For example, in the flat world map, if you sailed away from known territory you would fall off into the void and die a very unsettling death. In the round world map, you could sail as far away as you wanted from known territory in any direction and it was impossible to fall off. On a spherical world you cannot fall off. The changed thought-map creates an entirely new game, a game that continues today with development, exploration and change advancing at a galloping rate in every field.
Here is another question for you. When the map of planet Earth changed, did the planet itself change? The answer is, no. The planet itself did not change at all. The planet is the planet.
These two questions reveal an astonishing attribute of the human mind. We acquired new possibilities and options when our map of the world changed even though the world itself did not change. That is because we do not relate directly to the world as it is. We relate to life through our thought-maps of the world. For us, if we get a new mental-map of the world we get a new world!
Let’s use this powerful mapmaking phenomenon in another domain, the domain of feelings. Our old Map of Feelings says that it is not okay to feel. We specifically confirm that it is not okay to feel with evidence that we have collected repeatedly, for years. For example:
It is not okay to feel angry because anger is uncivilized, loud, destructive, unpredictable, impolite, might hurt someone, out of control, dangerous, insulting, immature, not taken seriously, embarrassing, makes others angry, creates chaos, and starts wars.
It is not okay to feel sad because sadness is weak, emotional, childish, pathetic, victimy, unprofessional, too soft, not fun, not creative, too vulnerable, makes you look ridiculous, ruins other people’s day, is discouraging, not inspiring, lacks modern happy society life, and, no matter what, men do not cry.
It is not okay to feel scared because fear is weak, cowardly, “scared rabbit,” irrational, impulsive, hysterical, incompetent, unstable, nerve wracking, paralyzing, powerless, stuck; it clouds decisions, is untrustworthy, childish, cannot protect, cannot lead, is an over reaction, can get out of control and can quickly cause general panic.
It is not okay to feel glad because joy is unrealistic, childish, giggly, not serious, pretentious, naïve, arrogant, temporary, means you are doing too well, not intellectual, not “real world,” blind to the problems of life, makes other people jealous. What do you have to be glad about anyway – haven’t you read the news? What goes up must come down! And besides, if you are sitting there smiling, people will think you are either on drugs or that you do not have enough work to do.
MAP OF MAPS
It is great to have a map. You know where the good guys and the bad guys are. But, on a flat map, if you sail away from known territory you fall off and die.
With a new round map, we get new possibilities – e.g., you cannot fall off: you get a totally new game. Did the Earth change with the new map? No. Only our map changed. We get new possibilities because we live according to our maps of the world. Get a new map and you get a new world.
The next map is waiting just out of view, exactly where the last new map was before it was discovered. We can never know what the next map will be.
The conclusions we have collected to prove that it is not okay for us or anyone around us to feel, run deep in our hearts. But let’s do an experiment, the “flat Earth / round Earth experiment.” Let’s take this territory of the four feelings and make a new map for it. Let the premise of the new map be that not only is it okay to feel, but the information and energy of feelings can actually serve us in creating relationship. How would this map look? For example:
What can we do with the energy and information called anger? We can say no, say yes (You cannot say yes unless it is okay for you to say no, otherwise the yes is a lie), start things, stop things, change things, clean out and get rid of things, create clarity, recognize unfairness, make boundaries, maintain integrity, show sincerity, make decisions, keep promises (for example: stay up all night to get a job finished on time), hold space, pay attention, self-observe, ask for what you want, take a stand for something or someone, or take actions, among other things.
What can we do with the energy and information called sadness? We can open up, share, be vulnerable, be still, accept things, let things go, grieve, give in, get healed, listen, contemplate, be spacious, connect, recognize pain, be authentic, finish things up, mourn, be wrong, be human, be silent, care, take a supportive position, be intimate, be invisible, and so on.
What can we do with the energy and information called fear? We can detect danger, measure risks, concentrate, focus, be curious, make plans, avoid disasters, stay balanced and centered, make agreements and contracts, handle details, be careful, be precise, ask dangerous questions, go beyond the known into the unknown, create something out of nothing, go nonlinear, stand there in the nothing and improvise, stay present, be alert, face the future, and so on.
What can we do with the energy and information called joy? We can be enthusiastic, motivate others, connect with our vision, go ahead, take risks, focus on possibilities, undertake adventures, explore, try new things, accept discomforts or hardships, dance through problems, be kind, be generous, build team spirit, make others alive, inspire people to keep going, lead, be playful, be easeful, and bless people for no reason.
The territory of feelings now has two maps. The old map where it is not okay to feel, and the new map where feelings serve your relationships. Which map do you choose?
A New Decision About Feelings
A new decision about feelings could go something like this: The feelings of anger, sadness, joy and fear are experiences. Experiences are completely neutral. An experience is experienced, and if you pay careful attention while you are experiencing the experience you will see that the experience arrives without a story attached to it. The experience is at first meaningless.
