A client of mine, who’s an executive in the middle of rewiring his nervous system toward more joy and calm, asked me a question recently that stopped me in my tracks:
Celinne, how do I feel my emotions?
I almost answered too quickly. But I’ve been asked this by so many extremely intelligent, self-aware, high-performing, heart-led human beings that I’ve stopped treating it as a basic question.
When I really think about it, it’s a question most people never get the answer to in a lifetime. We don’t have education systems or processes baked into modern society that actually teach us how to feel our emotions in a healthy way...
It’s kind of crazy when you think about it.
Here is what I’ll share. Feeling your emotions is really just three things. Sound, breath, and movement.
Sound — sounding, sighing, activating your vagus nerve. When you’re angry, there’s a sound. When you’re sad, it’s the whale. When you’re laughing, there’s sound that naturally emerges from your body when you’re in the emotion authentically.
Breath — when people are stressed, it’s really short. When people are relaxed, you have these long, slow, belly breaths. As a breathworker, I can tell so much about a person’s internal state just by watching how they breathe.
Movement — punching a pillow. Boxing. Letting healthy aggression move through. Or you’ve collapsed on the floor in a crying fit and curled into a ball. Ecstatic dance to a song that matches your grief. Your body knows how to express the emotion if you let it.
(I would also add a fourth one... choice, a.k.a. our ability to just decide and create a shift, but this is a story for another time!)
That’s really it. It’s so simple that it stuns people when they first hear it.
When I tell people this, I watch their face drop. Because that wasn’t actually the question.
The real question underneath the question is actually: why won’t I?
That is where I find people getting stuck. And that’s the real conversation — because if you walk around with stuck, unprocessed emotions every day, they become a big fat filter through which you see reality. (I’ve gone deeper into how this plays out specifically with our attention in Doomscrolling Again?.)
You start perceiving the world through whatever you haven’t felt. The decisions you make, the relationships you build, the things you create all carry that undercurrent. And the people who are most prone to this, in my experience, are the ones who appear to have the most figured out on the outside.
Most high performers don’t think they’re avoiding anything. They think they’re being productive, focused, disciplined, and sometimes they are... But there’s a tell.
It’s the urgency to check your phone the moment a hard thought lands. The sudden need to reorganize your inbox when a feeling rises. The dramatic situation that keeps repeating in your life that you can’t quite explain. The way you go cold the moment intimacy gets real.
This is the body’s strategy for not feeling what it doesn’t have capacity for yet.
The most useful question I know to interrupt this isn’t “what am I feeling?” — it’s “what would I feel right now if I didn’t reach for the thing?” That single pause is the doorway. It’s where the practice begins.
In the audio, I walk through why high performers, specifically, freeze at the doorway of their own emotional body... even after years of inner work. I share what the buffer period of “I don’t know how to do this” actually looks like, why sitting in that discomfort is one of the most underrated skills you can develop as a leader, and what changes in your decisions and relationships once emotions actually start moving through instead of staying stuck.
If you’ve been asking yourself, why am I still reacting this way after all the inner work? — this is for you.
TAKEAWAY: Your unfelt emotions become a big fat filter through which you see and sense reality.
Read The Burning Ground — I walked away from my unfulfilling life, bought a one-way ticket, and spent almost a year on a soul journey that took me across 18 countries — staying in the homes of 70+ strangers — to discover the purpose I’d been outrunning. This is the story of what I found on the other side, and what I’ve spent the last decade teaching. Pre-order now and receive an exclusive guided meditation and reader’s companion to guide you from where you are to your next transformation. Order your copy.
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