Learning to Value Our Feelings

Everyone has inside himself a piece of good news! The good news is that you really don't know how great you can be, how much you can love, what you can accomplish, and what your potential is! ~ Anne Frank

It’s been a while since I’ve written. I've been busy with my full-time day job as well as attending the Year of More at the Wright University. I just finished my first quarter, "Nourishment and Self Care". It was an amazing experience...I learned a lot about feelings and the importance of processing my feelings in lieu of pushing them down and avoiding working through them. Historically, that has been my modus operandi. I’ve also learned that there’s more to nourishment and self-care than food, movement, facials, and mani/pedis, although all of those are great starts to taking better care of ourselves and many times serve their own purpose in our self-care. In fact, processing our emotions may have more of an impact and be even more important than food and movement.

However, in this course, I learned the value and importance of processing my emotions. For decades I had the mindset that shit happens to most everyone…pick yourself up, dust yourself off and move on; no pity parties allowed here! I could not have been more wrong. Studies show that the more we shove our emotions to the side, don’t process them, and ignore them as if they don’t exist, we leave the door open to experience all different types of dis-ease. More on this later.

Processing our emotions starts with acknowledging they exist. So many of us go through life on a sort of hamster wheel; we wake up, go through our morning routine of getting ourselves and our children ready for work and school, head off to work, take our lunch breaks, get through our afternoon, head home, make dinner, get the kids through homework and ready for bed, stay up past the time we should to watch TV programs we’ve become addicted to, then head off to bed only to start the entire rat race all over again the next day. I know this because I lived it. I was fully in the know of the rat race I was in but didn’t know how to change it. I was doing all the things society said was expected of me, all the while knowing and feeling that there had to be more to life than “just this”.

In researching books about feelings, I was pleasantly surprised to see how many books and videos geared towards children there are about the importance of feelings. I believe it’s imperative we show our children the importance of and the value of our feelings and how feelings are a tool in helping us navigate our lives. How many times were we as children told that “children are to be seen and not heard”? Whether that was a statement that our parents said out loud or their actions made clear to us, we were taught to stay silent. How many of you were taught that anger was “bad”? I don’t know about you, but anger can be very motivating. When I’m angry, I can do some of the best and fastest house cleaning ever!

I have been on my journey of self-discovery for decades…literally decades. However, through this course, I m now on a journey of transformation, and it has all started with this one quarter. Tonight, I start my new quarter, “Robust Relationships”, which builds on the "Nourishment and Self Care” course. Since completing the first quarter on Tuesday, I feel a shift inside…I’m happier, calmer, more at peace, and am discovering my life purpose and path, and I know it has everything to do with learning how to process my feelings and emotions. I’m now excited to wake up in the morning and get my day started, I’m more focused at work and feel a renewed sense of purpose there, and I feel more engaged in life, which is very exciting to me!

I say all of this to say, stick around and engage with me as we go on a journey of discovering our feelings…acknowledging and feeling them, honoring them, listening to them and what they’re trying to tell us, and processing them. I promise you; this will take you on a journey of self-discovery that you never knew existed.