Directing the Power of Conscious Feelings- Living Your Own Truth

by Clinton Callahan

  Well before completing twelve years of schooling you were twisted into an intellectually enhanced monster with a horribly swollen head, shriveled heart and withered being. If you do not step beyond the limits of modern culture and find books, talks, workshops, practices and transformational processes to reeducate yourself, then modern culture’s imbalance hardens into crystallized habit. Your heart and soul starve while your mind eats your life. Since this same ailment plagues almost everyone you know you have little reason to question it. Yet here you are reading this book. There must be at least one little question motivating you . . . ?

  If you allow that question to move you to look in the mirror in certain quiet moments searching for your own authentic presence, your preference for numbness may acquire a sudden crack in it.

  MAP OF MODERN EDUCATIONAL DISTORTIONS

  World Copyright © 2010 owner Clinton Callahan grants permission to use. www.nextculture.org

  Viewed from within modern society the gross imbalances of our educational programs are not visible. When seen more objectively the imbalances verge on abuse. The intellectual body is force-fed verbal-reality information until it distends abnormally, while the emotional and energetic bodies atrophy from disuse. Addressing these imbalances begins with stepping beyond modern society limits and finding books, workshops, practices and transformational processes to reeducate ourselves in the skills of conscious feeling and conscious presence. Rebalancing takes time and effort.

  If you allow your question to cause you to ask your friends and colleagues about the purpose of their lives and their answers do not inspire you, the crack in the numbness widens.

  If you allow your question to move you to observe your neighbors frenetically distracting themselves with gossip, problems, overconsumption, and mass-produced entertainment, and you see yourself in them, the crack in your numbness gets bigger than the numbness itself. Your smart justifications dissolve into mere word salad, replaced by a direct experience of your own aching heart and starving soul.

  It is the ache that you may have desperately been trying to avoid, and yet the ache itself is the way through to expanded dimensions of feeling.

  As the sixty-year-old man said when he first shuffled into one of our Expand The Box trainings, “My wife said I should learn to feel something.” It may be pitiable, but here is where we are, so here is where we begin.

  NEW DIMENSIONS OF ECSTASY AND INTIMACY

  Let’s further explore the Map of Four Bodies.

  Let’s begin with the physical body. Physical food includes water, air, sunlight, exercise, and the four food groups with proper vitamins and minerals. Physical pain includes too loud sounds, too bright lights, dropping a hammer on your toe, hunger, headache, or creaky joints. Physical ecstasy includes sipping a hot latte macchiato on a crisp fall morning in a café overlooking a valley full of autumn leaves. It includes body surfing in Pacific Ocean waves, snorkeling on tropical reefs, mountain climbing, orgasm, running full out, sword fighting, galloping on a horse, dancing, and yoga.

  Intellectual food includes ideas, entertainment, plans, designs, knowledge, art, and music. Intellectual pain includes confusion, disagreement, forgetfulness, being lost, losing an argument, figuring something out wrong, or losing your car keys. Intellectual ecstasy includes clarity, agreement, remembering, creating solutions, entertaining others, solving a puzzle, or finding the car keys.

  Emotional food includes communicating both the information of a message as well as its carrier-wave, the feelings, delivered and understood with simplicity, clarity and responsibility. It includes respectful listening as well as respectful speaking, an exchange that can be called sharing. Emotional pain is feelings that are suppressed, denied, withheld, swallowed, feelings that are mixed confusingly together, or feelings that are expressed but heard by no one. Emotional ecstasy is completely un-hindered expression of feelings with confirmation about what is being shared, and also using the energy and information of feelings to fulfill one’s destiny by taking bold actions in the moment.

  Energetic food includes being in the company of saints, being in the presence of sacred artifacts, objective art, shrines, or holy spaces, facing certain kinds of stresses and challenges with commitment even if you don’t know how to do it. Energetic pain includes lack of vision, poor leadership, despair, existential angst, feeling as if you have fallen off the path of evolution, as if your love of the path has been subsumed by ego. Energetic ecstasy includes serving something greater than yourself, getting confirmation that you are well footed on the path, being in the company of fellow travelers, being in resonance with the flow of the universe, being the space through which the principles that you serve can do their work in the world, being present and in contact with someone else who is present, being in Countenance.

  These descriptions are clear about food, pain and ecstasy, but what about intimacy? Humans do not in general live alone in caves. We live in groups, families and tribes; we work in teams, projects and departments. Human beings thrive on intimacy. We seek to be in love, to be in working relationships.

  In those times when your main relationship is hurting nothing else in life seems to matter much. With relationship being so important to human satisfaction you would expect to have been born into a society that endows each of us since childhood with an abundance of education and support in the domain of relationship. But you definitely were not. Modern citizens are paupers, not even beggars, when it comes to understanding relationships. You were given no education, no training, no practices, no distinctions to implement. You were left to imitate what your parents demonstrated to you, or what you fantasize that movie stars might do when they are off camera.

