S2 EP272 – Emotional Awareness: Understanding Your Feelings

Hi everyone. Dr. Margaret Paul here with the Inner Bonding Podcast. And today I want to talk about feelings about being aware of your feelings, about understanding your feelings. I was raised not to be aware of my own feelings. I was raised to be aware of others’ feelings. I was raised to be a caretaker and put my own feelings aside and just pay attention to other people’s feelings, especially my mother’s feelings. Her feelings were the important feelings in our home, and my feelings actually didn’t count at all. And so of course I learned to not be aware of my own feelings, I was raised not to be aware of my own feelings. And being a highly sensitive person, I could easily feel other people’s feelings. And I was trained to take responsibility for their feelings, but I didn’t know anything about taking responsibility for my own feelings. This is what caretakers are trained to do.

They’re trained to not count, that my feelings weren’t important, my mother’s feelings were important, my father’s feelings were more important than my feelings, my feelings just didn’t count, and not only that, if somebody else’s feelings, like if my mother’s feelings were hurt, it was my fault and it was my responsibility to do something about it. So of course, I learned to not be present with my own feelings. I learned to be in my head, I learned to numb out with various addictions in order not to feel my feelings. And you know, so many people do this just about every client I have learned various ways of not feeling their feelings, not being aware of their feelings, not taking responsibility for their feelings, because this is not taught in our society that our feelings actually have very, very important information for us, and that when we ignore them, we don’t get all that information.

I had to learn this later. So I grew up taking responsibility for other people’s feelings, being a caretaker, and I did this for many years. I did this for my husband, for my kids, for my parents, for my clients, but you know you can’t be ignoring your own feelings all that time and be okay, and I wasn’t okay. I actually got very, very ill. And I see this a lot with my clients that they’re ill because they are not listening to their feelings, they’re not attending to their feelings. Our feelings are our soul. Our soul communicates with us through our feelings, and so if we’re not listening to them, it’s like we’re completely abandoning our inner child – our soul is our inner child. And if we’re not listening to them, if we’re avoiding them in various ways, like I was, numbing out, turning to addiction, staying in my head, then the message to our inner child is, you don’t count, you don’t matter.

You are not important. And that is the message that I got, and that is the message that I continued to give myself by being a caretaker for everyone. And like I said, you can’t keep doing that without it having a negative effect on the body. And it did, it had a very negative effect on my body, I was seeing doctors trying to find out what was wrong, I was eating really well, I had been eating organic for years and years and exercising every day and so I had no idea until I met Dr. Erika Chopich, who’s the co-creator of Inner Bonding and we created Inner Bonding, why I was so ill. And the doctors didn’t know because I was eating so well and I was exercising and I was sleeping, and I was doing the things that you’re supposed to do to not be sick, to be healthy.

And I don’t think the doctors at that time, this was quite a while ago, realize that the stress that comes from self abandonment is enough to make you very ill. A couple of doctors said to me that my immune system was shutting down that I was headed for very severe illness and they didn’t know and I didn’t know why this was happening. Until I met Erika and we co-created Inner Bonding with the help of our spiritual guidance. And then I started to realize that you can’t keep giving yourself up, that you can’t avoid responsibility for your own feelings and take responsibility for everybody else’s without getting physically worn down. It creates a lot of stress to take responsibility for everybody else’s feelings and to ignore your own. And stress is one of the major causes of illness. So it’s not a surprise, now looking back on it, that I got so sick.

So when Erika and I met and we put together what we each knew and realized that we had something really profound, we realize that step one of Inner Bonding is being in your body with your feelings. That that’s the first thing that needed to happen, that we needed to become aware of our feelings, I needed to become aware of my feelings, I wasn’t even aware of what my feelings were. And that’s because I was in my head. Our feelings are not in our head, our feelings are in our body. And so the first thing I needed to do is get in my body. Now we’re born being in our body, and we learn to disconnect due to the pain. One major way of avoiding pain is to go up in your head, dissociate from your body, disconnect from your body, except that’s where your inner child is.

