Let's Feel Our Way Out of This

We are in the throes of it all. Struggle, conflict, confusion abound. Institutions that appeared stable and intact are being shuttered, gutted, turned on their head. Systems that we imposed on our world to create a sense of safety or righteousness are balking under the weight of their foundational fissures. Individuals we trusted to guide us or lead us through these difficult passages appear as inert and clueless as we are.

We want answers, we want direction, we want clarity. We want to believe that if we are feeling this scared and inadequate, we can rely on our rational faculty to figure out a reasonable solution and we will feel safe again. So we get to work, thinking. We read, we ponder, we write, we chat, share choice words with loved ones. Eventually, we devise a few principles for understanding what’s happening currently based on our specific collection of data points and cleave it to our breasts like a shield. We find others with the same shield.

We create charts and graphs and diagrams and memes mapping all of our ideas. We come up with new words, signals, symbols. We convene meetings, gatherings, events, meet-ups, reading groups, lectures, presentations, retreats, summits, and workshops. We go through each proposed solution and analyze whether the approach is wrong or right until we have clarified our strategy in larger and larger groups. We congratulate and cheer each other on, publish PDFs, videos, books, Ted talks. We teach courses, host panels, record podcasts. We take it to the streets, we march, we occupy, we demand, we yell, we destroy things, we get arrested, we get a seat at the table, we see something change. And of course we diligently document all that we are doing on some social platform or another.

And all the while, for the most part, we make the same general economic, social, cultural, and relational decisions that have marked our lives; the same kinds of decisions we were making two years ago, and two years before that.

And all the while, the collapse feeling accelerates, and the sense that we just aren’t getting to the root of it swells.

These are patterns of collective action I’ve observed in myself and others as I have attempted to “do something” about the multiple crises that have shaped my life since I turned 18 years old; starting with Katrina, followed by the financial crisis, the first term of Trump, Covid, and now Trump’s second term.

But what we don’t seem to ever do, maybe we don’t really know how to do, is feel.

I was in a healing ceremony during the equinox where a fellow group member shared what was a powerful revelation for her–feelings have wisdom, pertinent information for the person who feels them. When she said it, I could feel the hackles rising on the back of my neck like a protective dog. My anger wasn’t directed at this beautiful person’s revelation–what made me so angry is how we have managed to create a world where this bit of information could be revelatory.

Let me be clear: the direct somatic embodied experiences that provide color, tone, and vibration to every single moment of your individual consciousness (your feelings) matter, and matter deeply. That this could be in question, is so much that is wrong with our world today.

I can imagine a variety of historical movements in human history that have gotten us to this point of numbness and rejection of feeling. Did it begin with the agricultural revolution, and the pervasive spread of monotheistic religions ruled by patriarchs? Or was it the time of the enlightenment, when the empirical method declared observable material events to be reality and everything else the realm of illusion?

Perhaps it didn’t really come into fullness until the industrial revolution, when we abandoned the traditional roles as stewards of the land, and became immersed in the story of a worker transcending the needs of the body/heart to become a servant to the machine of hoarding resources and wealth for a few, all for the fleeting hope that we could somehow become them.

The answer is probably a mix of those things and so many other things I don’t even know. But somehow we ended up here and now, numb in our hearts and stuck in our heads, disconnected from our bodies. Here we are now, where we sincerely question the value of feelings at all, seeing them primarily as annoying side effects of an undisciplined mind or body, trifle things to be processed, regulated, reframed, rationalized, and ultimately, if deemed unfit, suppressed, avoided, or denied.

We numbed our way into this mess, and we’ve been doing it for thousands of years now. We’ve been prizing our rational intellect and valuing its conclusions all the while violently repressing the wisdom of our hearts; and the roots of this are thousands of years old. This privileging of the mind over the heart is at the core of our narcissism, materialism, sense of isolation/disconnection, and ultimately our cowardice.

I know many people are feeling the need to feel too. In the 10+ years I’ve worked with clients on learning how to feel with their dreams, I have seen dramatic shifts in the cultural conversation towards feeling our feelings. We are naming the necessity of somatics and recognizing that at any time we have different parts of our psyche that embody conflicting emotions. We are cultivating presence for our feelings and the feelings of our children, and we are recognizing the role trauma plays in our emotional lives.

But thousands of years of cultural and social programming takes enormous intentional effort to overcome. As someone who has spent my entire adult life learning and practicing in a wide variety of psychological / spiritual healing settings, always sincerely seeking to feel my feelings authentically and express them with integrity—it is continually humbling how bad I am at it.

It’s just so hard. It's hard to feel like there is time, it’s hard to feel like it’s worthwhile, it’s hard to feel like there are any tangible benefits. It’s difficult to sit with feelings that don’t feel pleasurable, even harder to stay there without collapsing into shame or self-judgment for the feeling I’m having. It’s hard to stay still and just feel when my belly is on fire and it’s yelling do something! Say something! And it’s very difficult to come into presence when forces of apathy and disconnection keep me barreling down the path of whatever current addiction has me placated and numbed me enough to tune everything out.

And yet, I am left with my hackles rising. Yet again, my anger has called me into action, and clarified my deep desire to write and share in a way that brings me back into feeling. But it’s so messy. That’s one of the hardest things––feelings are so freaking messy. They slash around inflicting wounds, causing rifts, snubs, and silences. Their arrival is like an odor that conjures confusion where we once had stability; despair where we once had a well of hope.

So I know this can be messy, and scary, and I really can’t say that it won’t be. I don’t know how to feel, especially in groups. I know I don’t, certainly not as deeply or with as much presence as I would like. But I have some favorite tools for feeling—dreams being a big one. Singing and dancing together. Wailing together. Sitting around the fire and listening to each other, inviting each other’s hearts. Walking, using my body for meaningful care work. Being in intentional relationship with the land you live on. But even though I do all of those things regularly, I still spend the majority of my time thinking. I think so much all of the time about everything and it has nearly driven me insane.

And as the realities of this current moment on our earth and particularly in the United States, I just feel such a deep need to feel this time. I am not interested in slogans, ideas, strategies or even approaches. I just want to sit and cry or scream or rage or gently sob or laugh with you for a while, and then see what we feel like doing next. I want to gather in ways that intentionally invite us outside of our heads and into our hearts. I want to feel more, more often, for longer periods of time, in the presence of other people. I want to think less. Say less. Do more, take more actions. Read and consume things that make me feel, not think. I don’t need to think. I need to feel, feel until I feel the truth in my body and trust it like the air I breathe and the water I drink.

I just want to do it, I just want to do things that I don’t totally understand but doing it helps me to feel well, and that’s enough of a reason. I want to trust in that more. I want my heart in its rightful throne at my table. I want to give myself heart privileges. I want to believe that what I feel is actually more important than what I think. I want to trust that I can feel, and feel hard, and feel with others, and be clear about how I feel, and still be loved.

And I want to travel with you down these streams of feeling, I want my stream of feelings to collide with yours, converging down rushing waterfalls and through vine and root covered gulleys, meandering in wide drifting creeks and huge churning rivers until we crash into oceans and form into crests; emerging in singularity again, arising as single, ephemeral drops from the top to the bottom of a wave.

I want to feel it all with you, I want us to feel into this together. Let’s feel our way out of this. We don’t really have a choice.