Feeling

What is it

Feelings are movements of the soul—living energy currents. When allowed to flow naturally, they keep the soul in motion. When resisted or denied, they stagnate and create suffering.

Why it matters

Healing requires feeling. We cannot think our way through emotions that need to be experienced. Every feeling we fully experience loses its power to control us.

From Bones

~1~

In the feeling world, there are both good and bad experiences: happy and sad, pleasant and painful. Unlike thoughts, which simply register an impression, emotional experiences land much more deeply.

Since our struggle is to only have the happy feelings, and since immature emotions go along with unhappiness, we adjust our position and aim to avoid unhappiness—to not having feelings. (Chapter 1)

~2~

To whatever degree we dodge any kind of emotional experience, that’s the extent to which we’re closed off from experiencing happiness. What’s more, when we cut off our feelings, we cut off our creativity. (Chapter 1)

~3~

Even though it’s hard to discount how important our feelings are, without thinking this through, we believe our feelings should grow up without causing any growing pains… No, an organic process must happen in which our feelings naturally change their course—their aim and intensity.

For this to happen, we have to feel them. (Chapter 1)

~4~

It’s true that immature emotions are destructive and not apt to be well-received. But here’s the confusion. We believe that if we become aware of what we’re feeling, we must act out our feelings.

But these two things are not the same thing.

Likewise, it is not the same thing to talk about our feelings in the right time and place and with the right people, versus indiscriminately unleashing our feelings on whoever happens to be close to us. For to let go without discipline or aim, exposing our negative emotions without discernment, is indeed destructive. (Chapter 1)

~5~

We have to backtrack through those steps we skipped in childhood and adolescence so we can learn to no longer fear our feelings, and instead start to trust them. We need our feelings to guide us—that’s what well-functioning, mature people do. (Chapter 1)

~6~

It’s never true that if we don’t know what we feel or where our feelings come from, we can’t be hurt by them. They fester in our soul, becoming poisonous from not being released.

The way out is to feel, know, express and live through them as fully as we can.

So, all that is evil—our negative, destructive ways—results from defending against feeling pain. This denial of undesirable feelings causes our energy to stagnate, which makes it hard for us to move.

Feelings, which are moving energy currents, will change and transform as long as the energy is flowing. But freezing our feelings stops the movement and therefore stops life, making us feel lazy. (Chapter 2)

~7~

We must commit to going in and through our feelings, and not around. Humans, generally speaking, have a strong preference for going around… A second important aspect of meditation involves summoning the faith that going in and through our feelings won’t kill us.  (Chapter 2)

~8~

Every tear not shed is a block. Every protest not spoken sits like a lump in our throat, causing us to lash out inappropriately.

These feelings feel like bottomless pits.

Once we leap, though, we’ll find a deep well inside that is filled with the divine. It is light and alive, warm and secure.

We’re not making this up—this is a stark reality. But we can only experience it by going in and through the feelings we have avoided. (Chapter 2)

~9~

We find our strength by feeling our weakness; we find pleasure and joy by feeling our pain; we find safety and security by feeling our fear; we find companionship by feeling our loneliness; we find our capacity to love by feeling our hate; we find true and justified hope by feeling our hopelessness; we find fulfillment right now by accepting the lacks of our childhood. (Chapter 2)

~10~

It takes courage to go all the way through our feelings. Yet this is the only way to find the pure gold of the Real Self hiding behind them. (Chapter 7)

Continue with: Emotional Reaction • Pain • Pleasure Principle