Empowered feeling

Emotional resilience

Many people have a story that their feelings are too much and as such feel a like a victim to their emotions.  They try their best to not feel certain emotions as they fear that the emotion will overcome them and they will be lost in a particular feeling state indefinitely.  In this scenario what is happening is that we are giving away our power to our emotions.  We are essentially saying that our emotions are bigger than us (rather than a transitory aspect which we experience) and we are not realizing that we are the creator of our emotions to begin with.  

When we don’t realize that we are the creator of our emotions than we will always feel on some level like they are simply happening to us.  When we have this relationship of emotions happening to us we often feel powerless to change the way that we feel.  This can leave us feeling trapped until either the emotional state or the active trigger which seemed to create the emotional state passes.  

There is a way beyond having to wait it out, but it requires you to step into the next level of knowing yourself as the creator of your life, including your emotional state of being.  This is what I call having emotional resilience and empowered feeling.  It implies that you know you are the creator of your feeling states and thus you are ultimately in charge of how you are feeling at any given moment.  It means that you have to step completely out of the frame of mind that something can “happen to you” and realize that you are choosing what you experience.  This can be a big step especially when something really feels like it has a hold of us and we’ve completely lost sight of ourselves.  

This shift in consciousness and in identity is what allows you to take full responsibility for your feeling state.  In this way you can feel whatever you feel without needing to blame people, triggers, circumstances or conditions.  You realize that you are ultimately in charge and ultimately the only one who can change your emotional state of being at any moment.   

Empathy 

Feeling beyond our own skin line

This moves us now to feeling beyond our own emotional states into the world of empathy or feeling others.  Empathy is actually our natural state of being. I find it ironic that people have found a way to pathologize that which is inherent to us and to seek ways to treat it.  Someone has actually coined an “empathy disorder” characterized as someone who is too sensitive to the emotions and energy of people, animals and the environment beyond their conscious control.  The condition implies, as all do, that you are somehow a victim to what you feel/experience, rather than the knowledge that you are again ultimately the creator of all that you experience.  

I want to invite the perspective here that to be un-empathetic or non-sensitive is actually to be disconnected from your feeling body.  Part of being human is that we have an emotional body, to feel is natural, and to feel beyond one’s own skin line or to perceive feeling in that which is seemingly distinct and separate from you, such as another human being, plant or animal, is simply the waking up of your interconnectedness with all.  It is not a pathology, it is who and what you actually are beyond duality.    

Historically most all feeling, whether within or outside your own skin line, has been labeled as non-rational, hysteric or even impossible. In that way we have come to permission/create some feelings and not others. We’ve also learned through cultural conditioning that some feelings are bad or wrong, while others are good or right.  As you suspend your need to label some emotions as bad, wrong or too much, you will stop finding the need to pathologize your feelings and realize the gift of feeling and empathy.  The true pathology or problem is not in feeling or in being sensitive, but instead in repressing or dampening out that which you do feel. To feel is what is required to bring humanness back to being human, to bridge the gap of the illusion of our separateness from one another and wake up to the fact that we are ultimately one being.

Embrace your feelings, stop labeling them and stop judging yourself for having them. Rejoice that you can actually feel as there are many who still can’t find or feel their emotions. Know that you are the ultimate creator of all feeling.  Your feeling, your sensitivity, is an enormous gift that this world needs. Please recognize it as such and continue boldly in feeling all that which desires to be felt through you.

Dr. Amanda Hessel, Chiropractor, Network Spinal Analysis & Somato-Respiratory Integration, Boulder, Colorado