Feelings
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Transcript: Jesus didn’t suppress his feelings. Find wholeness via feelings you aren’t letting yourself feel
Jesus could feel his feelings and talked about them all the time. He expressed his feelings and acted according to them. He didn’t apologize for his strong feelings. When he spoke to the religious leaders of the day, cleared the temple, or cursed the fig tree, he acted from that place. When he went to the home of Lazarus, he wept. When he felt abandonment in the garden, he asked his disciples, “Why couldn’t you even stay with me for a few hours?” He felt so alone and abandoned by them.
Feelings are the human experience. The linguistic, interpretive layer is just a small percentage of your nervous system. You feel what you have going on before you even say it. But culturally—not just in Christianity—we are taught to ignore how we feel and instead prioritize how we think.
For example, when I was in Campus Crusade for Christ, we had the “faith, facts, feelings” choo-choo train. Faith—which now I would call dogma—was first. Facts were defined as whatever that dogma told you was true. And feelings were considered subordinate to both faith and facts. The teaching was that your facts should be subordinate to your faith, and your feelings subordinate to your facts. But really, that’s exactly backwards.
Think about how this shows up: someone says, “I’m so sad that my friend died,” and the response they get is, “Well, they’re in heaven.” Or someone shares, “I’m unhappy with such and such,” and the reply is, “Well, God doesn’t want you to be ungrateful.” In each case, an intellectual concept invalidates the feeling. But you can’t stop having a feeling. Instead, you suppress it. You deny it. Yet it still lives in you, and you still feel it.
This happens day in and day out, week after week. You keep suppressing your feelings until they all blur together into one big ball of unresolved emotion. At that point, you can’t even tell which feeling went with which thought. That’s when we become completely divorced from our bodies. The mind and body become disconnected because we’ve trained ourselves to intellectualize everything.
Unwinding that disconnection is critical to spiritual connection. We don’t connect to God through intellectual frameworks. We don’t reason our way to God. We connect spiritually through other parts of our being, not the thinking part. To do that, we first need to feel our bodies and understand what’s happening in them. A good therapist can help with this process, because unpacking it can be overwhelming. Once it starts unraveling, it can move fast and feel like too much.
But this journey is so worth it. It’s like having lived your whole life in a small room, believing that room was the entire world. Then one day you bust a hole in the wall, step outside, and realize you were only living in 2% of reality. Suddenly, there’s texture and richness to life. You’re connected. You’re experiencing things.
True connection, true wisdom, the fruits of the Spirit—these are not intellectual things. They are aspects of how the other parts of our being operate. They come from parts of us we forget even exist when we live entirely in our heads.
Transcript: Morning Practice
Good morning. I’m doing my morning journal process and I thought I would share that. Where I start is I just listen to every part of me that’s coming up in the moment. The biggest thing right now is I have a pretty intense sensation in my upper chest—quite anxious and fearful. My heart’s kind of pumping. So, I’m just going to write that down: I have a chest anxiousness. As I turn my attention towards it, I’m noticing it’s quite acute. I’ve actually got a shudder in my voice. There’s a little bit of a tremor in my body. Now, I did have a full pot of coffee, so I want to keep that in mind, but it feels like more than that. It’s pretty intense.
What I’m doing is I’m just being with it and letting it get as big as it wants. As I be with it, I notice how I’m feeling towards it. Part of me wants it to stop and says, “This is not how I want to feel. We need this to stop.” I’m just letting that idea—that this needs to stop—drift away for a moment. I’m not fighting that idea, but I’m asking it to just give me some space so I can be with this anxiousness in my chest. The anxiousness is actually settling now. I’m breathing deeply, which is helping my nervous system by sending signals that everything’s okay. There is no tiger in the bushes. This existential dread is not a physical threat right now.
Sometimes when I go through this, I have a little wave of grief, some tears, or maybe my body will shudder. I attempt to keep my body relaxed and really let it do whatever it spontaneously does as I attune to this sort of thing because my body has wisdom. It knows how to actually process this energy if I simply allow that. I’m attuning to the God image within myself and connecting that to the ball of anxiety. Now I’m asking the anxiety what it needs from me. I’ve been being vulnerable on the internet this week, and that seems to be related to it. This is in my attachment system—parts of me who always want everybody happy with me, parts who have been abandoned and want to always do the right things to make sure people don’t abandon me again.
There are also parts of me who don’t want to ruffle feathers or create crises of faith or problems for other people. There are parts who fear retribution, being misunderstood, mischaracterized, slandered, or shamed. The anxiety dissolves as I acknowledge all of that. I bring the part of me who wants the approval of people on the internet to the God image within me and say, “Look to that. That is your parent. That is your love. That is who you need the approval of—who gives it to you always, no matter what.” I also say it’s okay to want the approval of other people. It’s okay that the connection this part of me craves with members of my family and people I’ve known in the past—people I feel disconnected from these days—is something it wants, even if it isn’t possible and probably never will be. That grief is okay. It’s appropriate to feel sad about it. In fact, I wouldn’t want to not feel sad about it.
The anxiety has subsided. There’s a little shakiness in my hands, but again, could have been too much coffee. Now I notice a part of me who’s worried about work. I’m asking it what it needs me to know. It needs me to know that my job is important, paying the bills is important, and being able to help my family when they need it is important to me. I’m noticing that some of that is also rooted in fear and attachment needs. But of course, that’s all okay. This is me down here on Earth having a human experience, and part of that is connection needs and physical needs.
