Feeling Feelings, Self-Knowing, Ah Passion
Since January, each morning I do a meditation taught and guided by Mary Stokes as part of her EmbodyBeing program that I embarked upon this year. I do this while Pat does her morning AIP practices. Our morning meditation time generally runs 45 minutes to an hour, sometimes longer. The current EmbodyBeing Meditation is Number 7 and Mary titled it Practice Freeing the Body, Freeing the Emotions. Much of this practice is preparing the body to feel feelings. How appropriate for this German Lutheran Engineer!
Yesterday morning during this meditation what I noticed was that at the point where I was to feel my feelings in my body, I was blank. In this moment I realized that I do not recognize the experience of feeling my feelings. I am not judging this. I am not even saying I do not have feelings — just that I am not aware of what my feelings are, cannot seem to name them as mad, glad, sad, etc. I sometimes struggle with the list of feelings used by the Non-Violent Communications folks to describe feelings that occur when needs are either met (positive feelings) or not met (negative feelings).
My helper Moira reminded me last week that conscious or unconscious, feelings drive actions. If I am not aware of my feelings then I am not aware of why I act or react the way I do in any situation. But she also sees that I have tons of feelings, even though I claim to be a stone when it comes to feelings. Things to ponder.
In reflecting on all this I was reminded of an exercise I worked up to go along with the Pathwork Daily Review. What I called it was, Daily Motivation Review. This latter was a tool to help me and others to become more conscious by considering positive and negative feelings motivating any action one might take. I came up with a chart to describe this growth from unconscious to conscious behavior:
Moira suggested I look more deeply into my own motivations. Why do I record the Pathwork Lectures? Why do I serve Mid Atlantic Pathwork in so many roles? Why do I have coffee time with Pat? Why do I meditate in the morning with Pat? Why do I spend time with friends and relatives talking spirituality?
What I dared to consider here is that perhaps I was feeling my passion for truth, my passion for love, my passion for wisdom, my passion for growth. Yes, I can feel this! I can feel my passion! And this is coming from a deep place within me. AND this passion is part of my motivation to do what I do. So I do indeed have feelings, strong feelings. I had simply not recognized them as such.
When I do a blog entry, I am passionate to share my life. When I prepare a budget for Pathwork programs, I am passionate for bringing order and fiscal understanding to what we are doing in Mid Atlantic Pathwork. When I talk about matters spiritual with friends and family, I am passionate about matters spiritual.
AND because I am in this human body I also have distorted motivations. My blog can bring out my narcissism and pride. My role in Pathwork finances and organization can tap into my self-will, and so on. There is also a level of compulsiveness that covers my anxiety and fear — so I act on the side of busyness. And so on. Both positive passions from my higher self as well as distortions from my lower self are there! As I see all this I see that I am far from feelingless!
But most importantly I am in touch with my passions and in these I KNOW intuitively the Truth of Who I am! I can rely on my heartfelt passions for life. This, again, is what Moira was saying in pointing to my capacity for one-pointedness. I am invited to Follow my Bliss, as Joseph Campbell has said. As I put this into writing right now in this blog entry my body straightens, I feel full of life and energy.
So maybe I need to continue to build my consciousness here and use the two aforementioned Pathwork Tools to help. I just now cleaned them up a bit and put them in the Presentation section of my website (under Pathwork Resources/Events). One, as I noted previously, is Daily Review and the other Daily Motivation Review. And I notice that I have passion as I develop these presentations of Pathwork concepts as well. All part of who I am!
These brief write-ups and forms present these two Pathwork tools: Daily Review and Daily Motivation Review. The former includes a quote from Pathwork Lecture # 17 The Call — Daily Review. The latter includes a quote from Pathwork Lecture # 45 The Conflict Between Conscious and Unconscious Desires. We can use these as tools to grow in consciousness and awareness as we go from living our life on auto-pilot, numb to our true feelings, and clueless as to why we are doing what we are doing to living our life from a place of Knowing intuitively the truth of who we are. I invite you to make copies of the last page of each of these pieces and use these two forms to track your daily disharmonies as well as your daily motivations for action or reaction (or no action).
Pat sees her role in all of this as an encourager. The phrase she uses is borrowed from Jesus at the tomb of Lazarus when Jesus says, “Lazarus, Come forth!” And he did, of course. Walking in this aliveness is so energizing. Why would I let myself get bogged down with all the petty distortions that hold me back? Well because I am human and live in a world of duality. I can just accept this 50/50 good/bad state and allow myself to grow. Oh, as extra credit you could read, as I have, the Pathwork lecture Moira suggested to me. It hit the spot for me and maybe you’ll enjoy as well. It is Pathwork Lecture #97 Perfectionism Obstructs Happiness — Manipulation of Emotions. Enjoy! Feeling love.