The world is filled with people who are unhappy and even angry because they can’t get the love that they want. Most of us think that we need to do something different or be with someone different in order to get what we think we need—love from someone else. We have to be better, do more, achieve more, or look different to get what we want. Because much of the love we experience is conditional, and because of our societal norms which say that we need to buy or earn love, and the most powerful love is when we are romantically involved we developed blocking beliefs about love and our worthiness to receive it. We think we don’t deserve it or we haven’t done the right thing. We don’t realize that we do deserve it; love is already there and is always there for us if we can believe it and accept it.
We are also taught that blocking our feelings is what we need to do to feel good. Parents and society tell us that our feelings aren’t good, that we should deny them. So we are not taught to be with our feelings. Feelings need to be felt. To feel love we have to feel all of our feelings. Yet we fight our feelings because we are taught to resist them, and so we don’t learn how to be with what we feel. If we can be with our feelings, there is love at the other end. We just have to open to it. But we spend so much energy trying not to feel what we feel, that we end up blocking the path to experiencing exactly what we want. We don’t know that love is there to feel if we can just allow our feelings.
Love is the major energy in the universe. Often we fight to get love (thinking things like, “I’ll prove that I am worthy of their love”) but it is the fight that prevents us from feeling the love that is already there. We try to solve the problem of not having love by fighting, proving, resisting and this solution becomes the problem because we cannot feel love if we are in the fight/resist/proving place. Feel what your body feels like when you are in a place of resistance. Then feel what your body feels like when you feel love. One does not lead to the other. When we resist our feelings, we block love because we are in the resistance and so that is what we will feel.
Teach yourself and then teach your children how to find love by feeling your feelings. Love is not something you earn, it is in us and in the universe and we need to learn how to access it. When we can find love within ourselves, we are able to access peace even in difficult times. Then we no longer depend on “good things” happening to be content. We don’t expect from others what we need or want to be happy. We don’t expect others to fill us up with what our parents didn’t. Others can never fill us up and that is not their job. As long as we expect others to do this, our relationships won’t work. We need to fill up ourselves. We are responsible for ourselves and our emotions. The secret is being able to feel our feelings fully; allowing sensations of the feeling in the body. When we allow all of our feelings then we have the ability to also feel love.
Feeling our feelings does not mean acting out on them by angrily expressing them or silently getting back at someone. It does not mean yelling or having a tantrum. These expressions can harm others and they do nothing to bring us equanimity. Equanimity arises when we can sit with the feeling, noticing the sensations in our body. We sit still and observe ourselves and the emotions we have. If we don’t we are not fully processing the feeling and we are strengthening a neural pathway–the more it is used, the more likely we are to go down that path. When we let our children have tantrums, we are encouraging the development of a negative neural pathway. We are teaching them to be volatile, which does not bring peace to us and it can cause damage in relationships. When we process our feelings fully by sitting with them and observing them, we develop the “observer” which allows us to stop damaging behavior before it starts. When we sit in the fire of our emotions, we get to see where they come from and we are often rewarded with insight about the next step we can take.
A practice for beginning this lesson is to feel your feelings. Start by sitting in a chair and taking a few deep breaths. Observe how your body feels and what the sensations are. Let yourself feel the feelings you are having and notice the sensations that go along with the feelings. When thoughts arise about these feelings—thoughts like “I don’t want to feel this; if I do, I won’t be happy; this is too much; I can’t take it, I don’t deserve love,” or “this doesn’t feel good.” these are your blocking beliefs. Clear these by rubbing the sore points while saying the thoughts (see below “feeling blocking beliefs”). Go back to the sensations in your body and let your body process the feeling by just allowing the feeling. If more thoughts arise, feel the feeling that is there and clear them using the sore spots. The goal is to allow the feelings and just notice them without judgment. See if you can find the child where the origins of the feeling began. Be with the child and see if you can comfort him or her. Let yourself fill up with love. If the feelings are very intense and you can’t get to the place of love, it may help to go through the CLEAR process (go to Try CLEAR Now).
The benefits of feeling our feelings:
- When we process our feelings by being in the body, we avoid getting triggered and acting out on our feelings and thus hurting others around us.
- Often when the body has fully processed our feelings, we will have an insight. Insight is an important place for humans to evolve into. It involves the whole brain/body instead of just the left-brain. It is a higher form of problem solving than “figuring it out.” As Einstein said, our problems cannot be solved at the same level of thinking from which they were created, so we need to develop insight to help solve our problems. Insight comes when we allow our body to fully process feelings.
