Owning Our Feelings

Naming and owning our feelings—our emotional responses to what is happening around us—is key to experiencing natural joy. However, many of us do not know how to recognize the feelings we are experiencing, let alone, how to stay with them. There are three main challenges that we face when learning how to own our own feelings:
The first challenge: allow ourselves to acknowledge the existence of our feelings.

• Many of us have learned to push our feelings down, or distract ourselves from what we feel so that we can deceive ourselves that we are not feeling anything at all. 

The second challenge: name the feelings.

• Learn to identify what the feeling experienced is: sadness, anger, elation, fear, etc.

The third challenge: own and take responsibility for our feelings.

• Feelings do not come from outsides of us, they arise from within. Therefore no one else can be assigned responsibilty for what we feel but ourselves. Others can a be a catalyst for what we feel, but they are never the source.