That Certain Feeling

The thought that we are a separate entity moving around a world of separate things is intimately and inextricably linked to the embodied felt sense that we are. This experience is harder to spot than the thoughts of separation. It is relatively easy to understand the concept of limiting beliefs that create a sense of lack and fear such as “there is something wrong with me”, “I can never be happy like other people”, “unless I am in a relationship with this person I will be miserable for the rest of my life”, “when things go well, something will always go wrong”, “I cannot fathom or ever overcome the emotional blocks that seem to stop me from being happy” and so on.

It is much harder to see that these thoughts and the unpleasant feelings they engender are rooted in a deeper experience, that of the felt sense of being a located thing in a world of things. Quite literally, this is a bodily sensation that somehow you think is you. At the level of the bodily sensation this confusion is not unpleasant, and this is what makes it even harder to spot. It hides behind pleasantness, for no one likes unpleasant feelings and wants to rid themselves of them, and pleasant feelings are welcome and even seen as evidence that everything is okay. But the truth is that this is what lets our guard down, for it is the confusion of ourselves with these pleasant feelings that is the root cause of our identity crisis.

Lulled by their benign invitation, it is like having a glass of wine or something else we enjoy. We relax into them and allow ourselves to become them, and it is at this precise instant that we lose connection with our innate wholeness and begin to feel anxious. This can be shown by close examination of experience. In a quiet moment, when there are no strong emotions flowing, we can attune to these pleasant feelings of separateness. Often but not always they are in our torso or head, although each body is different and the examination has to be individual. Once these wolf in sheep’s clothing sensations are clearly seen as the culprits that lure us into feeling separate, we can repattern them by clearly seeing that they are appearances of our aware being and not us, and quite naturally we are less likely to be duped in future.

With love,

Freyja