What if you could live your life unafraid to make mistakes or take risks? What if you were undaunted by tough emotions, and as a result, could better tolerate the messiness, unpredictability, and adversity of life? In a world where many of us struggle to sit with difficult feelings and are quick to distract, avoid, or numb ourselves, The Feeling Muscle offers concrete tools to stay present with and outlast our most challenging emotions.

In her timely and compelling debut, Dr. Jenn Rapkin defines the term “felt emotion,” questions the widely held assumption that feeling is a cognitive or mental process, and asserts that feeling is, instead, the body’s job. The Feeling Muscle can help you recognize and respect your felt emotion as a tangible experience within the body and teach you how to use felt emotion to stay connected to yourself rather than choosing behaviors that numb and distract.

The Feeling Muscle is an accessible, self-paced, step-by-step guide to feeling, sitting with, and outlasting hard feelings through the development of a neutral, trusting, and attuned relationship with the body. Dr. Rapkin shares hard-won personal experiences as well as insights from her clinical practice to show how integrating mind and body is possible for everyone. Filled with simple exercises designed to be done at home at your own pace, The Feeling Muscle is a manual for choosing mindfulness over mindlessness and living a life filled with deeper feeling, more connection, and increased resilience.

Help for Frequent Feelers

While The Feeling Muscle can benefit every reader, Dr. Rapkin devotes time to understanding her fellow “Frequent Feelers” who struggle with deep and intense feelings that may exhaust and deplete them. She explains how Frequent Feelers can avoid burn out, tend to their inner needs, and turn their powerful “feeling muscle” into a strength.

Dr. Jenn Rapkin is a naturopathic physician, bodyworker, former dancer, and Frequent Feeler with more than twenty-five years of experience in mind-body and body-centered therapies. Her new book The Feeling Muscle chronicles her personal and professional transformation from physician to a shepherd of “feelings.” In her clinical practice, her bodywork table is a place to hold space for, validate, and give voice to her patients’ inner felt emotion. She has had the good fortune in her life to balance deep and meaningful inner reflection with rich and interesting life experiences – from growing up on Nantucket Island, go-go dancing in the Guggenheim Museum, and living as an expat in Barcelona to raising two amazingly soulful and spirited children in Connecticut.