Emotional Ruts

¡Hola! Everybody...

I've decided it's time for me to look for a new gig... some jobs are like those relationships we hang on to because of the familiarity and I have come to the realization that I'm in a professional rut. Time to move on.

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-=[ Emotional Constipation ]=-

We live in a society of emotional illiterates because our emotional lives have never been emphasized. Emotions are considered weak -- a poor substitute for reason. Too often conception is confused with perception. And the thing is you can commit to practice some esoteric technique (or shop for shoes) and it won’t change anything about your perception. Nothing changes because there is this incapacity to feel. We spend a huge amount of money, time, and effort into not feeling and we pay a high price. We pay a high price when we avoid feelings as they arise.

Just so we’re on the same page, I make a distinction between feelings and emotions. I see feelings as the reality -- the actual sensation -- of feeling. Feelings have a physical as well as a psychological component. Feelings manifest themselves in the body. Emotions on the other hand are the dramas we attach to feelings. In this way, we have feelings and then we have what we bring to them (emotions).

When we deny our feelings, they become “gooey,” and instead of passing through us, they clog up our psychic GI tract. It’s like an emotional constipation. You hear people say it all the time -- they “get stuck.”

There is a process. First, we create a habitual tension in the body that literally cuts off the free flow of sensation. The consequences are a lot deeper than you think. I once had a lover, for example, who found intercourse extremely uncomfortable, painful even. We tried everything: different positions, different patterns of stroking, lubrication -- we did everything except swing from the chandeliers while she ran around the block naked (actually, we thought about that too. LOL). Nothing worked. Medically, there was nothing wrong with her.

We were was at our wit’s end, until one day we were lying in bed together, clinched talking intimately. And somehow she began to talk to me. As she spoke, she began to cry. Of course, I became aroused because for some sick reason, I find the spectacle of a naked woman crying highly erotic. LOL!

I digress...

The more she spoke and the more she unburdened herself, the more she cried. The more she cried, the more she opened. I mean she was opening in every sense. She wasn’t talking about anything specific -- it wasn't so much the content of our conversation, but the feeling. I was holding her -- had been holding her -- for the longest. Eventually, she just let go. Something inside snapped or unfurled and she became open. We made love that day and she didn't experience any discomfort. It was an amazing experience for both of us.

I use this example to illustrate that there’s this price we pay for not feeling and part of that is physical -- this tension in the body. We create a body armor that numbs us from the free flow of reality. For my friend the tension manifested itself around her pelvic area, apparently creating extreme tension during intercourse. The way she described it, it was as if there was a void around that area. A void that would become tension. There are other physical manifestations. In order not to feel anger, for example, we clench the solar plexus and block feeling, blood flow, and energy. To avoid feeling fear, we contract the pectoral muscles and collapse the chest. Over time these unconscious attempts to block feeling in the body leads to postural imbalances and stress-related illnesses. You would be amazed at what one loving, unconditional hug could do for you.

There’s another stage or, better put, coping strategy we use in order to avoid feelings and that’s the use or overuse of intellectualizing or rationalizing. These are is common defense mechanisms and they can be infuriating. We sometimes develop strategies to control or stop the feelings. We ask, “Why am I feeling this?” then seek for an answer that usually begins with “Because.” I am angry because you... or they made me feel sad because they... And in that way, we get caught in the endless cycle of cause and effect.

Another strategy for not feeling is venting. This one is very seductive because it has become ingrained in our popular culture. We’ve all heard the cliche “letting it all out” is good for us. This is due to a popular misconception regarding the psychoanalytic concept of catharsis. Sometimes this happens very quickly and sometimes it simmers for a while before exploding. If you’re from a culture that frowns on open displays of emotion, for example, it might take years. However, when the lid finally blows on that pressure cooker, we create a lot of wreckage and a there’s a huge mess to clean up afterward. You can even cause permanent damage.

Venting is in actuality a rebellion against feeling. It’s a rebellion against the tension created between feeling and its repression. What happens is that we try to compensate for resisting our initial feeling with an explosive mixture of emotion and willfulness. Angry? You’re fuckin’ right I’m angry! And you had better sit there and listen to me!

Exploding or venting is not cathartic, it’s just another way to create the illusion of control over feeling and avoiding the feeling being overwhelmed. You think (rationalize) you’re managing your feelings by expressing your anger. In fact, you’re not feeling a feeling, but doing emotion -- creating drama. Rather than actually experiencing the feeling as a wave passing through us, we contract our small sense of self and become the wave. Rather than feeling anger or sadness, we say, “I am angry,” “I am sad.” In a very real sense, this movement or wave has taken over our very identity.

From the purely ego-driven, Mini Me perspective, the only choice we think we have is either to shut down (repress) our feelings or to be taken over by them and become reactive (vent).

