The Yoga of Feelings!
The great benefits of Yoga and meditation are being embraced in our culture now. As we adopt and create...
The great benefits of Yoga and meditation are being embraced in our culture now. As we adopt and create technologies and spiritual disciplines to achieve mind/body/spirit integration, I want to suggest an approach I call the Yoga of feelings.”
Yoga is a spirituality of uniting, as in yoking, and healing as in making whole. The Yoga of feelings is is a sacred alchemy for working w ith the split energies that comprise our life force. We have many splits within us, largely created by our attempts to run or fight with our feelings and emotional states. Even those who have had the direct mystical experience of oneness with all life, can still find areas within that are split, trapped in duality and not awake. Bringing this new consciousness into our daily life, is known to take 3-15 years. We do not awaken overnight and most of us could benefit from a practice that works with our feelings and emotions. It was my own need for this that led me to develop this approach based on contemporary and ancient spiritual understanding of this realm of our humanness.
First I want to distinguish between emotions and feelings. Feelings are pretty basic and natural to us as biological creatures. They are our spontaneous flow, the internal weather of our energetic system, always changing, in open awareness of the moment, arising out of contact with it. They are usually feelings of life and joy, sadness and grief, fear or aggression.
On the other hand our emotions are feeling states that are aroused in us in reaction to our thoughts and our interpretation of events and experience, which is largely determined by our programing and history. There are patterned dynamics connected with past trauma. Emotions have a past or future hook and morph into greed, distrust, control, judgements, impatience, blame, hopelessness, depression, ridgidity, contempt. These emotions create a lot of pain in our feeling body, but the pain is not real, it comes from our particular interpretation or “spin” we give to events. We make a story out of our experience. Here we are again, back in this all too familiar place blaming someone else, ourselves, god or the devil. It is the all too familiar drama that seems to permeate a certain aspect of our existence. The spin we give is usually the ego angling for specialness in some way. Even if it is to be special in misery.
In the Yoga of feelings, even this is met in awareness, held in compassion, and the real need illuminated and provided. The distortion, confusion and pain, forgiven in the light of clarity. A new fresh moment is born free of the past.
So as you can see here, the heart of the Yoga of feelings is compassionate presence that can “be with” the pain. You will experience for yourself that this can set you free. I have developed a variable but basic 4 part system to help us dis-identify with our drama and pain-bodies, so we can shift identity to our compassionate presence to be present to these all dis-harmonious feelings and negative emotional states. Not only does this release the pain, through this we free our feelings of joy, gratitude and oneness.
This approach is what I am calling the “Yoga of Feelings”. It works with the “bodies” including physical releasing, and emotional expression, but begins with a pain state, which we hold in awareness and focus on the inner sensory experience of this distress. When we are present, without the interpretations of the mind, or the mind trying to figure out what is wrong, these very energies we are attending to in consciousness, inform us and provide the awareness that we are seeking.
Our deepening presence and attention to energetic disturbances creates a healing container into which we consciously call the light, the life force, the higher wisdom we are seeking as we hold the troubling pattern. This is when it gets really interesting. Staying present within the sensory reality of our inner experience, we will actually receive in various ways a true illumination of the pain. We make the connections with the past, and with our own self-judgement. We receive the blessing of another presence with us in presence that holds us as we hold ourselves. We ground ourselves into the Divine Presence through presencing ourselves and all our feelings.
