Learning to Feel Again

I am very good at thinking.

Give me something difficult and my brain will happily analyse it from seventeen different angles. Why did that happen? What does it mean? What should I do? What’s the lesson here?

Thinking has served me incredibly well. But I’m beginning to realise that not everything needs to be understood. Some things need to be felt.

That sounds ridiculously simple. It isn’t.

There is a difference between knowing you have a body and actually inhabiting it. For years, I think I experienced much of life from the neck upwards. My body was something that carried me around. Something I exercised. Something I expected to keep going while my mind made most of the decisions.

But the more I’ve explored Sophrology, movement, breath, dance and different forms of embodied practice, the more fascinated I’ve become by how much is happening beneath our thoughts.

I’ve started noticing the tiny signals. A tightening in my chest. Warmth spreading through me. Butterflies. Goosebumps. My shoulders relaxing. A feeling of expansion. The instinct to move towards something. The instinct to pull away. The way certain people, places or experiences change the energy in my body before I’ve even had time to think about why.

Music has been a huge part of this for me. There are moments when I’m dancing and something happens that I couldn’t explain if I tried. I’m not thinking about how I’m moving. I’m not thinking about how I look. I’m not trying to get anywhere. I’m just there. In my body. Feeling.

And I think that’s something many of us lose. We become so accustomed to analysing our experience that sometimes we forget to actually have it.

We rationalise. We explain. We judge. We tell ourselves what we should or shouldn’t be feeling.

I’m trying something different. I’m learning to notice first.

That doesn’t mean every sensation is a sign or every feeling needs to become an action. Our bodies aren’t infallible. But I do think they deserve a seat at the table.

Pleasure. Discomfort. Excitement. Fear. Tenderness. Grief. Joy. Connection. Aliveness. All of it.

Maybe being connected to ourselves isn’t about feeling good all the time. Maybe it’s about becoming willing to feel what’s actually there. To experience an emotion without immediately needing to change it. To notice what our body is communicating before our mind writes a story around it. And to trust that sometimes we don’t need to understand an experience for it to be meaningful.

I’m discovering there is an enormous amount of information below the neck.

I just had to get quiet enough to hear it.