Fully Expressing Our Emotions… With Bernadette Pleasant

How comfortable are you with uncomfortable emotions?

How comfortable are you with feeling emotions like anger and grief?

How comfortable are you with feeling lust?

Are any emotions so uncomfortable that you choose (or try) not to feel them?

Bypassing emotions…

When we don’t feel our emotions we’re doing something called a “bypass.”

And when we bypass our emotions (by refusing to feel them) we’re actually keeping ourselves stuck in pain.

Because painful emotions don’t go away by pretending they don’t exist. They go away by getting processed and healed.

Usually people think that the only solution for healing our “emotional issues” is to see a psychologist.

But psychologists only work with the mind.

Going beyond the mind…

Ancient wisdom teaches us that emotions can’t just be healed using the mind.

Ancient practices such as yoga and chi gong and tai chi and tantra all contain wisdom for healing emotions through the body.

And today all over the world there are new teachers emerging who are creating opportunities for people to use their bodies as tools for emotional healing.

And in this episode of Women Wanting Women I interview Bernadette Pleasant, the creator of a class called

Femme! that is all about healing emotions through movement.

(And no, the word “femme” is not used here the way it is ordinarily used inside the lesbian community. She explains more about that in the interview.)

No emotions are “negative”…

As you’ll hear in this interview, Bernadette teaches that there are no "good" or "bad" or "light" or "dark" emotions – only emotions that need to be fully expressed.

We so often want to avoid feeling our uncomfortable emotions because they’re truly difficult to fully observe and pay attention to and feel and be present for.

But Bernadette Pleasant stands for the idea that no emotions are “negative.” Yes, there are some emotions “we don’t want to have.” But they are a part of what makes us human, and we are built for having them.

Bernadette’s class Femme! is a class where people can go to “move through” and “act out” and “give voice to” our wide range of emotions in order to help heal them.