This is the second part of the post published last week where we can learn more about being touched by the world around us.
Think of one event in your life where you tried to push away what you felt at that moment. Don’t relate to emotional trauma, or a big traumatic event, but to a recent situation from your life. It can be a situation when you felt insulted, or embarrassed, or a time that you felt hurt by something that happened. It can also be a moment when you felt excited, moved or experienced great pleasure, which you didn’t know how to express.
Remember both the event and your attempts to control the way you felt. There is always a physical aspect to the way we push unwanted events from our experience – we clench our jaws, we look downward with our eyes, we create tension in our upper back, we disconnect from our legs.
Focus on the physical expression you had of controlling what you felt and exaggerate it – clench your jaws even more, create the effort you did again, with your eyes and tense your neck even more.
After some time, let go of your attempt not to feel. Instead let whatever current or old emotion it is out, to be experienced. Notice what you need for that to happen – maybe it’s only breathing and relaxing, maybe it’s to call somebody, to do a certain act. Maybe it’s to spoil yourself and do something you really enjoy doing.
Notice your personal growth – that when you push a certain emotion away, you most probably also push other emotions away (e.g. if we don’t want the potential pain of love, we would also not let love to touch us).
Next time when you notice that you ignore what you feel, be attentive to the physical way that you do this and drop this effort. Be curious of the impact it would have on your own experience but also on your surroundings.
