“Anything you are not willing to experience and open as, you will repeatedly confront. If you are afraid to feel anger, if you are unwilling to love as anger and dissolve open as anger, then you will continually struggle with anger in yourself and others. If you are afraid to feel, love, and open as insecurity, then you will necessitate threats to your security. Your very recoil will sustain the ripples of that which you fear, necessitating a confrontation with whatever you are unwilling to fully feel, be alive as, and open as.” David Deida
This is such a powerful quote by one of the most controversial teachers I have had in my career. David Deida speaks a provocative truth about what it means to be a fully alive and awake embodied human. I was drawn to spend a week with him in 2006 at Kripalu, where I was part of 34 participants, 17 men and 17 women, exploring the cutting edge of spirituality and sexuality. What I came away knowing is that I, like most everyone else, was terrified of feeling fully alive, and yet, I wanted it more than I feared it. I wanted it more than anything else, and I was willing learn how, including looking at the stuff I had not been willing to face.
I learned how much we don’t really know is going on beneath the surface of every interaction. I learned how sexy it is to be totally vulnerable and totally strong at the same time. I learned to make relationships a spiritual practice, so that I could continue to feel love whether I am partnered or not. When I feel I need help with something, I check out A Quick Guide to Reading Tarot and try to find my own answers, or sometimes even get the help of professionals if I feel stuck.
My work as a couple’s therapist brings me exquisitely close to the terrain between two human beings that I consider sacred. It is the “space between” that Jewish philosopher Martin Buber talks about: “When two people relate to each other authentically and humanly, God is the electricity that surges between them.” I am humbled over and over by the power of that force, and I take that work to heart as an honor, and something I must remain consciously attuned for.
What I observe is that the language of feelings is scrambled. People seldom are not in touch with their feelings—-in fact, people are driven by their feelings—but they are jumbled up with all kinds of other feelings that come from beliefs that are just not true, but lived out, as if there were no other way.
As an example, a client who has been married for 26 is facing the devastation of her husband’s betrayal in falling in love with another woman. She becomes clear that she does not want to work on the marriage as long as the other woman is in the picture. When her husband accuses her of being unfair and rigid, especially since he never would have fallen in love with someone else if the marriage had met his needs, she begins to waffle. She faces a belief that her husband’s happiness is dependent on her being a certain way. She doubts her anger, and begins to lose power.
Regardless of how you react to this man, this woman has the enormous task of sorting out her own feelings, holding the tension between anger and grief, and getting clear as to what she can tolerate within the relationship while her husband is all over the map with his emotions of anger, grief, fear, and various forms of desperation. What they are both facing is that though they did a great job of raising 3 fine sons and climbing the ladder financially, they paid virtually no attention to the deeper feelings that were always there, often unexpressed, or acted out in ways that did not speak the truth of what each of them was really feeling. They lived their marriage according to a handed down, outdated template that had him bringing out the trash and her filling the sugar bowl.
Those days are over. We can no longer rely on the programming from our childhood. We are in a brave new world in which the solutions our parents turned to are simply not addressing the complexity of the challenges we face today. What we do have is Universal Laws that guide us in the simplest and most elegant way, if we can learn how to embrace where we are and pivot.
You have at your very fingertips an exquisite tool, your inner emotional GPS system. This is your best friend as you journey through life, since your emotions give you immediate feedback as to how you are doing. You thoughts chart the course, but your emotions let you know if you are on track. If you are going for feeling good, and you do not feel happy, then you know you are not going in the direction you say you desire. You can immediately note the contrast of where you are to where you want to be, and you begin to course correct, or what I call pivot.
Recall the last time you felt out of sorts and not what you wanted to feel– frustrated, angry, worried, sad, disappointed. You most likely wanted to shift away from the negative feeling to a more positive feeling as soon as possible. What if the very thing you need to do to begin to feel better is counter-instinctual—-in fact, the very opposite of what you have been doing most of your life?
You did not start out wanting to feel badly, but something happened that triggered you into that negative feeling.
Instead of turning away from that feeling, try this 3-Step Pivot:
Step 1: Identify the feeling you don’t want to be having and breathe and make room for it. This is starting point A, and you are simply allowing it. Hold this in merciful awareness.
Step 2: Decide where you want to get to—Destination B and focus on that.
Step 3: Feel your way into Desintation B. Take time to simply drop your thoughts about what happened, and surrender to the feeling you desire, for at least 17 seconds. Stay with it and make it good.
You must become the vibration of what you desire, or you will continue to attract to you that which is a match to what you are feeling. Rather than beat the drum of what you don’t want, you want to drum away at the good feeling.
So simple, and yet so elusive, this simple harnessing of the power behind your feelings. You can do this in your business to set in motion the results you desire. You can do this with your health, your relationships, with every aspect of your life.
The skill to communicate that into the space between you and another person is only helpful if you have first done some of your own inner energy work. It is sacred space, and not the place to dump unconscious and unmetabolized emotion.
This work takes less time than the breakdowns that happen when you don’t pay attention to it. I can attest to that after 28 years of helping people keep that space clean inside themselves and between the people they love and do business with.
If every person did that, we would live in a world of peace and harmony. Love would prevail, if every person cleaned up their side of the fence
