“Things can be basically good, even when circumstances are difficult…
…The secret to all [to being open to our lived experience] is hiding in plain sight. Your feeling, both the capacity for feeling and whatever you feel at any moment in particular, is what makes extraordinary experiences like [being grateful in any situation] commonplace. And they are already happening, though maybe in an unnecessarily complicated or dramatic way. Feeling has always been the basis for every experience you have.
The guiding principle is receptivity. Receptivity here means lucid relaxation.
If you don’t feel lucid and relaxed from moment to moment, and you would like to, you can practice…
The practice is simple: sit and feel. For a predetermined period of time on a daily basis, sit in a position that allows you to remain comfortably still, relaxed and awake. For the duration of that sit, relax and feel. That’s the entirety of the practice.”
While I am familiar with the basics of meditative practice, I had always framed it as either a way to tap into our direct experience, which helps us to get away from a preoccupation with thoughts. But, I think this one made me recognize that I have a greater focus on thinking. The idea of using meditation as a platform to more fully feel is a new one to me. For one, it is focused on feelings, which I don’t tend to do. Second, it is about expanding the sense and embracing a fuller range of feelings.
There are of, of course, precedents, such as the Staying With Feelings zine that provides an overview of Eugene T. Genglin’s Focusing: How to Gain Direct Access to Your Bodies Knowledge. And, it does specifically, identify meditation as a practice that can be part of that method. But, I didn’t think about it in that way. So, perhaps a new avenue to explore.
“…To varying degrees, there is an uncrossable chasm between you and everybody you care about.
There are two ways you can interpret this. One is the depressing route: to believe that your friends are not really your friends and that you don’t really know them. That you will never really know anybody at all. Or you can take the more optimistic route: it’s not that you know your friends less than you thought you did, it’s that you know strangers more. You don’t need to have an established relationship to help someone. Even transient moments have meaning.
This second route is the one my colleagues and I take every time we pick up the phone. Conversations on a phone helpline are different from normal conversations in two ways: we make few assumptions about the caller or their background, and our goal is for the caller to reach a better emotional state than when the conversation started.”
I find this quote interesting. For me, conversations are about ideas. I talk to people because I want people to know something, or I want to know something. However, I generally view people’s emotional states as their own problem. Managing our emotions is, arguably, one of the defining features that separate human beings from animals.
On the other hand, I recognize that my view is certainly the minority, if not an outlier. Most people’s conversations is primarily emotional in nature, where they are talking about their feelings and want other people to talk about theirs.
In my view, trying to manipulate someone else’s emotional state, even if you are doing so with their benefit in mind, is still manipulation. In certain circumstances, such as when you are working on a suicide help line, this may be appropriate behavior. People are calling in crisis are because they need help. You are there to help them. So, these kinds of interactions are kind of built in.
However, I’m not as comfortable thinking about helping the people in my life this way. This is the kind of behavior that underlies the paternalism that most parents engage in with their children, that what they are doing is for their own good. However, it is often “their own good” from our perspective and not theirs, which can often not be their good but our own. How is this different from the behavior of a Cluster B personality? I’m not sure it is different.
Yet, on the other hand, creating environments where people can grow and be supported emotionally is something most of us want. Individually, we can increase our vocabulary that helps us describe, understand and experience our feelings, using tools such as The Feeling Wheel or the guidebook, “Staying With Feelings“. But, maybe one piece I’ve been missing is that this kind of development ultimately has to be processed through our relationship with others.
The rub, and the thing that is very much not clear to me, is how do you make sure that what you are doing is about getting to a better emotional state for everyone rather than getting a better emotional state for ourselves or manipulating other people’s emotions for some other ends. I find this question difficult, one where I have thought it is best to let people deal with their own emotions and try not to be involved with it. But, I’m thinking, in this moment, that this is naive. Every conversation has an emotional component, and we cannot pretend that we don’t have, at least, some responsibility for the kind of emotional environment we are creating, both for ourselves and others.
I don’t have any answers here. However, I do think these are good questions worth much deeper exploration.
“Stay with the feeling, with interested curiosity, not trying to change it, or to force it to communicate: just being with it gently and curiously. Try to understand it from it’s point of view. Notice any words, images, or metaphors that come to mind. Acknowledge everything that comes up, e.g., further feelings or lack of feelings.”
Asking these questions helps is to understand our emotional landscape, which feelings we tend to prefer and gives us an opportunity to think about the emotional content of what we are saying before speaking. It also points to the notion that, if we use Freud’s ideas of the conscious and unconscious mind, maybe the body is unconscious mind, the seat of feeling.
I particularly like this quote from the Six Steps:
“One danger with a set of instructions is that people might use them to close off other ways. Anything human involves more than one method…
..Adopt a “split-level” approach to all instructions: On the one hand follow the instructions exactly, so that you can discover the experiences to which they point. On the other hand be sensitive to yourself and your own body. Assume that only sound expansive experiences are worth having. The moment doing it feels wrong in your body, stop following the instruction, and back up slightly. Stay there with your attention until you can sense exactly what is going wrong.“
cafebedouin.org 