feelings

CHOOSING OPENNESS

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CHOOSING OPENNESS 

Why we choose closed 

It’s easy to be closed.  It isn’t as overt as you might think it is.  In fact most people are closed and don’t even know it.  It tends to be what we think of as our natural state of being.  Comfortable and familiar to us, being closed keeps us contained and in our own little bubble of existing and feeling like we know what’s going to happen.  In contrast, openness feels more spacious, vulnerable and mysterious.  When we are open we can feel ourselves and others.  Often people have a negative relationship with feeling, especially if the feeling that’s present isn’t a “good” one.  This is why we close, and sometimes stay closed for most of our entire life.  

When we are closed we can avoid feeling the fullness of “bad” things or feelings.  While on the surface this might seem advantageous to you (which is why so many do this), but when viewing from the bigger picture of your life it’s quite disadvantageous.  The first reason it is disadvantageous is that when you are closed, and are unable to be feel, you lose connection with your guidance system and therefore yourself.  Feeling is guidance.  It’s your beeline to your higher self.  Emotions tell us how to proceed forward on our path and which choices to take.  What to say yes to and what to say no to.  When you can’t feel you will often have the experience of being lost, confused or stuck.  You can call this disconnection, and a sense of not knowing how to move forward or what actions to take in your life.  The second reason being closed is disadvantageous is that when you are closed you can’t feel the bad or the good, so your experience of life flattens.  It’s like being kind of numb.  You might sort of feel things, but your range of feeling is limited. Most days and experiences feel ordinary (aka non-magical).  You go through the motions of life, feeling human and like a separate person from other people.  Again you might not even know that things could be, or are, different than this.  It’s just your normal known state of existing or being in the world.  You don’t feel particularly bad, but you also don’t feel particularly good.  

Being closed feels protective.  It is a defense mechanism that we learn in order to not experience impact.  This is important when we don’t have the inner resources or awareness to be with that impact, and when we’ve either lost touch with ourselves or don’t yet know ourselves.  Examples of this are when we are infants, toddlers or young children and we had experiences that were too painful, scary or confusing to feel.  This is when we develop protective mechanisms.  Nearly all people are still functioning in their day to day life using these strategies.  This is why there is so much disconnect from self, others, animals, the planet, and the universe at large.  It’s why we feel separate and why people are often oblivious to their impact on self or others, or exceptionally vigilant to it.  It’s because we aren’t feeling or are afraid of feeling “bad” things.  It is not wrong.  It’s simply the stage of the game we are personally and collectively at; that is until we choose different. 

FEELING 

Good, bad and everything in between

It really isn’t as bad as you might think it is to feel things that don’t feel good.  In fact it’s rather freeing and liberating, but we aren’t there quite yet.  From where we are now it might seem scary to feel because you don’t know what will happen if you do.  Some people create stories that they will never stop feeling bad once they start.  That they will enter a bottomless pit of despair and suffering with no way out.  Others fear attracting more bad feelings to themselves.  Still others know that if they feel what they are feeling then something will need to change and they aren’t ready for that change yet.  Then there are those people that simply don’t even recognize that they are feeling.  All they know is that they don’t feel on par.  Maybe they have pain in their body, or things aren’t going how they would like them to be going in their life.  Maybe they feel irritated or they don’t sleep well.  Perhaps they have digestive issues or skin problems.  What we are feeling will manifest into our physical experience if we don’t feel it in our emotional bodies.  Feeling will do whatever it can to get our attention and find its expression, because remember feeling is nothing more than guidance, and our higher self wants nothing more earnestly than to guide us on this journey.  

Bad feelings have really gotten a bad rap.  There is an important distinction here between having a negative disposition on life and feeling bad feelings.  Bad feelings don’t equal having a negative outlook, that is unless you don’t feel them.  See many people that are angry, anxious or depressed, are so because they aren’t feeling, not because they are.  This is opposite to what most people believe.  Most people think that the people that seem generally negative on life must be feeling bad things all of the time, but what’s actually happening is that they are avoiding feeling bad things.  That is why they are angry, anxious and depressed.  When we feel bad feelings we liberate energy, and this feels good.  We get less angry, anxious and depressed rather than more.  We open rather than stay closed, and because openness is our true natural state of being, it feels good.  We feel connected even if we are feeling something bad.  

People that you view as having a generally positive disposition on life are regularly feeling bad things.  This is how they can stay positive.  It would otherwise be very challenging to do so because so much energy would be bound up in their system.  Bound energy is closed, looped, tight and distorted.  To have the courage to feel is to be honest with what’s present.  It’s to be authentic with what is.  It’s the opposite of spiritual bypassing, which is to have a kind of “false” positive disposition.  It’s to say everything is great when you aren’t actually experiencing great.  There is an incongruence there, it’s inauthentic, and it’s ok.  It’s simply another protective mechanism to not feel bad feelings, because for some reason you view them as less spiritual.  