- Emotions are processed in the Limbic part of the brain and if we are trying to figure out how to make ourselves feel better, we are in a different part of the brain—the neo cortex, which cannot process feelings. So we end up trying to solve a problem in a way it can’t be solved. This causes more anxiety because the feelings don’t go away when we try to figure it out, so using the left-brain for dealing with feelings can end up making us feel worse. If we just let ourselves feel the feeling, the eventual insight that comes will be more helpful than anything we do in the left-brain to try to fix it.
- When we allow all of our feelings then we have access to love, and after going through this process, it is easier to feel love.
Some of us think that if we accept what is we will never be happy so we fight reality. We think that if we accept what is, we won’t work to change it or ourselves. Accepting reality allows us to be in a place of openness, which is more conducive to feeling love. If you are always fighting reality, then you live in the fight mode and it is difficult to access love. Allowing doesn’t mean you won’t work to change. It just means you have access to a place of being that allows contentment and love. Practice accepting reality. And clear any beliefs you have about that (see below).
So accept what is. Stop expecting others to fill you up. Assume there is enough love for you. Feel your feelings, clear your blocking beliefs and let love in! And if it sounds too good to be true, you probably have more blocking beliefs to clear.
Feelings Blocking Beliefs
Clear each of the blocking beliefs by rubbing the sore point (in between your collar bone and pectorals) using this statement:
“Even though I believe…(list the beliefs here)…I love and accept myself, honor and respect myself. I forgive myself for thinking these things, and I forgive anyone who impacted me in thinking these things and I am present in my body.”
- It’s not okay to feel my feelings (fear/love/sadness/pain).
- It’s not okay to have emotions.
- I’ll be a wimp if I cry.
- It’s not okay to cry.
- I’ll be a wimp if I have emotions.
- Others will humiliate me if I have feelings.
- It’s not okay to feel.
- I can’t feel.
- I can’t be a good wo/man and feel my feelings.
- I’ll lose control if I feel my feelings.
- It’s not safe to feel my feelings.
- I don’t want to feel my feelings.
- I’ll be seen as weak if I have my feelings.
- I have to be strong.
- I can’t be vulnerable and be strong.
- I won’t be seen as strong if I am vulnerable or if I cry.
- I should be the one in control.
- If I have my emotions, I am not in control.
- If I have my feelings I won’t be happy/feel good.
- They will take me over.
- If I start feeling them I’ll be overwhelmed and I’ll never stop.
- If I have my feelings, something is wrong with me.
- I have to make good feelings happen.
- If I feel bad, I’m not trying hard enough.
- If I feel bad, I’m not strong enough.
- I have to fight my feelings.
Accepting Reality
Clear each of the blocking beliefs by rubbing the sore point (half way between your collar bone and pectorals, directly above the nipple) using this statement:
“Even though I believe…(list the beliefs here)…I love and accept myself, honor and respect myself. I forgive myself for thinking these things, and I forgive anyone who impacted me in thinking these things and I am present in my body.”
- I can’t accept reality.
- I can’t handle reality.
- I refuse to accept life as it is.
- I want life to be different than it is.
- The pain will kill me or I will kill myself so I don’t have to feel the pain.
- I was destroyed.
- I am small and can’t handle what is happening.
- The pain is bigger than me.
- If I’m vulnerable I’ll be annihilated.
- The pain will destroy me.
- I can’t handle the feelings.
- If I get their love (attention, affection, etc) then I’ll feel better.
- I’ll do anything to get rid of the pain
- I can’t cope with life’s difficulties.
- It’s too much.
- I need to make something happen; accepting reality is not going to make anything happen.
- There’s a happy ending in the future if I can just find the right thing to do/the right person to be with.
- Nothing will change if I accept what is (and I can’t stand the way things are).
- Something is wrong if I’m not happy.
- I need to make it different.
- I have to fix what is wrong (I can’t accept it).
- I need to make/force things to change.
- If I accept what is, it is a place of weakness, it is not strong; I’ll be in danger.
- It means I won’t be in control.
- I will have no defenses.
- I won’t know what is going on if I don’t judge and think about what is going on in this moment; if I don’t continuously interpret what is happening.
- If I accept what is, I won’t be safe; I’ll be confused.
- I need to think about things in order to understand and relate to them.
- I will become ignorant and be at the mercy of everyone.
- I will become stuck in the moment for the rest of my life.
- I will be stuck in the misery of what I feel right now if I accept it/allow it.
- I have to fight it to get out of it.
- I need to be in my head to be present/smart/protect myself/understand reality.
- If I am in my body, I’ll be weak/vulnerable/dumb/unsafe/unloved.
- It’s okay for others to disagree with me.