Honouring the Messiness of Feeling - Part 1
Honouring the Messiness of Feeling — A Three-Part Reflection
Many people sense that their emotional world is complex, layered, and not always easy to navigate — especially in a culture that often values clarity, control, and functionality over inner experience.
This three-part reflection is an invitation to slow down and listen more closely to feeling — not as something to fix or manage, but as something alive, intelligent, and deeply human.
In these pieces, I explore:
⟡ How feelings become shaped, constrained, or silenced over time
⟡ How emotions can act as signals pointing toward meaning and aliveness
⟡ And how we can stay present with feeling in everyday life, without overwhelm
You’re welcome to read each part on its own — or to move through them slowly, in your own time.
A Culture That Doesn't Value Feelings
For a lot of people, feelings weren’t truly welcomed or supported growing up — and even now, it can feel as though only certain feelings are easily received in society, while others are quietly discouraged. Many of us learned, in subtle or explicit ways, to tidy feelings up, make them manageable, keep them contained — and sometimes, if possible, keep them hidden. And when feelings are allowed, many people sense that some emotions are more easily acknowledged and accepted, while others struggle to find space or legitimacy. Sometimes, even the ‘acceptable’ feelings seem to come with an invisible time limit.
Grief is one place where this becomes especially visible. When we lose someone we love — or say goodbye to a part of life we once cherished — many people notice there is only a brief window where their pain feels welcome or visible. But what about the moments, months, or even decades later, when the waves still come?
When emotions are approached as simple cause and effect, it can be easy to miss their layering — the threads that reach back into earlier experiences, and into unspoken imprints carried from our beginnings. When these layers are given space, they can open pathways toward transformation and renewal. And it doesn’t all have to happen at once. Even the smallest moments of allowing a feeling can open new pathways of ease and aliveness.
This is something I’ve known in my own life. I lost my mother over 20 years ago, and even now, I sometimes still find myself unexpectedly overwhelmed with grief. Living with chronic illness has also brought its own layers of grief — including saying goodbye to my old life and learning to live within new limitations. Each time I allow myself to ride those waves, I find myself reaching a deeper place — one that has as much to do with healing relational space as it does with the loss itself.
Feelings Don’t Live in Boxes
In everyday life, many people find themselves sweeping a great deal under the carpet — not just sorrow, but also our anger when boundaries are crossed, or the shame we sometimes feel when we stepped out into the world showing up as our vulnerable selves or when we've not met some impossible standard. And sometimes, it’s not sorrow or anger at all, but our natural joy — even our very beingness — that gets boxed away behind heavy curtains because it doesn’t ‘fit’.
Many of these standards are first encountered outside us — handed down through culture, family, or community — and over time, they become internalised, living on inside of us, guiding our lives without us even knowing. The feeling of shame around our feelings can cut deep because it seems to come straight from within: when we feel we've fallen short of our own inner terms, our own quiet vision of how we "should" be. That kind of shame can be even harder to face, because it doesn’t even seem imposed from outside — it's deeply woven into the fabric of how we perceive ourselves.
Many of us dim our aliveness because we’ve learned that showing up fully with what we are feeling, or simply being ourselves, can make people uncomfortable. This in itself can start a spiral of constantly rushing to get away from ourselves, and from the deeper feelings that are calling.
Over time, this can leave us with little space to simply be with what is here now. And top of that, in a world that runs on linear logic and making sense, what happens to all those feelings and emotions that we can't make sense of? Even having that label — "this doesn't make sense" — can quietly teach many people to hide them away, even from themselves.
What if the feelings we learned to contain or silence weren’t problems to solve, but signals pointing toward something meaningful and alive?
Continue to Part 2
Soulful Embodiment Coach, Transformational Guide & Intuitive
Your energy and presence are gifts to share with the world — even if they are deeply quiet. They are the very fuel that helps you transform your life and truly flourish.
You can tap into this when you ground in the essence of being you.
That’s what this blog is here to hold: reflections from my own long journey home to myself, interwoven with the insights I’ve gained through years of lived experience and training.
Warmly, Julia
Author’s note:
This blog grounded my own lived experience and the work with my clients, and also draws on what I have learned through my extensive training in somatic and spiritual work. You can read more about me here.