This is the completion of last weeks article about how and why it is important to develop the skill of feeling.
Step two is to cultivate a state of intense curiosity about what is. You have to embrace what is as perfect. Any judgments you have will block your ability to receive what is because receiving is literally taking it into yourself. That is something you are not going to do if you are in judgment of what is. That does not mean that you have to adopt it as your truth for more than a moment as it may not match or be part of your path. But you do have to be willing to embrace what is for at least the moment it takes to see the world from this different perspective. Seeing the world from different perspectives is exactly what we are seeking.
Step three is to ask. For me, that is a request that simply says show me. My other favorite question is why, why is this something the way it is? For my sweetie, Ellen, it is in the form of a specific prayer “Please help me want to see ____.” There are probably thousands of techniques and disciplines that have taught this over the centuries. The essence is opening yourself to something more than you are right now, asking to be expanded and aligned with what is. The desire is to be made more than you are right now by letting go of limited parts of yourself. This requires great courage and great trust in something greater than your normal conscious self. But it means setting yourself free from the bonds of fear that keep you locked inside yourself. As I have said for many years, fear is just the Failure to Embrace and Accept Reality.
So these are the steps to feeling as I know them:
Step one: quiet the ego; the part of you that feels separate
Step two: get curious, really curious about what is
Step three: ask with trust and courage. Just ask
For me, all that remains is the waiting. The feelings, shifts in consciousness, and the answers come in their own time. My job is to stay in the state of expectancy that they are on their way. Sometimes I am not ready and I have to be graced with one or more other awareness first to prepare the space of acceptance within me. Other times I have to have my mind distracted in some mindless manner to get stuff past the busy chatter of my daily thoughts. The humor in my house is “what has the shower head told you today?” because when I am taking a shower, my mind lets go enough for stuff to come through. So maybe we have a fourth step as well.
Step four: Wait with expectancy but without anxiety. Everything comes in its time.
There is one last step; the step that is the actual feeling process. Once the new vision/ information/ relationship to life is downloaded, we get to try it on for size. We might start in imagination by imagining how we would act and feel differently with this new perspective on board. The point of the new information is to expand our sense of who we are and what new options for action open up to us as a result. See it. Hear it. Feel it. What does it feel like to act and be different? Imagination is a good place to start, but life rarely plays out the way things look in our imagination. We then have to start practicing the new actions built from the new perspectives in our real life. This is a real feeling experience because we will be experiencing feedback and outcomes that are very new to us. We have to integrate new patterns of behavior into the rest of our life. It changes us. It heals us. We become more than we were before. This is where the rubber meets the road when you ask to feel. You get to do and be more than you were before you felt what is and how you can relate from this new understanding; this new sense of self. When we see the world differently, we also see ourselves differently. Embracing what is reduces our fear. With less fear, we can show up bigger and brighter in life. That is the real goal of feeling.
Step five: Become more from your enhanced feeling relationship to life.
So let’s run through a real-life example of feeling in action. The initiation of any process begins with the awareness that something feels not right. This might be a feeling we have about ourselves, a loved one, someone we don’t know personally, or maybe the universe at large. But something just does not feel good. We could go into a reactive emotion from this or we might try to intellectually analyze what feels bad and how to fix it, or we could approach this feeling and follow it through by staying in the feeling flow. Each approach has its time and place. Most of the time the only thing you have any real control over is yourself in such situations. Your mind and emotions will only give you more of what you have already got. They are not able to see or act beyond themselves. If you want to create real change, you need to see things in a way that you have never seen before so you can act in a way you never have before.
Let’s imagine I am a proctologist. I have a good relationship with a patient and we have known each other for years. He tells me about his upcoming wedding and all the plans he and his fiancée are making. As the date comes closer, I notice that I have not gotten an invitation to the wedding. This does not feel good to me. My ego feels abused because I thought I was his friend. But I calm my ego down and get curious about why I wouldn’t be invited? I assume that there is a perfect reason for this that has nothing to do with me personally, or maybe there is a personal reason and I am simply unaware of what it might be. With my ego quiet, I am unafraid of the true answer and I am willing to ask and receive a new perspective that will make this situation clear to me. I go into casual rumination mode and wait to see what comes of my question. I am feeling my way subconsciously towards this information. While I am driving home from the office, I get a vision of being at his wedding and a couple of guests asking me how I know the groom. I respond that I have been taking care of his terrible hemorrhoid problem for years. I see the look on their faces as they think of the groom in this light. Suddenly I can feel the effect I would have on the party mood. When you are having a party where everyone is supposed to see you as wonderful, you don’t want people there sharing your dark secrets. Of course, you are not going to invite people you hire to fix the problems you don’t want anyone to know you have to a party that is all about spinning a story of romance and magic.
With this new perspective and understanding, I can feel relieved that the reason for not inviting me was not something bad about me but rather the groom’s own body shame he was keeping from the guests. Of course, you are not going to invite your proctologist, or your dentist, or your probation officer, or any other number of people you might have perfectly good relationships with to your wedding. These people are not a good mix for that particular venue. As I align with the perfectly understandable reason for the situation that initially felt bad, I find that it no longer feels bad. I have felt my way through the situation, and by expanding my view to understanding the other person’s reasoning, I feel it is perfectly fine. I still miss the party experience, but I am no longer taking it personally. My ego may be miffed that I am not more important than this person’s body shame, but I have to admit that I probably have people I know that I would not invite to my wedding. I get it and I am no longer offended.
We generally have a boatload of faulty perceptions about our relationship to people and the world left over from our childhood. When our brain is young, it does not have the ability to see the complexity of the world and the people in it. We see and feel ourselves as the center of everything because that’s all we really know. Everything else is like paper dolls to us. We can’t grasp that they are all just as complex inside as we are. Consequently, we unavoidably see life in terms of us as being the center of everything. This perception is frequently what gets to be expanded to appreciating others’ differences from us when we do feeling work – that difference being that they do not see us as the center but themselves instead. As we embrace this, we grow, we mature, and we become more effective in life.
What about bad feelings that don’t appear to be related to anything? You know those tight spots in the chest or queasiness in the gut or that irritability or sadness you have for no reason? Feelings are information; they are never for no reason. We just may not be aware of the reason. This may be simply because we are blocking awareness of the inner story attached to the feeling. But on the other hand, there could be all sorts of other reasons for the bad feelings. Unfortunately, we only experience a few basic feelings in our body, so any given feeling can be due to a wide number of causes. For example, the physical sensations for fear and excitement are exactly the same, only the context is different. Bad feelings could be a gut imbalance being felt, an immune system inflammation being felt, or the byproduct of a reaction to a food or inhalant. On the other extreme, we will feel things as a byproduct of the pheromones being excreted by people around us because of what they are feeling. Unconscious gestural cues others make trigger reactive feelings in us without us having any conscious awareness of it. This is how feelings travel through a big crowd. We may have nutritional deficiencies or neurochemical imbalances affecting our brains. The list is very long of all the things that might bring up feelings within us. Here the skill is being able to sit and simply feel them without judgment. Be curious. Ask why, what is this feeling all about? Answers may not appear right away. If you remain curious, in my experience, life will find a way to show you what this is all about.
I hope this conveys some sense of how to feel. There are a million situations this process can be applied to. It is different, but not particularly hard to do. Letting go of ego and the fear it carries is a challenge initially until ego gets on to how helpful this outside information is. Ego’s job is to keep us safe. As it observes that the big picture perspective works better than its current childish drive to control the world, it gets on board readily. Good luck and enjoy.
Take care,
David