Directing the Power of Conscious Feelings- Living Your Own Truth

by Clinton Callahan

  4. CONSCIOUSLY FEELING

  NOTE TO THE READER: If you have skipped ahead to this chapter without carefully studying the previous three chapters, it’s a clever idea but I don’t recommend it. Learning to consciously feel has similarities to learning to SCUBA dive, which is actually quite simple. Strap a tank of compressed air onto your back, push a regulator into your mouth, jump in the water and swim away. But they make you take lessons and get a license before letting you go SCUBA diving. It’s for your own good. That’s because if you hold your breath underwater and swim upward your lungs explode. If you stay down too deep for too long you get nitrogen narcosis. Come up without decompressing and you get “the bends.” I am not saying anything like this will happen if you skip over the previous chapters. But I am saying that the world of conscious feelings operates under different laws than the world of numbness, just like SCUBA diving is different from walking on dry land. Before you dive into consciously feeling, I strongly encourage you to study the first three chapters of this book. It’s for your own good.

  THE POWER OF BEING CENTERED

  Consciously feeling begins with being centered (as described in Chapter 3). It is simple to understand why modern culture avoids teaching you to be centered in your body, here and now in the present moment. The reason is this: if you are centered, then you have power—more power than can be suppressed by the modern methods of hierarchical governments, institutionalized religions, and corporate marketing agencies combined.

  When you are centered you have power to consciously choose among more options than are presented, power to declare what is so and what is not, power to ask questions whose answers are not contained in current reality, and power to take unprecedented action. These are standard human powers.

  When you are centered you have the kind of power that Andrew Jackson meant when he said, “One man with courage makes a majority.” (Note: I am certain that Mr. Jackson phrased his observation in this particular vernacular merely as a linguistic convenience and that if asked he would heartily agree that it applies equally well to women!)

  Modern society is so lacking in references to the noble qualities and nearly unimaginable powers of the adult man or woman that trying to compensate for this deficiency through a mere book is neither dignified nor substantial enough to rectify the condition. What is called for is an entirely new society, a society that supports each person to realize the fullness of their humanity through embracing their archetypal destiny.

  If you have the same temperament as I do, then when faced with the question of creating the next evolutionary step in society the only answer is, Yes! Let’s go!

  But there is a price that you pay for your enthusiasm about change. It is what my friend Bandhu Scott Dunham calls, the burn .

  Bandhu says that when you clearly perceive the possibility of an extraordinary new culture while at the same time recognizing in detail how far away you are from experiencing that vision in your daily life, a conflict ignites deep in your soul. It is a burning tension between what could be and what is, flashing like lightning, roaring like thunder, intensifying the experiential impact of each moment.

  This gut-wrenching dynamo is strong enough to tear me away from a summer afternoon of coffee and card playing on the back patio with my gorgeous and delightful female companion, and propelling me upstairs into my chair to wrestle these words into sentences with a fierce intention.

  I fantasize that the burn in me would ease up if I had certainty that these words encouraged you, in Andrew Jackson’s terms, “to become an irresistible majority,” making life choices not offered on the McMenu of globalized society.

  If I was convinced that you would take actions that bring next culture to life now, I would be certain of a bright future.

  But such “certainties” are rare, fleeting and frivolous. Instead, like you, I burn every which way while pushing a doubt-ridden present over the cliff into an unknown future. Then we wait and see how she flies.

  Seeking certainty is merely ego trying to avoid the intensity of continuously coaxing out of nothing that which does not yet exist. Creation doesn’t happen except within the terror of the uncreated, so here we go. Let us address the central question of this book: what is it all about, this stuff called “conscious feeling”?

  In the previous chapter we distinguished low drama and other discouraging consequences of living on a flat-world map of unconscious feeling. It is time now to consider what a round-world map might look like.

  SOME GENTLE PRECAUTIONS

  Upgrading the way you think about feelings is just as revolutionary today as it was five hundred years ago to adopt Galileo’s outrageous ideas about the orbit of the Earth. It is something you would only talk about while being mindful of who is listening at the next table preparing to report you to the authorities.

