Momentous Feelings

My emotions always flow, one into the other, never constant, always shifting, changing. One minute I can be fine, the next, some sadness may come in. I believe they are one of my greatest gifts. They tell me what I want, what I don't want, who I think I am. They are Life. They've brought me tons of pleasure, and pain. They are my Teachers, I want to feel them, I want to embrace them all.

Today I am wondering, again, what they are, why they are here, where they come from. Yes, I've already learned tons from Teachers on what they are. I know what the Masters say about them. I know Buddha's opinions on them. I know that many feel the best way to deal with them is to transcend them and attain BlissBunnyEnlightenment.

But since I'm ornery and don't really buy into what anyone else says, I've not bought into that one, either. And I guess, if truth be told, I don't even want to explore how to deal with them today (I would much rather be than do). Today I'm just curious, ever watching myself, as to what exactly they are, what rings true for me.

Sometimes they are influenced by my hormones. I know that when I feel, a whole set of chemical responses are elicited in my body that cause a physical response to what I'm feeling. Sometimes, depending on my cycle, I am touchier than others because of it.

Sometimes during my BleedingTimes I have so much joy that I'm close to tears for days because of Life's poignant beauty. I'm constantly in wonder of the BodyMind and how the pieces and parts influence and play with one another. I know all about molecules, syapses, receptor sites, etc., and find that whole thing fascinating as I love science. But science doesn't go far enough, is in too much of its infancy to have those considerations be the endplace for me. Whenever anyone wants to reduce emotions or feelings or sensations to a molecular event, I will always ask what the Prime Mover is. No one can answer that because (thankfully) that's still a mystery to us.

Sometimes, all at once, I'll run into tons of people who are dealing with many of the same core issues or feelings I'm having. When it finally gets surreal enough for me to be asking "what the heck is going on here??? I find out that some planet is void of something or some other star configuration is going on and I breathe a sigh of relief. So I feel that I'm connected to energies outside me in ways I don't always understand but just accept because my Mystic Logic Scientist sees the connection. It's seen it way too many times for way too many years to think differently.

I was talking with a friend the other day about how we think emotions evolve. First, we have things conscious and un, that we believe. When something happens, we have a response to those beliefs. This is why sometimes when I'm feeling really good, nothing effects me. But if I'm not, caught in thoughts that don't serve me, I have a different emotional response to the same thing.

With regards to having feelings "about someone" (positive or negative) I believe it's because they have qualities which we have identified as desirable or worth our feelings (whether happy or un). This set of thoughts, both conscious and un, result in an emotional response in us. These feelings can change with more information as the situation becomes more "itself" than our projection. We then have an emotional response to our emotion. Things can build both postively and not so inside us. I've also learned I can retrain myself over time in relationship to shift my emotions depending on what I focus on.

And then there are the situations that excite me and that I live for that confound and delight me and make me appreciate and watch and...perhaps not place so much weight on my particular emotion in the moment. I've seen it dozens of times in myself, those in my personal life and those I've coached. Where do feelings go?

Emotions are so ephemeral. Things that were so intensely important, both painful and positive to me in the past, make no difference to me today. I look back at some times when I thought I would die over something and I can't help but wonder now why I was so involved in them. Or why they were so important, or how I was so attracted to someone and now they don't even cross my mind. Or if they do it's with detachment. Or how I can feel very close to someone and then not...and then do again...and then don't want to even have contact with them. Or one day I miss someone and the next not only don't I miss them, I want to avoid them. I watch my daughter who has been so distant for so many months, silent and unreachable and she writes me a letter of her "beefs" with me, I don't get triggered at all (as I saw it had nothing to do with me) and now she is a sweet, cuddly person who initiates conversations with me and is affectionate.

I've obverved and experienced so much of this that I wonder: how is it that I'm supposed to take any feelings as "real?" They hide one another, or lead to one another or are gateways to deeper feelings that only come into expression when the masking one is fully felt and spontaneously released. There are way too many times that I've felt something fully, finally, and it instantaneously shifts and explodes into something else, or gives me a message about something deeper to just stop at one and think that's Truth. I'm thinking perhaps this is the nature of creation flowing through us...never stagnant, always changing, one building to some new creation.

I find God in paradox. The only place I feel emotions today is that they are my creative messengers of the moment. I can only find Truth in the paradox that they are the most intensely important things in my life in the moment AND that they mean absolutely nothing at all.

Art:

Flowing-Passion by Javier Lopez Barbosa

Sadness by Yvonne Munnik

Joy by Liz Cohn

Passion by Paul Curtis from here

Wrath by Santiago Mapache

Mobius by Cliff Teja from here

This article has been included in Be Conscious Now's Carnival of Truth #4.