Beyond Feelings
How Reliable Are Your Feelings?
Just because you feel afraid, it doesn’t mean you’re in danger.
We all know this. Remember the last time you watched a scary movie? Any fear you felt was completely disconnected from your reality – sitting safely on your sofa, or wherever.
A client recently gave me an experience with their Apple Vision Pro – or “apple goggles” as I misnamed them, much to his amusement. The realism of the immersive experience is on another level. The close encounter with baby elephants was breathtaking.
Vicarious Feelings
The a high-altitude tightrope walker demo made my heart beat faster. It was as if I was there in the panorama, thousands of feet up.
But I instantly regained my composure. I knew it wasn’t real, only something I was experiencing though the little headset, brought to life via my thoughts and physiology. I was perfectly safe.
There were no lingering effects. Only a wave of adrenaline – it was kind of fun!
Habitual Fear
So why does some fear seem so compelling and hang around?
Let’s say you find yourself anxious when bored. Or fearful whenever you’re alone. Those feelings can linger, ruining your morning, your whole day, even keeping you up at night. But there’s no difference between that illusory fear and the fleeting “apple goggles” experience.
Truly, you’re safe. You’re just having anxious thoughts: I should be doing something; I should have more friends/a partner/etc; What if I never get where I need to be? Everyone else is having fun without me – and any number of anxious thoughts. It’s this thinking that produces the fear.
Hanging on to Fear
And we get in our own way. We feel fear and we constrict. We wonder what the fear means about us. We fear the experience of the feelings themselves – it might hurt, we might not survive it, it might come back, it might never going away. Now your physiology is flooded with cortisol. A snowball of anxious thoughts perpetuates the feelings.
When you clamp down, the feelings get lodged, grow, and you only become more afraid of them.
Opening Yourself To Your Experience
Learn to relax into your human experience (we all feel afraid sometimes) and to recognise that it’s all only thinking.
Expand and allow the fear to pass through and dissipate. It will cease to have any hold over you. Fear is like a wave that comes and goes, and you are like the jellyfish, just noticing the current, suspended and relaxed in the vastness of the ocean.
You are so much bigger than any feeling you could possibly feel. You will not be overwhelmed, you will not break.
The Price of Freedom
When you no longer fear your feelings, you’re truly free. When you truly come to accept your experience – and all the wild thoughts and feelings that go with it – this is true liberation.
But you do have to feel! This is what it is to be human. You do have to face the reality of your life. Feeling everything is the price of freedom.
A Tool For The Work
Emotional Freedom Techniques (EFT ), or tapping, can be hugely supportive in allowing feelings to be processed through gently and safely, giving us the confidence to feel our feelings and move forward confidently, unbound by fear. EFT has been shown to be efficacious and efficient in a variety of settings.
