Willing To Feel….

We cannot read a situation clearly unless we can feel. But we have to know what feeling actually is. If we are truly feeling, there are no thought forms. Otherwise we only think we are feeling. Then we can fool ourselves into thinking we are feeling people.

People mistake, by choice, what it means to be with their experience. They believe they only have two options: either sit in the mental skybox and look at their experience, or wallow and drown in their experience. They either stuff or splatter. They then either dissociate or emote, but they do not feel, and they cannot empathize or love.

If we register a feeling from our head, then translate it into words and work with the words, we have chosen not to feel but instead to think about feeling. The difference is gigantic. We have made our internal experience abstract. Abstracting allows for no feeling, no love, and no care; it only allows for doing it “my” way.

If we think our feelings, we are paying attention to a series of ideas that we want to keep – the preset narrative, our preferred story. So we position ourselves where we believe we should be in the story, and that’s it. Once we do this, everyone involved, including ourselves, becomes a character, a moving piece in that story. Everybody’s an object, including us.

If we are not feeling and don’t see feeling as the solution, then all we believe we need to do is change our behavior. Behavior modification has nothing to do with feeling. But behavior modification is just a band-aid that will fall off in time. Feeling is closer to our underlying motivation, so it will seep through our behavior modification, no matter how conscientiously we alter our outward behavior. At some point, we have to own and master our feelings, or they will continue to master us. So our solution can’t be “I’m just going to do the opposite of what I would habitually do”. Are you willing to be with your experience, whatever it is, let whatever comes up come up from that experience, and function appropriately?

Many people who know better than to trust in behavior modification believe that they can bypass their felt experience inwardly. They think that if they get underneath a vibration, they have handled it. But getting underneath a vibration does not mean it has gone away. You will still at some point have to face it, own it, be with it, master it, and transcend it. And you can’t really get underneath a vibration until you have owned it, anyway, so most of these people are fooling themselves from the start.

What these people are in fact doing is trying to evade feeling. But avoiding feeling means that we do not love ourselves enough to be with whatever experience comes up within us. We deny who we really are, see ourselves as having no intrinsic value, and look outside ourselves for justification for our existence. When we do this, our own feelings have no worth to us, and we would rather not acknowledge them. We instead take refuge in “positive” ideas.

As we go inward, we move from all too apparent, where our feelings are running us completely, to alternating, at which point there are times when we appear to have restraint and awareness. Only when we have attenuated our feelings can we show consistent restraint and appropriate expression. We have owned our feelings and are willing to use them as the situation requires. Eventually we achieve complete mastery of our feelings, which is referred to as dormancy. It is not that we do not feel, but that we feel cleanly and clearly without attachment.

This process of mastering our feelings takes guidance, time, effort, and courage. We need to rely on the Guru to guide us through the maze of our vibrations. It takes time and consistent effort to map the territory of our feelings. And we have to have courage to feel all that we have to feel.

Our models in this practice are the monk and the warrior. The monk and the warrior are very similar, and respect each other. Both have to face the enemy, and the first enemy is ourselves. If we don’t face ourselves, we will never be monks or warriors—or warrior monks, or monk warriors. There is no place here for timidity.

In The Art of War, Sun Tzu says that in order to be a successful strategist, you must know yourself, know the terrain, and know the enemy. Much of the struggle in our lives, indeed most of it, is with our own feelings. With courage, tenacity, and trust in the Guru, we can own, master, and transcend our inner vibrations and achieve the interior stillness in which Love arises.