Guidance from our feelings is a critical part of our spiritual growth. The common phrase “let your feelings guide you” or “be guided by your heart” is standard advice from the spiritual growth crowd. The problem is no one really tells us just what this means or how to do it. It is like it is assumed that everyone knows how to do this when in fact hardly anyone has a clue as to what this even means. It is powerful and meaningful once you figure it out, but it is not what most people think it is.
Feelings are in-the-moment perceptions of our relationship to ourselves and the world at this moment. These are completely different from our reactions to what is based on our history. History-based-reactions I call emotions. For example our sense of right and wrong are learned and appear as emotional reactions to things. Our fears, entitlements, habits, expectations, confidences, and relationship patterns are charged with lots of historical emotions based on how things turned out for us in the past. Most people live their lives based on these learned relationships based on what they have encountered before. This is “safe” in the sense of the comfort of being able to recreate what you have experienced before. We get to re-experience the same emotions over and over as we recreate variations of the same themes in our lives. This re-creating process is what some authors call our comfort zone.
How does this relate to feeling guidance? It is very different. For the typical person, feeling guidance is simply part of our survival mechanism. We take in millions of bits of data every minute, but can only pay attention to a tiny fraction of that data. Most of it is automatically filtered to screen out what is not relevant to our survival needs. But sometimes this filtering mechanism perceives data that is not necessarily relevant to our goals in the moment, but may be important to us anyway. This data gets sent to us through feelings. The most common example of this is the feeling that something is not right – possibly a threat. This may be relative to a person, a food item at a potluck, a supplement, a situation, or most anything. That filtering part of our brain is letting us know that we need to be more aware of the present moment because something may need to be responded to that is not part of what we are routinely expecting.
Commonly feelings are accompanied by an actual kinesthetic feeling in the body. Some people feel a change in pressure over the chest, others a tingling in the back of the head or a tension in the throat. Physical feelings are often the trigger for you to pay attention. They let you know something is coming in.
This is feeling guidance. It does not have anything to do with expectations based on events from our past. It is not any sort of reaction to something we know, but instead just a heads up that something needs more attention from us than usual. Some writers have called this guidance instinct. That is a good term for the survival aspects of this guidance, but there is more. This feeling can feed us a lot of guidance about how to reach goals when we don’t know how to get where we want to be. This is so much more than just survival instinct. Our senses have access to more information than our conscious mind can process. Rationally we ignore this kind of information because we can’t understand it, but it exists anyway. When you open to being guided by feeling information (not emotional reactions), you get access to this extra supportive input. Some of this data comes from input beyond our five senses. How we are able perceive it is still mostly conjecture. There are tons of theories and philosophies about this, but understanding it is completely unnecessary to being able to use it.
The key is learning to distinguish between emotional reactions and feeling guidance. This can be very difficult. It is hard to tell the difference between clear feeling guidance and emotional reactions to parts of our past that we are simply not conscious of. The first step is to filter out stuff that has a story attached to it. Stories automatically mean that what we are feeling is a reaction – either to something in the present or to our past. Wanting to punch somebody in the nose because they are being loud and annoying is an example of a present time reaction. We have a story that we are entitled to have people behave the way we want. Not trusting a dog because you have experienced being bit by a dog in the past is an example of replaying a past emotional reaction. But not trusting a dog because it is behaving oddly right now may be a feeling guidance.
Feelings often flow from the awareness that something is behaving differently than usual. Often times feelings come from a subconscious awareness of changes in peoples’ vocal tones, or pheromone signals, or postural shifts, or tiny changes in eye movements. These things will all be subconscious signals to you that your filtering system picks up on and lets you know about through feelings.
Other feeling guidance examples defy physical science explanations. An example might be the feeling that a loved one is in trouble right when they are. Another might be the feeling that someone you know will call you and they do. I hesitate to mention this example, but it is real and does happen – precognition – the knowledge that something in particular is going to happen. Clinical studies have been done demonstrating this with successful gambling on the stock market. This is where my hesitation lies – one of the big realities about feeling guidance is that you usually can not tell the difference between feeling desires for a particular outcome and actual feeling guidance about a particular outcome. We are masters at fooling ourselves. The more we want something to be true, the more it feels true to us. That is why most people that try to use feeling guidance for stock market picking fail miserably. But that does not invalidate the field of precognitive research that has shown some spectacular successes.
I mention this possible area simply to help you not limit the information you could gain from feelings.
Another constant requirement when trusting feeling guidance is continuous reality confirmation. Everything you get on a feeling level must be checked out in the real world. The information must always be validated. If it can’t be validated it is largely useless information. Lots of folks in the “spiritual” world of inner guidance will craft an entire alternate reality that has no relationship to what actually happens and works in the real world. It may be great fun as a fantasy escape, but this is not useful in helping you manifest your personal unfoldment and creative manifestation. Accepting any feeling piece of information without checking it out quickly leads to beliefs and actions based on faulty information.
Whenever I get a feeling guidance piece, I file it in my brain as a possible reality and then start looking for more data to either support it or reject it. I can’t say that my way of doing things is the best way, but it has served me well in my life. Others are greater risk takers and are willing to leap without looking just because it feels right. Sometimes they succeed brilliantly, but other times they crash horribly. I am more conservative I guess. Take that into account as my bias in this article. You each have to live within your innate levels of risk taking.
So to sum up, feeling guidance is subtle and difficult to distinguish from emotional reactions and feeling desires. Guidance is real and very powerful when you get tuned into it, but it is easy to spiral into fantasy wish fulfillment instead of useful guidance. Ignoring any data that has a story attached to it is a big help. Keeping focused in the present moment helps. Reality checking is a basic requirement from my perspective. It is too easy to turn what you believe to be feeling inputs into an utterly false set of beliefs about reality. If the information is good then it will pan out in the real world. If it doesn’t then it is bogus.
We seem to have an infinite capacity to make up stuff to fill in our understanding of reality. We really don’t like having unknown stuff in our universe. This works against us as we are prone to make up false feeling information to fill in these gaps. But at the same time it is precisely these unknown elements that push us to open to wider sources of information – feeling information.
Just a last caution – don’t reject feeling information just because it makes no sense to you based on what you believe to be real today. Too many times I have been given what felt like conflicting feeling information only to discover later that my beliefs about how things are were completely wrong. The feeling guidance was trying to tell me this and I just was not ready to listen. That is why I keep all this type of stuff in the ‘possible’ box until I get more input or confirmation.
Life is more amazing than we are able to conceive. Guidance through some of that amazingness can be really helpful. Let a little bit of it in.