Feeling as fully as possible, is the key to being alive. It is about letting your life unfold via feeling through the heart, rather than controlling your life via regulating through the mind.
It is a state in which all of your qualities are fully playing their own melody, in the symphony you orchestrate to be your life. Feeling all of your qualities makes them play in tune. And while they evolve and you encounter challenges, you transform your symphony accordingly. Playing with your own qualities and that of your environment, however small or big, is a constant exploration of beautiful life meeting itself.
Fully meeting ourselves and the world, is wonderfully easy for children:
They bring their courage
come from innocence
not worrying about right or wrong
because they are exploring life itself
while they accept their own play
with purpose, curiosity, and joy
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Initially, we have so much trust in life and our heart-qualities, that we fully show and use them, all of the time. In the context of this article, heart-qualities are our personal qualities, for which we need an opened heart to use them. Some of these qualities are our uniqueness, respect, trust, harmony, peace, transparency, love, joy, courage, curiosity, creativity, anger, sadness, acceptance, empathy, forgiveness, deep understanding and serenity.
Through these qualities, each human is fully capable of exploring life, experiencing each situation on its own. Each stage of the situation can be handled and processed as it unfolds, by using the right heart-quality at the right moment, that matches each individual uniqueness. For children, they may require support with the use of their heart-qualities in their own way, along with the freedom to explore them in their own pace.
But along our life, while fully using our heart-qualities, we end up in situations that are too much for us to handle: Through external restrictions, or lack of support, we cannot fully process the situation. Being scared and unable to handle the whole situation, we focus on handling only a part of the situation, using a coping mechanism. This can be any form of fight, flight or freeze.
Ideally we revisit the situation later, coming to a complete understanding of what happened: We allow ourselves to handle the whole situation, meeting it fully with all of our qualities. But if we do not revisit the unhandled parts, the fear stays unprocessed in our system, and the whole situation remains misunderstood. In that case, (subconsciously) we don't want to remember and feel this part in us, and we start avoiding it.
Having made a choice to not fully feel what happened, we can not move past the original fear anymore. We miss out on understanding why and how the situation occurred. Additionally, we miss out on discharging the fear from our system. The fear stays in our body, attacking our health in all sorts of ways.
In the future we may encounter similar situations, that remind us of the original situation: They will activate our fear and the related coping mechanism, preventing us to fully meet the situation we are in. In this state of fear, we lose sight of what is truly happening around is, becoming ineffective in our relationships and shaping life around us.
Consequently, we keep on misunderstanding what is happening, emotionally and rationally. We lose sight of the context in which we live. Anytime something or someone else activates our original fear, by chance or on purpose, we become controlled by our blind fear, and behave through our habitual coping mechanism.
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To protect us, our mind starts to take control over our life with pre-calculated behavior. It makes us avoid similar situations and related feelings. It also prevents us from using our heart qualities, that are misunderstood to cause the original and related situations. Gradually we start to live through our mind: to detect, train, and respond. But more importantly, our heart is incrementally shut down: more and more we lose access to all of our heart qualities.
Our mind may even start to confuse our heart qualities. Like love for hypocrisy, truth for naivety, transparency for vulnerability, uniqueness for loneliness, courage for stupidity, sadness for unworthiness, creativity for bullshit, acceptance for cowardice, sensitivity for weakness, anger for aggressiveness, forgiveness for humiliation, joy for childishness, and deep understanding for fake conformism.
From the mind's perspective, this even is "understandable": Because what does love mean, when we do not have the courage and truth to show ourselves and meet the other? And what does forgiveness mean, when we cannot restore our boundaries with anger, and cannot accept through sadness what we have lost? What does joy mean, when it is reflected without our uniqueness, and we can't feed it with our curiosity and sensitivity? What does creativity mean in constantly shaping our own life, if we can not deeply understand what happens around us?
Without our heart qualities having each other's magic to stay alive, they begin to fade. Our mind tries to imitate and replace our forgotten qualities, feelings and self expression: we become inauthentic. We start to forget what it truly is to be alive in our own powers and the ambitions we had with them.
