Welcome to Letters From Love, where — one day at a time — we are learning how to write to ourselves and speak to ourselves from a place of unconditional love. And how beautiful this writing is! Thanks to all of you who post your own letters in the comments each week. I try to read every single one of them, and I reply to as many as I am able to, depending upon the demands of the week. But I see you. That’s what I want to say. I see you all.
Last week, our theme was “aloneness,” and the letters you all wrote were universally both beautiful and incredibly reassuring. How many of you were told in your letters, by love itself, that you could never be alone if you tried, that it is simply not possible, that there is something — a presence — that is always with you!
A Lovelet named Cynthia (or, rather, Cynthia’s Spirit of Unconditional Love) wrote:
AMEN. Amen to sovereignty. Amen to finding love for yourself in the intimate, sometimes deeply uncomfortable, connection to your aloneness. Amen to the love I read in these words. The real love. The kind that doesn’t go away, no matter what else (or who else) departs.
This is what we are here for.
Our special guest this week is my beloved old friend, the author and illustrator and poet and playwright and actor and — yes! — gardener, Irene O’Garden. Love has something to say to her about the great difference between the feeling self and the intellectual self. We think you will like it. Actually, we feel you will love it.
Let’s keep going.
PS, a reminder: I will be leading a creativity workshop at the great Omega Institute in Rhinebeck, NY from September 25-27! It’s called Magical Freedom Weekend, and it’s all about getting out of our own way in order to live and create more freely and more authentically. Click here for all the details. We get a lot done during these weekends and I’d love to see you there!
If you’d like to write your own letter from love but don’t know how, let us hold your hand.
And if you’d like to share your letter with us, just leave it in the comments section. To do so, you must have a paid subscription to Letters From Love. We have found that the paywall safeguards our kind, like-hearted community and the intimate work we do together.
Dear Love, what would you have me know about thinking versus feeling?
Dearest peanut butter nose,
Oh, how much you would rather think than feel. And how much you would rather talk about what you’re thinking about your feelings, than actually feel them.
How much safer it seems for you to have an opinion or an analysis about your feelings rather than to actually experience them — especially some of the hardest ones, some of the hardest feelings that a human can feel.
And for how many years were you absolutely mistaken about what a feeling actually is! So very mistaken, that so many things that you called feelings, it turns out, were in fact thoughts and opinions about feelings — and these thoughts and opinions, often eloquently expressed, became shields that you could hide behind, when the big feelings (especially fear and anger) arose.
Shall we review, little poppet?
Whenever you told someone that you were feeling abandoned: that’s not a feeling. “Abandoned” is not a feeling, little buttercup, it’s a thought. It’s an opinion about a feeling. The feeling you were actually experiencing was fear, mixed with another feeling called anger and another feeling called sadness.
But you called it “abandonment.”
You hated saying that you felt afraid and angry and sad. So instead you’d say “I feel abandoned,” which also neatly puts the responsibility on the other person. They are now the problem, not the feelings that you are having. Beautiful! The feeling has been dodged, and now you are in discussion. And you are so much happier in discussion than you are in feeling.
Let’s keep going, if we are brave enough, my little muffin tin?
How about this one: “I feel disappointed.” We’ve heard you say that a lot.
Also not a feeling, sweetheart. “Disappointed” is also a thought — an opinion — about a feeling. And the feeling you were actually feeling when you expressed “disappointment” was, again, your old friends fear mixed with sadness and anger.
Here’s another one you used to say: “I feel excluded.” Also not a feeling.
“Excluded,” once again, is a thought — an opinion — about a feeling that you don’t want to admit you’re having. And that feeling, once more, is fear mixed with anger and sadness.
And here’s another one: “I feel betrayed.” What you were actually feeling all those times you said you were feeling “betrayed” was (you guessed it) fear, anger, and sadness. Sweetheart, are you seeing the pattern? Those are feelings. “Betrayed” is an opinion that separates you from the feeling.
How differently all these conversations might have gone if you had been able to first feel, and then express, the base emotions that you were actually having of fear, anger, and sadness.
And can we drill down even deeper to the real real real power dark emotion that is usually, if not always, buried at the base of all of these other feelings and feelings-adjacent experiences?
It’s fear, sweetie.
It’s just fear.
