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Becoming Conscious
of Your Feelings

by Karol Kuhn Truman

The place to start is to become mindful or conscious of what you are feeling, what you are thinking, what you are saying and what you are doing. The minute you awaken in the morning, access your first feeling and your first thought. That first feeling or thought of the day commonly sets the stage and the tone for the rest of the day. So, if that first feeling/thought is not to your liking, the choice is yours. Right then and there is the best time to change it with feelings/thoughts that ARE of your liking.

Become aware of any incident, comment, situation, or person that triggers in you some kind of discomfort response... when you feel something you don't enjoy feeling, or think something you don't enjoy thinking.

For instance: You're stopped at a stop light when it is red; it turns green but the person in front of you fails to see the green light and doesn't move forward. Do you impatiently honk your horn, get mad or upset and start calling that person all kinds of names? At the very moment this happens, what are you feeling?

What feelings are generated in the following situations:

1) Your neighbor down the street drives by in the brand new car that you would give anything to be able to own, but can't afford.

2) Standing in a long line at the supermarket, movie, bank, or restaurant, someone comes and breaks into the line.

3) The group of friends you associate with attend some activity and don't include you.

4) Someone makes a cutting remark about your abilities or your looks.

5) Someone else takes the credit for one of your original ideas. How do these situations cause you to feel?

As we sharpen our awareness we gather strong clues from the little daily incidents in our lives that will help us learn to identify what we are feeling and what we are thinking. Do you become disgusted with yourself for feeling a particular way whenever the same situation presents itself over and over again, and wish you didn't feel that way? This could be a definite indicator to you that the feeling involved with this situation is a good one to start working on and resolve.

For example, between the ages of 16-48, I accompanied many fine musicians at various functions. Very often my name would inadvertently be left off the printed program, or I would somehow be overlooked in spite of hours of rehearsal. There could be as few as three on the program or as many as 50, yet, often every participant but myself would be listed on the printed program. This caused me to feel slighted, left out, hurt, and overlooked. But what I felt most of all was, "I'm not important." (As you read on you will understand the significance of my feeling "I'm not important.")

I didn't understand why this was a continual scenario for me. With every similar incident I would experience hurt feelings no matter how many times I told myself, "It doesn't matter. It's okay. The important thing was that you did a good job." I thought of everything I could to talk myself out of the hurt feelings. And each time it happened I would tell myself, "Next time, I won't allow it to bother me." Even so, the next time the experience was repeated, those same feelings would hit me in the face.

In any situation, become conscious of what you are feeling, of what you are thinking, and whether it's comfortable or not. Be conscious of yourself and what you are experiencing in the moment. We all go through peaks and valleys with our feelings and emotions. Be aware of the peaks as well as the valleys and learn to recognize where the difference BEGINS. When you can identify where the shift occurs soon enough and often enough, the valleys won't be so low and your in-betweens (when you feel peace) will be of longer duration until you finally enjoy smooth sailing.

All too often our conditioning has been to turn our feelings and emotions off. Social restrictions often made it inappropriate to say what we truly felt or thought. Rather than learning how to appropriately address our true feelings/emotions we were led to believe that if we turned them off, somehow we wouldn't hurt inside. Instead, we have paid a high price by supposedly turning them off -- by always conforming. The price was that we lost touch with our true feelings. If and when we get back in touch with those feelings - when we face them head on -- our growth and progress will be much better served.

In order to remedy the negative effects any feelings/emotions have had in our lives, it is necessary for us to take responsibility for them and become accountable to ourselves for them. If we continue to deny feelings as they happen, and refuse to be accountable for them, there is NO growth. And even though we may deny our feelings, we can't sweep them under the rug. They don't and they won't go away.

To deny feelings doesn't mean they are dead or no longer exist, that the energies of those feelings are no longer present in your energy field. On the contrary, if feelings are not resolved, their energy remains stored inside you, and, like a yeast, this energy continues growing and expanding, gathering more and more energy -- resonating and joining forces with all similar feeling vibrations that are still inside your energy field. These energies create blocks like a dam in a ditch of water and short-circuit your system in more ways than you can imagine. If the feelings remain unresolved, this process continues to compound, and you could experience any number of disturbing effects. When you recognize these disturbing effects, be aware that alterations are now in order.

These unresolved feeling vibrations can never be considered dead and buried because they are energies that are still alive... resonating at some level. And these feelings WILL manifest themselves somewhere, sometime. Their vibrations are on-going. How liberating it is to know that any negative on-going vibrations you are storing inside you can be transformed into permanent, positive, healing energy vibrations.

Since energy matter is indestructible but possible to change, so, likewise, feelings, which are energy matter, are possible to change. You CAN change their vibrations from negative to positive. These negative feelings can be PERMANENTLY RESOLVED. And it is an exciting, fun, therapeutic, healing, and rewarding endeavor -- an endeavor which enables a person to tap the yet dormant, unrealized, and full potential that is within him. How do you accomplish this resolution?

In order to fill a container with new material, first, you must eliminate the old garbage. In other words, to replace the negative with the positive, it is first necessary to identify and process the negative so a resolution is possible. Even though it takes time and effort to accomplish your desired goals, when you are ready for changes in your life, you will be motivated to make a commitment to yourself and apply yourself to achieving an "inner healing." Just remember, what's going on inside you didn't happen overnight. It's unrealistic to expect the impact of years of negative feelings to disappear overnight.

This article is excerpted from the book "Feelings Buried Alive Never Die", ©1991, by Karol Kuhn Truman. Published by Olympus Distributing. Reprinted with permission.

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Spanish-language edition.

About The Author

KAROL KUHN TRUMAN is a practicing therapist, instructor, and counselor who specializes in reaching "core" issues and resolving them painlessly. She is also the author of Healing Feelings From Your Heart. For more info on her work, visit her website http://healingfeelings.com.

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