Either way, you’re still caught. In the final analysis, we are still controlled by emotional states that are in actuality disconnected from the world around us and we are stopped from being able to offer our deepest gifts.

Love,

Eddie

Feelings, pt. III

¡Hola! Everybody...
I promise! After today no more about feelings! LOL!

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-[ Angels with Dirty Faces ]=-

It’s scary as hell to make our self be known, the parts that are unlovable, the parts we don’t love, that no one else will love, that are just too messy, that are unworthy. Yet we’re dying inside to be completely loved and received and forgiven.

-- Jennifer Garcia

I operate under the assumption that almost everything you have been taught about finding happiness is inaccurate, misleading, and false. Furthermore, I believe those very beliefs are making you miserable. My challenge is thus: what if you discovered that your very efforts to find happiness were actually preventing you from achieving it? What if almost everyone you knew turned out to be in the same boat -- including all the “experts” and self-help gurus who claim to have answers?

In part, this series on feelings is my answer to that challenge...

Recap time, girls and boys! First, I tried to explain how feelings are different from emotions. Feelings are based in the body, waves of energy, that we experience. Emotions are the stories we attach to these waves: “I am angry,” “She makes me sad,” etc. So, there was this discussion around feelings and emotions and what happens if we practice experiencing the waves as they are, rather than attaching the stories (what I called the “personal novelas” -- soap operas). Next, I discussed what that does to feelings -- how being fully present with feelings act as a liberating force from the drama of our lives. I consider this something of a miracle, or at least an awakening.

There is a second awakening, or miracle: the realization that our feelings are our children. As with real children, some are well behaved, clean, polite, and socially acceptable. Others are little monsters -- little diablitos. The issue here is we tend to nurture the children we like, give them food, dress them really nice, and pose them for our family “Christmas Card,” and trot them out when our neighbors come to visit.

The ones we don’t like, we push out into the yard, into the doghouse, with no nourishment and barely protected against the elements, in the cold. Occasionally, we might see them, their dirty and hungry faces pressed against the windows, the early stages of malicious intent reflected in their haunted eyes. Sometimes there is a mutiny and a few of them break in through the windows. Or, we might let a pleasant feeling out to play and a few of the juvenile delinquent feelings rush in uninvited. Our abandoned feelings haunt our dreams and make horrible noises in the night. One thing is for sure: they will completely sabotage our every attempt to look good or socially acceptable to the neighbors.

This is true no matter how hard you fight. The more fences and barbed wire you erect, the more they will plan schemes to disrupt your neat little life.

Once we begin to awaken to who we really are, into our natural state, we are no longer threatened by our feelings and we slowly begin to invite our abandoned children back inside. This is a slow, gradual process, as you open the door of your heart to your exiled children, one by one.

Invite Grief inside and sooner or later, you are sitting down to dinner with Anger, having a “Blockbuster night,” enjoying yourselves. “I’m sorry,” you say. “This was a misunderstanding. I realize now you are my child. I gave birth to you. Come inside, sit by the fire, and have something to eat. Look. Your bed is right over there and you can stay here.”

Initially, your abandoned, bleary-eyed children will not believe what’s going on. Hey! They might even be a little bit pissed off, burning holes in the couch and insulting people on the phone.

They will need reassurance. You assure them that they can stay forever, as long as they want. We might say to Anger, “I’m sorry I pushed you away, and I’m really sorry that my father did before me, and my grandfather before that. I’m sorry my entire culture has made you feel that you don’t belong. But now, you are welcome, come on in.”

As soon as you welcome the banished, they are transformed. This is a lesson almost every parent knows. I learned it with my own son. It seemed that as a young boy whenever I was busy with work, or on the phone, my son would suddenly decide he wanted me to get him something or to play with him. If I pushed him away, he would become more demanding. But then I learned that if brought him close to me, his apparent need would quickly disappear. His real longing was for attention, and once that need was fulfilled, all else receded to the background.

And so it is with “emotions.” When we are fully present with them as they arise, and draw them close to us when they seek our attention, their agenda is upset, and the cycle of drama is thwarted. Here’s an even better recap on this series on feelings:

Feelings arise

They are embraced

They pass again

… and we are free o be spacious and empty, and to be available to life and connected to the world.

Evolving people embrace this process over and over again. It is an awakening and it is our birthright as human beings. The miracle is that by welcoming feelings, we can transform them. For example, Anger, when welcomed, embraced, given a good meal, and clean clothes becomes authority and power. Sexual desire, when all moral charges are dropped and the fingers of accusation have stopped wagging, becomes our basic life energy, our chi. Having a friendly relationship with Grief lets us uncover our depth, the very core of our selves. Fear reveals excitement and energy, Boredom uncovers our desire for meaning. By consciously dropping the “personal novela” -- dropping the drama and returning to pure feeling -- we discover a great truth: there is no such thing as negative energy. Even the most catastrophic emotional tsunamis, abandoned for lifetimes, which seem capable of destroying us and other people, are transformed when accepted and given as gifts.

