feeling
Feeling is how you experience aliveness. Thought can give you concepts, a sense of security in beliefs, but if you do not feel you are not really alive. Remember those peak moments and those small pleasures and it is a whole-body energy experience, not a set of ideas or conclusions.
Sometimes I see a beautiful tree or a flock of birds and an ecstatic wave pulses through my being. I was never taught to cultivate this, never taught to value feeling. Talking in this way, with friends, colleagues or family would have been met with ridicule. Talking about difficult feelings would have been met with contempt.
We are taught at a young age to resist feeling, to perceive feeling without trust, to act out or push down. As we age this becomes both subtle and habitual. We suppress challenging feelings and create a dull, constant background anxiety.
People everywhere have the tone of their existence set by anxiety, addictive behaviours, numbing jobs and stuck relationships. And a terror of genuine self-expression.
When you unconsciously resist painful feelings, you erode your capacity to feel joyous ones. You forget how to love and fear of pain dictates your action and expression from the shadows. You are trapped. Recovering your felt sense and accepting pain will free you.
You can learn to sense and become fully present to the energy signature of feeling in your body. There is a magic here. Old wounds heal, self-worth grows and the voice in your head becomes still and calm. Authenticity becomes a lived value, as the rationalisations you make, the compromises, no longer convince you, no longer hold sway. A shattering but liberating moment arrives when see and feel how fear has shaped and controlled you. Then you can start to move forward. Only then.
Relearning how to feel is the reverse of boiling the frog. It's the deep healing of old wounds and discovery of unbounded life energy. It is freedom.