Two Instruments for Understanding the Transformation of Feelings

Dear reader,

In my last article I promised to share more about the methodology I’ve developed and used with clients over the years. So in this article I’m going to explore a couple of  instruments or frameworks I made so you can have a taste for what capability development looks like up close.

I decided to focus in this article on feelings, as that is an area of our inner life that is both very present and also mysterious; usually outside of our obvious control.

I want to expose you to what a path of growth looks like so you have a new perspective, a new ideal for yourself and what you can achieve in your feeling life if you work at it. 

This is very important on any path of development. In my violin teaching days I found that the pupils who had heard what the violin was capable of did much better than those who hadn’t, because the ones who had been exposed to the violin’s virtuosity had an imagination for what they were trying to accomplish, regardless of their actual talent.

I think it is the same with inner development; you need to have pictures and imaginations for what you are striving for.

My perspective on the inner life — and in this case the feeling life — is very different in many ways from a conventional, more psychology-based point of view because I don’t see the inner life and its many problems as health issues of the physical body. I see them instead as diseases of consciousness.

I come from a philosophical / spiritual perspective where I include the phenomena of consciousness in everything about the nature of the inner life. 

Why is this important, or necessary? 

Because I have found that everything human made is downstream of the thought, of consciousness. The things of this world have fallen out of the creative, dynamic potential of the originating world of living thinking and idea — the roads, houses, the economy, government, organizations, the systems of society — and have become convention and habit — in a word, “fixed” into matter and form. But they began as an ideal, an imagination, arising out of pure potential.

In other words, what begins as fluid, mobile, intuitive thinking takes tangible form; it becomes “fixed” into a thought or a concept. It loses its living, dynamic potential and becomes something static and concrete. 

This is the origin of habits in the inner life. Where did your thinking come from before it arrived as a conclusion or belief in you? It was somewhere else, existing as a living concept or idea — and then it became “rigidified” as a fixed idea and a belief. 

Just as the eye is built out of the phenomena of the light — the light came first, not the eye — so is your concept-forming process built out of the phenomena of consciousness, which was there before taking form as ideas and beliefs in your mind.

Consciousness is pure potential before it manifests in you, and that pure potential is creative spiritual substance.

So that means, in my world, that the inner life is constructed of spiritual substance, that falls into matter as soon as our thinking becomes fixed, and then becomes repeating patterns of finished thoughts. I call this “thoughting.”

The thoughting — we can’t call it thinking anymore because its no longer new but instead what we have already thought, over and over again — can become so fixed in place in our minds that it takes on a life of its own. It becomes neuroses, or psychoses. We develop cognitive distortions, as Jung put it, that take over and become “truth” to us.

And THAT is how we develop problems in our inner world: co-dependence, anxiety, disordered attachment, depression, and on and on, are very understandable responses to not only challenges in life but also the fallen nature of our own thinking patterns that get locked into beliefs and stuck, cycling and destructive — fallen right out of archtype and out of a living, previously healthy consciousness.

That has been my focus for the past 15+ years in working with people struggling with long standing trauma and mental health challenges. I’ve accompanied — and still do — many people through the stages and effort of healing and transformation. 

I have taught meditation and a spiritually oriented method of inner transformation, and have broken down the essential steps that I’ve observed every human follows on their path of development. There are archetypal steps we all take and it has been my life’s work to map out this path.

Instruments of Capability Building for the Inner Life 

In the instrument below, I show a high level overview of the terrain of capability building in the inner life as I see it:

If you’re familiar with my work, you’ll recognize the spheres of thinking, feeling, and willing, which are where the actual activity of capability building takes place. All the practices I use myself and that I bring to my clients can be categorized under these three spheres.

We can either grow or decay our capabilities in those spheres; for example, our feeling life can get caught up in chronic moods of resentment or anger at life. In which case, we aren’t really growing or transforming, but are experiencing a stuckness that can spiral on a downward trajectory of cascading dark feelings. 

This is very challenging If we don’t know how to lift our feelings out of compulsion and into a space where we have a choice about what we harbor in our feeling life. This is why I talk about freer and less free feelings — freedom describes a path of development for the feeling life.

Let’s look closer at the development of feelings so we can study what capability building looks like.

This is a list of capabilities going from least free through to the most free. Freedom in the context of feelings means you have agency over what you choose to feel — will you choose to remain angry, or will you turn away from blame and toward understanding which generates compassion? 

Typically the feeling life is outside of our control; we have to wait for strong feelings to subside on their own before we can find a calmer frame of mind. Feelings come and go like storms — until we learn how to master them with practice.

It is not an easy path toward mastery because all too easily we mistake suppression or denial as evidence of our ability to control our emotions. Mastery looks very different from this; it has little to do with control, and my list of the stages of development in the feeling life is meant to illustrate this.

