Getting in Touch with our Feelings

How do we get in touch with our feelings? It often seems as though there is a wall between our consciousness and what we feel. It seems as though we might just be able to get there, but not quite. I think this awareness of the wall and the almost but not quite accessability to our feelings and emotions is the beginning of the process. When we are really out of touch is when we don’t sense these unapproachable feelings and emotions at all.

I’m convinced that the only way to dissolve the wall and approach these feelings is through active listening – the kind of listening that is non-judgmental. It may help to do this type of listening with one other person or with a group. Counseling may often provide the best method, and sessions with a good counselor trained in active listening may be necessary as a first step.

The necessary element though is to suspend self-judgment. Counseling can provide the safe environment in which to do this for the first time. The amazing thing is that we fear to releace ourselves from self-judgment, as though we fear we will lose ourselves entirely without this judging voice defining who we are. A good, well moderated support group can also provide a useful environment for self discovery and exploring feelings and emotions, usually during or after personal counseling. Another good environment is within a conscious relationship with someone else commited to the process of self discovery and eager to share in the process of active listening to explore hidden feelings and emotions that invariably arise each day to niggle at us until we make contact and explore what they are about.

These background or below the surface feelings and emotions are sometimes strictly contemporary reactions to current events, but they are more often there because of past events triggered by present experiences. We are often fooled into thinking that what we are doing just now is too insignificant to cause any feeling or emotion such as those we sense in the background. This idea, I submit, is another suggestion of the judging voice within us that will attempt to hold us back from contacting these feelings and emotions found at the core of who we fully are. The real wonder and irony of it all is that what is most profound is almost always revealed by things that can be seen and experienced as purely ordinary and even unimportant. It could be that the judging voice within us also keeps us from acknowledging the true wonder of even the everyday things we do.

Take the analogy of our suddenly knowing for certain this would be our last day in this existence: suddenly everything would seem extraordinarily special, no matter how insignificant it seemed to us previously. We would then put aside the judgment voice in our brave determination to be fully who we are for these last precious moments. Of course I don’t have to remind anyone that we are never really aware of when these final moments will be and we all will sense the true brevity of our lives when we do reach the final moments. Why not suspend judgment and become fully aware now? It may be as easy as seeing absolutely everything, including – and maybe most importantly – ourselves as pure miracle and not something to be taken for granted. When you think about it, what is the statistical likelihood that we would be here at all when we accept the vast universe as perhaps nearly if not entirely empty of conscious life other than ourselves and our fellow earth creatures?

The final and most essential way to self discovery – full exploration of those blocked feelings and emotions – is through an active listening dialogue within ourselves. This inner dialogue is something to practice everyday once we reach the point where we can attempt it. Counseling, group and relationship settings can help us get there and they may also be essential in furthering our progress once self dialogue is well underway. These settings may also provide a welcoming environment to share new discovery with others on similar quests. Personal dialogue can happen through active meditation that can be seen as a dialogue without words in that it is an opening of the self through varying means for deeper awareness and communication with universal being at the core of each individual self. This awakening can also occur through journaling, an active conversation with the self in which the judgment voice is suspended at least for that time. Surviving the journaling session without losing definition without the judgment voice there to insure it may encourage us to eventually do without it altogether.

Simply dialoging with ourselves within our minds may help to get the journaling or meditation process started, but without structure it may stumble into self accusation within only a few moments. This is why a specific mantra, meditative prayer or structured meditation on a certain topic or topics is necessary if this type of conscious dialogue is chosen for meditation. The method we choose will depend on who we are as individuals and where we are on our journeys. The feeling that we want to explore a different or additional type of meditation indicates that something within us is calling us to do so.

Each of these activities from counseling to meditation takes dedicated time and concentration. We usually devote the time for counseling sessions without too much question as we usually pay for them. Group sessions are sometimes an extension of individual counseling and we may easily stick regularly with them as part of that process. Regularity in relationship dialogue and personal meditation is harder to establish as an ongoing discipline. The couple must share equally in a sense of dedication to it if relationship dialogue is to prosper. It will take setting aside time to explore together at regular intervals, preferably at least once each day at a specific time and within a specific setting. These can be seen as ensuring that partners share in a conscious relationship and as part of assisting each other in personal development as well as in deepening shared understanding of each other and the shared relationship.

Personal meditation can develop even without relationship sharing of course. Fundamental to all of this is recognition that even meditation involves relationship with the self, the relationship that is fundamental to all domestic and social relationships. Our outer relationships become healthy and sustainable when we reach good relationship with ourselves. That relationship happens when we can finally suspend the judging voice within each one of us.

Think of a good friendship you may have! If your friend tells you about something do you habitually respond with criticism or do you habitually respond with support? Though you may supply advice when needed, I would think that no friendship would survive on a diet of constant criticism. Would you regularly share with anyone whom you knew would only criticize you in response?

The judging voice within us may define us more in terms of what we are not than in terms of what we really are. We may see intellectually that we are more than that voice allows but we remain emotionally tied to its definition as though we are afraid somehow that we will lose our center if we refuse what it says. It can be a composite of all the negatives we’ve ever heard. It may say constantly, “You stupid child!” even in the midst of our greatest accomplishments. It seeks to keep us pinned down within that negative and fixed view whereas the real dynamic self is always changing and evolving. It could be that something as simple as fear of change may be at the source of our reluctance to turn loose of this judging voice. Change always means that something will outgrow our conception (definition) of what is. When we change, our self concept has to grow to match.

We want to see who we are as a fixed and sure thing in the midst of all the uncertainty of the outside world. If we set ourselves free to fully respond to life, free of judgmental restraint, then we come to see ourselves as dynamic, always evolving (changing). We then come to realize that self understanding is an ongoing, dynamic process as well that necessitates the types of self exploration described above. In meditation we recognize we are essentially asking “who am I today?– in this moment – in this specific now.”