• This is written for the empaths – those whose sensitive hardware can make this world feel so loud, confusing and overwhelming.

    I wrote this guide because I’ve struggled to survive in this world as an empath. And I know I’m not the only one. I’ve grown tired of seeing my empathic nature as a liability that I must compensate for. This is a common experience for empaths.

    And yet, as this story will reveal, the problem lies not in the intensity of the world we live in, nor in our own apparent design faults.

    I believe the way to truly survive as an empath in this world, is to realise none of it has design faults, and that the same capacities that seem like such liabilities, are in fact super-powers that are waiting for you to unlock them.

    The way to do so? A journey into yourself of course.

    Who is the empath?

    Empath – one who has a high capacity for feeling/sensing. The root of the word empathy means to be “in feeling”. This is a universal human capacity. An empath is one who has a particularly high capacity for the felt experience of reality.

    You’re born this way. In fact, it’s something that you already are as a soul (most likely). To become an empath takes a great deal of work on the part of the soul. Lifetimes of lessons. So, in the grand scheme of things, you could think of yourself as “high level” in this particular ability (which is a good counterpoint to the common feeling of it being a disability).

    Perhaps this fact helps relieve you of some sense of fault – the idea that you’ve messed up your own nervous system, or you’re just built wrong. It’s actually quite the opposite.

    In our current world culture, empaths are often people carrying significant trauma. Indeed it can seem as though the two are fused, or caused by each other. That’s kind of true.

    It’s more like we’ve set up this trial for ourselves as incarnated beings, where we’re lovingly forced to struggle in some particular way with these capacities – and through walking into pain time and again, we force ourselves to learn who we are and where our gifts truly lie. The one doing the forcing – who set this thing up? You.

    We’ve got to go through these trials to be conscious of those gifts. To claim them and therefore wield them with consciousness, remembering who we are.

    To be an empath in today’s world is no easy feat. Especially if you want to make a splash with your contributions – make a difference. Our culture neither trains us well to use these gifts, nor creates conditions where empaths thrive. Indeed, our rational culture usually sees empathic abilities as soft, weak, fragile, dramatic etc. The modern world occurs as loud and often overwhelming. It’s easy to become entwined in victim stories about all of this. And to feel misunderstood and defective.

    Part of my own challenge has been to admit to myself how sensitive and empathic I truly am. It doesn’t really go with the outfit I’ve been trying to wear in the world. But as I’ve got over myself (and into myself), I’ve come to see, with increasing grace, the power and blessings of these capacities. And that it is in fact possible to reach a place of harmony in your relationship to the world, where you feel like you’re navigating the ocean of life, rather than being drowned by it.

    The following four principles are I believe, universally applicable to empaths. The first two are more like skills or capacities, the second two more like strategies. They all require practice.

    If you want to make a difference, use the gifts you possess and feel empowered in the journey rather than overwhelmed by its magnitude, these principles are keys that help you unlock yourself.

    One — Learn how to self-regulate

    I believe this is the core survival skill for an empath. Because as an empath in this world, you’re going to get knocked out of equilibrium (and your self-sense) a lot. In other words, you’re easily triggered!

    Something happens, and suddenly you’re feeling all this stuff in yourself, and in the other people around you, and it’s hard to tell whose is whose and what is what. Your head spins, your body goes into fight, flight, freeze. It’s all so much!

    This happens principally because you feel a lot — you experience a lot of impact from the things that happen – it really resonates inside of your body-mind. Add in all that trauma your family line has been carrying for generations, add in all the ways you were fucked up as a child, add in all the karmic lessons you wanted to come and face, and you get a powerful mixture just ready to trigger and overwhelm you, greasing the descent into “here we fucking go again”.

    This is all happening in a post-covid world where things seem the same but are definitely not. It’s like the gods switched the energy field of the planet when we were all in lockdown, creating a pressure cooker of what’s not working, thinning the veil and spotlighting all our unconsciousness.

    This all adds up to a potent dojo for self-regulation practice.

    Self-regulation is the capacity to find equilibrium in your own nervous system, in the moment.

    One of my teachers Michaela describes it like a sheet of thick handmade paper. Your nervous system is the paper, and through your upbringing, it got all screwed up and bent out of shape.

    You can meditate in the forest for 3 days and smooth the whole thing out, and it all looks flat. But the moment you walk back into the world, and someone says that thing again, those same crease lines show up once more.

    You can’t change the crease lines says Michaela. You can’t get rid of them. But you can learn how to smooth yourself out. This is the capacity for self-regulation.

    When you know how to do this, you can smooth things out as or after they occur. This empowers you to work with the challenges and trials your life is throwing at you, rather than feeling overwhelmed by the magnitude of all the fucking feelings.

    This can only be done in the body.

    It takes a lot of work, or at least it’s taken me a great deal of work to get to a place where I’m (at least) competent.

    It can only happen in the body because that’s the location of the actual hardware, and therefore all the latent capacities and buried traumas. You can’t talk or think your way through this.

    You have to go down and in, and come bottom up. There are a hundred different approaches. My own path has involved a lot of embodied yogic/tantric practice, lots of bodywork (a kind that teaches you how to self-regulate), different kinds of relational practice, psychotherapy, shamanic healing.

    Whatever the method that works for you and your being, the key is to spend time exploring the felt sense of your own body, and particularly the places you habitually don’t feel. I think it helps to do this in a safe space, on the mat or with a professional.

    The key to empowerment here is developing the capacity to self-regulate in the moment. This is the power move. You have enough self-awareness to be able to notice yourself getting activated (or that you’re already activated), and enough skill to change your emotional and energetic state — regulating your own nervous system.

    This actually requires a kind of “going with it” (rather than against it), allowing the energy to flow without swamping you.

    In other words, you notice when you’re getting swamped, and know how to get your head back above the surface.

    I think the most basic form of this is to pause and take a breath (or three). It’s like a remembering – “oh, I can slow myself out of the tailspin”, which opens up the space around you, rather than fixating on the rabbit hole you’re feeling sucked down.

    When I do this now, it kicks into gear a whole lot of instinctual things I do with my body, breath, energy and feeling. These are things that I’ve developed over time non-rationally, lying on the table with my bodyworker Markus, or exploring on the floor of my practice room.

    However you develop this capacity to self-regulate, I believe it’s the first key to surviving this world as an empath. Without it, you’re liable to be a victim of overwhelm. With it, you’re empowered to explore the intensity of your experience, uncovering deep understanding about the nature of yourself, the world, and your place in it.

    Two — Develop your boundaries and barriers

    Boundaries and barriers (which are different) are the second survival capacity for an empath. They combat our deep tendency to get entwined and lost in the feeling state of everything happening around us, putting our attention on everyone else, losing touch with our own self.

