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When I say ‘feeling’, I often include the other perception organs…
The most obviously not ‘mind’ feeling is the physical sensation of pressure, heat, blockage, itches, tickles, nausea, headaches, pain, burning sensation, orgasm, warmth, butterflies in your stomach. When I say ‘feeling’, I don’t mean emotion, even though emotions have feeling-components. For example all 48 Bach Feelings feel in a certain way in a certain part of the body.
But what I mean: the uninterpreted raw sensation, that either comes from the outside or from the body itself.
Feeling is a language. The more fluent you are in that language the more in touch you are with yourself and with reality… and thus the more appropriate can be your actions.
When we talk ‘outside’ feelings, they are the result of a ‘conversation’ between the body and the outside, or the body and a body part… from the same body.
The language is called ‘structural language’ and it is wordless.
If you are sitting, you can feel into the conversation between your butt and the seat you are sitting on.
When you are holding a coffee cup: you can observe inwardly the feeling conversation between your hand and the cup.
When you hug yourself… there is a conversation, a structural conversation there.
Untranslated.
The translation happens in the mind. The mind gives, assigns, makes up meaning… but it doesn’t belong to the conversation, it is made up and INDEPENDENT of the conversation, whether a conversation is in the structural language or in words.
If you want to be able to return to yourself… and live a life where what YOU say matters, you need to pull out of the mind and stay with the conversations out there… in the body, and other people.
Humanity, at this point in time, on average, lives in their minds. They have scarcely any idea about reality, of what is happening in their body, in their life.
This mind-living is the real Matrix… the place where no matter what YOU want, what will happen, what you will do, what you will ‘feel’ is given to you by the Matrix, and you are completely out of control of your life, and completely have no autonomy, self-authority, anything to say about anything. Really.
My theory, my untested theory is that if you diligently add the physical sensations to your world, you can come out of the Matrix and start having a Self, a Self that can call the shot to one degree or another.
The challenge is to arrest, to block, or invalidate the meaning.
The mind adds the meaning automatically. Unless you arrest it, block it, or invalidate it, depending when you catch that the mind is doing that, the meanings create emotions, attitudes, and you have nothing to say in the matter. Once the emotion is there you are not.
A fully functional Self is virtually emotionless… Meaning: the Self has the emotions but the emotions don’t have the Self…
The majority of people don’t feel what they feel… they only feel the subsequent emotions…
I read a way to express what isn’t happening: the word: register.
Unless you register the feeling, cold, pressure, pain, it is like the tree that falls in the forest and doesn’t make a sound because there is no one to hear it.
Another word I like is witnessing. Not what Christians call witnessing. That I have no idea what it is… It is simply being in the forest and hear that a tree fell.
I used to be like most of humanity: not be present, not witnessing, not registering my body talking to me. I wasn’t firmly in my body: I was in my head.
Not necessarily in my mind: I do a lot of thinking work, but I was still in my head.
- Today I am in my mind, or more accurately I look in my mind 3% of the time.
- I spend 70% of my attention in my brain doing creative work there.
- And in 27% of the time I am in my body fully.
Is there an ideal combination? I don’t know.
The goal is to not go the emotions route.
They are not useful. The words that create the emotions are from the past. And they are words that once they made you feel miserable, less than, not loved, etc.
Today’s feelings coupled with past based words are a sure prescription of being stuck in limbo.
Limbo is, by the way, the antechamber of hell. It is not quite hell, but it is not life either.
The only place where you can do something useful is life… So the goal is to get out of limbo.
In limbo, even if you actually DO something, it will be advised by the limbo, by the past, the desire to fix something that is not wrong.
The only way out of limbo is getting sober. Sober eyes, no emotions. No meaning. No commentary. None.
It is what it is. I feel what I feel. It doesn’t mean anything. And it is not wrong: it doesn’t need to be fixed, suppressed, released, expressed. None of that. It just is and your job is to allow it to be what it is. Any effort, any action, anything to change it… and you remain in limbo.
In the beginning this takes time.
When I ask students/clients to close their eyes and allow the tension to flow out of their body, I first need to feel for them. Need to feel where the tension is, and ask them specifically to let it go.
One client who is no longer a client, but left a deep impression on me, forced everything… instead of allowing.
- If your nature is resisting, avoiding domination, you need to learn to not force.
- The other extreme is the ragdoll… They can’t and won’t take charge.
You can tell how someone will be by their voice… If you have ears to hear, and if what you hear registers. Not what they say, but how they say it.
By the way seeing, hearing are also physical:
it is safe to say that you feel what you see, and you feel what you hear… or not.
When I ask people to do collages as a supreme tool to transform long-held ideas that keep them in limbo… if they go to the computer and try to do it there, I know they won’t move.
They put something between themselves and their feelings: touch, manipulating, the scissors, the glue, the positioning… all kinesthetic, i.e. directly structural language.
Instead they firmly remain in their minds and the words.
This article is the beginnings of the work that could take humanity out of the limbo. Will it? Probably not.
Why? Because the whole world argues for the limbo… It’s like you cannot hear yourself when you are in a sports arena with thousands of screaming fans… You need to go somewhere where you can hear yourself. Where you can witness yourself.
Whatever I teach here, unfortunately isn’t something that you can use directly on your lonesome, or at least I don’t think so.
You need guidance… if you want to get out of the limbo… the antechamber of hell.
The Feel your Feelings course may be a good course if you want to dip your toe into this water and see if it is for you… or not.
Learn to feel your feelingsFeel yourself out of the limbo
