5 Easy Steps How To Feel Feelings Without Overwhelm

Self Care, Self Discovery, Self Love, Wellness

To feel feelings, how to feel your feelings, you must freak out and then try to think about everything good in your life. You must practice gratitude immediately and forgive everyone and everything…just kidding.

But, that’s what we usually do, right?

We avoid stuff:

try to make it “pretty,”
bypass spirituality,
ignore it,
ask someone else to make it better by telling them all the things wrong,
and/or freak out so we don’t have to face what we are really feeling, which is way scarier than sitting with what we’re feeling.

So what the heck do we do instead?

I see you. I was once you

Hey babe, I’m Lumalia, a self-coined beauty hunter, somatic wellness practitioner, and Portland boudoir photographer (aka empowerment photographer). I’m here to inspire you to drop back into your magnificent power as a human, the one where you’re connected to your deepest power, presence in your body attuned to the magnificence constantly in and around you.

Story Time

A decade ago, I was once in your shoes, feeling overwhelmed with all the emotional experiences, how to feel my feelings, and only able to feel happy or angry. The emotions and feelings were allowed and modeled for me by my family and peers. Until I got really sick with multiple chronic illnesses and autoimmune diseases that were my body’s and feelings’ way of saying PAY ATTENTION.

So I did, and now I don’t need the symptoms to speak for me; I don’t need the disease to get my attention, and now I get to experience a wildly beautiful life. Yes, I am still human; I have a sink full of dirty dishes as I write this article, and my three girls are pressing my limits as they enter into being teenagers. (Find more of my story in how I healed my illnesses along with generational trauma and found so much magic along the healing process in my book memoir Blooming Upside Down.)

So, how do we actually feel all our feelings without feeling overwhelmed?

Be present in your body’s sensations.

It sounds simple, right? It is, but most of us are unpracticed at listening to our body’s sensations.

Please don’t assume it’s our fault, though it’s our responsibility to change.

We live in a world that constantly draws our attention to what we need to do, pay attention to, or fix about ourselves, the world, and others.

you are impactful when you are fully present in your body

But I’m here to be the first to tell you that you are most impactful as a human when you are fully present in your own body and its sensations, in its feelings, and getting to choose not what feelings rule you but what feelings you want to tap into on purpose.

Let me say that again; the goal isn’t to be ruled by our emotions but to become a master at choosing where we set our attention and, therefore, our impact.

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(it’s a House of Pain lyrics reference)

What are emotions (feel feelings) really?

Emotions are sensations in the body that are trying to move us to action or communicate a need we need now or a reminder of a need we once didn’t have. Emotions are also what connect us to ourselves, each other and our environments.

Without emotions, we become a product of our environments and our upbringing, which may or may not make us cringe. Without our emotions we lose our ability to connect to ourselves, the world and the people in it.

It is why “numbing out” literally disconnects you from your body, people, and your environment.

But what if you had to choose the environment in which you lived? What if you could change the way your body experiences your memories or triggers? What if you could feel confident in any emotional experience you have as a human and not feel overwhelmed, shut down, want to control the emotion, avoid or suppress it? What if you became resilient and chose how you respond and interact with the life around you and inside of you?

This is the practice I’m here to share with you.

Can we just ignore feeling feelings and emotions?

You might hear the terms mastering, controlling, or managing emotions, and I want to be very clear about these statements. They are another form of avoiding. They involve trying to manipulate and control instead of being present.

Think of someone who steps into a gym’s weight room. With zero experience lifting weights or anything else, they jump straight for a 100-lb weight and will most likely hurt themselves.

The same is true of trying to jump straight into managing our emotions. We cannot go straight into the heavyweights just by saying, “I’m just going to put you here or deal with you this way,” without actually building up the strength and practice of being with them. We must learn how to have the best body posture, start small, and build resilience and strength to be with the full spectrum, the total weight.

It does feel overwhelming because the way to feel emotions should have been taught to us as children and modeled for us in safe environments. Most of us should have had decades of practice with this.

most of us haven’t had safe places to feel

But the reality is that most of us haven’t. Again, we must accept that with compassion for ourselves and others and choose differently as we take responsibility for ourselves as adults. Do not blame our caretakers, our culture, or anyone. But take radical responsibility for the change we can be in the world. It starts with learning ourselves, which is why you’re here. Yay!

