As a consequence of writing last weeks newsl
etter on living a lifestyle based on just enough, it became clear that a fundamental concept the article was based on was unclear. The article revolved around the ability to develop feeling skills in order to be successful in life. Feeling skills are such an intrinsic part of everyone’s daily life that I did not question whether anyone would know what I was writing about. Well it seems that lots of people do not know what that phrase refers to. What are feeling skills?
Let me give you an example of a feeling skill most of 
you have that you don’t even think about – driving. When you first learn how to drive you first engage the process of learning the rules, the DMV Handbook. In reality you began learning the rules by watching the actions of your parents or caretakers while they drove. You already have a pretty good idea of the basics before you ever encounter the dreaded DMV Handbook. When you finally do make that encounter you discover that so much of what your parents demonstrated for you is just plain wrong. The handbook is knowledge based information about what is right and what is wrong. Feeling skills are about 10% knowledge, the rest is equal parts attitude and experience.
Without an attitude of desire to engage you can not l
earn a new feeling skill. If you really hate the snow, how likely it is that you will become a great skier? In equal need is actual experience. Developing skill requires lots of practice. Will you ever become a great musician if you never practice? Back to our driving example, most of us began our driving with a great desire to learn how to drive and we followed that up with tons of practice. Over time we develop the skill of driving. That skill is what I call a feeling skill – you get a feel for driving. Once you have that skill, you don’t have to think about how to accelerate or put on the brakes. You can feel about how fast you are going without having to constantly check the speedometer. Driving has become a feeling skill. How polite or aggressive you are while driving is also part of the feeling skill. How distracted or hyper-vigilant you are is also part of your feeling skill. Your attitudes and experiences mold the skills of driving you use.
Our lives are driven by the feeling skills we develop to 
navigate life. The games we play socially are created by the feeling skills we have. Are we gregarious extroverts or shy introverts? Are we leaders or followers? Are we innovators or copiers? Are we adventurous or do we stick with the tried and true? How good are our negotiation skills or maybe our sales skills? Are we a workaholic producer or an enthusiastic consumer? Are we stubbornly independent or do we prefer to belong to the “in” group? All of these are built out of basic feeling skills. Each of them starts with us encountering and learning the “rules” of the position or identity we are attracted to and then through trial and error we learn our own unique expression of that identity. The attraction might not be based on joy, but rather a perceived survival need. For instance in a neighborhood filled with gangs, belonging to a powerful gang might be the only way to survive. Survival is a strong motivator. Survival becomes your dominant attitude. Avoiding death is your goal. You learn the gang rules, but that is only the beginning. Through experience you learn to feel how to play the power games so you know who to kiss up to and who you can ignore. After a while you don’t have to think about this. It becomes an automatic, feeling skill.
Hopefully at this point I am beginning to get across ho
w our success in life is all about developing feeling skills that are appropriate to our situation and desires. Part of how we cement these survival skills in on the feeling level is we invent stories that support our choices. These stories become the filters through which we interpret everything that happens to us and around us. Sometimes we inherit these stories from our parents or peers and other times we invent them all on our own. Either way, the stories become self-reinforcing since we filter our experiences through them. This makes them seem and feel like truth. For example, if you were raised in an abusive household you may have developed the story that you have no value. Once you have that story you block receiving positive feedback and only let in the negative feedback. This is not a conscious process, you just don’t see the positive input. You have developed the feeling skill of victim which actually helps you survive in an abusive house. That skill tells you to cower and hide when a parent figure is angry. If you stood up for yourself you would likely end up dead.
Basic feeling skills serve us to keep us alive. More
advanced feeling skills help us achieve happiness and success. The problem is our identification with our basic feeling skills often blocks our ability to develop more advanced feeling skills. If your childhood identity and skill set was about being a resistant troublemaker to keep you from being swallowed up by overly controlling parents, a more advanced goal of having a happy family of your own will be compromised. It is hard to build a happy family if you are a resistant ass.
This means that to become happy and successful in life you often have to let go of your old identities and feeling skill sets that keep you behaving in old ways. This is not easy to do becaus
e your personal story continues to feel like truth to you. That story is still filtering your perceptions of reality making you believe that only the old you can survive. Letting go of your old beliefs is hard to do. My experience in this arena shows me that generally it is the pain and suffering that our old stories and beliefs create that eventually drives us to abandon them. Living is survival mode is very damaging to our body, and that chronic stress ends up creating disease. I see this in my office every day. Lifetime patterns of stress end up crashing someone’s health. In the early stages the symptoms are generally outside the realm of traditional medicine so they end up in my office. I can be supportive in ways that slow down the process and often improve symptoms. But many times I also see the silent desperation driving the chronic stress that is the actual driver of the patients conditions.