To be open is to allow all.  Nothing needs fixed or changed.  All is allowed and all is ok.  It’s not hard to feel bad things when they arise, but it does take a practice of slowing down and paying attention to yourself.  When you are in the doing mode of life, you are often not focused on your feeling body.  This is when you don’t even know that you are feeling, or you notice that something is off, but don’t want to take the time to stop and feel it.  Feeling might feel foreign to you at first, but I promise with a little attention to it, it’s not as mysterious as it might seem.  The reward in it, is you being connected to yourself again.  It’s to have more guidance and clarity.  It’s to be able to feel life, yourself, others, and to have connection to all of existence on this planet and inside this universe.  It’s to have passion for life and to act in alignment and integrity with yourself, your path and your calling. 

Dr. Amanda Love, Chiropractor, Network Spinal Analysis & Somato-Respiratory Integration, Boulder, Colorado

SUBTLE FEELINGS & SENSATIONS

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SUBTLE FEELINGS & SENSATIONS 

Journeying deeper into Self

We all have a thousand feelings and sensations per day.  Many of those feelings & sensations we don’t fully register.  For example we often don’t register the feeling of our butt on a chair unless we have been sitting for too long, nor do we feel our feet on the ground unless we deliberately focus on those feelings.  Instead of feeling every nuance our nervous system does something that is called accommodation.  In this way we learn to tune out or become less aware of all the “ordinary” feelings and sensations that we have on a day to day basis.  

This accommodation or tuning out function has pros and cons.  On the pro side of things most of us don’t want to be feeling every single sensation that arises as it would become distracting.  We would never get things done because we would be feeling every aspect of every moment.  It would be hard to be focused on anything else.  Also for people who tend towards vigilance and/or hypersensitivity, feeling every aspect of their experience would feel overwhelming.  For these reasons the accommodating function of the nervous system is beneficial.  

Now for the cons.  On the journey of deepening into self-recognition it is helpful to have gateways and pointers.  Due to the fact that we are physically focused right now we have these bodies with nervous systems that can perceive sensations and feelings.  These sensations and feelings are pointers into developing greater awareness of self.  If we’ve simply accommodated to say the sensations of our fears or anxieties to the point that they don’t register with us than we lose valuable access points into our patterns, which means that the patterns go unchecked.  When a pattern is unchecked it runs the show of our life, but does so unconscious to our knowing of it.  

The dance then becomes the selective attunement to the subtleties of your feelings and sensations.  For some this means coming out of automatic mode and noticing those feelings and sensations that you’ve been overriding without knowing that you’ve been overriding them.  Slowing down enough to recognize that you are having a feeling or sensation that perhaps isn’t overt, but is present.  For others, particularly those that tend to be more sensitive to sensations or feelings, it’s the willingness to feel them rather than going into overwhelm or victimization to them as if they are somehow bigger than you.   

TECHNOLOGY OF AWARENESS 

Going through the sensation portal

There is an obvious difference between an overt sensation or feeling and a subtle one.  When we override the subtle ones than life has to speak to us in louder ways to get our attention for our own learning, healing and growing.  We’ve collectively agreed to call those louder ways that life speaks to us physical symptoms, which come with a set of labels and conditions.  However the subtle feelings and sensations are the ones that, if we can tune into them, the current medical model says its all in our heads because they have no way to measure them.  Its clearly not that they don’t exist inside of our experience, but instead that our current level of technology can’t attune to it.  

Good thing we don’t need to rely on external technology to tell us information about ourselves.  We have within our body some of the most advanced technology available on planet earth and in fact in this entire universe.  That technology is called our awareness.  Awareness is alert, awake, clear, attentive, and conscious.  This entire life journey is about becoming more awake, conscious of ourselves and of this awareness that we are.  One of the prime ways this occurs is through paying attention and noticing what is in our experience and what it is pointing too.  Through investigation of this we learn what those sensations and feelings are all about and why they are created in the first place.     

One fundamental thing to understand is that all sensations and feelings, subtle or overt, are simply catalyst for learning.  They arise to teach us something about ourselves, about the way we do life, about who we are and who we think we are, about what we are here to share and be.  That is really it.  No more meaning than that.  We can try to make them into problems and things that need to be fixed or changed, but in truth that is not what they are.  The perspective of seeing them as problems is viewed through the lens of wrongness and trying to make the forms of life permanent when they are not and are not meant to be. 

