How To Feel Your Emotions… And Ease Your Heart

You’re wondering how to feel your emotions without getting overwhelmed. Maybe you’ve spent years pushing feelings down, staying busy, or living in your head. Now something inside you is asking for a different way.

As a soul coach with over 25 years of experience in spiritual guidance, I’ve helped hundreds of people learn to feel their emotions instead of avoiding them. My book The Butterfly Silhouette: 12 Principles for Following Your Soul won the San Francisco Book Festival in both Spirituality and Poetry categories (2012), and teaches a framework for emotional and spiritual freedom. One of those principles—Principle 9: Pry Yourself Free—is all about releasing trapped emotions so you can live lighter and more authentically.

This article will show you how to feel your emotions in a way that actually heals you, rather than overwhelming you.

For a complete guide to soul healing including emotional release methods, soul lessons, grounding your energy, and soul alignment, read: Soul Healing: A Simple Guide To Joining Heart And Soul

The Feelings Lady

I had a client many years ago whose family called me the feelings lady. I guess she told them that I kept asking her to get out of her head and feel. Luckily she had a good sense of humor because “feel your emotions” is not the exciting message people want to hear! Myself included.

I was working hard on feeling emotions myself. And it wasn’t easy. I had so many buried emotions living inside of me. I understood these emotions intellectually. I knew I was angry. I knew I was hurt. But I couldn’t feel it. Why would I want to feel it!?

Yet Spirit tells us over and over to feel our way through this human experience. This is the tool Spirit gives us for moving energy out, healing, and becoming lighter. Well, that part sounds good!

Spirituality and emotions work closely together. So on your journey to elevate and expand your soul, feel along the way. Trust that your spirit team is holding you through it.

Your soul comes from this place of oneness, love and light. It’s who you really are. And, to be free of the past, we are encouraged to feel what we feel.

Why feel your emotions

We feel it to heal it. That’s how the body is made.

As you feel uncomfortable emotions and let them pass through you, you’re slowly healing your life. The physical sensations, the tightness in your chest, the lump in your throat—these are your body’s way of processing what’s stored inside.

In The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma, Bessel Van der Kolk writes, “Neuroscience research shows that the only way we can change the way we feel is by becoming aware of our inner experience and learning to befriend what is going on inside of ourselves.”

Allow the fear, hurt, heartache, and anger. Let them surface without judgment.

Van der Kolk adds, “As long as you keep secrets and suppress information, you are fundamentally at war with yourself. The critical issue is allowing yourself to know what you know. That takes an enormous amount of courage.”

Feeling your emotions is an act of courage. It’s also one of the 12 Principles I teach in The Butterfly Silhouette. Principle 9: Pry Yourself Free. It’s about releasing what’s trapped inside so you can live the life your soul came here to experience.

What Happens When You Avoid Emotions

Here’s something important to understand: unexpressed emotions don’t just vanish into thin air. They stay in your body, and that’s not healthy for you.

Think of your emotions like water in an old-fashioned teapot. When you ignore or suppress what you’re feeling, it’s like adding water to that teapot and turning up the heat. At first, the water is calm and manageable. You might tell yourself, “I can handle this. I don’t need to make a big deal out of it.”

But as you continue to push down your feelings, the water begins to heat up and simmer. You might notice your shoulders getting tense, or maybe you’re having trouble sleeping. Perhaps you find yourself getting irritated over small things that normally wouldn’t bother you. This is your body’s way of telling you that pressure is building.

That emotional pressure needs somewhere to go.

Here’s what often happens when emotions stay unexpressed:

• Physical tension that settles in your neck, jaw, or stomach
• Unexpected outbursts over seemingly minor issues
• Feeling overwhelmed by situations you used to handle easily
• A general sense that something is “off” but you can’t pinpoint what

According to John Hopkins Medicine, these uncomfortable emotions “make us feel bad, sap our energy, and lower our self-esteem.”

But when you give your emotions healthy expression, you’re releasing that pressure valve. Instead of waiting for physical symptoms or explosive moments, you’re allowing your feelings to move through you naturally. Your body can relax, your mind can clear, and you can respond to life from a calmer, more centered place.

The key is learning to feel your emotions as they arise, rather than storing them up until they become too much to handle.

How to Identify Your Feelings

You’d think identifying how you feel would be simple, but in my experience as a coach and human, it’s one of the most surprisingly tricky things we face.

Why? Because most of us live in our heads. We analyze, we overthink, we try to figure out our emotions instead of actually feeling them.

So here’s the first step: gently drop out of your head and into your body.

Yes, literally. Say a quiet thinking, thinking and shift your awareness downward. Into your chest. Into your heart. Your belly. Your throat. Anywhere you tend to carry stress.

Now, just notice what’s there.

What are the sensations? Tightness? Heat? A lump in your throat? A fluttery stomach? Do you feel like you want to crawl out of your skin, or curl into a ball?

These physical sensations are your emotional clues.

You don’t need to name the emotion right away. Start by noticing how it feels in your body. Let the body speak first.

The more you practice this kind of body-based awareness, the more emotionally fluent you become. And with time, feelings that once felt overwhelming or confusing start to make sense in a deeper, more compassionate way.

To help you identify the feeling, the Feelings Wheel by Dr. Gloria Wilcox is a fantastic resource. Some people refer to this concept as an emotions wheel to help you gauge your emotional state.

Simply Say: I Feel

Say, I feel… and state the feeling. For example, I feel afraid. I feel angry. I feel hurt.

Use I feel… instead of I am.

