Feelings are not only normal, they’re vital for healing

“People are all about ‘feelings’ these days, and it’s pure silliness,” was how the conversation started at church one Sunday.  When I hear people downplay the role of feelings, I generally get a little suspicious of why.  I stayed in the conversation, though, because I knew there was some middle ground to reach.

There is no question that our feelings need to be governed, otherwise we can end up damaging ourselves and others, but a total negation of our feelings?

I like to think of feelings as the wind that pushes a sailboat along, where thoughts are the actual sails and rudder; they help direct the boat to where it’s trying to go.

Ideally, in the healed way of things, all our feelings are acknowledged, for they are what they are.  From feelings comes the opportunity of the mind to reflect over the felt state — to not judge either ourselves as wrong or how another person or people cause us to feel.

The reason we all battle with addictions or maladaptive ways of dealing with our lives is we don’t relish the pain of the rawness of our feelings.

We might think, “Hey, I’m not addicted to anything,” but if you listened to a contemplative like Fr. Richard Rohr you might come to understand addiction in a different way.

Again, we escape many of life’s hard-felt situations because of how our feelings cause us to feel.

We cannot enter a state of spiritual healing until we sit with what makes us feel inadequate, ashamed, worthless, guilty, fearful, sorrowful, etc.

There is no easy way out of it.  But it’s also not rocket science.  It’s not hard to understand.  But it is hard to bear at times.  And we always must acknowledge that we never arrive.  Feeling our feelings is a practice.

If only we can feel our feelings — and as Fred Rogers would say, “Everything’s mentionable, so everything must be manageable” — without fear we enter God’s process for experiencing the healing our Lord has ordained for us to feel.

As these feelings are depicted as a wind — the Spirit of God — and we’re contented to feel however we feel — even the ugly feelings — we then have the power to set our sails so as to direct ourselves wherever we choose.

Your feelings are important.  But they are only productive if we’re able to sit in them and reflect over them, learning to accept them for what they are.  God’s healing presence comes within this process.  It may seem hard, but it is possible, and in this we experience the healing hand of God.

God’s healing hand is manifest when our ugly feelings are calmed to the point where we hurt nobody, neither others nor ourselves.

Photo by Jairph on Unsplash