MAP OF FOUR FEELINGS (OLD VERSION)
ASSUMPTION: IT IS NOT OKAY TO FEELÉ
So where does the meaning of an experience come from? We know that two people in the same circumstance often give circumstances entirely different or even contradictory meanings. He says the garbage can needs to be emptied. She says the garbage can is not even half full! The relativity of the stories about an experience identifies human beings as the source of the stories. Human beings are meaning-making machines. Without a human being to add meaning, there would be no meaning.
If you focus your attention to a smaller more precise time-frame, you start noticing that there is a tiny gap after having an experience and before generating our story about that experience. In that gap you will discover neutrality, including the neutrality of experiencing feelings.
The new decision about feelings could be that the four feelings are as neutral as the four directions on a compass. Is north bad? Is east good? Is west negative? Is south positive? Silly questions. The same with anger, sadness, joy and fear. Feelings are neither good nor bad, neither positive nor negative. Feelings are feelings. Feelings are neutral experiences, and are as normal a part of being human as thinking, moving, sensing and being.
In the new map, feelings provide us with the information and energy we need to fulfill our “destiny,” the three to five Bright Principles that most matter to us in life. To gain access to our information and energy we must leave our cultural education about feelings behind us and change our relationship to our feelings. In the old map, our feelings are bigger than us and our feelings own us. In the new map, we are bigger than our feelings. We have the feelings instead of the feelings having us. To genuinely implement this realization, however, you will need to go outside of the limits of standard education and get further training. The ideas in this book can give you new perspectives and experiments to try. But actually changing your relationship to your feelings requires practice with real-time feedback from a living coach.
MAP OF FOUR FEELINGS (NEW VERSION)
ASSUMPTION: FEELINGS SERVE US RELATIONALLYÉ
Inner Navigating
Feelings can be felt consciously or unconsciously. In order for the feelings to be felt consciously a person must learn “inner navigation.” We develop inner navigation skills when we change our intellectual clarity about feelings into experiential clarity about feelings. Experiential clarity comes from learning the wordless feel of the feeling, its definition through the internal experience of its qualities rather than simply by its name. Each of the four feelings expresses itself with distinct sensations and physical manifestations. When we gain experiential clarity, our body becomes our compass. After learning the sensations internally, we know in any moment what we are feeling; and, therefore, where we are on the Map of Feelings.
When we know what we are feeling it becomes a simple matter to feel what another person is feeling. Knowing what we feel, and being able to listen to what our partner feels, adds precious dimensions for communication and intimacy with our partner.
“Feeling consciously” includes experiencing and expressing our feelings at various levels of intensity, from 0 percent (numb), to 100 percent (Archetypal). Feedback from an experienced coach permits us to calibrate our scale of how big 50 percent of Archetypal rage feels, for example. In a safe environment, such as in a training, we can experiment to allow ourselves to liberate 100 percent of each of the four feelings. “In a training” means: Do not try this at home. The reason is that, when we get our feelings back, they return at the same level of maturity they were at when we shut them down. For most of us this occurred when we were very young and very immature. During a training, the trainer can safely guide us to bring our feelings to maturity over a short period of time. Facilitating the maturation process is awkward to self-manage – like being handed a razor blade and a bottle of Scotch and being asked to take out your own appendix.
Reconnecting to our feelings involves experiencing things that we previously regarded as too painful to approach. Now we learn that what we blocked off as insurmountable pain is just one of the four feelings, and that adult men and women are designed to feel at an intensity far beyond what is tolerable for a child to endure. We shut the feelings down long ago when they overwhelmed us. Now we are getting our feelings back as adults. It is like returning to a long forgotten cave in which there is known to be a dragon. When we finally get enough courage to enter the cave and encounter the dragon, he turns out to be more the size of a fence lizard, and quite uncertain about himself.
SECTION 5-C
Mixing Feelings
Feelings are most useful when felt in their pure form. If you consciously or unconsciously experience your feelings in a mixed form, that is, not distinctly experienced one from the other, then you are mixing feelings. Mixing feelings is not bad or wrong, but it tends to take your natural power and clarity away. Marion Krause, who developed the Map of Mixing Feelings in 2003, found that people rapidly acquired clarity and enthusiasm as soon as they started experiencing their feelings clearly and distinctly. Separating mixed feelings, and feeling them in their pure form, uses inner navigation skills.
For example, mixing anger with sadness produces the sensation commonly known as depression. The result is automatic. What it feels like to mix anger with sadness is depression. These two feelings do not have to be mixed together. Even if you feel both anger and sadness about the same thing, the two feelings can be experienced each in its own measure, distinctly and clearly. You never need to mix your feelings.
Mixing anger with sadness is like mixing beer and cow poop together. Beer has its own uses. Cow poop has its own uses. If you mix the two of them together all you get is slime. The same is true of feelings. Mixing anger and sadness automatically produces the “feeling-slime” experience called “depression.” To step out of depression, focus your intention to distinguish your anger from your sadness. Reach into your chest and pull the two feelings apart from each other with your fingers. Pull your anger into your right hand and your sadness into your left hand. Put the sadness on a shelf so you can get to it later. Bring the anger back into your chest. Then you have your clarity and power back because you can experience and express pure anger. Next, you can put the anger on a shelf and pull the sadness back into your chest and experience and express your sadness. You feel anger in one moment, sadness in the next moment, and there is no more mixing so there will be no more depression.
