What needs to be felt.

Speaking for myself alone, the question of “what needs to be felt” is of the most heartbreaking, fugue-inducing, dissociation ground, and also, the most fruitful of all thoughts.

I feel in general, we have a “what’s wrong with this picture” radar, on micro and macro levels of reality and a sense of truth-seeking that is often inflated by our own ideas of what makes us big or small, inferior or superior, and how does that even matter in the grand scheme of things and in our daily lives in particular. What I mean is, how do our own ideas about how life is, how life behaves with us, what we attribute significance about all things we consider life, and how do we perpetuate errata notions built upon layers and layers of proving ourselves to be right in our previous assumptions. But in the end, we are just waltzing along trying not to feel the deep deep pains of what was previously held as belief systems and notions about what all of this means to us and how all this translates to our daily living.

In resolving an almost unrelated internal nuisance, I stumbled upon something that I hadn’t thought about it more than half a decade. Somewhere along a period of myself, I had a conversation with other people, in which certain notions about life (mine and them) were revealed. And I think, in general, people shed certain notions along the way. I have no idea if they still think the same, but I certainly have different ideas about life than I did back then. But this unresolved conundrum inside was like a type of snare loop that kept beating in my thought patterns relating to certain subjects. I was sitting in a café having lunch the other day and all of a sudden an insight about it jumped forth for me and I sensed clearly that behind a lot of the issues I was trying to solve internally were connected to this faux idea about certain aspects of life, love, and relationships. It simply did not make any sense at all, it wasn’t even rootedly connected to any sort of obvious reality and it laid on the notion that a game-like determinism was a force behind life, love, and relationships — something I don’t agree with the slightest.

I then understood very deeply how relationships often affect our perceived notions of things, and how unresolved thinking can perpetuate often invalid and detrimental behavioral patterns throughout our shared living.

So, then I started thinking about how to solve this idea beyond feeling the absurdity of it, finding a satisfying answer for myself, and most of all, having an internalized resolution for a breakthrough that would help me move forward from that. And once again, like it often happens in my life, the question of “what needs to be felt” popped up.

For a long time now, I’ve been dealing with things by feeling the pain behind the anger, or the anxiety that precedes fear, or the fear that promotes my reactivity and so forth, but after that moment in the café, I understood very very deeply that this internalized unresolved belief was deeply connected to a very deep sense of my self-worth being dependent on what other people perceive of me, so I internalized something I wasn’t in agreement with, so I could have a sense that I was pleasing their notions of life, love, and natural forces, that weren’t even congruent to my own belief systems and actually created some disturbance in how I perceived others in the answers of relating. Not only that, that the more I focused on the “wrong people” that have passed through my life, the less I had the anemic strength to focus on all the good people, the good deeds, and the kind and loving relationships that are actually the very, very large majority of what I’ve experienced thus far. So this “what’s wrong with this picture” radar kind of had turned into an apologetic behavioral pattern of trying to do an alchemic transformation of what for a long time now, ceased to make sense. It was impossible to make sense of it, and it was also impossible to move forward from that. I couldn’t find in my own reality something that made that nonsensical notion actually true. So by not making any sense, it possibly wasn’t worth my time and effort and kept me stuck on that snare loop that didn’t quite fit the entire melody at all.

It drove me back to a conversation I had with my therapist a long time ago, about how the truest and honest way of dealing with the real things in life, is to transform and adapt to healthy relationship patterns — much like we do in Permaculture, where all things are interconnected and healthily interdependent — and in the process of dealing with the relationship we have with things, people, life and ourselves, we kind of understand a deeper, more well-aligned, notions of real-life, spirituality and how it all meets our real needs, and then how to transform these notions into healthy behavioral patterns of relating.

All of our existence is a relationship, we are in constant relationship with ourselves and what’s outside of our peripheral body-self, and what we do, how we talk, think, act, feel and behave in every second. So in healing these connections, like neural pathways, we also heal the brain, body, and notions of self. And then, the question of “what needs to be felt”, needs to move beyond the “what’s wrong with this picture” radar into the wellness and kindness of all things real to us. So the “what’s right with this picture” radar becomes rooted in common sense, or how we say in the Portuguese language, good sense, which for me is the sense of good.

We never stray from any path if we focus on the good we can do for ourselves, others, and the environments we’re in. The whole “be mindful of the energy you bring into this place” has been very real to me for a long time now, exactly because I’ve dealt with relating to things in very nonsensical patterns that brought to the surface a lot of issues that needed solving for me to truly live a content, happy, and satisfying life.

