Stop Justifying Your Experience

How to Embrace Your Sensations and Emotions

"When we slow down and quiet the mind, we come to realize that there is something more than what we see on the surface of life." ~ Ram Dass

Do you find yourself constantly justifying and explaining your experiences to others?

Do you struggle to simply stay present with your sensations and emotions without immediately going into sense-making and story mode?

You're not alone.

And I want you to hear something really important.

Your experience doesn't require an explanation.

In this blog post, I want to encourage you to trust your experience and dare to slow down and stay with it. I'll explore why it's important to stay present with your sensations, and resist the urge to jump into sense-making too quickly.

In our fast-paced world, it can be challenging to simply stay in the present moment and be with our experiences without immediately trying to make sense of them. In my work, I've noticed that many people have a hard time simply staying at the level of experience and sensation without immediately feeling the need to jump into story-telling mode and justify or explain their experience.

Some of this is a concern about how you might be perceived by others. Especially if you have a streak of people-pleasing in your perfectionism, it's easy to be worried about how someone else might react and so the tendency to caveat, soften and make your experience somehow more palatable makes a lot of sense.

Let's not forgot that this style of revealing your present moment experience - being at the relational level of conversation - is not the typical way of interacting, sadly. You're likely to be much more familiar and comfortable with sharing facts and information or perhaps your opinion with people. I had certainly not regularly hung out at the relational level until I started practising Authentic Relating.

And I think this tendency to immediately want to jump into rationalising and making sense of the experience, even before fully understanding it yourself, comes from an internal discomfort with being in the mess of a human experience. I believe that this recurring need to explain and justify often stems from a sense of perfectionism: thinking that you're not doing something right or that the experience you're having isn't right somehow.

Sense-making is necessary. And I've noticed that when I jump too quickly into this mode, I'm not really getting under the surface of what I'm feeling or noticing. Your emotions are data; they help you understand your relationship with the world around you and whether your needs are being met. Move on to sense-making too quickly and you risk ignoring the deeper levels of information available to you.

Stay at the level of sensation and noticing for a moment or two longer. Take a few moments to be with what is before trying to find the reason for it. Keep noticing what you're feeling in your body; orient towards your reality. By doing so, you can start to find the data you need to make sense of your experiences without jumping over the important steps of dropping into the depths of your emotions.

You get to be here exactly as you are, and you get to have the experience that you're having. It doesn't have to make sense to you, and it definitely doesn't have to make sense to anybody else in that moment. Allow yourself to fully inhabit your experience without needing to bend or explain it to others. Your experience is the one you're having. Trust it and dare to trust the rightness of your experience. That is the path to wisdom.

So, my suggestion to you is this: slow down. You don't need to jump straight into sense-making. Take the time to fully notice and experience what you're feeling without immediately trying to explain it or make sense of it. Trust your experience and know that it's showing you something valuable.

By slowing down and staying with your experiences, you can start to uncover the valuable insights that lie beneath the surface level. And by daring to trust the rightness of your experiences, you can move towards greater authenticity and wisdom in your life.

I'd love to hear your thoughts on this. How do you react when someone tells you to trust your experience? What comes up for you? Share your thoughts in the comments below. Remember, your experience is your own, and you don't have to justify it to anyone.