How To Expand Our Emotional Bandwidth and Invite Healing
We don’t know what we don’t know. And before I became a mother I did not realize how much emotional baggage I was carrying. I had spent much of life running away from the bad feelings and ugly emotions only to face them head on in the most sensitive periods of my life - early motherhood.
These are the steps I used to soften into allowing myself to expand my emotional bandwidth and invite emotional healing into my life.
Acknowledge
The first step in honing our skill of sensitivity is to acknowledge our feelings. It’s helpful to take a look at our past, has someone ever described you as “too sensitive”? Or perhaps people say the opposite, that you are “cold” or “numb”. It’s irrelevant what end of the spectrum we are beginning from. This gives us our sense of where our emotional bookends are.
To begin to acknowledge our feelings, we must ask ourselves how we can become more open to feeling? How can we take action to acknowledge the feelings as they come up?
It’s helpful to journal or meditate on these questions. Allow the body space to respond. In my experience, by being mindful and asking “what message this feeling is trying to transmit” has been helpful in acknowledging my feelings. It has connected me with my emotional body in a nonjudgmental way.
Feel
For some of us, we may have felt too much, through trauma or otherwise, and have developed a blockage within our energy body. Blockages can happen as a way of protection, or through unhelpful behaviors. Some signs that blockages are present within the body are: frequent illness or injury in same area/system, feeling stuck, ungrounded, or unbalanced. We may shut down when uncomfortable feelings arise in order to allow them to pass quickly or out of ease. When we lose connection to our feelings, the message they have, and allow that energy to move through us (remember, e-motion), we are placing thinking over experiencing. By doing this we become more closed off from our feelings and in turn, the feminine.
Integrate
How do we integrate our feelings? By allowing their meaning to be received. When you feel something, anything, arise in the body- notice it.
Take a moment to check in right now. What exactly are you feeling? Maybe it’s the chair under your bum, the blanket or baby on your lap, an achy lower back. Just notice what sensations are present for you right now.
Do not apply labels, or meanings. Just take note of what you are feeling in this moment.
Now, ask yourself, what message is coming through?
What is your body trying to communicate with you?
When we do this, we are opening space for integration to take place. For our feelings to transmit their message and therefore do their “job”.
Intimacy with Senses
Once we understand the message, or “job”, of our emotions, it’s important to become intimate with the senses. We do not want to feel pain, of course, but by avoiding pain we are limiting our spectrum of sensation. It’s like pushing those emotional bookends more closely together. By narrowing our ability to feel one way, we decrease our ability to feel the true bliss that is available to us.
To practice this, embrace all emotions equally. There are no “bad” emotions or “good” emotions. There are different sensations in the body. When we become intimate with these senses we understand them in a deeper way. Our feelings then become our guide to navigating energetic parenting.
Best Practice: We often ask “what do you think about that?” It’s a harmless question looking for someone’s perspective. A better way to ask would be “what do you feel about that?” By connecting someone to their feelings we are able to switch into the feminine. And gain a more valid insight into their perspective.
Along the journey to motherhood there are many checkpoints and moments where we easily shift out of our feminine energetics and into the masculine. (Remember, both are needed.) In order to thrive in motherhood, we need to bring about more balance in these areas that follow.
To continue reading, purchase Energetics of Parenting: A New Way of Being in Motherhood today!
I’d love to hear how these steps into deeper expression find you. Be sure to drop a comment to share what you were able to relate with and how this will change your motherhood experience.