if you want to be

If you want to be

First allow yourself to feel

We live in a complex world. Life has a lot going on in it, for many people. We no longer live simple lives, and this complexity demands that we think a lot. It requires many concepts. And so just to exist in modern society, we tend to spend a lot of time in our heads, with thoughts, words, concepts. And all of this tends to take us away from our feelings. Although they may play a part in our life, we conceptualise the feelings too, and build a big story around them. In a way, this allows us to avoid really feeling the feelings.

And of course, some feelings are painful. Sadness can be difficult to really feel, challenging. It actually has a beauty in it, a great depth. And yet it's not pleasant, it's not a pleasurable feeling, and so in a way, we tried to find some way of avoiding sadness. We might jump into anger – another feeling, not exactly pleasant, and yet it does carry a certain power. A part of us can like to get angry. It's a great assertion of the self, the ego, demanding things to be different to how they are.

If our feelings are painful, we might avoid them in other ways. We might numb ourself to our feelings. If we do this, then we lose touch with our body. It's no coincidence that in the English language the word feeling means both these things: the emotional feeling, and also the sensational feeling, sensations in the body. These two are closely related. So if we numb ourselves to our feelings, our emotions, then we also numb our awareness of our own bodily sensations. Effectively, we cut ourselves off from our own body.

We might do this in another way as well, instead of numbing ourselves, we might space out. It's a similar effect only now we're taking our awareness away into some dreamy heavenly realm. It's another way of avoiding our own feelings. 

All of this is an escape and it has some great problems associated with it. If we escape in this way, first of all the emotional energy is still there in our body. We are just not aware of it any longer. And when we don't bring awareness to our body and to our emotions, that emotional energy will turn cancerous. It will eat away inside us, eventually becoming physical disease. So it is very unhealthy to avoid it.

Furthermore, we cannot selectively avoid emotions. If we go down this route of spacing out, or numbing ourselves to our emotions, or conceptualising everything so we don't really feel, these mechanisms will apply to all our emotions, positive and negative. We will lose the joy of life as well as avoiding the pain.

And there is a yet deeper problem if we avoid our feelings. And that is we cannot really be, unless we are prepared to feel our feelings. Being is really the essential core element of our existence. And to really be, our awareness has to reach our very centre. We need to live our life from that centre. And the difficulty arises because to reach that centre, we have to go through our feelings.

To give an analogy, we could say that the thoughts and the mind, the thinking mind, are very superficial, on the surface of our being, and underneath that there exist our emotions, our feelings and bodily sensations as well. They are deeper, a more mysterious and profound aspect of our being. And we have to be prepared to live in that world, to go through that world, if we want to reach even deeper into our being, to the centre of our being, to our being itself. And we could say that this centre, this being, is the end point of our spiritual journey, in so far as it has an end point. This is in a way what we are yearning for, to come back to our centre, to be once more.

So if we want this, if we want to really be, we first have to be prepared to really feel, and by this I mean to bring our awareness fully into our emotions, and also into our bodily sensations. And this can take some practice if we have become accustomed to avoiding our feelings, if we are used to avoiding sensing our body. It can take some practice, some discipline, to find our way back into our own body and into our own emotions, to be able to sit with the awareness on the emotions without running away, without numbing out, without conceptualising, without making a story – just to feel whatever emotional energy is coming up, to sit with it, allow it, accept it. And if we can do this, if we can do this, then miraculously, without doing anything else, we will sooner or later begin to drop into our being, and this is a blissful, peaceful space to be in.