It can take great courage to really sit with our feelings, allowing ourselves to surrender to their powerful energies. All too often we set our feelings aside, thinking we will deal with them later. If we don’t deal with them, we end up storing them in our minds and bodies and this is when anxiety and other health issues can arise. Denying what our bodies want to feel can lead to trouble now or down the line, which is why being in the thick of our feelings, no matter how scary it seems, is really the best thing we can do for ourselves. One of the reasons we tend to hide or push aside our feelings is that we live in a culture that has not traditionally supported emotional awareness. However, as the connection between mind and body--our emotions and our physical health-- becomes clearer, awareness of the importance of feeling our feelings has grown.
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I used to believe that to be productive as well as sane, emotions like grief, anger, betrayal, and fear...to name just a few....had to be overcome, and quickly. Such strong feelings of hot pain could only hurt me, I thought. It's taken me a very long time to get to believing that the real harm is in suppressing it all! Now, I work at allowing, and I teach others the same. There is much comfort as well as power in allowing. It spells accepting and loving all of ourselves.
