Something that I have heard a few times in coaching calls is that feelings are information to be decoded.

Also, that feelings are not emergencies and are just happenings in our consciousness that have no power over us.

So I am kind of confused, or maybe interested is a better word, how do we understand when the information to be decoded is relevant to us and that we want to look at it closer, and when “it’s just a feeling”?

For instance, we may be overweight and have an experience of guilt and shame over and over around our bodies. We could see that the information beneath these experiences of shame and guilt is a “call to act,” a call to learn to love our body more and to take better care of it.

On the other side, we could also just feel the shame and guilt, not making it mean anything, not looking at them deeper, not questioning nor analyzing, just feel them, do nothing and go back to what we are doing, in a way that we progressively desensitize our reaction to them.

What do you think about these two attitudes towards feelings, do you have a sign/indicator that tells you when following one is more useful than the other?