Directing the Power of Conscious Feelings- Living Your Own Truth

by Clinton Callahan

  The possibility of high drama begins in the adult ego state, where you have your own voice and your own feelings in the present moment. These are the resources you need for creating high drama.

  One way out of a low drama is through responsibly admitting that you are in a low drama. This is a kind of radical honesty. Admitting the truth even if you look bad gives you the power of actually being where you are. Responsibly admitting you are in a low drama is an act of high drama.

  You may have imagined that high drama would be bold and noble deeds, riding up on your white horse and saving the world from the bad guys: Star Wars, Lord of the Rings, Matrix, The Fifth Element, Avatar, this sort of thing.

  It can be.

  In the world’s present state of affairs, it needs to be.

  At the same time, high drama starts in your own home with your own partner, kids, and neighbors: staying in contact, listening fully, keeping your promises, doing what you say you will do, retaining your center, holding space for Bright Principles and High Level Fun. High drama starts as close as your own aching back.

  HIGH DRAMA BACKACHE

  These days many people seem to experience more pain than they know what to do with. If you go the mainstream route with your pain you will walk out of the pharmacy with an armload of prescription drugs designed to help you stay numb. Staying numb with prescription drugs can be fatal. For example, the New York City medical examiner’s office ruled the cause of Heath Ledger’s death to be “acute intoxication by the combined effects of prescription medications including painkillers, anti-anxiety drugs and sleeping pills.” Sounds like he knew of no other way to deal with his feelings. Too bad. Michael Jackson died after an injection of the painkiller Propofol—clearly trying to stay numb.

  In fact, the third highest cause of death in America after heart disease and cancer is prescription drugs! Hundreds of thousands of victims each year in America alone learn this the hard way. Research it yourself (e.g., google iatrogenesis).

  For every person that somehow dies using health food supplements in America, fifty thousand people die from prescription drugs, yet pharmaceutical companies find it profitable to spend hundreds of millions of dollars each year—more than any other industry—lobbying to get more drugs legalized, and more natural vitamins, minerals and herbs outlawed. But I digress . . .

  I sometimes ask groups of people assembled for a public talk how many would honestly admit to having physical aches and pains during their day. On average, 90 percent raise their hands; sometimes everyone. Physical pain is not the rare occurrence we might have assumed it to be.

  If expressing feelings is judged to be bad or dangerous, the Box may decide it is safer to opt for the physical pain of repressing feelings into deep muscle tissues rather than to consciously experience the feelings.

  Let’s say a person has back pain. If they only know low drama, they could easily feel victimized by their pain. The natural victim response is to reject the pain, hate the pain, give up life in the face of so much pain, fight the pain, or try to get rid of the pain. Much physical, intellectual, emotional and spiritual energy is expended relating to pain as if the pain is persecuting them.

  If this person were to take radical responsibility for the existence of their pain, their relationship to the pain would become a dance of high drama collaboration. The pain would no longer own them. Instead the pain would be a trusted messenger. The pain would become a pathway for Box expansion, matrix building, and personal transformation. The high drama person begins their conversation with pain by saying, “Hello, pain. What do you teach me today? What do you teach me in this moment?”

  In high drama, pain is the teacher. Pain can teach many things. If you let your pain or other people’s pain speak to you, pain becomes a gateway to new ways of being. Pain is your friend. Pain can teach you:

  • to express deep unexpressed anger: anger from birth, from childhood, even from lifetimes ago.

  • to express unexpressed fears: fears from birth, from childhood, even from lifetimes ago.

  • to express unexpressed sadness: sadness from birth, from childhood, even from lifetimes ago.

  • to express unexpressed joy: joy from choosing to be born, from childhood, even from lifetimes ago.

  • to no longer carry the burdens of your parents and ancestors; they are not your burdens. You can give those burdens back to their rightful owners so they carry their own burdens and did not die in vain.

  • to no longer carry the burdens of your children as they become responsible for their own lives; the decisions and consequences are theirs, not yours.

  • to accept and be compassionate about other people’s pain, so you can be with them even when they have pain.

  • to face your own death; to accept that you are mortal and that your body is impermanent.

  • to minimize your now into this very moment when you experience the pain.

  • to recognize and accept that you do have limitations.

  • to accept that you can be weak; that you can be the opposite of the strong, numb survival hero.

  Trying to get rid of pain is trying to reject what is. What is is what is. What is cannot be rejected except at great price; for example, sacrificing your ability to take action according to the exact circumstances of what is. Only through accepting what is, as it is, do you have the power to navigate what is into something else.

  In high drama pain is the message that life is to be lived fully, out loud, and now. Pain is the reminder that you are still alive and have something yet to do.

