Why I stopped trying to understand my feelings…

Something has been shifting in the work I'm doing with my somatic coach, and I keep coming back to the same image to explain it.

A WiFi signal. Not something I'm generating, just something moving through me. And the more I try to manage the transmission, to direct it, speed it up, make sense of it, the more interference I create.

For most of my life, feelings have been something I process rather than something I experience. Something would arrive like frustration, longing, low-level dread, and almost immediately my brain would get to work on it. What is this, why is it here, what does it mean, what should I do about it. Fast, efficient, and completely exhausting in a way I didn't fully clock until recently.

What my coach has been asking me to try is just letting things move. Not understanding them, not resolving them, not even naming them particularly accurately. Just noticing they're there and not grabbing at them.

The first few times I genuinely didn't know how to do that. I kept waiting for an instruction, a framework, some handle to hold onto.

But slowly I've started to notice that when I don't immediately reach for an explanation, feelings actually do move on their own. They change shape, they soften, they pass. Not always quickly, and not always cleanly. But they go. And when I get in the way, when I'm already three steps ahead constructing the meaning, they seem to get stuck. Like I've interrupted something that had its own rhythm.

I don't have this figured out. But I'm starting to understand the difference between processing an experience and actually having one.

And for a long time, without really knowing it, I was mostly doing the first one.