    A powerful empath walks into a room, and whether they’re conscious of it or not, feels the whole thing. Their nervous system is set up to tune into the emotional and energetic state of the place and people. They literally feel the room.

    A skilled and conscious empath can distinguish between their own energetic state, and that of others. Through regulation of their own nervous system, they can become a beacon of higher consciousness, even changing the energetic state around them.

    Without the capacity to create boundaries and barriers these situations often result in an experience of overwhelm and suffering. The tumult of emotions, unsaid feelings, unconscious behaviours and intertwining energy fields results in a confusion for the empath, who cannot tell whose is whose, and falls into the same old story that the world is too loud and too much.

    The root solution to this challenge is boundaries and barriers.

    Boundaries

    Boundaries are about expressing to someone else, where the walls of your castle lie.

    “No, I don’t want you to talk to me like this anymore.”

    “No, I’m not going to do it.”

    “No, I don’t want you to come closer.”

    Your boundaries are in a sense, natural—they are what lie at the edge of your own kingdom. They have an “authentic” location. However for many of us (and especially empaths) they’re often hard to locate. It often takes someone trying to cross one, to show you where it actually is. And the moment they do, you feel it.

    Boundaries are fuelled in part by the energy of anger. Not aggression. But the natural anger that protects your sovereign space. Your own ability to say ‘no’ is connected to the predator in you who is quite happy to kill a possibility or create a wounded reaction.

    It’s an explicit naming of where the line around your territory is. And when someone then respects that line, you create an experience of safety and sovereignty for yourself.

    Boundaries come from a lot of relational practice – finding and owning your “no” with the people in your life.

    Declaring a boundary – saying no – always starts with feeling the truth of it inside yourself. It’s a body sense before it’s a decision. For example you can ask “does my body want to be in this room right now?” Yes or no? That’s a felt sense, not a rational decision.

    The higher level practice is one of truth telling – being so sovereign that you only say yes to the things you genuinely and somatically feel a yes to, and saying no to all the things that you don’t actually want to do. That puts the cat among the pigeons.

    Barriers

    While a boundary requires a naming – an actual communication of where the line is —barriers are done without a word. It’s the thing you do on an airplane or a bus when you just close yourself to the people around you and sit in your own space.

    It is always and already in your own sovereign power to actually own your own castle. Your energy field. This can be done in a moment.

    The goal is to seal yourself up in your own energy field. The feeling is like becoming denser – your own self is more concentrated in your bodily location.

    This is the opposite to the common state of an empath – having your feeling sensors out all over the room and world.

    Instead, you just sit in your own bubble. I’m me. I’m here.

    I do this by imagining myself contained in an energetic bubble, the feeling of just being me, sitting in the sphere of my own energy.

    It helps me feel at peace, safe, contained. I have the ground and space to follow my curiosity. I am protected from the intensity of the world around me. I can regulate the input and output.

    Barriers stop other people reading you, or unconsciously reacting to you. It’s not invisibility, though people in public places will probably pay much less attention to you. It’s more like you’re just there doing your thing, and then they can just do their thing.

    Barriers are also what protect you from psychic phenomena. A shaman or spiritual healer must have strong barriers to shield and protect them from the negative effects of any work they may undertake.

    In its most simple sense, strong barriers are the result of just being in your own energy field. When you inhabit all the different parts of you, and you know who you are, nothing comes in that you don’t know about, or consent to. The barrier becomes a perfect membrane that allows you to be you, and everyone else to be everyone else.

    Three – Be conscious of your energetic diet

    What you take in is what your body then has to digest. This is obvious in the case of our physical diet. The food we choose to eat is what our body then digests. This is equally true for our energetic diet – the relational input we’re receiving — the ideas, feelings and stories we take in.

    As relational beings, empaths are disproportionally affected by the quality and nature of the relationships they have. All the people who you have regular contact with impact your nervous system more deeply than most. Meaning: positive nourishing relationships feed you deeply, and negative draining relationships cost you highly.

    I think of this like relational energy input. Our system is designed to feel deeply, therefore each relational connection is attended to with a lot of consciousness (whether we’re aware of it or not!).

    And there has never been a time in known history when humans had quite this much relational connection in our daily lives. Unfortunately, most of it is connection with people we don’t know. For example, all the people suffering in a far-off country. Or the political leaders in such a such place. And these connections are mediated through screens in our pockets or on the desk.

    None of this plays to the strengths of an empath, who is designed to feel deeply, and influence the people who are around them.

    So, a key to survival is therefore: consciously limiting your nervous system input. Restricting the amount of relational connections you’re actively engaged in reduces the empathic load on your system. You don’t have to be connected into quite so many dramas.

    For example, I have realised reading the news is a net negative for me. As I tracked my experience after reading it, I realised that it resulted in my feeling worse 100% of the time. Never once did I flip onto the headlines, read about the carnage, and then feel better and more positive about myself and my day.

    My current practice is a 20 second skim of the headlines once per day. This seems to keep me informed about the facts, without getting infected by the polarised, vitriolic drama-porn.

    I can’t say where you should draw the line for yourself. I can say that I strongly encourage you to draw one.

    The same principle applies to personal relationships. Which are the connections that are a net negative for you? When you add it all up at the end, does it cost you energy or give you energy? Do you feel more alive and grateful after talking with someone? Or more tired and pessimistic? Your energy-body doesn’t lie.

    Empaths are built for relational connection. We’re so sensitive to the nuances of things, we feel natural compassion for those involved, and we think about it while we’re doing other things.

    What’s your inventory of relational connections that feed into your nervous system?  Which ones feed you? Which ones drain you?

    Four – Healing is not optional

    Empaths are generally carrying a whole bunch of trauma. It doesn’t really matter where it comes from, or what it is – the result is a great deal of difficulty and discomfort with being in the body. To be in a full feeling state for an empath, means being in touch with all the things that are hanging out down in the depths.

    So we learn to cope with the pain in our bodies. Our world – with it’s brilliantly powerful market system – has created an unprecedented variety of disembodiment options. From sugar packed foods, to drama filled TV, to addictive super computers running our social media input, the market has created a million ways for us to distract us from ourselves, and numb our feelings.

    The way out is of course through – down into and through your own body. And to learn to re-associate yourself with yourself means facing what you’re carrying.

    Whether it is coming to terms with what happened to you as a child, or unravelling what your family lines gave you, the healing of ourselves is a key part of the journey. The same gifts that make an empath feel challenged in life also hold the key to superpowers. The route to both the healing and the empowerment is through the body.

    I think therapy, and more traditional healing modalities are important, and often necessary. I think some of the most direct healing methodologies are shamanic and energetic – ones that work with the energy and life force of things, returning them to their rightful place.

