Welcome to Trust Your Sacred Feminine Flow and the Divine Feminine Awakening Series.
Despite the prevailing paradigm, there is great strength in our capacity to meet our tender and vulnerable feelings. Those of us who are hardwired to be emotionally sensitive have a unique and often overlooked perspective on this skill.
In this 2018 re-release, we will explore the value and contribution of our emotional nature as well as the unique gifts of emotional sensitivity.
Whether we’re deeply emotional or not we all must learn to trust our emotional nature. This integral dimension of our humanity is often devalued and suppressed.
Discussed in this episode:
- How the culture we live in is not set up to support those of us who are predominantly emotional beings.
- Why it’s so vitally important to really feel our feeling and the risk that comes from not doing so
- How by looking at the expression of emotions from babies, we can see how detached we’ve become from our emotions
- Why if you are deeply emotional, it’s so important to understand that you have a gift that not many others do.
Listen to The Gift of Our Emotional Nature by clicking the play button on the audio player below.
Subscribe & Review Trust Your Sacred Feminine Flow
Apple l Spotify l Google Play l Stitcher I iHeartRADIO
Read the Full Transcript Here:
Welcome to Trust Your Sacred Feminine Flow. I’m your host, Joan Advent Maher. I’m a spiritual midwife and a transformational guide. Today, I want to speak with you about how we can honor and celebrate and partner with our emotional nature. And this is an important topic to me in part because I’ve always been a deeply, deeply emotional person. As a little girl, I was the feeler in the household, which means I was the one that was feeling everything that was going on in the family. And when others had pain, I was both aware of it, but also feeling it. And I have carried that into my adulthood. And some of you may recognize this as, uh, being empathic and that is a component of it. I am deeply empathic, but the fact of the matter is, that some of us, like myself, orient and process life first and foremost, through our emotional body, as opposed to our rational mind or our will center.
And so for those of us who are hardwired this way, our emotions are a significant part of our day to day life. And whether that is true for you or not, I’m guessing that you have encountered people like that, either in your family or in your life where feelings are at the forefront of how they experience their life. So I want to both discuss that piece, but also for all of us, our emotions and our emotional nature is important. So let’s start with that. Most of us live in a culture that worships the rational mind and that worships reasoning in our capacity to cultivate and strengthen our intellect. We also live in a culture that worships strength of body and of character, but there really is not a lot of attention paid to our emotions. In fact, most of what is portrayed is the value of having our emotions under control, being invulnerable.
And that leads to a way of perceiving life as linear and rational. And as we’ve talked about many times on this podcast, a more patriarchal perspective, a perspective of right and wrong. And I think about the Rumi quote, which I love, which says somewhere “Beyond right and wrong, there is a garden. I will meet you there” And I believe that it is in part our emotions that allow us to inhabit that garden beyond right and wrong. And so many of us, we’re not given the space to just feel what was true or just feel what we were experiencing in the moment emotionally. And we have learned to close it down, compartmentalize it, gloss over it, or toughen up and become invulnerable. There is such a glorification at this time in being bulletproof and frankly, pardon me, but it’s a bunch of bullshit because the strongest, most courageous people I know are those people who are able and willing to meet their tender, vulnerable feelings, those people that are willing to have their heart broken again and again and again, by being fully present in their lives.
And that means being willing to feel our feelings. And I don’t mean wallowing in a puddle of despair or grief or pain, but what I mean is learning and cultivating a facility and an agency in both being present to our emotions, allowing them to inform what we know and who we are, and to bring a fullness and a vibrancy to our, because as we know, if you’re not able to feel your pain, then you cannot feel your pleasure. You cannot feel joy. You cannot feel ecstasy. And that is our invitation. Our invitation is to be here fully alive and fully engaged with life and to say yes to it all, to lean in and to allow ourselves to be affected by life. And when we do that, we naturally have feelings. We have sadness, we have joy, we have emotional pain and we have ecstasy.