Let’s explore each of the definitions in the image above. A word of caution here: I don’t mean to imply that any of the feeling states I’m describing are bad or good. Watch that you don’t judge yourself or others based on these descriptions. Rather, this is an opportunity to explore where we tend to be unfree, and to have a choice about whether we WANT to operate out of such ways of being. And to know there are more generative and freer ways of moving through the world with our feelings.

Sentience (good for me / bad for me)

Sentience is the style of feeling that is a primitive “good for me / bad for me” level of operation. There is little consciousness about what is churning below the surface in the feelings. This is the very simplest way we walk through life as feeling beings. 

We feel our way forward without much consciousness about WHAT we feel. We just react to life with our own idiosyncratic trigger/reactions that don’t have much to do with logic. I sometimes call this “sentient logic” because it can help explain why some people can meander in conversation in such random ways, why their explanations for their decisions can seem so, frankly, illogical, and why memory appears to be so selective. It is because they are operating out of a sentient logic, a self-feeling way of deciding about things that isn’t based on the intellect. Sentience has its own logic based on emotions and reactions. 

Self-feeling / non-cognitive feeling

Self-feeling is a more challenging descriptor because it is where we go when we are reacting to some stimulus. We self-feel. Self feeling is usually negative emotions such as anger, resentment, despair, apathy, fear, anxiety, contempt, or various feelings of disempowerment. If we’ve developed a habit with such feelings and they are familiar to us, then they can become a way we “feel ourselves”. We identify with them, we know who we are when we are anxious, for example; we become addicted to our self-feeling tendencies. This is one reason why states such as anxiety and depression are so difficult to shake. We become so identified with these emotional states that we don’t know who we are without them. They provide a sense of identity, we feel ourselves through them, however painfully. 

But self-feeling style of feelings (I tend to call these emotions rather than feelings) are “non-cognitive”, meaning, they can’t tell you anything about the world, they’re entirely self focused and self-enclosed. There is no dialogue with the world via this style of emotions; they can’t speak to you about anything except your pain — and in a non-word-like, non-articulate way. There is no intelligence, no consciousness, no growth, no living nature to them. And yet they storm through and take over completely; they hijack your entire system for a while. They are in contrast to cognitive-style feelings, which I will get to later.

Self-feeling is not always a negative emotion; it can also be states of pleasure which are addictive in nature. For example, drug or alcohol induced ecstasy, aggrandizement, inflation, control, infatuation — any state of pleasure that inevitably wears off and has to be re-created, again and again. Self-feeling is essentially egotistical, self-involved, non-conscious.

Again, try not to judge whether you yourself “self-feel”. We all do, I know I do. My practice is to get clear on what self-feeling is as an inner experience, and what it is like to turn away from that state to something more productive, more “cognitive”. We’ll talk more about that in the next stages of development.

Reactivity / habit loop

This is the state where we are not yet at the steering wheel of our feelings and emotions. We are not the “captains of our soul”. We still react habitually to life, and also to our inner condition. Reactivity is the endless cycle of trigger / reaction, a habit loop that is closed and self-reinforcing. We get triggered by something we don’t like — a difficult conversation, something breaking, an unexpected event — and we react with no thought, just habit. We inflame, self-feeling our trigger/reaction, and eventually calm down and get on with life, only to get triggered and go through the cycle again.

However, between trigger and reaction lies a potential space that we can learn to open wider and wider so that we have a moment of choice. That choice point becomes the life line which enables us to transform the stuck habit and closed loop and open it up to something more generative, more free. This space making is crucial for the healing journey of the feeling life. 

We can go from a closed and binding circle, to a upward flowing spiral of evolving octaves. We get triggered, but every time we go around the cycle we are a little more aware, have a little more agency in how we react. And so we evolve the wound/trigger to a higher level, a higher octave of self-awareness and mastery.

100% responsibility

This is a big goal on the healing journey of the feeling life: taking 100% responsibility for what you feel. This flies in the face of what we WANT to do instead, which is to blame someone else, or the world, for how we feel. “He made me feel this way”, “you made me feel…: “It made me feel…” It’s all too easy to believe something else caused our feelings. But the truth is, on some level we are already predisposed to react in the ways that we do. Our feeling life is predictable and habitual. We WILL project our feelings onto another unless we learn to take back our projections and stop blaming others for how we feel.

This is a challenging idea because, for example, if someone is treating us poorly, how are we to feel anything but outrage? I’m not saying outrage at someone’s behavior is a problem; I’m saying it’s when you give away your power to circumstances by believing they are responsible for your feelings. This essentially means you are unable to intervene in the space between trigger and reaction — you give away your agency and make an outside circumstance the arbiter of your feeling life.