Let me use anger as an example. At first, I was a little hesitant to let anger out of its cage. I was afraid of what might happen. But this was when I was confusing feeling with reactivity. Anger thrown onto another person without first being deeply felt (embraced) can have disastrous consequences. I am learning, with practice, to breathe deeply into the belly and allow it to be just as it is, that I can experiment with anger, a little bit at a time. Once I felt the raw, savage beauty of anger, I felt a deeper connection to the earth; my body opened and came to life. I learned and experienced that I could feel my anger repeatedly, each time more deeply. The more I allowed it, the deeper the anger took me into myself. Now it can be given as a gift to others and myself. The gift of authority, of waking up, of integrity, of speaking truth to power in the face of social injustice.

When Anger is felt and given, free of resistance, it can be received by others as a gift, as a blessing.

When I experience anger in this way, I am truly conscious when I am pissed off. There’s no “personal novela.” It happens

BAM!

And then it’s finished, and then I’m back. I give myself permission to get pissed, I ride that wave of anger, and then it becomes a gift for whomever I’m pissed at. Once we become willing to disengage the feeling from the drama, there is an immediate liberation. Without a story, of victimhood or a wound (sometimes we become our wounds), there is nothing left to defend, nothing to resist, and we are liberated from the addictive bitterness or niceness a response to all that we have repressed.

Real love can be ferocious, it can be deeply honest, and it can be a gift in a million different flavors.

When we feel fully, and free ourselves of the shadows of our past, every feeling fully felt, without resistance and freely given, then we express true love. Anything else is just candy.

I hope you, the reader, has found something useful in these three different posts on feelings. I hope that it may have somehow touched something within you to question the everyday, knee-jerk, manner we are conditioned to respond to feelings. I f we become like an ocean, then a wave is merely a ripple on the surface of things. If we choose to remain stuck to a narrowly defined sense of self, then our emotional lives will be forever doomed to resemble natural catastrophes.

Love,

Eddie

Feelings, pt. II

¡Hola! Everybody...
It is cold out here! But I’d rather be here than there. LOL!

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-=[ Emotional Constipation ]=-

Everything is always washing into my heart. And I have a choice in any moment to open to it or close to it, to resist or allow it to protect myself from it or to open to it and let whatever response comes just be.
-- Amy McCarrel

Feelings aren't facts, but it's a fact that you feel.
-- Popular 12-Step fellowship slogan

When I first wrote yesterday’s blog, I posted it with some trepidation because understanding being present intellectually and actually experiencing it, are two different things and takes practice. However, awakening, another word for being present, is an option for anyone at any time. My own experience tells me that everything necessary for your fulfillment exists right here, right now, this very moment. All you have to do is awake to that potential and actually experience it, rather than to continue to conceptualize it.

Judging by the responses over the years, my initial feelings were unwarranted. When I began this series, I mentioned that my work brings me into contact with literally hundreds of people every year. And I am always amazed by the number of people who have chosen to take responsibility for their own awakening outside the context of organized religions. There is a wave, a movement, of people seeking to find their own answers and that is one of the most remarkable things about the present historical period.

There are two knee-jerk (conditioned) responses to feelings, and they both have their price: to run from them, or indulge them. In addition, as I wrote yesterday, we attach stories to our feelings, creating our own personal novelas (Novelas are Spanish-language soap operas with titles such as Amor Salvaje! [Savage Love], or, Deseo Bestial [Savage Desire]). This does not mean, however, that feelings are not real. Moreover, I do not mean to imply that the awakening process results in a super calm person floating an inch above the ground offering benedictions to everybody.

Let me state two myths about awakening:

Myth #1 Awakening means not having feelings, especially “negative” ones like anger, fear, jealousy, or greed. Instead, the process leads to an unchanging, always calm, state.

Myth #2 You have to choose between feelings and presence. When you have feelings, you have lost who you are.

These two myths are stereotypes and quite laughable, if you ask me. Being awake is to feel completely, to love passionately, to become transparent or translucent. Awakening to what is (rather than arguing against reality) leads one to feel more fully but in a way that doesn't make us prisoners.