  In the modern culture context it is common to think that relationships depend on love. You learned this from pop songs on the radio. But radio songs only teach about ordinary love, leaving extraordinary love and archetypal Love completely off your thoughtmaps. (For more about navigating the space of your relationship through three domains of love, please refer to my book Radiant Joy Brilliant Love—secrets for creating an extraordinary life and profound intimacy with your partner.)

  In the ordinary context it is common to think that relationships die from a lack of love, and they do not. There can be a wealth of love and a very crippled relationship, because relationships do not die from a lack of love. Relationships die from a lack of intimacy. It is intimacy that feeds the body, mind, heart and soul. A diamond mine full of brilliant possibilities for intimacy opens up when you distinguish four bodies and consequently four kinds of intimacy.

  MAP OF FOUR KINDS OF INTIMACY

  World Copyright © 2010 owner Clinton Callahan grants permission to use. www.nextculture.org

  Relationships do not die from a lack of love. Relationships die from a lack of intimacy. Distinguishing four bodies opens whole new dimensions for experiencing profound intimacy in your everyday life.

  1. PHYSICAL INTIMACY: singing, eating, washing dishes, walking, holding hands, sauna, sports such as roller-skating, biking, tennis, skiing, swimming, etc., martial arts, dancing, massage, being held without caresses, brushing your partner’s hair, brushing their teeth, cutting their fingernails, bathing them, dressing them, a private fashion show, traveling, making art together, body painting, gardening, playing with the children, action games such as charades, going to the zoo, remodeling the house, cleaning out the garage, and so on. Also foreplay (what isn’t foreplay?) and sex.

  2. INTELLECTUAL INTIMACY: talking, discussing, philosophizing, debating, writing poetry, writing proposals, running a business, meeting, planning, strategizing, designing, creating, learning together (such as languages), taking classes, lessons or workshops, attending conferences, playing games (cards, chess, Scrabble, Twenty Questions), entertainment (opera, theater, concerts, shows, movies), going to museums, reading articles out loud, telling stories, telling jokes, humor, sharing memories, collaborative writing, creating possibilities, and so on.

  3. EMOTIONAL INTIMACY:
sharing the experience and the expression of feelings with 1000 percent trust, saying “I feel mad, sad, glad or scared because…,” vulnerability, openness, acceptance, deep listening without discussion, grieving, contact, simplifying, revealing wounds, sensitivity, warmth, compassion, generosity, kindness, weakness, confusion, consciously separating the mixed feelings of depression or jealousy, expressing ecstasy, joy, delight, passion, and so on.

  4. ENERGETIC INTIMACY: being present, being-with the other, praying together, ritual, meditation, appreciation of experiences, being in the company of saints or sacred artifacts, respect, dignity, nobility, being in the space of Love, moving at the speed of Love, communion, oneness, Countenance, evolution, transformational processes, development, expanding the Box, radiance, teamwork, family, community, holding space, serving Bright Principles as a couple, and so on.

  The Map of Four Kinds of Intimacy lists dozens of opportunities for intimacy. I encourage you to consider each idea as a unique invitation to do personal experimentation. Sure, you have tried a couple of intimacies in each of the four categories. All of us have. Limiting yourself to those known few intimacies may at the time seem intelligent. (Oh, but I can’t dance. I can’t wear things like that! That’s silly. That’s ridiculous. I don’t know how to do that. I can’t do that with you. It’s too embarrassing to try. I’d feel like an idiot.) To you, your own Box sounds so reasonable. But I would suggest that the abundance of excuses generated by your Box is, in effect, strangling an endless flood of unexpected joys from gushing into your life day after day. Are you sure you want to insist on staying the same?

  Most of your blocks to intimacy hinge on your inexperience with feelings and with sharing your feelings. All this is about to change for you. By studying this book and trying the exercises you are learning to consciously feel. Then experiencing and expressing your feelings will itself become a cherished form of intimacy.

  RESISTANCE TO CHANGE

  Learning something new changes your life. A change in your life affects the people and environment around you. Here’s how. Imagine that you are an egg in an egg carton. When you read this book or take a training, you step out of the egg carton. Because of what you learn your volume of presence expands. You change from a chicken egg into a goose egg. Then as you return to your life in the egg carton it becomes obvious that you have changed but your life has not. The space is too small for you. As you snoozle your way back into everyday relationships the people closest to you must jostle around to give you more room. They need to change to adjust to your new shape—and it wasn’t their idea to change! It was your idea! So it is understandable if they get a little upset about the forced inconvenience.

  In fact, your friends and relatives may get upset even if you hint that you wish to learn something new. They could say that you are crazy. “It’s probably a sect or something,” they say. “It might not be so wonderful here, but at least it’s familiar. Out there you don’t even know if you will survive.”

  On April 26, 1986, a nuclear reactor exploded in Chernobyl, a Russian town now listed as one of the ten most toxic cities of the world. The unbelievable thing about this disaster is that people still live in the town of Chernobyl! Nuclear contamination of Chernobyl’s dust, food, air and water has caused multiple cancers, horrible birth defects, mental retardation, and a life expectancy reminiscent of the Dark Ages. Why don’t people leave the town? Chernobyl is not an island! People could walk to anywhere in Europe, Asia or Africa. Why stay in a place where you and your family’s lives are almost guaranteed to be unnecessarily miserable? What is so resistant to change? The answer is, the Box.

