What is a feeling? Where does it originate from? Where does a feeling go when left ignored?

Feelings create thoughts. Consider a feeling like love. How many volumes of texts, how many reels of film and verses of poetry have been espoused to attempt to convey the feeling of love? Four letters are the bare minimum to express “love”, and yet it is all that we have as tools sometimes.

We might engage in years of therapy to understand a feeling like grief, guilt, or avoidance. We might be ruled our whole lives by limiting beliefs: “I am not good enough”, “I am lonely”, “I am undeserving”. These manifest as feelings of anxiety, fear, unworthiness, and apathy… and then we say “yes” when we should have said “no”, or run away when we should have run towards.

Some coaches advocate saying affirmations in a mirror to shift your feelings. While this can be temporarily valuable, it can be long-term detrimental if the feeling is left unacknowledged. That’s because the body keeps the score: emotions are energy in motion that get stuck in the body, then expressed in indirect ways. Anger can become resentment; sadness becomes pessimism; ignorance becomes depression.

The first step in making the pivot away from believing our automatic thoughts is to become aware of just how complicated our thought processes are. To really understand and be with our feelings, we must first understand that feelings are constructed of four elements:

1. An emotion, which are variations of happiness, sadness, fear, disgust, anger, or surprise;

2. An image, which is a visual memory or imagination.

3. A thought, which is an heard as an auditory monologue in our mind; and

4. A bodily sensation, which might feel like weight, pressure, pain, temperature, expansion/contraction, and more.

Consider this for a moment. Pause, take a deep breath, and allow yourself to be with a feeling. What image is conjured up in your mind’s eye? What emotion do you feel? What thoughts race across your awareness–are there justifications, blame, todo lists, or ideas? What sensations do you feel in your body? If you can discern these four elements, you are able to be with your feelings in greater depth rather than an unidentifiable blend.

Often, when we are asked “how do you feel”, we might reply with a vanilla “good”. Sometimes, we are racing through life so quickly that we do not pause to actually feel our feelings. Other times, we don’t feel safe enough to share with the other person that we are really feeling sad or angry or hurt. It is these little moments of averting our inner gaze–of not being honest with ourselves and others–that leads us to distance our experience from the Truth that lies within.

Being with a feeling can often be one of the most challenging experiences a human being can face. We do not want to feel grief or stress; instead, we want to feel joy and peace. So, in the pursuit of happiness, one might drink or gamble or move towards addictions to quiet the racing thoughts and tune down the pain. This natural process expresses itself in different ways for different people. In all cases, the energy behind the feelings doesn’t go away… it just festers.

The trick to truly feeling peace is to allow ourselves the grace to feel our feelings in their entirety. When we feel, we notice our thoughts; when we notice our thoughts, we feel more. There may seem like an endless cycle of thoughts and feelings that have been swept under the rug if we trace this cycle to completion. When these are brought into the light, the limiting beliefs and suffering that have laid dormant can begin to lose their grip. We begin to feel the fullness of life. We begin to express ourselves with integrity.

In this way, we find freedom.