All day long, things enter and exit your experience. Along with those experiences come feelings. The natural flow of these feelings is also to come and go. But most of the time, that’s not what happens. Instead of coming and going, they get stuck inside of you.
Feelings get stuck when you cling to the ones you like and when you resist the ones you don’t like.
At first, this seems like normal behavior. You cling to positive feelings because you like feeling them. You don’t want to lose them. But when good feelings fade, it causes you stress, anxiety, and depression. Conversely, you resist negative feelings by pushing them away. You think pushing them away gets rid of them. But they gnaw at you from the inside, causing you stress, anxiety, and depression.
As stuck feelings accumulate, they have a direct adverse effect on your mental, emotional, and physical well-being. Your outlook on life dims. Your energy dwindles. Little things annoy you. Decisions feel heavy, like you’re carrying around a weight. That’s because you are. All stuck feelings are a burden on your system. If left unaddressed, they eventually surface as illness.
The good news is you can release stuck feelings. The trick is remarkably simple: you learn to observe them. Observing them means experiencing them fully, but without clinging to the ones you like and resisting the ones you don’t. You’re giving all feelings the space to come and go.
The key to learning to observe your feelings without reacting to them is to recognize that all feelings show up as sensations in your body. When you fall in love, you might feel butterflies in your stomach. When you’re scared, the hair on the back of your neck might bristle. When you get angry, you might experience your heart pounding in your chest. Every feeling has a corresponding sensation in your body that you can learn to observe. By observing sensations, you release stuck feelings back into the flow.
In the next section of this course, you will learn a specific technique of self-observation. It is recommended that you find a quiet, comfortable corner or a room where you can have at least 1/2 hour uninterrupted me-time.
