Listening To Your Feelings X Mental Health Monday

Listening to your feelings is important, you may not always understand where the feelings are coming from, mental health is complicated but you can acknowledge the way you're truly feeling. You may feel multiple emotions at the same time, know that this is okay but you could do with an outlet like using art for therapy; create pieces inspired by lyrics, quotes or even your own thoughts, to release the emotion further use colours you're initially drawn to as this represents your mood. "You cannot find your soul with your mind, you must use your heart. You must know what you're feeling." 

Sometimes it's easy to figure out how you're feeling and other times not so much but what do you do if you can't identify your feelings? You could do a mind dump where you should list everything on you mind your worries, your joys, the silly and stuff that doesn't make sense and don't judge whether the thoughts are valid or not just that you're having them.  Or you could find words from song lyrics/quotes that resonate and represent your thoughts, this is great for pin pointing whats going on with your emotions when you don't have the words yourself. Another tip would be to art journal, just do whatever comes naturally; if you feel like sticking do that if you wanna use gouache do that, whatever floats ya boat. If you use colours you're initially drawn to you can then google the meaning of that colour to associate it with an emotion. 

When you've figured out what the emotion(s) is/are then you'll be able to understand what it's trying to show you:

• Anger - "shows you what you're passionate about, where your boundaries are, and what you believe needs to change"
• Sadness - "shows you the depth of your feeling..."
• Guilt - "helps you to understand the person you do not want to be, it gives you the opportunity to forgive yourself in order to move on" 
• Shame - "shows you that you're internalising other people's beliefs about who you should be (or who you are) and that you need to reconnect with yourself"
• Resentment - "shows you that you're living in the past and not allowing the present to be as it is"
• Bitterness - "shows you where you need to heal, where you're still holding judgements on others and yourself
• Discomfort - "shows you that you need to pay attention right now to what is happening because you're being given the opportunity to change, to do something different than how you typically do it" 

Recognising your feelings is important because maintaining your mental health is difficult when you don't know what's going on with you. 

When was the last time you listened to your feelings? 

Till next time,

Stevie x