That’s where your feelings are. And so that’s what I learned to do. I learned to disconnect, and I realized I needed to learn to get back into my body. Now, this wasn’t easy for me. I created Inner Bonding when I was 45 years old. And all that time, I had been avoiding my feelings and being in my head. And so learning to get present in my body was not easy. There were a lot of things I needed to do. I put sticky notes all around, I had something called a motivator that buzzed against my body, and I could set it at the beginning for every five minutes and every 10 minutes and every half an hour to remind me to get into my body. It’s not that it was hard for me to go into my body and be aware of my feelings, it’s just that I couldn’t remember to do it.

I had been avoiding that for so long that I just couldn’t remember to get into my body. So I had to have these supports, the motivator, the sticky notes all around just to remind me to check into my body and see what was going on, on the inner level. And really it took me a couple years before I was able to live in my body, now I live in my body, since that time, since the first couple years of practicing Inner Bonding, I’ve learned to live in my body and be aware of my feelings. It’s like being aware of a baby, you want to be a good parent, you’re aware of when the baby cries so that you can attend. And Inner Bonding is about being aware of our feelings in any given moment so that we can attend when there’s something less than peace and less than fullness.

When there’s a feeling of emptiness or anxiety or depression or guilt or shame or aloneness or anger, these feelings have information for us, and I needed to learn to be aware of them. And so I did. I retrained myself to be present in my body with my feelings. And in doing that and in practicing the six steps of Inner Bonding, I learned to learn from my feelings rather than avoid them. I had been avoiding them all these years, all the years before Inner Bonding, I had been avoiding them, which was why I was so sick, you just can’t do that and be healthy. So I learned to learn from my feelings rather than avoid them. And I learned amazing things, I learned that all my feelings have such vital, important information for me. I learned that we have two kinds of feelings, which I’ve talked about.

We have the wounded feelings that we cause with our self-abandonment, with our self-judgment, which I was also doing, really, really judging myself, staying in my head, avoiding them in that way, turning to addictions, to numb out and making others responsible for my feelings, I was doing all of it. And not realizing that each feeling had important information for me. So now I know that my feelings have so much information, if I feel anxious, I go inside and I ask, “What am I telling myself? How am I treating myself? What am I doing or not doing that’s creating anxiety?” The anxiety is my inner child letting me know that there’s some way I’m treating myself that is not loving to me, that is self-abandoning. Same thing with depression or guilt or shame or anger or aloneness or emptiness. All of these feelings are telling us that we’re abandoning ourselves in various ways.

And so I had to learn this. I had to learn that this is what my feelings were telling me. I had to learn about how I was treating myself that was causing these feelings. I had to be open to understanding that these feelings were not being caused by other people or by situations, but they were being caused by how I was treating myself. By my false beliefs. What I was telling myself from my false beliefs. Then I came to understand that there’s another kind of feeling, there’s the existential painful feelings of life. For me, this started with being aware of loneliness. I grew up as an only child, a very, very lonely only child. And if I had felt the level of loneliness, I don’t think I would’ve made it. And so as part of my survival, I learned to avoid that loneliness with all of myself, abandoning behaviors, and especially by being a caretaker.

I got to believe that this was the way I could connect with people was to be there for them and abandon myself. And so the first existential feeling that I became aware of was loneliness, and I actually didn’t even know what the feeling was when I first felt it. When I first felt it, I can remember that I first felt it when I was outside on a walk because I’ve walked for years, I love to walk, walk my dogs. And I got this feeling, this kind of searing, burning feeling in my body, and I didn’t know what it was, I had no idea what it was. And so I asked my guidance, “What is this feeling?” By this time, I was practicing Inner Bonding quite a while, I had good access to my guidance, and my guidance said to me when I said, what is this feeling

she said, “It’s loneliness.” I had no idea that it was loneliness, and it was really painful, and I thought, “Well, no wonder I’ve been avoiding this feeling, it’s so painful!” So I said to her, “What should I do with this?” And she said, “Hang out with it. It has information for you.” Hang out with it? It was such a painful feeling I didn’t want to hang out with it, but I did. I hung out with it for a couple of months. And in that time, I learned so much. I learned that loneliness has really vital information for me, primarily about what’s going on between me and another person, loneliness is an existential feeling, meaning it’s coming from outside. I wasn’t causing my loneliness, just like I don’t cause the grief that comes from loss or the heartbreak that comes from people being mean and unloving, and the helplessness that comes when people are being mean and unloving, and there’s nothing I can do about it.

