I have a different view of feelings than many people, and I’ve talked about it a lot on this blog. That’s because understanding feelings (and thus not making a big deal out of them) is so important to being at peace. When you experience for yourself that feelings are nothing more than nameless, temporary energy in the body, then they just aren’t as big a deal as they used to be. You know that no matter what else is true, if it’s a feeling then it will pass. Period. It’s job is to pass – no feeling in the history of the world has ever been permanent. They just don’t have that power. And I know some have seemed pretty permanent, but they aren’t if you look closely.
So let’s ramp it up a bit and give you a tool that might be useful in the heat of the moment. To sum this attitude up, we could say, “I don’t care how I feel.” That’s a nice, succinct phrase that you can tell yourself to snap out of it when you’re not feeling so hot and you’re making a big deal about it. The voice in the head loves to comment on how we feel when we’re not feeling good. And this, of course, makes it worse. When I catch myself doing this, I nip it in the bud right away by saying, “I don’t care how my body feels now – I’m going about my day anyway.” And it works! Pretty cool. It works because I mean it. I don’t have that voice saying, “Yeah that’s cool and all, but… you don’t feel so good and that’s bad.” It’s not like that voice doesn’t try to be heard, but I don’t really let it be heard. And when it does talk, I don’t really listen to it. Instead, I just correct it by saying again, “I don’t care how I feel – I’m going about my day anyway! No big deal.” After a while, you might notice that you feel fine. You basically made the decision to just let those feelings pass. When you went on with your day, they did just that – they passed. Good work.
Let’s note that this is not the same thing as denial or suppression of feelings. We aren’t pretending that the bad feeling, whatever particular flavor it might be, isn’t there. We’re actually saying it is totally there, but we’re not afraid of it. We’re willing to let it be there because we know it’s temporary. And we’re willing to feel it thoroughly, but with absolutely no commentary from the voice in the head. Then it’s just nameless energy in the body that hangs out a while and then goes. No big deal.
Try this out for yourself and see what happens. This is all meant to be experienced by you and not taken as truth – it doesn’t work that way. And know that if it’s a new way of doing things, you should give it some time. And like pretty much everything, it generally takes practice. As always, let me know if I can help! Life is much smoother when we really don’t care how our body feels. Then feelings are able to flow through us without getting stuck. And then… feelings just aren’t a problem in our lives anymore. How nice!
P.S. This doesn’t mean you’re a zombie who doesn’t feel anything. It seems that there’s a natural joy that’s underneath all of this stuff that we’re letting go of. And that feels pretty nice…