    I confess, I used to think “healing” was woo-woo and dumb – something for folks who did unicorn mantras because they couldn’t hold down a career.

    Then my guides started facilitating me through shamanic healing processes, and I experienced the undeniable and strange power of it all.

    I don’t think you can survive in this world as an empath without committing to your own healing journey. The conditions make it impossible – you will suffer indescribably if you try.

    This is partly to do with the level of trauma we’re tasked with clearing as a species, and partly with the way the mechanics work. The healing journey not only knits up the wounds you carry, and reintegrates your sense of self, it teaches you, indeed shows you, where your deeper gifts lie.

    You came down here into this life with a particular purpose. And if you’re an empath then you also came here to help with the big collective purpose of healing up the millennia of trauma we’ve all built up. And specifically, you might well have volunteered to come and heal your own particular family lines, and childhood experiences.

    If you feel like that’s bullshit, and no one would willingly choose the amount of suffering you’ve had to endure, maybe it says more about how evolved you actually are as a soul, that you would choose to come and transmute it all. You must have the chops for it—some really big chops.

    Healing and integration create space for super-powers

    The dysregulated empath lives a life that is constantly on the edge of overwhelm. Things in your life swamp you, or threaten to. And so we’ve all learned to cope, find strategies that make it more manageable. Most of these are compensation strategies. They seek to make up for the short fall on one end, with more extension on the other. We think we’re too fucking fragile, so we heavily invest in the tough exterior. We’re scared of people disconnecting from us, so we work extra hard to be nice and likeable.

    The foundational fear is that it all becomes too much. Too much for little you to handle.

    These four principles are a basis for surfing the waters of life, rather than constantly drowning in them.

    As you develop the root ability to self regulate in the moment, the conscious you comes present. The one who can act in the face of the wave, rather than floundering. This gives a fundamental experience of empowerment.

    Boundaries and barriers are what teach us to distinguish between self and other, and to root in one’s own self first. These are both things empaths usually struggle with. This rooting in self further empowers you in your own sovereignty.

    As you’re able to regulate, keeping your feet in your own self, you get more choice about the waters you surf. So often we get so used to feeling overwhelmed, we don’t notice that we keep picking relational connections that actually overstimulate us. It becomes a weird kind of comfort zone. Choosing our energetic diet is like the hero choosing to walk their own path, knowing where to go and where to avoid.

    This entire process is a healing journey. It takes you into the heart of yourself, and all the ways you struggle to interface with life. The sooner we accept that, and commit to our own healing, the deeper the wounds we are able to reknit. And they go deep. Generations back. Incarnations back. And of course back into the deep pains of your own childhood.

    Healing is not optional. And it’s also not something you need to complete before you move forward. You don’t need to fix your brokenness first. It becomes fixed as you walk the path and engage with life.

    The integration of your own body and mind using these principles leads to a potent possibility for the empath: the use of their super-powers for the greater good, and the flourishing of their own life.

    The central shift is described beautifully by my body worker Markus. Once you learn how to self-regulate, you can begin to navigate. The capacity for regulation increases your opportunities to explore your sensations with curiosity and openness. To navigate the territory rather than be overwhelmed by it.

    The world on the other side feels fundamentally different. One of possibility rather than liability. There is a switch in outlook.

    Less: I’m a sensitive empath who is struggling with the overwhelm of this world that doesn’t understand me.

    More: I’m a highly developed empath who chose to come here to learn and help by doing my thing.

    Or in other words, less victim, more beautiful, awesome being.

    As the victim stories in me continue to melt and evaporate, I have experienced first-hand, capacities and powers that come online. Here are three that I believe are common for empaths.

    One – The super-power of intuition

    Empaths, as deep and sensitive feelers, are built to work intuitively. This is a powerful ability when unleashed. Unlike the thinking mind (which our culture generally considers the true mind), the intuitive mind is plugged into the territory of experience, rather than the map of experience.

    To think your way through a problem requires mapping the territory, making assessments based on past experience and knowledge, then running the different scenarios through your simulating imagination. This is the superpower beneath our culture, and therefore also it’s limitation.

    The intuitive mind does not think through the problem, it plugs into the territory – the actual energetic experience of it – and gains direct knowledge about it. With skill (knowing how to be pointed in your intention) and discernment (knowing what is noise and what is signal), your intuition can lead you to answers that according to the rational thinking mind, we have no right to know.

    This can be applied to the most practical of situations. When for example, considering an invitation to an event, the thinking mind can spend a long time computing the different rationales, considerations, possibilities. But when explored intuitively, you get direct data from the body.

    If you imagine being there, in the room, your body will tell you how it feels about it. It will know things about that place that you have no consciousness of.

    If you chase the gift of intuition further along the tracks you arrive at what we’d now call magical abilities, physic gifts. These are still treated with scepticism by our modern culture. They are, however perfectly native, and increasingly impatient about being let out once more.

    Two — The super-power of non-physical communication

    One of the root abilities of a shaman or psychic is their access to non-ordinary reality. While modern culture only believes in physical reality, there is a whole variety of worlds and dimensions accessible when you know how to look. As an empath, you have a particular sensitivity to the subtle dimensions, allowing you to sense what many would never notice.

    You can sense the actual spirit of a thing. And if you can sense it, you can communicate with it.

    A tree doesn’t have a mouth that physically talks, and they don’t have a neo-cortex that (we believe) enables them to think. However, through non-ordinary reality, you can absolutely talk to a tree, and discover it has a mind too.

    The same goes for spirit guides, deities, ancestors, celestial bodies etc.

    These abilities are sometimes called the “claires”: clairvoyance, clairaudience etc. These are the different channels through which we can communicate in this way. Some people “hear” in non-ordinary reality, a kind of telepathy with other beings (I am like this). Others “see” the non-ordinary realms in image, shape and colour. As an empath, you certainly “feel” the other dimensions.

    Underneath the survival strategies of the empath lies the ability to sense deep into reality, to know things our culture doesn’t even believe in.

    Three – The super-power of space change

    An empath has the capacity to walk into a room, and feel the room — to feel the energetic and emotional currents that are flowing through all the people and beings in that space. While in an untrained empath, this leads to overwhelm and overload, the integrated empath does something else. They don’t seek to tolerate the soup of sensations; they consciously influence the space.

    Without saying a word, you are able to consciously change the energy of a room or situation. This begins with changing your own energy, expanding your own field, earthing down into the core.

    The funky gunky feeling can be cleansed and cleaned. The tension acknowledged and given air to breathe. The darkness and negativity dissolved into light and love.

    Whatever you feel like your current level of skill may be, know that your hardware sets you up to command this level of influence. A fully empowered empath is a master of spatial energy, conducting the flow of the moment through their own body-mind.

