Feel Your Emotions

[MajestyJo]

Feel your emotions

"The key is to not resist or rebel against emotions or to try to get around them by devising all sorts of tricks; but to accept them directly, as they are."

-- Takahisa Kora

Emotions are energy in motion. They bring us information if we are willing to experience them. Unfortunately, many of us are afraid of the energy of emotions and so we automatically resist them. And when we refuse to experience our emotions, we block them up. They become trapped and that entrapment drains our energy and brings continuing discomfort.

Don't let emotions push you into action or reaction. Just STOP and PAY ATTENTION. Allow them to be and to speak to you. Once they are acknowledged, their energy is released.

"Instead of resisting any emotion, the best way to dispel it is to enter it fully, embrace it and see through your resistance."

-- Deepak Chopra

"We have to become more conscious of our feeling-world. By learning to identify the ‘emotional baggage’ and manage our feeling-world reactions, we can view life based on current information instead of being held captive by our past."

-- Doc Childre

"Our feelings are our most genuine paths to knowledge."

-- Audre Lorde

In recovery, I found that a lot of feelings in today were often compounded interest from things that happened a long time ago in my childhood. Often they were the result of FEAR - false evidence appear real, often based on a false sense of pride and responsibility and not mine to take on, and the feelings were more acute as a result of many years of stuffing.

Buried resentments, abandonment issues, rejection and hurt feelings can lead to a lot of pain and insecurity. Emotional pain can make itself known physically. Physical pain ignored can be made itself mentally, emotionally, and spiritually.

[MajestyJo]

It is up to me, the adult self to give the child within the love and care he/she never received. When I am feeling hurt, it is often rooted in a past feeling. I need to learn to be my own best friend, and give myself a hug.

I need to wash away those old feelings and replace them with positive ones. I need to cleanse my spirit and often I need to release tears to do that. Sometimes it is just going into a shower or a bath and changing the energy around me. I often say a prayer in the shower asking that I be cleansed of all negativity to make room for positive and good in my life.

[MajestyJo]

"USING TRUST AND LOVE - I CHANGE AND GROW INTO HIGHER AND BETTER THINGS."

We are aware that blaming and arguing never helps us and only creates a wider gap between us, and that only understanding, trust and love can help us change and grow.

- Thich Nhat Hanh

Learning to trust myself has been a long and difficult journey for me. Even though I was told many years ago, "If you doubt yourself, you are doubting God!" Yet when the old tapes play, when people project their thoughts and feelings onto me, and I push the play button and give up my power, then I put myself in a place of mistrust, doubt and low self-worth.

Someone can't put me down unless I allow them to, they can't have the power unless I give it up, and today, thanks to the program, I can pause and take and inventory and prioritize my life and redirect my actions.

Today I know that God is love, that all He wants for me is love and goodness, and that my purpose is to carry that message to others.

In the past I was always told, "Who are you to say? Who are you to know? What makes you think..." In today it isn't about what others think, say and do, it is about my recovery. My serenity and sobriety (soundness of mind) is what has to come first.

I have to learn to listen for and trust that voice within. I had to learn to believe that God loved me and that He directed people, places and things into my life to show me a better way of living, so long as I follow that way, I have nothing to fear. I can walk in faith and know and trust that God is with me.

[MajestyJo]

God's Yellow Pages

You can look up the scriptures that apply to our feeling.

http://www.divinepeace.com/yellow/Go...low_Pages.html

Philippians 4:7
New International Version (NIV)

And the peace of God, which transcends all understanding, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus.

[MajestyJo]

Anger

It is a normal emotion. It isn't healthy for the alcoholic and addict. The difference in today is learning how to express it in a healthy way, instead of hitting out and acting out in my disease.

Go for a walk. Share with your sponsor, your clergy, your closest friend, your parents, etc. Just don't keep it buried within so it will fester and grow out of proportion and becomes unmanageable.

Write a letter (you don't have to mail it), journal, pray and turn it over to the God of your understanding. Let go and let God. Don't let it poison your spirit.

[MajestyJo]

The mind is a powerful tool. It can talk you into or out of anything and everything. When I am not living God-centered, I become a product of that mind. It can tell me I am just 'fine' or it can tell me I am very sick and not worthy of love and care. It is so important to feed my mind with positive affirmations. I have to remember that all I have is today. Whatever label I choose to wear in today, is subject to change be it positive or negative. The choice is mine.

I am a recovering addict, who used alcohol and other mind altering substances, to deal with life. Today, when I hear someone say, "Well I am an addict/alcoholic you know!" I always ask, "So what are you doing about it?

A part of my mind was filled with blame and shame. Blaming other people for the conditions in my life and shame as to where I allowed myself to go as a result of my using. It wasn't just what I did but it was the fact that I lost my principles, put aside my beliefs, went where I said I would never go, and puffed myself into this prideful balloon full of hot air that was false and filled with a lot of things I had no reason to be proud of.

The things that I did as a result of trying to please others, looking for affirmation and acceptance, the letting go my integrity and principles that were such a big part of my life to end up an empty shell with no mind of her own with no will to live and completely void of feelings.

What a gift the program has given back. My sense of self, a new set of principles, and a sense of pride in who I am in today.

How easily I can get my nose all bent out of shape over the littlest things and forget where I came from, and forget how far I have come back.

[MajestyJo]

The grieving process is an up and down whirlwind of feelings which have no order and once they are gone, they come back again and repeat themselves not always in the same order.

I am entitled to my feelings. They are mine. No one has a right to disagree with them. They can disagree with the concept or my conclusion about the feelings, but the feelings are mine. The person may have had similar feelings but they are not attached to the things that my feelings are attached to.

Even if the person has a son, there son is not the same as my son. Even if the person has experience grief, there feelings were there own not mine.

What is nice that I can share my feelings and people can identify. When they start to compare, they can seem less than or greater than, and no ones feelings are less than or greater than, they just are! It is important to validate your feelings and that validation doesn't have to come from outside of yourself. When we compare, we end up feeling less than or greater than, which is not a healthy way to live.

Feelings are feelings and as the slogan says, "This too shall pass." Acknowledging them and accepting them for what they are in the moment, helps them to heal and then you are better able to let them go.

I will always remember the girl in treatment who kept saying, "But how do you feel?" I use to get really annoyed with her, mainly because I didn't know how to answer her. I couldn't identify my feelings.

I wasn't allowed to express them when I was growing up. How can you know if you were never taught. How can you identify something that you never allowed yourself to feel?

After a while, I felt anger and I acted out in the anger the only way I knew how to do, with more anger. I repleid to her, "And how the f*&k should I know? If I knew what I was feeling I would be in this f*&king place!

So glad I don't have to act out those old feelings the way I use to. I am so glad that I have a better way of dealing with them. I can turn them over to my Higher Power and ask them to be changed. I was told to clean up my person, clean up my act, and clean up my mouth!

I still have trouble crying, the difference in today is that if they appear in today, I don't shut them down and allow them to flow. They are so healing.

So many times the feelings are attached to the past and are attached to an old memory that I never acknowledged and I didn't allow the grief, instead I had picked up a cigarette, a drink, a pill, food, work, etc.

Things that I have problem forgiving in today, is often rooted in my past, and feelings are hard to let go because they are go so far back, long forgotten or ignored.

If your God brings you to it, He will see you through it. That isn't just situations in life, it is about dealing with past issues and feelings.