Episode 241 Minisode: The POINT Of Feeling Your Feelings
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Hello everyone. So I do a daily podcast called Coffee with Colleen inside my emotional sobriety coaching program. These are short, sweet mini-sodes that either give you an inside look at something I’m going through in my own life or a simple, easy strategy that you can implement or both. You may hear me reference other content that only my clients have access to. So if you’re interested in learning more about my program,
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get in the show notes and schedule a discovery call with me or my team. My name is Colleen and I’m a mindful drinking coach helping high achieving professional women permanently reduce their alcohol consumption by 80%. Join me each week for evidence-based holistic strategies to regulate your nervous system, balance your dopamine and activate the growth mindset that makes you so powerful in other areas of your life.
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so you can stop worrying about losing control and trust yourself again. Get happy, not sober. It’s not about the alcohol.
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So let’s talk about the purpose, the through line of feeling your feelings. What is the point? I like to say a little snarky saying that the reason feeling your feeling gets a bad name is because you’re just doing it wrong. You’re not actually feeling your feelings. You’re thinking about them. Okay, so tell me how to do that. This happened on last night’s call. What the heck do you mean feel my feelings? What does that entail?
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And the instruction I gave was very simple. Feel your big toe. Put your consciousness, put your focus on your big toe right now. Wiggle it around. Notice where it is in space. Is it crammed into your shoe? Is it at an odd angle? Does it have a temperature? Does it have a color? Does it have a shape? Does it have sensations happening in it as you move your toe around? Is there bubbles or stickiness or whatever?
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Well, that’s feeling your feelings. And I want to distinguish between feeling sensations of things that are kind of neutral, your big toe, your elbow, your butt on the chair, neutral, right? It’s not painful. It’s not good. It’s not bad. It’s not right or wrong. It’s just a sensation. You can turn your attention there for a little while, and then you can move on. There’s not a lot to see. But with emotions,
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Emotions are energy that is stuck in your body. Why is it stuck? Because you are resisting the flow of that energy. You don’t like that energy. And energy is always moving through your body. I want you to imagine a river and upstream downstream. You know, the river is emptying out into the ocean. If nothing is blocking,
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The water. The water flows from the river into the ocean. But as we put up dams or build structures to redirect the flow of the water, it alters the flow. Sometimes not all of the water gets through and it forms a holding pond or we run it through a turbine and a generator and use it to create electricity.
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Well, it is the same thing with energy that is flowing in our body. When we resist the flow of energy because I don’t like this, I don’t want this, I can’t handle this, I don’t want to feel this way. When we resist it, it stops the flow of the energy. It changes the flow of the energy. And when it comes to suppressing and ignoring our emotions, our energy, often it forms really stagnant ponds. And the ponds get full of pus.
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We have an emotional owie. We have a trigger that something sets us off. We have outsized reactions to things that are happening in the here and now, but our reaction isn’t about the here and the now. It’s about the inability of our emotion to flow, and it’s creating a disturbance in our physical body. When we block the flow of our emotions, we create either stagnancy,
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Sometimes, just like a turbine, we use the fuel of anger or embarrassment to power ourselves into other behaviors and transmute it that way. But whenever we feel an emotional disturbance, an emotional reaction, when we feel triggered, what you know for sure is that you are experiencing resistance, and you’re trying to block the flow of energy through you.
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you’re holding on. And maybe you’ll power it for something good, but for the most part, you’ll power it to perpetuate the patterns of the past. Because you want to avoid feeling that way, and anything that you perceive that might cause you to feel that way, you alter, you detour, you work around it, you expend a lot of energy simply trying to block the flow of your own energy. And this is how we end up all
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emotionally constipated. This is why we carry around such heavy baggage and feel so tired and overwhelmed because we are using so much energy to block the flow of our own energy and it’s exhausting and also
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We don’t realize, but we are perpetuating the patterns of the past and projecting them into the future and just creating the same problem over and over in different contexts and then having to spend all of our time and energy diverting the flow around yet another stagnant pond or alternate path. Because we think that if we just work harder and do better and convince the people around us to give us the love and approval and validation, then we won’t have to feel
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things we don’t want to feel. And so what I want to tell you is that if you just fucking feel the feelings and you allow them to be and stop resisting them, stop resisting the flow of what is just energy through your body, it’s not even painful, then you not only clear the blockages that are
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costing you all sorts of energy and self-sabotage and worry and concern because you don’t want to feel the thing and you have to do all the other things so you don’t feel the thing, then you get to be free of all of that. You don’t have to feel threatened and defensive and get stuck trying to build a retention pond around your emotional owie or generate all of this electricity to power yourself so that you can continue to stay stuck.
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pretending that this resistance, this obstacle, this energy blockage isn’t there. It is there. The sensation in your body, when you feel it, it tells you there’s something there. And the beautiful, wonderful, good news is that you don’t have to figure it all out. You don’t have to make sense of things. Sometimes that’s fun and helpful and allows you to move through it because you’re allowed to see something from a different perspective or
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tell a story from a different angle. All of that is fine and good, but it’s really for entertainment purposes only. The bottom line is when you feel your feelings and allow them to flow through you, instead of getting attached to them and identifying with them and trying to hide or suppress or change them, when you just allow them to flow through you, it is what it is, the feeling is what it feels, you become free.
