Honour Your Feelings

You are getting the idea that troublesome, disturbing feelings are caused by thinking. On this basis, you may begin to censor some of your difficult emotions because you have an idea that they are based upon sloppy or crooked thinking. You also may be censoring feelings because they are no fun - shame for instance is a common candidate for censorship, and shame certainly is no fun.

Alert: Try not to censor your feelings.

Your feelings are your direct experience of your self - your life energies. Even if they are all dressed up into the shapes of panic, depression, disgust or shame, try not to censor them. Suppressing your own life force is not a good idea. It will make you sick and eventually turn you into Mount St. (your name).

When you push your feelings away, it will be difficult for you to get to the roots of your tough-to-live-with emotions - your thinking. And pushing your feelings away is actually throwing the baby out with the bath water. You really want to help your emotional energies to get out of the confinement of habituated thinking. So don't censor your feelings.

For you who have been sexually victimized, the experience of emotions may be difficult. Be gentle with yourself. In the victimization experience, your rights were severely trampled by the person who assaulted you. You have a right to all of your feelings. "I shouldn't be feeling like this!", is a thinking error that is begging for demolition. Of course you should be feeling whatever you feel. You arrived into this moment with your life energies intact and flowing. You bring your thinking patterns with you into this moment - they create your emotional experience of right now.

If you have a garden, then you know that you have to let the weeds grow big enough so that you can get a firm hold on them, in order to yank the little blighters out by the roots. Much the same thing here with the faulty beliefs and thinking errors. Honour your feelings. Find ways to get them out on the table - through talking, writing, screaming at a friendly tree, crying, laughing, giggling hysterically, listening to music, painting, playing music, singing, dancing or though relaxing, calming yourself and resting. Honouring your feelings means experiencing and expressing them as fully as you can without getting arrested or tromping on someone else's rights. It is the first step, which once taken, allows you to do the rest of the work.

Here's a clue: Saying, "I'm a jerk, or You're a jerk," is not a feeling statement. It's a position statement - an opinion - a value judgement. Feelings statements often start with: "I feel . . . "

Bummer feelings are an opportunity, not a sign of failure. Period. If they aren't out in the light of day, how the heck are you going to track down the thinking that shapes them?

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