Without being able to trust our heart-qualities, trust in ourselves and life decreases, and we stop meeting life fully. Life is no longer lived by us, but is controlled, avoided even, by our blind fears through our minds. Our lives becomes repetitive, and loses its creativity and deep meaning. And while stepping away from our qualities, our self respect makes less sense to our mind: We disconnect from our self-love and dignity as well.
To the extent that we abandon our heart, life becomes a process that is controlled by the mind, trying to avoid and refuse any situations, feelings and heart-qualities that the mind considers to be negative. Our minds also "helps" us to avoid people that challenge our way of avoiding too much: we end up living with people that confirm our mind perspective even more.
The avoiding (and refusing) starts to show up in our life through many different strategies, like: a busy life, perfectionism, suppressing thoughts, preventing people from coming close to us, overeating, withholding our self-expression, withdrawing, over connecting, muscular tensions, diseases, ignoring personal needs, recreating similar situations to avoid other situations, or through any addiction to create other feelings to distract us.
Through conscious choice, any of the above strategies can be used or not-used to serve a particular situation. In that way they are part of our personal power. But when the strategies start to control us to any extent, they become our limiting habitual responses, our so-called (dysfunctional) patterns. They make us miss out on opportunities in life.
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The paradox is that in order to restore our aliveness, we need to (safely) fully feel our feelings that make us decrease our aliveness.
There exist many strategies for increasing our aliveness. Next to meditating and spending time in nature, it generally is about consciously and fully feeling the feelings we are avoiding. At the same time we should be supported to use our right heart qualities at our right time.
The feelings and related situation should receive enough attention and encouragement, so it becomes unstuck and starts unfolding again, in the direction of the natural completion of the original situation. If it does not receive the appropriate attention and encouragement, it stays stuck and we are just repeating negative feelings.
We avoid certain feelings and situations because our mind doesn't have "a solution" for them, still thinking it is too much for us to handle. But by thinking something through our minds, it simply is technically impossible to reach our soul: So we miss out on the infinite creativity our soul provides. At best our mind can provide us with repetitive ideas that lead to a repetitive life, nowhere near a serious breakthrough.
Our mind doesn't realize that we simply cannot evolve from something that we keep pushing away with our minds, we did not accept through our hearts, something we keep resisting to allow to affect us, something we do not feel. Because we actually do need the real experience to grow the power to step out of it. And this power is only acquired by feeling it fully.
Our heart is the portal to our soul. By consciously feeling any feelings through our heart, sending them through the heart-soul connection, we connect our complete selves with the situation we were in, moving back into that now-moment. We give ourselves a chance again to participate in the game of life, going all-in, the real deal.
At the same time, we are feeding our heart-soul-intelligence information on how precisely the related situation affected us, and why. An invitation is created on the deepest existential level. An invitation to become inspired, respond to, and grow from the situation and its related feelings. In these deepest layers of our being, the trust that we give ourselves, we are not just battling an immense fear. But we are tapping in our unlimited potential as a soulful human being to enrich ourselves with a new experience.
In feeling any situation, what only matters is how it uniquely felt to us. Not the feelings, or intentions/thoughts etc for that matter, of someone else. Feelings or intentions of others may affect what feelings are invoked within us, but that is something totally different than using feelings or intentions of others to guide or control what we should feel. Because what we truly need is the power to move through what happened to us, not through what happened to someone else.
And every time we transcend our mind and make the jump to trust our heart-soul intelligence, we use our automatic and built-in mechanism to transform ourselves: We evolve our identity and what we are capable of. And more importantly, it helps us to expand our dignified truth: Understanding and respecting ourselves, and whatever happened through a much bigger perspective.
Avoiding these situations is not anymore a matter of fear of "something" that can happen, but a matter of clarity and choice on how we navigate life. We then understand the related feelings to be something out of the past. Any sane amount of fear can still be there, but we no longer blindingly fear the fear, so that we can stay open to life.