  While you study these next pages please give yourself time and space to permit the internal reordering of your other three bodies to keep pace with your mind. Giving yourself time and space might involve not skimming through the pages so fast that the ideas only brush your brain cells, never caressing your heart. Giving yourself space might mean not squeezing everything you planned into your daily schedule this week. It might involve drinking a little extra water, taking a few slow walks in the woods and a long hot bath, going to bed earlier, or having daily naps.

  If you get a headache, catch a cold, drop a dish on the floor, or forget your dentist appointment, please don’t rush off to get a brain scan! Nothing is wrong with you.

  If you get overwhelmed with deep grief and suddenly need to cry for a few hours, go ahead and enjoy the crying. You are not psychotic. When was the last time you sobbed deeply anyway?

  If fear comes up your spine, more fear than you ever remember feeling, or anger takes you by surprise like a herd of stampeding buffalo, it is not lethal. It will pass. Let yourself have these experiences.

  These symptoms as well as others reflect that learning is happening. Conditions are simply readjusting themselves inside of your four bodies to accommodate your modified view of the world. Reading this book could be like watching someone you love sail beyond a horizon which you believe to be the edge of the world, and then sail back again transformed . . . only that someone is you!

  Allow yourself an extra dose of patience while old attitudes and preconceptions detach themselves from you and float away. You can’t rush these kinds of changes, even when they seem inevitable, just as you can’t rush a cherry blossom’s opening.

  Would it help a butterfly to surgically extract it from its chrysalis? No. The struggle to escape the confining shell helps force fluids into the butterfly’s unfolding wings. Eliminating the struggle would leave the butterfly with tiny shriveled wings, crippled for life. Your own evolutionary struggle will take months, years. The struggle is part of the process.

  It is true that using a year or two to learn to feel is a long time, but think of how many years you dedicated yourself to repressing your feelings, to avoiding being authentic . . .

  EXPANDING CONSCIOUSNESS HAS A SPEED LIMIT

  Expanding your kindness and generosity are side effects of expanding your consciousness. Consciousness is not in your mind. Consciousness is in your being. If consciousness existed in a person’s mind then we could simply explain the consequences of the corporate strategy of externalizing costs and people would instantly stop working or investing in any corporation forever. We could explain the horrors of overpopulation and Indian and African villagers would instantly and forever stop having more than two children. But it does not work that way. Adding information to the mind is not enough to create change. Expanded consciousness is required.

  Consciousness expands at a certain speed limit. It can only increase as fast as you can build the energetic matrix to support it, and building matrix takes time. It’s like building good soil. Without good soil, plants won’t grow. If you start out with rocks, sand or clay, building good soil requires consistent hard work
over a long period of time. Pull out the stones, break up chunks of clay, mix in compost, balance the acidity.

  Similar time and effort is required to build the energetic matrix upon which consciousness can grow.

  Just as a good strong trellis supports a vibrantly healthy climbing rosebush, so too a good strong energetic matrix supports a vibrantly healthy growing consciousness.

  Diligently practicing the exercises in this book, even if they seem embarrassing or confusing at first, is a proven approach for building matrix.

  Matrix can also be built through persistently engaging other constructive stresses, such as:

  • Living in foreign cultures, eating unfamiliar foods, communicating in foreign languages, adapting to different customs, etc.

  • Being in the company of saints.

  • Building a consistent practice involving skills or lifestyle choices such as physical exercise, vegetarianism, study, meditation, martial arts, singing, music, etc.

  • Exposing yourself to radiations from sacred artifacts, holy tombs and sanctuaries.

  • Having integrity, which means doing what you say you will do (e.g., spending time with the kids, being on time to appointments, paying the bills on time, taking out the garbage).

  • Giving improvised public talks with feedback and coaching from the audience.

  • Being radically honest.

  • Regular fasting for one to three days.

