Difficulty with getting "feelings"

Some people will have read to this point, and then will say that they don’t know what is meant by a " feeling" or " sensing into" a feeling.

One way to get at that is to take easier examples than our personal problems. For instance, how do you feel about some person you know? When you get a hold of that, perhaps first in words, take the most meaningful words and ask yourself what they refer to; what you mean by them. At the end of that question you will find the whole feeling texture relevant of those words.

Or, take something upsetting that happened today. Any day, usually, there are small things that happen that we don't like. Typically, we try to be " above" them, and so far as actions about it go, we do want to be above them. But we do have feelings about them. Can you recall such an incident from today, and ask yourself what you now feel about it, still? (Your official position is probably that you feel OK about it, and that's fine. But see, just to yourself, what is left of it, that you do feel. )

Then ask yourself what this feeling is, what is in it, involved in it.

You may find that quite a lot is involved in it. Not just what happened, and not even just what you felt about it, but also how often that happens to you, and how you feel about its often happening, and what you do to yourself when it happens,

and what it makes you feel about yourself, and why that is, what other things it brings up, and so on. You can't think all this, you'd have to think all these things one at a time, but you have all this there when you just let yourself have the feel of that situation, what the whole thing felt like, to you.

Therefore, it is possible to call the feeling of it by some one name (for     instance, I felt " hurt" ), and yet, there might be twenty things or many more in it.

It's not wrong to say you felt " hurt, " if that's how you felt. But, also, if you let it open up, there will be many things in it, too. " Hurt" isn't just itself; it's all the many things involved in this hurt now for you.

Do you see that the many things in the way it felt to you are not the same as the many objective descriptions you could make of a situation? For instance, a list of who was there, why they did what they did, their biographies and attitudes, how they relate to each other, exactly what else was happening at the time, and so on. These external complications are, some of them, important too. But they aren't the same as your felt sense of the situation, which has in it very many things that were involved in how you feel about it.

Some people will now say, " Sure, I get that kind of maze of stuff, but for me it’s words, or thoughts. Why do you call it “feelings”? All I do is I stop and let more thoughts come, and they come because situations can be complicated. But what is all this about “feeling”?

Just take any thought that seems important, and stop: don’t go on to the next one. Repeat this thought over and over, and see if you can sense what the thought was about, what in you it came out of, or was made from. THAT’s there, even if you stop saying the words.

Here are more exact steps for doing that - special steps to get to a felt sense, if this is difficult for you:

Ask yourself to think of something you love. Now say why you do - let a few sentences go on. Then ask yourself, why else? Soon you have no ready words, and you have to " think" why. But you don’t really " think" now, because you are going to your felt sense of this, which you love, to see why and how you do. That, there, to which you go to answer such a question, is a felt sense.

Instead of " choosing" a problem, as the focusing instructions have you do, see instead what problem of yours, that you think of, has with it a feeling of importance, urgency, pregnancy, so that you would want to get into it now, so it is live for you now. Again, how you know this is by a felt sense, this what you have there, along with the words (which you don’t have for other problems you think of), is a felt sense of it. (When you focus, pick one like that. ) Then, keep checking back to this sense of the problem, expect it to have a felt shift in it. So long as it stays the same, not much has yet happened.

Think back to a time when you forgot something, and tried to recall it but couldn't (it might have been someone's name, or something you planned to do, or something else). When you forget something, you are not just plain blank, you have left a felt sense of what it was. When you get close to remembering you can feel it most clearly, and yet even so you may not remember. This felt sense is enough to let you know that a lot of things it might have been are not really what it was (as you suggest to yourself, “Maybe it was this… or that…” the felt sense of what it was doesn’t budge. You know it isn't this, or that, which you forgot, but something else). Then, when you remember, there is a felt shift, a release, an easing, which lets you know that this time you have remembered what you had forgotten. That feeling you have before you actually remember is a felt sense, and as usual it isn't just one thing, but all the circumstances and details and how you are in them, a whole complicated mesh. But it's one feeling, and you have it even without knowing what it is.