The Feeling Muscle: How Felt Emotion Can Help You Sit with and Outlast Hard Feelings

Could learning to feel again be the most radical act of self-care? We exercise and train our bodies, but we ignore a muscle essential to our well-being – our emotional muscle. In an age of constant distraction, we are quick to numb and avoid our feelings. What if we could learn to ride the waves of our difficult and painful emotions by moving through our feelings, not around them?What if you could live undaunted by stress or anxiety, take risks and make mistakes without fear of failure, and better tolerate the messiness, unpredictability, and adversity of life? In her timely and compelling debut, Dr. Rapkin, a naturopathic physician, bodyworker, and Frequent Feeler (someone who feels emotions deeply within the body), offers real solutions for finding self-awareness, intention, and resilience in the face of a distracted and emotionally avoidant culture.Filled with simple mind-body and somatic exercises designed to be done at home at your own pace, this book is a relatable and compassionate manual for choosing mindfulness over mindlessness and living a life filled with deeper feeling and more connection – with yourself and others.By sharing hard-won personal experiences, patient stories, and clinical insights, Dr. Rapkin defines the term “felt emotion,” questions the widely held assumption that feeling is a cognitive or mental process, and asserts that feeling is, instead, the body’s job. The Feeling Muscle introduces a step-by-step framework for emotional fitness – how felt emotion, a discernable and tangible physical experience, can help you live in the present moment and tolerate challenging feelings through the development of a neutral, friendly, and attuned relationship with your body.Learn how the cultural messages we take in about emotion, like “Get over it,” “Grow thicker skin,” and “Boys don’t cry,” reflect a societal intolerance of emotions. These messages combined with the abundance of opportunities to be distracted are colliding to create an ever-present health crisis – an inability to sit with hard feelings. Read more