  In high drama pain is not negative, bad or dangerous. Pain is pain. Pain has sounds that you can make, sounds that lead to feelings that can be expressed and heard. Expressing these pain feelings frees up isometric pain energy. This freed-up energy lets you move in new ways and take new actions that were blocked before. Pain informs you of new risks to take, new experiments to try, communications to make, boundaries to establish, physical movements to stretch into, projects to start, psychoemotional baggage to let go of.

  In high drama, pain is perceived within a larger field of ecstatic existence rather than the other way around in low drama, where moments of ecstasy are perceived as lost within a field of overall pain.

  In high drama pain informs you about who to talk to about what; where to go and what to do there; what needs to be said or listened to; who to apologize to; who to forgive; who to say “I love you” to before it’s too late.

  You may want to find partners and take turns experimenting in the direction of overacting the feelings in your pain. Get on stage and really complain. Consciously exaggerate your repressed emotions. Angrily curse at God for inventing pain and at your own body for hurting. The idea, of course, is to gain experience being no longer numb. What you will find is that everything actually hurts: even laughing, even feathers, even ecstasy. Lower your numbness bar to get used to the intensity of experience, each incidence of which is at first classified in your mind as painful.

  MAP OF LOW DRAMA AND HIGH DRAMA FEELINGS

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

  Your four feelings of anger, sadness, fear and joy are neutral energy and information. By attaching the story that your feelings are positive or negative, good or bad, your feelings are no longer neutral. Then you unconsciously use your feelings to empower low drama archetypes (the good/bad dichotomy is itself a low drama principle). By consciously attaching your four feelings to stories that empower loving communication, useful nonlinear creation, clear responsible action, and visionary leadership, you empower high drama archetypes. In each moment, the choice about which way to use your feelings is yours.

  In most every moment you have feelings in your body. These feelings are neutral energy and information provided in the times and amounts needed by you to fulfill your destiny. If you use your feelings unconsciously and irresponsibly, you create low drama. If you use the feelings consciously and responsibly, you cre
ate high drama.

  AUTHENTICITY

  High drama appears to take many different forms, some of them quite unexpected when viewed from the perspectives of modern culture. For example, one form of high drama is authenticity.

  In modern society authenticity is “a four-letter word,” as are words like integrity, impeccability, dignity, or transparency. Yet, authenticity is the basis of intimate relationship and a strong source of nutrition for body, mind, heart and soul.

  In mainstream society we divide life circumstances into two categories: those things we find acceptable, and those things that are not acceptable to us.

  Through becoming more intimately aware of your subtle daily feelings you could well discover that there is a third category of conditions in your life: those things that you pretend to accept but which you actually do not accept. This is your area of false acceptance.

  MAP OF AUTHENTICALLY HITTING BOTTOM

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

  The way toward authenticity is through being authentic about your inauthenticity. To say: I have been fooling myself about . . . This is painful. This is hitting bottom. Whenever you hit bottom, stay there. Feeling the pain of authentic remorse redeems your underworld; meaning that your underworld becomes useful in the moment that you allow your pain about underworld-motivated actions to become conscious.

  NOTE: The Acceptance-Unacceptance Rectangle was originated by Thomas Gordon before 1970. More information can be found in his excellent book P.E.T.: Parent Effectiveness Training .

  The conditions that you falsely accept are the areas in which you are inauthentic.

  False acceptance is still false acceptance even if it is brief or trivial. For example, if you invite someone over for coffee and they arrive twenty minutes early, it may be false acceptance if you stop and entertain them instead of having them wait while you finish what you truly want to do.

  Or you might discover that the firm that manufactures your favorite chocolate mints was bought by a large conglomerate that is also taking ownership of local and national water supplies because having control over a dwindling public water supply could become quite profitable for them. Continuing to buy their chocolate mints might be false acceptance.

  It gets worse. If your government representatives have been coerced by corporate weapons / banking / pharmaceutical / oil lobbyists to pass measures for borrowing and spending ungodly amounts of money in your name for military and political involvements that only bring more profits to the corporations and more misery to people instead of increasing human well-being on Earth, and you still remain a citizen of that country, this could be false acceptance.

  The way toward authenticity is to be authentic about your inauthenticity. This will entail integrating feelings into your communications.

  6. COMMUNICATING WITH FEELINGS

  (NOTE TO THE READER: If you have skipped ahead to this chapter without carefully studying the previous five chapters, it’s a clever idea but I don’t recommend it. Learning to consciously feel has similarities to learning to tame lions, which is actually quite simple. Grab a whip and a chair, keep a few chunks of beef in your pocket, and shout your commands. But they make you take lessons and get a license before letting you go tame lions. It’s for your own good. That’s because if you neglect the pecking order of the pride and put the wrong lion first they will rip each other to shreds. If you don’t command your own attention they will ignore you completely. And if you forget that they only do what you want because they want to do it, they will bite your head off. 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 lion taming is different from petting your kitty. Before you pick up the challenge of communicating with feelings I strongly encourage you to study the first five chapters of this book. It’s for your own good.)

