Do you know how you feel?
Can you identify, name, and express what you're feeling accurately?
For the past 5 weeks, I've been going through the book Nonviolent Communication by Marshall Rosenberg with some of you, via Zoom and sharing live on Facebook.
What I've realized during this experience so far, is that for as long as I can remember... I haven't been aware of how I truly felt and I didn't even know how to identify and understand how I felt.
I can't recall being asked how I feel much throughout my lifetime, and I also have never had someone show me how to understand what my feelings are, separating them from my judgments and projections. This stems from not being allowed to have boundaries as a child and not being able to express myself freely and safely.
So now, when I notice a shift in how I feel, I'm asking myself to identify how I feel and to identify the stimulus and cause of that feeling.
It's been quite an enlightening experience, as it's helped me to develop my perception more accurately.
This has also been a very healing experience because every time we experience something that we react to with negative feelings and try to ignore and forget about... it metastasizes and eventually expresses itself as dis-ease (physical, mental, and spiritual).
Here's a positive example of how I'm changing my programming:
The last time I asked myself how I feel... my initial conditioned response was loved.
Because of this work I'm in the middle of, I realized right away that was a judgment of someone else's behavior towards me... and not how I actually felt or even what that other person may have been intending to share with me.
So I tried again and identified with feeling happy.
When I investigated as to the reason I felt this way, it was because I had received physical affection in the form of a hug which satisfies a concept I have around my needs.
This helped me to realize how I've attributed certain qualities to people incorrectly in the past and have "felt" things that weren't really there. This has also helped me understand better why I've trusted people that have harmed me the most in the past.
This realization is extremely freeing because we humans can be stubborn and ignore reality oftentimes... just to fit the narratives we've made up in our own minds. Cognitive dissonance is more times than not, more painful than whatever feeling we're trying to suppress instead of sublimating or expressing in a healthy manner.
I'm kind of thinking out loud here, so I hope this makes sense to those of you who are just as ignorant as I have been around understanding feelings... because when we are aware of how we feel and why, as well as able to recognize the boundaries and personal responsibilities between ourselves and others, we're able to connect and get along better and more compassionately with each other.