Those are not feelings I cause; those are the painful feelings of life. And so I came to understand that the loneliness was telling me that when I was with somebody and I felt lonely that it was because either I was closed or they were closed, or we both were closed because I didn’t feel lonely when I was alone, I learned to be alone because I was alone so much I learned to entertain myself, I learned to, I did a lot of reading, I did crafts, I did art, I did all kinds of things to be okay with being alone. But lonely was something else. Lonely was something that I was feeling in my marriage and in my relationship with my parents, in my relationship with some of my friends. And so I got through hanging out with the feeling of loneliness, that it was an important feeling that let me know if I was open, that I was lonely because the other person wasn’t open.

And I use this all the time now in my work with clients, I know that I approach that open, and so if I’m feeling lonely with a client, that lets me know that I can’t connect to them because their heart is closed, because they are in the intention to protect, avoid control, and not open to learning. This is important information, it’s very important for me when I work with somebody but it’s also important for me in my relationships with the important people in my life. And so I became open to valuing the feeling of loneliness that led to valuing the other painful feelings of life, the grief, the heartbreak, the helplessness over others, the sorrow over people being mean to each other. These are important feelings that let us know, that give us a lot of information about what’s happening externally. So I became very grateful for the loneliness.

Now I don’t have to have that searing pain anymore, that was at the beginning, it was really intense. Now my inner child lets me know with a kind of subtle feeling in my gut that she’s lonely with a person, and I listen. I value that. It’s important information for me. So through Inner Bonding, I learned to learn from all of my feelings rather than continue to avoid them. 

And this has led to so much goodness in my life. It’s led to me being able to speak up for myself with others, which I could never do when I was being a caretaker and avoiding my feelings, it’s led to me being able to be guided by my spiritual guidance, I could never connect with my guidance before this, I knew it was there. I took all sorts of classes opening to guidance, opening to your higher power, all these different courses that I took, and I could never do it, and I didn’t understand why I couldn’t access my spiritual guidance. 

Once I became open to learning with my own feelings, and once I became open to taking responsibility for my feelings, that’s when I became able to access my guidance and be guided in my highest good. Now, this is life-changing. For me, it was life-changing to know that I was never alone, that I had my higher self or God or whatever you want to call that guidance, hear from me at all times, that when I was open to learning, and of course I was eating well for so many years, I started eating well when I was 22, eating only organic, which enabled me to keep my frequency high enough to access guidance, once I opened to learning about loving myself, once I opened to learning about taking responsibility for my own feelings, my own needs, that’s when I became able to access my higher guidance.

Because that’s what your guidance is here for. It’s here to guide you and what’s loving to you. It’s not here to give you the lottery numbers, it’s here to help you evolve in your ability to love. And so that’s what was happening for me. I was absolutely thrilled when I became able to access my higher guidance. It just changed everything for me. And by practicing Inner Bonding, taking responsibility for my feelings, learning to take loving care of myself, learning to access my higher guidance, I eventually reached a point where I could access the guidance of my clients, which is how I work now, I can tune into my guidance, I can tune into their guidance. Sometimes I get whole pictures or holograms about what’s going on with a person and how I can be of help to them. So I just feel very, very blessed at this point that I can access my guidance and other people’s guidance when I’m working with them.

Life has changed so much for me by doing Inner Bonding, by learning to feel my feelings and learn from them and take responsibility for them. I don’t think that I ever felt true joy before I started to practice Inner Bonding. It has been so powerful and so life-changing for me, which is why I’m so devoted to getting it out to you, and I just really, really want to encourage you to learn and practice Inner Bonding. I’ve tried so many other things for so many years, and this is what has been so life-changing for me. Now, you can learn much more about learning from your feelings in my masterclass, which I think we’re changing to Master Circle, which meets every other week, it’s a really great way of learning Inner Bonding and with my Love Yourself course, which also teaches Inner Bonding in a very profound way. And you can find these courses, you can find out how to join them on our website at innerbonding.com. So I hope that you’re motivated enough to truly learn to be on the path of evolving and your ability to love, which is why we’re here on the planet to learn the self-healing process of Inner Bonding. I’m sending you my love and my blessings.

https://www.innerbonding.com

https://innerbondinghub.com/membership.

I am sending you my love and my blessings.