Note: Being angry and frustrated about this reality is OK. That is a beautiful feeling!… Let’s keep talking about noticing and what to do when we think these very human things.

How do you feel feelings and Emotions?

When we want to know how to feel our feelings we’ve learned we cannot ignore them and jump straight into moving past them or holding them all and saying, “Got it, good, ready to move on,” by controlling or managing our emotions. What do we do? How do we feel our feelings without getting overwhelmed?

Feeling exasperated already? Me too. It can sometimes feel like we’re not doing it “right,” that even trying to feel our feelings doesn’t help, and that can feel discouraging, overwhelming, and disappointing.

Another story time

This girl must like her stories, I bet she’s a memoirist

(She is. Find her first book here.)

When I was sick and starting therapy, I also began doing yoga and yoga teacher training. It was the only movement that was safe to do with all my life-threatening symptoms, like passing out randomly when I overexert myself. But stretching and moving on the floor was a lot more safe.

As I began to pay attention to sensations in my body, like traditional yoga practices, invite you into doing, not just making shapes, but mainly as a teacher learning to share sensations, not forms, I had to pay attention to what my body was feeling, well that and chronic anything will also force you into that.

It was like something got unlocked in me. Practicing paying attention to the sensations in my body, I could more easily recognize when I was hungry, when I was tired, when I was frustrated, and when I was sad.

I could communicate my needs more and let the emotion express itself. In other words, I was able to let the sensation be tied to emotion, let it go, and have a moment in the spotlight. When I felt emotionally overwhelmed to say hey, I need to be alone right now, I’d turn off everything and be with myself, staring at the ceiling, breathing. Letting my body express its overwhelm with the breath and regulate by being in just my own energy.

When I felt tension in my body and energy rising up through my belly and face, I’d name it anger, separate myself from the moment, and go scream into my pillow instead of snap at whoever talked to me next.

When I felt tired I went and took a nap even though I used to judge myself or feel bad for napping.

Enjoying my stories? Read more in my book Blooming Upside Down the chapter called “No Exit Plan” is a powerful story about feeling your feelings.

(P.S. Purchases from Bookshop.org support local book stores and authors like me more than other retailers.)

These are things we traditionally learn in toddlerhood. To notice what our body is saying and give it the needs we need, but sadly, most of us did not have that environment where we were asked to pay attention to the sensations in our bodies, communicate them, and have our caregivers help provide environments for our growing needs and emotions. Often, they were oppressed, told to be quiet, ignored, or bypassed because a parent had “bigger” emotional needs than us. (Or a slew of other scenarios that could have a whole book written about.)

It’s our turn to return to child-like curioisity

So now, it’s our turn to return to childlike curiosity, to pay attention to sensations first, to see if we can pair them with an emotion or need, and to fulfill them for ourselves.

It sounds simple, but it’s ok if it’s not at first.

It’s okay if you find one sensation and you find many.
It’s okay if when you find one emotion, you find many.
It’s ok if when you find a need, you find many and a lot that need to change.

Take it a step at a time, as much as possible.

See what feels the “biggest” and most urgent in your sensations, feelings, and needs that you can give yourself right now. Then make plans for the rest, maybe as you come into some post-processing care.

Look! She even made a pretty acronym for us!

How to feel your feelings: don’t forget your H.E.A.R.T.

Hear Your Sensations:

Observe your sensations without judgment, just noticing, bringing awareness to tensions, lightness, and senses in the body.

Engage Your Feelings:

Bring your full attention to the sensations and see if they have emotions tied to them, like anger, frustration, disappointment, etc.; they may also not have an emotional name but stay in sensation or manifest as color, shape or memory

Allow Expression:

Allow the sensation to express itself safely in a way that gives the sensation the stage but does not cause harm to you or those around you.

Receive self-support or ask for support:

Are your sensations asking for a behavior, life, or habit change? Is it asking for an experience to have gone differently? Does it need anything practical or emotional? How can you start to build this for yourself one step at a time, taking radical responsibility for what you can and shifting your environment to match it as best you can?

Tend to your self-care:

On that subject, keep reading. (and save our self care article later)

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Feeling Feelings Without Waking He Bear

As we begin to become aware of our feelings, notice the sensations in our bodies and then our feelings, and take supportive action for them, we can often meet the edges of our environments and the people in our lives.