  • Making a fierce commitment to complete a worthy project.

  • Observing periods of silence.

  • Staying alert to the responsible or irresponsible purposes of your interpretations about what is happening.

  • Cleaning your house of extraneous material possessions.

  • Asking for, and listening undefendedly to feedback from your enemies.

  • Changing small habits of behavior (e.g., putting your jacket on starting with the opposite sleeve from usual, clasping your hands with the other thumb on top, not scratching a particular small itch, ordering food you would not normally order at the restaurant, being of service to strangers).

  • Working in faster or slower rhythms than are usual for you (e.g., taking twice as long to set the table or make the bed, chewing twice as fast as normal).

  • Going to the edge of your comfort zone and staying there by implementing new behaviors while acting as if they are normal (e.g., behaving as if you are from a foreign land, acting as if you are handicapped, being innocently unknowledgeable about common things, being delighted by the ordinary, having a sense of the miraculous in everyday life).

  Building matrix through any of these various behaviors amplifies the effect of reading this book. An additional way of building matrix is daily use of Tonic Gold, a true alchemical elixir: two drops on the tongue first thing in the morning. (For more information about Tonic Gold see the Further Experiments page at the end of this book.)

  A NEW MAP OF FEELINGS

  In the previous chapter we saw how feelings are commonly perceived as positive or negative, good or bad, and we considered the belief that it is categorically not okay to feel. This is how feelings look when viewed from the Old Map of Four Feelings. Let us approach the same territory of feelings and frame it in a new story, in a new context.

  What new context?

  Let us create a New Map of Four Feelings. Let us establish this new map in the context of Ten Distinctions for Consciously Feeling.

  Rather than assuming there are positive and negative feelings, as on the Old Map of Four Feelings, we establish a frame where feelings are neutral energy and information. Then there are no good feelings or bad feelings anymore, no positive or negative feelings. There are just feelings. From the conscious, responsible, adult perspective, it is okay to feel, because your feelings provide you with the wisdom and energy needed for fulfilling your destiny.

  MAP OF TEN DISTINCTIONS FOR CONSCIOUSLY FEELING

  World Copyright © 2010 owner Clinton Callahan grants permission to use. www.nextculture.org

  What would happen to your belief system, your self-experience, your defensive strategies, your abilities to communicate and relate, if you consciously applied these ten adult, responsible distinctions to feelings?

  TEN DISTINCTIONS FOR CONSCIOUSLY FEELING

  1. There are only four feelings: anger, sadness, fear and joy. All feelings fit into one of these four categories or are mixtures of these four.

  2. There is a difference between thoughts and feelings. Thoughts come from your intellectual body’s mind. Feelings come from your emotional body’s heart.

  3. There is a difference between feelings and emotions. Feelings come from yourself in the present moment. Emotions are incomplete feelings that come from the past, or inauthentic feelings that come from some other person or organization.

  4. Feelings are absolutely neutral energy and information, neither good nor bad, neither positive nor negative. Feelings are feelings.

  5. Feelings serve you powerfully in their pure form, not mixed with each other. Mixed feelings include depression, hysteria, jealousy, despair, melancholy, shame, guilt, schadenfreude, and so on. To shi˝ out of these mixed feelings, simply unmix them.

  6. Feelings can be experienced from 0 to 100 percent intensity. In each moment you are feeling all four feelings, but one is always bigger. This is what you are feeling.

  7. There are two phases in feelings work. In Phase 1 you learn to detect and avoid low drama through consciously feeling neutral, unmixed, 100 percent intensity feelings. In Phase 2 you learn to create high drama through consciously applying the vast information and energy resources of your feelings with adult responsibility.

  8. As an adult you can consciously integrate feelings into responsible speaking and listening so that feelings serve you relationally and professionally.

  9. Feelings work is part of a formal rite of passage that awakens (stellates) archetypal structures and talents that have been lying dormant within you, waiting to be turned on and used to fulfill your destiny.

