Directing the Power of Conscious Feelings- Living Your Own Truth

by Clinton Callahan

  When anger speaks from your heart, it speaks with more passion and more commitment than the mind can muster, often using whole-body gestures, not just the hands.

  The heart speaks its feelings unrehearsed. This means that your heart speaks before your mind knows what you are going to say. So you may be as startled, touched, amused or inspired as your listener by what your heart says. If you find yourself rehearsing a conversation in your mind before you open your mouth then it is not likely that your heart is speaking.

  FEELINGS MATURE

  When you first get your feelings back they return at the same level of maturity they were when you first shut them down. This means that your anger, sadness, fear or joy, when you finally experience them as a grown-up, may be the repressed and immature feelings stored in the muscles of your body since you were a child. Back then you had feelings, of course, but it may not have been acceptable to the people around you for you to experience and express the true intensity of your feelings. To save yourself from the repercussions of people reacting to your feelings you may have shut your feelings down as a survival strategy.

  While doing adult feelings work you may be startled to find yourself feeling exactly the feelings that were repressed so long ago, still locked away in your body all this time. If you allow yourself to wholeheartedly express these immature feelings, and if they are heard by another person, then they are completed and will quickly mature into the adult feelings of a person your present age. However, the first few weeks and months of feelings work might be a little rocky. Just don’t worry! Your feelings will quickly catch up to you in age all by themselves, and then you can proceed into adult and archetypal feelings work.

  In a safe environment feelings can be allowed to go and go until they stop by themselves. The adult human body is designed to experience and express 100 percent archetypal intensity of each of the four feelings. In the moment that you reach 100 percent maximum archetypal expression of a feeling, your relationship to that feeling permanently transforms. We will investigate more about these ideas in the chapter “Stellating Feelings.”

  Making a safe environment for your feelings work includes making a particular agreement with a mature adult listener. (Note: Please do not use your child as your listening partner. The exercises in this book are to be done with adult partners. It might seem safer to use children as your listeners, but a child is not an emotional garbage can. Too painfully often adults confide in children and share their problems with their children; this is a form of emotional abuse. It is not the child’s responsibility to heal adults. If you are using children like this in any form, please stop it immediately.)

  The agreement to make with the listener is that the listener listens. They listen to what you say, not to what they think you should say. They do not try to solve your problems. They do not try to rescue poor you. They do not pity you, calm you down, heal you, defend your position, or assure you that everything will be okay in the end. None of that stuff. They listen, and they repeat back what they heard you say. If they don’t get it right, you tell them that’s not what you said, and you say it again, including both the feelings and the information in your communications. Then you make the same agreement with them, in reverse. Through practicing this speaking and listening exercise you can learn to consciously feel.

  MAP OF HOW TO CONSCIOUSLY FEEL

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

  This thirty-minute partner exercise is done once or twice a week for as many weeks as you wish. It’s a simple, safe and effective way to learn to consciously feel.

  HOW TO CONSCIOUSLY FEEL

  1. Please note that this is a partner exercise, not to be done alone. It won’t hurt you to do it alone, but it won’t help you much either. That’s because a communication persists until it is received. For your communication to be received there needs to be someone there to hear you. If you are a man, speak with an adult man. If you are a woman, speak with an adult woman. Without a responsible listener you are merely drowning in your own sorrows.

  2. Each session has two halves. In the first half do the exercise in one direction and then reverse roles. You each get to play both parts. This avoids the client/therapist (“I’m broken, fix me.”) dynamic. Neither of you is broken. You are doing edgework experiments to expand your Box!

  3. Prearrange a place where the two of you can have enough privacy to make noise undisturbed. Feelings can be loud.

  4. Bring a sturdy hand towel and some tissues. The towel can be wrung between your hands to help do rage work. You know what the tissues are for.

  5. Sit facing each other in straight-back chairs with no table between you. (Sitting on the ˝oor tends to compress the chest and block your feelings.)

  6. One person goes first: the feeler. The other person is the coach. The coach’s main job is to listen.

  7. The coach says, “Close your eyes and trust your feelings. Let your feelings lead.” In a safe space it only takes a few seconds before the first manifestation of a feeling shows up, such as swallowing, fidgeting fingers, a tapping foot, sighing. The coach simply says, “Let the feeling get bigger.”

  8. Don’t worry if nothing seems to happen for the first few meetings, or even if a feeling only gets to 5 percent intensity. A new kind of trust is developing. The work goes in steps and layers. Trust the process.

  9. Even if joy, fear, or sadness appear to be the topmost feelings, I suggest that you work with anger first. When you have your anger back, then you can use your anger to assure your own safety while exploring the other feelings.

  10. The coach’s job is to:

  a. Ask to hear the story behind the feelings. Say, “ên what happened?”

  b. Repeat back what the feeler says to complete the communications.

  c. Encourage the feeler to stay out of their head and instead say, “I feel (mad, sad, glad or scared) because ________.”

  d. Coach the feeler to unmix their mixed feelings. e. Coach the feeler to gauge the intensity (1 percent - 100 percent) of their feelings.

  f. At the climax point, ask, “What did you decide?” Write that down.

  g. At the halfway time, change roles and start over.

