Feel It to Heal It

From This Week's Love Letter

“You’ve got to feel it to heal it.”

“The only way out is through.”

These are phrases I’ve heard and used for most of my life as a healer. They point to something simple that can be incredibly difficult to practice: we have to be willing to feel what we feel.

Water is the element associated with our emotions. Our emotions are meant to move.

Think about what happens when we dam a river. The water doesn’t disappear. It collects. It presses against whatever is holding it back. Downstream, the places that depend on that water begin to dry up.

Our feelings can be like this too.

We learn to hold them in. Swallow the grief. Push down the anger. Distract ourselves from the fear. Sometimes we do this because feeling what is actually there seems too painful. Sometimes because we learned very early that certain emotions weren’t welcome.

But the feeling doesn’t disappear just because we don’t want to feel it.

And when we close ourselves off to pain, we also close ourselves off to joy.

We are water beings.

A newborn baby is about 75 percent water. That percentage changes as we grow, but for our entire lives, more than half of our bodies are made of water.

We carry water within us. We cry it from our eyes. We sweat it through our skin. We drink it to stay alive.

And we feel.

Grief. Anger. Fear. Longing. Delight. Wonder. Joy.

Our emotions move through us, changing us as they go.

And perhaps one of the greatest gifts we can offer another person is our willingness to share what we truly feel, and our willingness to stay present when they do the same.

This is how we see and are seen.

And I think being truly seen may be one of the things we crave most in this life.

So let the water move.

Feel what you feel.

You don’t have to fix it.

You don’t have to explain it.

You don’t have to make it mean anything.

Let yourself be moved.

The only way out is through.