  10. Stellated masculine and feminine archetypes form the basis of a new and truly sustainable culture (archearchy) oriented more toward being present and being with, and less toward consuming, owning, having, going and doing.

  Understanding, exploring, and learning to apply these Ten Distinctions for Consciously Feeling is a spectacular undertaking, and will take us through the remainder of this book. Along the way we will find new power in the terms conscious, responsible and adult. Since these words are not respected in modern culture, befriending them could reinvent your everyday experience. For easy reference, the Ten Distinctions are also listed in the back of this book in Appendix B.

  FIRST DISTINCTION: THERE ARE ONLY FOUR FEELINGS

  The first of the Ten Distinctions for Consciously Feeling is that there are only four feelings: anger, sadness, fear and joy. This does not say that the wide variety of sensations that we think of as feelings do not exist. It says that all the sensations we think of as feelings can be assigned to one of the four categories of feelings.

  For example, which of the four feelings categories would include experiences like nervous, jumpy, skeptical, worried, panicky, doubtful, hesitant, distrusting, apprehensive or anxious? Yes, fear!

  What about perturbed, annoyed, pent up, struggling, antsy, irritated, resentful, confined, enraged, exasperated, or frustrated? Yes, anger!

  What about grief, mourning, regret, abandonment, missing, loneliness, anguish, loss, left out, or sorrowful? Yes, sadness!

  What about contented, cheerful, excited, curious, satisfied, happy, enthusiastic, committed, pleased, motivated, blissful, sexy, ecstatic, or delighted? Yes, joy!

  See! It is not so difficult. Having the entire field of feelings classified into four simple categories is very good news, especially for the men! (We can handle this, guys! There are only four feelings! It’s not so bad . . .) Recognizing the four feelings categories is very simple and yet provides a huge step forward in the direction of consciously feelin
g.

  MAP OF FOUR FEELINGS

  World Copyright © 2010 owner Clinton Callahan grants permission to use. www.nextculture.org

  In this new map of feelings, there are only four feelings: anger, sadness, fear, and joy. Feelings are as neutral as the four directions of a compass, neither good nor bad, neither positive nor negative. Each feeling is a distinct experience with powerful energy and clear information needed to fulfil your destiny.

  This thoughtmap was originated by Valerie Lankford in 1975 (www.valcanhelp.com) when Valerie’s coach, Jaqui Schiff, of the Cathexis Institute, encouraged her to learn to think and be effective even while having strong feelings. The result was Valerie Lankford’s Map of Four Feelings, a pioneering work that has helped many thousands of people find revolutionary clarity about what was previously regarded only as pain.

  After establishing that there are four feeling categories you can take the next step: learning to detect which of the four feelings you experience in any given moment. How do you know which feeling territory you are in? What do the feelings actually feel like? Here is a brief description of each of the four feelings when they are not being repressed.

  ANGER – Anger brings your hands into fists. Your jaws clench together. Blood pressure rises as your heart pumps extra blood to your large arm and leg muscles, which are bunched up, ready for immediate action. Your feet tap on the floor. Your eyes are open and alert, but squinted for protection and focus. Your lips are pressed together or your teeth are bared. The tension in your hands, arms, legs, stomach, shoulders, jaw and throat erupts in strong, clear, boundary-setting words such as No! or Stop! Your whole body is ready to explode with a warrior’s fierceness.

  SADNESS – Sadness makes your head hang down and your shoulders droop. Your hands are open and limp. Your jaw muscles are loose. Your blood pressure drops. There is nothing to be done. The ache in your heart and the lump in your throat are sobs and wails of sadness that want to come out. You take deep breaths and make big sighs. Finally the dam breaks. Tears come to your eyes. Your nose drips, your eyes close, and the wall around your heart crumbles and washes away. You open up. Your broken heart can no longer hold itself together and a flood of sobbing sadness comes. Finally you are letting yourself be seen and known in undefended vulnerability. Each of us has the same sadness. In sorrows we are one.