Feeling is a skill. It doesn’t come easily to all of us, especially if trauma is part of the picture. But why would we want to develop it? In this episode I give you about a bajillion reasons why you might want to (I didn’t count them, so don’t quote me on that number!) develop this essential skill that you might not even know you are lacking.
Today, we’re going to talk about the skill of feeling. So I didn’t really know what to talk about for today’s episode. And I was thinking about my small group membership (I don’t really know whether to call it a small group or a membership, It’s kind of both in different ways that the doors are open until the end of this month, October 27th.) and I was just thinking about the work that we do in there and what does it give people? What’s the point? Why would somebody want to come into Presence, The name of the group, and I started writing and I came up with 20, 30 statements about the skill of feeling. And this is one thing that I’m learning the longer and longer that I’m a coach. And the more I have worked with the somatic practices is that the skill of feeling, and I do call it a skill because There’s a part of feeling that just happens naturally and organically, and that part’s not a skill, but the actual skill of learning how to feel the sensations and feelings and emotions in your body is needed for any success.
Not just business success, not just relationship success, but like anything that you want, any change you want to make, any feeling you want to have, any result that you want to have. You need the skill of feeling, and that’s the crux of what we do in Presence, is kind of healing from trauma, becoming more embodied, coming out of our minds, into our bodies.
And it just started flowing once I started writing. And so each of these statements is inspired by my own work or by the work of one or more of my clients. And I just wanted to preface this by saying that feelings or emotions, I’m going to use these words interchangeably for the purposes of this podcast, are signals from our body. And when we’re willing to be with them and to fully pay attention and feel them and be present to them, they shift and change organically. It’s like the image that came into my mind was grabbing a stick of butter from the fridge.
When you hold the butter in your hand, it takes time, but it always starts to melt eventually. And that’s how I see feelings, these sensations in our bodies. Sometimes they get stuck. And we don’t like to be with them. We don’t like to feel them, but when we can be present to them, when we can actually spend some time and be with them, they end up changing and shifting and new openings, new, pathways emerge.
And the other thing I wanted to say as a preface is that it’s like the gift of the Holy Ghost. For those of you in my faith tradition, I think of the gift of the Holy Ghost as the key that unlocks any answer, anything you want to know, anything, any decision. You know, anything in your life, you need this gift of the Holy Ghost, or I should say we don’t need it because not everybody has the gift of the Holy Ghost, right?
But it is genuinely helpful in all situations. But one thing I always think about is how, in order to most successfully use the gift of the Holy Ghost, we have to have this skill to be able to feel in our bodies what the Holy Ghost feels like. So I think these two skills or gifts come hand in hand. So in that way, the skill of feeling is like a skeleton key. It’s like a master key that unlocks any answer.
I’m going to pause and I think if you can learn how to feel, it’s just needed less. It’s like more of just like an, “Oh, this is a tool that we need now, but not all the time.” So here, here are the statements that I came up with. And for some of these, I’m going to pause and give a little bit more explanation when you can feel you can start to trust yourself.
You guys, I did not trust myself for so long. And it’s really hard to make decisions and to be in relationships. A lot of things in life are really hard when you can’t trust yourself, but I believe that when you gain the skill of feeling and you use it over and over again, one of the things that organically starts to happen is that you build self trust.
It is such a beautiful, beautiful gift. When you can feel, you can start to know yourself again. I’ve heard myself say this. I’ve heard clients say this. I just want to know like who I am and what I am. And my opinion is that this happens over time through trial and error, through trying new things out, but we don’t do that when we’re scared of feeling. If we can’t feel, then fear and doubt and all these negative emotions hold us back. And so then we can’t get to know ourselves. So feeling, trusting, knowing, I think they are three skills that build on each other. That’s the foundation of the work that I do with my clients in Presence. You learn how to feel, which leads you to trust yourself, which leads you to know yourself.
When you can feel, you can follow your intuition. You can follow the spirit. If this is something you struggle with, I just don’t know what the spirit feels like to me. And honestly, I think that. We talk about the spirit feeling certain ways, and they’re just kind of the most common ways. But I think there are many, many, many other ways that the spirit speaks to us that are not common to talk about in our culture.
