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

The Butterfly Effect

¡Hola! Everybody...
My online interactions will noticeably decrease as I struggle to catch up on paperwork I’ve ignored for most of the year. I will be posting (though not as often as in the past), but the debating/ comments part will be curtailed... This here is a repost.

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-=[ The Butterfly Effect ]=-

Feelings aren’t facts...

Think about it: how much time do we spend agonizing over things that, in the long run, are inconsequential? I submit that about 99.999999% of the shit we sweat in our lives is totally unnecessary. But sweat we do -- all the time.

Reminds me of a story. I love stories, so bear with me. A great teacher famous for teaching that life was all illusion was discovered sobbing uncontrollably by one of his followers. He was grieving because his son had passed away. Shocked, the follower asked his teacher, “Don’t you preach that all life is an illusion?” The teacher turned to his disciple and said, “Yes it is true that all of life is an illusion, but this is a big illusion.” LOL

And so it is with life: feelings aren’t facts, but it’s a fact that you feel. Some issues are graver than others and we can get stuck, but the real heart of the matter is how long we stay stuck. If we spend our lives feeling betrayed, angry, resentful, or insulted, then where is the time for living? You will blink your eyes one day and years have passed and realize they have been wasted fighting off a swarm of butterflies.

This is not to say that we shouldn’t be considerate of the way other people feel, or that our relationships are meaningless. I know I have made some genuine connections here on the ‘Net over the years and I am grateful for them. I happen to consider some as friends, but I have seen others show their real side. There are many people who engage in cruel behavior on here and in “real” life and rationalize it by saying some bullshit like, “It’s just the internet.” I submit that if you’re capable of cruelty here, then that potential exists somewhere in you.

Of course we shouldn’t proceed as if nothing mattered because that’s the other extreme and it’s called nihilism. What it does mean is that we choose our attitudes and reactions all the time.

There are plenty examples to go around. How many times have you caught feelings over a miscommunication and as a result exchanged insults. It’s happened to me. Some of us resemble out and out psychopaths, resorting to all kinds of stupidity. This happens for several reasons, but the main reason is that there is anger in our hearts. The tragedy (and comedy) in the grand scheme of things is: what did it matter? Not much is often the honest answer. But it matters that people feel insulted and disrespected, misunderstood and ridiculed.

Now, before anyone here begins commenting, let’s all be honest and just say we have all experienced similar events in our life, okay? I see it and hear it all the time. Most of the time, it’s not even worth it. That means you and I.

Shit happens: we lose jobs, grow out of relationships, get hurt, and betrayed. Shoot, I live in a city where pushing and jostling is considered OK. I run up against sweet old ladies who act like All Pro NFL linebackers when getting on and off the subway. LOL! The thing is that life is like that. There’s shit happening all the time. If you’re waiting for the perfect moment, with the perfect love (“The One”), at the perfect job, or location -- if you’re waiting for all that in order to smile and smell a flower, then you will have wasted your life waiting, because, I hate to be the one to break it to you, but there’s no Santa Claus, no Tooth Fairy and life is hard.

Life is hard and full of suffering. However, it’s also beautiful and amazing, the most precious gift, and the one true choice you have -- the one card you can play -- is whether you will face it all with a smile or a frown. This is it, people. I mean, I see all the wise quotes, but can you find the serenity within the chaos? Can you walk the walk? Can you sit in the midst of life and face it with joy and love -- all of it, not just the good shit?

Love,

Eddie

Sunday Sermon [The Full Catastrophe]

¡Hola! Everybody...
Americans work to damned hard! People? When you’re freakin’ dying, I guarantee you will not be overcome with regret for not spending more time at the office. I need to move to Europe or some shit like that...

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-=[ The Full Catastrophe ]=-

Am I not a man? And is not a man stupid? I’m a man. So I married. Wife, children, house, everything. The full catastrophe.

-- Zorba the Greek

Those of you familiar with the author, Nikos Kazantzakis, are probably familiar with this quote. Jon Kabat-Zinn, the founder of the Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction (MSBR) Clinic named one of his best books on the subject of using Buddhist mindfulness meditation to address stress, “Full Catastrophe Living.”

It’s an interesting proposition: using all of life -- the good, the bad, and the ugly -- as grist for the mill. I hear too many people talking about how they want to remove “negativity” from their lives. I question the notion to ignore/ remove at least 50% of your life. Actually, I’ve tried this and I’m here to tell you that living in a sensory deprivation environment (otherwise known as solitary confinement -- true story), is not all it’s geared to be.

I mean, I’m not saying we go out of our way to create or engage “negativity,” but why turn away from it? Why not use it? For those that garden, turning away from the perception of negativity is a lot like refusing to use manure, or compost to cultivate your garden. And what is negativity anyway? Sadly, negativity is oftentimes some shit or someone you don’t like. And no matter how much you try to turn away from negativity, everywhere you go, there you are -- with all your own negative baggage. If you perceive it as merely negative, whatever it is, then no amount of turning away will do away with negativity because you are creating the perception of negativity in the first place.

Check this out: every situation, properly perceived, becomes an opportunity to heal. That means negative situations too. No, it doesn’t mean it will all be pleasant and the sun will be shining all the fuckin time. What? Didn’t you get the memo?!! Santa Claus doesn’t exist and life is tough sometimes. Sorry to break it down in such a cold manner. LOL Honestly, I see a lot of unrealistic expectations from the adults of the world. It seems many of us actually believe spending our lives running from unpleasant feelings and clinging pleasant ones is a viable life strategy.

