Feelings.  Right now, just notice your initial reaction to that word.  What comes to your mind?  For some, even saying/hearing/thinking the word is a traumatic experience.  Some perceive feelings as weakness, or sappy, or a nuisance, or scary.  Some work hard to suppress them; others work hard to repeat them. 
   What IS a feeling, really?  For our purposes right now, we're talking about emotions - not physical sensations.  And we're also not talking about thoughts.  Emotions/feelings come from an old part of our brain called the limbic system.  Children in all cultures share four basic emotions:  anger, fear, sadness and joy.  There are dozens of variations and combinations of these feelings and being human can provide us the opportunity to experience all of them!
   The problem with feelings as it relates to our wellness isn't the feelings themselves.  Rather it is our interpreta- tion and judgement of them that can cause an issue.  Feelings themselves are neither good nor bad.  They are something our brain produces in response to a stimulus - like it produces hormones or proteins or anything else when prompted by a different stimulus.  What gets us in trouble is when we are taught or grow to believe that one, or any, of the emotions are bad.  This judgment of emotion varies a little between cultures, but here in the U.S., it is pretty easy to see that expressions of anger and fear are discouraged.  Perhaps to a lesser extent, so is sadness.  How many of us have suffered a loss of a loved one and find that after a certain amount of time, we're expected to not be sad about it anymore?  In school, smiling and passive behaviors are rewarded far more than aggressive, angry behaviors, so children tend to learn this early on.  If we continue to believe that some feelings are "good" and to be worked for and others are "bad" and to be avoided or denied - we set ourselves up for not only a limited experience of life, but the potential for destructive habits and ultimately poor health.
   Emotions are part of what make us human and we have the amazing ability to feel a wide range of them.  Emotions are an integral part of all our experiences.  In fact, we know that our learning and memory is enhanced by the association of a strong emotion.  The emotions tend to come first from that primitive part of our brain.  THEN the reasoning part of our brain jumps in and starts to assess the whole experience and determine if it's okay to have this feeling or not.  If we've learned that it's not okay, our brains are clever and can make us believe we didn't really have that emotion, or change it into something that it thinks is more acceptable, or eventually can just dull our awareness overall so that we don't really feel much of anything anymore. 
   To maximize our health and wellbeing, we need to become aware of our emotions - ALL of them - be okay with having them and find healthy ways of expressing them.  We might expand our awareness to see what triggers we have for what emotions and what actually happens in our physical body when we have an emotion.  We can start to recognize the emotion as just an emotion - and look past it to what we think about it - and why and how it started and see if it's serving you now or just reinforcing bad habits or physical pain.  We can develop new, healthy ways of experiencing and expressing emotions.  This is going to look very different for different people.  Some need a physical outlet, some need to talk with a trusted friend, some will journal or do another creative activity and there are hundreds of other methods to help us get our emotions OUT, instead of letting them fester inside us. 
   Yes, sometimes feelings hurt.  It is simply part of the human experience.  But, feelings are what makes us ALIVE!  They are a gift.  Make friends with yours and improve your health and wellbeing!