Feelings

You’re always feeling. Being conscious means to feel. Are you conscious how you are feeling? Now, on this very moment, sometimes, often or always? Do you dare to feel? Do you have the courage to ask this question to yourself: how am I feeling now? Or do you prefer to avoid that? Does your conscious feeling has priority on your thinking, or the reverse? Or do you regard them as equal? Does this alternates: periods in which the pole of the mind is on the prominent place, as well as other periods in which the feelings are central? Are you conscious of this periods? Or do you experience an eternal battle between two poles: feelings and thoughts? Or perhaps they are isolated from each other? Is there a partition in your body, which keeps feelings and thought separated? Be warned: that ‘s quite a dissipation of energy and very discouraging, and it simply doesn’t work! Do you have heights in your feelings, interrupting your peaceful existence? Does it disturb the harmony?

Can you disentangle feelings, describe them, give them a name? It doesn’t always have to, you may let it be mystery for a part. But it is practical to have a certain insight in your feelings, to realise what drives you to specific acts and it makes you able to do something with it. Expression is important: if you are angry for instance, you don’t have to weep. That ‘s the moment of putting force in your voice. You can shout for yourself if you feel the need, to the other it is more practical to be assertive.

How far do you go in becoming self-conscious? Can you look to your own feelings without rejecting them, judging, analysing? Can you accept your feelings? Or do you prefer not to have them? Did you learn to live with them, or did you give them a place? Or do you accept they are your life? Perhaps there is no place for emotions in your vision?

Are you conscious of pleasant or more of unpleasant feelings? Perhaps you need to give more attention to the pleasant ones? Or are you somebody who is always hunting pleasant feelings and avoiding or ignoring the unpleasant? Do you make your life pleasantly or are you a die-hard or a masochist? Maybe you are the opposite: there’s nothing the matter, you have a boundless trust? Or do you suppress and forget the distasteful feelings? Even if you want to confront them, what to do with the unavoidable? For example fear: do you suppress it, or does it dominate your life? Or do you confront them, but prevent they dictate your acts? Fear is natural, it is our instinct of self-preservation and it keeps us from being reckless, but one shouldn’t allow it to terrorize oneself. Strange enough: if you don’t want to confront fear, it becomes stronger!

© Copyright Johan Framhout 2009