There are four foundational principles of the Healthy Grieving process.  They are:
<ol>
	<li>To undertake the process, you have to be willing to move on from the pain of the loss and be ready to let go.</li>
	<li>You have to be honest.  <i>No healing can take place at the level of a story.</i></li>
	<li>You have to be willing to bypass the mind and all its defenses, resistance and objections in order to get to the truth and to the feelings; this is where muscle testing responses comes into play.</li>
	<li>You have to be willing to feel your feelings.</li>
</ol>
Number four is a lot trickier than you may think for two reasons.  The first is that as humans, we want, at all costs, to avoid pain, and going into painful feelings is the opposite of avoidance.  We can probably all intellectually understand the need to feel our painful feelings, but still we resist  . . . even when we’re seeking to be healed.  The healing process won’t work if we’re not willing to go there; as John Bradshaw famously said, “you can’t heal what you won’t feel.”

But the bigger obstacle is that we – and I mean almost every one of us including those of us who think of ourselves as emotional – generally do not know how to actually feel our feelings.

So one of the first things we do in the Healthy Grieving Workshop and the Two-Day Training is to talk about the difference between emotions and feelings.

In brief, emotions are charges – reactions to external events – that are universal and easily labeled.  We have all felt angry, lost, disrespected, unloved, unsafe, abandoned etc. and can all relate to the “charge” that those emotions carry.

Feelings are deeper and much more personal.  Feelings take us below the surface – below the charge even – to our own very personal and unique<b><i> experience</i></b> of the emotion.  For example, when we say we feel abandoned, what does that mean <i>to us?</i>  What is our own <i>experience </i>of that emotion?  For one person that might feel like “left all alone in the world with no one to rely on; I can never count on anyone to be there for me.”  Another’s experience is “I don’t matter; I don’t even exist. I am invisible. I am nothing.” For another, “I am in a black hole, an abyss and there is no way out.”  Those are three different experiences of the word or label of the emotion called “abandoned.”

For the Healthy Grieving process, the client has to get to the feelings and the experience.  One of the most challenging aspects of taking someone through the process is to continually move them from emotions to feelings.  The counselor must continually guide the client to “Describe what that means FOR YOU.  Describe abandoned AS YOU.  Tell me how you FEEL when you’re angry.  Go into that place and describe your own experience. “

Sometimes when this process is taking place in the front of the room it can be uncomfortable for those watching – especially therapists who are trained not to be “invasive” or “leading” or “directive” with their clients. Sometimes, depending on the watcher’s own perspective and triggers, it can even look like badgering or bullying – pushing the client to get to the feelings. What if they’re not ready?  What if their protective mechanisms are in place for a reason? Shouldn’t the therapist respect where the client is resisting going?

But it is important to remember that the client has given permission to be guided into that place because what they want is to heal – to get release from --  their held  pain; and to accomplish that, we need to lead them to the place they have avoided.  That is why the Healthy Grieving process sometimes involves persistent insistence to “go deeper, go there, describe the emotion, not as an externalized abstraction, but as you yourself personally experience it; go back to that place and<i> feel</i> it.”

The mind and its protective mechanisms are going to avoid going there, but a trained and dedicated Healthy Grieving counselor will continue to guide the client to the place his or her mind doesn’t want to go – and will do so to honor the request from the client’s deepest self for help in releasing the ongoing pain.

It may be uncomfortable for the client (and for any audience watching at a training or workshop) but it bears wonderful fruit.

After a recent workshop, the volunteer who experienced the Healthy Grieving process thanked the trainer for having the “patience to hang in with me as I struggled to actually feel my feelings.”   “It took me a while to get there,” he said to the group, “but I’m glad I finally did because it was so worth it.”