FULL TRANSCRIPT:

Hello, welcome! Today I'd like to talk to you about how to feel.  Not feel, like touch feel, but how to feel things in your heart. And some of you may be listening and you say, “Well Jen I know how to feel, I get lots of emotions that come up all the time.”

Wonderful! I am happy that you have that experience! We can talk about how to control and direct your emotions if you already have the ability to feel.

But there are many, many people that I encounter all the time who have have turned off that ability to feel, and so many of these people who have done so are what I jokingly referred to as recovering empaths.

​You may be an empath yourself or know somebody who is. Empaths are people who are more highly, naturally highly sensitive to the emotions and the energies that surround them and those of other people.

So how do you know if this is you or not? Well you just might already realize this because if you go into large groups it can be very difficult for you because of all the different energies that are present.

If you walk into some sort of space, you go into a store, or you get together with a bunch of friends and you walk into a restaurant to go meet them, and you get there and all of a sudden you start to feel down or angry or sad or something and you don't know what it is; that's the sign of being an empath.

Or you come home from being out – you've spent your day outside interacting with people and you come home and you feel icky and you don't know exactly why. Or you feel upset or angry and you can't figure out what's going on. You have probably been taking on the emotions and energies of other people. This doesn't just happen for empaths in live situations, it also happens from music and television and magazines and scrolling through your Facebook feed.

I know myself, I have significantly limited the media that I participate in because some things are physically painful for me to see or to even read about. And so what most people do who are  empaths, who have this heightened awareness, they grow up in homes where they don't really know this is who they are, what's going on, and it's very difficult to deal with. So, so many people simply turn it off. They don't know how to process it.

Mom and dad don't know what's going on, and they don't know how to help them. And so the child just says, “well, you know what, this is too difficult .I'm just going to turn it off I'm going to block it and when I do feel these things I'm just going to ignore them and stuff them inside because I don't like them.” So, many empaths turn off their ability to feel.

A lot of times people just turn off their ability to feel what they feel, what's in their heart because it's not accepted by other people or because you've had experiences in your life that are simply painful and we don't like to feel pain.

But here's the problem. Now there are many problems, so some of the problems with turning off your ability to feel means that you lose your ability to connect. You lose your ability to connect with yourself, with God, with your source, and with other people and with those around you. Because we don't connect through our just our words and our thoughts, we connect heart-to-heart through our feelings.

We also then have much more difficulty in realizing and manifesting our goals, because one of the key things for helping to make your goals a reality is to envision and call upon the feeling, the feeling of that goal being realized, and to live in that state of that emotion.

In Proverbs it says, “as a man thinketh in his heart so is he.” It's not just your thoughts that matter, it's your feelings about what the things that you think about. So if you have your goal – which I hope you do – and you're reviewing your goal regularly, you want to have the emotion that goes along with that goal to help you make it more real and to help you act that way and become that person that can have that goal.

So there are a lot of problems that come about when we don't allow ourselves to feel. In that energy work that I do, The Body Code and The Emotion Code, everybody has actually one or multiple heart walls. A heart wall is a literal wall made up of trapped emotions that keeps our heart safe and protected. So it keeps us safe from feeling the things that hurt us, but at the same time it blocks out all the goodness that we want. It blocks out that connection, those feelings of love and happiness and joy.

And so often you hear people say, “well what do you want to do with your life? well what makes you happy?” If you have a heart wall and if you have turned off your ability to feel it's going to be really difficult for you to know what makes you happy and what you want to do with your life. It's also going to make it difficult to know, well what hobbies, do you simply want to do with your time? What interests do you have? If you don't know how you feel about things, you have blocked off and suppressed so much of who you are and your ability to connect with others and to enjoy this life now.

​How do you know if you stopped feeling, and you're having a hard time feeling? Well some of you just know because you feel you feel kind of empty inside. or you feel very dead inside. You have very little emotional response to things that happen to yourself or to other people. You just kind of go through your days experiencing the events but not really integrating them into who you are and feeling what might normally go along with the events, so you've just kind of turned that off and it makes everything a little more grey because you lose the peaks that give you the happiness and the joyfulness which are very colorful and very bright.

Another great way to know that you have turned off your ability to feel is what's happening in your physical body. Your feelings and your emotions are meant to be expressed. There are meant to be felt and allowed to bubble up to the surface and to come out, and if you habitually turn them off or suppress them eventually you will become sick in some way or another. It will manifest a some sort of illness. You may be depressed, you may be anxious, you may have chronic problems with your digestion and your stomach. You may have headaches, you may have joint pain, you may have skin rashes. It varies from person to person. It's not always the same, but ultimately your body is not going to function optimally and it's going to start to break down and be sick because you keep all these things trapped up inside.

