How Can I Tell What I am Feeling? Connecting with Harder Emotions

Below, you will find a practice that can be a great resource to consult as you get to know yourself better.

We experience a wide spectrum of emotions.

Emotions: a natural instinctive state of mind deriving from one's circumstances, mood, or relationships with others.

However, it is unusual for any of those emotions to exist or be experienced in the same way forever.

In some moments, while in the thick of our emotions, it seems as though the experience of feeling them could stick around for the rest of our lives.

Even more commonly, we can try to avoid + suppress our emotions out of fear that the felt experience will never go away.

Understanding our emotions as flexible and ever-changing can help us improve our relationships with ourselves.

After all, emotions show up to get our attention and communicate important messages with us.

You can use the idea of emotional continuums to track the intensity of the emotions you experience.

Below are some examples of what I notice happens to me when I am in different places of the difficult emotional continuum. Your invitation is to bring to mind a recent time you felt one of these emotions and plug in your responses to help you gauge where you are.

Some cues to know where you’re at on your continuum may include body sensations, thoughts, impulses, patterns, and behaviors.

If you have a hard time remembering what it felt like in the past, see if you can pay attention in the days/weeks to come. It is likely you will experience one of the emotions listed below.

As we practice this exercise, we may see some overlap in our emotional experiences. I encourage you to be curious about how these difficult emotions may interact, play off each other, and impact one another as you are experiencing them.

It’s totally normal to experience lots of different emotions at once and to experience varying degrees of these emotions at any given time.

The closing invitation of this practice is to offer compassion towards yourself for whatever is showing up.

Our emotions share what we need to know and help us guide us to me our own needs. 

If you’re interested in exploring more resources like this practice check out the Topaz Healing Library