But the whole process of transforming our lives to be rooted in common sense can be truly confusing, to say the least. To remember at every moment, in every interaction with everything we do, feel, think and say, to be rooted in kindness and good is also a constant reminder of how not in alignment with our values we sometimes truly are. And then we realize, that this balance between the “what’s wrong” radar and “what’s right” radar, comes into the insight that we don’t really know what’s right and wrong in every situation.

That can be a disturbing thought to have, to realize that our moral compasses and notions of what is right and wrong sometimes are truly out of whack.

So a deep, deep process of realizing self-worth and how to be truly rooted in our senses and in our perceived notions of reality needs to realize itself into a very giant “I don’t know”, and that is a hard place to be. Being stuck in a place of choosing between two apples and not knowing which one to choose, mostly gives us an idea that the only way to truly know which one of them is sweeter is by eating the two. So how does common sense come into play in the choosing? We smell, nudge and attribute some randomness to the decision, sometimes even giving meanings to things that have no actual signification rooted in reality, like “this apple is shinier” or “the form is more round”. In other words, we use our senses, our ways to understand how something is to our pleasing or not, and then we kind of allow for the real part of the choosing to be aleatory. This for me is the genuine realization of trusting in life. Either apple we choose in this conundrum, we will be nourished by an apple, and maybe if the first apple wasn’t as sweet or sturdy, maybe the other apple will be.

How often do we deal with things this way in our daily relationships? From choosing partners to friendships and even life paths.

So it’s very important to learn to pause. It’s what I’ve been learning in life for the past few years and how to apply it in my daily life, is pausing before talking, before making an assumption, or after making an assumption, and before acting with others in ways that may not be conducive to a healthy interconnection and relating. Trusting life is key to leading a healthy, happy, and content life. But in trusting life, there needs to be a deep, deep, realization that we are choosing things to consume, give meaning to and move forward with at every moment and every interaction of relatedness.

And, look and behold, it’s in this pausing that we understand what needs to be felt and it’s often easier to feel it because it’s in alignment with what is being asked of us in that particular moment. Pause and smell the roses, is a saying that also relates directly to this.

In my meditation practice and professional life as a meditation teacher, I often create pauses in the guiding for understanding what arises and what needs to be in awareness at any given moment. Pausing also supports the notion that we have time to handle it all and to deal with difficult things in a healthy way. Pausing before reacting to some sort of real or perceived offense, can help mitigate conflicts, erasing or avoiding them entirely.

This metaphor really helps me sometimes: by thinking of ourselves as on the wheel of some sort of transportation going somewhere, I know that at every hour of driving I should pause for at least 15 to 20 minutes to rest, drink, eat, pee… and then carry on with renewed energy for another hour. The same goes with our thinking mind, or in our daily living. We need recurrent pauses to remind ourselves of what we are doing, why we are doing it, and also just to sit back for a bit and smell the roses.

Our anxieties, fears, judgments, and even preconceived assumptions — meaning, assumptions we felt were right before we knew better — sometimes really cloud our ideas about how to relate to the things which are connected to them. And a lot of times, we have identifications that were born out of the anxieties, fears, judgments, and preconceived assumptions, that are not even congruent to either our own moral compasses or our belief systems.

Kind of like a joke Tara Brach tells often, very much paraphrasing here: A nun moves to a monastery and she can only speak every two years and only say two words to the abbot. After the first two years of her arrival, the abbot asks “how are you enjoying your stay?”, and she replies: “Bed hard”. The abbot tells her to move past the feelings of comfort and try to find joy in a simple life… After another two years, the abbot asks the same question again and she replies “Food bad”. The abbot tells her to try to find pleasure in less hedonistic notions of consumption. After two years the abbot asks the same question again, to which she replies “I’m leaving”, and the abbot is fast to say “Obviously, you did nothing but complain since you got here”.

So we have this internalized notion of how things are not to our liking at all times, sometimes dismissing why we chose a certain path, and a lot of times realizing that the path we chose maybe was not the best for us. So we use complaining, about ourselves, others, behaviors, feelings, systems, societies, religions, and so forth because we feel these things are in the wrong place of how we wish to perceive life to be. It’s a very difficult place to be in when we find ourselves against a lot of things that we feel we should be comfortable with. We really need to start practicing non-judgment to feel relatively well about things concerning life that we don’t agree with and don’t have the ability to do anything about.