So let's move on and talk about the fun stuff! How do you let those emotions come out? How do you allow yourself to start feeling again when maybe you've spent most of your life not feeling? Well the first thing I want to say is that for most people it's a very frightening idea because these past  feelings, the reason we've turned off our ability to feel, is because it's been painful. And so we think, “well but I don't want to feel these things because it's painful for me to do so. So now you're telling me that if I want to experience joy I have to allow myself to feel? But all I remember feeling is pain.”

And I want to offer you some consolation here that, yes, there are some things that you will feel and experience that do not feel good. But at the same time, the joy and happiness that you can feel far outweigh and surpass any of the not good feelings that are still stuck with inside. And the alternative is if you continue the way you are and you keep not feeling, you're going to be continually living down here. Everything is going to stay gray and flat and you're going to feel distant and you're going to feel unconnected and you're going to feel kind of lost, and eventually that gets to be a very unfulfilled way to live your life and to express who you are.

You are here and you are meant to be here to let your light shine and to express yourself! So yes the process itself can be uncomfortable, especially in the beginning. But I promise you that it will get easier and easier as you continue to allow yourself to feel more and more and your life will become better and better because you will experience more and more joy.

So I want to offer you two suggestions for things that you can do to start allowing yourself to feel what's in your heart.

The first thing is, simply allow the feelings to come up when they come up. Now you want to start doing this in a place where you feel safe, so in the middle of your work day or the middle of being at school is probably not the place to start practicing this. But when you're at home or some other place where you feel safe and an emotion gets triggered or you feel something, instead of initially and immediately turning away from it allow yourself to experience it. Maybe turn on a movie or TV  show that you know will trigger some emotions in you, right, they're great atdoing that, that's the whole point. So allow yourself to feel whatever it is that you feel and just notice it. That's it! Do nothing else.

The first step is to simply allow it to come into your body and notice what it is. You don't have to try  to change it, you don't need to judge it, whether it's good or bad or right or wrong. You don't need to follow it down a path of thoughts that you don't like. You simply need to allow it and recognize it for what it is. Because once you acknowledge and recognize the feeling, then you can make a choice to do something with it. But we're not going to go there yet. We're just starting to allow yourself to feel.

Again, so the first thing is, in a safe space, when you feel the emotions let them come. Just let them come, and it'll be okay.

The second thing you can do so that you can continue to feel more is to practice gratitude. Practice being thankful, not just on a sporadic occasion but every single day. Every morning take five or ten minutes and write down a list of ten things, yep ten things for which you are grateful. Now you can do this in a very intellectual, thought based way without feeling any emotion, but that completely defeats the purpose of it. The whole point of this exercise is to allow yourself to feel the gratitude for the events, for the things, for the people. To feel the happiness, to feel the love and the joy.

So the beautiful thing about this exercise of practicing gratitude every morning, or if you prefer every night, is that it gives you an opportunity to focus on the emotions that we like, that bring you good feelings instead of having to worry about the ones coming up that make you feel uncomfortable or unhappy. Now if you've been closed off when you first start practicing gratitude you are probably not going to feel a darn thing. And this can be very frustrating because the whole point of the exercise is to start feeling more, right? But it's not necessarily just going to spontaneously happen, especially if you've been closed off for twenty or thirty or forty years. It's a process and it's going to take some time.

You might have to artificially create the feelings of gratitude, of love, of thankfulness, of appreciation. And so to do that, when you make your list think of something, call to mind a memory, bring a feeling if you have that ability already. But call to mind a memory that brings good feelings to your heart and then take those good feelings and apply them to the other things. It's going to take a little time. Or if that's, if ten things is too hard for you to go through all at once, just pick one or two things for which you're grateful and spend five minutes creating feelings of gratitude and love and appreciation just for those one or two things.

The key to this practice, to actually both of these things, is to do them repetitively every single day. It's that compound effect of the small habits practice consistently and repetitively over time that will give you the changes that you seek in your life.

So your two things that can help you feel again: one, in a safe place simply allow the feelings to surface and come up, and two, your gratitude list. Practice gratitude every single day and give yourself some time.

You also have the option of scheduling a session with me. If you'd like to see if you have a heart wall I can usually, we can find and release those in one session, sometimes two sessions, depends on the person. I would love to help you with that, to give you a kickstart to help you increase your ability to open your heart and to feel the good, the happy, the joy as you go through your life on a day to day basis.

You deserve to feel good and to feel happy! Start allowing yourself to feel. Have a fantastic day!