Two reactions with a heavy price attached: running (aversion) and clinging (desire). Two sides of the same emotional coin. We live in a male-dominated society in which feelings are viewed as inferior. To be “emotional” is considered unprofessional and we spend much time and money constantly “processing” our feelings away. I think in this sense, women (or rather, the feminine essence) offer a lot in teaching us to be present with our feelings. I have a simple technique when I am working with people. Ask anyone what he or she is feeling and I have found they usually will proceed to describe to you what they are thinking. So what I do is to ask them to tell me where they are feeling it in their bodies. This usually works to center someone in the moment, rather than describing his or her emotional novelas.

This is where the feminine principle can help us: that wonderful capacity to experience everything in the body can become repressed when our little “mini me” starts its whispering.

But I digress!

We pay a high price when we avoid our feelings as they arise. They then become sticky and gooey and don‘t pass through us as cleanly. What happens is that we first create a tension in the body and literally cut off the free flow of sensation. In order not to feel anger in the belly, we clench the solar plexus and block feeling, blood flow, and energy. To avoid feeling fear we contract the pectoral muscles and collapse the chest. The consequence is that, over time these attempts to stop feelings leads to imbalances and stress-related illnesses. We literally create body armor to protect ourselves from feelings.

Another consequence of avoiding feelings, especially the ones we view as negative or threatening, is to become “rational.” We develop strategies to control or stop feelings. As an answer to the question, “Why am I feeling this?” we often quickly say something beginning with “Because”: I am angry because of you… or: they made me feel sad when they…” And in that way, we get caught up in the endless rollercoaster of cause and effect.

The other option is indulging our feelings. Sometimes this happens right away (I was infamous for this. LOL!) and sometimes it simmers for a while before boiling over -- maybe after a few hours, days, or even years. The point is that once the floodgates open, there is hell to pay and a big mess to clean after. You can even cause permanent damage. Indulging is just another way of rebelling against the tension created between the feeling and its repression. We have to compensate for our initial response with an explosive mixture of emotion and willfulness:

Angry?!! You’re damned right I’m angry, and you’re going to sit right there and listen to why!”

Exploding is just another way of attempting to have control over feeling and avoid being overwhelmed. You think you are managing the feeling, but in fact, you are not feeling, but doing emotion. We create drama. Rather than experiencing feeling as a wave, we constrict our sense of self and become the wave itself. Instead of feeling anger or sadness, we become it. Listen to the language we use to describe these states: we say, “I am angry,” “I am sad.” This emotional experience has temporarily taken over our very identity.

Once in the possession of our small, fearful selves, the only choice we think we have is either to repress our feelings or to be taken over them and become reactive. Either way, we are still trapped. We are still run by our personal emotional novelas disconnected from the reality of the world around us, and we are still unable to give ourselves and others our deepest gifts.

That’s it for now. Tomorrow: our emotions as our children...

Love,

Eddie.

Feelings, pt. I

¡Hola! Everybody...
He’s dying a slow painful death... they’re not giving him more than a few days...

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-=[ Feelings & Your Personal Novela ]=-

Tears are always like a breaking. When tears fall, it is like a rain of grace. It means that something has actually touched the truth of your heart, has actually cracked and caused some rain.
-- Sofia Diaz

I think once you start the process of awakening, you learn how to embrace feelings. As we begin to dissolve rigidly held, or what I call “frozen,” beliefs, we begin to make room for all feelings, both those we perceive as positive and those we have abandoned as negative. Developing the capacity to remain present, fully in this moment with whatever arises, instead of resisting feelings, leads us to a direct and powerful gateway into a deeper love.

First let me clarify what I mean by “feelings.” People often confuse the words feelings and emotions to be synonymous. However, they have quite different roots. I am a huge word fan and sometimes this pays off in ways I would never dream of. Feeling comes from the Old English word, fellen, the physical capacity to experience something as it is. Feeling is one of the five senses, along with sight, hearing, smell, and taste. It is also closely associated with being present and in touch with the sensations in the body. Emotion comes from an Old French word, emovoir, to stir up, to create agitation. Emotion then, creates movement within the mind, or better put, it creates movement within consciousness.

Feeling is passive, a capacity to experience, while emotion is fluid and leads to action and expression. Feelings occur within the here and now-- in the present -- and come in all flavors. If we remain open and receptive to them, they can lead us home to peace, to a deeper love. Emotions usually become attached to a story in time that then leads us into a whirlwind of drama. By assuming that every internal feeling has an outside cause, the purity, power, and mystery of feelings are lost. They become dramatized into a personal soap opera -- what I like to call our personal novellas -- from the Spanish-language TV, over-the-top soap operas.

When every feeling becomes a self-centered emotion referenced as “me, me, me,” it becomes a habit and we react (becoming reactive) instead of settling into the experience. In fact, we can be very emotional without feeling at all. We can also feel in profoundly without becoming lost in the emotion. The truth is, if you practice enough and develop the ability to drop the drama from the feelings, you begin to develop a much greater capacity to feel, and in the process, you become less reactive emotionally.