    The practice is one of feeling yourself in your wholeness, then expanding to include the wider room in the same way you feel yourself. For example, feel yourself as a being of luminous love, sit in that direct experience, then expand the field of love to include everyone around you.

    This can radically change a conversation, or a room, or a situation.

    Closing thoughts

    Writing this has been a healing experience for me – to see how far I’ve come. I often don’t find this an easy world to be in, given the level of my sensitivity. And I know how deeply many of us struggle with these same challenges.

    Many has been the day I’ve railed at myself and God over the difficulty level of the game.

    “Holy fuck, why does it have to be this hard!?”

    Sometimes now, my guides will reply. “You’re finding it hard Ewan? Then make yourself soft.” Which is good advice for an empath. For in that softness lies all exquisite sensing ability that gives us such power.

    I feel it now as I imagine you reading these words. The softness. The compassion for us, and all the struggles we’re encountering.

    So I send you love and blessings, wherever you are fellow empath. I hope this has helped you in some way, as you walk your journey. If you ever get lost, feeling drowned by the near infinite possibility? Go down and in.

    Your body knows.

    Ewan Townhead

    , , , ,

  • Underneath the clench that maintains the dominant posture, lies a sea of feeling and imagery that contradicts who you believe yourself to be.

    That is why you must clench—tighten your gut, armour your heart, squeeze your asshole—because to discontinue this habit would be to plunge yourself into the underworld of the present moment, where the rest of your being—the aspects that you are thus far unable to tolerate—resides.

    It hurts to let go.

    That’s why you hold on so tight.

    Rather the reliable experience of a stiff manageability, than the disruption of a loosened body-mind. Rather the relief of floating above the sensations in a mental world of ideas, worries and dreams, than sinking down into the enormity of what you do not yet know how to embody.

    But it is through the pain that is felt, when you fill out into the fullness of the softened body-mind that you will discover the opposites of consciousness that can be woven into a posture that holds the whole.

    To find the centre—the middle of existence—you must include the extremities of the polarities upon which everything is built.

    To inhabit the heart of the human experience, you must simultaneously reach up into the heights of your foresight, and sink down into the depths of your memory.

    To inhabit the centre of this moment you must simultaneously reach forth into the world with the right hand of agentic penetration, and invite in the world with the left hand of permeable affect.

    Or at least, this is a good place to start.

    As the muscles of my stomach let go, and the floor of my torso softens, there is uncovered, a great wobbly fear—sickness, as though I have eaten a rotten meal. The sensation is of exposure, of such detailed apprehension that I can barely stand it.

    “Run!” cries the ego.

    But I have come this far, and the prospect of returning to the clench feels even worse.

    I do not know how to banish the pain, and the nausea. I do not know how to morph the tension into opening.

    So I sit. In the midst.

    How convenient it is that there is such a multitude of pain-killers. The phone in my pocket that plugs my mind into the social matrix. The cigarettes on the table that give me temporary relief from the crucible of creative tension. The habitual self-flagellation that comes from the story of all the things I am doing wrong.

    I can ingest each and every belief and story—maintaining the ignorance of one who dare not feel the realness of the moment.

    But it doesn’t work does it? It just perpetuates the lie. It simply numbs the sensation of life. It blinds us from the eye that sees the golden thread, that leads from the mind trap of striving to be accepted, toward the wholeness of soul-incarnate.

    “Please God. Show me the way.” I utter, seeking the mythical key that finally delivers me from my suffering.

    And then something softens.

    It is not the mythical key. It is the presence that I was clenching against feeling.

    I feel Him—that archetypal expression of what is divine in each of us, my own true self, the soul manifest. He is right here. Beneath the eternal spin of the narrative world. Inside the feeling of my body, in this chair, in this moment, in this world, under these stars.

    He moves, as I move. The soft undulation of a body that has been tied into conformity for too long. The sensitization of a being that feels he must deflect the harsh inputs of an urban world.

    The sudden smile, as my eyes soften, and I notice the swaying of the trees, and the shape of the houses, and the gift of the consciousness that is able to apprehend all of this.

    Ewan Townhead

    ,

  • My father just left on a train. He’s been visiting me, and now he’s going back to where he lives in England.

    And all of a sudden, it reminds me of the time when I was a child. When he left, moved away, and never came back.

    It still hurts, all these years later. I hide my tears behind my sunglasses.

    My father is the one who taught me to feel deeply. He was a therapist and encouraged feelings. He taught me to show my pain when I was hurt.

    Then I was sent out into the world – “the world” at the age of five, being Lowfield Primary School. And there I discovered, much to my shock, that showing I was hurt didn’t work the same way.

    When I showed I was hurt at school, people withdrew from me. Or even worse, they teased me. I learned a new lesson.

    Don’t show that you’re hurt. Don’t show that you’re in pain.

    It makes people uncomfortable.

    People don’t know what to do around people in pain. It confronts them with the reminder that in fact pain does exist, and they in fact carry it, but don’t want to feel it.

    If you show me your pain, then there it is. It’s between us in the space, in us. And we can no longer deny the existence of it.

    That’s how we work. If we’re in connection with someone, we feel what they feel. This isn’t just therapeutic theory, it’s neurological fact.

    And so when you feel pain, I feel pain too. And if I’m someone that tries to avoid pain as much as possible, then I’m not going to be particularly appreciative of what you’ve just done.

    “Thanks so much. You’ve just made me feel the pain I don’t want.”

    Dealing with the feeling of pain

    From this point I have a variety of options.

    I can freeze up, and numb myself. I don’t know what else to do, it’s all too much, and so as the overwhelm takes over I find myself finally relaxing.

    The pain dissipates, along with my awareness of you, and my body, and what’s happening around me.

    I go into a kind of peaceful daze. This is the body’s fall back option when pain is too high. It’s the same system that kicks in when an antelope gets scragged by a lion and goes limp.

    Or I can run.

    I don’t like what you’ve made me feel. It’s way too uncomfortable. You’re weird, or dangerous. So I’ll disconnect.

    The running away may not be as dramatic as it sounds. It may be a subtle severing of the connection we had, and a polite announcement that I must be “moving along now”.

    Or I can attack you.

    I can take my pain, the pain you’ve made me feel, and I can throw it back at you.

    “Oh are you going to cry about it? What a pussy.”

    It makes me feel in control again, and I become focussed on your pain, and making sure you won’t hurt me like that ever again!

    Or I can take a breath.

    And do something we’re not really wired to do. I can face the pain.

    Pain is a doorway

    Who wants to feel pain? Who wants to voluntarily open up their body-mind and welcome in the feeling of being hurt?

    Why would anyone prefer that?

    “Ok, I can either hit you with this giant fucking hammer. Or I can not. What would you prefer?”

    Why would you choose the hammer? Why would you choose the pain?

