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cedar_groveFrom The Book of Awakening: Having the Life You Want by Being Present to the Life You Have.
This sounds pretty simple, but though it's easy to know you have feelings, easy to know their weight and agitation and suddenness of mood, it is another, more subtle matter to feel them-that is, let them penetrate your being the way wind snaps through a flag...
...Though we fear it, feeling our feelings is the only clear and direct way to free our hearts of pain.
I trickle.
I have been told this by a counsellor that I had to see as a mandatory part of treatment I was receiving for infertility, (pardon if that's too much information, please excersise the right to navigate away). Once a week I would go to the clinic at the hospital, sit in the little room and meet with this woman, and talk about the emotional burden on me, as a woman, (and doubly heavily personally as a priestess of a religion where nature and fertility feature heavily), being unable to conceive a child. On one occasion, she turned around to me and told me that.
"You trickle," she said. "you never just let go... it's like you have a valve on it that you turn just enough to let the pressure out; to let the water trickle through, but you still have all those feelings trapped inside. Why can't you let them out? Feel them and let them go?"
To use the flag analoge above, it'd be like starching all but the very edge of the flag and letting that edge be the only part that fluttered in the wind.
Perhaps it's that I don't trust the universe to hold me up if I let go... don't trust the banks of the river to guide my flow and feel I'll drown if I just undo the crank completely and let out all the water. Perhaps it's that I'm so often told that it's not about me that I truly have come to believe that it's inappropriate for me to feel the feelings, because in feeling them would I not also be demonstrative.
Perhaps it's that I don't want to make other people feel uncomfortable. It's a sad fact of modern society that there's little room for expressions of emotion. If we become emotional in public, people around us can't cope with it. Does it remind them that they too must feel? So instead we reserve our emotions for consumption in private, like some forbidden drug or fetish of which we should be ashamed.
Whatever the reason, I feel... 'infected' by the inability to be human, and feel those emotions, display those emotions, live those emotions, even if only for the time necessary to feel release.
I trickle - yet I should flow.
The fastest way to freedom is to
feel your feelings.
-Gita Bellin
This sounds pretty simple, but though it's easy to know you have feelings, easy to know their weight and agitation and suddenness of mood, it is another, more subtle matter to feel them-that is, let them penetrate your being the way wind snaps through a flag...
...Though we fear it, feeling our feelings is the only clear and direct way to free our hearts of pain.
I trickle.
I have been told this by a counsellor that I had to see as a mandatory part of treatment I was receiving for infertility, (pardon if that's too much information, please excersise the right to navigate away). Once a week I would go to the clinic at the hospital, sit in the little room and meet with this woman, and talk about the emotional burden on me, as a woman, (and doubly heavily personally as a priestess of a religion where nature and fertility feature heavily), being unable to conceive a child. On one occasion, she turned around to me and told me that.
"You trickle," she said. "you never just let go... it's like you have a valve on it that you turn just enough to let the pressure out; to let the water trickle through, but you still have all those feelings trapped inside. Why can't you let them out? Feel them and let them go?"
To use the flag analoge above, it'd be like starching all but the very edge of the flag and letting that edge be the only part that fluttered in the wind.
Perhaps it's that I don't trust the universe to hold me up if I let go... don't trust the banks of the river to guide my flow and feel I'll drown if I just undo the crank completely and let out all the water. Perhaps it's that I'm so often told that it's not about me that I truly have come to believe that it's inappropriate for me to feel the feelings, because in feeling them would I not also be demonstrative.
Perhaps it's that I don't want to make other people feel uncomfortable. It's a sad fact of modern society that there's little room for expressions of emotion. If we become emotional in public, people around us can't cope with it. Does it remind them that they too must feel? So instead we reserve our emotions for consumption in private, like some forbidden drug or fetish of which we should be ashamed.
Whatever the reason, I feel... 'infected' by the inability to be human, and feel those emotions, display those emotions, live those emotions, even if only for the time necessary to feel release.
I trickle - yet I should flow.
