In My Feelings by Drake

I was a newborn in the world of personal development, just had my second baby, and in an effort to "get my body back" had fallen in love with Buti Yoga, (a fun upbeat exercise I could do from home while my babes were napping and also listen to Drake 😉) oh, and I wanted to write a mommy blog. 

I decided the first step to achieve all this was to buy myself Danielle Laporte’s The Desire Map Planner (2017) 

Each day I wrote out how I wanted to feel. Content and fulfilled were on almost every page.

When my little one was almost 1, I got to do yoga teacher training, it was life-changing.

One day, we went around in a circle and shared how we wanted to feel. I said content. Right after I said it, my heart sank, and a wave of shame washed over me. Is that not enough? Should I want more? Should I have said fulfilled? Are people going to judge me? (now you have an inside view of the way my brain works)

Since that time I have come to realize that contentment is one of the most underrated feelings out there, and not to be confused with complacent.

I think contentment opens the door to presence. When I am not content, I am rarely present.

And as a mom with little ones who wanted to be a yoga teacher and a blogger, I also really wanted to have moments of contentment and presence with the amazing little humans I got to spend my time with. 

I have thought about that moment often since then, especially as I dove deeper into the world of coaching, personal development, and non-violent communication.

Feelings are complicated, and nobody really teaches you about them.

But without understanding feelings, and having language to describe them, it is hard to understand yourself or communicate clearly with others.

So, here's the skinny on feelings. They happen inside your body, and they are actual physical sensations.

Like content, when I feel content, I feel present and open, my belly is soft, my throat is open, and my chest feels light.

Or when I feel joy, it feels light, and like moving energy. I feel it in all of my body, my belly, my heart, my limbs. It feels open and expansive.

Let’s also explore some of the less positive feelings.

Anxious for example. When I am anxious, I feel tightness in my belly, and there is also movement, like busy almost hopping or popping energy.

When I feel discouraged, I feel a heaviness in my chest and a constriction in my throat. It feels slow and sloggy and like it’s hard to get through it.

Do you see how each one of the feelings has physical sensations attached to it? They don't happen in your mind or outside of you but right here in your body.

When you can notice the sensations in your body, you have the power to make a choice of how you want to respond, before your automatic responses are off to the races getting you in trouble.

I’ve also learned, since that time 6 years ago when I felt shame about how I wanted to feel, that there is no room for feeling bad about how you feel or how you want to feel. 

Only a gentle noticing, and an attempt to understand and support yourself to get your needs met.

You don’t want to shove your feelings down, (they’re going to come out at some point, and it's not gonna be pretty). Imagine trying to hold a beach ball under the water!! When it finally comes out, it explodes into the air!! 

You also don’t want to make them wrong. 

You do want to acknowledge them, learn from them, and use them to understand yourself better!

And when you understand yourself better, you communicate better. Not sure if you've ever noticed, but it's very hard to communicate clearly when you don’t even know how you feel.

And once you have the words, then you can start feeling into your body and noticing your physical sensations.