From our youngest years, we receive countless messages about what is and what is not acceptable for us to feel. Depending on who we are, the kind of family that we grow up in, and our culture, there are complex layers of conditioning placed, as it were, between us and our inner experience.

As a white person, as a woman, as a “good” girl in a family with British middle-class values, I was taught – amongst many other things – to be controlled and self-contained. Overt displays of emotion were clearly unacceptable. My tears were shamed or ignored, my aggression mocked or used against me, my anger punished.

Later, I imbibed the widespread notions that I should accept and forgive; that I should question my thoughts, or witness my experience as a detached observer, or “see through” my sense of self, or “sit with” my feelings.

I practiced with as much sincerity and earnestness as I could muster. For sure, there were insights, realisations, and moments of catharsis, but I was still left with the idea that I shouldn’t be feeling what I was feeling, that I was doing the techniques wrong, and that unless I did them right, nothing would change.

(Ultimately, I found all the techniques wanting, having originally found myself wanting, hence my attraction to the techniques.)

There came a time, at the start of my dark night of the soul, when my coping-and-survival strategies failed to stem the tide of raw emotion and body-held truth that surged forth.

My first response was to double down in the belief that I definitely shouldn’t be feeling what I was feeling. I tried even harder to manage, control, calm, heal, or change what I was feeling. I therapied, remedied, read, wrote, and inquired, all in a bid to quell the pain, to feel something other than this, whatever this was in the moment.

But occasionally, and despite myself, there were moments when I was simply in my experience, such as it was. Moments in which there was none of the usual grappling with the overlay of ideas or judgements about how I should be with my experience (such judgements rarely coincided with reality, so I was often in a state of inner conflict).

Those moments seemed to come about because I couldn’t do anything other than feel what I was feeling. They certainly didn’t come about by design. Surprisingly, it was always a deep – if painful – relief to just be in what I was in. Things would unravel or open in surprising ways.

Over the ensuing years, any fixed ideas about how I should relate to my feelings and thoughts ebbed away. The notion that I should attempt to have a predetermined relationship with my experience – that I should accept, embrace, observe, for example, or be grateful for or compassionate or welcoming to my feelings – gave way to discovering what my actual relationship with my experience was.

There’s a moment – which is beautiful to witness – in which someone goes from feeling that there’s something wrong with them for feeling what they’re feeling to a full-bodied sense of “no wonder I’m feeling this.” A moment of suddenly seeing the reality of the circumstances to which the feeling was a natural reaction. Of suddenly making the feeling intelligible. Of realising that the fact of the feeling’s presence isn’t wrong. Of a deep somatic knowing of what transpired, both externally and internally. Of beginning to read and relate to inner experience, not as something to be controlled or corralled, but as something to be related with.

In these beautiful moments, there’s a loosening or undoing of the layers of conditioning, and the growth of a sense of what we might call inner authority. A knowing of and a trusting in our own unique process. A starting to side with ourselves and our felt experience, rather than taking a stand against both. A starting to realise that we’re not too much (or too sensitive, or too broken, or any other kind of too).

Giving way to the actual – the visceral reality as it is in each moment – slowly opens up a space of radical unconditionality. A space for all that’s been diminished, or excluded, or shamed. A space for all that’s taboo – rage, anger, grief, terror, humiliation, hopelessness, and every other feeling that we’ve tried to mute or contain or hold ourselves apart from.

In this space, it’s alright that we’re feeling what we’re feeling. I don’t mean that it feels alright to feel what we’re feeling – of course, it doesn’t feel alright to be terrified or burning with shame or torn asunder by grief, but it is alright that we’re feeling what we’re feeling. (Don’t be fooled into thinking that what you’re feeling is not alright, that it is too much or not enough or it’s the wrong kind of feeling or not the feeling you should be having.)

In the intimacy of this space, we begin to enter into our own precious depths, and clarity and aliveness slowly emerge.