feelings

As part of the healing I am doing right now, after the break up of my relationship with Andy, I have been seeing a counselor for an hour once a week. It is really good work I am doing there and I wanted to share a little part of my journey back to myself with you here.

I am a feelings person. I have very strong, and at times overwhelming feelings. In the past (and of course even now) the intensity of my feelings have stopped me from functioning as my true self. I also realise that I have found it very difficult to express 'negative feelings'  like anger, dislike, dissatisfaction, hurt and sadness. At my session last week my counselor asked me to run my hands through a basket of pebbles and chose the one that felt, to me, like those stored feelings.

This is the pebble I chose. She then asked me where in my body I was carrying it, this hard rock of bad feelings. I placed the stone, where I felt it, on my diaphragm underneath my rib cage. My counselor gently let me know that I needed to do something about that hard little rock before it turned into something more serious and more physical. 

She then gave me home work of making an art work of what 'feelings' are for me.

These are my feelings, in fact this is me.
The whole complete circle.
Making this drawing was so eye opening for me and I realised so many things about my feelings.

They are colourful and each of them beautiful in it's own right.

They are not isolated things, instead they meld and blend and flow.

Some like anger and creativity are the opposite to each other.

I see that the white inner core is my pure self (my Buddha nature/ essence of Gaia/ whatever you want to call that beautiful pure connectedness to the universe). That my pure self looks through a layer or filter of whatever I am feeling at that moment and thus whatever I am seeing or experience is coloured in some way by my own feelings.

Equally my response is filtered back out through that feeling and will emerge into the world coloured by the emotion it emanates through. I learned today (a week on) that I want to be able to live life as my pure self, I want to make decisions as my own self and not in the state of an emotion. I realise that it is possible to give my inner self time to speak, to quieten the emotions long enough to let me true self speak from the heart.

I see that sadness (above) is so like rain, and tears like rain are cleansing and give new life.

At the moment I am allowing this information to sink in. I know that in time I will learn how to live and breathe as my true self and to see my emotions in a more detached way. For now I am marveling in their beauty and the beauty of having time to learn about my true self.

What do your feelings look like?