Feeling Together Podcast – Episode 1 – Introduction to the Podcast

Click here to listen to this episode.

Click here to donate and support this podcast.

Welcome to the Feeling Together podcast, the show that helps you are your family feel together again. Your host dr. Emily Keller is a play therapist and Mom to four boys she draws in her professional experience and personal vignette to help families connect learn to listen to your feelings to create the life you want and to cultivate a sense of wonder. And now your host, Emily. 

Hi, I’m Dr. Emily Keller. I got the idea for this podcast about a year ago when I was realizing that my life needed a change. I knew that, somewhere deep inside, based on how I was feeling. And yet I kept discounting how I was feeling to convince myself to stay where I was in life and to make things work. It just wasn’t happening.

 I was growing more anxious, angrier, and sadder. My children were too. In fact, I noticed that as my emotions changed their emotions changed. They got more chaotic. They were acting out. Meantime, my husband was working more. Both of us had given up so much of our connection time to ourselves, to nature, and as a family just to make our jobs work that we really were tag-teaming our way through life and feeling quite miserable about it. 

So, I wasn’t starting this podcast, and now I know why because … How could I start a podcast about feelings–and the importance of tuning in to them and responding to them appropriately to live an authentic connected life–when I was discounting my own feelings and creating misery for everyone? 

Once I tuned in and decided to take the action that best took care of my emotions everything started falling into place. Now, on the flip side, everything about the life I had also was falling apart. If it weren’t for my trust that everything was going to fall into place I don’t know that I would have had the courage to let it fall apart. But, I did, and as soon as I let go what started falling into place built momentum. Within just a couple of weeks, we had made the decision to move from the East Coast to the West Coast, changing careers and changing our lives completely.  

We decided we were going to rebuild our lives: make time for ourselves, make time for connecting with nature, and make time for each other. I write a lot about connection. I also write about cultivating a sense of wonder and the role that wonder has in healing individuals, in progressing naturally through childhood, and in creating more connected healthier societies. I know and trust that feelings are really important to connecting to a sense of wonder and cultivating Wonder. 

This Feeling Together podcast, number one, it’s about you feeling together again. It’s about feeling together even when the things around you are falling apart. And really sometimes you just have to let them go and let them fall because it’s not working. If it’s not working and it’s really hard, it just isn’t right for you. Feeling Together is also about tuning in to our emotions and being with each other, not in the doing of life, most of us got that down. And, yeah, I’m pretty competent. I could have kept working at the level I was working and going and going and going but there was no room to simply be in life.  

Feeling together, as you become more connected with yourself, allows you to feel connected to the people in your life. In fact, connections really are built on these moments of feeling together, tuning into, revealing what we’re feeling, understanding, being with, and joining the other person. In this way, we develop more authentic true connections.  I believe we end up building, moment by moment, the society that we really want. One in which everyone feels connected to themselves, something greater than themselves, and each other. 

Many of us don’t feel like we even have control or power or say over what this society around us looks like. The reality is we do. We can recreate it and we can do that from the inside out. Understanding and naming our emotions and really getting what they mean about what we’re experiencing is one part of what this podcast is about. And it’s the main part because really it’s missing. 

In society, the importance of tuning in to and understanding emotions is simply discounted. What we tend to focus on is the doing of life: the knowing, the intellectual aspects. We value certain intelligence over others and we need both to progress as a society. We are gathering a wealth of information. The question is “What do we do with all this information? How do we move forward?”

I propose that we’re not going to move beyond what we can hold emotionally — what we will hold emotionally: for ourselves and for others. Emotional intelligence: I think of this as a container. The more emotional intelligence and emotional literacy that I have, the more I can hold discomforts — of maybe looking inward and seeing things that I want to change about myself, seeing opportunities for growth, seeing the hurt, and holding and sitting with another person even if I caused that hurt.

Emotional holding and literacy allow us to go into the unknown, which really is a very comfortable place. We would rather categorize things as black or white than be in this gray space of not knowing. Yet, it’s in the space of not knowing that we are willing to become and are willing to progress, individually and together. Ultimately, feeling together is about more than me and you and our individual emotions, it’s about developing a collective wealth of emotional understanding; a collective experience and capacity for sitting together with each other in this unknown space so that we can create something better, something beautiful.  Specifically, the reality is, as humans, we have a great capacity to do terrible things and we have a great capacity to do beautiful things.