Learning to love ourselves is an art; and there are behavioral things we can do to truly perfect the art.

Please read the previous two blogs to understand where I am going with this.

Today I am looking at learning to love yourself by meeting your emotional needs. This can be a difficult area to work in because our society has not placed a high value on this. Instead, our society has taught us to move into our heads and intellectualize our feeling  needs. This can be likened to a heart by-pass and by doing this, we are eliminating a very important way of gaining information through our emotional nature.

Carl Jung, the famous Swiss Psychiatrist, taught there are four functions of consciousness or 4 ways of knowing. These four are: Thinking, feeling, intuiting and sensing. These four areas parallel the four categories of needs:  Thinking or meeting needs in the intellectual area; Feeling or meeting needs in the emotional area; Intuiting or meeting needs in the Spiritual Arena; Sensing or meeting needs in the Physical arena.

Today we are looking at the emotional arena. Again, I acknowledged that society for the most part has valued the intellectual arena first and foremost and almost always places a higher value on the intellectual arena.

However, our feelings are as important as the other areas of knowing. To learn to love yourself by meeting your needs in this area, it is important to know what each feeling indicates. I list the 4 major categories of feelings below:

SADNESS

If you have had a loss of any kind, you will have a feeling of sadness. Period! Though many people will talk you out of this feeling of sadness, my advice to you is to find a safe person who will simply be present to your sadness and let you talk about it.

ANGER

If someone has invaded your boundaries, whether emotionally, physically, intellectually or otherwise, your being will generate a feeling of anger. There is nothing wrong with anger!!!!!!!!  I will say this again, THERE IS NOTHING WRONG WITH ANGER!!!!. It is how we express it that causes the problem and normally we have seen anger expressed so violently that most people do all they can to avoid anger, conflict and disagreement. Again, anger is generated when our boundaries are violated. And, the thing to do when we notice anger is to be curious about it first and then to be willing to look at what happened and then to find a way to communicate this to the one that invaded the boundaries. This is a tall order, however and if you are reading this and are willing to learn how to communicate anger correctly, please call me if you have no  idea how to do this I would suggest using  the communication system created by Marshall Rosenberg called  “Non-violent communication”. ( just google this or call for a coaching session with me; this could change your life”.

FEAR

I think everyone knows what fear feels like. However, and once again, our society has taught us to ignore fear and we do this at our peril. Certainly, there is toxic fear that someone has learned to generate as a way of not dealing with life. However, if we could learn to pay attention to the experience of fear and then to look and see if in fact there is something dangerous, we would be able to keep ourselves on our own authentic path in ways that we may have never thought of before. There are a lot of people and things that SHOULD make us afraid. However, when we feel the fear and then pay attention to it and do something about it to make sure we are safe,  we are able to go about taking meaningful steps on our own authentic path.

JOY

Finally, the last major category of feeling is JOY and Happiness. Often, however, if we have shut down to knowing how to feel the other feelings, our capacity for feeling joy is greatly  diminished. Joy is often a natural by-product of being on our authentic path.

So, One of the best ways to love yourself in this arena is to accept that your feelings are important and be willing to own them and express them.

Two wonderful resources to help in this arena.

First, buy the Grief Recovery Handbook and do the work in the book. I cannot express to you how important this book will be  to your personal growth. I am also a certified grief counselor with the Grief Recovery Institute and I would love to help you do this work

The other resource is to buy Mark Nepo’s BOOK OF AWAKENING. He is so perfectly aware of the need to feel our feelings that if you would commit to reading his daily reading for one year, you would understand your feelings in a new way at the end of the year. Plus, his book will also be a way of meeting your spiritual needs as well.  So, you would be “launching 2 birds with one hand”.  ( my version of this idea 😉

Tomorrow, we will look at meeting our needs in the Intellectual arena………