The purpose of my work, my writing, and frankly what I think life is all about is to fully live. To experience joy, love, anguish, grief, and all the other emotions and sensations that we can feel. I think that throughout life we get burdened with thoughts, beliefs, and experiences that precipitate negative emotions and that we have to release those negative vibes in exchange for positive ones. This is the process of raising our consciousness and transcending the human experience.
Recently I’ve talked about the desensitizing that happens in life. The coping mechanism or adaptation that occurs so that we can protect ourselves from being swallowed up by shame, hatred, anxiety, despair, and blame, to name a few.
I’ve talked a bit about the idea of high sensation seeking-the phenomenon of feeling intense things (adrenaline junky, intensity junky, thrill seeking, and even being a drama queen/king, etc.) I love this way of living. Give me big big feels and I’m happy. It makes me feel alive. What I’ve also learned was that most, if not all of the time, I would utilize these big feels so that I didn’t feel other things… yeah, it was a nice distraction. So I was thinking that I really liked to feel but the deeper truth was that I didn’t like or want to feel. I only wanted part of the human experience.
I’ve come to believe that in order to feel the good stuff we need to face the “bad” stuff. We have sophisticated ways of repressing, suppressing, and even expressing our negative feelings but those don’t actually experience them. I’m not saying that we should get lost in our negative emotions and fall into the “wound worshiping” trap but we have to face our whole selves.
The next thing to put on the table here is sensation limiting or sensation avoiding/numbing. This is pretty self explanatory but I like talking about it because of it shows that on the spectrum of sensation we can be all over the place and still be doing stuff to limit feeling the deeper, “real” stuff.
In previous blogs I’ve shared my thoughts about the process of how I’ve desensitized myself and the above mentioned were certainly tools in my bag of tricks. The re-sensitizing process has been and continues to be about “experiencing” sensations, good and bad, in order to heal and more fully live.
The opportunity:
What are the ways you set up not feeling?
Why do you do that?
What do you think would happen if you experienced life more fully, the good and the bad?
What does it cost you to not feel?
Thanks for your time, have a great day!