Say your dog is barking at night. All you want to do is go to sleep, yet the dog keeps barking and keeps you awake. You want to go outside and yell at the dog “Hey! Shut up!”

But then you forget this is why you bought the dog to start off with.

The dog is letting you know that there is an intruder around. The dog is letting you know that there is something wrong happening and you need to attend to it.

Our feelings are the same way. They are the barking dog. But we silence them and we ignore them.

We tell them to shut up when we stop paying attention to them. Now of course we didn’t buy the internal dog – that is part of the standard package that comes with being human. We were given it for free when we were born. It is a gift to us from God. These thoughts and feelings are there to keep us safe.

Remember how they say you should always trust your gut? Your gut is where your dog lives. Always pay attention to it if you feel like something is wrong. Follow that feeling.

Now this doesn’t mean to let your fears rule you. It doesn’t mean to always hide and run away from problems.

Sometimes the problem isn’t the person or the situation in front of you. Sometimes the problem is what you think about the person or the situation in front of you. You may be having a reaction or a memory to some bad thing that happened to you in the past. You may not remember what the problem was to start off with. You are having a reaction or a reflex.

You should always heed your feelings because your feelings will let you know that there is a problem that needs to be dealt with.

This is called projection and it is important to deal with. It is important to understand and face. Now, instead of running away from the situation, sometimes what you need to do is lean into it.

Sometimes you may need to look at it sort of sideways and not necessarily face it head on. Sometimes facing it head on is very scary. But more importantly, don’t run away from it. If you’re running away from it then you’re telling the dog to shut up.

Ignoring the problem and running away from it are both dangerous they seem opposite but really they both involve not dealing with the intruder. You have to deal with the intruder because otherwise if you ignore it then it is simply going to come in and steal everything in your house. Your house represents your safety and your sanity. If you run away from it or tell it to shut up, then you’re not using this as a valuable lesson to strengthen up your defenses.