And when you can feel, you can start noticing your own patterns, and it kind of goes along with that trusting and feeling the spirit. That Ability really starts to come forth. So if that’s something that you want, I highly encourage you to come check out Presence. When you can feel, you become less reactive. When you can feel, you become less reactive because what other people say and do is not a threat because you know you can feel whatever comes up.
When you can feel, you are less stuck. This is some of the work that we do with healing trauma. Oftentimes, trauma is an emotion that feels very overwhelming or scary and we can’t be with it. And so it becomes trauma. It becomes a trauma pattern and it keeps us stuck. So if this is something you say to yourself often, I just feel stuck.
It’s the skill of feeling that is going to get you unstuck. And it’s little by little, only as much as is beneficial for you. When you can feel you are brave and you can reach your big goals. Big goals are almost necessarily scary and when you can feel and metabolize that fear and move forward anyway, that is what I call courage.
Bravery, when you can feel you can have difficult conversations. And I just want to remind you of something I heard recently. If you don’t have difficult conversations, you have difficult relationships. So essentially what I’m saying here is when you can feel. your relationships get easier. The thing that is difficult about a conversation is the feeling you have around it, the assumed feeling that you think you will have.
And when you build the skill of feeling, it no longer becomes scary. It no longer becomes an obstacle. It doesn’t mean it’s super comfortable, but it’s not something that holds you back. And you can have those difficult conversations. I have seen it. So many of my clients do this when you can feel you can roll with life’s punches without much anxiety or worry, because you know, you can figure out whatever comes your way at the very worst.
It’s a feeling. I know this seems simplified and I have tried to dissect it and figure out, is there a way that it’s not this simple, but it always is. I have never found a way that it’s not this simple.
It’s because of ultimately how we think it will make us feel. If you follow and you pull the thread long enough, it’s always a feeling. So when you build the skill of feeling. It’s almost like fear, anxiety, worry, it’s not that they go completely away, but they just become less scary. When you can feel you become more of yourself in a world that tells you you’re too much or not enough.
It’s that friction between what we think other people think and how we are feeling in ourselves that often holds us back from being our big, beautiful self. When you can feel, you can learn to hold two opposing feelings at the same time. Oh my gosh, isn’t this what it is to be human? Can you hold the beauty of how you feel about God and the pain of someone who feels shunned from God?
Sometimes we have feelings that seem mutually exclusive. But to be human is to be able to feel two mutually exclusive feelings at the same time. They’re not mutually exclusive. We just think they are. And that, when we can lean into that experience, oh, life becomes so beautiful. When you can feel you can make bold decisions.
As a woman in this world, I have been socialized to be scared of my own decisions, to fear, you know, possible pushback or to not have my own back. I’ve been scared of, “Oh, I can’t make that decision because what if it doesn’t turn out?” But when you can feel and something doesn’t turn out. It’s okay. You’ll just feel that you’ll feel that disappointment or that fear or that shame or whatever it is.
When you learn the skill of feeling, decisions become like, well, it’s just a decision. We’ll just have to figure it out. We’ll just go and change course if we need to. This one seems obvious, but when you can feel you can heal from trauma. When you can feel you can speak up for those who don’t have a voice.
When you can feel you can navigate anxiety and depression, it’s my opinion that depression, at the crux, at the heart of depression is a resistance to feeling what is in our bodies. So we bounce into anxiety because we don’t want to feel that, right? And we bounce back and forth between anxiety and depression.
But when you gain the skill of feeling neither of those things become scary. And entire worlds are opened up to you when you can feel you can be alive in your body, not just thinking about emotions and what they must be like, but actually embodying the emotions, not living your life from the neck up.
I’m just going to refer to an experience that I’ve shared here on the podcast before, but this feels appropriate again. When I first was doing this work, this somatic work and like coming back into my body and not being afraid of my feelings, I was taking a shower one morning and I was washing my face.