I also have a part who’s excited about today. I’ve been alone all week while my wife’s at a retreat, and I’m going to see her today. That’s been quite hard for this part of me, and it’s excited that’s ending. I’m also noticing we’re traveling tomorrow, and there’s some anxiety around that. I’m writing each of these down, and the part feels acknowledged and seen when I do that. I just come back to neutral, letting the motor idle, and write down the next thing that comes up. If another part says, “You’re not supposed to feel that way” or “Don’t write that down,” then I have two things to write down—the part I’m experiencing and the part who doesn’t like it or thinks it’s inappropriate. I just get it all on the page.
I’m offering love and connection to each of these parts of myself. All of their points of view make sense. After I’ve written them all down, I cycle back through them and notice if there are any polarities—parts conflicting with other parts. If so, I listen to that argument from a place of spiritual connection and keep asking what needs to happen until it untangles itself.
Finally, I close by thanking all the parts for sharing with me and making their needs and desires conscious instead of acting subconsciously and causing me to self-sabotage outside my awareness. I invite all these parts to notify me today if they become upset again and need my attention. That’s my morning practice. During the day, I sometimes do it if I find I’ve lost my way, feel stuck and looping, or have a heavy sense of dread, shame, or worthlessness. I can come back to this same exercise—writing down what’s coming up one thing at a time, giving each one my full attention, while making sure I’m spiritually connected. That’s my process.
Transcript: Freak Out? Numb Out? Why Polyvagal Theory is probably the best place to start in Mental Health
Your vagus nerve stretches from your brain stem. It goes down into your body around your stomach and has connections that go throughout your whole body. It comes back up from your stomach and actually innervates your vocal cords, terminating higher up. The purpose of the vagus nerve—within the framework of polyvagal theory—is to regulate the fight, flight, freeze, and fawn responses in our systems.
This explains a lot and is probably one of the most useful places a person could start when looking into mental health. We are all familiar with fight or flight. For example, if you’re at the grocery store and the woman ahead of you starts shaking and screaming at the cashier, her nervous system has shifted into fight-or-flight and she is completely out of control in her ability to manage what’s happening. When you’re in these activated states, whole regions of your brain go offline. You lose access to skills, memory, and abilities you normally have. People who experience this frequently may not even remember what happened during their activation. This can create a “Jekyll and Hyde” effect, where they don’t realize how their responses are affecting others.
The amnesia effect is strong because people often carry tremendous shame. Public freakouts are embarrassing, and to manage the shame and horror, the nervous system blocks memory. This isn’t their fault—it’s the outcome of a traumatized nervous system trying to function in the world. While many know about fight or flight, fewer understand freeze and fawn. That’s the vagal takeover I have experienced more in life. It feels like numbing.
Imagine a little boy being screamed at by a caregiver. As the yelling continues, his eyes glaze over, and he begins to sway and fade away. When the adult shouts, “Are you listening to me?” the boy snaps back, makes eye contact, listens—and then begins drifting away again. What’s happening is that the child’s nervous system is saying, “I can’t fight. I can’t flee. I’m going to shut down.” His body floods with shutdown hormones and he fades out. Today, when I’m in conflict, I can literally feel a wave of shutdown sweep across my system. After years of work, I’ve learned to connect with it, ask it to let me stay present, and remind myself that this situation is not life-threatening, even though it feels that way.
The nervous system is very primitive. It exists even in reptiles. It’s not verbal—you can’t reason with it. You have to connect with it and let it know things are okay, and you must do this before it takes over. That requires cultivating awareness, a “witness” within yourself that notices what’s happening. When our systems get triggered, we often push away the feelings or thoughts. That avoidance forces the nervous system to escalate into extreme responses, because all it senses is rejection: “You don’t exist.”
Instead, when you notice someone is triggering you, you can connect with your nervous system and reassure it that you’re okay. You can ask it to let you remain engaged, present, and able to participate in life. Befriending your nervous system takes time, practice, and a lot of self-compassion when you fail and fall back into old modes. Both fight-or-flight and freeze responses are incredibly destructive to relationships. In freakout mode, others can’t trust you because they never know who they’ll get. In freeze mode, conflicts remain unresolved because one partner becomes unavailable.
Often in relationships, especially heterosexual ones, men are more prone to freezing out. As boys, they were often overwhelmed and taught to numb, so as adults they disconnect and shut down. Meanwhile, their partner becomes more activated because she feels abandoned, which escalates the cycle. It’s crucial for couples to recognize this dynamic and learn to stay present together during difficult moments.
Awareness is the key. Sometimes, you get warnings hours or even days before activation. Anxiety may build around finances, seeing someone who triggers you, or facing a difficult task. If you notice this, you can connect early with your system. For me, with numbing, I’ve built a relationship where I can beg it to trust me: “Please let me stay. I can handle this.” At first, it didn’t trust me, even though I could sense it listening. That phase lasted months. But now, I rarely numb out. If it starts creeping in, I address it quickly by staying ahead of my triggers.
We want to send signals to the nervous system that things are okay. There’s no tiger in the bushes, no enemy tribe, no imminent starvation—yet these are the threats it was designed for. It isn’t built for modern stressors like social media, mortgages, or existential worries. So we must connect with it differently.
Because the vagus nerve wraps around the stomach and vocal cords, there are “somatic doors” you can use to work with it. The stomach is an early warning system—tightness or unease there signals activation. The larynx is another: humming can calm the vagus nerve. When you hum, you vibrate the nerve and reassure your body that things aren’t dangerous. If you’re relaxed enough to hum, the nervous system accepts that it’s safe.
In this way, working with the nervous system is a lot like working with a cat. You don’t control it; you befriend it. How long it takes, how you soothe it, how you earn its trust—all vary. If you’ve ever lived with a cat, you already know much about how to gently build trust with your nervous system.