Trying to address that silent desperation is a major rea
son I write these newsletters. I am not a psychotherapist and can not spend an hour every week for a few years to help a person shift out of old stress causing beliefs and identities and into better happier relationships with life. But I am a strong proponent of do-it-yourself therapy. It is definitely helpful to have outside objective perspective feedback to help me see through my own blind spots. But do-it-yourself therapy takes a huge amount of commitment in time and focused energy to make any headway. Is it worth it?
It appears to me that this growth stuff is automatically bu
ilt in to our lives. Physically our brain steadily loses its ability to block pain from our body as we age. This causes us to narrow our concerns about life to more immediate concerns, like “Ouch, my knee hurts!” It is a natural way of getting us to practice being more in the moment. Pain is actually a way for our bodies to get us to focus in the now and deal with the problems at hand. As we get older, we also start to realize that we are not going to win this battle we have had with life forever. We start to accept that we are never going to get life to be our way. Once we start to embrace this reality we stop giving a damn about a whole lot of stuff. Amazingly, when we do this we start to feel happier. It is like our suffering was just our angst about not getting everything to be our way. Once we get old enough to give up the fight, we can relax and let the stress go.
Those of you that have not hit your 70’s yet may hav
e to go through a bunch of that personal growth stuff to get the happiness you desire. But it is nice to know that you will eventually get there. So on that note,
Take care,
David
Ellen
Ellen has decided to share some of her thoughts and fee
lings that reflect the type of self work we do for fun in this newsletter. Here she is showing off a bottle of homeopathic remedy she creates for her clients who do some of this same work.
Letters to My Subconscious
3/24
There is a purpose to these letters. The purpose is to resolve the suffering in my life. Most trauma is hidden and stored below conscious awareness, but it influences our perception and decisions, guiding our choices throughout our lives. Without conscious awareness, our lives become a never-ending attempt to ease this trauma. We repeat actions designed to recreate feelings of unresolved trauma hidden in our subconscious. How do I know this? I just look at my life and the lives of my clients.
These letters focus my attention, aiming to uncover my participation in the manifestation of my suffering. At a glance, my pain appears to be the pain of isolation and separation. I did survival and creation but did not do well with connection. Some of us remember, from the old days, “to heal it, you must feel it,” which is my intent. It starts with awareness and then moves to a feeling, functional relationship with “how things work.” Through focus of attention, contemplation, and feeling experience, I aim to align my life with God (not my way).
My First Letter
Yes, I know that “My way is for me alone.”
But… this belief did not give me the feeling of importance that I thought was the answer to my feelings of isolation and separation. I had the drive and the skills to organize and create a successful business on an intuitive level. (and I did many times over) So why didn’t I feel important? Because I failed to be important in my relationships. I could not, would not, let go of pushing “my way” onto others. I believed I was “right” or “had the answers” to everything. This attitude left no room for others to be in my life. Actually, no one wanted to be in my life because there was no opening for anything different to be accepted or expressed. Acceptance of this realization was slow and painful; it meant owning my creation of the isolation and separation that made my life so painful. I could no longer place the blame outside myself and see the world as an unfriendly place. I was the unfriendly one. It has been a slow process, but with willingness, diligence, introspection, and the help of feedback from others, I am learning to create connection and harmony.
Even one concussion
Even a single mild concussion in your teen years reduces your chances of being able to get into college by 15%. That much brain damage happens when you have a concussion.
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~David DeLapp
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45,000 people were assessed concerning time spent on a phone screen before bed. Regardless of what you were looking at on the phone, 1 hour of screen time increased the prevalence of insomnia by 59%.
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“Creativity: The essence of creativity is the willingness to not know and the drive to experiment to find out. There is no creativity when dealing with the fixed or established known. Creativity appears when you step outside the box of already existing forms and play with something new. “
~David DeLapp
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Milk helps with drug absorption
Many drugs have a hard time getting absorbed into our b
lood stream from our gut. It appears that taking the drug with milk causes it to be carried into the body along with the milk as it gets digested.
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“The day to day purpose of life is to feel our heart’s desires and develop effective harmonious skills to achieve them. Why? Because this is how we learn respect for others.“
~David DeLapp