I feel, therefore I am

“But feelings can't be ignored, no matter how unjust or ungrateful they seem.” 
― Anne Frank, The Diary of a Young Girl

“One ought to hold on to one's heart; for if one lets it go, one soon loses control of the head too.” 
― Friedrich Nietzsche

“The best and most beautiful things in the world cannot be seen or even touched. They must be felt with the heart” 
― Helen Keller

The famous quote by Descartes "Cogito ergo sum" (I think, therefore I am) seems nowadays to be giving its place to the importance of emotional awareness and connection with one's inner feelings.

• What makes you feel less in touch with yourself?
• What makes you have the impression you cannot control the things that affect you in your daily routine?

From the moment we are born, we feel. Through our senses and our experiences with the world, we learn to express certain emotions and silence a few others. The moment we cry, a hug or a touch of someone else's hand or the sound of a soothing voice might make us feel better. The moment we fall onto the ground and have a wound, the time we spend to heal that on our own, or with the help of another person, teaches us how to take care of ourselves or how to heal from an injury. Our minds forget these early experiences, but our bodies remember and store them as guidance for the future.
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"Don't act like a child, grow up!" seems to be a common phrase we tell ourselves when things get more stressful and we need to act fast and move forward. But the underlying emotions of fear, anger, sadness, shame, guilt and many more, remain unexplored, hidden, waiting to be heard. And they will be, sooner or later.  

Either it's a separation, a divorce, a change of countries, a fight, a mistake we made or an unjust situation we feel trapped, all these events create some emotions which are often ignored in favor of our cognitive capacity to deal with a situation and feel "in control". So, we might not mourn for something we lost and try to find the antidote instead, which will bring us pleasure and will help us forget the adverse thing that happened to us. But the feelings for what happened will remain unfed. They are waiting for our attention, they are asking for space and time to be experienced, before we are truly healed. 
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As soon as we undergo this route of connecting to our emotions and inner experiences, everything starts to fall back into place. After having  realized the emotional impact of our experiences, after having attended to the emotional pain we felt during a certain event, then we can make sense of who we are, what we need and who we want to be in the future to come.

​It might often seem as a difficult path to take, but it is the one which connects us to our genuine self.