If you’ve been following this work for a while, chances are you’ve heard me talk - at length - about how our feelings are there to help us figure out what is and isn’t true in life and in reality.
That our minds can be programmed to believe anything is or isn’t true, given enough evidence or given enough ABSENCE of evidence. That our minds can be coaxed into a state of bias that blocks our ability to see perspectives that may actually be more true than the ones we are holding and that our minds can get caught in loops of thought and meaning making that make sense to us on an intellectual level but that aren’t actually TRUE in practice/outcome.
We’ve explored how we all take on conditioning and programming in our childhoods that can then become the way we view ourselves and the world - which again can be totally out of sync with truth.
We can believe things about ourselves that aren’t true - such as believing that we are only worthy of love if we are succeeding in a very specific career or if we are in a specific relationship dynamic. We can adopt the idea that we have to have certain things, that we must wear certain things, that we must present in certain ways otherwise we will be shunned, abandoned or otherwise shameful.
We can believe that there are right and wrong ways to express ourselves, to eat, to move our bodies, to speak and to gather knowledge that are totally not true in actual reality.
We can be deeply convinced that if we were to change our way of being in certain ways that it will lead to ultimate success or ultimate failure - only to discover that in our lived experience the opposite is true.
With this, we may observe that even if we are getting results that contradict what we believe, many of us will hold onto our ideas and ideals anyway. We will assume that life is going wrong, that we are doing something wrong or that if we just keep trying hard enough and pushing forward with what we believe, that this will eventually lead to the outcomes we want - only to experience pain and failure over and over and over again.
This is the ‘problem’ with relying only on the intellect to guide our lives.
The intellect is awesome and we need it - it’s just not the thing we want to be TOTALLY in the driver's seat in terms of what’s helping us determine what reality is, what we want, what we need and what truth is.
For that, we need to connect with FEELING.
The Reason Feelings Matter
From here, we need to understand that it’s through our feelings that we are going to be able to determine what of our intellectual ideas are true, which are false and which are based in conditioning and programming vs. actual reality.
Our feelings are there to help us figure out if something we are believing is actually TRUE and real, or if it’s a concept that we’ve been handed that may make intellectual sense to us, but isn’t actually beneficial long term.
Our feelings are there to help us ground into actual reality - what’s happening right now - and they are there to help us figure out what our next steps are when we’re feeling lost, confused and overwhelmed.
You see, our feelings are a part of ourselves that can’t be programmed to be out of synch with reality.
We can misunderstand our feelings and assume that they are meaning things that they don’t mean - this can be out of synch with reality - but our actual feelings are ALWAYS going to be there to let us know when we are moving from a place of seeing life for how it actually is, and when we aren’t.
How, you may be asking?
The way our feelings speak to us is of course, through SENSATION.
You see, many of us expect that our ‘intuition’ or knowledge that we couldn’t possibly know, that our higher wisdom or that ‘truth’ is going to speak to us in a big, booming voice. Many of us believe that in order to connect to our deeper knowledge, we have to have some sort of special skill or gift - that only truly ‘spiritual’ people are able to know things and see things.
But the reality is, we ALL have access to a tool that can help us navigate away from what’s not true, what’s not real, what’s not helpful and what’s actually beneficial to us long term, by tuning into our BODIES and the sensations that arise when we are thinking what we’re thinking, believing what we’re believing and doing what we’re doing.
You see, the mind can be convinced that anything is true - but the FEELINGS are connected directly to reality.
The body cannot be fooled because the BODY is having to actually EXPERIENCE the outcomes of our actions - our actions that come as a result of our thoughts and beliefs. The body is having to experience the OUTCOME of our mindsets and beliefs even BEFORE the external world has responded with an outcome.
The BODY is FEELING the TRUTH.
We can see this with the following example:
We may be able to fully convince ourselves using our logic and reason that if we were to run to the edge of a cliff, flap our arms really hard and leap that we would be able to fly like a bird.
We may be able to come up with all the math, all the physics, all the explanations in the WORLD for how this is going to work, how this is going to be successful and how we will fly.
But when we actually try, when push comes to shove, we are going to have a rude awakening when our bodies come crashing to the ground after we launch ourselves off of that cliff.
Now, this may seem overly simplistic, but in real reality, it’s not.
From here, when we are believing something about ourselves that isn’t true, when we are believing something about life that isn’t true and when we are trying to orient ourselves around a reality that doesn’t exist - we may be able to ‘make things work’ to a degree. We may be able to force ourselves into certain jobs, into certain diets, into certain ways of relating and communicating with others that align with our conditioning or with what we think is right - and we will often be able to ‘get away with’ doing these things for a period of time.
But what we are invariably going to find is that as we’re doing this, there’s a sense of emotional/physical pain that comes along with it.
We’re going to notice that even before we get negative outcomes like relationships that continually fall apart, jobs we can’t seem to succeed in no matter how much we apply ourselves, needing coping mechanisms and ways of numbing ourselves to deal with the lived reality of believing terrible things about ourselves - if we tune into our physical experience, there’s going to be a FELT sense of PAIN that is there to warn us that the path we are about to walk ISN’T the path we think it is.
We’re going to start to notice, if we actually slow down enough to pay attention, that our FEELINGS are speaking to us all the time about what is and isn’t real.
The problem is, that most of us either don’t notice these sensations, write them off as unimportant OR we believe that the WORSE something feels, the MORE true it must be - so every time the body tries to communicate to us that what we are doing/believing/thinking isn’t accurate to reality through pain, we interpret that pain to mean that we are failing, wrong, bad, shameful or otherwise to blame for our pain - and thus we keep heading down paths that don’t serve us thinking we’re doing the right thing and listening to our bodies and emotions.
THIS is the turning point that most of us are going to make that will make all the difference in the world in terms of our capacity to tap into and actually utilize the wisdom of the body.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Let’s take a break here, and come back next week for part two of this post!
<3
Want more tools like this?
Check out The Mystery School Here