    Because to choose its opposite – to choose the suppression of your felt experience – is to choose to supress the moment itself.

    To choose to feel pain is to choose your human experience. For in the pain is the very reason that you resist life. In the pain is the secret design specifications for your greatest gifts.

    What hurts you is a doorway, if you dare to open it, that leads you down into your deeper nature.

    To be worthy of wielding your greatest gift is the result of facing your deepest pain.

    And who knows when that pain will visit on you. And when that opportunity will be gifted to you. When that doorway opens for a moment.

    In a chance conversation with a stranger.

    In the innocent reading of a passage in a book.

    In the vulnerable confession to a client.

    On a train platform. Watching my father ride away once more.

    Ewan Townhead

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  • I don’t want to feel it.

    Whatever the fuck it is, I don’t want to get close to it – that feeling lurking inside. Because I know it changes everything.

    The feeling is me.

    The feeling is my actual experience of the universe, in this moment, as I let the tingles creep over the outsides of my hands, and my spine starts to uncoil of its own accord, and the buried grief from a lifetime ago yells to be acknowledged.

    The feeling is everything. The unfiltered phenomena of life in this skin on this earth, under these stars.

    And encoded within the feeling is everything I am. And everything I don’t want to face.

    You don’t want to feel it

    It is understandable. Life is a shockingly visceral affair. There’s a lot of it, and not very much of you. It plants itself inside your body, pulls on your nerves, weighs down on your shoulders, plucks at your heart strings, squeezes at your guts.

    It’s understandable you don’t want to feel it. Because if you choose feeling, the result is non-consensual. Once you peel off the hardness and shake out the stuckness, you are then plunged into feeling itself. All of it.

    You don’t get to choose what you feel, and what you don’t. You can’t let in the nice stuff and keep out the painful. It’s all or nothing.

    Easier to stay numb. Safer to veg out. Simpler to maintain that you are nothing more than the ideas in your mind, and the job that you perform, and the identity you’ve been given.

    Much better not to feel.

    There are two fundamental ways to do this.

    One. You can rise above it

    Rise above the feeling.

    You can do this through calming breaths, positive mantras, or simply arguing with the utility of feeling in the first place.

    You can seek out the holiest of holy spiritual ideals, and float above yourself on a cloud of love and unicorns.

    You can drink five espressos a day, and drown out the feeling with a heroically full schedule.

    You can craft a superior and grandiose throne for yourself from which you can condemn and banish this feeling.

    You can do many of these at once! You may even be able to do it for years, decades. Some do it right until the bitter end. But bitter then you will be, for you will have spent your entire life in evasion.

    Because the feeling is none other than experience itself, which is none other than God, who is none other than you.

    And so as you rise above yourself, you ascend to a plane unearned, and thus pull rank on God himself, and claim that you know better than he, what should be felt, and what should not.

    You will not find yourself this way.

    Two. You can sink into it

    There is another way to wriggle out of this inconvenient problem of feeling. The relief of the full bodied collapse.

    Fall. Fall so fully into the feeling that you become it. Let it consume you and pull you down into its dark and warm embrace.

    Let the feeling becomes so full that the line between you and it dissolves as you become One.

    When you emerge once more, you may feel grateful. You might call it catharsis. You might even have paid workshop leaders to take you into this experience so you can feel like you’re making good progress toward finally healing yourself.

    You can spend a very long time looking for yourself in the intensity of the feeling. But it will not provide what you seek.

    For while you may believe you have honoured the feeling by communing with it so fully, what you have actually done is to have merged with it.

    You have unplugged your consciousness from awareness, and relieved yourself of the responsibility of experiencing the feeling. You have collapsed the boundaries and returned to the infancy in which there is no difference.

    You cannot feel the feeing if you are the feeling.

    You will not find yourself this way either.

    The movement of the centre

    First, drawing in the fullness of breath, to fill your chest and dilute the dry nameless pain. Bringing to life what you don’t want to feel.

    Then, slowly releasing the fullness of breath, to empty yourself and return to the silence. Reminding yourself that you are more than what you can feel.

    First, expanding up and outward, giving you a higher perspective so you can lead the chaos of life as it happens.

    Then, hunkering down and inward, bringing you into contact, so you can surrender to life as it happens.

    Up and out. Down and in.

    And in this moment it all comes together.

    The heart, held in the centre, delicately moving back and forth, regulating the flow of life.

    It is in this feeling that you reside.

    This is where you live. All of you.

    This is where you’re closest to God.

    This is where you find yourself.

    Ewan Townhead

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  • She came too close.

    She presumed too much.

    She took what she needed.

    I’ve spent my life trying to keep her happy, making sure I’m giving her what she needs. There’s something in my base-code, an algorithm that says her emotional well-being is my responsibility.

    So when she’s unhappy, my code tells me it’s my fault. And I must comply with her demands.

    She’s not a specific woman, she’s woman, and when she calls, I must answer.

    It’s taken me years, but slowly, through much work, with much help I’ve learned to see underneath my programming. And underneath it exists a line. A demarcation between she and I.

    I don’t know precisely where the line comes from. But if I pay attention, the feeling of its violation is unmistakable, like an enemy coming into home territory uninvited.

    And I’ve learned that the line is mine. One to be spoken.

    “No. I don’t want to give you what you want. Back you go.”

    The violation of boundaries is a universal human experience. It’s the inevitable consequence of the fact that we are separate, and yet yearn for union.

    We violate these lines in different ways.

    He is an expert at overt violation, rough and physical, he just grabs what he wants, brutally shoving dissent out of the way. She is an expert at covert violation – subtle and emotional – she schemes and manipulates, sliding past dissent unseen.

    It took me years to notice that she violates too. I thought it was just him. That’s what I’d been told, but it wasn’t true.

    “You always do this.” She says in that voice that cuts right through into my shame. “I hate that you don’t think of me first. I’m wondering if you actually love me at all! If you did, you’d give me what I want.”

    The average man is not a good player in this emotional game. He thinks in simple terms. He’s clumsy in the emotional world and crumbles in the face of her power.

    “Sorry.”

    He drops his head, beaten by her shaming, he tells her he’ll do better next time, and be a good boy.

    Or he desperately fights back, closes his heart, refuses to swallow the shame, pushes it back at her with force and aggression, defending himself behind his shields and armour.

    Both tactics end up in the same place. The place where we’re alone, and hurt and ashamed. Both of us. All of us.

    The alternative is to draw the line.

    It’s there, waiting for you to take its implicit truth, and create its explicit form. The line is real. Its existence is the very definition of self-love.

    “No.”

    But don’t forget to keep your heart open. Maybe she doesn’t know where your line is. Maybe you’ve never told her before. Maybe you’ve never told yourself before, and the line is just newly acknowledged.