So we have the whole range. And so much of what we’re taught is to run away from the painful feelings from the vulnerable feelings. But the fact of the matter is, if we were able to just be present with the sensation or with the experience in the moment, it takes literally 90 seconds for the electrical chemical response in the physical body to register an emotion for it to complete its circuit, it takes 90 seconds. So it really is just like wind blowing through a screen that we can allow to flow and to move. And to the extent we can learn to breathe, to be present, to say yes to the experience, without the mind, hopping on board, to fill in the story, to keep the story, going, to keep the emotion going when we can just allow the pure sensation of the energy of the emotion to move through us.
It quickly shifts and evolves to something different. We have all witnessed that with babies or with young children it’s as if the storm comes in and they feel very intensely, whether it’s their anger or their sadness or their fear, they allow themselves, full-body, to experience it. And then it’s over. It’s like the storm has passed. They look up, they look around and it’s like, okay, what’s next? And they’re ready to move fully into life. So for most of us, somewhere between childhood infanthood and where we are today, we learned to cut off and shut down our emotions. And certainly, we need containers of support, and we need a loving presence in order to really feel free, to experience some of the more painful emotions of life. And we can create that for ourselves. But for most of us, we didn’t receive that fully along the way.
And we have those frozen stuck emotions that we’re still carrying around in our body and that we’re working to avoid. And it’s almost like hitting the pause button on the recorder or the video player where we get stuck in this state of suffering. And so the release of the emotion is never allowed to complete itself because I’ve said before that our system is always moving towards health, wellness, and wholeness, and that’s true of our emotional being and our emotional body as well. So if we can learn to breathe and be present with those feelings and know that they will pass, that we can have more dynamic and fluid life energy, we can have a more dynamic and fluid experience in our life. And again, sometimes that requires calling in supports for ourselves, finding those people who can tenderly hold a safe, protective, supportive space for us to just really let down into those deep feelings.
And to the extent that we can do that, it really makes space and expands our capacity for deep joy and ecstatic living. And now I want to do a special honoring and acknowledgment for those of you that are the sensitives that are the deeply emotional ones. One of the things I’ve come to realize because for most of my life, I really thought that having such potent emotions that I would need to stop, pause and process before I could tend to things or before I could think clearly I thought that it was a liability. I thought it was a weakness and certainly, my culture and my tribe and my family growing up did give me that message. But I have come to realize that it is one of my most powerful strengths. It is one of my most powerful gifts. And that is true for you.
As I know that I have a perceptive capability that is beyond most people because I am so deeply emotional. And I believe that if you are deeply emotional, you have that capacity as well. And we do have the necessity to learn to balance and partner with that emotional nature. And what I mean by that is to not lose ourselves in it, because that can be the challenge when we feel deeply to get lost in it and not keep our bearings and our capacity, to have one foot on the shore, even as we’re in the deep waters of emotion. So those are skills that we can learn. But once, once we do, we have incredible perceptive abilities and it’s not unlike how animals have a capacity to perceive things that we humans cannot. Those of us that feel deeply have perceptive abilities that are beyond the average everyday person.
And so I want to acknowledge and celebrate that we bring a unique kind of leadership and gift to the world that is so desperately needed because we are the ones I believe calling our brothers and sisters, our human family, back to our humanity back to remembering that when we treat each other badly, there is a price to pay. We are the heart of humanity and we are the ones saying, remember, look into my eyes and remember, sometimes the way we move through life is not in a neat package. Sometimes it’s a little messy and that can be intimidating and threatening to folks, but it’s oh, so potent and powerful, whether it’s the deep passion, the tender tears, the generous, loving heart, that is a gift that the deeply emotional person brings to the table. And all of our gifts are needed at the table. All of our gifts are needed in order for us to make the great shift, to shift out of these old paradigms and shift to a new way of being together.
And one way to do that is by both honoring your emotional nature. And if you are deeply emotional, recognizing that as one of your superpowers and one of your gifts. So that brings us to our close for today. Beloved, I do want to invite you again to join me in the Standing in Your Sovereignty three part series. It is my gift for you. You can sign up by going to standinginyoursovereignty.com and you will receive tools and practices, a blessing, and in vocation, all designed to bring you to that place of sovereignty within you. The place of choice, the place where you can see, recognize, and fully express your gifts in the world. And co-create a life that is a full expression of who you are. I would love to share that gift with you again at standinginyoursovereignty.com and until next time beloved always trust what your heart knows.