Learn to identify my feelings

My first thought was: brain dead! Wait a second… tired… slightly dissatisfied… but largely content… and a bit guilty.

Why? Because I’ve spent too much time using the computer today, because I only got six and a half hours sleep last night (which, in the long run, is not enough for me), because I don’t feel like I’ve achieved anything amazing today, because I’m not working at the moment and can do what I like, and because I probably should have started job hunting by now!

This morning I felt strong. I asked myself how I felt and before I even had time to think and analyse, the word ‘strong’ came into my head. Since my intuition is feeling quite powerful at the moment I decided to go with it. In my body it just felt like a sensation of strength in my limbs, with energy running through them.

when I consciously identified my feelings I felt happy and excited (because of knowing that I have many free hours today to do stuff for myself, stuff I haven’t had time to do all week). In response to sweetness’s suggestion I thought about how these feelings feel in my body. I’ve been doing that for a while now and have found that happiness feels like a kind of tingling in the base of my skull. It’s a nice feeling.

Then I identified exitement as feeling like a tension in my arms, bum and legs. It actually wasn’t that pleasant a feeling. It was too much, and I knew that this level of nervous excitement was not going to be healthy, that it would result in a lack of focus, unrealistic expectations of myself and then a comedown and a feeling of disappointment.

So I lay there and breathed deeply from my diaphragm for a while and felt a whole lot better. Thanks again, sweetnesses. Identifying my feelings in my body really does give me a whole new layer of insight.

I’ve been doing this every day and one of the great things I have discovered is that most of the time I feel happy! Especially recently; I’ve been feeling really good. I read somewhere that when you’re not feeling any of the ‘negative’ emotions (the one I feel most often is anxious – or just plain tired! Not really an emotion, I know, but when I feel tired it’s often impossible to feel anything else!) that what remains is happiness. And I’ve discovered that it’s true.

Another cool thing is that identifying what I’m feeling as ‘happy’ makes me feel even better. It kind of perpetuates itself.

Identifying my feelings has also helped me to make decisions more wisely. So often I have chosen what I think will make another person happy, without thinking about how I really feel about that thing. Recently a friend invited me out dancing and I hesitated to say yes, because I knew my boyfriend would have liked a cuddly evening in. But I thought about how I felt about going out and I realized I really wanted to and had been wanting to go out and party for a while. So I did, and it was great, partly because it was just really fun and partly because I felt good about listening to my feelings and acting on them.

I think I should definitely pay more attention to how I feel about things. I would like to be more aware of how I feel about things on a gut level. It would help with making decisions and it would help me to be less passive and defer to others less. It would help me to develop my intuitive skills.

How can I increase my awareness of my gut feelings? I need to become more practised at identifying my feelings generally. I’ve started taking the rest-time after my morning and afternoon meditations as a time to identify my feelings. I’ve been doing it for a few weeks now and have been finding it really interesting and revealing. It really does make me feel much more self-aware.

It also occurred to me that identifying my feelings in this way might be a good way of getting inspiration for short stories and poems, e.g. writing a story based around the feelings I feel at a specific time.

At the moment I think the conscious practice of identifying my feelings should be a twice-a-day effort. More than that and I feel like I’d never have time for anything else. But I’m hoping that as I get more used to identifying my feelings it will start to happen spontaneously and if I feel the need to be aware of them for a specific purpose, e.g. decision-making, it will be much easier to identify them accurately. I think this practice is a good start and I can always develop it further once I feel more secure in my abilities.