Maybe your environment isn’t comfortable with you expressing sadness, or perhaps you fear that expressing your emotions will make someone feel uncomfortable or unsafe.

Sometimes, we judge ourselves for having emotions in the first place. This is often because emotions weren’t safe to have growing up or modeled for us in any of our worlds. Crying got you made fun of in school. Emotions were only for “girls.” You’re hysterical if you’re emotional. These are called meta-emotions and, sadly, are still a part of too many of our societies. But left unchecked can bring on depression. I’m going to be radical and say depression and anxiety are mostly linked to our world that doesn’t have safe places for us to express our emotions without judgment regularly.

So it is our job to create that safety for ourselves and each other. To be places where it’s safe to have emotions, not responsible for other’s emotional experiences, or validating emotional experiences that are harmful to others, but accept that having and expressing emotions it’s a normal part of being human.

However in our world that doesn’t always give safe space for us to express our emotions, we sometimes have to ask our emotions to wait for a moment, pause, and then create a safe place to express and support them.

For example, one morning, I woke up feeling so much rage in my body with how my mother continued to ignore me and the abuse I experienced as a child, how she gaslighted me by avoiding talking about what happened. I want to yell and snap at every single person around me. But I had to get my daughter to school, have my two stepdaughters around the house getting ready, and my husband doing things around the house. After I returned from dropping my daughter off at school, I asked my husband when I could process my anger. He told me in 30 minutes. He put loud headphones on, and my stepdaughters got picked up by their mother for the day. I went into our bedroom and screamed into my pillow, threw them on the bed, and ripped apart pieces of paper. I let all the anger in my body out until I began to weep. I journaled, wrote about what I was feeling, witnessed myself, and released more rage and more grief.

While I could have been snappy or irritated all day, I asked for space to process my emotions.

And it doesn’t always have to be a long process. Sometimes, you can go scream in your car alone. Sometimes, you can rip apart a piece of paper and sing along to a song that feels like rage releasing in your body. Sometimes, you can ask for that sensation and emotion to wait until a specific “date” to let it all out.

The more space you give to practicing this, the easier it will become.

practice always helps

What happens if I begin to feel and more come?

This is so normal. Usually, one feeling is holding another, and once we notice one more, we come online and say, “Oh, HI! IT’S ME!” I’ve been meaning to tell you about this one thing.

That can feel overwhelming, and that is where you can say, “Okay, step by step.” And be honest with yourself. You don’t have to feel all your feelings all at once all the time. You can make space and a ritual for it, and some even call it self-care!

Make space for it, and set your boundaries, no matter what supporting yourself looks like. Sometimes, we cannot scream in the middle of a grocery store when we are angry. But we can sigh loudly or hum profoundly and ask for time to let out more anger in a more appropriate container to express ourselves fully.

Sometimes, we can say I’m going to give myself 30 minutes to notice sensations and feel my feelings, and then I’m going to let myself do nothing, to numb out and just be. And we need that sometimes.

But we can also provide aftercare.

This is the read “t” more part in h.e.a.r.t.

How to support feeling your feelings after you feel your feelings

Aftercare for feelings is an essential part of the practice of feeling your feelings. Often, we skip this step, or this is not talked about enough, so if you do anything after feeling your feelings, make sure to do at least one of these.

When we skip the aftercare of feeling our feelings, we associate feeling overwhelmed with the actual sense. Having little practice again can feel like carrying 100 lbs without training. But the more we practice AND have aftercare associated with something pleasurable, the more we’ll build resilience to being able to do it again.

Aftercare helps support our associates with feeling feelings for good things. Not having to stay in the uncomfortable sensations but, in some ways, getting rewarded with the feel-good neurochemicals that these aftercare tips naturally and effortlessly provide. Aftercare re-teaches our bodies that emotions and feelings are safe to feel and that we have the capacity to feel them even if, growing up, we didn’t experience this.

If you go back to the toddlerhood story, you’ll notice that in an ideal situation, after a toddler has big feelings, they express them safely and are supported in what they need, such as a hug. This is our body’s natural way of regulating after feeling a lot.

Here are a few ways to give yourself aftercare after going into sensations and feelings.