The more you can shift your focus to the perspective that life is about learning rather than trying to make this human experience consistent or permanent, the more flexible you will be in navigating subtle and overt sensations and feelings.  The more willing you are to slow down the more you will tune into your subtle nature and less you will bypass, overlook or accommodate to those sensations and feelings that are portals into greater understanding of yourself.  The more you prioritize self-growth, self-recognition and self-mastery the more energy that will become available to you to penetrate through all of the relevant sensations and feelings so you can see what they are actually made of, which is a conglomerate of thoughts, ideas and beliefs about self and life.  The freer you will become.  The more stable in self you will feel.  The less fear will arise because you will have seen through the roots of it.  These are the rewards of tuning to the subtleties and going in and through the sensation and feeling portals of life.  Utilize what’s been given to you.  Rather than see it as an interference, be curious and come to know the gift of it.  It all arises for your benefit and growth.  There is no other reason.  

Dr. Amanda Love, Chiropractor, Network Spinal Analysis & Somato-Respiratory Integration, Boulder, Colorado

Empathy & empowered feeling

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Empowered feeling

Emotional resilience

Woman with heart. Lotus positionMany people have a story that their feelings are too much and as such feel a like a victim to their emotions.  They try their best to not feel certain emotions as they fear that the emotion will overcome them and they will be lost in a particular feeling state indefinitely.  In this scenario what is happening is that we are giving away our power to our emotions.  We are essentially saying that our emotions are bigger than us (rather than a transitory aspect which we experience) and we are not realizing that we are the creator of our emotions to begin with.  

When we don’t realize that we are the creator of our emotions than we will always feel on some level like they are simply happening to us.  When we have this relationship of emotions happening to us we often feel powerless to change the way that we feel.  This can leave us feeling trapped until either the emotional state or the active trigger which seemed to create the emotional state passes.  

There is a way beyond having to wait it out, but it requires you to step into the next level of knowing yourself as the creator of your life, including your emotional state of being.  This is what I call having emotional resilience and empowered feeling.  It implies that you know you are the creator of your feeling states and thus you are ultimately in charge of how you are feeling at any given moment.  It means that you have to step completely out of the frame of mind that something can “happen to you” and realize that you are choosing what you experience.  This can be a big step especially when something really feels like it has a hold of us and we’ve completely lost sight of ourselves.  

This shift in consciousness and in identity is what allows you to take full responsibility for your feeling state.  In this way you can feel whatever you feel without needing to blame people, triggers, circumstances or conditions.  You realize that you are ultimately in charge and ultimately the only one who can change your emotional state of being at any moment.   

Empathy 

Feeling beyond our own skin line

oneness fieldThis moves us now to feeling beyond our own emotional states into the world of empathy or feeling others.  Empathy is actually our natural state of being. I find it ironic that people have found a way to pathologize that which is inherent to us and to seek ways to treat it.  Someone has actually coined an “empathy disorder” characterized as someone who is too sensitive to the emotions and energy of people, animals and the environment beyond their conscious control.  The condition implies, as all do, that you are somehow a victim to what you feel/experience, rather than the knowledge that you are again ultimately the creator of all that you experience.  

I want to invite the perspective here that to be un-empathetic or non-sensitive is actually to be disconnected from your feeling body.  Part of being human is that we have an emotional body, to feel is natural, and to feel beyond one’s own skin line or to perceive feeling in that which is seemingly distinct and separate from you, such as another human being, plant or animal, is simply the waking up of your interconnectedness with all.  It is not a pathology, it is who and what you actually are beyond duality.    

Historically most all feeling, whether within or outside your own skin line, has been labeled as non-rational, hysteric or even impossible. In that way we have come to permission/create some feelings and not others. We’ve also learned through cultural conditioning that some feelings are bad or wrong, while others are good or right.  As you suspend your need to label some emotions as bad, wrong or too much, you will stop finding the need to pathologize your feelings and realize the gift of feeling and empathy.  The true pathology or problem is not in feeling or in being sensitive, but instead in repressing or dampening out that which you do feel. To feel is what is required to bring humanness back to being human, to bridge the gap of the illusion of our separateness from one another and wake up to the fact that we are ultimately one being.

Embrace your feelings, stop labeling them and stop judging yourself for having them. Rejoice that you can actually feel as there are many who still can’t find or feel their emotions. Know that you are the ultimate creator of all feeling.  Your feeling, your sensitivity, is an enormous gift that this world needs. Please recognize it as such and continue boldly in feeling all that which desires to be felt through you.

Dr. Amanda Hessel, Chiropractor, Network Spinal Analysis & Somato-Respiratory Integration, Boulder, Colorado