  While growing up you collected an assortment of behaviors and attitudes for the purpose of finding a way to survive. This collection becomes your worldview, psychological defense strategy, personal identity, belief system, comfort zone . . . in short, your Box. The Box is made of very real things: thoughtmaps, assumptions, expectations, opinions, rules, beliefs, decisions, interpretations, memories, meanings, etc. Everyone has a Box made out of similar structural components, and yet each Box is unique, custom designed by the owner, you.

  Your Box stands between you and the world as a giant filter that edits everything you can perceive and everything you can express. Its purpose is to assure your survival. Since the Box has so far succeeded in its defensive purpose—demonstrated by your being still alive—the Box makes its top priority to defend itself first. It figures that if it can defend itself, it can then defend you. So the Box is one of the hardest things in the universe, far harder than diamonds.

  The Box does everything it can to control and shape your surroundings to fit its survival techniques—including where you live, who you marry, what kind of job you do, how much money you make, how you dress, how you take care of your health, how much happiness you experience, and the limits of your future possibilities. Changing even one tiny aspect of your life condition threatens the Box’s ability to assure your survival, and against this event the entire defenses of the Box are automatically directed.

  It can be shocking to realize that your actual survival could be threatened by submitting to your Box’s standard techniques of survival. For example:

  • People live in toxic environments, assuring themselves an early and agonizing death, so their Box does not have to feel uncomfortable moving to the strange surroundings of a healthy environment.

  • A woman stays with a physically violent man because being battered and terrified is more familiar to her Box than leaving the man to live a joyous adult life with someone who respects her.

  • A man works long years in a job that does not fulfill his heart’s desires because depression, despair and secret outrage are more comfortable for his Box than the risks of creative self-expression. The man’s Box feels more comfortable following society’s plan than it would feel if he chose to use the intelligence and energy of his feelings to do what he came here to do: reinvent society.

  • A student remains in a school that wastes the years of his youth teaching him things that won’t help him live well in rapidly dis-integrating conditions, financial collapse, peak oil and climate change. He stays because leaving school would give him new problems that his Box does not already know how to manage.

  • A soldier faces a nameless enemy who is scared and fanatical, doing everything to end this soldier’s life. The soldier has seen too much to believe the deceptions parroted by government officials. His future passes before his eyes: DU (Depleted Uranium) contamination, PTSD (Post Traumatic Stress Syndrome), Gulf War Syndrome, drugs, suicide. He could just stop being a soldier. He could go home to his wife and kids. But what would his buddies think? They’re sticking it out. He will too.

  MAP OF THE BOX (BOX TECHNOLOGY)

  World Copyright © 2010 owner Clinton Callahan grants permission to use. www.nextculture.org

  THE BOX DISTINCTION:

  YOU HAVE A BOX. YOU ARE NOT YOUR BOX. NEITHER ARE THEY!

  The Box is dedicated to your survival. The Box asserts that if it can defend itself first, then it can defend you. This is true throughout childhood, but at some point, what once defended you has now become your prison. Your full potential is accessible through becoming less identified as a thing and more as a flexible space of possibility. At about fifteen years of age your Box is prepared to shift from defending itself to expanding itself. Through a formidable rite of passage into adulthood you take over responsibility for your life from your Box. Then instead of merely surviving you shift to fully living. Your rite of passage begins with being no longer numb.

  Locking yourself into the prison of your Box’s limitations so you can survive is made all the more ludicrous through acknowledging that survival is the one thing you can never attain—because in the end you will die. The final scene of your present existence is already known.

  You cannot change the end of your story; however, you can change the middle chapters. But your Box is fast and clever and offers every reason for you to avoid change.


  Most people stay captured by the reasons of their Box. You do not have to. Freedom from your Box’s imperatives comes through breaking the weld between you and your Box. Replace the bond with a gap, a paper thin friction-free space so your Box can react in whatever way it needs to and you don’t have to. Then set about learning more about your Box’s various operating modes.

  It is unbelievable, but examples of the Box’s ability to threaten your life in the name of saving your life are as endless as human creativity. The same creative force can be used unconsciously to stay numb, or consciously to stay alert and creative.

  Consciously directing your creating comes through consciously feeling, which begins by becoming painfully aware of how, when, where and why you block yourself from feeling. Thus you commence the journey into your own shadowlands.

  MAP OF THE BOX’S RESISTANCE TO CHANGE

  World Copyright © 2010 owner Clinton Callahan grants permission to use. www.nextculture.org

  The Box’s resistance to change is stronger than common sense. Here are four typical traps your Box may use to interfere with your natural impulses to learn something extraordinary.

  1. Friends’ and relatives’ Boxes will attempt to dissuade you from making any changes because through your changes they are forced to change. They will use their fears, doubts, insecurities, victimhood, love and care for you as ropes to bind you to the limits of their world.

  2. Your own partner may want to stay locked into their life as it is. This only becomes a problem for you if you catch yourself thinking that to love someone means to block your own development so as to not upset the world of your partner, their friends and family.