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I was inspired to do this episode based on a share we had on last night’s call. And she’s been to the doctor, and her liver enzymes are elevated. And so all of this guilt and embarrassment and shame, and she’s doing the things, and she’s showing up, and she’s asking for help, and she’s in this program. And she’s confident that changing her behavior will correct the little red flags that are coming up on her lab results. But there’s also a niggling of doubt.
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because she got the same test results last year, did some things, made some changes, and then slid back into her old habits. And now she’s here again. And I was telling her she needs to feel her feelings and just allow the guilt and the shame and the doubt and the embarrassment to be there without clinging to it. And she asked the question, what does that mean? And it came to me after the call that the whole purpose of learning how to feel your feelings
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is to learn to allow them to exist in your body without identifying with them. And I use the analogy of having gas pains. know, when something is going on in your gut and all of a sudden you get that overwhelming cramp, you just stop and you breathe and you hope that you can pass gas or you can burp or you you just let it ride and it’ll go away. That’s the same thing that you need to learn to do with your emotions.
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You don’t feel the gas pains come on and then suddenly think, oh, fuck, I’m full of shit. Nobody can know that this is what’s going on inside of me. I can’t talk about it. I need to hide because God forbid I pass a fart and it smells and somebody smells it. And then they judge me and they think horrible things about me because I farted. No, that’s not what we do. We just get our bodies into a comfortable position and do whatever it takes to allow that energy that
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sensation, that pain to pass through us. We know that it’s temporary. And that’s the problem with the energy that gets stuck in our body, our emotions is that we don’t know it’s temporary. We think it’s telling us the truth about who we are, that we are bad and guilty and shameful and inappropriate and negligent and awful and selfish and stupid. And so we hold on.
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to those stories. We hold on to the energy because we think it needs to be hidden or diverted. And that’s how we get blocked energy, because we don’t allow the feeling like, OK, I just feel embarrassed right now. And embarrassment is a good one to think about, because often we feel embarrassed. There’s spinach in your teeth after the presentation, or you do fart and it stinks and everybody in the elevator knows it was you. But you don’t cling to it as an identity. And yet, this is what we’ve done with
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our most painful emotions is we have not allowed them to flow through us. Instead, we’ve attached to them and identified them. And so the antidote is feeling the feeling without attaching to it, allowing it to be there for as long as it is. And some of your emotions are deep and connected to a lot of things. And this isn’t a one and done. But when you can make a habit, a practice of allowing the feeling to be there without
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attaching to the story, you’re feeling you’re not thinking and not attaching to the story and identifying with it. That is will then clear that energy blockage because you’re no longer afraid to feel that. Oh, oh, I just feel stupid right now. Okay, like I’m experiencing stupidity. I am not stupid. I’m experiencing guilt, but I am not guilty because you understand that all time is now.
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The past, it does not exist. The past is only the story in your head that you did something bad, that this is your fault, that you are not capable of handling this. And as long as you hold on to that story, that energy, your future is going to be a trajectory. It’s going to include those facts, whether they are hidden in the fabric and the opposite of what you’re projecting to the outside world or whether you’re just owning it.
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I’m a mean, miserable bitch. Stay out of my way. When you can allow the energy to move through you, you can be a mean, miserable bitch in this moment, but that doesn’t define the next moment. And you can be kind and sweet and gentle and loving in one moment, but that doesn’t define the next moment. Like this is where just letting energy move through you, allowing yourself to experience all the human emotions.
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I use the analogy of it’s like a piano keyboard. There’s 88 keys. You got all of them. You don’t get to say, my keyboard doesn’t make that sound. Yes, it does. And the more time you spend trying to pretend that certain keys don’t exist on your board and that you’re not capable of feeling jealous or little or petty or greedy or whatever it is that you don’t want to be, the more time you
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end up getting stuck there and then spending all of your energy, you know, acting the opposite way or again, just giving up and going with it. And this is who I am, but you’re stuck. You’re identifying as that story that was true in one moment, but you forgot to let it go. And now you’re still carrying it around with you, letting it dictate your future. You know, I’m not saying let go of the facts. I’m not saying
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Let go of the facts that the blood test was there last year, and the blood test has come back again this year, and you’ve repeated a pattern. Those are the facts. You don’t let go of the facts. You let go of your story about the facts, that somehow it means something about you in this moment. You have a choice at all times. You can either let your story that you don’t even like define you.
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Or you can define yourself by whatever story you choose. And you may be like, well, you can’t just make shit up. Well, of course you can. Everybody’s making it up. It’s all made up. None of it’s true. All of it’s true. You get to pick. And you know that the most powerful people that you are attracted to that have risen to heights that most humans won’t, you know they got the most powerful stories. But they are not defined.
