Feeling Your Feelings

[The Stage is on Fire] is a page-turner in which, much like life, there are no easy answers and yet each step of the journey yields insight and hope. This work of heart must not be missed!

Melanie Faith

Creative Writing Teacher, Essayist & Poet.

Katie Steedly’s first-person piece [The Unspeakable Gift] is a riveting retelling of her participation in a National Institutes of Health study that aided her quest to come to grips with her life of living with a rare genetic disorder. Her writing is superb.

The Society of Professional Journalists

In recognition of receiving the Dateline Award for the Washingtonian Magazine essay, The Unspeakable Gift.

I thank you … It is the authenticity of your “class notes”; and it is the delicacy and skill with which you present the nuances of classroom life and the actuality of your students’ and fellow teachers’ lives.

Maxine Greene

Philosopher and Education Scholar

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The fastest way to freedom is to feel your feelings. – Gita Bellin

Dear Speed and Quick Fixes,

I understand your appeal. I am attracted by diversion and distraction. Fast offers “freedom.” Fixing “gives me more time for things that matter.” Productivity is intoxicating. Organization offers a respite from my chaotic day-to-day. The relief I feel when I hack, strategize, and purge is like finding water while dying of thirst in the desert.

I want to quit you. I don’t want to bring you into my sacred morning hours. I don’t want to schedule you into the nooks and crannies of my days. I don’t want to venerate those who write books about how to be masters of speed and fixes.

You are my anesthesia. If I go fast, I don’t have to feel. If I hack, strategize, and organize, I may find momentary health without doing the work of knowing why I am in pain in the first place. If I just keep aspiring, reaching, grasping, I never have to sit with myself and understand.

I am not saying you are 100% bad. You are not. You can offer focus, motivation, and hope. You can be a path to clarity, vision, and purpose. What I am suggesting is that in my pursuit of you I must find a gentle heart. I must learn to dance with chaos, uncertainty, and failure. I must feel my feelings in the midst of a world that celebrates separation from my true self.

This is what I want you to know. I want to be free. I want to be free from the pressure of the judgement and expectation that often walk alongside you. I want to be free to imagine, create, and rest but not hurry. I want to be free to love in ways that take real time.

Often slow and broken and grateful,

Katie

https://kitt.global/march-26-feeling-your-feelings-mark-nepo-the-book-of-awakening/