Feeling Your Feelings Nervous system regulation supports:

from a lady who ought-a know
(It’s me Lumalia, your fellow wellness practitioner)

Nature: If it’s safe, be in nature. Look at a tree, touch its bark, put your bare feet on the ground, and feel the wind on your skin.
Sing: a lullaby to yourself or a favorite song. Singing activates your vagus nerve, which helps pull your body from reaction mode into regulation present mode.
Humming: Simple humming is also very powerful when doing the same thing.
Breathwork: also does the same thing. Sample my 10-minute beginner class here.
Candle: Stare at a candle flickering or a green plant proven to help regulate us.
Move: Get some gentle movement in yoga, dancing, or any movement you love
Hug: Ask for a hug from someone you love
Greenery: If you cannot do any of the above, Watch nature videos with a lot of greenery or water (check out my waterfall video here). Be careful to avoid going down a social media scrolling rabbit hole with this, too.

But when do we practice gratitude and thinking positively?

Honestly, never. While you’re processing your emotions, thinking positively and practicing gratitude bypasses and avoids what you’re feeling. This is like putting a bandaid on a wound that needs stitches. Yes, it helps for a moment, but it will keep coming back until you honestly drop into fully being present with the sessions before offering solutions.

This does not mean that you can never think positively or feel grateful. It means that your feelings do not need your positive twists or gratitude to disappear. Feelings aren’t meant to go away, be controlled, or be managed.

Your feelings need your attention, expression, sometimes actionable support, and aftercare.

So when do gratitude and positive thinking come into our lives? They can be found in our faith that everything is working out for us and in our appreciation of the life we have and live. We can also practice other practices, like noticing sensations and feelings. We can also practice reprogramming our brains to move from thinking negatively to thinking positively. We can also practice always believing we need more to realize we already have everything.

Gratitude and positive thinking become necessary to work when we want to heal from deep subconscious beliefs (not feelings) about how we view our lives, ourselves, and the world around us. It’s about a mindset shift, not a sensation fix.

this must be our “talkin-to”

We don’t fix sensations. We support them

We shift mindsets

We support the emotional experiences of having mindsets that negatively impact us. Often, this results in grief.

This is why if you consistently offer solutions and try to think positively, many people may be frustrated with you. Because when we offer solutions or think positively about people’s feelings, including our own, we are essentially say what you feel; what you sensing isn’t real. To many of us, this feels like “you do not exist.” Invalidating their very existence. And sometimes we do this to ourselves…again it was probably a model to us or picked up as a way to exist in our worlds growing up. So we hold compassion, say ick, and choose differently.

We cannot control what we sense and feel but can always choose our response.

I hope, my dear, that you will build your muscles by always choosing compassion. I promise it will become easier and more accessible the more you do it.

she said darlin’ so I guess we’re gonna be ok now.

Not asking others to carry our feelings?

When we get overwhelmed, we often feel this urgency for someone or anyone to hold our feelings for us. We feel this need to tell everyone about all our problems and troubles, just looking for someone to validate what we are seeing and experiencing. This little child in us wasn’t allowed to be seen in our emotional experience, and it is our job, not our friends, partners, now as adults, to see ourselves. To validate our emotions as true, to build new parents for ourselves that live within us that says what you’re feeling is real and you CAN sit with it. You CAN hold your own emotional experiences, and you CAN get through what you’re getting through.

Why are meditation and yoga powerful at helping you feel your feelings?

Meditation and yoga are practices that help you notice your sensations. They take you out of your thinking mind and into what you’re actually experiencing physically, into the places where your body feels.

this is where she turns meditation teacher on us

Many people practice yoga and sometimes start crying. And that’s okay; it’s often because our bodies were storing something that was never safe to express and release, and yoga, movement in general, helps those emotions come out safely. And my goodness, isn’t that freaking beautiful? A place in you once oppressed getting a safe place to express. Wow!

So, if you’re ready to step into deep awareness, drop into more sensations, and get support, consider trying out some of my free experiences inside my Self Care Roadmaps inside my Self Care Membership Library full of 100+ resources to support you in feeling your feelings and integration after.

Take my self-awareness quiz to determine which self-care journey is best for you that includes beginner friendly meditation and yoga practices.

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