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by the original circumstance. They’re defining themselves by how they’re choosing to see themselves, how they came through that story, what they learned from that experience, how it made them better and stronger and more resilient and allowed them to teach others to help them avoid maybe that story. Like they have become the master of the story. There’s no such thing as a true story. A story by definition has themes and characters and a beginning and an end.
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and heroes and villains, but it’s cherry picked data. And you can always expand the timeline and tell the story from a different perspective. You get to do that. You are the creator and the author of your life. And as long as you’re sitting there holding onto the story, I’m bad because my blood work is the same as it was last year, then you will be stuck. And you can’t rewrite the story.
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in the emotion that is telling the story, right? You have to let that shit go and flow on down your river of life. And then you can turn around and write your autobiography or your comeback story or make your movie or whatever it is that you want. You can’t do mindset work. You can’t think differently in the emotional state that’s generating the thought patterns. So you have to let that shit go.
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And that is why I’m here to tell you that all you have to do is feel the feeling, allow it. Feel it in your body, notice the energy. And then if you wanna name it, oh, this is depression, this is fear, this is guilt, this is anger. And I allow it, I accept this emotion to be in my body for as long as it needs to be there, but I’m not gonna attach to it.
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I’m not going to hold on to it. I’m not going to bury it. I’m not going to repress it. I’m not going to act on it, whether it be to reinforce it or to prove that it is not there. Either way, I’m not going to take the energy. I’m just going to allow this to move through me. Letting go of your attachment to the energy is what frees them. And it is the story in your head that you’re going to be letting go of. Your story is your jail cell.
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are your own prison guard. Only you have the power to set yourself free by allowing these emotions to exist and not identifying with them, allowing them to move through you. And just imagine, you know, we seek, if we feel guilt, right? We want people to forgive us, to see us, to see us for who we really are and not for the thing that we did, right? And somebody, everybody can forgive you.
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But if you don’t forgive yourself, it doesn’t matter. You’re still a prisoner of that story, of that energy. And that goes both ways. And this is the harder one, right, is when other people blame you and they are not willing to forgive you. And you think you cannot be released from this energy. But again, it goes both ways. If you don’t blame you, it doesn’t matter. Only you can set yourself free. Each of us is.
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our own prisoner guards, each of us gets to choose whether we live in this emotional bondage and expend our energy pushing and repelling and resisting and fighting against the energy in our own bodies, or we can learn how to let that go. And I just want you to imagine being free, being powerful and kind and compassionate to not just yourself, but to everybody because you
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can, because you know how, because you have the power and you are free to do so. Nobody can be bestow that power on you. Power is not something other people give you. That’s not what power is. If someone if you’re waiting on somebody to give you your power, it’s not your power, is it? Okay. And when you learn and get attracted to the idea that you can free yourself,
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you will change the world. We already know that hurt people hurt people, but healed people, whole people heal people and allow them to be whole. And when you can stand in your wholeness, allowing energy to move through you and not attached to it, then you get to experience joy and happiness and curiosity and learning and you get to move through life free.
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and from a place of power. But the power is within you, Dorothy. You’ve had the power all along. And so full circle back to the point, the purpose of feeling your feelings is to let the energy flow through you. How do you do that? When it comes up, you notice that it’s there and you stop, drop, and feel, and you say, I allow this, I accept it.
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You just put your conscious attention on where it is in your body. You disconnect from the story. And you can name the emotion if you want. I feel bad, guilty, ashamed, afraid, whatever it is. And I release that. I’m not going to attach my identity onto that feeling. And in the end, what emotional sobriety is, what it does, is it neutralizes.
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everything. Like it just is what it is. Happiness, it’s a feeling, it is what it is. Sadness, it’s a feeling, it is what it is. And when you allow the waves to flow through you without attaching, especially to those negative energies, but the positive ones too, like you can’t be happy all the time. You can’t experience any emotion all the time. That’s like saying, I don’t like waves in my ocean. It doesn’t work that way. But when you allow those waves of energy to go through you, you are
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resilient and free to create a different future because you no longer feel like you have to hide or repress or hold on to things that you don’t like. You can write your own story. You can rewrite your story as many times as you want. You can decide what you want and then you can change your mind and then you can re-change your mind. Like this is what you get to do as a human being experiencing playing all the keys on the piano.
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And when you hit a note that is sour and doesn’t go with your particular tune, you allow it to resonate. You don’t stop and remove the key off the keyboard so that it never gets hit again. You just let the sound dissipate. Let the energy go away and keep on playing and dancing and singing and feeling all of the feelings because you’re not afraid of them. Because the truth is always changing. There is no truth that defines you.
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because the truth is a one and done experience and your experiences are always changing, which means it is not the truth that sets you free. It is you that sets the truth free so that you are free to experience new truths. So stop blocking your truths, my friends. Feel them to heal them and then let that shit go.
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All right, thanks for listening. And if you’re a high achieving, coachable woman who is ready to commit to manifesting your best life, and you’re going to need to reduce your alcohol consumption by about 80 % so that alcohol goes back to being a pleasure instead of a soul sucking problem, get in the show notes and click the link and schedule a discovery call with me or my team.