Hello again!
If you haven’t already done so, please do go and read:
Part One
Of this series.
Today we’re going to be talking about how to take our insights from our feeling work and use them to direct our logic in a practical way.
Because we can’t be living from a place of ALL feeling.
We need our minds, logic and intellect to help us integrate our feelings, to help us make sense of them and to help us utilize them.
It is our feelings job to point us in the direction we want to go - but the logic is required to help us actually GO in that direction. It is the logic that figures out how we are going to APPLY the awareness we have gotten from our feelings.
So let’s explore how we can work to unite our logic and feelings to combine into the ultimate reality-seeing duo.
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Using Logic To Work WITH My Feelings
From the feeling work, THAT is where I put my LOGIC to use.
I had to learn that the process of discovering how I was going to move from what wasn’t working but what was the only thing I had awareness of into a state of figuring out what WAS going to work - was again first allowing myself to fully ADMIT that something wasn’t working and that I was at the limits of my understanding. That was often the HARDEST part.
This usually meant that I first had to take a step back and look at where I had convinced myself I had ‘tried everything’ or where I had convinced myself that I HAD THE SOLUTION if I could just ‘stick with it’ long enough - and to see how THAT wasn’t true.
You see, usually when I was stuck somewhere, I realized that I HAD been doing what I THOUGHT was going to fix the situation based on what I already knew.
For instance, with my health, I realized that I was constantly swinging between two poles.
I had to admit to myself that often in this space what I was doing was clinging to what I thought would work, trying it, doing it for a while, getting to a place where it obviously didn’t work - and rather than looking for a TRUE solution, I would then swing WILDLY to the ‘opposite’ of what I was doing - as though that would be the obvious solution.
I had to admit to myself where I was doing ONE specific diet, seeing that it did give me *some* results, but didn’t work to FULLY give me what I wanted - and thus instead of figuring out what DID work about it that I could build on and what DIDN’T work about it that I could learn from and tweak, instead I would swing to an OPPOSITE diet, doing that for a while, getting some satisfaction from that, eventually seeing that it didn’t work fully, remembering the ‘good things’ about the FIRST diet, then going BACK to that first diet - believing it was going to ‘work this time’, getting *some* results, eventually getting tired of not getting the FULL results I wanted, quitting, swinging to the other extreme again - over and over again.
In this I had convinced myself that I was really TRYING to figure it out, that I was doing ‘different’ things, that I was finding answers but it was just my willpower that was the problem. I had convinced myself that I had tried ‘everything’ because in my mind, doing one thing and then doing its opposite WAS doing EVERYTHING.
I realized that THIS is what MOST people are doing in their lives, over and over again, round and round.
Swinging from one side of a pendulum to the other, getting some good results and some bad results on both sides - and never finding an actual PATH forward.
I realized in this, that it was time to slow down, and truly use my feelings as a guide, and then to use my LOGIC to help me ACTUALLY move forward.
So what I mean by this practically was - I had to stop swinging from one extreme to the other, and first assess - what felt GOOD about each extreme? What worked? What parts of each extreme pole gave me SOME results. Then I had to assess what DIDN’T work about each pole. What DIDN’T feel good. What didn’t give me results.
Then I had to use that information to come up with a THIRD WAY.
I had to admit that neither was the answer - and that neither were EVERYTHING.
There was MORE.
I had to take what worked about both, and COMBINE them in order to come up with my own third solution - a way of eating that included only the aspects of each step that actually WORKED and that eliminated the parts of each pole that didn’t.
From there, I would open up to searching for MORE THINGS that felt good, more things that worked, and more steps to try. More tools to add to my tool box. More information. More awareness. I never assumed I had the full picture - instead I kept BUILDING on what was working through CURIOSITY about what ELSE may contribute to MORE results.
I did this in EVERY area of my life.
I let myself DISSECT what aspects of what I was doing felt GOOD, what aspects felt BAD - and continued to build on what felt good, to assess why what felt bad felt bad, looking for the reasons WHY, and using my logical mind to help me understand the REASONS for my feelings.
I would use my feelings to help POINT ME in the direction I was supposed to go - admitting what felt good and what felt bad deep inside, admitting what was working and what wasn’t working - and then the LOGICAL MIND was used as the tool to figure out HOW to apply that knowledge.
I would use my LOGIC to work out HOW to follow the guidance my feelings were giving me. The logic came in SECOND to work how the steps, after the feelings told me what to go for, what to move away from, what to try and what to avoid.
Feeling first, logic second.
Not one or the other.
That’s how I used my feelings to figure out STEPS.
Does it feel good? Follow it. What works about it? What feels good about it? What are the results?
Does it feel bad? Why? What feels bad? What are the results? Why are those results happening?
Making The Foundation ‘What Am I Learning?’
The whole idea was - what am I LEARNING about reality through this?
That was my stance. That every experience was one where I could LEARN something about reality I didn’t know before. My feelings were pointing me in the direction of where to look, and then it was my minds job to assess, understand, work out and create the map for how to actually walk OUT what my feelings were telling me.
The feelings said this or that diet modality felt good - the mind figured out WHY it worked and HOW to do it in real life. The mind said this diet aspect felt bad, the logical mind then worked out how to let that go, why it felt bad, what didn’t work about it and then OPENED to being CURIOUS about what I could do INSTEAD to get my intended result that WASN’T what I had already tried.
I had to have FAITH in my pleasure, in the things that felt exciting, and had to have FAITH that letting go and not knowing wasn’t the end of the road - that if I stayed open, I WOULD find something else to fill in what I had just released.
Then I had to learn to LEARN from my experience - not to write anything off but to get something out of EVERYTHING I went through. No more saying reality went wrong when it didn’t go how I expected it to, and assuming EVERYTHING was leading me where I wanted to go, if I was willing to KEEP GOING and keep LEARNING from everything.
So rather than assuming ‘this feels good and thus when I follow it I am going to get THIS result and anything else means life has gone wrong - I had to say ‘this feels good. I will try it. I will take the step. Then no matter WHAT happens, I will FEEL how it feels, I will witness OUTCOMES, and I will ASSESS what this taught me about REALITY.’
Rather than living as though I could take a ‘wrong’ step - I followed my pain and pleasure into the next logical step, and then I was willing to LEARN from every step.
I would get excited about a dietary approach, try it on, see that there were SOME things that worked and felt good about it and SOME things that didn’t and felt bad - and that was BUILDING on my knowledge. So I would keep what worked, let go of what didn’t, then stay open to building even MORE on what DID by deepening my knowledge of that.
In my career I would take a step, see the consequences, work with what worked and learn from what didn’t.
Nothing ever went perfectly, and nothing was ever the be-all-end-all step.
But EVERY step taught me something that gave me the ability to build to the NEXT step.
One step at a time.
Learning from what worked and from what didn’t.
Taking what worked and assessing what didn’t work about what didn’t work, and looking for OTHER modalities and answers that could give me the results I wanted.
Feeling, assessing, logic, steps, assessing, feeling, assessing, logic, steps, assessing - THIS was the path.
Over and over again.
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How is this all landing for you?
Is the life generating life starting to take full shape in your mind?
Are you starting to feel like this may be a doable path for you?
I would love to hear your thoughts!
Next week we will wrap up this series by looking at the whole picture and putting all these concepts together.
<3
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