I often have imaginary conversations with Mother Earth, I’m not sure they are entirely imaginary and I’m not sure they are entirely real either, but they are always helpful. I keep having this notion of injustice that is happening towards the planet, for people feeling larger than life itself. I had a very deep thought relating one course I’m taking, in which the content talked about “The rights of Nature”, and I felt the need to speak about how nature is life itself, and life itself dictates the rights it has or not, and it’s really a matter of convenience and comfort for ourselves to feel larger than life to then keep learning the same lesson all over again, we’re not larger than life itself and it’s just a symbolic convenience, which is good to ascertain for our collective notions of the kindness we have inside, to create a piece of writing, which we all accept, in which humanity gives life the right to have rights — it’s absolutely symbolic, but if it will help humanity thrive beyond destruction and blind consumerism, so be it.

A lot of current spiritual belief systems rest on the notion of transcendence through superiority, which is a huge fallacy because the biggest transcendence one can experience is the feeling of gratitude for being this tiny speck of a human which has a voice to speak and think things through and relate to others in healthy ways and to live in a respectful manner.

There is this plot in a narrative that we hear and read in a lot of circles of a sort of intricate conspiracy against life. I think it’s really difficult to think in terms of how we perceive this to be true if we believe humanity is superior to the planet itself, and pulling that thread we kind of understand that the whole issue is based on two ideas: 1) science is still determining whether collectively we ought to believe or not that life is intelligent and 2) that instead of corruption (or soul snatching as they say, which is a very physical impossibility) and deep-seated wishes for destruction what is actually present is a deep inadequacy and incompetence to relate. I keep saying that life regenerates, that life itself has its own rights and life itself knows how to behave with us and teach us the lessons we need teaching. Often they are lessons of kindness and trust, not only often, but all the time. Even, for some reason that we may not know or understand, people in Wallstreet are trustworthy to live and are needed in the giant interconnection of humanity. This for me was a very difficult pill to swallow, in the past I’d rather be God herself than to allow that to be true. But very patiently, life explained to me that everyone is inherently special, unique, and precious by a common standard. Most grudges we hold in life towards others come from a place of misunderstanding, ignorance about a lot of things, and some sort of learning curve towards the humble notions of being unique, and authentically ourselves.

This feeling of inadequacy most of us, or the ones who are barely awake, feel is that we often don’t sense we are in alignment with the values that we feel are important to us. If we fight with someone we love, if we do some sort of behavioral mistake, we turn against ourselves with feelings and self-talk about how horrible we are. Some of us are blunt enough to even say it to others. How horrible it is to keep judging everyone we meet by every single piece of them, from bodyweight to behavioral mistakes to even thoughts and feelings that we think are not congruent to how others and life should be. How do we truly know others and how do we truly behave in our own personal lives?

I had a very deep-seated wish a few years ago to be very aggressive, what others perceived that to be insanity, instability, and all other things which for me were terrifying to think about myself, not entirely true or false either, I was going through a rough period and what I needed was sympathy, respect, and kindness of myself towards myself. I realized years later that I was just trying to prove to myself that I have “bad” inside me, the “what’s wrong with this picture” radar in my head was almost exclusively turned against myself and almost exclusively dependent on opinions of people who did not understand the underlying causes of my life, and had very unhealthy mechanisms of dealing with their own selves and life, so I could prove those notions true. And all those notions above, the aggression, instability, insanity, the idea of “bad inside” and also the wanting to please certain aspects that weren’t congruent to my own moral compass, my ideas on common sense, kindness, wellness, and everything good about me, felt like they were upside down. I did understand later on that all of us were in a process, and obviously still are, and that those notions were partly rooted in assumptions and partly rooted in a feeling of superiority of judgment and ability to judge what was right and wrong towards me, when in fact, they barely knew me at all, and I barely knew me at all. Because what they saw, wasn’t me. What they knew, wasn’t me. What I perceived or wanted to prove to be me, wasn’t, so what I showed, was a fallacy. And had a lot of instability to show for it. So how could it be possible to know who I am, who I can become, and where I’m going, if the ideas about “the other” are rooted in unhealthy patterns of relating? If the ideas about the self, are rooted in the stories we tell ourselves, and things we read that may or not be true?

Pausing and resting in the I don’t know, but I’m okay about it and I’m obviously a good person towards myself and others are key.

So, healing all this was also for me and many others in my life, a way to brave into the depths of healthy living and what that means.