    Tell her with love.

    “No sweetie.”

    The line is drawn.

    And then, magically, I can see her as if for the first time. The woman in my head dissolves – the one who always does this to me – and the woman in front of me appears, real and human.

    There she is, the woman on the other side of the boundary.

    She’s beautiful. I can see that now. Now that I don’t have to desperately defend against her attack.

    I see her now as her. I see her unique being, her good intentions, her imperfect actions. She’s like me, but different.

    And now I’ve shown her where she can’t cross, I have all the space in the world from which to love her.

     

    Ewan Townhead

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  • I’m a sensitive man.

    By that I don’t mean one who is touchy, emotionally volatile, or easily hurt (though I have all these characteristics), I mean in the literal sense of one who has a high capacity for sensing.

    I’m pretty sure I was born sensitive. Though I was also born the son of a somatic therapist. As a child, my father would encourage me to cry, to express my desires and to feel the impact of things. He said feelings were good, and so under his tutelage, and the natural sensitivity of my mother, I learned to feel. A lot.

    It’s a double edged sword. One side powerful. One side compromising. And it’s a characteristic that I’ve struggled to integrate with the fact that I’m a man.

    Here’s how the established logic worked inside my mind.

    1. I’m a man.
    2. Men are supposed to be masculine.
    3. Sensitivity is a feminine trait.
    4. Therefore, I’m either not masculine, or I should stop being sensitive.

    It’s been a long road to untangle that one. And I don’t just mean conceptually, I mean somatically and archetypally. The cultural voices are loud. The biology is deeply wired. The new models are still sketchy.

    But untangle it all we must. Times are changing remarkably fast, and we’re rushing to create new stories about men and women, to fill the void left by the throwing out of orthodoxy.

    Should men be sensitive? How can deep feeling and masculinity co-exist? These are pressing questions for our culture, and for me personally. Here’s my take on the answer.

    Sensitivity is the opposite of numb

    We consider insensitive people to be those that don’t consider the feelings of others. They’re not aware of the impact of their behaviour. This stems from the fact that they can’t actually feel themselves, and thus cannot feel others.

    They don’t notice that the loud conversation they’re having on their phone is irritating every other person in the otherwise silent train carriage.

    They don’t hear their own loudness. They don’t notice their own blindness. They can’t feel their own delicate and ever changing emotional flavour.

    They’re numb.

    This is very helpful in certain situations, or for certain roles. And it’s a vital adaptation to the experience of pain, an adaptation that we all make in some way or another. A child who is abused must desensitize themselves. The pain will kill them otherwise. And we’re all abused to one degree or another.

    You could also say that sensitivity is the original state. The state we are born in, a permeable sponge of experience.

    Being sensitive doesn’t mean you’re ‘emotional’, it means you’re more highly attuned to all sensory data. It’s like a highly calibrated microphone, able to pick up the quietest of sounds – things no one else can hear. But when a siren goes off, the sensory input is too high, overwhelming the microphone and distorting what’s captured.

    It is this sense of overwhelm that I experienced as I child in school. When other kids said hurtful things to me, I experienced the hurt with great visceral detail. Break times were the hardest – the sensory overload of more children than I’d ever seen in my life, all playing at once. I would find quiet corners to hide in.

    Though it also meant that I could sense the mood of my teachers as soon as they walked in the room. He’s angry today – better stay quiet. She’s happy today – maybe she’ll take us to the music room again!

    As I got older I tried as hard as I could to hide my sensitivity. It was a weakness that was not respected by my peers. So I played it tough (as best I could), so I could be one of the boys.

    We don’t want our boys to be sensitive

    Traditionally, we don’t encourage boys to be sensitive. We tell them they need to toughen up.

    And for a culture that long required its men to physically protect its borders – whether the farmer protecting his family from criminals, or the soldier protecting his people from invaders – sensitivity was indeed not a useful capacity for them to have.

    The chief consequence of high sensitivity is the possibility of overwhelm. I feel so much that I get flooded by sensation and lose myself.

    In the midst of combat, when people you care about depend on your conscious vigilance, this is a serious handicap. Freezing up from overwhelm as the enemy storm toward you means death. And not just for you, but for your comrades who depend upon you, and your family, who will have no one left to protect them.

    This is why tough men call sensitive men ‘pussies’. This is not actually a denigration of female genitalia, but rather a comment on the disposition required for men in combat. That is, you need to be hard, not soft.

    Soft means dead. And dead men can’t protect anyone, which is what we’ve spent millennia doing. Thus history has bred us to be tough. It was an evolutionary necessity. We’re all the descendants of tough men who numbed themselves sufficiently to go to war, and protect us from invaders.

    But now the men are confused

    For an unbelievably long time, this is how it was. Men did men’s jobs and women did women’s jobs. This wasn’t a patriarchal conspiracy; it was the way things were. Women spent their lives creating our homes and bringing up our children, and men spent their lives working our fields, and protecting our borders.

    In a couple of generations, we’ve unravelled millennia of tradition. And we’re all reeling as a result.

    Men are confused. I’ve been confused. I was brought up at least as much like a girl as I was a boy. My father himself was trying to work out what it meant to be a man in this new age.

    My culture confused me. It told me guns and violence were wrong and were the ills of history. And yet at the same time, fed me exhilarating films and cartoons where men used guns and violence for good. I didn’t know what was true.

    And it’s because we are confused. All of us. We ripped up the rule book, and now we no longer know where we stand.

    Women have done a pretty damned good job at learning the masculine game. They’ve stepped into the public arena and learned how to be hard. Women who kick ass are celebrated. As they should be.

    Men who feel a lot are still struggling.

    The sensitive men of old

    It was a couple of years ago now, in the midst of a training course with my Tantra teachers that I asked them about this topic.

    “I’m worried. By sensitizing myself, am I not compromising my masculine ability to get shit done, to drive through difficulty? I’m worried I’m making myself less of a man.”

    They told me of the men of the past, the ones who felt deeply, and were celebrated for it.

    The most effective hunters were those who could feel the animals as they walked through the forest, and thus knew where to find them.

    They told me of the Polynesian Wayfinders. The veritable kings of the South Pacific tribes, who through their immense sensitivity could feel the layers of ocean currents beneath their wooden canoes, know where they were, and thus navigate across hundreds of miles of open ocean with no compass or sextant.

    These guys were so deeply sensitive to the world that they facilitated the spread of a people from the Indian sub-continent, all the way down to New Zealand, and all the way across to Hawaii.

    That takes balls man. And I mean that literally – the way they developed that sensitivity was by tying their testicles to the tiller.

    It takes a real man to be sensitive

    And by real man, I don’t mean the macho man of old, but the man that is equipped with the range and depth to face our new evolutionary challenges.

