I Feel Because...
On learning to trust the intelligence your body has been speaking all along
I took my A1 Portuguese test this week. I crammed so many words into my brain in such a short time that I have to admit, it is hard to keep all the new words straight. It feels like I know just enough to be confused. I keep hearing from locals that I need to practice more, or rather, I need to “Prática, Prática, Prática!”
I am, trust me.
While learning the parts of the body and how to ask for help if we need it, we learned the word for “healthy”, which is saudável, and “health,” which is saúde. You can say this when someone sneezes, and it is also what you say when you raise a glass in a toast. Like the French santé or the Spanish salud. Basically, a proclamation and a toast “to your health!”
But there is a word in Portuguese - saudade - that has no direct English translation, but shares the same root word tracing back to the Latin salus, meaning health, wholeness, safety, and well-being.
But there is no English equivalent to learn in this case, which intrigued me… so I had to dive a bit deeper.
Scholars have tried. They reach for nostalgia, longing, melancholy, and yearning. None of them lands. Because saudade isn’t simply missing something.
Saudade is the feeling of an absence that is also somehow a presence… a love that persists even when the thing loved is gone, or has not yet arrived, or may never arrive at all. It is the ache of something true living in your body before your mind has words for it.
How incredibly beautiful to have a word that has to enter through our body’s awareness before it enters the mind.
And I find myself understanding on some level, yet not with words, something that my mind can’t quite define, but must be felt. And while I didn’t have a word to describe how different parts of my life’s journey (and perhaps yours too) could be described this way…where there is a longing for something that you can’t quite explain with words.
The Portuguese don’t think saudade. They feel it settle into their chest on a grey afternoon. They feel it in the old fado music that rises from open windows in Lisbon. They feel it before they can explain why.
Madeira, Portugal, is home right now… an island in the Atlantic, far from the life I used to be so certain about. And I think I moved here partly because I had been living with my own version of saudade for years without knowing what to call it. A longing for a self I hadn’t yet become. A grief for a life that felt like mine but wasn’t. A pull toward something I couldn’t see clearly but could feel, with an insistence my mind kept trying to argue away.
We have been taught - carefully, systematically, across decades of schooling and socialization - to lead with I think.
Me too.
I think I should stay in this marriage a little longer.
I think I should take the safer job.
I think this isn’t the right time to leave.
AND…
We call this reason.
We call this being responsible.
We call this being an adult.
But here is what I want to offer you today, from both sides of the clinical desk and from the middle of a life I blew up and rebuilt on an Atlantic island at fifty-something: feeling is not the opposite of thinking. It is thinking, conducted in an older, wiser, and far more honest language.
It took me longer than I care to admit to learn this, but it can be learned. Once I started letting my feelings lead the way (and my desires), my life shifted.
One of my favorite quotes of all time is one I first read in college, which, being a hardcore Biology and Chemistry major, struck a chord somewhere inside me like an arrow. I copied it down and stuck it on my dorm room wall with a collection of other inspiring quotes from the Great Books curriculum I was enrolled in. I didn’t understand it, but even then it intrigued me. It was a quote by the mathematician Blaise Pascal, and he said: “The heart has a reason of which the mind knows nothing”.
I’ve never forgotten this, even though I fought against this truth for most of my adult life.
Your Gut Is Not Lying to You
Here’s something I also learned in those Biology classes that many people don’t know: your gut has its own nervous system, separate and distinct from your central nervous system (your brain and spinal cord).
About 100 million neurons line your gastrointestinal tract, which is more than your spinal cord. The nervous system of the gut is called the enteric nervous system, and it communicates directly with your brain through the vagus nerve, a long, wandering highway that connects your brainstem to your heart, your lungs, and your belly. The signal travels both ways, but here’s what’s striking: roughly 80 to 90 percent of the fibers run upward (afferent neurons), carrying sensations from body to brain, not brain to body. Your gut is not receiving most of the instructions. It is sending them.
This is the biology of what we casually call a gut feeling. When something feels off before you can name why. That’s not irrationality. That’s a message in transit where your body is completing an assessment your conscious mind hasn’t caught up to yet.
We treat gut feelings like they’re noise to be filtered out.
We assume the mind knows better.
Your gut clenches when there is incongruency in life. Your shoulders drop the moment you walk into the right room. Your chest tightens when someone says something that isn’t quite true.
This is data, even if we don’t call it that or name it.
It is a feeling.
The ego thinks. It strategizes. It manages appearances. It builds elaborate arguments for why you should stay where it is safe and known.
The Self feels. It knows. And it communicates not in rational sentences but in the language of the body - in restlessness, in symptoms, in that particular saudade that arrives on Sunday evenings when you look at the week ahead and feel nothing but a low grey weight.
I see this again and again in my therapy practice: the woman who “couldn’t explain” why she was exhausted by her marriage, but her body had been explaining it for years. The executive who “thought” he loved his career but couldn’t sleep, couldn’t play, couldn’t be still. The mother who “knew” she should want the life she’d built, but felt a kind of saudade for some other version of herself every time she imagined the next twenty years.
The mind had constructed airtight cases for the expected path. The body had been quietly, persistently filing dissenting opinions.
