Why Sitting With Your Feelings Is So Hard

Sitting with your feelings is hard because you likely learned a long time ago that it wasn't safe to feel. Something in you moves away from the emotions almost before the feeling has fully arrived. That pattern was intelligent. And the fact that it's still happening, even when the original situation changed decades ago, makes complete sense.

The nervous system doesn't update itself automatically. It updates through practice. Through the slow, patient experience of staying with something difficult long enough to find out it doesn't destroy you. That's what somatic work is. Not a technique or an exercise program. A practice of staying, just a moment longer than you usually do, until the feeling can complete.

If you'd like to explore this more before reading on, this week's coaching video goes into the full teaching: Why Sitting With Your Feelings Is So Hard

Or keep reading.

Have you ever noticed how much energy goes into not feeling something?

It may not be super obvious or a dramatic suppression of someone white-knuckling through a hard moment. We find subtle and imperceptible ways to not feel our feelings. The way we "need" to check our phone right as something starts to surface. The way a to-do list suddenly feels urgent. The way your mind moves toward the problem of the feeling instead of the feeling itself.

I spent most of my adult life doing exactly that. I would stand in the kitchen in the early morning, already running through everything that needed to happen that day, and something would stir in my chest. Something I hadn't made space for. And before it had a chance to arrive, my mind was already on it. Naming it. Categorizing it. Looking for the insight that would make it safe.

What I didn't understand was that the analyzing was its own kind of leaving.

Staying in the head can feel like engagement with the feeling. However, it's a very sophisticated way of being somewhere else. And the feelings I was trying to understand kept showing up again, because they were never actually felt. They were only thought about.

Feelings, when they're given enough space, move. They arise, they peak, they shift. This is the part most of us never get to see, because we leave right before the peak. Right at the moment when it gets most uncomfortable, something in us turns away. And the feeling goes back underground, back into the tissues, back into that familiar tightness in your chest or your shoulders or the base of your throat. And the next time something slows you down enough, there it is again.

The body holds what hasn't been finished.

That instinct to move away has a very long history. At some point, most of us learned that our emotional experience was more than the people around us could hold. Maybe it happened in small ways. The way a conversation changed subject when you cried. The way a parent insisted you were ok because they were uncomfortable with your pain. The way a room got quieter when you expressed something too large. Children adapt. When a child learns that her emotional experience creates difficulty or discomfort for the people they depend on, they learn to move through feelings quickly, or to skip the processing altogether. To stay on the surface where things are more manageable.

That was brilliant. And the fact that you're still doing it years later means the nervous system is faithful. It has been practicing this for a long time.

But just because you learned to survive that way doesn't mean you have to keep surviving that way.

What somatic practice offers is an orientation or an intention. A willingness to turn toward physical sensation with curiosity rather than alarm. To notice where the sensation lives, what it feels like, whether it has a quality, such as heaviness, heat, a kind of aliveness or pressure. To stay curious instead of urgent. To not decide what the feeling means before it has had a chance to tell you itself.

The tools are not complicated. They're compassion and patience. Compassion means you bring the same quality of presence to your own inner experience that you would offer someone you love who is struggling. You don't try to fix it or rush it. You stay. Patience means you trust that the feeling is going somewhere, even when you can't see where.

The capacity to be with your inner experience is a skill. It gets built slowly, the way any capacity gets built, through practice and through small moments of willingness. You don't have to become someone who loves sitting with difficult emotions. You just have to be willing to stay a moment longer than yesterday. That's the whole practice. 

I have a few resources for you to support the practice of being with your feelings.  Stay tuned for next week's follow along open heart somatic movement practice. And there will be more to come of this style of video on The Mindful Movement Coaching channel.

This week's meditation: Vagus Nerve Sleep Hypnosis for an Overloaded Nervous System can also be supportive.  

Or give this short Somatic Centering Meditation a try.

If this resonates and you want to keep exploring, the Returning to Yourself free journey is a gentle place to begin.

A question I hear often: What if I start feeling something and I can't stop?

That fear makes complete sense, and it's worth naming. The body doesn't give you more than you can hold in a given moment — it protects you naturally by offering only what you're ready to be with. If something feels like too much, you can always bring your attention back to physical anchors: the surface beneath you, the weight of your hands, the feel of your feet on the floor. You are always allowed to slow down.

You might also wonder: What's the difference between feeling my feelings and just wallowing in them?

The difference is movement. When you stay with a feeling somatically, you're staying with the sensation in your body while keeping a thread of awareness that can witness what's happening. Wallowing usually looks like rumination — circling the story, not the sensation. Somatic practice moves your attention from the narrative to the physical experience. And physical experiences, unlike thoughts, tend to complete.

Much love,

Sara