Honouring the Messiness of Feeling Series - Part 2
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.
Feelings help you navigate towards your soul
This part explores feelings not as problems to be solved, but as meaningful signals — carrying information about aliveness, connection, and what longs to move or be reclaimed.
Feelings and emotions can powerfully help you connect with your soul. I like to think of those feelings that ‘don’t make sense’ as a frequency that hasn’t yet tuned in clearly. A teacher of mine, Christine Caldwell, author and founder of The Moving Cycle Institute, once described them like being a radio signal we still need to tune into to clearly understand and sense the messages. Having ‘noise’ is normal in that case. I truly believe that feelings are pathways to your soul. They are your heart speaking, your inner guidance showing you the places that long for healing or self-expression. They lead you to what makes you feel truly alive. To ignore them can create a quiet rupture between us and our deeper truth.
Layers of Suppression and the Roots of Aliveness
This suppression of our feelings and our aliveness is often shaped by our childhood experiences, by the dynamics of our partnerships, by the patterns passed down through generations, and by the collective weight of oppression. What about having a space to truly be with the deeper layers of those feelings? In my own life, and in the space I hold for others, I've seen how, when we allow these layers to be felt and witnessed, we reach places that feel more whole — places where we can finally embrace ourselves in our emotional truth.
Many people grow up without much guidance in how to stay with feelings in a way that honours their depth and complexity. Instead of being supported to sense feelings as part of an inner navigation system — a kind of compass for one’s precious innermost self and vulnerable heart — slowing down and creating pauses is often something we have to discover later in life, if at all. Over time, quiet ideas about “acceptable” and “unacceptable” feelings can begin to form — not always spoken aloud, but felt — influencing which parts of our inner world are allowed space, and which are gently pushed aside.
The Pain of Not Being Seen and Met
For so many of us, one of the deepest hurts we carry in our precious vulnerable hearts is the pain of not being seen and met in our feelings. It's the moment you expressed something raw and real, and it was met with silence… or a quick change of subject… or even criticism.
Over time, those moments teach us that our feelings aren't safe to share — or worse, that they don't matter. This absence of being truly witnessed leaves an ache that runs deeper than the emotion itself. It's not just about feeling sad, angry, or afraid — the ache comes from the aloneness of those feelings. And when that aloneness is repeated, the wound becomes part of the fabric of how we perceive ourselves and how we move in the world.
Feeling seen and met — truly seen and met — in our emotions is one of the most healing experiences we can have. And even if you've rarely had that in your life, it's something you can begin to offer yourself now: to witness your own feelings with the presence and tenderness you've always needed.
Feelings that Begin Before Words
Before there were words, there were feelings. Our bodies were already listening — to the tone of voices, the warmth of touch, the presence or absence of safety. These first impressions, gathered in silence, became the earliest threads of who we are. Some feelings never made it into language. They live in the quiet, pre-verbal layers — shaped by our beginnings, and by the echoes of complex trauma, by moments too overwhelming for a child to integrate alone.
These currents are so often left unmet, unseen, perhaps never even allowed to exist. But they do live underneath the surface, moving in their own times and currents, like swaying seaweed at the bottom of the ocean floor. When emotions are seen and met — whether by another or within ourselves — something in them often begins to settle and move. When those earliest layers are left unseen, they can rise as tides we don't understand — sensations and reactions that seem "too much" or “feel bad” but are in truth ancient signals from our own history, asking to be witnessed, felt and held. It begins with seeing ourselves. With normalising the emotional currents that move through us, and honouring them as wisdom — not as flaws. They are stories that may never be told in words, but that live in the language of the body, the body-mind-soul, waiting to be felt.
In meeting these layered truths with kindness and compassion, we gather back pieces of our wholeness.
From Survival to Reclaiming
For many of us, emotional suppression was once about survival — it kept us safe in families or environments where feeling fully wasn't an option. That protective strategy served us then. But now, as adults, we can begin to reclaim what we had to set aside.
We can leave that needing to be "on top of things" and embrace ourselves in our messy aliveness, and allow our emotions and feelings to fuel the flow of transformation through our systems as they guide us to access deeper layers of ourselves. We can honour and own that feelings are not tidy. They're not linear. They live in an interconnected web at the foundation of our being — a bit like mycelium beneath the forest floor. And in that web, there is also resilience, creativity, unexpected joy waiting to be touched — and the light that often only reveals itself when we dare to sit with the shadows. They are deeply needed.
Seen this way, feelings are not obstacles to life, but part of how life moves through us — asking to be met, not mastered. The question then becomes not whether we feel, but how we stay connected to feeling — especially in the midst of everyday life.
Continue to Part 3
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.