Feelings as Teachers: An Introduction to Emotional Presence
- Tammy Waldron
- Jan 18
- 2 min read
Hi friend,
Through years of deep inner work—and through the healing spaces I hold with clients—I began to notice something consistent.
No matter the story. The diagnosis. The life circumstance.
Through years of deep inner work—and through the healing spaces I hold with clients—I began to notice something consistent.
No matter the story. The diagnosis. The life circumstance.
The same pattern kept emerging:
Our relationship with our feelings shapes our relationship with ourselves.
When emotions are avoided, misunderstood, or pushed away, they don’t disappear. They compress. They tangle with stories. They take up residence in the body—as tension, overwhelm, numbness, reactivity, or quiet self-judgment.
What isn’t felt doesn’t vanish. It waits.
And when emotions are met with presence—when they are allowed to be seen, heard, understood, and felt—something begins to shift.
✨ They soften.
✨ They clarify.
✨ They teach.
Over time, these observations led me to develop a way of understanding how feelings move through us—not just psychologically, but somatically and spiritually as part of our lived human experience.
I call this The Emotional Presence Framework™.
And the conversations that flow from it live here, in this blog series: Feelings as Teachers.
This framework builds upon the emotional spectrum developed by Katherine Ebacher, whose work offers a rich and nuanced language for naming emotional states. I’ve expanded on that foundation through the lens of embodiment, presence, and integration.
At its heart, this framework is about learning how to be with our emotions—without becoming them, suppressing them, or trying to bypass them. It reflects how feelings move through the mind, body, and spirit—and how our capacity for presence shapes the way we experience them.
When emotional presence is low, feelings are often fused with identity: I am the feeling.
✨ They are tangled with past or future stories.
✨ They feel overwhelming or inescapable.
✨ There is little space to observe—only to react or retreat.
When emotional presence is high, feelings are experienced differently.
They are felt in the body without flooding. They exist in the present moment. They offer information rather than take control.
In this state, we remember something essential: We are not our feelings. We are the ones feeling them.
Our emotions are not problems to solve.
✨ They are signals.
✨ They are guides.
✨ They are invitations into deeper presence.
None of our feelings are against us. None are enemies.
Each one carries something meaningful to show us—about what needs attention, what longs to be healed, and how to return home to ourselves.
Over the coming months, we’ll explore this framework one feeling at a time—moving from compressed and disconnected states, through moments of transition, and into expanded, integrated presence.
This is slow work.
Intentional work.
Human work.
One feeling at a time.
Seen. Heard. Understood. Felt.
💛 You are here for a reason. The world needs your light, your truth, and your gifts—now more than ever.
Are you ready to Rise?
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