The woman I quoted above, Sofia Diaz, is a mentor to literally thousands of people, mostly women. She says that feelings are neglected in our culture, dominated by the emphasis on rational thought. She goes on to say, “… If you feel the trees from your belly, it is an entirely different universe than if you think about feeling the trees.” Once you begin to practice, she says, an entire universe reveals itself. A universe you never knew existed before.

Let me try to clarify that a bit. Usually we need to say: “I am angry because of what of so-and-so did.” Most of our energy then goes into changing the individual and very little into what we feel. It is extremely rare for anyone to be willing to feel without logical cause:

“How are you doing?”

“I’m so mad I could kill with my bare hands.”

“My God! Why?”

“No reason, just a wave passing through. Feels great, actually. I love it!”

Imagine how liberating a response like that would be. Imagine being with a feeling as a vibration, like listening to music. If we are honest, we really don’t have a fuckin’ clue about why we are feeling what we feel. Is it really the guy who cut you off? Or was it that funny remark your co-worker made yesterday? Perhaps you’re really angry with your father.

What I am submitting here is that the stories we attach to our feelings are often inaccurate. Like old maps to territories that no longer exist. The more agitated you become the more complicated things get and the further away you are pulled from your actual feelings.

When we remove the drama -- the personal soap opera -- attached to our feelings, the feelings become less distinct, and they begin to defy labeling. Someone reading my daily rants may get angry and see me as a pompous ass possessed by a need to show off my pseudo intellect to the world, for example. Another may attach the story that my posts are motivated by a need to share my experiences and create some form of dialogue. Who’s right?

Let me offer another example that most here will identify with. You are getting ready for a first date. You feel a quickening in your heartbeat, a tightening in your belly. Label it fear, and you have the beginning of one story: I might be rejected. I know I’ll say something stupid. Now, label the same feeling excitement, and spin a different story: Maybe he’s the one. However, if you leave the feeling undefined, and just feel it as a mystery, you will discover that fear and excitement are a hairbreadth apart, separated only by a different story. They easily change into one another.

Try this the next time you feel afraid. Ask yourself if you know, for sure, that what you are feeling is fear. Could it be equally labeled excitement? Can you leave it without any label at all? The same is true of grief and gratitude. The next time you feel deep grief, see if it is possible (just for a moment dammit!), to feel it more deeply while thinking less about why. Then look around at anything, a flower, a color, a bird, and see if your tears are only of regret or also of thanks. Fear, and excitement, grief and gratitude, anger and power, sadness and vulnerability: they are all separated from one another when we make them into an emotional drama, but they become one when we feel them as pure energy.

This is the first miracle when we awake: the more deeply we feel -- the more present we are – the more at peace we become, and the simpler outer situations become. When we become less of a knee-jerk responder, we can give the gift of a pure response to a situation instead merely reacting to it. We can express what we are feeling in tune with the present moment. In this way, grief or anger or overwhelming affection can all be gifts to enhance the world, to bring it more color, more aliveness. Feelings become a generosity of spirit.

Love,

Eddie

Monday Madness [Emotional Healing]

¡Hola! Everybody…
Well it’s back to work for yours truly. I took a two-week vacation in which I did… nothing. Yup, that’s right, I did nothing. Do you know hard it is to do nothing? I mean, it’s, like, a sin or against the law to do nothing in America. People would ask and when I informed them that I was doing nothing, they would look at me as if I’d just developed a third eye and immediately offer “solutions” to my “predicament.” Some people actually looked resentful that I had the audacity to do nothing – or at least admit that I was doing nothing. People: don’t drink the Kool-Aid.

SMDH

I think we all should do nothing more often.

Today’s art work, titled Emotional Healing Reprise, is by James D. Lewis (click here to visit his website).

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-=[ Emotional Healing ]=-
“We must take care not to make intellect our god. It has, of course, powerful muscles, but no personality. It cannot rule, only serve.”
-- Albert Einstein

Emotions get a bad rap in our culture, but without emotions, life would have no meaning. In fact, without emotions we would’ve ceased to exist as a species a long time ago. Emotions give direction to our thoughts and are integral to our decision-making process. Furthermore, without love, beauty, justice, truth, dignity, honor and the great satisfactions each of these provide, what worth would life hold?

These experiences, and the emotions that drive them, gives us our direction. They compel us toward more love, more beauty, more justice, and to distance our selves from their opposites. Without emotions, we lose our ground of being – our fundamental bearings – and we cannot make choices that truly reflect what matters most to us.