When have you ever expressed anger when there wasn’t fear hidden beneath it? Fear that you were not loved. Fear that you (or someone you cared about) was in danger. Fear of pain — now, or in the future. Fear of humiliation. Fear that you were going to have to be alone. Fear that you were not respected. Fear that you were not successful. Fear that you were not wanted. Fear that you were not important.
When have you ever experienced sadness when there was not also fear hidden under it? Fear that you were not loved. Fear that you (or someone you cared about) was going to be in danger. Fear of pain — now, or in the future. Fear of humiliation. Fear that you were going to have to be alone. Fear that you were not respected. Fear that you were not successful. Fear that you were not wanted. Fear that you were not important.
Oh yes, there are so many other feelings too — positive feelings, as you call them! Joy is a positive feeling. Peace is a positive feeling. Connection and love are positive feelings. But if you look beneath all those more positive emotions, what you will find is safety — in other words, security.
You can only feel joy when you feel security.
You can only feel peace when you feel security.
You can only feel connection and love when you feel security.
Do you see where this is leading, angel?
Could it be possible, if we really want to boil it down and keep it super simple for your brain (which always tries to complicate things), that once you take away the thinking and opinions and analysis, there are only two basic feelings: fear and security — and everything else grows out of them, negative or positive? Could it be possible that fear/not-fear is a toggle switch, and only one can be on at a time?
And when the “fear” switch is on, all the other scary emotions arise —anger and sadness — which you then turn into stories about abandonment, betrayal, exclusion, resentment. Which stories you then polish into gleaming stones of righteous indignation and arch moral outrage (which is not really about feeling anything at all, but more about trying to flex an illusion of control).
And when the “security” system is on, all the beautiful feelings can arise. Joy. Serenity. Peace. Connection. Creativity.
So what makes you feel safe, little one? That’s the abiding question, isn’t it? What makes the toggle switch over from fear to security?
Well, sweetie, it’s us. It’s unconditional love. We are the switch.
Our presence is the magic that melts. Your awareness that we are here, that you are not alone and could never be alone, is what makes your vigilance relax — that terrible, life-destroying vigilance that makes joy and connection and love feel so out of reach.
But in order to reach us, ironically enough, you must first let yourself feel the fear. Not to try to control it, not to assign blame, not to intellectualize it — but to sit with it and really feel it. And then to meet that fear, not with strategies and complicated escape fantasies and blame and shifting of responsibility to others, but to meet that fear with us. With unconditional love.
From inside the flames of fear, that is where you will find the toggle switch of love.
Listen, boo, we know how hard it is to take form, to come to Earth School, to experience the world and all its threats and dangers. We know how real those threats and dangers are. Or at least how real they feel. We know how real pain is. How real loss is. How terrifying the future can seem. And how equally terrifying the past.
This is a brave mission, being born, and a scary one. Yet fear is not the only feeling available here in this realm. There’s a reason souls wait for untold ages to be born human, to have the chance to experience this journey: because there is something that can happen in this realm that is every bit worth waiting for.
It’s the moment when the toggle switches from fear to security.
And that is the moment of the arrival of love — and not necessarily love that comes from others toward you, although it is nice when that shows up. But it doesn’t quite reach the inner, inner system for you. It’s the arrival of the feeling of unconditional love within you, toward you, about you — which then, when it is sincere, radiates outwards toward the world, and which has the potential (sometimes, when miracles are in the air) to transform everything in the environment from hell to heaven. With nothing external needing to change.
That’s what souls come here to do. And that, dearest angel, is what we are doing here. Right here, now. In this moment. Beyond the level of thinking. Beyond the level of knowing. “Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing,” as Rumi wrote, “there is a field. I’ll meet you there.” That is where we are all meeting.
That’s all for now, sweetheart. You are beginning to understand.
Let us love you, and you will know security.
Are you having feelings? Or are you having thoughts about feelings? Are your yucky feelings (to use the clinical term) really code for something like fear, your positive feelings code for something that rhymes with safety? Can we get better at recognizing how and why we react to the messiness of this life, and stop intellectualizing our deep-down feelings?
This week, please find a place and moment of stillness and write down this question: Dear Love, what would you have me know about thinking versus feeling? I can’t wait to read your letters!
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