Feelings are OK!
After attending one of Judy Clinton’s ‘Writing the Spirit’ workshops Alan Russell asked why she had so much to say about the importance of people’s feelings. Here is her spontaneous reply.
Feelings are the most accurate guide we have to who we are and how we are conducting our lives. As very small children we were in touch with how we felt about everything, and we freely expressed our feelings – as long as we weren’t in an unsafe environment. Most of us were then conditioned into suppressing certain feelings (and that was certainly very gender-related) and came to think of some as being unacceptable. I was told to ‘pipe down’ when I got very excited and to ‘not make such a fuss’ if I got upset. The net result of this is that we become less and less whole.
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