    This man need no longer be the specialist of old – the soldier, who had to numb himself in order to survive the horrors of war. For, many men are still playing that role in their droves, it’s just that the battlefield went indoors, and the weapons became products and stocks, and the killings monetary in nature. But they’re still numb.

    And becoming a deeply sensitive man so you can nurture children, empathise with the oppressed and cry in the woods with your brothers is not enough. I’ve met these men, I’ve been this man. It doesn’t work.

    The answer I believe, is that the sensitivity of the modern man must be used for the purposes of masculine ideals, just like the men of old. While our world has changed radically since those times, the principles are I believe, the same.

    A sensitive man is so much less capable of creating unnecessary hurt in another, because he feels the hurt in another. And as he deepens his ability to feel, he is released to embody that archetypal masculine action – penetration.

    It is this nature that is under cultural attack. But the problem is not that men penetrate, it’s that they do so without feeling the consequences. The more I as a man am able to feel what it is I am penetrating, the more I am able to take skilful and appropriate action.

    By feeling the texture of my client’s heart, I can slice through his avoidance, into the truth of what he does not want to face.

    By hearing the pain and suffering of those around me, I can hunt down the dangerous ideas that maintain their victimhood.

    By sensing the currents of my life and all those I am connected to, I can navigate through the unknown, to a better and more beautiful future.

    Men are designed to penetrate, to break through boundaries, to pierce the status quo, to open what was closed. This can be done with grace, or with brutality. And sensitivity is the difference that makes that difference.

    Ewan Townhead

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  • You’re here for a reason. It’s not a mistake.

    You have to work to do. You have things to create, wisdom to convey, gifts to offer. Your work is just that. It is your Work. It is unique. And if you don’t create it, the world will never have it.

    Your work is something you did not ultimately choose. But it is something that if you commit to uncover and give it, will transform reality in ways you can’t imagine.

    Your work is to create the Work you were made for.

    And yet as we follow the path of living our work, reality tests us. God challenges us. We doubt it. We doubt ourselves. It’s inevitable.

    There are stories we so often tell ourselves, that stop us from offering our true work to the world. They’re stories I’ve told myself, they’re stories my clients tell themselves, they’re stories my friends have told themselves.

    The stories will always spin. But when you mistake them for the truth, the world is robbed of your genius, and you are robbed of your destiny.

    Here are 6 such stories. And how to re-frame them.

    1. Who am I to…

    Who am I to write about the spiritual nature of business? Who am I to coach people on business success? Who the fuck am I to call my brand The Realized Entrepreneur!?

    I doubted it all. I was terrified of arrogance. Of pretending a level of authority that I neither felt nor deserved.

    There’s a myth that we need to have mastered something in order to teach it. You train to become qualified, and then you teach.

    I train for 5 years to become an engineer, then I start engineering. I spend $12,000 on coach training, then I start being a coach.

    This myth relies on the notion of expertise; that I need a certain amount of knowledge to qualify as someone who can then practice. It’s a two-step process. Novice, expert. Student, teacher.

    On the deepest level however, we are each asked to teach that which we most need to learn. The very thing that we are afraid of, yet are attracted to, is our teaching. The very thing that we struggle with, yet are captivated by is our lesson.

    Do not wait until you feel qualified to teach it. Do not wait until it feels safe to give it.

    The journey into the unknown is anything but safe. The winding cosmic pathway toward expressing your God-given essence is littered with discomfort.

    But it is also imbued with light. Follow the light. It’s in you.

    It is you.

    2. I’ll be Judged

    They’ll say I’m arrogant, or delusional. They’ll condemn me, as worthless, or worse. They’ll dismiss me as a naïve narcissist. I’ll be judged.

    Yes. You will.

    People will judge you. They’ll judge you for sticking your head up above the safety line. They’ll dismiss you. They’ll attack you. They’ll ignore you. They’ll bad-mouth you.

    You can’t escape it.

    As Seth Godin says: “You can’t both fit in, and stand out.”

    If you offer your true work, you’ll stand out. And you’ll indirectly illuminate the fact that there are people who are scared, and who are hiding, and not giving their work, and they know it.

    When you shine, they’ll squirm. And the more they squirm, the more they’ll look for a source of the pain and discomfort. And if they don’t look at themselves, they might look at you.

    Your enlightened offerings, have illuminated their shadowed ambitions. Your piercing brilliance, has highlighted their dark desires.

    And if they aren’t vulnerable enough to burn in that discomfort, they’ll disperse the energy.

    The more you offer your true work, the more those who aren’t, will assess and judge you. It’s not a sign that you’re getting it wrong, it’s a sign that you’re getting it right.

    It’s nothing to do with you, or even them. It’s just God inviting us all deeper.

    3. This will ruin my reputation

    My family will never look at me the same way. I have a carefully created reputation with my community and customers, I don’t want to risk that by putting out this risky stuff. No-one will take me seriously if I say what I really think.

    When a relatively little known researcher on vulnerability decided to see what would happen if she presented her study findings while actually showing her own vulnerability, she was terrified it would ruin her professional reputation. 20 million video views later, and Brene Brown’s reputation as a global leader in vulnerability is well established.

    A reputation that is not based on your true work, is a reputation that insulates you from what you’re called to create.

    Something old needs to be broken down, before something new can be created.

    What is the box you have created for yourself? What is the label you’ve carefully applied to you and your work? Is it truly you? Truly you?

    Maybe not.

    4. I don’t know if it’s good enough

    I don’t know if it works. I don’t know if I like it, or if anyone else will like it. I don’t know if it’s good enough.

    Doubting quality means you’re in true creativity. Creativity comes from the frothy space of tension between success and failure. If it’s sure to work, it’s not creative.

    It is not your role to judge the value of what you create. That privilege lies with your tribe, those you’re serving.

    It’s not about perfecting it, then giving it. It’s about experimenting and then experimenting. It’s about the never ending dance, at the edges of your lived expression, as you offer what seems to be in your soul, and the world around you responds with peculiar originality.

    It’s about never knowing if it’s good enough. Because it’s not about good enough anymore, it’s about brave enough, or surrendered enough.

    I wrote a piece recently. I didn’t like it. I wanted to bin it and write something else, but I didn’t have time. So I threw it out, and people loved it. They wouldn’t have, if I’d have listened to my own judgement.

    Are you brave enough to share the work that you literally don’t know the quality of?

    Are you surrendered enough to discover who you are, and what your work is, as you continually give it, and the world continually responds, and you continually pivot and weave, and the world continues in its immeasurably beautiful dance?

    5. I don’t want to be seen

    A couple of months ago someone plagiarized one of my articles. And I don’t mean ripping off a few lines here and there, I mean the whole 1800 word thing, copied and pasted, under his own name.

