Feeling feelings

Both personally and in my work in mental health, I have come to see that the value of feeling our feelings (rather than avoiding or indulging them) cannot be overstated. The "emotion phobic" tendency that seems to be inbuilt in us drives all kinds of addiction, over-consumption, violence, etc. Therefore I love this video (which applies equally to men and women) that invites us to experience our feelings nonverbally. Thinking about feelings is the opposite of feeling them; thinking is a defense and barrier against unpleasant feelings, it is a distancing mechanism which walls us off from our own life energy. When we block out the "bad" stuff (unpleasant feelings), the "good" stuff is equally blocked out. A kinked hose blocks the flow of any fluid equally.

The body and psyche are overstuffed suitcases full of repressed emotional material. I feel this is true to some extent for every human being. How do we "unpack" the suitcase of stuffed feelings? We don't. It unpacks itself. Whatever feelings are present in this moment are all that need to be met. We don't have to worry about whatever accumulation of grief and fear is lodged in the tissues, it will surface of its own accord at exactly the right time and pace. This makes it simple: we need only meet what is here now with openness and silence. I find that the "taste" of even unpleasant feelings can be surprisingly enjoyable when they are experienced on an energetic level without labels or judgments.

Flooding feelings with the energy of consciousness is inherently beneficial.

This is very different than ruminating over feelings or trying to work out a bad mood with the thinking process- this usually backfires and embeds the feelings somewhere in the "suitcase" of body and psyche.

Thought is used as a kind of protective shield to fend off unwanted feelings through analysis, rationalization, explanation, blame, guilt, etc. In whatever way the mind can label, package, shelve, project or otherwise "get rid" of unpleasant feelings, it will do so. This is how we get tied up in knots and drive the brain-engine to an ever increasing and chaotic velocity.

From an evolutionary, biological perspective, the capacity of thought to fend off unwanted feelings through judgment, analysis, repression, etc., may have been useful. But this once helpful survival mechanism has "gone overboard" and hypertrophied to the point where thinking has become a mental disease. We don't need to "throw out the baby with the bathwater"- thinking can still be beautiful and beneficial- but when thinking is used to alienate us from our feelings, it is harmful rather than helpful. The mind and thought processes have swollen to such an extent that they cause much personal and planetary suffering.

Enjoy this wonderful video that invites us to enter the energy of present feelings.

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Gratitude to Chameli Ardagh. You can read about Chameli in the outstanding book Ordinary Women, Extraordinary Wisdom, by Rita Marie Robinson.

Is death a problem?

     Is death a problem?
     No, death is a natural and sacred occurrence.
     It is the way of all form to vanish.

     Only the mind makes up a story that death is bad.

     Why not question this story?
     I'm sure I will weep and feel intense agony when my loved ones die.  I will likely feel fear and great sadness when I approach my own death, and this is fine.  All of these feelings are fine, and they don't make death a problem.

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"Sitting with uncomfortable feelings..."

  "Yet it is here- at futility's brink- where we can begin to free ourselves.  The cycle of craving is interrupted when we learn how to stop.  "Sitting with uncomfortable feelings, getting friendly with the hole you really are, you realize that emptiness is not really a problem," says Buddhist teacher David Loy.  "It's our ways of trying to escape it that turn it into a problem."  When we learn to tolerate this empty feeling within, instead of binge-feeding the hungry ghosts, an important, metanoia-like turnaround occurs (Buddhists call it paravritti), when the "festering hole at our core turns into a life-healing flow springing up spontaneously from we know not where," in Loy's words.  "The empty core becomes a place where there is now awareness of something other than, greater than, my usual sense of self- greater than I understand myself to be."

Mark Matousek, When You're Falling, Dive, p. 197

What is denied

What is denied cannot be integrated.

Denied feelings, thoughts, experiences clog up the energy pipes. What is denied cannot be absorbed, metabolized, transformed.

Fear is the force that pushes things down.

I'm afraid of my anger and I push it down.
I'm afraid of my sadness and I push it down.
I'm afraid of my arrogance and I push it down.
I'm afraid of my insecurity and I push it down.

Fear is a repressive force.

But what is there to fear?
This person I'm trying to protect is not there, this body-mind hurtling like a projectile through time and space from the cradle to the grave is in fact nothing but fleeting images appearing and disappearing on the motionless screen of awareness.

Seeing the insubstantiality of the time-bound self-sense releases long-held fears. The self-image is vulnerable in the extreme, but the core of being that is our reality is rock-solid power.

There is a shift from feeling that my identity is the story-of-me, to feeling that my identity is something real that cannot be described but that is inhabited effortlessly at this very instant and at every instant, whether it is consciously realized or not.