There’s a sort of narrative that “good means weak”. When we understand that it’s okay to feel weak, it’s okay to make mistakes and learn from them, and it’s okay to want to deal with things that sometimes are beyond our comprehension, we kind of understand that good is the strongest of all forces.

So, a pause here before finishing this article. Deep, deep breath.

What really needs to be felt, for all of us, even the Wallstreet jerks, is the good inside. There is a major difference between someone who just wants to be okay and someone who causes actual harm to others on purpose and very conscious of the harm they’re causing. We do this comparison because most of us feel so guilty about things that aren’t our fault, or we didn’t know any better or we couldn’t help ourselves, or there was some sort of thing we believed to be very true about it that in the end, we found it not to be. There is a very big difference and the comparison can be healthy, but not if we compare ourselves to people who actively do harm unless we understand that we are internalizing that “I have bad” notion and realizing it in real life to prove ourselves constantly right, constantly belonging to a narrative of a “bad humanity”. And in the end, we can only perceive certain judgments about life and about things related to common sense, in a very “it has to fulfill my feelings of being adequate to everyone involved, if not good for everyone involved, that respects integrity, the sense of good, and kindness”, other than that, there is no other way of healthy relating. And when that’s done, we understand that the majority of what we see humanity as, is obviously and clearly, good.

My dog came to me with some trauma, and she had some aggression to solve, and helping her move past it took a lot of healthy notions of what it means to be trustworthy to myself as a human who takes care of a puppy and the puppy that needs to help maintain a healthy behavioral balance in the household, as a member of a family, for her to feel belonging and for her to feel she could trust me to support her wellbeing. It seems too much of a task to ask of a puppy, but in watching her learn things, I understood that the thing she most wants is to be happy, and she does know how to internalize and create that happiness for herself, and she understands perfectly that she belongs to our household, and as a family member, her behavior also matters. She knows that biting is not acceptable, not because of punishment, but because she understands it to be unacceptable to cause harm. Sometimes she growls when she digs through the trash, or when she is chewing a bone, and sometimes she feels she can be more in tune with notions of possession, but she’s also learning that when she’s chewing a bone everyone around her is happy for her, and does not wish to steal her bone. It’s a question of trusting us to not steal her bone and is a question of us trusting the goodness of her intentions. All she wants is to chew her bone in peace.

It’s obvious for her that her life is good, she is happy all the time, has a lot of care, attention, life is good for her, and has bones and nice walks in the woods. And it was a matter of trust and building confidence in her own notions of what it means to be in alignment with me and her own behavior and her own feelings. The trust I share with her is from deep-seated respect for one another and the notion that we love each other very much and can trust each other too.

I don’t feel myself making a list of all the mistakes my dog makes, obviously, so why should I do that to myself?

The things I was impelled to do when I did not truly understand how to live according to my own moral compass, how to stop and appreciate myself, after almost two decades of learning to not be negligent of my wellbeing, can be relearned into living a more fulfilled life and understanding that I do not want to belong to the part of humanity who is with the eyes shut for all the good inside and outside. Life’s teachings are an incredible way to perceive how much of dwelling we actually need to understand the simple notion that life is good, even if we don’t believe it to be. And the biggest lesson of my life so far was how amazing life can be in giving second and third chances of being kind to us, always believing we can do better, we can be better and we can be kind to ourselves and others, that our inherent goodness is not weakness, but what sustains our strengths.

Life is an amazing teacher, and I think the thing that really needs to be felt, for all of us, is just how compassionate, kind and loving, life truly is to us all. To want to be a part of the goodness of humanity is to realize that by wanting it, we already are. I’ve always believed idealists of the good because often those are the prophets of the evolution of our times. The general ideas I found in folks who were and probably still are learning that life truly loves us unconditionally and that it is possible to have a feeling of unconditionality in our close circles of friends and family, and that even if harm is caused good prevails in the end — always, no matter what you believe and what your beliefs are, is what sustains the whole idea that even if we do make mistakes, we are forgiven, if only by ourselves (as we are living too), and we care enough about ourselves to know that we can be happy knowing the goodness within us and in our outer realities. I understood this when I realized that some people feel impelled to cause harm in order for good to happen to them, like my ex who lived off my hard work and money, or that friend who took advantage of my goodwill, or Wallstreet marketers who want to manipulate public opinion to please their notions of right and wrong and live lives which are carefree — which possibly, aren’t at all, considering their emotional reactions to a stupid thing like the stock market. It comes from a place of inadequacy about living, but not mine, ours, but theirs. For me, choosing to live a healthier relational life means choosing the people in my life better and understanding that even some family members are not meant to stick around, and that’s fine for everyone involved. I wasn’t always the best person to have around, and I’m fine with that, it’s up to me to deal with my mistakes and shortcomings and to forgive myself for them.