100% responsibility is difficult but necessary on the path of freedom. When you take back your agency, you realize just how much your feelings come from older habits that shape your perceptions and conclusions about what happened that triggered you. Someone else would react differently than you would under the exact same circumstances. This realization helps soften the hardness of the conclusions we draw about others and life, helping us realize we have more agency and power when we take responsibility for how we react to any given situation.

Turning the soul at will

Building on the increasing capability to take responsibility for your feeling life enables you to take your triggers in hand and, with practice, choose how you are going to feel about something. Turning the soul is what we do when we are able to observe ourselves following a habit loop, to pause upon being triggered, and deciding whether we are going to follow through on the habitual and tempting reactivity, or instead respond in a more thoughtful and generative way. 

We turn our soul away from the addictive pull of self-feeling, and turn toward a strategy that wasn’t available to us before. The new strategy can only come to us once we are free from the compulsive and habitual habit loop’s trigger / reaction cycle. But when it does, we experience enormous energy that now becomes available to us. This is because a great deal of emotional energy goes into attending to our wounds, habits, and self-feeling addictions. Once we transform those habits, that energy now becomes available to us as free creative energies. Those free creative energies then reveal to us new ways we can deal more generatively with the circumstances that used to trigger us.

For example, instead of yelling because we can’t get our needs met for recognition and connection, we are able to make a specific request of another in a way that enables them to say yes. This is because we no longer make it impossible for them to see us or connect to us because of difficult and self-sabotaging behaviors arising out of our self-feeling (non-cognitive) and destructive reactivity.

Organ of perception (intuition) / cognitive feeling

Cognitive feeling is the opposite of non-cognitive, self-feeling in that the style of feelings here can tell you something about the world. They are outward facing, and cognize, or recognize, or feel the world. Reverence, wonder, joy, amusement, peace, awe, love, recognition, empathy — these are all examples of feelings that are not self-enclosed, self-facing, nor egotistical in nature. 

In the kind of meditation I teach, I work with particular cognitive-style feelings to help my students “get a feel” for the difference between non-cognitive and cognitive style feelings, and learn to have the flexibility in the soul such that they can eventually have a choice about what they feel about circumstances. And that remains a goal as they put together the pieces of the story of the wound playing out in them of which the self-feeling tendencies are symptoms. 

Cognitive style feelings have a healing and rejuvenating impact on the soul. Imagine if you are able to call up, with practice, a feeling of peace and calm at will. This kind of practice will give you over time a reservoir of peace you can call upon in times of drama so you can face trouble with more strength and equanimity, and presence of mind.

The reason why I also call cognitive style feelings an organ of perception is that your feeling life, cultivated to this level of freedom, enable a level of intuition to become available to you that can sometimes border on extrasensory. You are attuned, via your feeling life, into more sensitive, finer, more rarified levels of perception that defy the more mundane and coarser aspects of daily life. Your feeling life, in essence, becomes a new “eye” in the soul.

Thinking heart

The thinking heart is consciousness, a living thinking, come alive in the heart. What happens is we become connected to the cosmic wisdom of our higher self, that part of us that lives in potential in pure spiritual form. As a society we are not yet in full cognizance of our higher aspect, but we are on the way toward developing it. In my studies of the evolution of consciousness, I see a general picture of where we are at in the process. Over eons we’ve gradually developed our sentient capability, then our intellectual capability, and now we’re working on our capability to think with our heart.

This highest expression of freedom in the feeling life is, to put it more pictorially, an ability to be both at the center and the periphery at the same time. We stand at the center, very present and awake, and are attuned at the same time to the periphery where archetypes exist before coming into being through the medium of human consciousness — before percept and concept fall into matter and form.

It is a clairsentient capacity in the soul; a perceptive and intuitive ability that is precise and not arbitrary. The thinking heart is tuned toward the original state of the feeling life before it became distorted and perverted, before humanity fell into the mythological darkness and ignorance long spoken of in many cultures around the world. The world of feeling historically is connected to the zodiac, and some esoteric schools call the aspect of the human that experiences feelings the “astral body”. 

Ultimately, the “purification of the astral body”, in other words the purification of the feeling life in the ways described here, is a path of initiation in western esoteric traditions, and the thinking heart in the goal for a particular stage in that process.

In conclusion, the picture I tried to bring is one of possibilities; what actually can be achieved if one were to go on a systematic path of development. 

I’ve likened this path to learning to play the violin in previous articles. There are different methods and systems for going from beginner to mastery (Suzuki, Eastern European, English, etc), but they all follow a step by step, gradual accumulation of technique at the appropriate stages. I hope you can see that the cultivation of the feeling life also has stages of lawful development that follow the realities and phenomena of the inner life.

As always, I invite you to let me know how this lands with you and what questions you have regarding this exploration of the feeling life.

Warmly,

Louisa