People with serious mental illness lose this ability. Like, Emilia, for example, a young woman who came to my office one day. Part of my training involves listening at a level most people are unfamiliar with. One of the things I look for is an individual’s ability to stay “on task” – to demonstrate some measure of focus. Initially, she seemed quite normal, though she had problems making eye contact. For the sake of brevity, I’ll just say that Emilia eventually attempted to stab me with a letter opener. Luckily, I was paying attention and realized, after a while, that she seemed to be listening to voices. I also noticed she was taking quick glances at a cup on my desk that held the letter opener and scissors.

As the realization that I was with a disturbed individual dawned on me, I went to take the cup out of reach as subtly as possible. That’s when she lunged for the letter opener. I was able to wrest the cup for her grasp, but it was a harrowing experience nonetheless.

I was able to get Emilia some help, but the next time I saw her, there was no life in her eyes. And it was sad to watch her. While the antipsychotic medicine helped take away the voices and hallucinations, she seemed more like a zombie than the vibrant, intelligent young woman her family remembered. And that’s the whole thing: no emotion, no life. Today, there are antipsychotic medications whose side effects are less disturbing, but side effects are always a concern. We just don’t know enough about the way the mind/ brain works.

On the other hand, emotional over indulgence does not make for skillful living. Emotions must be tempered by the rational analysis that the cognitive brain provides. Otherwise, rash decisions made in the heat of the moment can adversely affect our relationships with others. I’m willing to bet that many of you reading this have probably had children off a feeling. LOL

Emotions without focus, thoughtfulness, and planning leave us at the mercy of the vicissitudes – the random ups and downs -- of life. If we are incapable of controlling our existence, life loses meaning too.

Your life is unique – every life is unique. It is also true that every life is difficult. Too often I hear people comment that if only they had more money, were better looking, or were more talented, that they would then be happy. By becoming someone else, they seem to be saying, they would not have to face their obstacles and problems – and that is true. But they would have other problems – theirs!

I say, if you’re not happy now, then you’ll never be happy no matter what. You will always have something to bitch about; something will always bother you, or stop you from your happiness. You will always say…

If only…

Marilyn Monroe was perhaps considered the sexiest, most famous, and most desired of all women of her generation. Yet, she could never escape a deeply embedded sense of loneliness which she drowned in alcohol. Eventually, she would die of an overdose of barbiturates. Jimi Hendrix became a superstar and changed the very way the guitar was played and no one today can pick up a guitar without being influenced by his playing. He too died from an overdose of drugs. One of my favorite writers, Earnest Hemingway, won a Nobel Prize and led a life full of adventure and excitement and yet that didn’t stop him from putting a gun to head and pulling the trigger.

Neither talent, nor glory, power, money, nor the adulation of men and women can make the essence of life easier.

Still, there are people who seem to live in harmony. Most often they have a feeling that life is generous. They are able to enjoy the people around them and the mundane everyday pleasures: meals, sleep, projects, and relationships. They don’t belong to a cult or a specific religion. Some are rich, some are not. Some are married, others live alone. Some possess extraordinary talents, others are quite ordinary. They all have experienced failures, disappointments, and dark moments. Nobody – nobody – escapes from hardships.

However, overall, these people seem better equipped to overcome obstacles. They seem to have a special ability to get through misfortune, to give meaning to their lives, as if they had a closer relationship to their lives, with others, and with what they have chosen to do with their existence.

I believe that we all can learn to live in this way – to live in harmony with our environment and our internal values. My experience has shown me that we can learn to heal ourselves, that there is a vast reservoir of healing energy within all of us. I also believe that this healing power is within our grasp and that it lies in learning to harness the power of our emotions.

Love,

Eddie

Feelings, pt. II

¡Hola! Everybody...
I’m not well, I feel drained, and I think my job is making me sick. I don't think I will last the year at this current job. I'm sending my resume out… took the day off

I wrote the following as part of a series on feelings three years ago…

(initially, I titled this part I, but it isn't. It's the second of three posts I did on feelings -- I think. LOL Those interested in reading the series should begin with Feelings 101, then read this one, and then read part III, )

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-=[ Feelings, pt. II ]=-

Feelings aren’t facts, but it’s a fact that you feel.
-- Popular 12-step fellowship saying

Everything is always washing into my heart. And I have the choice in any moment to open to it or to close to it, to resist or allow it to protect myself from it or to open to it and let whatever response comes just be.

-- Amy McCarrel

Awakening, another word for being present, is an option for anyone at any time. My own experience tells me that everything necessary for our fulfillment – our happiness -- exists right here, right now, this very moment. All we have to do is awake to that potential and actually experience it, rather than to continue to conceptualize it.

I make a distinction between feelings and emotions. Feelings are the physical manifestations of our responses to life, while emotions are the stories we attach to these responses (for those interested, I go into further detail click here).