  11. Spend a few minutes at the end of each session sharing observations and insights. Have a glass of water. Clean up the space together.

  THIRD DISTINCTION: THERE IS A DIFFERENCE BETWEEN FEELINGS AND EMOTIONS

  The third of the Ten Distinctions for Consciously Feeling says that there is a difference between feelings and emotions. It is a huge difference! Feelings and emotions come from completely different universes of purpose. If you are not distinguishing feelings from emotions during moment-to-moment interactions, then when someone is expressing emotions and you interact with them as if they are expressing feelings, you will be trapped and powerless within the confusion.

  For example, if your partner reacts to something you do or don’t do, say or don’t say, because they have incomplete feelings about someone else who did or didn’t do or say something similar, they are expressing emotions. If you don’t know that these are incomplete feelings projected onto you from their past that don’t actually relate to you at all, you will be sucked into their low drama as if it is real.

  Another example could be that your partner, a colleague, or a neighbor comes to you carrying a feeling that doesn’t originate in them. Perhaps they took on the feeling from one of their parents, or from the boss or a client. Or perhaps the feeling comes from an organization such as a political party (e.g., Progressives are tree huggers), a company brand (e.g., Ford is better than Chevy), a cultural prejudice (e.g., Americans are arrogant idiots), or a religious belief (e.g., All nonbelievers are terrorists). The person may indeed claim that these are their true feelings, but we often adopt feelings unconsciously from powerful influences as a way of surviving under those influences. If the feelings come from someone or something else they are not feelings but emotions. When the collea
gue or neighbor complains to you with their angry, sad, scared or glad emotional opinions and beliefs and you assume it is a feeling instead of an emotion, you may try to argue back with your own opinions and beliefs. No matter how effectively you argue your points, that person’s feelings won’t change, because what is being talked about is not the source of the feelings. Somebody or something else is. The feelings are inauthentic because they come from an external source. Therefore, they are emotions.

  It is even more confusing when you yourself feel emotions from the past or emotions adopted from elsewhere and you regard these emotions as your own true feelings, saying things and taking actions accordingly. It is no wonder that you do not achieve the results you hope for if you start from emotional confusion.

  We can hardly imagine what a silly, expensive, and perhaps lethal mistake it is to interchange emotions and feelings. So many tangled messes are generated so quickly in personal, familial, national and global interactions. Is this an accident or is it to keep the sheeple disem-powered? Confusing emotions and feelings is a defining characteristic of modern society. Must it also define your life?

  By combining the following information and examples with determined practice, you will build a practical understanding for yourself of life in a new world. In this new world, feelings and emotions are as different from each other as living and plastic roses.

  DISTINGUISHING FEELINGS FROM EMOTIONS

  At first, the emotions of anger, sadness, fear and joy feel identical to the feelings of anger, sadness, fear, and joy. How can you detect the difference between experiencing a feeling and experiencing one of the two kinds of emotions?

  The way to tell the difference between feelings and emotions is to note how long the experience lasts.

  When you feel and express an emotion it does not get completed. Feelings, on the other hand, arise, are used with gratitude, and then completely vanish within a minute or two.

  I heard that Zen practitioners may seriously practice meditation for twenty years before they experience their first true feeling. I was thirty-nine years old before I experienced my first feeling, and I still remember the moment. This is humbling news. It implies that, for the time being, it would be smart of you to assume that almost everything you feel is not a feeling at all but rather emotions from the past or from others.

  It means that your daily feelings that you think are caused by those unfair people and unfortunate circumstances out there are actually self-generated emotions surrounding you like a space suit and regulating your entire experience of life.

  Failing to distinguish feelings from emotions is like failing to distinguish solid land from quicksand. Take one blind step in the wrong direction and you are sure to be sucked into a low drama quagmire from which it is extremely difficult to extract yourself.

  The power to avoid such interactions would seem like magic.

  As has often been said, “One man’s magic is another man’s technology.” Learning to consciously feel is the magical technology.

  Practical application of the new technology begins when you make and continuously hold this distinction between feelings and emotions:

  Feelings arise in and of the present moment, come out of your authentic self, and vanish completely when applied.

  Emotions feel like feelings but they last longer than the present moment.

  There are two kinds of emotions:

  1. Inauthentic feelings from someone else, and

  2. Incomplete feelings from the past.

  This is best explained on the Map of Two Kinds of Emotions.

  We will examine the two kinds of emotions separately below. The value of understanding how emotions originate and operate is that it awakens sensitivity for detecting emotions before they can fully arise in you and take over the inner controls. If you cannot detect and instantly divert yourself away from a rising emotional tidal wave, then in the next instant it becomes too late. You get knocked unconscious and have to go through the whole emotional process, waking up an hour, a day, or a week later, after the low drama Gremlin feeding frenzy has subsided.

