The amazing thing about life is we get to feel.  The fact that we can feel and experience anything is a phenomenal gift and I don’t think that we take enough time to understand that experience of feeling.  We rest in our thoughts and feelings but we don’t take the time to wonder at them.   When we really look at our lives, do we allow ourselves the experience to appreciate that we were brave enough to live?  The whole point of these essays, this work in general  is to encourage people to take the leap toward self-realization on the path of who they actually are.  In order to do that we need to honor the fact that we have these thoughts and emotions and are able to process things and make decisions.  For a long time I know I didn’t like my feelings and then I went the other way and felt them too much—I mean I collapsed into anything I was feeling in the moment and fixated intensely.  But when we let go and we let life be life, amazing things happen and we understand the amazing gifts in life.

Now I know that feeling is a sort of super power.  While we all do it, not many people are emotionally intelligent enough to use it correctly.  I used to use feelings as a barometer of how I should act around people—and I know fellow people pleasers out there know what this about.  Then I started to understand that people’s behavior really stemmed from their feelings, typically insecurity or fears.  I wish I could say that made me patient, but it didn’t.  It absolutely made me understanding of where these individuals came from and why they did what they did, but I would lose patience because THEY didn’t understand that.  They would continue along their way without checking their own behavior oblivious to what it did to others.  So then I went the other way and I spent too much time tailoring my behavior to what others wanted in some weird attempt at being an example.  It only made me a martyr.  As I’ve progressed in this work, I understand there is a middle ground.  We can understand people and hold them accountable but it isn’t our job to enforce their responsibility.  We are meant to use our feelings as a beacon to open people up to what they feel and to understand that. 

How bland would this life be if we didn’t feel anything at all?  Not feeling appreciation, or love, or hope, or excitement, or the anger of injustice.  We’d sit here numb to all of it, not responsive to anything.  We need to understand that we can’t make people feel the same way about things that we do.  Their experience and context tell a different story than ours.  That doesn’t mean that we need to stop what we feel. We need to lean into how we feel and make the decision on how we use that.  I don’t want to waste a second of my time not feeling the magic of something.  The breath in my lungs and the air on my face, the heat of a fire in the fall and the burn of creative energy inside, the solidness of the Earth beneath me and the stability of follow through, the cleansing of water and learning to be in flow.  I also wouldn’t change the gift of being able to understand what people are feeling and learning to communicate with them based on where they are at.  Feeling is a gift.  Feeling and support and love and trust are all the drivers forward.  They are the pillars that move us into who we are at our core.  We just need to have enough belief in that feeling to trust it.  And I know now that if we feel it, it is meant for us.  Believe.