There are two knee-jerk (conditioned) responses to feelings, and they both have their price: to run from them, or indulge them. In addition, we attach “stories” to our feelings, creating our own personal novelas (novelas are Spanish-language soap operas: Amor Salvaje!, or, Deseo Bestial! LOL!). In the process however, this does not mean that feelings are not real. Moreover, I do not mean to imply that the awakening process results in a super calm person floating around offering benedictions to everybody.

Let me state two myths about awakening:

Myth #1 Awakening to our original self means not having feelings, especially “negative” ones like anger, fear, jealousy, or greed. Instead, the process leads to an unchanging, always calm, state.

Myth #2 You have to choose between feelings and presence. When you have feelings, you have lost who you are.

These two myths are stereotypes and quite laughable, if you ask me. Being awake is to feel completely, love passionately, to become transparent.

Two reactions to feelings and a heavy price to pay for both: running (aversion) and clinging (desire). Two sides of the same emotional coin. We live in a male-dominated society in which feelings are dismissed as inferior to reason. If you doubt me, then just take a look at all the reactions to T.O.’s recent cyring jag, or Hilary Clinton’s supposed tears. To be “emotional” is considered unprofessional and we spend much time and money constantly “processing” our feelings away. I think in this sense, women, or rather, our feminine aspects, offer a much in teaching us to be present with our feelings.

I have a simple technique when I am working with overly analytical people (most of whom are women!). Ask anyone what they are feeling and they usually will proceed to describe to you what they are thinking. Therefore, what I do is to ask them to tell me where they feeling it in their bodies. This usually works to center someone in the moment, rather than spending time chasing his or her emotional novelas.

This is where the feminine principle can help us: that wonderful capacity to experience our reality in the body can become repressed when our little “mini me” starts whispering.

But I digress...

We pay a high price when we avoid our feelings as they arise. They then become sticky and gooey and don‘t pass through us as cleanly. A lot like being emotionally constipated. What happens with avoidance as a coping strategy is that we first create a tension in the body and literally cut off the free flow of sensation. Parts of our bodies become numb. Many women, for example, carry a lot of numbness in their genital areas as a result of sexual betrayal/ trauma. In order not to feel anger in the belly, we clench the solar plexus and block feeling, blood flow, and energy. The blockage remains and even becomes more entrenched.

To use another example, in order to avoid feeling fear we contract the pectoral muscles and collapse the chest. The consequence is that, over time these attempts to stop feeling leads to imbalances and stress-related illnesses. We literally create body armor to protect ourselves from feelings.

Another consequence of avoiding feelings, especially the ones we view as negative or threatening, is to become “rational.” We develop strategies (rationalizing, intellectualizing) in order to control or stop feelings. As an answer to the question, “Why am I feeling this?” we quickly say something beginning with “Because”: I am angry because you… or they made me feel sad because they… And in that way, we get caught in the endless rollercoaster of cause and effect.

The other trap is indulging (venting) our feelings. Sometimes this happens right away (I was notorious for this! LOL!) and sometimes it simmers for a while before boiling over—maybe after a few hours, days, or even years. The point is that once the floodgates open, there is hell to pay and a big mess to clean afterwards. You can even cause permanent damage. Indulging (or venting) is just another way of rebelling against the tension created between the feeling and its repression. We have to compensate for our initial response with an explosive mixture of emotion and willfulness:

Angry?!?! You’re damned right I’m angry, and you’re going to sit right there and listen to why!”

Exploding is just another way of attempting to have control (not experience) our feelings and avoid feeling overwhelmed. You think you are managing the feeling, but in fact, you are not feeling, but rather you are doing emotion. We create drama. Rather than experiencing feeling as a wave, we constrict our sense of self and become the wave itself. Instead of feeling anger or sadness, we become it. Listen to the language we use to describe these states: we say, “I am angry,” “I am sad.” This expression of what we are feeling has temporarily taken over our identity.

Once in the possession of our small, fearful selves, the “mini me,” the only choice we think we have is either to repress our feelings or to be taken over them and become reactive. Either way, we are still stuck on stupid. We are still controlled by our personal emotional novelas disconnected from the reality of the world around and in us, and we are still unable to give ourselves and others our deepest gifts.

Love,

Eddie

Feelings 101

Hola Everybody,
I’m not well, I feel drained, and I think my job is making me sick. I believe I won’t be here much longer… took the day off.

I wrote the following as part of a series on feelings (for part II: click here/ part III: click here) three years ago…

* * *

Feelings, pt. I (Personal Novelas)

“Feelings aren’t facts, but it’s a fact that you feel.”
-- Popular 12-step fellowship saying

“Everything is always washing into my heart. And I have the choice in any moment to open to it or to close to it, to resist or allow it to protect myself from it or to open to it and let whatever response comes just be.”
-- Amy McCarrel

Awakening, another word for being present, is an option for anyone at any time. My own experience tells me that everything necessary for our fulfillment – our happiness -- exists right here, right now, this very moment. All we have to do is awake to that potential and actually experience it, rather than to continue to conceptualize it.

