When I was 12 years old, I lost my mom.
I had no idea how to grieve. At her funeral, I took a friend down to the river to go swimming. From the outside, I looked fine. On the inside, every emotion I didn't know what to do with was piling up, and it was going into my body.
I didn't notice it happening, but other people did. A classmate asked me why my shoulders were up like that and why my head was tilted. My sister told me I seemed to be getting smaller, like I was shrinking. Two years later, a teacher told me he didn't like seeing me alone all the time.
Before my mom passed, I was vibrant and talkative, and everyone knew me. Throughout high school, I became quiet and shrank into myself.
It wasn't until years later that I went back to that moment and let myself feel what I never allowed myself to feel at 12. When I finally did, I was able to let it go.
That experience taught me what I now teach as a coach: healing doesn't happen only in the mind. It happens in the body.
Emotions Are Energy in Motion
Look at the word itself: e-motion. It means energy in motion.
Emotions aren't just ideas floating around in our heads. They're physical events. Think of the heat, the tightness, the heaviness, the flutter, or the lump in your throat. Emotions are meant to move. Like a wave, they rise, peak, and pass.
The trouble starts when we block the wave. We suppress it, distract ourselves, numb out or stay "logical." The energy doesn't disappear. It gets stored, often in the same part of the body where it was first felt. For example, my grief went into my shoulders, my posture, and how small I made myself.
Where Do You Feel It?
Emotions tend to show up in familiar places, and many of them cluster in the chest, throat, and gut:
- Anxiety or fear: a tight chest, butterflies, shallow breathing, tense shoulders and jaw
- Sadness or grief: heaviness in the chest, a lump in the throat, tired limbs
- Anger: heat in the chest and face, a clenched jaw or fists
- Shame: a hot face, a collapsing feeling, wanting to disappear
- Joy: expansiveness, lightness, energy in the limbs
- Love: warmth in the chest, openness, sometimes tears
Notice that anxiety and excitement can both feel like butterflies. The sensation is the same, and it's the story we tell about it that differs.
Try this now: where do you usually feel stress in your body? And where do you feel excitement?
Emotions Aren't Good or Bad. They're Information.
We're trained to sort emotions into "positive" ones we welcome and "negative" ones we fix or hide. But every emotion is doing a job. It points you toward something that needs attention:
- Anxiety may be asking for safety or preparation.
- Sadness may be asking for rest, comfort, or grieving.
- Anger may be signaling a crossed boundary.
- Loneliness may be asking for connection.
An emotion is like a compass. A compass doesn't tell you a direction is good or bad. It tells you where you're facing so you can course-correct. The goal was never to feel only the good emotions and get rid of the rest. It's to listen to all of them.
Emotional Awareness: Name It, Feel It, Breathe Into It
Emotional awareness is the ability to notice, name, and understand what you're feeling, and how it shapes your thoughts and behavior, while it's happening, not just after the fact.
Ask yourself:
- What am I feeling right now?
- Where do I feel it in my body?
- How is it affecting my thoughts, my mood, and the way I treat others?
Then practice three steps:
- Name it. Put a word to it: "I'm anxious." "I feel hurt." Naming an emotion engages a different part of the brain and can lower its intensity. This is sometimes called "name it to tame it."
- Feel it. This is the step most of us skip. We name the emotion, then immediately try to think our way out of it or push past it. Instead, let it be in the body without rushing to fix or explain it.
- Breathe into it. Bring your breath and attention to the place where the emotion lives. Breathing signals safety to the nervous system and helps the emotion move instead of staying stuck.
What Happens When We Ignore What We Feel
Unfelt emotion doesn't vanish. It comes out sideways, as reaction instead of response.
Picture a man I'll call Daniel. His manager talks over him in meetings and takes credit for his ideas, and Daniel absorbs it every time. "It's not worth the conflict," he tells himself. Then one evening his partner asks him to take out the trash, and he explodes in a way that shocks even him. It was never about the trash. It was two months of unfelt frustration finally finding an exit.
Or picture someone who goes through a breakup and throws themselves into work and social plans to avoid the sadness. For weeks they seem fine, even proud of how well they're handling it. Then in the middle of a grocery store, a wave of panic hits out of nowhere. It isn't random. The grief they never allowed themselves to feel arrives all at once, at full force.
Awareness gives emotion a small, manageable doorway to move through. Avoidance forces it to find its own way out, usually at the worst possible time.
You Can't Out-Think a Feeling
You can know, logically, that you shouldn't be anxious about something. You can tell yourself "it's not a big deal" and still feel exactly the same. That isn't a failure of willpower or intelligence. Emotions are processed in the body and the nervous system, not solved by the reasoning part of the brain.
That's why "just think positive" or "just let it go" rarely works on its own. You have to go to where the feeling lives and let your body do what it knows how to do: feel it fully, then release it. Drop out of the mind and into the body.
How Unnamed Emotions Show Up in Our Lives
What we don't name and feel, we tend to act out:
- Projection: placing our unacknowledged feelings on other people
- Reactivity: outsized responses to small triggers
- Defensiveness: feeling attacked by feedback because we're protecting a wound we haven't looked at
- Other patterns: self-sabotage, people-pleasing, numbing through overworking, overeating or endless scrolling, and strained relationships, because the people closest to us often absorb what we haven't processed
Every unnamed emotion still finds a way to speak. The only question is whether it speaks through your awareness or through your behavior.
A Simple Tool: F.E.E.L.
Next time you feel triggered, anxious, sad or overwhelmed, pause before you react or distract yourself, and run through this. It takes less than a minute.
- F: Find it. Name the emotion. What am I actually feeling?
- E: Explore it. Where does it live in my body?
- E: Ease into it. Breathe into that spot instead of resisting it.
- L: Let it move. Allow it to rise, peak, and pass, without rushing or blocking it.
Try a Quick Body Scan
Right now, take a slow breath in and out. Bring your attention to the top of your head and notice any tension. Move down through your forehead and jaw, where many of us hold more than we realize. Let your shoulders drop if they're ready to. Notice your chest, then your stomach, then your hands, legs and feet.
Is there an emotion present? Name it silently: "I feel..." Find where it lives in your body and breathe into that spot, as if you're sending it care. As you breathe out, let it soften a little. You don't have to force it to leave. Let it be met, let it be felt, and let it move at its own pace.
Building a Relationship With Your Emotions
Emotional awareness isn't about controlling or eliminating your emotions. It's about building a relationship with them. Your body isn't separate from your emotional well-being. It's where that wellbeing lives and heals.
This week, try F.E.E.L. once a day. Start small, and notice what changes.
If this resonated, I'd love to hear from you. You can reach me at realrachelk@gmail to learn more about my coaching work, or about my online life skills class that helps kids build self-love, self-worth, and emotional intelligence. If you are looking to be heard, find our listeners at my-safespace.org
