Feelings, the Guide to Home
As a society, we get told certain conditions and feelings are illnesses like they are bacteria or viruses invading the body. When we feel anxious or depressed we go to our GP to try to find help, they say for example, ‘so you have depression or anxiety, here take a pill.’
They almost become like sweets with more and more people prescribed. If you are feeling really bad then you are referred to a psychiatrist and then they do an assessment on you with many questions and tick boxes. From this they make an assessment and deem you as having a disorder from their manual of over 380 of them, tell you that you are biologically ill and that your brain is damaged or has something wrong with it. But not to worry as we can give you some magic pills that will help you, but unfortunately, as you now have this incurable illness, you will have to take them for the rest of your life. I’ve then heard from people I know and read personal stories of having an adverse reaction to these pills and then going back to the doctor, who then tells them that the reaction is part of the illness and the pills they have been taking are doing their job and have unlocked something that was hidden and needed to come out. They are then prescribed more and more powerful pills with higher and higher doses until they completely become void of any emotion or feeling. Initially, this may seem great in that they no longer have to experience pain and suffering, but the pills don’t just take away these feelings, they numb all feelings. Then we become condemned to a lifetime of this.
But if we look at feelings a different way, we could actually see that everything is part of the Universe or God, and there are no judgments or duality of good and bad, positive and negative, spiritual and physical, and so on. This is just a construct of the intellectual mind. We can then start to see that the classification of good and bad feelings is something we created. If everything is the one God, including us, all of nature, and the universe, then surely even what we consider to be negative feelings must also be part of this one energy of God.
So they must have some reason for them beyond just being an invasion of our body or damage to our brain and have their purpose. If we know that truly we are this one being of all creation that is pure love and understanding and we can reconnect ourselves to this source within us when we do go beyond the constant ruminating, analysing, and judgment of our daily lives, past, and future, perhaps we can look at all feelings as being something beyond good and bad, healthy and ill. This place is where we came from and is always within us, so is our home base. We just leave home to try and discover more of this world and at times get totally lost.
We create this whole reality of perception of the world based on how we are thinking in that particular moment. So if we’re having thoughts that the morning is a sunny day and we feel great, we feel that we can conquer the world. Everything we perceive outside will be great, we’ll smile at people, go around with a bright exterior, notice all the beauty of nature and the cute animals, and just feel generally peaceful inside. But if we wake up with the thought that I really can’t be bothered today and that everything is so hard, then the world will look like a dark place. We then just see misery and notice the rubbish on the road, people ignoring us or being rude, how noisy everything is and generally what a terrible world we live in, it’s not fair, etc. Then all the demons from the past can come flying into our heads and start to play and we get stuck in this line of thought for a long time, sometimes decades.
So how about looking at feelings from the point of view that we have been given this gift of an internal alarm system? It lets us know when we are going astray from our path and going too far away from who we are by becoming lost in our head and analytical mind.
If we are straying away from this, wouldn’t we want something that calls us back and wakes us up?
Just becoming aware of this alarm system and it’s initial signals, for me that will be a feeling in my head, tapping a pencil on my hand, and pacing around, has allowed me to recognise that I am starting to fire up the brain and become lost in my head of dreams or nightmares. Then I can do something to pull myself back to the present moment, or even let those close to me be aware of these initial signals so they can talk to me to get me back out of my head of constant thinking. I see it all as just being part of the Universe and when I am in that state of peacefulness and relaxation I am home and at one with everything.
So when I receive what is perceived as negative feelings, emotions, and bodily sensations, I now just imagine myself as a small child who has run away from home and my parents are calling me ‘Joe come back home, we need and love you. Please don’t go’,.
