Oh, clarity, you old so and so. The way in which you dawn with no apparent rhyme nor reason. Like the way you’ve suddenly revealed that notwithstanding having spent countless hours of my adult life thinking about feelings, thinking about feeling feelings, talking, reading, listening, workshopping, and generally psych-nerding out in every possible way about feelings, I’ve likely spent precious little time actually feeling them.
Yes, I can see it clearly now. Just because I’ve ruminated about how I don’t want to feel certain feelings, how I should or shouldn’t feel certain feelings, and how I wish I felt other feelings doesn’t mean I’ve felt them. Just because I’ve chewed every stick of feeling in the mental chewing gum pack, stuck it under the desk, then started afresh with a new pack for days upon years doesn’t grant me feeling cred. The truth, dirty as it is, seems to be that I’ve mostly hovered above my feelings just closely enough to convince myself I was feeling them.
Yet I know that I am not alone in having been guilty of pseudo-feeling. Over a long arc of time engaging in my own froth and foppery around feelings, I’ve run across more than a few other folks expressing genuine confusion about what it even means to feel one’s feelings. I’ve witnessed anything from bemusement: How does one “feel” a feeling? <shrug> to full-bore tantrum: I don’t know HOW to feel my feelings!!! <tears, gnashing of teeth and renting of garments>.
So, how is it that we came to be so confused around this seemingly simple act? Not haphazardly and not by happenstance, friends. Many of us come from long family legacies of emotional illiteracy and received education from systems where emotional awareness wasn’t on the curriculum (getting detention for losing your cool during a kickball altercation in gym class doesn’t count). And lest we neglect to give credit where credit is due, culture generally fails to support us in taking time for the sticky business of feeling. Unless it reaches the level of crisis, in which case it should be dealt with as unobtrusively as possible, preferably under the cover of night and the care of a medical doctor and a pharmacist.
Also. I have my suspicions that the logical, analytical, linear left hemisphere (which, incidentally, seems to prefer being referred to as “your royal cerebral highness,” or at least mine does) pretty immediately puts the kibosh on feeling feelings of all kinds. As a matter of fact, a friend and I were recently hypothesizing about how the left side of the brain seems to tell us that since it understands the concept of feeling feelings, there is no need to waste time slowing down to feel them. From its imperial perspective, why should we spend time doing something as elementary as feeling when there is so much sophisticated and pressing thinking to be done?
So how does one feel their feelings?? Well friends, I tried it this past week, and I found it to be deceptively simple (but not easy).
For reasons I can only chalk up to divine mystery, the moment had arrived. It was time. Time to take a stand against my bossy left hemisphere and really sit with some feelings, to stop hovering and drop in with my full and unfettered attention. It struck without a moment’s notice, lightning disguised as an email. The email appeared, heralding unwanted news, and BOOM! A jolt of electricity surged through my chest then swept like a wall of fire through my gut and my limbs. My pulse and respiration rates took off at a gallop and all my cells wanted to follow suit. Instead, I put my hand on my chest, closed my eyes and waited.
Then what, you ask? After a minute+ of waiting, it was like someone cut the juice to the defibrillator panels. The sensations slowly but surely pixelated, dissipated, and subsided. And once it was over, I found perspective. The email and I were suddenly right-sized. I could see that I had choices about how to respond. The smoke had cleared from my mind, and my body felt…neutral.
Divine mystery aside, I must confess here that the idea of waiting out the feeling storm didn’t come to me out of nowhere. It was more like the spontaneous germination of a little neuroscience seed planted in my psyche some time ago. A small but mighty little seed otherwise known as the “90-second rule” (as distinguished from the 70% rule we discussed not long ago). The seed was sewn by neuroanatomist Jill Bolte Taylor, who survived and recovered from a massive stroke in her left hemisphere that both incapacitated her for years and positioned her to become a purveyor of insights about, among other things, the way emotion plays out in the nervous system.
According to Dr. Bolte Taylor, the way the 90 second rule works is approximately thusly:
1. A person has a thought that gives rise to a distressing emotion (something in the fear or anger categories);
2. The thought activates the emotional circuitry of fight-or-flight
3. That emotional circuitry triggers a physiological dumpage of biochemicals into the bloodstream that make you feel all kinds of interesting sensations in the body
4. The biochemicals flush through and out in less than 90 seconds.
Now, when something distressing occurs, narrative thoughts around it have a way of popping back up like weeds, so this 90-second process might need to happen repeatedly until we can at long last drop the thinking and just be with the physicality of it. But in my experience, repeated 90-second pauses that refresh beat the heck out of the claustrophobia of negative feedback loops with no clear end in sight. I have long insisted that I was feeling my feelings by naming the fact that I was angry/scared/freaking out, all the while stoking the feelings furnace by focusing on my narratives around why I was feeling them. No wonder why the train barreled like a runaway express down the neural tracks.
So, there you have it, friends. Next time you’re feeling jolted by some high-octane emotion, don’t just do something. Sit there instead. Radically accompany yourself and your sensations, rather than rushing to distract, deflect, or otherwise knee-jerk into thought or action. My hope is that your experience will be similar to mine: as the biochemicals flush out, perspective and peace will rush in.
The timing of this feels ironic because last night (seemingly) out of nowhere I felt SO sad but I couldn't figure out exactly why, and the more I tried to think about it, the worse I felt. I had such an ache in my chest, and I ended up getting into bed and turning on a yoga video for grief and just immediately started sobbing. But after sitting there and just letting myself feel the feelings, I felt so much better.
Ah I’d totally forgotten about the 90-second rule!! Thanks so much for the reminder! I got to the end of this piece and just thought, “Wow. This was SO helpful.” (Psst btw to anybody reading this, I am lucky enough to have gotten some coaching from Keith, and I’m sure it won’t surprise you when I say he is AMAZING.) And also, the wordplay!!! Your pieces are so expertly crafted my goodness. So many hilarious images in here!! I can totally imagine you having just so much fun alchemizing your lived experience into words ❤️ I don’t know if this is true (some writers claim to suffer as they write?) but joy and silliness are really coming through for me :)