Because you are not the emotion, you are simply having the emotion or feeling the emotion.

Remember, you are 100% entitled to whatever you’re feeling. Emotions are not logical.

Uncomfortable vs. Negative Emotions

I don’t like calling emotions… negative. I prefer to think of them as uncomfortable.

Why? Because when we label emotions as negative, we subconsciously treat them like something to avoid, suppress, or judge. And that creates shame around simply being human.

Calling an emotion uncomfortable instead of negative softens our relationship with it. It reminds us that we’re not wrong or broken for feeling what we feel. We’re just experiencing something hard, and that’s okay.

Emotions aren’t your identity. They don’t define your worth. They’re signals, messengers, and sometimes sacred invitations to go inward and listen more closely to what your very real soul is trying to say.

Name It to Tame It

Dr. Dan Siegel, UCLA clinical psychiatry professor and neuropsychiatrist, is known for helping parents coach their children through their feelings, so they’ll express feelings instead of acting out.

His work is changing the ways parents and children relate to emotions. I’m personally very grateful for his groundbreaking work.

Dr. Siegel says that as we name how we feel, as we Name it to Tame it, the limbic brain calms down to some degree, helping us to feel calmer.

For example, saying: “I feel sad. I feel mad. I feel glad. I feel bad.”

In his book No-Drama Discipline: The Whole-Brain Way to Calm the Chaos and Nurture Your Child’s Developing Mind, Dr. Siegel writes…

“Imagine the last time you felt really sad or angry or upset. How would it have felt if someone you love told you, ‘You need to calm down,’ or ‘It’s not that big a deal’? Or what if you were told to ‘go be by yourself until you’re calm and ready to be nice and happy’? These responses would feel awful, wouldn’t they? Yet these are the kinds of things people tell kids all the time. When we do, we actually increase their internal distress, leading to more acting out, not less.”

Expressing Emotions Through Creativity

Journaling is a wonderful way of expressing emotions in a way that feels safe. Just be sure you give someone instructions to blow up the journal if they find it and you’re not around, if you know what I mean.

Creative arts like painting, drawing, writing, and acting are all great ways of expressing emotions.

Think of emotions as messengers, telling us what we need.

Expression of emotions is a very important part of caring for the soul. Plus, it’s a key part of healing your life and following your soul’s path.

Obviously, people enjoy comfortable feelings like happiness, joy, and excitement. However, uncomfortable feelings like fear, anger, and anxiety all play an important role in our life.

Remember to Breathe

It’s important to breathe throughout as you’re expressing your feelings. Take a deep breath or a few deep breaths to calm down the body.

This breath count works very well for calming down: Inhale 4 counts, pause at the top, and exhale 8 counts.

Breathing signals your nervous system that you’re safe. It creates space between you and the emotion, allowing you to feel it without getting swept away by it.

Self-Talk for Feeling Emotions

Your feelings are yours and yours alone.

When you try to express them, you may feel tongue-tied. That’s understandable because when we’re upset, we don’t think as clearly.

As you become comfortable expressing your feelings in your own head, you become more likely to express your feelings to others.

Here are positive self-talk examples to help you.

First, here’s what your inner dialogue might sound like as you’re realizing how much you’ve been ignoring or suppressing how you feel.

“I love myself enough to let myself feel this way, even though all my life I’ve worried that I’m too sensitive. And it hurts to hear it because as a result of being told that I’m too sensitive, I find that I dumb down my feelings and I swallow them and ignore them, and suppress them. I am not allowing myself to feel what is naturally coming up for me, and I’m not going to do that anymore.”

I Honor What’s True

“I’m going to honor whatever feelings come up in a way that respects me and respects others.”

“I will not ignore my emotions any longer.”

“So when I’m angry, I’m going to allow myself to feel angry. I’m going to find healthy ways to handle that anger and express my feelings.”

“And when I feel afraid, I’m going to feel afraid. I will find nurturing ways to feel safe, decrease my fear, and allow it to exist in my life. I am human and fear is part of this human experience.”

I Give Myself Space

“As with all these emotions that are uncomfortable for me and uncomfortable for other people, I love myself enough to allow the space to feel it.”

“I give myself the time each day to feel whatever comes up because I know that when I’m really busy, I tend to ignore how I feel.”

“And instead of feeling it, I might do things to distract myself from feeling it. I know that doesn’t serve me. I know that doesn’t love me.”

How Am I Feeling Now?

“I am honoring how I feel by showing up for it each day and asking myself: how are you feeling at this moment?”

“And then being honest with myself, with how I feel, and then allowing myself to feel it. This is a habit I am creating so that I don’t ignore how I feel.”

“I am committed to honoring my emotions so that I can be healthy and I can be open to what’s happening in my life.”

“I love myself enough to allow myself to feel this way.”

For effective strategies on negative self-talk, here’s how to change negative self-talk patterns.

Final Thoughts

We feel it to heal it. That’s how the body is made.

As you allow yourself the full range of your emotions, you bring them to the surface where they can be processed and healed. Part of your destiny includes healing the fear, hurt, heartache, and anger. Give yourself enough grace to do so.

This is what Principle 9—Pry Yourself Free—is all about. When you feel your emotions instead of suppressing them, you create space for your soul to breathe. You become lighter. You become freer.

And as you do, you’re helping heal yourself and the planet.

This article is part of my comprehensive guide on soul healing. To learn more about emotional release techniques, soul lessons, grounding practices, and how to align with your soul’s path, read the full guide: Soul Healing: A Simple Guide To Joining Heart And Soul