Express yourself to know your love is real.

To feel, we must express. When we conceal a sensation, we not only dampen the magnitude of that moment, we inhibit our ability to feel the next one, and the one after, and so on.

At what point do we let the thinking mind begin to throttle sensation? When do we stop openly feeling and expressing the sensations we feel? With each movement we make to hide how we feel, we hide ourselves from the world, and more importantly, more devastatingly, from ourselves.

When we begin to limit our sensations, we lose touch with their potential, We distort the essential connection from unconscious to conscious, we forget the language of expression.

Imagine instead what might happen if we begin sharing our sensations, all of them, everything we feel all day long, we express that feeling without hesitation. Sound a little daunting? What if we just name the sensation to start? What if we just start paying attention to the nuances of sensation and consider the movements and thoughts that led us there?

If we could connect with a broader spectrum of sensation, if we could feel more deeply and concretely, we might begin to encourage our hidden, sensitive selves to show up more often. We might begin to feel more, and feel more confident in how we feel. Then imagine if we could begin to expand this emotional vocabulary, imagine that we might be able to help our loved ones do the same. 

What if we could help our partners truly express the full spectrum of sensations they experience day in and day out? What if we could teach our kids this skill early on so they live a life full of sensations realized, so they are familiar with words like excitement and joy and unconditional love, not just as kids but as teens and adults?

And yes, with sensations like joy, sadness and embarrassment and grief come along too. But shouldn't we, mustn't we help them with these words as well? They won't be able to express the high highs of sensation without also knowing the low lows. Is this a hard topic to delve into, to think about and talk about with our kids? Yes, of course, especially as we consider our kids hitting low lows we know are inevitable, the lows we’ve hit ourselves.

But what's even harder is them hitting those lows without a way to process and recover. And what's even more concerning and troublesome is to consider what happens when we don’t know when they hit those low lows because they lack the ability to express those sensations.

To develop our own emotional lexicon and commit to feeling all the feels is incredibly important, not only because it opens us up to a routine of rich, robust, invigorating experiences, but also because it models this essential behavior for our kids, and plants the seeds of a healthy emotional vocabulary they will need to harvest in the future.