Feel The Feelings

Melanie left me with this drawing.

Some people are just born to be hypnotherapy candidates.

29-year-old Melanie is such a person.

She is young, but she is a troubled soul. Severe weight loss, feeling weak and tired, sexually assaulted at a younger age, physical pain and emotional turmoil.

She brought to the session two full pages of “My Intentions for Hypnotherapy”. Reading those words seemed to be a daunting task. Here are summarized items that she wanted to release through hypnotherapy:

All fear, shame, guilt, sadness, anger, depression, and anxiety through past life regression, future life progression and parallel probable lives.
Rape – feeling soiled, dirty and self-harm.
Bullying – feelings of being a victim; feelings of being trapped. Helplessness.
Feelings of being unworthy and unwanted.
Physical – parasites, fatigue, feelings out of the body, food restrictions, weight loss.
Failure to thrive, feeling of starving….

Then there were items she wants to remove, to reclaim, to reset and to reprogram.

I couldn’t even start to imagine how many years she needed to go through traditional talk therapy to resolve these many issues.

Needless to say, she is not working at the moment, with all those things going on in her life. She moved in with her mother.

Luckily, being a born hypnotherapy candidate, we worked it out with two sessions.

Each session, she brought her mother in, as she didn’t even trust herself driving a vehicle anymore. Melanie’s mother witnessed the sessions – what she called “miracle” – right in front of her eyes.

We did a spirit release session, where Melanie realizes that some of the emotions are not hers. And we did a past life regression session, where the girl Sarah was raped by her father after mother died.

What Melanie found the most useful through our sessions is the acknowledgment of her feelings. Melanie is an extremely creative and artistic person. She sings and is a vocal coach. She draws and paints. She writes. The ability to feel is very natural to her. There is nothing wrong with it, but it’s the personalization of those feelings and judgments of those feelings that got her.

In our work, I gave her suggestions to accept and feel those feelings without making them personal – To breathe in feelings, without resisting or fighting them. Melanie left my office feeling a new person. It inspired her mother to learn hypnotherapy.

We all want to feel, but when the feeling comes in, it confuses us, as it defies the mind. It defies all the structures that we have given ourselves and all of our dear controls. Feeling – true feeling, sensory perception – doesn’t like controls. Controls kill feeling.

What I observed in my hypnotherapy work, is that we say we want to feel. And when feeling starts to come in, we fight it. We try to turn off the volume on feeling. We try to temper it. We take feeling and turn it into a demon and a monster. We try to blame it on others or the world.

Perhaps it feels like a tidal wave of energy or consciousness that’s going to somehow roll over you and take you over.

When you accept feeling, it is actually an amazing thing because you don’t have to use hardly any of your mind energy to feel. You don’t have to use a control energy to allow feeling into your life. It is raw. It is intuitive. It is open. It is wonderful. It’s like taking an amazing ride in a powerful fast vehicle like you’ve never felt before. It’s exhilarating and perhaps a little bit frightening. But it is feeling.

Feeling is living.

Humanity in general tends to try to stop feeling in action. We’re talking about the ability to sense everything – the physical, the nonphysical – humans try to stop that. We live in a very mental society right now. Everything has to be facts and statistics and it has to be calculable. It has to fall within very rigid parameters.

To try to stop the feelings is to stop living. An odd thing happens when we deliberately try to stop feeling: we start to need some excitement in life because it feels dead – Maybe that’s why people can get addicted to drugs, porn or gambling.

We limit our feelings so we just do the ordinary functions every day, and life becomes so boring that we have to find some drama. So we either create it or we go out and pay for it, a scary movie, an amusement park. We spend money on a temporary thrill. We create some type of crisis just to remind ourselves for a moment that we’re alive and then we go back to not feeling anymore.

As when our own feelings try to come knocking at the door saying, “There’s something more genuine, there’s something very real, there’s something filled with spirit and life and love,” we close and lock the door to keep feelings out. We are afraid of feelings. We are afraid to sense life, afraid to sense other people. So we keep life out.

Feelings cannot take you over. Some people fear that a feeling will come in and they will never escape from it; it will own them. How can it own you when you are the one creating the feelings? Accepting and allowing yourself to sense the feelings is the quickest way to process them.

I feel Melanie. I feel her pain. I feel her joy as well. I feel them and that’s why I can sit there with her and my other clients. I’m not talking about thinking it or being aware of it from a distance. I’m talking about feeling it right within myself. I allow myself to feel them but I know they are not my feelings. It’s not about me, unless I want it to be.

I told Melanie, “When the intense feelings come, you wonder what’s wrong with you. You wonder if it’s your past life, your childhood, and you said maybe it’s your fate, or maybe you are just a hopeless person… You put that suit on and you wear it for the rest of the day. Maybe it’s not yours. Just because you feel it doesn’t make it yours.”

“Then whose feelings are they?”

“People around you… Humanity… Your ancestor… Your past lives… Does it matter?”

“So, I just tell myself they are not my feelings?”

“How do you feel now when you decide to tell yourself so?”

“Pretty free, actually.” Melanie looked up at me.

“Yes, feel it and tell yourself it’s not yours unless you choose it to be. Anything you don’t choose, is not yours.”

Melanie left me with all her pages of written affirmations – affirmations to fight feelings, pages of written goals – goals to feel less. “I don’t need those pages anymore. Do whatever you’d like with them. I’ll walk out of here clean, clear, and pure. Nothing needs to change, but it’s a big change, because now I know I’m okay, regardless how much I feel.”