  MAP OF TWO KINDS OF EMOTIONS

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

  DETECTING PARENT EMOTIONS: INAUTHENTIC FEELINGS FROM OTHERS

  As a way to survive you may have adopted inauthentic feelings from your parents or other authority figures, or from a political, corporate, cultural or religious belief system. Because an inauthentic feeling originates outside of yourself it has no true power within you. The only power it has within you is the power you attribute to it by mistaking it for your own personal feeling. After you have survived, meaning after you are fifteen or eighteen years old, the deeply ingrained habit of adopting inauthentic feelings blocks you from being yourself. New ways of behaving can be learned.

  I offer a personal example of adopting inauthentic feelings from an authority figure. Each time I drove up to a tollbooth or to the exit of a parking lot and came face to face with the fee collector, an inexplicable rage would grip me. I suddenly hated that person as if they were threatening my life or torturing my children. My rage was completely unconscious and I didn’t even notice it was happening until I got married. One day my wife asked, “Why are you so hostile toward the tollbooth man?” I had no immediate answer. My reaction was completely irrational and a total mystery to me.

  Then one day we flew to California to visit my parents. They met us at the baggage claim of LAX and we walked together out to their car. As we drove to the exit booth, my father suddenly became insanely enraged at the poor ticket woman, speaking to her in the most bigoted, degrading and juvenile way. I was shocked. In that moment I saw myself. At the same time I realized that this particular rage, which I had been carrying probably since childhood, was not my rage at all; it was my father’s rage. I didn’t know where he got it; perhaps from his own father. But I knew I didn’t have to keep it.

  As soon as we had privacy I started a conversation with my wife that I had never had before. I took responsibility for unconsciously carrying my father’s rage all those years. I apologized for the pain and upset I had been causing her and our children with this insane hostility toward toll takers. And I vowed never to empower that rage again. Making a vow like this carries the consequence of fiercely practicing new behavior until it becomes an unconscious competence. It took me years of vigilant self-observation and practice.

  Here is an example of the second type of inauthentic feelings, those that come from an institutional belief system. It comes from a roommate I was given by the dormitory office during my freshman year at California Polytechnic State University in San Luis Obispo. He was a fundamentalist Christian and must have decided that the choice of roommates was divinely ordained because he made it a personal mission to either successfully convert me to his sect or condemn me to eternity in hell. He would interrupt our study time with unconsciously mixed anger, fear and sadness about the state of my soul; yet nothing touched me because his feelings were inauthentic. Both the logic he used and the source of his feelings originated outside of himself in a belief system. He seemed to be reciting a used car salesman’s script, playing a forced role. It wasn’t him happening. Nothing I said to him made any difference either, because he wasn’t at source for what he was saying—the belief system was—so he could not authentically listen, think or interact. Since he could feel angry, sad, and afraid, he assumed that the feelings were his own. But they were not even feelings. They were emotions that he had adopted from the belief system of a religious organization.

  I once spoke with a young exchange student from China. She seemed open, enthusiastic, intelligent and present. Then suddenly a tape was triggered in her mind and she ferociously affirmed the belief that China was correct to invade Tibet and to try to reclaim Taiwan. Where could a young girl have gained the worldly experience to assess such horrific political maneuverings? She couldn’t. These emotionally charged beliefs did not come fr
om her. Like a parasitic infection, this young woman carries strong emotions that she unconsciously adopted to survive under the authority of a political regime.

  Another time, during the Bush-Cheney Iraq invasion, I was traveling to America with my German-born partner, Marion. We had a long layover at the Atlanta international airport, which was swarming with soldiers. She kept asking me why so many Americans dressed up in soldier outfits and went off to fight? I had no answer so I said, “Go ask them yourself.” She sat on the floor next to a soldier in his early thirties, a leader type, and interviewed him for half an hour. She asked why he was doing what he was doing. He said he was returning to Iraq “to support and protect innocent civilians from the enemy.” This man was risking his life based on emotional misinformation created by a corporate-controlled political system to benefit wealthy oil, banking, construction and weapons dealers, and he believed he was doing a good thing. He mistook parent emotions to be his own feelings.

  Parent emotions originate in emotions from authority figures or from institutions. They are not from you. Government propaganda, political campaigns, corporate marketing scams, cultural attitudes, religious traditions, male and female chauvinism are all emotionally charged dogma. They are not feelings.

  Emotions smear the airwaves 24/7 through modern culture’s mainstream media—breaking news, soap operas, natural disasters, intrigue, movie star gossip, latest fashions, financial investments, diseases, cool gizmos, hot cars, naked women, wars. Any individual not hyper attentive about protecting themselves from these pervasive and invasive influences gets inundated to the point of suffocation. What remains after the suffocation is a walking, talking, robot-ghost, the classic compliant consumer.

  PROTECTING YOUR ATTENTION

  Purveyors of modern culture have one prize in mind: your attention. If they can capture your attention they have captured your wallet. When they have your wallet, their efforts more than pay for themselves. That is why they keep advertising.