I M Perfect lady

"The fastest way to freedom is to feel your feelings."  Gita Bellin

"This sounds pretty simple, but though it's easy to know you have feelings, easy to know their weight and agitation and suddenness of mood, it is another, more subtle matter to feel them – that is, to let them penetrate your being in the way wind snaps through a flag."

"This is necessary because if we don't feel our feelings all the way through, they never leave us, and then we do all kinds of unusual things to get out from under them.  This is the cause of many an addiction."

"I've diverted myself many times by becoming involved in what surrounds my pain or sadness, while never feeling the thing itself.  So, when someone asks me how I feel, I wind up retelling the circumstances of the pain, but not feeling it.  Or strategizing what to do next, but  not feeling it. Or anticipating reactions, but not feeling what is mine to feel.  Or swimming in the anger and injustice, but not diving through the wound."

"Though we fear it, feeling our feelings is the only clear and direct way to free our hearts of pain."  Mark Nepo

How appropriate to have this reading this morning.  Feeling our feelings seems like it would be impossible to do, yet I quickly get caught up in the current of anger and injustice, the wide and swirling river of it…unexpressed feelings from long long ago.

It seems that river never runs dry.

What I believe happens is that if you can't feel as a child, then as an adult, you don't just feel this moment of feelings, but all the similar type feelings of the past pile upon  each other to be expressed.

So, instead of being mildly put out, I am outraged.

Instead of feeling a bit overlooked, I feel totally neglected.

The wealth of feelings that I have to feel, truly feel like 50 years worth of bottled up negativity…and even joy.  

Overreacting is standard for me…for in the past I under felt.

I never felt all the way through feelings…

And sadly, the more traumatic, the less I ventured in.  Now all feelings feel like tragedies are looming.  Simplistic and typical pulls and pushes of parent and teenage child, feel to me like I am being abused, again.

Feelings stored in me find opportunities to be expressed…so of course it is in relationships that they line up, pushing and shoving to come out.

Separating the old feelings from the new is very tricky.

Letting out and airing the childhood wounds AND not inflicting wounds upon my children is crucial.  The two can't be joined…yet it seems this is where my expressing happens.  I get a voice of expression, but at the wrong time…

When someone labeled feelings "Time travelers"….they were right.

I am saying what I needed to say, but 50 years too late.

How do I now feel them all the way through, without subjecting my children with their expression?  How do you get them to rise to the surface without something/someone prompting them?  Is it possible to get them to rise by myself? Is it possible to feel them, without a label?

In yoga feelings arise without labels….I feel.

In real life feelings are triggered, labeled.  Does it matter?

Am I like a ticking time bomb waiting to explode?  Is yoga the place to defuse that bomb? Writing and acknowledging and knowing is good, but it is when I get an emotional response that the feelings feel felt.