I worked for years as a priest and now for the last two in a private practice dedicated to soul work. The most surprising thing I’ve learned from my work is this: people don’t know how to feel.
Now you might think this is a crazy idea but I stand by it. What I see cultural-wide is the mass suppression of our innate human ability to feel. The suppression of our feeling lies at the root of so much of the suffering we endure.
The good news though is we can learn how to feel. There’s a practice or process to cultivate our feeling. There’s an art to working with feeling.
My perspective is that feeling is what it is to be human. In my view, thought is a kind of feeling. Thought is what happens when our brain feels. Thought is what our brain feels like. Physical sensations are what are our nervous systems feel like. And emotions are what our heart feels like.
The upshot of all this is that if we learn how to feel then we will experience what I call being an integrated(ish) human being. The -ish in integrated(ish) stands for the fact that we never ever reach a completely, 100% integrated place but we can get to a much more integrated place. It’s a process we can learn.
A number of positive effects occur as a result of becoming an integrated(ish) human being. For example, when we learn how to work with our feeling then we find that grounding happens on its own naturally. We don’t have to try to ground ourselves. Grounding becomes an effect of feeling, not something we strive for.
Feeling is the conscious state of being a bodily human organism. We humans are feeling organisms. I sometimes say that we are not human beings but human feelings. We are not people who “have bodies”, as if our bodies were some kind of object. We are bodily. Feeling in its deepest sense is the feeling of being a human organismic reality where mind, body, emotion, and sensation are all integrated aspects of one underlying integrated process--what I call feeling.
And that birthright of ours has been stolen from us. Our schools, our families, our workplaces, even many of our spiritual teachings have suppressed our ability to feel. We need to relearn this art, this way of connecting to our natural feeling capacity.
I’ll be facilitating a half-day workshop at Bowen Island Yoga on Sat, April 18th from 1-5:30 ($50). In this workshop we will learn how to feel.
For more information and registration go to www.bowenislandyoga.com
Chris Dierkes has a strong background in Christian mysticism, integral theory, global spirituality, as well as shamanic forms of consciousness. He holds a Masters in Divinity from the Vancouver School of Theology and worked for a number of years as a parish priest in the Anglican church.
