"Feeling your feelings" means locating the physical sensation a feeling creates in your body — the tight chest, the racing heart, the knot in your stomach — and giving it space to be there without analyzing or trying to make it go away. That's it. Not thinking about the feeling. Not narrating it. Actually being with the sensation itself, in your body, for as long as it needs.
I know, I know. That sounds almost too simple. But stay with me — because this took me years to get, and when it finally clicked, it changed everything.
The question I couldn't answer
For a long time, every coach I worked with would ask me some version of the same question: "What does that feel like in your body?" Or, "How does that feel?"
And I'd give an answer. A smart one, even. I'd say something like, "It feels like I'm not good enough," or "It feels like nobody actually wants me around." I thought I was nailing it. I was articulate. I was doing the work.
But those aren't feelings in your body. Those are thoughts. Interpretations. Stories. And I didn't know the difference.
Every time a coach asked me to go deeper — "But where do you feel that?" — I genuinely didn't know what they were looking for. I couldn't access it. I wasn't being difficult. I just didn't understand what they meant.
The coaches weren't wrong. It just hadn't landed yet.
I want to be clear: the coaches I worked with were great. Each one gave me something real. I made progress. I started seeing my patterns. I started giving myself more grace. That mattered.
But there was still a wall. I could describe what I was going through with incredible precision, and the actual feeling underneath it would stay stuck. I was doing the work — I just didn't have the last piece yet.
Then I started working with a coach named Kim Kimball (Kim Kimball Coaching), and something shifted. Kim didn't push. She didn't make me feel behind. She gave me space to arrive at it on my own — and when she explained it, it was so simple that I almost didn't believe it.
She said: just find the sensation.
That's it. The racing heart. The shortness of breath. The butterflies. The tingling in your arms. The tightness in your chest. Those sensations are the feeling. They're what everyone had been asking me to notice, and I couldn't even tell they were there.
The feeling isn't the story your brain is telling. It's the sensation your body is holding.
Kim helped me see that all I needed to do was let those sensations be there. Not analyze them. Not figure out what they were trying to tell me. Not make them mean something. Just allow them. Give them space.
How I actually do it
Here's what it looks like for me now. Something happens — someone's tone, a text that sits weird, a wave of dread before a hard conversation — and I notice the pull. The pull to spin. To overthink. To start performing.
Instead, I close my eyes. I imagine an empty chair in front of me. And I let whatever sensations are showing up have a seat.
The tight chest? Come sit down. The racing heart? You too. The heaviness in my stomach? Pull up a chair.
I don't try to make them leave. I don't ask them what they want. I just welcome them and let them be there.
It sounds weird. I know it sounds weird. But once I started practicing this on my own — giving myself a system for when something bothered me, when I felt overwhelmed, when the spiral started — everything started to change. I went from understanding myself to actually supporting myself. Changing from the inside out. My relationships got better. My decisions got clearer. The stuff that used to send me into a tailspin for days started moving through me in minutes.
What it's NOT
Feeling your feelings is not sitting in a dark room crying. (Though crying is welcome if it shows up.) It's not journaling about it for an hour. It's not analyzing where the feeling came from or which childhood experience it connects to.
All of those things can be useful at other times. But they're not the same as feeling the feeling.
The feeling lives in your body. The tightness, the heat, the shaking, the hollowness — that's it. That's the whole thing. You find the sensation, and you give it room to be there. A feeling fully felt lasts about 90 seconds. But most of us never actually feel it — we think about it, and that can last for hours. Days. Years.
We used to know how to do this
Here's something I think about a lot. Early humans didn't need instructions for this. They didn't have to "do extra" to feel their feelings. Everything was sensation. Fear came, the body responded, the feeling moved, and they moved on. There was no gap between feeling something and letting it pass through.
Then our brains evolved. And they are incredible — genuinely, spectacularly incredible. We can plan and build and reason and create. But somewhere in the process of becoming the most brilliant thinkers on the planet, we moved out of our bodies and into our heads. We started treating every feeling like a problem to be solved rather than a sensation to be felt.
That's not a flaw. It's just what happened. And the work now — if you want to call it that — is simply reconnecting. Getting back to what was always there. The body never forgot how to do this. It's been patiently holding all of it, waiting for you to come back.
I'm obsessed with this part of the human experience. The fact that we're wired for it. That it's not something we have to learn from scratch — it's something we get to remember.
What changed for me
Here's a funny thing: during my coach training, I was actually averse to somatic approaches. The whole "feel it in your body" thing? I didn't get it. It didn't click. I gravitated toward the cognitive frameworks, the models, the things I could think through.
Now? It's the thing I believe in more than anything. It just needed to make sense to me first. Once it did — once Kim gave me that space to understand how simple it really was — I couldn't go back.
And that's the piece I want you to know: if someone has told you to "feel your feelings" and you've nodded while quietly thinking I literally don't know what that means — you're not wrong for that. You're not behind. You're not doing it wrong. You just haven't had it explained in a way that landed yet.
The sensation is the feeling. Find it. Let it sit. That's the whole thing.
The point of being alive is to feel alive. And you can't get there by thinking about it.
