Why we feel

Early this year, I had one of the most important breakthroughs I experienced in my life: I learned to see myself.

This can be translated into many forms: loving myself, validating myself, trusting myself, and realizing my worth despite my external world and achievements.

It was as if all the pieces of knowledge and experience I had collected over the years had been floating in my mind, and all of a sudden they came together. A giant light bulb illuminated in my brain, and then I could finally see.

But it wasn't all of a sudden, really.

It took months of resilience to navigate through a combination of painful experiences that combined at the same time: a difficult heartbreak, losing my sense of identity, and lacking meaning and direction at work.

Each one of these situations is pretty hard in itself; imagine experiencing them all together…

So what was it that enabled me to rise from that and grow in connection with myself?

Transformative changes don't occur overnight, by magic, or by chance. For years, I'd immersed myself in psychology and therapeutic approaches, trying to "fix" myself.

I've come to believe that when we're truly ready, life presents us with challenges and tests, opportunities to respond differently than we did before, and to put in practice the learnings we acquired. That's when growth happens.

And life tested me hard this time. And I responded differently: I decided to feel it all.

I didn't try to stop feeling uncomfortable feelings.

I didn't distracted myself from the overwhelming emotions.

I didn't repress. I didn't shut down.

I was a river. Whatever rose in me, I let it flow through me.

Grief. Pain. Anger. Sadness. Joy. Gratitude.

The worst I felt, the kinder I was to myself.

This combination of feeling my feelings and being gentle to myself, no judgement, no pressure, no "shoulds", was the most transformative medicine I ever experienced. But doing so wasn't an easy task.

I noticed my mind constantly wanting to revert to its default operation mode of dissociating and wanting to "keep up" with the pace of the world, be practical, solution-focused. "The world is moving and you're here stuck," "You should be doing that," "You shouldn't be feeling like this at this point" were some voices that constantly whispered in my head.

In the face of each of them, I took a deep breath and sat with whatever I was feeling. That's it. It's as hard as this: sitting, no distractions, and diving into your feelings.

After all this, and noticing how transformative the power of feeling is, I dove even more into understanding the science behind it and why it caused me such profound changes.

In the last weeks, a question popped up in my mind:

Why we feel?

First things first:

There are emotions and there are feelings.

Emotions, as the word suggests, are energy in motion. They're biological signals. What's going on in your body? Heart rate, sweaty palms, tension in the muscles, chest compressed, etc.

Whatever happens at a biological/physical level is energy moving through your body. Emotions are stereotypes of energetic patterns that show certain "symptoms" in the body, and we label them. We all have emotions at every single second of the day.

Feelings, on the other hand, are the awareness of the energy in our mind. The energy (emotion) is always there, but we don't necessarily feel it, that's when we get stuck.

OK, but why is it important to feel? Why did nature imbue us with this functioning? Why do we get stuck when we don't feel our feelings?

1) First thing:

Imagine your brain is like a big computer with different parts.

One of these parts is the “arousal system", think of it as the power button.

Usually, your brain has all these really smart and complex thoughts, but they are not always “on” or active. Like apps on your phone, they are installed but not always running.

The arousal system or “power button” wakes up and activates these complex thoughts, making them conscious, meaning that now you're aware of them and can use them.

Without this “power button”, a lot of your brain's smartest functions would just stay “asleep” or unconscious, and you wouldn't be able to use them.

Guess how the power button is activated?

Through our feelings.

It's our feelings that make us conscious and aware of our thoughts and surroundings.

When we are aware of the emotions (what's going on in our body) and reflect on what's causing us to feel this way, we have much more depth in perception and understanding about ourselves and the situations around us.

In other words, feelings make us smarter and more capable.

2) Second thing:

Feelings are drives for change.

Feelings are information, and this information becomes a motivation or urge to fulfill a specific need, physiological or emotional. Feelings serve as catalysts for action and change in our lives.

It works like this:

1. We first experience the emotion (neurobiological energy).

2. Then, by becoming aware of this emotion, we notice the feeling.

3. This awareness turns into a drive to meet a specific need — either physical or emotional.

It's only when the need becomes felt that it becomes a drive for us to fulfill it.

When we repress our feelings, distract ourselves, or dissociate, we become helpless in attending to our own needs, which only extends our suffering of not having our needs met. This can eventually turn into a sensation of emptiness that many of us carry through life.

3) Third thing:

There's no consciousness without feelings.

In simplified terms, imagine our brain divided into two parts:

• There's the top part, which is the "conscious and rational," the neocortex, where our thoughts emerge from.

• And there's the bottom part, which is the "emotional" brain, the limbic brain, where we experience our emotions.

Generally speaking, most of us tend to believe that our perception of the world comes from our "conscious and rational" brain, meaning that → "If I see something, I notice it, I think about it, I'm conscious that it exists."

But actually our perception and understanding of the world, others, and ourselves, is shaped by our emotional brain, the bottom part. We feel our way into the world, otherwise it's all unconscious perception.

When we don't feel our emotions, we're not aware, and we live in unconscious programming. We are not in control of our lives because we don't know what is driving us.

Our capacity to feel is directly related to our understanding of the meaning of life

Which led me to discover that understanding the meaning of life is directly related to understanding our emotional world.

When we are aware of our emotions, when we feel what's going on inside of us, two things happen:

1. We let energy move through us and transform.

2. When we understand that things are happening inside of us and not to us, we move away from the victim role and rise in responsibility for ourselves, for our own care, choices, and happiness.

If we are not aware of where we are internally, how can we possibly move away from that? How can we possibly explore better alternatives and directions to fulfill our needs? It's very likely that the times in life when we find ourselves feeling lost overlap with the times in life when we're not fully feeling our emotions.

"Crossing the threshold from the victim position to ownership is the most important transition one can ever make in their life. And to do that, we have to understand where we are now in the universe of emotions." — Dr. Alan Watkins.

On a PS note:

The stereotypical distorted idea of what feeling looks like

Feeling is not what the main characters of Mexican telenovelas portray on TV.

Feeling is developing awareness about what's going on inside of you, making your emotions conscious by labeling them, and allowing the energy to flow through you.

When we let intense emotions flow, we discover that our bodies have natural ways to regulate ourselves according to what is coming up for us. Sometimes it can be crying, other times it can be screaming, or even laughing. Or we can learn ways to self-soothe or co-regulate with others.

Feeling doesn't mean creating drama, feeding narratives in your mind, erupting emotionally towards others. This is the opposite of feeling (creating awareness), this is unconsciously reacting.

With love,

Nat

P.S: If you enjoyed this post or know someone who may find it insightful, please share it with them and encourage them to subscribe: dearself.beehiiv.com/p/why-we-feel