#1 Life Skill for Peace and Fulfillment
If you want more peace and fulfillment in your life, make sure you have this #1 essential life skill: connection with your feelings.
Do you know your feelings? Do they take you by surprise? Do you overreact to feelings? Are you able to express them appropriately? Can you let them go or do they haunt you for the rest of your life? Many of us are disconnected from our feelings when we’re growing up. We lose touch with feelings as an essential tool for understanding ourselves and how we’re responding to the world. This disconnection can lead to anxiety and dissatisfaction.
When I was young, I learned to deny and suppress my feelings. I ended up pushing them down and closing my throat against them, creating a literal “bottleneck.” I had a lump in my throat and frequently felt like crying. I had to shove it all down any time a sad feeling came up.
I knew all this suppression was hurting me and preventing me from finding peace and happiness. I knew I had to do the hard work of revisiting those repressed feelings, letting them out, acknowledging them, and letting them go. It took years and several different methods to truly release the toxic build up of feelings.
But that was only the beginning. I needed a process for doing feelings in a healthy way. This is what I’ve come up with:
1. First, we need to identify them. Is that sadness? Or anger? Frustration? Rage? Anxiety? Fear? And that most baffling of feelings – joy? That last one was so foreign to me that when I got a blast of happiness, I almost felt afraid!
2. After identifying them, we need to accept them. This means feeling them, talking about them, exploring them: “processing” them.
3. And after accepting them and processing them and expressing them, we can let them go! According to neuroscientist Jill Bolte Taylor, a feeling naturally arises and passes away in 90 seconds. She calls it the 90-second rule. *90 seconds* !
That means, when you get to the point that you’ve released old, toxic feelings, the build up of years, the repression of a lifetime, you can process a feeling at warp speed – if not seconds, then maybe days or even hours or minutes.
SO MUCH BETTER THAN A LIFETIME OF SUPPRESSION!
We can just let a feeling be a feeling, not a life-defining event we never recover from. So start that awareness – what are you feeling? Can you name it? And talk about it with someone you trust. Process and explore it. Express it. Allow it. And then, let it go.
Clear the decks so that you’re letting those feelings arise and pass away without bogging you down and adding to a lifetime of emotional baggage.
WHAT A RELIEF!
So what are you feeling today that you can identify, process, and let go of?
Photo by Joseph Frank on Unsplash