It isn’t...

People will disappoint you, the fates will conspire to fuck up your plans, your kids will sometimes never appreciate your sacrifices and not all women will allow me to screw them in the ass.

And??

Shit, I just watched the hot new Shakira video and I’m really upset the bitch got all freakin skinny! What happened to the really curvy Shakira?!! You can play the marimba on her fuckin ribs! I mean, she still gotta lil bootie, but she must not be hangin’ out with Latino/as because she would be force-fed in Columbia, Puerto Rico, or almost any other Latin American country! But all that is not going to ruin my day...

Shit happens and she doesn’t even answer my calls.

I’m not saying I should deny my feelings. I am actually saying we all should do the opposite: feel your feelings completely. Feel the full catastrophe of your life. What happens to anger, sadness, fear, hate, and envy, lust when you stop trying to categorize / analyze them and just fuckin feel them? What happens when you invite the negative as well as the positive and embrace both as a mother would embrace both a good and bad child? I’ll tell you what happens: you become free as you are healed and made whole.

All healing is essentially letting go of fear. Playing the run-around game based on your likes and dislikes is in reality fear-based living. Try it one day: stay with the hurt without giving in the compulsion to attach a story to it. What we often do is we substitute neurosis for suffering and that just makes it all a lot more painful. Add stress to pain and you have suffering. Let me break that down:

pain + stress = suffering.

I think that’s also a good formula for neurosis.

All healing is actually a release from the past. Now here’s where it gets a little tricky. People will rightfully point out that there is a process that leads to letting go, that leads to grief. The thing is this: how many times must you do the process before you start getting it without having to go through all the stages?

Suffering, my friends, is optional.

Love,

Eddie

Feelings, pt. III

¡Hola! Everybody...

I would like to take a moment to recognize Jennifer’s (complicatedadventure) daughter Amber. Amber took on the establishment at her school and questioned the constitutionality of the school’s policy regarding movement during the pledge of allegiance. Last night, the school district realized the error of its ways and agreed to amend the wording to this policy. Now, whether you agree with Amber or not, I don’t give a shit. The important part is that she got involved and she made a difference. I’m really proud of Amber and Jennifer deserves major props too for encouraging this kind of spirit in her daughter. Go Grrrrrls! Stop by and recognize Amber and Jennifer for their independent thinking (click here)

Today’s blog photo is from The Great Cosmic Happy-Ass Card Company. I love their shit! Check them out (click here)

I promise! After today no more about feelings! LOL!

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-=[ Feelings, pt. III: Feelings as Children ]=-

“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

Recap time, girls and boys! First, I tried to explain how feelings are different from emotions (click here). Feelings are rooted in the body, waves of energy that we actually 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 our personal novelas – soap operas). Finally I discussed what that does to feelings – how being fully present with the feelings acts as a liberating force from the drama of our lives. I consider this something of a miracle, an awakening (click here).

There is another awakening, or miracle: the realization that our feelings are our children. Like real children, some are well behaved: clean, polite, and socially acceptable. Others are little monsters – little diablitos! What happens is we tend to nurture the children we like, give them food, dress them really nice, and pose them so that our neighbors could see them.

The ones we don’t like, we push out into the yard, into the doghouse, with no nourishment and barely dressed to protect against the elements – in the cold. Every once in a while, we might see them, their dirty and hungry faces pressed against the windows, the beginnings of malicious intent 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 sometimes make horrible noises in the night. One thing is for sure: they will completely sabotage our every attempt to look good 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 cozy little life.

Once we begin to settle into who we really are (awakening to our true selves), 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 eventually, 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, mijito. 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 teed off, burning holes in the couch and insulting people on the phone.

They will need reassurance: you tell them that they can stay forever, as long as they want. We might say to our 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 any parent learns. I learned it with my own son. It seemed that whenever I was busy with work, or on the phone, as a young boy 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 seemingly all-consuming 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 feelings: 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 upended. 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 this: by welcoming feelings, we can transform them. For example, Anger, when welcomed home, 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 depths of our true 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 begin to discover a great truth: there is no such thing as negative energy. Even the most unwelcome emotional tsunamis, that have been incarcerated and abandoned for lifetimes, which seem capable of destroying us and other people, are transformed into something divine that are 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 learned, with practice, to breathe deeply into the belly and allow it to be just as it is, trusting the knowledge that I can experiment with my 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 again and again, 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, 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 – a blessing.

When I can experience Anger in this way, I am truly conscious when I am teed 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 with. Once we become willing to disengage the feeling from the drama, there is an immediate liberation. Without a story, whether that story be of victimhood or a wound, there is nothing left to defend, nothing to resist, and we are liberated from the addictive bitterness or niceness as a cure to all that we have repressed.

Genuine 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 from the shadows of our past, every feeling fully felt, without resistance and freely given, then we express true love. Anything else is just so much cotton candy – sugared air, insubstantial.

I hope you have found something useful in these three different posts on feelings. My hope is that it may have somehow touched something within, motivating you to question the everyday, unthinking, manner we are conditioned to respond to feelings. If we become like an ocean, then a tsunami is merely a ripple on the surface of things. If we stubbornly choose to remain stuck to a narrowly defined sense of ourselves (the ego-driven mini me), then our emotional lives will be forever doomed to resemble natural catastrophes.

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, )

* * *

-=[ 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