Heart Reading … Day 55

Feelings ebb and flow like the tide.

A few years ago I took a big risk, acted impulsively, and learned the difference between feelings and emotions. I followed my heart and attended a two-week retreat with strangers, was guided toward deep trust in the process of allowing feelings to be as big as possible, trusting others to bear witness, and trusting myself to watch it all unfold. Understanding this distinction between feelings and emotions, I quickly learned, can support and sustain healthy dialogue.

Feelings are a tool our bodies use to help us navigate experiences and relationships, ideally to keep us healthy and grow our spirits. These ebb and flow and we can attend to them with care when they rise up with intensity. If we don’t attend to feelings they become stuck — they meld together and get confused. Feelings become emotions. Emotions don’t ebb and flow, they stick in parts of our body-mind like taffy.

This morning I shared a personal story with a group of friends. We were making space together to share what was on our hearts. We made a lot of space. We all hold so much energy in our hearts. And what I’m reading from my heart in this moment is that the best we can do to coexist with all our individual and collective ebbing and flowing is to keep learning how to better express our feelings.

While this image below (called Plutchik’s Wheel of Emotion) is a simpler version of the model I learned, it is such a great example of how energies can blend. And all energies are valid, important, and useful for informing how we express ourselves and attend to others.

There is no question that we can all become more adept at experiencing and articulating the feelings we have as they move through us. There is no question that we can all become more compassionate at witnessing others articulate their feelings. And there is no question that as more of us practice this, we can all benefit from a growing sense of emotional safety.