Feeling our way to wholeness

I was walking on this glorious beach this morning and when I was overcome with tears.

Suddenly there was a wave of emotion moving through me, joy, deep gratitude, sadness, grief for my younger self and her wounds, love for my current self and the lessons she’s learned, intense desire for the business I am working to create and the women I have yet to meet and serve, and fear about whether or not I’m “good enough” to achieve this, fear of rejection and failure, fear of success.

But the thing that moved me the most, and that actually nourished me the most, was that I was feeling. It felt SO GOOD to be FEELING.

I think of all the years I feared my feelings. If was afraid if I allowed my feelings to flow they would overwhelm me, maybe even devour me. I’d been given the idea that some of my feelings were wrong or unacceptable, they made others uncomfortable at times, and so I distrusted them. I was only willing to accept my “positive” feelings, and tried to banish my “negative” ones.

And so, like millions of other women, I stuffed them down or numbed them out with food. I disconnected from what was really, deeply true at the heart of me. I shut down the tender parts of myself, the angry parts of myself, the parts I didn’t believe were acceptable or that might upset the status quo. And I checked out of my body. I didn’t feel anything other than the shame and guilt of repeatedly breaking promises to myself around eating “right.”

And although it kept things seemingly a little more steady on the surface, inside I was starving. I was starving for the experience of feeling.

Here’s what I have learned: To feel is to be alive. It is nourishing to feel. It is safe to feel. This is where your salvation lies. This is what you are hungry for when you are numbing or distracting yourself with food, or with any compulsion for that matter.

I’ve learned that if you do allow yourself to fully feel a feeling, it rarely lasts for more than 90 seconds before it releases and passes through you. (Which helps make it less scary!)

And I’ve learned that our hearts have an immeasurable capacity to hold great happiness, gratitude, fear, longing and so much more, simultaneously. We can be all of these things at once, many beautiful pieces that make up the whole of us.

It’s even more beautiful when we allow them all to coexist and don’t try to banish any one of them. We cannot deny the whole of us. We are always, in every moment, both shadow and light, loving and self-protective, strong and vulnerable, fierce and terribly afraid.

And so, this morning, this was the real me:

• Grateful for life, for the feel of coastal morning sun and salt breeze on my skin.
• Grateful for new relationships in my life that are beautiful tender buds unfolding, and already just little scared of losing them.
• Relishing in the aliveness being in my body, with tears of love and sadness and desire flowing through me, and the feel of sand beneath my feet.
• With a deep longing to be of value in the world, and to make meaning of the struggles I faced with food by helping other women make meaning of theirs. And really not knowing HOW to make it all happen other than just to keep showing up as me.

You are whole. No matter what you’ve experienced, what you’ve done, or how you look. Your feelings are longing for your acceptance, only yours.

What if you knew it was safe to feel? That it wouldn’t consume you? And what if you knew that your struggle with food was simply a doorway leading you back home to yourself? Would you be willing to turn and walk through?

This weekend, I invite you to create some space for yourself to tune in. I invite you to give yourself permission to feel what you feel. And I invite you to feast on your wholeness.

Does this spark something for you?  Leave a comment below and let me know.