2018 Word of the Year: Feel

Sorry for the silence on my blog!  I have been M.I.A. for the past couple months.  I built a dollhouse for my daughter for Christmas and that project occupied all of my free time during most of November and December.  I learned a lot from that project so maybe I’ll write a post about it sometime soon. 🙂  

Christmas is over now, and things are starting to settle back down.  I’m excited for life to be returning back to normal.

Today is the first day of a brand new year.  I love fresh starts and new beginnings.  New Year’s Day is probably one of the biggest symbols of Jesus Christ.  He makes new beginnings possible.  Gratefully, we aren’t limited to one day a year.  We can start fresh and clean every day, even multiple times each day.  All we have to do is ask for His help and accept His gift of His Atonement. “Though your sins be as scarlet, they shall be as white as snow.”  (Isaiah 1:18)

Photo by Morgan Sessions on Unsplash

I used to write long lists of goals at the beginning of each year.  But at the beginning of last year, I decided to do something a little different than I had in the past.  I decided to follow the lead of other people on the internet, (mostly Ali Edwards), and choose one word for the year that I would focus on.

I had a few words in mind, but it was hard for me to narrow it down to just one word.  The word that I finally settled on was nurture.  This word held multiple layers (nurturing myself, nurturing my relationships with my family, nurturing my relationship with God, etc.)  While I think I applied this word to each of those areas to one degree or another, looking back, I can really see that 2017 was a year of intentional nurturing of my marriage.  I spent the entire year very immersed in learning and practicing Wife for Life skills and tools.  And 2017 ended up being the best year yet for our marriage.

A few days ago, I was thinking about this new year and picking a word for 2018.  Unlike last year, when I had a hard time choosing, this year, the word just stood out to me as clear as day.  The word that I chose for 2018 is feel.  Just feel.

As I have thought about this word over the past few days, I have been discovering more and more layers as to how focusing on this word can improve my life. 

I want to be better at leaning into feeling and allowing myself to feel deeply.  I want to add more depth to my ability to feel both positive and negative emotions.  Really feel them.    

I want to be better at leaning into my own feelings/emotions.  This applies to both positive and negative emotions.   

I want to practice owning my negative emotions and allowing myself to sit with them and learn from them, instead of doing what I usually do, which is to buffer and just suppress the feelings.  Negative emotions include the obvious ones like sadness, grief, anxiety, fear, anger, etc.  But I think it also includes the almost neutral emotions like boredom and apathy. 

I have noticed that I am prone to mindlessly scroll through social media on my phone when I’m bored.  And while this habit isn’t necessarily bad, I know that it’s not the best use of my time.  

I know that I want to feel/hear/recognize the Spirit more in my life. My actions often show that I want other things more though in the moment. Like social media. I clog up my mind with so much unnecessary information that I can’t even hear the Spirit because the signal gets so jumbled up with everything else. In order to improve in this area, I need to allow myself to sit in the neutral/negative emotion of boredom. Just allow it. Sit in it. Don’t stuff it down with a buffer.

This is just one area where learning to allow negative emotion would improve my life.  There are many, many more.

I want to practice allowing myself to feel positive emotion more deeply.  I want to allow myself to really feel joy.  I want to feel joy for myself and my own circumstances.  I also want to feel joy for others and their successes (this can be hard sometimes – even when my life is going great.  Why is that?  Why do I feel jealous even when I have a great life?).

Photo by Jared Sluyter on Unsplash

I also want to develop more ability to feel with others (empathy, mourning with those that mourn, etc.) – especially feeling with my kids when they are hurting (emotionally, physically, etc.) I have a tendency to brush off their feelings and disregard them (mainly because it stirs up negative feelings in myself when they are crying/whining/etc.) I want to improve in this area. I want to be able to stop and have empathy and compassion instead of annoyance and irritation.

Photo by Ben White on Unsplash

This all reminds me of a post that my friend, Emily, wrote on Instagram a couple weeks ago. She said…

“I listened to a podcast recently that talked about how, if we’re striving to become like Jesus, that also means coming to know and become the side of Him that is a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief. and at least from what I’ve seen of this world, the deepest of sorrow and grief is by no means limited to that which is associated with death. which is, in some ways more perplexing and uncertain. Even if there’s a bright morning coming ultimately, sometimes the only thing to do first is to sit inside the grief. to come and to sit, to weep with those who weep. when the pain stretches far and wide, the only real thing to do first is to follow the example of that God who weeps (see moses 7). one of the most profound moments in the scriptures, i feel, consists of only two words: “Jesus wept.” and so, with those we love (and perhaps those we’re still learning to love), we sit inside the grief—and together we weep.”

I love that. Jesus wept. He wept for others and with others. I want to get better at that.

I also ran across a blog post by someone the other day that really resonated with me.  It made me think about Jesus’s example and the concept/skill of feeling before fixing.

A scripture in Romans fits perfectly with my word this year.

“Rejoice with them that do rejoice and weep with them that weep.”  (Romans 12:15).

So my word for 2018 is Feel. Just Feel.

I expect this to be a year of discomfort because feeling, really feeling deeply, usually isn’t all that comfortable.  Sometimes its really vulnerable.  Sometimes its annoying.  Sometimes its downright painful.  But the rewards are worth it in the end.

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