The absence of the me-entity as anything other than images in awareness is not something to be believed or disbelieved.

The absence of the me-entity is discovered by looking a thousand times: the me I think I am is nowhere to be found. While the truth of what I am is fully present. Only direct inquiry reveals this.

What had been denied no longer needs to be denied. It enters fully into conscious awareness and can be felt, accepted, absorbed, metabolized, transformed. Like ice melting into a flash of water, energy flows within.


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Damaged and undamaged

I read a poem by Mary Oliver today that I had never read before. It evoked a sense of the strange harmony between the damaged and undamaged regions within each of us. Here is the poem-




Mysteries, Yes


Truly, we live with mysteries too marvelous
to be understood.




How grass can be nourishing in the
mouths of the lambs.


How rivers and stones are forever
in allegiance with gravity
while we ourselves dream of rising.

How two hands touch and the bonds will
never be broken.


How people come, from delight or the
scars of damage,
to the comfort of a poem.




Let me keep my distance, always, from those
who think they have the answers.


Let me keep company always with those who say
"Look!" and laugh in astonishment,
and bow their heads.


(from the book Evidence, 2009)


I have noticed a tendency within myself to hide, minimize, and avoid any sense of hurt or damage. My vanity wants to be flawlessly spiritual and joyful. But lately I"m more interested in honesty and courage and facing with kindness the pain within myself and others. I'm interested in integrating the long rejected feelings, swallowing them in the mouth of nonjudgmental awareness and love.

Mary Oliver notes that both delight and the scars of damage attract a person to the comfort of a poem. On one level, or from one perspective, I have been damaged and I have inflicted damage. On the temporal plane, who has never been damaged or inflicted damage?

It is our universal lot. Yet from another perspective, on another level, every being is wholly inviolate, undamaged, intact. The paradox is that opposite facts are simultaneously true.

Today I'm interested in a new relationship with painful memories when they arise. It is possible to be a space of loving acceptance for what arises. This is something I am learning very, very slowly and gently.

Planted here in the undamaged wholeness of reality, a reconciliation occurs as feelings of shame and damage come out of hiding and are not banned but received. It's time to end the internal holocaust where unflattering feelings were sent to the gas chambers. Let the damaged and undamaged regions within enjoy a mysterious harmony.

(Note: Thank you to Fred Lamotte of yourradiance.blogspot for post 3/25/10 about embracing and honoring wounds and disabilities, which led to these reflections.)

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Bad day

Actually, the day is the day, and, like all days, it's a miracle beyond description; however, my mood is moderately miserable. Funny how I tend to blame my mood on the day, when it's not the day's fault.

Moods appear, and it could become a full-time job analyzing them and tracing the intricate strands of causation for every mood that arises. I've certainly spent plenty of time trying to figure out why I get in bad moods occasionally. What thoughts, beliefs, attitudes, hormones, conditioning, circumstances, etc. could be causing the miserable mood?

I begin to realize that excessive analysis of feelings is a tactic to avoid them. And tactics to avoid feelings are a kind of procrastination.

Feelings can't be escaped, only felt. What feels feelings? Awareness. Silent, nonjudgmental, awareness. The silence within me feels my feelings and is not repelled by them in the least. In this silence which could be called love the feelings are embraced. And in the embrace the feelings relax. And in the relaxation the feelings may or may not dissolve. And the energy of flux continues fluxing through the silent space of this moment, as appearances appear and disappear, and moods morph into an endless parade of colors.

I argued with my nine year-old son because he hadn't taken a shower when I wanted him to take a shower. A blister of painful thoughts burst, "Colleen, you should be a better parent. You should be able to have your child take a shower without a lot of drama." I argued with people I love and said things I wish I had not said.

I notice that nearly every speck of my conscious attention collapses down into the tiny space of a few painful thoughts. This shriveling of the vast field of awareness down into such a small space is painful, like trying to compress an ocean into a thimble.

In the midst of my miserable mood, what washes up on the shore? Some words from a kind and wonderful mentor to me, Stephan Bodian, found in his book Wake Up Now. I'd like to share them with you.

"As you relax and let everything be just as it is, the tendency for awareness to fixate on objects naturally relaxes as well, and awareness spontaneously becomes aware of itself. True meditation is a kind of homecoming- you recognize the place immediately, and every cell and fiber of your being lets go and relaxes in relief."

Surprise! There is enough room here for my miserable mood, there is enough room in this world for all the miserable moods that arise in all of us...I am grateful for the room that is available for all that arises. I don't have to be spiritual and perfect. I can be ego-identified and miserable and deluded. Nothing that appears is exiled, and I don't have to pretend to be anything.