What Your Feelings Know Before You Do

One of my longtime clients didn't know he was sad.

He was sitting in a lawyer's office, going through a deal process for his company. The valuations from the marketplace weren't what he'd hoped for. There was a number in his head all along, and the market wasn't giving it to him. But he wanted to sell and be done with it.

What he didn't realize was that he was grieving the exit he'd imagined. He thought he was being rational. So instead of feeling the sadness, he built around it.

He restructured the whole deal, and the contract he eventually signed told the whole story: it included a call option at exactly the number he'd always had in his head.

He ran that company for five more years, but the enterprise value didn't move by a dollar. Looking back, he could see what had happened: one unfelt feeling had shaped an entire chapter of his life.

A lot of people are running businesses they no longer actually want to be running, staying in partnerships that no longer make sense, way too busy, all because they're not willing to feel the sadness and grief of letting go of something.

And it's not just sadness. Most people are organizing their entire lives around the unwillingness to feel a single feeling, instead of around what they actually want.

All Emotions Are Love Through a Prism

I mentioned last week that I think of emotions as love through a prism. Each one is love expressed as something different, each one a pathway back to presence, back home.

Most people sort these into good and bad without realizing it. Joy and excitement: welcome. Fear, sadness, anger: push down and get past. But what you resist doesn't go away. It runs you from below the surface, the way it was running my client's way of structuring the deal.

You can't be present if you're not willing to feel a feeling that's arising in the present. In fact, one of the main reasons we go out of presence is to avoid the feeling. For example, there's anger. I don't want to feel that. So I go into my head and think about things, and now I'm no longer in reality.

How to Work With This

Step 1: Find it in your body.

Emotions are physical before they're conceptual. Each one tends to live somewhere specific:

• Joy: chest and core
• Sadness: eyes, throat, and high chest
• Anger: back, neck, and shoulders
• Fear: belly, often felt as a pit or butterflies in the stomach
• Excitement: an energetic sensation, which can be akin to sexual energy

When something arises, start there. Where in your body is it, and what does it actually feel like?

One thing worth knowing: when you're actually feeling an emotion, it tends to move through quickly, often in under two minutes. If a feeling seems to have been with you for days or years, as it had been for that client, you're likely in a thought loop about the feeling rather than actually feeling it. The mind generates stories about what the emotion means and those stories can run indefinitely. What you're practicing is contact with the sensation itself.

Step 2: Ask the wisdom question.

Once you've located it, get curious. Each emotion is a messenger pointing somewhere specific.

• Joy: What wants to be celebrated?
• Sadness: What wants to be let go of?
• Anger: What wants to be stopped?
• Fear: What wants to become known?
• Excitement: What wants to be created?

(Credit to The Conscious Leadership Group for this framework.)

On the Other Side of the Feeling

The sadness had been asking him to let go of that number, that version of the exit, all along. Once he stopped avoiding it and actually felt it, he did the work, let go, brought in a new CEO, and sold. He says he's happier and more peaceful for it, and that's worth a lot.

I've grown to love heartbreak. I look forward to anger now, and to sadness, and even to fear. The joy comes in cleaner. All emotions flow through the same pipe: if you're kinking it for fear or sadness, you're kinking it for love too.

Feeling all of it is how you get clear on what you actually want. And the more of the spectrum you're willing to feel, the greater your capacity to love.

With love,

Dave Kashen