Mixing sadness with fear produces isolation or desperation. Mixing sadness with joy produces sentimentality or nostalgia. Mixing anger and fear produces hysteria. Mixing fear and joy produces careless risk, such as gambling or speeding. Mixing anger and joy produces “Ha-ha I got you! I win, you lose!” – feeling glad when someone else feels pain. In German there is a perfect word for this: schadenfreude, “damage joy.”
MAP OF MIXING FEELINGS
MIXING FEELINGS CAN CREATE DIS-EASE
ANGER + SADNESS = DEPRESSION
SADNESS + FEAR = ISOLATION
JOY + FEAR = CARELESS RISKS
ANGER + JOY = FEELING GLAD WHEN OTHERS HURT
ANGER + FEAR = HYSTERIA
JOY + SADNESS = SENTIMENTALITY, NOSTALGIA
MIXING 3 CAN CREATE STRONG JEALOUSY OR GUILT
MIXING 4 CAN CREATE PSYCHOLOGICAL BREAKDOWN
Mixing three or four feelings all together can produce emotional or psychological breakdown. For example, jealousy is mixing rage, fear and sadness together. That is why jealousy can grab you with such force. When jealousy has its crusty hand wrapped around your heart, everything else fades into the background. Unwrap jealousy the same way you unwrap depression. Untangle all three feelings with clarity, one from the other, and bring them into their pure form. Then, experience and express each of the three feelings individually: no more jealousy.
The clarity about mixing feelings is not yet known in our culture. If you are a therapist or healer and you integrate the procedure of requiring your clients to separate their feelings distinctly one from the other while they communicate, you will be shocked by how effectively this procedure supports their development. Your results could bring you to ask a rather frightening question: How many people are prescribed with brain chemicals or actually locked away in institutions because our culture does not yet have this clarity about the four feelings and not mixing feelings together?
Human beings have the capacity to start learning about feelings when we are about seven years old. Our schools do not provide this clarity. To add such clarity to our schooling would require that teachers get trained to have the clarity first. The students can only go as far as the teachers can go. If you understand what I am saying, and you care about children and our schools, you have a job on your desk: Provide teachers with training in clarity about feelings.
SECTION 5-D
Our Fear of Fear
We pretend to be afraid of fear. Every year, millions of people around the world swarm to amusement parks to feel the intense fear produced when dropping straight down on roller coasters, crashing into “solid barriers” on wild rides, or seeing ghosts and skeletons in the Haunted House. We crave fear and arrange to experience it on a daily basis by driving unsafely; eating and drinking unhealthily; flirting or having affairs in secret; breaking the law in little ways; exposing ourselves to terror in the news and on television; studying conspiracy theories, cataclysm scenarios or predictions of doomsday; meditating on WWII holocaust images or the techniques of serial killers; lying; engaging in gossip; playing in rough physical sports; and even by watching action films and reading gothic novels. Perhaps you have had the experience that no matter where your conversation starts with certain older people it inevitably leads to them recounting their horror experiences from the war (whatever war they happened to be in). The times they were most afraid were also the times they were most awake.
Clearly, we are not afraid of feeling fear. Rather, our Box strategically pretends to be afraid of feeling fear so as to avoid experiences that might change its established behaviors and attitudes. Pretending to be afraid of fear might protect our personal status quo, b
ut sooner or later we might question the cost of continuing this self-deception. Those behaviors we protect from exposure to evolution easily harden into suits of armor that restrict our movement to predictable patterns. And the evolutionary forces we hide from may turn out to be those influences that are the most dear – our hearts, our inspiration, our passion and our love.
Feeling afraid of fear is the most common reason for avoiding intimacy, even with the people closest to us. I just witnessed a mother discover why she avoided physical, intellectual, emotional and spiritual intimacy with her own children. Deep in her heart she had an emotional scar that made her afraid of children in general, especially wild or loud children, especially boys. As a child she was teased at school for her fine clothes, for being neat and pretty, and for being smart. Half the children admired her and wanted to be her friend, but the other half hated her and tormented her constantly. They would pinch her and rip at her clothes. One time after school, some of the boys jumped out from behind the bushes and kicked her in the stomach. She was not able to take care of herself, and a fear of children entered her body with such force that it lasted into adulthood. Her fear of children prevented her from bonding with or even simply being-with her own children, all three of whom were boys. Her fear of boy children was unconscious, so she was making decisions based on fear without knowing that her decisions were based on fear. In her perception, the decisions seemed rational or practical. Her Box filled in the gap of cognitive dissonance with understandable reasons. Sadly, the decisions resulted in her keeping distance from her sons before she realized that she herself was creating the separation.
Radiant Joy Brilliant Love Page 16