Welcome to the True For You podcast. This is your host, Renee Cupples. Today is day 10 of 40. We're doing a 40 day series where I show up for five minutes a day to share my experience with sadhana and why a practice like this is something you might wanna lean into. A sadhana in yoga is a 40-day practice that leads to self-realization. And in week one, we went over the basics of sadhana, and in week two, we're diving a little bit deeper, some additional practices that help to expand the daily practice, some tools and some things that might help us go a little bit deeper. 

And today is all about feelings. The area of the body associated with feelings is actually our second chakra, just below the navel, and the hips are said to be the seat of our emotions. And sometimes when you practice yoga, meditation, check in with yourself intentionally, daily, repeatedly, you might feel some feelings. You might have some things rise up and that you notice. And a lot of times I think with feelings, we often do not want to feel them. They show up in often the most inconvenient times, right? And even in the privacy of your own home, your own space, in a safe space to feel your feelings, they can often feel very uncomfortable. You can well up with emotion, and it can feel vulnerable to feel that and to process that. 

I would say that an important part of feeling your feelings is allowing yourself to feel, giving yourself permission to feel, to process it all the way through. You might not solve that feeling in the moment that you're feeling it, but allowing it to rise up and pass through and kind of live its arc, right? And, to not run away from it, to fully feel it. Maybe you feel where in the body you're feeling it. Maybe there doesn't have to be an answer as to why you're feeling it. And that processing piece, journaling or processing after your daily practice, can allow you to help, uh, process your emotions. Just maybe record what came up, and just really being gentle with yourself. 

And if you're a deeply feeling person like myself, giving yourself some grace that we often feel a lot of things that are not ours, right? We can feel the world, and we can feel the people around us, and energy is all around us, and spirit is all around us. So you know, being able to discern what is yours and what is not, right? What is coming into your field, that is actually something that you're experiencing or maybe you're holding something that is somebody else's. 

And one thing that can help feeling your feelings in a safe space alone is a lot of times when feelings rise up when we're interacting with other humans, we can react off of those feelings. And when you have the time to process in a safe space, by yourself, that reactivity can lessen. So in acknowledging your own emotions and processing them, it's kind of becomes a practice, right, of noticing, the different waves of, of emotions that might occur or that might rise up. And then your reactivity when you're interacting with other humans, your awareness of an emotion, it can decrease reactivity, and it just becomes a super powerful tool in order to be able to process even in the moment, allowing yourself to settle when you're noticing a reaction, when you're interacting with other humans. What an incredible superpower and tool that you can practice safely on your own without other humans.

It took me a long time to be comfortable with the idea of feeling my feelings. Even as a deeply feeling person, I would often feel shame for my feelings or, you know, try to numb or shove them down. And, becoming a yoga teacher completely changed the way that I approached, the way that feelings are coming up. Not to say that I never numb or shove them down, right? But to just be aware is a huge step in the process. 

So let me know how you feel about feelings and how you make space and room for them in your life. And I'll be back tomorrow with day 11. Take care.