why feelings are the heart of dream work...
Question: Once we make the trip from the head to the heart, is there only one true feeling?
When a feeling flushes through my body, the tingle, the rush, I’m trying to notice if it is the same for pain, joy, sorrow, all of them. Can this be? And if so, what does that mean? The key right now for me seems to be that it has to be deeply felt in my body, including the etheric body...but not go to my mind, no story attached. If this turns out to be true, then what’s the point? Just feeling? No good feelings versus bad feelings? Non-duality to the max? So, for example, if someone directs a mean comment my way, what I call ‘hurt’...does that have the same texture, vibratory rate on my body as a tender comment from someone I love? What would this mean? That to ‘be in my feelings’ may be what it means to be awake? That to be in the present moment is not just a dry noticing or witnessing but an active participation in the moment.
I spent time the past few days watching for and staying with the range of feelings (anger, jealousy, love, pain, fear, etc.) that arose. I let them be as they were...just noticing the texture. They sure felt different and because of that it was often hard work to not react, project, spin out into story...away from my center.
As I’ve learned to be aware of feelings and out of my mind, when a feeling comes to me, overcomes me...more and more it reaches my mind last, so it doesn’t have a label. First it flushes through my body...rising...in a way that makes me need to sit down for a moment. In my ability to let it rise, trusting it to move through me in its own wisdom, it doesn’t have to reach my mind and be made separate. It becomes the cycle of one or a few breaths...and then dissolves. Rising and falling...breath...feelings. Only when I bring mind into it does it become dualistic, this and that.
What’s keeping me fooled is the mind stuff, the separating out...judging, suffering, bargaining, comparing, etc., and so the accompanying feeling is labeled as such and made separate into a feeling I want to avoid. I have wanted to think that pain feels differently than love, that anger feels differently than serenity, but maybe it’s not that way. What if it’s not just ‘feel it all,’ it’s more like ‘all is feeling’...and all feeling at it’s core is the same. So when my dreams show me how I avoid fear, anger, pain, etc., and I open to those and really stay...something new is revealed. The outer wrapping of name and story is dropped and what’s underneath is the core feeling.
They say there are only two feelings...love and fear. What if there is truly only one feeling...love? What if what I believe to be separate feelings are just how near or far I am from the one feeling...divine love. The further I am, the less I trust and feel I am alone, have to do it on my own, figure it out for myself. The closer in I am, the more I am my soul, trusting, feeling the inner support. Maybe that’s why Earth school is so important and why human birth is so precious. Like a prism, all the nuances of what I believe are separate feelings are coming out of the one.
“A property of the awakened ones is to come the instant they are called.”
What if the calling is to feel our feelings?
Mary Jo Heyen
Archetypal Dreamwork Practitioner
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