Name That Feeling   😊

I can remember a late night host sketch about the man in the street asking people how many feelings they could name. The ones most often identified and familiar to us are: Angry, Happy, Sad, Fear. There is one feeling that is often left off of the list that many of us may include on our list. The feeling is love. ❤️ Love is the feeling that is different from the others. What makes love different from other feelings? It doesn’t have to be taught to us. It is a feeling like no other in that it is pure and natural in its origin. We are born out of love and created perfectly in love. The first relationship of love is with ourselves while we are developing in the womb. This kind of self-love has no attachments or conditions. It starts with us from the inside- out and then we may share it with others.

The feeling of fear is different from the feeling of love because fear is taught to us by others for the purpose of control. It is used as a means to control our performance and promote our behavior to be for the benefit of others. This programming teaches us to find our validation from the outside- in based upon our performance. Fear is introduced to us by others to get us to shift away from living in this self- love that we are designed perfectly in. The fear is taught to us in the form of three feelings that can be identified as guilt, blame and shame. If we choose to consider loving ourselves first before others, then we are described as being selfish. Selfish is one of those powerful words to keep us imprisoned with these guilt feelings that promote unselfish choices, which then will influence our behavior to promote others before ourselves. The word selfish is part of the programming to keep us humble and not shine for ourselves. We become a shadow in the background or totally invisible to ourselves.

We do have different options to choose from though. The first option is to view the word selfish differently. Selfish simply means loving self as we are perfectly designed to do. We have been programmed to view selfishness as being judged as something bad and unwanted. As a result of this programmed view, we are reluctant to put ourselves first. We have a choice to see ourselves as worthy of loving ourselves without judgment. We first have to acknowledge all of our feelings in such a manner that we don’t view them as good, bad, right or wrong for having them. All of our feelings are valid and are worthy of being experienced in whatever way we choose to experience them. We are free to acknowledge the feelings of joy, happiness and compassion for both others and ourselves, which then allows for the full expression of them and for us to shine brightly from the inside- out, which is part of our perfect design.
Once we give ourselves permission to acknowledge all of our feelings without attaching any judgment to them, we are in a place to choose differently. We can have more of a balance in the choices we make and shift from making choices from a place of judgment to a place of worthiness to make ourselves as much of a priority as we make others and to then share ourselves in our relationships with others. This choice is making a shift from an exclusive focus of always being selfless to an inclusive shift that allows for ourselves to be selfish at times and be at peace with the way we demonstrate love to ourselves and others because we are all worthy of it.