Have you ever thought about your feelings as another sense?
Our awareness and ability to use our feelings to navigate the world is essentially our sixth sense. It is incredibly fundamental to our experience of being human. If we can’t listen to, understand, or process them life becomes challenging meaning that we require more support and accommodation to live with peace. It’s never too late to learn how to use this sense with grace and intention and see how it can enrich our lives.
Today I want to invite you to make a map or sketch of your feelings as a beginning step to contemplating how we make sense of and interpret our them.
Do this, next time something big bubbles up for you take a moment to think about these 3 questions.
Where in my BODY am I experiencing this?
What ACTIONS do I want to take in response to this?
What THOUGHTS, stories or words are running through my head?
Body, action and thoughts. That’s it. If you can make a quick sketch of it great but it may just be a mental checklist you run through in the moment. See my sketch below as a guide but feel free to change it in any way that best meets your needs.
See if you can make this map a few times over the next week if something big bubbles up. No need to do anything more. We are simply observing our experiences with a little more intention in hopes that we can cultivate a stronger emotional literacy for ourselves.
Next time we will take our maps and dig deeper into this all exploring what to do with our observations and of course find more ways to creatively process it all so we can keep our feelings moving through us!
Thank you as always for being here with me.
Rachel
