Becoming your own safe place

Steps 1 & 2

Jun 12, 2025

Heavenly Father, someone asked me to help them feel their feelings. Hallelujah, I’m ready to go to your heavenly arms.

Jk a lil bit.

I plan to write my next one about what shenanigans I’ve been up to in the last 8 months, that led to pictures like this one in Gallup, NM:

And maybe a two-parter leading to how I just started working on a pig farm in Maryland this week.

But through it all, my one true passion remains: feeling feelings.

I’ve reached a level of calm capacity, presence, and general joy I’ve never been to before.

Right now I’m on the level of sitting-in-my-bathtub-asking-if-there-are-any-feelings-I-didn’t-feel-today and constantly noticing when I try not to feel something, identifying it with crystal specificity, and then feeling it as intensely as possible so there is no juice left. The layers are many. They are often subtle. And I’ve realized that most people might not have any clue what I’m talking about.

First You Have Sensations

The closest thing to a beginning I can think of yet is to start with this, from Gautama Buddha, who taught that our feelings are experienced through the body, and even our thoughts have sensations. What we avoid aren’t our problems but the sensations we associate with those problems.

So first you have to be able to feel sensations enough to notice them. It’s a difficult task when you’re used to your thoughts running away with you and taking up your entire focus. Buddha started with a meditation called anapana, asking his students to simply notice the feeling of air going in and out of their noses on their upper lip. Do this for a few days, and you begin to be able to tune into sensation separate from thought.

Reactions Are Sensations

Then personally I’d ask you if you’d ever felt a feeling or an emotion, maybe a reaction is a better term, through to its completion.

Every reaction has a sensational feeling attached to it. The negative ones and the positive ones all take place in the body, somewhere.

Usually people take some kind of action before the feeling has a chance to move through them. They start writing a tart reply, or reshare the offending article on Facebook while winding themselves up tighter in the process, or simply pinch off the sensation at the threshold they are comfortable feeling it.

Granted, almost no one knows that you can feel a feeling until it stops. And that it will stop. It will change you and mature you in the process.

If you focus on the sensations in a relaxed way they will move around then disappear.

To practice feeling something fully through it might be but isn’t guaranteed to be easier to start with something you enjoy thinking about. A happy memory of a little girl you love. A first kiss. That video of a cat that you commented “oh my god I would die for them” on. Something that you know makes you feel something.

Pick a thing. Try to notice what sensations accompany it. I promise that if you don’t stop or try to control the sensations they will travel through your body and dissipate. Like a wave cresting then fully disappearing back into the water.

It may take a few dozen tries to stop stopping yourself from feeling it all the way. You could have stories that it’s too indulgent to really feel something or you might just habitually throttle halfway through, (as I did).

If you keep your body relaxed and open, avoiding any closure or muscle tension from creeping in, the feeling will move through and change. Just notice when you tense up, then practice staying relaxed as you feel things instead.

You’ll never be more relaxed than when you learn how to let your reactions move through your body fully.

Your attention proves that you are not the feeling or reaction, but the thing that can focus on the feeling and decide whether or not to let it be felt.

From there you might begin trying with less positive reactions when you’re in a comfortable space to focus on them. Set aside a time to meditate. Instead of meditating and trying to shoo away thoughts or feelings, focus on whatever pops up fully and let it move through you. Your relaxed attention makes it move. Your attention proves that you are not the feeling or reaction, but the thing that can focus on the feeling and decide whether or not to let it be felt. Suppression is always an option, but it takes a lot of background energy to keep a beach ball under the water.

The goal is to be friendly to yourself. To become a place in which it is safe to feel things. If you can learn how to feel things all the way through to completion, you send yourself the message, “It’s ok to feel that.” I bet you and me both have always wished we had somewhere that it was ok to feel things. We learn that it’s not ok when people told us to stop or that we were ok when we weren’t done feeling yet, so we clenched until we cut it off. We experience new safety by no longer stopping the sensations.

You need to divorce yourself from the idea that feeling things, any things, means something about you.

Feeling feelings fully as they go up and down and wherever they’re going to go on their way out is simply a skill unto itself. One that will make you a better person, a safe person for other people’s feelings. Because you are a safe place for yourself. A better person in an emergency. Someone people can turn to and be honest with. Background tension in a feeling is a spring waiting to be sprung on people.

Feeling your sadness makes you feel less sad. Feeling anything makes you capable of handling more of it next time. That includes joy and all the positive ones too.

“But Sam, I can’t just start crying like a fool whenever I feel something.”

Ever since I started feeling things all the way, not only do I have so much less shame in general but I often find that sad stuff that seems like it will be a big cry turns into the smallest hiccup when I decide to let it through. Maybe if you have a bunch of suppressed stuff it will take a while to work things out, but eventually you’ll only be reacting to the present and less a compounding of your present and all your past unfelt hurts. Start doing it in a short, controlled time slot where you practice in a meditation before you try to feel things fully live.

Also, the ability to focus on the sensations of emotions depersonalizes it a ton. The sensations move through you in seconds in all but serious situations where nobody would blame you anyway for having big feels. Suppressing is what builds it up to out-of-proportion proportions.

How did I do on my first attempt to explain this in this round of my samsara?

The meditation I posted in my last podcast recording takes this feeling feelings in a new direction.