Brilliant Spiritual Leader and author, Mark Nepo, speaks on feelings from his master-piece work, THE BOOK OF AWAKENING from the reading on April 8th.
He says…………………”This is at once the clearest of spiritual intents and yet the hardest to stay true to: how to stay open to what others feel and not to what they think. We cannot live without being affected by others, but we are only real when we let truth and love shape us from within. Our want to be liked, our want to avoid conflicts, our want to be understood—all these traits tease us away from taking the voice within seriously.”
I expand this by focusing on the feeling idea today. For some reason, I have always been aware of my feelings. When I was learning Play Therapy, my teacher and mentor demonstrated how the essence of Play Therapy was to be present to the child’s feelings. I was able to do this clearly and easily. By being open to the feelings of one another, we get to the heart of the matter. We connect with one another as if by “invisible strings” that enable us to feel one with each other without even trying.
However, in this world made of concrete and asphalt, we humans have learned to ignore feelings and to intellectualize everything. The Mighty intellect has taken over and so when someone expresses feelings of sad, mad, glad or fearful, the humans around them often reply with some intellectual response that actually dissolves connection and makes one perceive that they are invisible.
For example, when one is sad over the loss of a loved one, they hear from 90% of those around them things like: “Well your loved one is in a better place”, “They are no longer suffering”, “They lived a good life”, “There are many other fish in the sea”, “God must have needed her in heaven”.
While some of these sentiments may be true, they in fact, do nothing, nada, zip, NOTHING to help the broken heart of the one who lost their loved one. The “joining response” would be something like: “ I can only imagine how you feel but I want you to know I love you and am right here with you and will hold your hand and let you cry as long as you need to”. Now that is a joining response that truly does help the griever heal. The other intellectual responses simply tell the griever they are all alone and there is no help available from the one who is “honking” the intellectual statements.
We humans are wired at a neuro-biological level to actually be able to understand the feelings of others in an internal way. Though, we may not know why someone is sad, when we see someone crying, our brains actually create a mirror representation in our bodies so we can at least understand that the person crying is feeling sad.
So, the point of this blog today is this: DO YOU WANT TO JOIN WITH OTHERS or DO YOU WANT TO PUSH THEM AWAY?. If you choose joining, then you must be willing to join with your own feelings first and listen very carefully to that inner voice within. You will know what to say when another is emoting. That is, you may only be able to say: I can sense you are “mad, or sad, or scared”; and though I can’t know exactly how you are feeling, I am going to be right with you as you go through this.
If we choose the intellectual response, we are first of all ignoring our own neuro-biology and second, we are pushing the other way by using words that sever the connection that being aware of feelings could have created.
The choice is YOURS. Please call for coaching if you need help in this area.