My work brings me into contact with literally hundreds of people every year. And I am totally amazed by the number of people who have chosen to take responsibility for their own awakening outside the context of organized religions. There is a wave, a movement, of people seeking to find their own answers and that is one of the most remarkable things about the time we are living in.

There are two knee-jerk (conditioned) responses to feelings, and they both have their price: to run from them, or indulge them. In addition, we attach “stories” to our feelings, creating our own personal novelas (novelas are Spanish-language soap operas: Amor Salvaje!, or, Deseo Bestial! LOL!). In the process however, this does not mean that feelings are not real. Moreover, I do not mean to imply that the awakening process results in a super calm person floating around offering benedictions to everybody.

Let me state two myths about awakening:

Myth #1 Awakening to our original self means not having feelings, especially “negative” ones like anger, fear, jealousy, or greed. Instead, the process leads to an unchanging, always calm, state.

Myth #2 You have to choose between feelings and presence. When you have feelings, you have lost who you are.

These two myths are stereotypes and quite laughable, if you ask me. Being awake is to feel completely, love passionately, to become transparent.

Two reactions to feelings and a heavy price to pay for both: running (aversion) and clinging (desire). Two sides of the same emotional coin. We live in a male-dominated society in which feelings are dismissed as inferior to reason. If you doubt me, then just take a look at all the reactions to T.O.’s recent cyring jag, or Hilary Clinton’s supposed tears. To be “emotional” is considered unprofessional and we spend much time and money constantly “processing” our feelings away. I think in this sense, women, or rather, our feminine aspects, offer a much in teaching us to be present with our feelings.

I have a simple technique when I am working with overly analytical people (most of whom are women!). Ask anyone what they are feeling and they usually will proceed to describe to you what they are thinking. Therefore, what I do is to ask them to tell me where they feeling it in their bodies. This usually works to center someone in the moment, rather than spending time chasing his or her emotional novelas.

This is where the feminine principle can help us: that wonderful capacity to experience our reality in the body can become repressed when our little Mini me starts whispering.

But I digress...

We pay a high price when we avoid our feelings as they arise. They then become sticky and gooey and don‘t pass through us as cleanly. A lot like being emotionally constipated. What happens with avoidance as a coping strategy is that we first create a tension in the body and literally cut off the free flow of sensation. Parts of our bodies become numb. Many women, for example, carry a lot of numbness in their genital areas as a result of sexual betrayal/ trauma. In order not to feel anger in the belly, we clench the solar plexus and block feeling, blood flow, and energy. The blockage remains and even becomes more entrenched.

To use another example, in order to avoid feeling fear we contract the pectoral muscles and collapse the chest. The consequence is that, over time these attempts to stop feeling leads to imbalances and stress-related illnesses. We literally create body armor to protect ourselves from feelings.

Another consequence of avoiding feelings, especially the ones we view as negative or threatening, is to become “rational.” We develop strategies (rationalizing, intellectualizing) in order to control or stop feelings. As an answer to the question, “Why am I feeling this?” we quickly say something beginning with “Because”: I am angry because you… or they made me feel sad because they… And in that way, we get caught in the endless rollercoaster of cause and effect.

The other trap is indulging (venting) our feelings. Sometimes this happens right away (I was notorious for this! LOL!) and sometimes it simmers for a while before boiling over—maybe after a few hours, days, or even years. The point is that once the floodgates open, there is hell to pay and a big mess to clean afterwards. You can even cause permanent damage. Indulging (or venting) is just another way of rebelling against the tension created between the feeling and its repression. We have to compensate for our initial response with an explosive mixture of emotion and willfulness:

Angry?!?! You’re damned right I’m angry, and you’re going to sit right there and listen to why!”

Exploding is just another way of attempting to have control (not experience) our feelings and avoid feeling overwhelmed. You think you are managing the feeling, but in fact, you are not feeling, but rather you are doing emotion. We create drama. Rather than experiencing feeling as a wave, we constrict our sense of self and become the wave itself. Instead of feeling anger or sadness, we become it. Listen to the language we use to describe these states: we say, “I am angry,” “I am sad.” This expression of what we are feeling has temporarily taken over our identity.

Once in the possession of our small, fearful selves, the Mini Me, the only choice we think we have is either to repress our feelings or to be taken over them and become reactive. Either way, we are still stuck on stupid. We are still controlled by our personal emotional novelas disconnected from the reality of the world around and in us, and we are still unable to give ourselves and others our deepest gifts.

Love,

Eddie