Someone asked me this question the other day, “How does one go about feeling?” This may seem like a silly question to the average person, but the person asking me this understood that I distinguish between feelings and emotions. They may seem similar, but I use the words to describe two very different states of consciousness. Most people are very familiar with emotions. Something happens and you experience fear or anger or sadness or joy. These are emotions. Emotions are reactions to our external environment based on our history. Feelings are internal bodily sensations based on our awareness of present time information without referencing any historical experiences. Both of these are built-in survival skills. Emotions are part of the automatic trigger reactions we have to move us out of harm’s way before we even have time to think. They are based on previous experience with danger and get us to avoid danger quickly. Feelings, on the other hand, are part of our adaptive skills for new situations. When we are facing the unknown, we have to rely on lots of often subtle information that tells us what our current relationship is in this moment. We have to feel both what we want at that moment and what the situation may allow. This is the basis of intuition.
We are well familiar with our emotional reactions to things in life, but our culture does not teach us much about how to feel our way through the unknowns in life. And yet, it is understood that in the battle for survival in this life, it is not the strongest or the smartest or the most righteous that survives, but the most adaptable. This is the basis for the evolution of life on this planet. Feelings are our most basic adaptation skill. Instead, our culture tries to teach us to think effectively. Thinking is a good skill, but it can not deal with the unknown. Thinking is good for prioritizing the known and planning a course of action when you already know all the factors involved. It fails completely with the unknown and you are left with going with your gut feelings which are usually just old reactive historical patterns in these situations. Unfortunately, in the detailed analysis of life, almost everything is actually filled with unknown factors. In those cases, you either feel your way to a chosen action or roll the dice and go with a random choice. Feeling works better.
So why is it important to feel? Risk management is the big reason in the present moment. For example, do I step in front of that car because I believe it will stop for me as I’m the center of the universe, or do I wait for the light to turn red before crossing? But we also have a huge backlog of old experiences where we would have participated with life more effectively if we had felt our way through the situations and circumstances instead of reacting with emotions or bulling our way through with what we believed to be right thinking. Our emotions get pulled into play to give us some sort of action in response to life even though the situation is not actually a survival threat that matches a past experience. Rather than have no response to life, we will generalize our emotions to make them try to fit in all sorts of inappropriate ways. Right thinking fails us almost every time because right is just another way of saying my way which puts me first and makes me the winner. Life does not work that way. To be sustainable, life interactions must be mutually beneficial and respectful so everyone wins. Feeling your way through will show you just what your real needs are and what the life situation can provide you in exchange for what you can do for it. You can feel this balance and this gives you a huge adaptation advantage. The unknown we are always facing is a world that is not our way and does not care to be our way. Feelings are powerful information we can use. We don’t need to change them and we certainly don’t want to resist them or push them away even if they are uncomfortable. Anything new is always uncomfortable precisely because it is outside our comfort zone. That newness is what makes it valuable to us. It opens doors to new ways of relating to life that may work better for us.
So this feeling thing is vital for us to function effectively in the world. When we have a history full of old failures, to function effectively we generate a head full of faulty beliefs about the world. These faulty beliefs now become our expectations and projections about the world of here and now and cause us to keep recreating the same failure-based actions we tried and failed with in the past. We can not get out of the failure loop with what we know. We have to go back to the past failures and re-experience and re-feel them with feelings that draw in information from the unknown; from the bigger world that is not our way. Only in this way can we change our faulty beliefs about the world and how it works. Some folks call this outside information from the unknown grace. That works for me. We receive grace through our feelings. Others call this intuition. That also works for me. Call it what you will, it involves letting go of our beliefs and conclusions about life and just taking in what is there without our filters and interpretations. This allows us to be kinder to ourselves and let go of the burden we are carrying on our self-judgments. In this way, we can heal our past trauma. We believe that anything which does not see us as first and most important is traumatizing to us. We believe we have been wounded when life does not care about us and make us center and special. Such emotions are mostly useful when we want to justify our self-centered actions in the world. They are not useful in helping us grow up and adapt to the reality of life. More importantly, they harm us by blocking self-love and the love life has for us. We can’t see that love when we have preconceptions about how that love should look. Once we let in the truth, we can feel how much we are loved.
There is an old maxim: The feeling is the healing. This is mostly true. It leaves out a few steps, but it is probably the most important. Once we feel the truth of what is and the truth of how we can participate with it, we still have to develop the skills to engage that participation effectively. That requires us to keep on feeling and take in corrective feedback from life. We have to assess our actions and make frequent course corrections based on what is working and what is not. Life requires us to be constantly adapting. The only constant in life is change. Adaptation begins in feeling who we really are and what our real needs are, not the false ego needs for power and control. Knowing the truth about who we really are empowers us to gently and simply communicate to others our truth and our needs. Our truth becomes what some people call good boundaries because in truth our boundaries are simply the extent of who we are and what we can do and how we can participate in service to life. Boundaries are not walls or borders that need to be defended. They are simply what we can and cannot be and do.
So now we get down to it; how do we embrace our feeling abilities? First, what do we mean by the term feelings? We have established that we are not talking about beliefs we have created to give us a relationship to the various experiences in our life or the emotional adrenaline rush or light up of various brain regions that accompanies them. Nor are we talking about our thoughts, perspectives, or biases we create to advance our goals in life. With feelings, we are talking about a type of inner processing that reaches beyond our normal conscious mind. Depending upon your nature, this processing may happen kinesthetically as body sensations, auditorily as sound or conversational voices as though you are talking to yourself, visually as imaginative pictures or inner movies, or for some people, it is just a sudden knowing about stuff you didn’t know before. These all qualify as feelings of the type I am describing here.
What is this? I have heard many conjectures over the years. Some say this is tapping into the processing of the right global processing side of the brain as opposed to the left linear logical side. Others say that we are connecting to a higher more knowing part of ourselves. Still, others say we are listening to our angels or to spirit or even to God. The key element is that we are processing information that is outside our normal relationship to life. This is the world of feelings, and feelings give us access to perspectives and understandings beyond our personal take on the world. It allows us to touch what is as it is rather than just how we normally relate to it. This is what we need to get us beyond our locked-in relationships with the world. Normally our perception of life is a prison of our own making created by our belief that everything is about us. Actually, we are insignificant. It is only our service to the world that has any value. And even that is relevant to only some people, but that is another story.
With a few moments of contemplation, you can see the tremendous adaptive survival advantage we gain by being able to see the world as it is instead of only seeing it from our personal limited perspective. One side effect of this viewpoint is the loss of the need to compete, to win, or to be first. Seeing the world as it is is very humbling. Perhaps this is why feelings are not so popular. To feel you have to let go of the illusion of power and control. You have to let go of trying to make things be your way. This is step one in learning to feel – let go of the desire for the power to make things be your way. You can’t feel what is if you are in competition with what is. You don’t get to be right about anyone or anything but yourself.
The inside piece of step one is to let go of self-judgment. This is just another form of seeking the power to make things be your way except it is being applied to yourself. The illusion is that you can make something be different by suppressing it through judgment. This is a lie. Suppression can block the expression of something, but it can not make it be different. It can only show less of what it is.
Take care,
David