your glass of water but be unable to sense whether it was in your grip. Nope. It is this: you don’t know if you are sitting down because you can’t tell if your body is touching a chair; you can’t sense your feet touching the ground so you can’t walk or stand or anything; you can’t sense your clothes touching your skin so you can’t tell if you are naked or not; you can’t sense the food touching your mouth so you can’t eat safely. It is serious. And it is not about touch. It is more accurately about feel.
I’m adamant about referring to the sense of “touch” as the sense of feel because I want others to elevate feelings, emotions, to the status of other sensations. We trust hearing. We trust seeing. We should trust feeling just as much, but we don’t. And it is to our detriment.
Our feelings are information. That hungry feeling in your stomach? That is info. That thrill of warmth emanating from your chest into your face and arms? That is info, too. Maybe that is joy.
If you practice introspection and become adept at properly, and perhaps more importantly, consistently identifying your emotions, you can effectively use your feelings to help you make choices. If you trust your feelings already, pursue the pleasing feelings as often as possible. If you are new to identifying your feelings, first things first: get to know them and trust them.
In moments of relative calm check in with your sense of feel. Ask, “What is my body feeling right now?” Start with the external if you want. Pressure, temperature, texture. ID all those. Then move to your interior body. What do I feel inside? Cramps? Hunger? Tension? Ease? Expansion? Contraction? Notice what you can about the feelings in your body, including your face, hands, and feet. Then connect them to the language of emotions. Happy, joy, anger, relief, despair, inspiration, sad, irritable, generous.
I could talk about feelings forever. I love them. I’ve always loved them. They let me know how I feel (obviously) and I was always able to appreciate that, even if I did not always know how to respond. Understanding feelings is, for sure, a skill worth developing.