  FEELINGS BRING MORE HARMONY

  Spiritual teacher Lee Lozowick says, “Feelings are for bringing some kind of harmony to the system, as strange as it may seem.” This distinction can lead you into some very interesting experiments. For example, each time you have a feeling, what if you consider it to be a message from your heart telling you that something is out of harmony? The feeling informs you that an action is required to bring things back into balance.

  The experiment is to trust rather than reject the incoming flow of even subtle feelings. Permit each feeling to not only reveal exactly what action would bring more harmony, but also to deliver an impulse that moves you from your center to accomplish that action. The intelligence of the feeling informs you what requires your attention in this moment. The energy of the feeling empowers responsible actions that bring things into a more elegant and beneficial balance.

  NOTE: The above procedures come from Phase 2 of feelings work because they involve the conscious and responsible use of feelings. You may not yet be ready for Phase 2 of feelings work. Here is the test. If you . . .

  • still mix your feelings and experience depression, schadenfreude, despair or hysteria,

  • still participate in low drama bickering, permitting your Gremlin to feed on the potential intimacies between you and your partner, children, colleagues, relatives or neighbors,

  • still think that circumstances or someone else is ruining your life,

  • still regard emotions from your past, from someone else, or from some institution as if they are real feelings,

  • still think your stories or other people’s stories are the truth instead if Is-Glued concoctions of conscious or unconscious theater,

  . . . then you have not yet graduated from Phase 1 of feelings work. It would probably be wisest if you stopped reading here, returned to Chapter 1, and read the previous five chapters over again.

  Many people who follow this recommendation report that during their second reading they cannot believe how many whole paragraphs seem completely new to them, as if they had never read them before.

  This is understandable. Most of the information in this book is stunningly new. It comes from next culture, completely beyond the limits of mainstream thinking. It won’t take you so long to read these pages a second time. Taking this responsible action would establish a solid platform from which you could embark on a future of Phase 2 feelings work with confidence and good cheer. I encourage you to take a moment now to decide whether you will start over at Chapter 1 again or are qualified to continue reading.

  FEELINGS BRING MORE ENERGY

  Living with feelings (as opposed to emotions) can be like surfing. A surfer does not use his own energy to ride to the shore. He is transported along by the force of the waves.

  The same can happen when you are no longer numb. Depending on low drama energy to get through the onslaught of daily life challenges can make you exhausted, whereas adult and archetypal feelings provide an external source of energy for you to use. If you distinguish between feelings and emotions, and if you set the emotions aside and feel your feelings, then just as in surfing, you can be carried along by the energy and intelligence of your feelings. The feelings energy is not your energy, so you are not exhausted! The energy and intelligence of feelings is available for you to fulfill your destiny.

  FEELINGS COME WITH ACTION STEPS ATTACHED

  One morning I sat down at my office desk and noticed I was feeling afraid. “That’s strange,” I thought. The fear did not make sense. I looked around my desk. “What is there to be afraid of?” The thing that caught my attention was an unopened envelope. I picked it up and saw that it was a bill from the telephone company. I tore it open and found that the payment was due that day. I paid the bill, and immediately the fear vanished. This is what fear is for. If I was afraid to feel my 3 percent intensity fear when I sat down at my desk that morning, I would not have benefited from its intelligent message.

  Fear comes with action steps t
o check on plans and agreements for times, places, dates, and finances. Fear tells you what to watch out for, what to be cautious about, when to be precise, how to regain balance, which details are important, how to prepare, when to be careful, and what to proactively handle.

  Anger comes with action steps to create clarity, make distinctions, make clear decisions, start something, change something, juice up to complete something, and end something by saying, “This is finished!” Anger cleans things out, makes boundaries, and indicates what to manage to make things happen.

  Sadness comes with action steps to connect more intimately, to let go control, to trust, to listen, to honor and respect, to have compassion, to be vulnerable, to accept what is, to get off of your rigid position, to understand from a bigger perspective, to be flexible, to let yourself be known, and to share with others what is important for you before it is time to die.

  Joy comes with action steps to take more risks, to bring people together, to share your vision, to play, to empower diverse intelligences in your team, to lead, to send blessings, to invest in the development of your own community and their projects, and to celebrate even when there is nothing to celebrate about.

  USE FEELINGS TO MAKE NEW DECISIONS

  Sometimes the action step attached to a feeling will be to make a new decision. For example, during childhood you quite likely made many basic life decisions about who you were, who other people were in relation to you, and what to do to survive in the situation you found yourself in with people like them. As you grew older the circumstances surrounding you may have changed, but the decisions themselves have remained in effect exactly as you made them in childhood. Since the decisions have become so familiar you have forgotten they were decisions. You assume the world and other people are actually like you decided they are, and you don’t even know that it is an assumption.