Decades of Doing the Expected Right Thing
I did the expected right thing for a very long time.
I built the career that made sense. I stayed in the structures that were legible to others. I made the responsible choices, the practical choices, the choices that required no explanation at dinner parties because everyone could nod along.
And somewhere in all of that ego-centric life building that looked good on paper, I stopped asking the only question that actually matters: What do I feel right now? How do I feel about my life at this junction when kids are flying the nest, and it’s quiet? What now are the longings of my heart in this chapter in life?
Not what do I think I should feel. Not what a reasonable person would feel. Not what would be easiest to explain.
What do I actually feel?
What I felt and what I had been feeling for longer than I wanted to admit was saudade.
Not for something I had lost.
For something I had never quite let myself have.
A self that was fully mine.
A life built from the inside out rather than assembled to specification.
This was where Pascal’s words resurfaced in my life.
The decision to leave, to relocate to Portugal, to dismantle the life I’d built and rebuild something unrecognizable didn’t begin with a thought. It began with that feeling. A low-grade constriction, as if the life I was living was a size too small now. An ache I kept trying to rationalize away, until the day I finally stopped and let myself feel it all the way to the bottom.
What I found there wasn’t chaos.
It was direction.
I couldn’t think my way into understanding it. But when I finally let myself feel it -really feel it, without rushing to analyze or defend or explain - the path became obvious. Not easy. Obvious.
There is a difference.
“I Feel Because…” — The Grammar of Embodied Wisdom
In therapy, one of the most powerful interventions I use is deceptively simple: I ask clients to finish this sentence.
I feel _______ because _______.
Not, I think I feel.
Not, I feel like maybe.
Not I feel, but I know that doesn’t make sense.
Just: I feel. Because.
The “because” is crucial. It invites the body to explain itself, to articulate the intelligence it has already arrived at. It moves sensation from noise into signal, from experience into meaning.
What I’ve witnessed, hundreds of times across clinical practice and now in my own work with midlife women navigating reinvention, is that the “because” is almost always already there. The body knows why. It has always known why. It simply needed to be asked in a language it could answer.
I feel contracted because this path is not mine. I feel lit up because this is exactly mine. I feel grief because I’ve been betraying myself for years. I feel afraid because something real is finally within reach.
Listening to our feelings is not bypassing the mind. It is integrating them. The felt sense and the cognitive understanding arrive together, each making the other more coherent.
The Practice
This week, I want to invite you into a simple practice.
Set aside fifteen minutes. Find a quiet place. Have a journal nearby.
Begin with your body. Place one hand on your chest and one on your belly. Take three slow breaths.
Ask yourself: What am I carrying right now that I haven’t let myself feel?
Don’t answer with your mind. Wait. Notice what shifts - a tightness, a softening, a heaviness, a sudden, surprising lightness. Let the sensation be there without rushing to explain it.
Then write: “I feel _______ because…”
Let the “because” come from the same place as the feeling. Not from logic. Not from what you’ve been told you should feel. From the body’s own account of itself.
Write without editing. Write until something feels complete
Finally, ask: “What does this feeling know that I’ve been unwilling to hear?”
Write that answer, too. Even if it scares you. Especially if it scares you.
A Note on Trust
I want to name something directly, because I think it matters.
Learning to trust your felt sense is not a one-weekend workshop. Particularly for women who spent decades in high-performing roles, in caregiving roles, in roles that required constant self-suppression in the service of function, the body’s signal has often been muffled for so long that it takes time, patience, and repeated practice before it speaks clearly again.
If you have been carrying a longing you can’t quite name… for a different life, a truer self, a version of your story that feels more like yours - that is not restlessness to be managed.
That is your gut speaking.
That is your Self pointing.
The path back to yourself doesn’t run through your head. It runs through your chest, your gut, your throat, the soles of your feet on the ground.
It runs through I feel. Because.
And sometimes, if you follow it long enough, the saudade quiets. Not because the feeling disappears, but because you finally arrive somewhere that feels like home.
The saudade you might be carrying - the longing for a truer self - is connected to your own health and vitality. The words are connected. In some unspoken way, it is your body insisting on wholeness.
And like me, learning this new language, unlearning old patterns of navigating the world and adopting more “I feel, because” wisdom into your life will just take more…
Prática, Prática, Prática!
xo,
Jada
I’d love to know what comes up for you in this practice. Drop into the comments! And if this resonates, share it with a woman in your life who has been thinking about a decision for far too long.
Jada Butler is a PA-C and Licensed Professional Counselor writing from Madeira, Portugal. She writes about midlife reinvention, somatic identity, and the courage to build a life that actually fits. Find her at soulviasole.com.
I feel inspired because of your post!
I had to sit with your post for a couple of days, and reread it as well. When you wrote, the ," constant suppression in the service of function", that description hit me like a brick. I had a role to play in every one else's life except my own. After moving to Germany three years ago with my husband and leaving our adult children in the States, I finally got the time and space to focus on myself. But I still struggle with finding purpose in my life. Your suggestion of how to tap into my body and listen to it for guidance might just be the way forward. Thank you so much!