Philip McKernan: Understanding the Barrier to Your Truth

The Find Your True North Episode podcast episode with Philip McKernan can be found on iTunes or Soundcloud. For More information about Philip and his work, go to philipmckernan.com.

Philip McKernan’s lyrical Irish accent makes every discussion pleasurable, even if he’s telling you something you don’t want to hear (which he frequently does with his clients – I’ve never known someone who makes so many people cry in a good way).

In our interview, we touched on the relationship between feelings and intuition. Philip teaches his clients that the source of our inner wisdom is our feelings.

But Philip, I asked, what about feelings that are too fleeting to rely on? Don’t they change too quickly from one minute to the other?

He explained that he would question the person who says their feelings are changing from one day to another. He wonders why there’s a cycle around the way we feel, and posits there may not be a cycle at all.

The oscillating feelings could be a result of your refusal to allow the feeling to be there in the first place.

In other words, since we don’t accept the feeling, it comes and goes, resurfacing at seemingly random moments (but let’s be real, they probably aren’t random).

When we finally see that we have these feelings, we don’t want to stay there long. He used the bungee-jump as an example. When we discover it’s there, we bungee-jump into the uncomfortable feeling, going deep for a moment before we’re yanked back out. And then we ask for the quickest way to the other side. “How do I get through this? How do I deal with this so I can do the next analytical thing that sounds good?”

The truth is that rage, grief, anger, sadness are emotions we don’t move through in just a moment. They take a lot of time to process, particularly if we’ve held onto those feelings for quite a while, or if they come as the result of years of trauma.

There is no one size fits all way to approach this. This not a formulaic post with “5 Steps to Unlocking and Clearing Out Your Shadow Side.” Nope, that journey is not for the faint of heart, and it takes time and the willingness to go there, to those places in your emotional and mental life that you don’t want to deal with.

However, I can share my own experience with this, and maybe you’ll get something out of it that’s useful. I used to think I had no anger… that I was not an “angry person.” I told myself this story for most of my adult life.

A year ago, I was with my partner visiting Colorado (where, little did we know, we would soon be living). He was walking me through a meditation, and for some reason this particular meditation was stoking my anger. I could feel myself getting more and more angry as he spoke. Eventually, I felt like I had descended into a pit of emotions that I had never seen before.

What I found was anger, rage, jealousy, envy, greed, even malice. There were things that were unnameable but dark.

My first thought was “Wow, who’s energy am I picking up?”

Ha. Right? Cause it’s easier to say “This belongs to someone else” than it is to own it. What I found were all the emotions I hadn’t known what to do with at the moment they arose. I had shoved them in the proverbial kitchen drawer. You know, the one where all the lost and placeless things go.

What I found was years of suppressed “negative,” hard-to-deal-with feelings.

So there I was, suddenly aware of a boatload of shit that I’d been carrying around and pretending didn’t exist. It was revelatory for me, but as soon as I came out of the meditation, my partner and I talked about it briefly and then moved on.

I had bungeed in and out.

It wasn’t until the following week that I realized there was a lot more to the story. I was back at home in California, where I lived at the time. I was cutting onions, and I suddenly realized that I was gritting and clenching my teeth. When the tightness in my jaw became enough for me to notice, I stopped a moment and wondered aloud why my jaw was so tight. I went back to cutting the onions and realized that for some reason, I was getting impatient and angry about the time it was taking to accomplish the task. Only, the anger had come and gone so fast that I hadn’t even noticed it. It was like a fish in a pond, surfacing only for a moment, and then slipping back down to the depths so quickly that it seemed as if it was never there in the first place.

Needless to say, it’s taken a long time to uncover my own anger and rage, and to realize how and why I tend to stuff it before it’s felt (whole books could are written on this topic – particularly about why women aren’t comfortable expressing and venting their anger… maybe a post for another time). It wasn’t something I could bungee jump into and claim to have #handled. I’ve had to unpack all of it (and still am), from the reasons I get angry, to what I experience when I feel that emotion, to how it’s expressed.

Assessing your blocked emotions isn’t just a key to intuition; it’s a key to living a happier life. Dealing with rage isn’t fun, of course, but I can tell you that I live a life that’s much more authentic to itself than where I was a year ago, and I have access to a wider range of emotions and feelings than I ever have before.

I invite you to think about it for yourself. Think about the things you haven’t ever looked at. Some of them are obvious, and some of them are less so. But if you find yourself saying “I’m not a [insert descriptor here] person,” look again.