I don’t believe in a higher power who judges us harshly for things we don’t know any better, and I don’t believe in a higher power who would put us on this life just to suffer. Otherwise, there wouldn’t be any people left at all, and or most of us would be completely insane or dead at a very early age. I do believe, however, that our notions of free will only rest in the place of choice, and life — a lot of times! — protects us from the poor choices we want to make. But for that, we need to listen to the voice of common sense, of goodwill, of kindness. And if we do understand where our errors are, it’s halfway up the road of changing our choices and behaviors to be more inclusive of the goodness we have inside and outside of us.

The whole process of maturation into adulthood goes through the stage of claiming responsibility towards ourselves, our choices, and how we behave towards others. To be our own parents sometimes means also to be kind enough with ourselves to understand when to forgive ourselves for things that are no fault of our own, and to deeply relate to ourselves in a way that is congruent to who we want to be “when we grow more” and how to act with discipline in our lives for a better future that we build in the present.

What really deeply needs to be felt is what shows itself to deal with in life-moments of learning places. How to be parents, family members to dogs and cats, how to be our own force of good to ourselves, and how to forgive ourselves for things that aren’t our fault, as much as we forgive the shortcomings of others.

Often the constant criticism we perceive to receive is just illusory, it’s just our ideas on how others will compare their perceived notions of what they feel is right for them, compared to what we may be possibly, perhaps, doing wrong. To break free from this is to be our own selves those we want to please. If I aim to please my sense of justice, or my sense of kindness, or whatever notion I have of my own moral compass, it’s not through the unknown moral compass of others that we will be able to be happy for sure. Often not even others show their true moral compass, and it’s when we try to please others so often that we understand we need to pause to make a statement towards ourselves, and possibly life itself too if we want, that we can and will, and possibly already do, behave in a way that will please ourselves and make us proud and happy to be us.

And that is how life teaches us to be who we want to be. There isn’t exactly a need to believe in another dimensional heaven or hell, it is needed to understand that our choices help create the communities we live in, that in turn help sustain the societies we belong to, that in turn build the systems we are in. So often we want to be against the turning wheels of what we feel is degenerative to our senses of wellbeing, and so often we find that we were the culprits of how badly we felt for this constant self-talk of being less than.

My mom, with all her wonderful wisdom, told me that she feels my current prerogative is to get out of the constant lookout for how bad I am, to the deep understanding of how much lack of bad I actually have inside me, and how deeply I try so hard to make everyone in my life feel loved and appreciated and cared for, how I do so many good conscious acts to make the people and animals I love and care for, happy.

Again with Tara Brach, she said that all of us, no exclusion, are walking around with a metaphorical “please love me” sign attached to us, and I deeply feel that to be true. Throughout my life, for a long time, but not in the near reality, I’ve found I was wanting to love primarily those who were committing acts to be unlovable, to prove to them that somehow we are all worthy of being loved. In the end, that proved to be something that made me realize I wasn’t loving myself enough, and that loving myself also means choosing people to love in my life that are in alignment with what I want in life and what type of people I want around me.

For a very good reason, I’m one of those lucky people who have a lot of very long and true friendships. In my 34 years of life, I can say I have more than a handful of people in my close circle who have been in my life for more than 30 years. I’m incredibly blessed for all of them, their support, their intricacies, and their paths to the greatness they are. I know I can disagree and even fight with someone who I love deeply and still feel very close and very belonging.

I struggled a lot with notions of what I wanted to be, what I wanted to do, and who I wanted to feel belonging with, only to realize that I already was, I already do and I already belong.

Gratitude may not always be at the forefront of my mind, but I do feel grateful all the time to have the understanding that my perceived errors were stepping stones for the future I wanted to build for myself and to know that this future is here, I do have to pause to feel the sense of accomplishment.

I don’t feel completely self-realized, there are a lot of things I want to do, but the goals I put for myself maybe 10 years ago, finally gave me fruits of the life I truly wanted to live back then, and now, by creating my own opportunities, and deep hard battles later with a lot of small and big victories, I can safely say that I don’t need to look for outward forgiveness— if I didn’t truly cause any real harm to anyone but myself, so it’s my own future self who needs to find the forgiveness for all my perceived wrongness.

And that's fine with me.