After a pregnant pause, I realized I didn’t know. I didn’t know how I felt.
Reflecting on that experience, I have feelings about that experience that match my overall sense of feeling stuck. Why am I afraid, paralyzed, stuck, frustrated, angry, sad?
You asked something like, “Was that experience more analytical?”
Then, I felt disappointed. I felt like I missed the whole point of the exercise. I am just so stuck in my head that I forgot to feel. Even worse, I felt like I had disappointed you.
I am afraid of feeling, because I think I will be overwhelmed by my emotions. I don’t think I have what it takes to respond with love, to walk in love. How do I not lose everything that I am in the process?
I think it’s too hard for me, so I don’t try. But when I try, I am often amazed by what I can do. I surprise myself by doing something that I didn’t think was possible.
So, I am racking my brain to discover what I was missing. I missed the whole point of that experience. Then, another voice said to me, first release those feelings of shame, blame, and regret. Then ask a more beautiful question.
What happened next? I did in two minutes what I couldn’t do in twenty minutes.
What was that? I learned what the purpose of this previous failure to feel was for. I was feeling instead of just thinking. I was even getting behind the thoughts, sensations, feelings, and emotions to the stillness that persists beyond any of these passing, impermanent experiences. That is my True Self.
We can only learn the difference by sensing the contrasts between one thing and another. That is why there are such things as polarities and binaries. Light and shadow, feminine and masculine. This is how we learn.
I remember a wise person saying, “You will do even greater things than these.”
I have heard myself saying, I keep on bumping up against my limits.
That sounds like someone who hasn’t given up. There is a sadness about the way things are. How can people be so horrible? Why is life so disappointing? Why am I so stuck? And that is the darkness before the dawn. Those are the cracks where the light gets in. When the egg cracks open, what emerges from the shadow is a new way of being in the world, a new form of life that brings new capabilities. When the old form dissolves, the new can form—from the chrysalis to the butterfly—transforming pain into beauty and suffering into happiness.
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