Friends of mine were recently sharing together on a text chat that this whole coronavirus situation has helped the aging process, happening in us middle-aged women, to move along quite exponentially. Talk about adding insult to injury! I feel like I am taking the Advanced Placement Menopause course, as we mostly shelter in place. I don’t know if this “uber warp speed aging” is actually happening, or I was just too busy to notice before. Plus, regular salon visits, pedicures, and spa days, went a long way in keeping the whole aging process at bay, or at least a little more hidden from view. Truly, though, if we are honest with ourselves, stress wreaks havoc on our physical bodies. And I think that we can all agree that our stress levels are climbing right along, in tandem, with the coronavirus case growth charts.
I’ve been reading some materials lately about how to best deal with our stress and emotions, through all of this. We women, have a tendency to not only feel, intuit and take on our own stresses, but we often open our own tender hearts to feel, intuit, and take on the stresses of our families, our friends, our neighbors, our coworkers, our pets, our community workers . . . . you know the drill. We women especially, often get overloaded with emotion and often, we don’t even realize it, until our unprocessed feelings show up in our bodies, in the form of ailments, injuries, exhaustion, exponential aging, etc. So what’s the best way to deal with this swirling cauldron of all of these intense feelings??? The answer is to feel them. As a wise person once said to me, “Don’t fix your feelings. Feel them.”
There’s a method to allowing yourself to feel your feelings, without getting overwhelmed. Worrying about getting overwhelmed with emotion, is why so many of us avoid the healthy experience of just feeling our feelings. We are afraid of losing control, but the irony of it is, when we don’t allow ourselves to feel our own very natural feelings, we have lost control. What we resist, persists. The feelings and emotions that have not been allowed to be accepted, to be felt, and then finally to be released, remain in our physical bodies and our mental states, and they come out in different ways, such as an over-reaction to a slight, or migraine headaches or a shutdown mental state where we get so numb that we can’t even feel all of the good feelings, which are also a very important part of our daily existence.
Many of us middle-aged women have had, at least, one or two experiences with yoga and/or meditation. The idea behind these lovely practices, is to calm your system down to the point where you are very much in, the actual present moment. You are very in-tuned to yourself right in that very present, now moment. In these slow, deliberate states of being, you are able to notice things about yourself. You notice your own thoughts, and you notice all different sensations in your body. This process allows you to see, that in actuality, the most peaceful, centered part of yourself, is the wise presence inside of yourself, that is able to notice your thoughts (without judging your thoughts, or at the very least, your wise presence just also notices your judgment thoughts). Many spiritual people believe that this very peaceful, centered, Awareness part of you, which just lovingly notices and experiences your thoughts and your sensations in every moment, is the real You – your spirit, your God within. The idea of Oneness comes about, when it dawns on you, that every living thing has this very same loving, peaceful, Awareness within, and all of the rest of it – the body, the ego mind with its judgments and preferences, the individual external experiences, are all really just fluff. The rest of it (the fluff), is really just tools and vehicles that give us the ability for the real part of us (spirit) to have this Life experience. In that sense, God is the Ocean and we are the waves. Everyone carries the Universe inside of themselves.
So with that in mind, just like we notice our thoughts, or notice pain in our body, we can also just notice our emotions. Feelings are natural. There is nothing wrong with having thoughts and feelings, even the ones that we label as “bad.” We will only ever be held accountable for how we act on our thoughts and feelings. Feelings and thoughts are nothing more than energy that is part of the natural process of life. Every human has all sorts of thoughts and feelings going on, all day long, every day.
Interestingly, we humans typically do three things with our emotions. We either suppress/repress them, in other words, trying to deny that we have them, because we have judged these feelings as negative, and we want to disassociate ourselves from the “badness” of them, or we try to escape from our feelings, often with addictions like working, TV, alcohol, drugs, eating, etc. or finally, we express our feelings by venting, over-rumination, over-analyzing or dumping them on to someone else. In none of these cases, do we just let the quiet, peaceful Awareness part of us to just relax into the experience of just feeling our feelings. If we can sit with our emotion, we can just notice it. What thoughts are flaring up with this emotion that we are feeling? What body sensations are happening to us as we “feel our feels”? Remember, what we resist, persists. But if we sit with our emotion, realizing that a particular emotion will be like a wave that comes in, crests, and then flows out, it becomes, really no big deal. And a felt feeling doesn’t leave residual “stuff”, for our bodies and hearts to have to carry with it, like a big heavy load of baggage. The feeling is felt, and then, the feeling is let go.
Now realize, because many of us middle-agers have spent a lot of our lives, stuffing our feelings, avoiding our feelings, denying our feelings, judging our feelings, analyzing our feelings, intellectualizing our feelings, projecting our feelings – basically doing everything but actually FEELING our feelings, there is a pretty big reservoir of unfelt/unaccepted/unprocessed emotion in many of us, that we carry around with us, all day, day in and day out. I have heard the stored unprocessed feelings, to be likened to a giant Olympic-sized swimming pool, or to a huge pile of coal. So, in particular circumstances, say for example, unprocessed anger about a very unfair job situation that happened ten years ago, part of that reservoir, that giant pool of stored emotion, will often spill out in say, an over-reaction to someone cutting you off in traffic. In that case, when that anger flairs up, you give the other driver the finger and you stew in over-sized annoyance or you carry a grudge all day about that driver and you let that incidence color your entire day. But if you are being aware of your thoughts and feelings on a regular basis, you probably start realizing that your over-reaction to being cut off is probably more about a lot of unprocessed anger, in you, about a lot of other stuff. In this example, you are just expressing your emotion, but you aren’t really allowing yourself to just feel the anger, to accept the emotion without resistance and judgment, and most importantly, by not feeling and accepting the anger within you, you can’t get to the point of being able to then, let the anger go. Instead, you have just added more drops of water to the Olympic-sized pool of stored anger energy, that you haul around with you every day. You cannot let go of a feeling until you actually have allowed yourself to feel the energy of the emotion, without judgment, without analyzing it, and without guilt. If we don’t allow ourselves to feel the natural feeling, that unprocessed feeling becomes another pitcher full of water or another lump of coal, in the already heavy load of cargo that we’ve been carrying around with us our whole lives.
Now keep in mind, even the most enlightened among us, probably still have some stored-up, unfelt emotion about past events in our lives. Working through the feelings, and being able to feel pools of emotions, whether they be kiddie pools or water parks or piles of feelings, whether they be ant hills or mountains, takes time and it takes energy. Often, there is a guilt or shame feeling, about having our other feelings that must be felt and experienced and accepted and let go, prior to being able to feel the original feelings of say, anger or jealousy or resentment or pride.
I bring all of this feeling work stuff up, because I am trying to avoid adding to my own pools and adding to own my piles of unprocessed feelings, with this very scary, fear laden situation that we have going on in the world, with this awful virus. I have been trying to do this process of just letting myself feel my feelings, whenever they come up to my conscious, so that I am able to accept them and then, I am able to let my feelings go. This process helps me to come to the end of a day, with a relatively even-keeled sense of peace and it has helped navigate me, to areas where I really need to focus on cleaning up some pretty big piles of unfelt/unreleased emotion, when I am ready to do that process. Give the “feel your feelings” process a try. Start with little feels, like annoyances with people standing too close to you in the grocery store, or disappointment about a cancelled event. Feel the annoyance, feel the disappointment. Notice, with detachment, the thoughts and the body sensations that arrive with the feelings of annoyance and disappointment, and then notice, surprisingly, how quickly the emotion goes back out from the shore of your presence, back out into the big arms of the ocean of peace. Let go and let God, “they” say. What could be better?