And I had to pause and I was like, feel my face. Like I feel it. I feel my face on my hands as I’m washing, as I have this soap. It was like this new sensation. It was like, I was just there with my hands and my face and my body. And like I said, it’s kind of beyond words, but being alive in your body. Oh, it’s amazing.
When you can feel, you can let emotions pass instead of holding onto them. I want this for so many of you. So many of you are holding on to emotions unnecessarily because you just don’t know how to let them pass through you. When you can feel, you can powerfully decide what you want. Ugh, this statement gives me chills.
I think that so often the question behind everything that we do is, What do I want? And when you can feel into that, that question gets an answer. You can change it at any time, but this is like one of the existential questions of my life. What do I want and how do I know I want it? And what if I change my mind and who am I with this desire?
Ah, all the skill of feeling helps with all of those questions. When you can feel, you can feel close to God. When you can feel you can grieve and still do life. Well, another thing that I want for so many people in this world. When you can feel, you can stop assuming the worst in other people because it’s not dangerous anymore.
When you can feel, you can let spouses, children, siblings, parents, whoever you’re in relationship with, you can let them be who they are without making it mean you are a terrible person. When you can feel, you can be your big, beautiful, full self. You are not too much and you are not. Not enough. When you can feel, you can navigate life’s disappointments and heartaches.
Are you single and want to be married? Have you been through a divorce? Did you want children and that’s not happening? Like all of these things that we have expectations for ourselves and want to live. And this is part of life. And when we learn this skill of feeling, we can, we can deal with those things really well actually.
When you can feel, you can create new value in the world. Isn’t it amazing that we have computers and running water and heat? In the walls of our homes and cars and like all these amazing things, dishwashers, right? That like somebody thought those up and it didn’t used to be that way. When you can feel and you can be with the disappointment and with the celebrations and with all of the range of emotions that life gives us, you open yourself up to creativity and you can.
Bring new value in the world. And I know some of you have big, bold dreams. When you can feel you can be everything you want to be one step at a time. When you can feel you can keep going no matter what. When you can feel life seems simpler.
I love the idea of a simple life. And I’m always trying to distill things down to simpler terms, simpler ideas. And I think this is one of the simplest, is that life is really about feeling. That’s what I think. Maybe you disagree with me, and that’s okay. But it just, I think, from my experience, the skill of feeling makes life simpler.
When you can feel, you can see yourself in your highest self, the way God sees you. And might I just add that this is a beautiful, beautiful blessing when you can feel, you can love purely that that is what I want for you. That is what I want for me. I wanna be able to love everyone I come in contact with, with pure love, with the love of God.
And I think we have to be able to set aside our fears and our worries and our disappointments and all of those things kind of muddy the waters. And when we can feel those things, we can metabolize them. We can let them pass through us and we can get to pure love.
Okay. I have a little letter for you that I hope touches your heart.
Dear you, you are strong. You are brave. You are beautiful. You are bold. You are gentle. You make things happen. You have large love. You are skilled. You are talented. You are funny and interesting. You are powerful. The world needs you now. Scratch that. The world wants you. Your gifts make this place better for everyone you come in contact with.
That’s the truth of you. That’s what I want you to feel. That’s what I want you to embody. That’s what I want you to live from. A deep, deep knowledge and trust of who you are and what you are capable of in this world.
And that is why I created Presence. It is a small group slash membership. It is an intimate experience.
I love every single person that’s in there. I’m so grateful for them. They come and they’re vulnerable and they’re brave and we co create together new things and help them get these internal obstacles untangled. That is what I want for you. So, come join me in Presence. The doors are open until October 27th.
If you want to do a free call with me, you absolutely can. If you don’t think you need it, just email me, Denita@denitabremer. com. Find me on Instagram, send a message, and just say, I’m ready, and I’ll send you a link.
That’s enough for now, and so are you. If this podcast has been helpful for you, would you please take a minute to leave a rating or review or share it with a friend so others can find this free help?
Remember that I’m a life coach, not a doctor or a psychologist. Any suggestions or advice mentioned in this podcast should not be a substitute for medical or mental health care. Until next time, go be yourself and feel your feelings.
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