How Are You?
How are you? A simple question that you probably hear several times a day. How often to you think about how you ‘really’ are before you reply, “I’m fine. How are you?”
How about when someone asks you how you are feeling? What’s the normal response? “Well, last week, I was sick, but I am feeling better now.” In this instance, you are actually saying how ‘your body’ is feeling not how ‘you’ are feeling.
Feelings and emotions are not something that we readily accept and talk about as a society. We have what we call the ‘good’ emotions–happiness, excitement, peace, and love. We usually readily share these emotions with everyone. Then we have what we call the ‘bad’ emotions–sadness, fear, anger, guilt, hatred. These emotions we rarely share with anyone else and we seldom talk about them. We are afraid that if we share these ‘negative’ emotions, then someone might laugh at us or they won’t like us.
What is often forgotten is that emotions are neither good, bad, positive, negative, right or wrong. They just are!
What we feel is often brushed aside because a) we don’t really recognize how we are feeling, b) we think we need to be strong or c) we just don’t want to talk about them. I usually fall in the latter 2 categories. I like to think that I am ‘strong’. I mean what would happen if someone saw me crying or angry or sad, what would they think? Also talking about my feelings, feels very taboo to me. If I am talking about my feelings, that makes them real. Never mind, that I know they are real and I am feeling them in my body, but talking about them makes them more real to me.
But there are times when I don’t even recognize how I am feeling. I am on autopilot and am so busy that I just don’t take the time to recognize that I am feeling anything. I came across an exercise from the book, You Can Have It All by Arnold Patent. It is called the “Feeling Exercise”. Ok, you can stop rolling your eyes at me now. I know that you are wondering why I am going on and on about emotions and feelings. I am writing about them because your emotions and feelings can and will affect your body. (To read more about “Your Powerful Emotions”, please click here.)
The Feeling Exercise
(My own comments are placed in the parentheses)
Close your eyes and scan your body. Notice how you are feeling. Then:
- Feel the feeling free of any thoughts you have about it. (No matter what you are feeling, try not to place any judgment on it).
- Feel love for the feeling just the way it is. (Accept the fact that you are feeling something and be OK with it.)
- Feel love for yourself feeling the feeling. (Truly be ok with the fact that you are feeling that.)
The idea behind this exercise is to realize that you are feeling a ‘feeling’ and it is ok to feel that way. If you start paying attention just a little bit to what you may be feeling, you start the process of becoming more aware of all your feelings and what affect they have on your body. Any and all feelings are real–none of them are good, bad, positive, negative, good or bad.
Feelings just are! Where you get tripped up is the label that you place on that feeling. For instance, anger is a feeling that I try my hardest to avoid. My anger makes me feel very uncomfortable because I feel that anger is wrong. When I get angry I feel vengeful and mean and those aren’t pleasant feelings for me at all. So I avoid arguments and any confrontations because I don’t want to be angry. Well, the truth of the matter is–I am angry, whether I express it or not. If I don’t give that anger an ‘out’ of some sort, it will remain in my body which could result in physical pain because I am stopping the emotion. So I am trying to be more cognizant of my anger. Instead of flying off the handle and being afraid I am going to hurt someone’s feelings, I try to acknowledge to myself that I am angry and that is ok. To me, just acknowledging to myself that I am angry is a huge step and is far better than my old motto, which was “Suck it up and drive on.” I will admit that my old motto is my default. It feels so much easier to me than admitting even to myself that I am angry. It takes a conscious effort on my part to take a step back and allow myself to be OK with being angry.
MY CHALLENGE TO YOU: Try the Feeling Exercise and see what you come up with. Just pay attention to your body when you are doing the exercise. Remember feelings and emotions aren’t right, wrong, good, bad, positive or negative. They just are! Notice them, pay attention to them–they will offer you fantastic clues on how they are affecting your body.