Honoring your feelings
is healing
to your heart

Do you know what you are feeling at this moment? Do you speak up and share your feelings?

When you honor your feelings, you come to your own aid with empowerment. Listening to your feelings gives you information that helps resolve inner struggles and needs. Without knowing your feelings, you neglect a basic need that enables you to be happy and free.

Habitually stuffing down feelings leads to a practice of low self esteem. It sends a message that you and your feelings are not important or worthy of being known.

Have you ever been told by someone, “You shouldn’t feel that way?” There is no “should” in feelings. Feelings simply are.

Rather than being defined by your feelings, look at your feelings from a point of observation and learn about yourself. Feelings are interesting. They tell us when we feel fear, anger, hurt, guilt, sadness, shame, and when we feel like crying. They tell us how we view ourselves. They also help us identify what makes us feel touched, joyful, optimistic, glad, calm, free, grateful, relieved, and proud.

There are millions of feelings! How many can you identify right now? Can you feel your feelings – negative or positive – without fear? Can you give yourself permission to look at your feelings regardless of others’ opinions?

Honoring your feelings means that you are open to knowing them. And open to speaking up to honor them.
Some feelings are so overwhelming that it may take courage to face them. Once faced, however, they can receive your love and honoring. Some of us have been conditioned to think that certain feelings are wrong. We feel ashamed for even feeling them! So we accept the false belief that when those feelings arise, they should be ignored and left unexamined.

We all suffer from not knowing our feelings. Without knowing and honoring your own feelings, and without speaking up, your actions will fail to represent you and often confuse others. By daring to look at negative feelings within, you see how much pain they are causing you.

By honoring your feelings, you allow them to surface so that you can know yourself and honor yourself more openly. You discover how to make better decisions and create new habits that free you. You learn how to speak your feelings in a loving way. Healing emerges – even physical healing.

A wonderful way of discovering your feelings is through journaling. This helps you discover the power of identifying and validating your feelings and allowing no one else to tell you what you are feeling, or that your feelings are wrong. Journaling lets you speak up – to yourself.

Love yourself by listening to your feelings, honoring them, and validating your right to feel what is within.

Affirmation

My feelings are valid & valuable.
I deserve to know my feelings & express them with love

Action Step

In silence with yourself, get in touch
with your most positive feeling & your most negative feeling today
& honor these feelings as valid & valuable.
Then share them openly – and with love – with a good friend
or the person who most needs to hear them