Are you afraid to feel?

Dissociation is something we humans do often as a way to cope with stress, pain overwhelm, and trauma. 

It’s a process whereby the mind disconnects from your thoughts, feelings, memories or sense of identity - like it’s taking a break in how it handles information.

An example of disassociation that is a common everyday experience is when you are driving a familiar route and you arrive at your destination without any memory of how you got there. 

Most people learn to dissociate at a young age as a way of coping with stressful experiences.  

I dissociated a large part of my life and wasn’t aware of it.  I just thought that was ‘normal’.  When I dissociated, I didn’t have to feel.  It was a way of avoiding feeling.  Feeling was uncomfortable.  I had labelled feeling as something bad, something to be avoided.

 Recently I was presented with this mantra:  “I allow myself to feel everything.” 

 How does this mantra make you feel? 

 It took me by surprise when I noticed my reaction to it.  

For me, even with all the work I’ve done to clear blocks in my emotional body, I noticed that there was still an uncomfortableness, unpleasantness or even fear that came up when I heard this mantra.  

It made me aware that I still had beliefs around the word ‘feel’.  That word was still connecting me to the unpleasant feelings - fear, shame, guilt, worry.  I still wasn’t open to the word also encompassing all the higher vibrational emotions - the joy, the bliss, the ecstasy, the peace.  

 Feeling everything means feeling everything - without labelling one good or one bad.  If we are afraid to feel because we don’t want to feel lower vibrational emotions, we are also shutting out the higher ones.  

 After this realisation, my next step was to remove the labels ‘good’ and ‘bad’ and then move into a state of gratitude that I can feel.  That I allow myself to feel everything.  What a gift. 

 Repeat the mantra and check in to how it makes you feel.

 Are you afraid to feel? Are you selective in what you want to feel? Or are you feeling everything?

Be the Change.