12 Things People Who Are Comfortable With Their Feelings Understand
1. Feelings are not facts. Like an opinion, a feeling is a valid and personal take on something – but not necessarily a factual representation of reality. Most of the time, your feelings about a person or situation are different from how they really are. Sometimes for better, sometimes for worse.
2. Being afraid of things going wrong is not the way to make them go right. Worrying is not what you do when something bad happens, it’s what you do when you anticipate a potential negative outcome and don’t believe you have the capability to handle it. It’s not a coping mechanism, it’s a panic response. But you can’t use pain to shield yourself from more pain. You can’t beat fear to the finish line.
3. Most things are a blank canvas. What you see depends on what you look for. Your confirmation bias will essentially cause you to validate essentially anything you want to believe is true, so you must choose consciously and wisely.
4. Feelings cannot actually hurt you. A feeling can scare you, or upset you, or make you feel hurt, but they can’t do anything more than that on their own. A feeling can only ruin your life if you take it as an impetus to do something destructive (which is often what happens when we suppress, ignore and avoid them).
5. Most communication is nonverbal. Most of what you need to know about others comes from what they do, how they behave, and what they respond to – not what they say. If you’re comfortable enough to know the truth about people, you’ll know it immediately (and it won’t be the culmination of what they tell you to believe).
6. Feelings are signals. The only problem is not understanding where different ones point. For example, numbness is not feeling “nothing,” it’s feeling everything at once. Neutrality is nothing. Anxiety is resistance, or a desire for control, sadness is an attachment to a different outcome. Shame is being worried someone else sees you as “bad.”
7. The way you perceive other people is a projection of how you see yourself. What angers you and thrills you and incites admiration in your heart is all a projection of however you perceive yourself to be. In understanding this, almost every seemingly irrational hatred or random person you love will make complete sense.
8. The way other people perceive you is a projection of how they see themselves. When people dislike you, it is because you are a living, breathing, speaking reminder of the part of themselves they are suppressing. It’s not your job to fix this, it is only your job to remember that you are not only as loved as you are liked by everyone.
9. Complaining is the desire for pain to be seen. When people complain, it’s because they want others to see and validate their own pain. The tricky part is that said pain usually has nothing (or little) to do with whatever they’re complaining about. Do they really care about a dirty dish in the sink? Unlikely. Do they really care about feeling disrespected and out of control of their home? Probably.
10. A bad feeling is not a bad life. Being comfortable with your feelings doesn’t mean you have to actively enjoy them, or even like them. Being comfortable with your feelings is fully acknowledging that they are impermanent, transitory. Everything passes eventually.
11. Feeling does not actually make you vulnerable. It only makes you feel more vulnerable… and though that feeling can be extremely convincing at times, don’t let it talk you into shutting yourself down.
12. Feeling things deeply is a sign of a whole heart, a conscious mind, and an awakened spirit. Embracing what you feel makes you stronger; rejecting your internal navigation system is when you lose your power. 
