About feelings

These are some of the feelings that we could have underneath the personality we use to relate to people: fear of getting/being hurt; need/desire to be liked/loved; guilt for past wrongdoings; shame; feeling inadequate, deficient, flawed, unworthy, worthless, unlovable; fear of being seen as wrong or bad or not good enough; fear of being rejected; anger/resentment towards particular people or towards no one in particular, or towards everyone; desire for all kinds of worldly security especially good health and material comforts; fear of illness, loneliness, death; afraid of making mistakes or being seen as weak; fear of God's punishment; various other unnamed and unspecified anxieties, fears, and desires.

Even if we speak about these fears and desires with someone, we often don't actually let ourselves feel the emotion as energy in the body--we are too busy explaining ourselves to the person. And when we're alone, we rarely are aware of deep emotional sensations, since our lives are filled with ways to distract ourselves from uncomfortable bodily sensations, especially ones that have a strong emotional charge.

Some would say what's the point of feeling things deeply? Well, what's the point of tasting things, or seeing things, or hearing? These senses are part of the body and have important functions. Same with emotions. They are put in our body to receive and reveal to us all kinds of information about the external and internal environment of the body, and they are used to respond to and relate to other people, to ideas, and to things all around us.

An important function of the emotions, I believe, is to apprehend the spiritual reality. We need to feel love, don't we? It is not just an idea in our mind. We feel hurt or loneliness, and then we want love, lasting love, is this not so? We feel an anxious feeling if we do something wrong, don't we? These are emotions revealing to us a response that we need to consider for our physical and spiritual survival.

Emotions have a magnificent and complex functioning we have yet to understand. Science is just beginning to appreciate the power of emotion in our lives. Too bad in the current social and economic system of frenetic struggle for material security and rampant escapism, we are unable to value emotions and regard their place in our lives. We have not learned how to manage feelings, and we are not taught their purpose in our lives. So we learn to ignore them, repress them, or appease our suffering with quick fixes to squelch any negative or painful feeling we may have. After all, we have an image to uphold for others, and this is the way we procure material advantage in this society. God willing, one day soon this trend will be reversed and we will learn how to manage and integrate our feelings, listen to their wisdom, and allow them to add depth, wonder, and healing to our lives.