Or perhaps the title should be: “daring to feel the new”, because feeling is timeless. But explaining feeling as in pain is still explainable to everyone. Things become different when feeling also becomes one of your co-decisors in daily life. After all, we know what is implied when someone says: “that doesn’t feel good”. It’s great when people dare to base their decision on that and not just use facts to make decisions. Now it is precisely this aspect that we see coming back more and more… we dare more.
What does Van Dale say about ,feeling,?
Van Dale gives the following explanation for the word feeling:
- Receiving impressions with the sense of touch: feeling pain.
- Feeling to examine: feel these substances; it feels soft the feeling gives the impression of something soft.
- (In general) notice, perceive, realise: do you feel? you understand?
- To feel for something (a) to feel like it; (b) sympathize with it.
This also means that feeling has many meanings, but they can all be traced back to the feeling. Feeling in the literal sense of pain or the figurative sense with which we control intuition. The latter version is the version that is increasingly being promoted. We want and need to feel and experience something again.
Psyche
It is not strange that we want to live through things. If we look at it from the perspective of evolution and people were concerned with survival (enough food, conquering animals and enduring wars) and reproduction, after stabilization the next step comes that we want to collect as much as possible. We become more self-centered and power and wealth in money and goods is like a warm bath. Something like that goes wrong somewhere because jealousy, for example, is a human trait. When things go wrong, in whatever sense , people are shocked. On the one hand, because the need to survive and continue to reproduce, the primal urge comes into play again and on the other hand, the intelligent person starts to wonder whether this is it. Why have you been on this earth for roughly 80 years, just to collect?
For some, the answer to the latter must be yes, but the group that continues to search is becoming increasingly larger. This then means that we have to let go of the known, the established and familiar and that can be very frightening. After all, the comfort zone we have lived in for years may not be very challenging, but it is also a warm bath.
Accept the challenge
The researchers of this world, the people who dare to let go of the comfort zone, often seek and find the challenge of feeling. What this involves is daring to feel it again. Not just living in your head (and taking the functioning body for granted), but experiencing your body as it is and learning to trust it. Trust that goes beyond your daily food, that food is processed in your body and you can take one step after another. If you want to feel this way and you never have, it’s not easy.
Learning to feel
And then learning comes into the picture, because if you often live in your head and we have experienced this over the years, it is a transition to feel again. Literally and figuratively. There are some things you can start with to learn to trust what feelings tell you again. Actually, these are normal everyday matters, but things that we do too often on autopilot.
- For dry skin or just to smell nice, we often apply body lotion after showering. Do this consciously and feel your hands and fingertips running over your feet, your legs, your stomach, your arms, etc. with the soft, pleasantly scented lotion. Feel how the lotion is absorbed into your skin and makes it supple. After the lotion has been absorbed, gently rub your skin again with your fingertips.
- Consciously rub your hands together as if you were applying hand lotion and feel the skin when you run your fingertips over your palm. Gently touch your skin with your fingertips.
- Think of something that was exciting for you and recall that feeling. Then feel what that might do to your stomach again. The well-known “gut feeling”, the tension indicates whether something feels good or not.
- Think about some recent things that you ,predicted, well and how you came to these decisions (without just citing all kinds of facts).
That last point makes it difficult, because when we assert our feelings, we often unconsciously also take the rational approach with us. If we let go of the fact that this is wrong, you will ultimately make decisions based on facts and other information from outside and your feelings. In this way, body and mind come closer together.
Finally
Not radically cutting all the lines of what we know, but adding your feelings to the whole, makes us come closer to ourselves and take our feelings into account in decisions. Perhaps scary when you start with this, but definitely of added value.
Also accept that you make mistakes or have not properly taken into account all aspects from facts to feelings in your decisions. You learn from mistakes and, moreover, if this is new, it is something that has to grow. Daring to trust what your gut feeling, for many people, says, can be scary at first. If you start with a positive approach, that will take you the most.