What people say
I can honestly say that, for the first time in 50 years, I’m learning how to just be. How to relish the present moment, which, magically and mysteriously, unlocks the door to the treasure house that is the rest of my life.
- Jennifer Green, Salem, Oregon
From the moment Jon and I connected, I had this deep experience of loving presence and complete trust. Something bypassed my mind and my ability to figure things out, and communicated directly to my heart and soul that I was safe and in the right place. There was a creation of power in our relationship that he honored and witnessed as being mine. It was my power. I had the experience of being wonderfully, beautifully powerful, in the most loving, energized way.
- Laura Lind-Blum, The Idea Midwife, Waterbury Center, Vermont
Jon can help you recognize where you are, and become more clear. My work with him has not been about plotting out my future, it has been about helping me come into deeper relationship with myself so that next steps unfold easily and effortlessly.
He creates a safe, spacious container for you to go as deep or wide or high as you’re capable of in any given moment. It’s a matter of him being able to see the facets and help me make them real in me.
- Sandra Leader, Carmel, CA
My feelings changed from, “Quick, fix me, I can’t stand how I feel, make it better, hurry,” to, it’s not about hurry, and it’s not about fixing, it’s about staying where you are and getting more and more and deeper and deeper sensations that this is okay. You’re fine, this is okay.
It helps me reframe experience. I don’t see anything that’s happening quite the same as I’ve ever seen it before, because my viewpoint has been enlarged. There’s more, there’s peace, there’s joy, there’s love, there’s health, there’s everything.
- Layne Young, artist, Salem, Oregon
Experiencing the Full Range of Feeling
February 8 2011
Powerful emotions — especially those we consider uncomfortable or unpleasant — can feel overwhelming.
Caught up in rage, deep grief, or even in simpler feelings of frustration or impatience, my clients sometimes tell me they’re afraid of being overpowered by the experience.
As children, we’re not taught how to be with our emotions. Instead, we’re often encouraged to suppress or deny what we feel. We might have been taught that good boys and girls don’t feel anger, or that tears are inappropriate in public places — and perhaps that they’re seldom appropriate even privately for boys.
Parents may feel shocked or overwhelmed by the ways in which young children can become immersed in their experience of emotion. At the same time, small children are intensely sensitive to the reactions of their parents. No matter how accepting and loving a parent may feel and may try to be, the child can feel the parent’s flinching from their shrieks of rage or storms of tears.
As adults, therefore, we may be so accustomed to — and so good at — suppressing and turning away from our experiences of powerful emotion that we aren’t even aware of the depth of what we’re feeling.
Yet those feelings are present, even if not consciously felt. And when we turn away from one type of emotional experience — the ones we consider unacceptable or unpleasant — we inevitably also suppress the emotions we find more enjoyable. It’s simply not possible to block out only half the emotional spectrum. Instead, it’s an all or nothing process.
Therefore, in denying our grief, anger, and fear, we also end up denying joy, love, and vulnerability. We lose our ability to be intimate with ourselves, and thus we lose our ability to be intimate with others.
Helping my clients come back to experiencing the full range of true feeling is a big part of my work. Here are a few of the things I explore with them that may be helpful for you.
Stay aware
One of the reasons we flinch from strong emotions is that they can be hurtful weapons when wielded from an unconscious or immature place.
As you experiment with the suggestions here, be conscious of witnessing, watching, and awareness. Notice what is happening and what you’re thinking, as well as what you’re experiencing.
As one client said, “There’s a difference between feeling anger and how I choose to express it. I can express it honestly and with respect for everyone involved, including myself — or I can express it irrationally and inappropriately. And I’ve come to know that as long as I remain aware of myself and who I really am, I won’t use my anger and fear as a weapon to hurt other people, no matter how many times I saw that happen in my family. But at the same time,” she added, “I don’t have to be a doormat, either. There’s a happy medium, and I’m so glad to be exploring it!”
Allow what’s true for you
Whatever you’re feeling doesn’t make you a bad person. Whatever you’re feeling is okay — deeply, truly okay.
Many of my clients tell me that they’ve denied their feelings of anger, frustration, and sadness because they feel no one wants to hear about it. But as they open to a deeper understanding of what’s really true for them, they also find themselves able to open to an honest expression of their feelings.
What would it be like to feel what you feel — while trusting yourself not to let it spill over onto the people around you?
What would it be like to trust those around you to take care of themselves, even in the face of your feelings?
It’s just energy
Emotion is a form of energy.
As that energy moves through your body, it often creates physical responses. Your heart might pound, your breathing may speed up, your gut might clench, you may find yourself sobbing.
But in the end, it’s simply energy. When you can allow emotional energy to move through you freely, without trying to stop it or shove it away, you’ll find that it feels less uncomfortable — and will often dissipate more quickly.
“The first time I simply allowed myself to cry, to freely express the grief that had been bottled up inside, I was surprised by what happened,” a client told me. “It was suddenly obvious that all my efforts to ‘make myself feel better’ or to ‘put on a happy face’ had just made my sadness more painful. In letting my tears just be there, I felt a real, genuine release — and so much less pain!”
Move!
Emotion is energy — and sometimes that energy responds to being expressed in movement. Anger and fear in particular tend to create surges of adrenaline in your body. Burning that adrenaline through physical movement will often help the energy move through your body more easily as well.
“I’ve learned to get up and go to the gym, or at least for a walk around the block, when I get annoyed or frustrated,” a client said. “Even a few moments of strong physical movement can help me settle down and feel less worried about saying or doing something I’ll regret later.”
Reach out
It’s important to stay in touch with others, especially when you’re not accustomed to allowing yourself to feel what you feel.
Several of my clients have noticed that they tend to isolate themselves when they’re struggling with strong emotions — and they’ve also told me that reaching out, whether to me or to a close friend or family member, helps them stabilize and ground themselves.
“There’s a difference,” one client said, “between reaching out with ‘woe is me’ dramatics, and reaching out for a hand to hold when things are tough. The ‘woe is me’ thing tends to just make it all worse. Being able to really ask for help, though — being able to be vulnerable when I’m feeling wobbly — can be a very supportive experience.”
Powerful emotion is part of the richness of our human experience. And the full experience of powerful emotion is part of what it takes to forge meaningful connections between ourselves and the people in our lives. Yes, it can sometimes feel frightening and painfully vulnerable. But for me, and for many of my clients — the resulting depth of connection is well worth it.
”Alleluia! We do not have to be right! We do have to love, to be vulnerable, to accept joy and pain, and to grow through them.“ Madeleine L’Engle (1918-2007), American fiction and science fiction author.
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