    I swapped emails with the guy. I assumed good intent. He gave me some pseudo-spiritual justification for the deception. I asked him to attribute it to me. He refused. I decided to share about the episode on Facebook, as it was happening.

    The thread went crazy. My website traffic sky-rocketed. I felt delighted. I felt uncomfortable.

    The next morning, I sat down to journal about the experience. And I realized that the uncomfortable feeling was one of not wanting to be seen.

    I felt exposed. I felt illuminated. I felt witnessed. I wanted crawl back under the cover of obscurity.

    I knew this wouldn’t be the last time. It felt like a watershed moment. I knew I couldn’t go back. People were starting to see me. I was scared. And it was exactly what I wanted.

    I do want to be seen. I want my work to be seen. By thousands of people. Maybe millions. And I’m scared. And so are you.

    6. What if it’s not my true work?

    I’m just not sure this is my true calling. I’m just not sure that this is what I’m here to do. What if this isn’t my purpose? What if I’ve got the wrong thing?

    Your true work is not a thing. It’s an ever evolving expression. It’s not something you discover once, and then spend your life making. It’s something you continually deepen into, finding new edges, new delights and new expressions.

    Your true work is discovered by continually creating what you believe your true work to be, and weaving as you go, reflecting, adjusting, pivoting, embracing.

    To try and clarify and define it before you start creating it, is futile at best.

    If you don’t know what your true work is, then you have a huge open space within which to go and explore. Don’t deliberate. Create.

    A wonderful man taught me something recently. He said: “Ewan, just jam a stake in the ground and then fucking go at it. And if things change? Move the stake, and then fucking go at it.”

    It’s not about getting it right. It’s about going at it, and getting it wrong. It’s about the going, not the getting.

    Go create your work.

    Releasing yourself  from story

    Stories are like old soundtracks that you used to like listening to, but forgot to turn off. Can you hear them? They’re humming along in the background, drowning out the voice of your creative expression.

    Don’t shout louder. Get quieter. And when you really hear them, you can find the off switch.

    The world wants your work. And I know you want to give it.

    It begins with the smallest step imaginable.

    A whisper.

    “Yes. I want to create my true work.”

    Ewan Townhead

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  • Human beings feel.

    And these days we’re feeling a lot. There’s a lot to feel.

    We’re desiring connection with one another. We’re feeling scared at the prospect of actually doing what our inner-guidance asks of us. We’re feeling hurt when people don’t like what we create.

    We’re feeling increasingly free, as we discover that our livelihood and quest for meaning can be the same thing.

    And we’re feeling increasingly frustrated as the ‘simple 3-step solutions’ turn out to be neither simple, nor a solution.

    What are my true feelings?

    “I feel called to a new and deeper embodiment of my purpose.”

    We’re called. We feel it. The tug of possibility. The yearning of the soul. It’s real. Visceral.

    “I don’t feel like I’m good enough to build this business to the next level.”

    It’s hard. It’s not flowing. We’re coming up short. It starts to feel like a mistake, the dream was a mirage. What happened?

    “I feel confused.”

    What’s true? I’m trying to trust my experience, listen to my feelings, and yet they seem to contradict one another.

    6 Different kinds of feeling

    Feeling one thing is not the same as feeling another.

    Leonard Cohen said “I don’t trust my inner feelings. Inner feelings come and go.” Which is a pretty provocative statement from one of our most feelingful contemporary mystics.

    But what I think he’s actually pointing to is the fact that we’re confused about the nature of feelings.

    When I say “I feel…” I think it’s one thing. It’s a feeling. It’s true, and it’s the same as other feelings. All feeling are made equal.

    They’re not.

    So let’s unpack feeling. There are at least 6 different kinds. Probably more. But let’s start with 6. They’re really different. Even though each one uses the verb feel.

    1. Sensory Feelings

    This is the most basic kind of feeling. And perhaps the original meaning of the word. It’s a sensory feeling.

    “I feel your hand in my hand.”

    I feel your touch. It’s undeniable. It’s not open to interpretation. I feel your hand. And it’s touching my hand.

    However I can also feel internal sensations. These can be a little more elusive. But they’re the same awareness of sensation.

    “I feel a contraction in my belly.”

    If I can be quiet and still enough I’ll notice it. I slight pulling, dry sensation in my lower gut. It feels contracted.

    Sometimes it may not be so subtle. A raging suck in my entire lower body.

    Feelings on the level of sensation are very direct. They’re closest to the source of experience. They require no interpretation. They simply require observation.

    2. Emotional Feelings

    “I feel angry.”

    It’s not a sensation. Though it has a sensory base to it. Probably a hot sensation, rising. But it’s more than that. Anger is an emotion. And again, we feel it.

    “I feel sad.”

    It doesn’t require too much interpretation. Although sometimes it can take us years to actually recognize an emotion. It took me a long time to recognize anger in myself. I misidentified it a lot. And it would get twisted into depression.

    There are four fundamental emotions: anger, sadness, fear and joy.

    There are hundreds of shades of emotion. Some of things we call emotions are not really emotions.

    3. Feelings of Desire

    “I feel a desire to kiss you.”

    Desire is not an emotion. It’s a pull. It’s the pull of Eros. Eros is the root of erotic, but erotic doesn’t mean suspender belts and baby-oil, it means the mysterious force of nature that has us want something. It’s love with movement. It’s evolution rising up.

    “I love writing. I want to write.”

    We feel it. We feel desire. Desire is not sexual. Though it can be expressed sexually. Desire is the movement that wants to push out and through, into something new.

    “I feel a desire to help you create your new teaching program.”

    It’s not an emotional feeling. I just feel I want it. I desire it.

    4. Intuitive Feelings

    “I feel it could be powerful for you to explore your relationship to money.”

    I said that to a new client recently. I just had a feeling that exploring his relationship to money was going to unlock a lot of the things he was struggling with.

    It wasn’t an emotion or a sensation. It wasn’t a desire. I didn’t want him to explore it necessarily. But I had a feeling it could open up some things neither of us could quite see yet.

    It was an intuition.

    Dan Siegel, the famous Neurobiologist says intuition is a feeling based in science. It’s the ability to draw information from the neuronal webs that surround all your bodily organs.

    We think our brain is in our head. It’s not. We have neural networks throughout our entire body. The biggest cluster is indeed in our head. But we have two enormous clusters around our heart, and in our gut too.

    “I have this really strong feeling we should go meet this guy. I don’t know why.”

    Intuition is the ability to feel the messages from our body.

    5. Relational Feelings

    “I feel really close to you.”

    Closeness can mean physical proximity. But when I say “I feel close” I normally mean that I feel connected to you. It’s a relational feeling.

    We’re mammals. We’re designed to attach to one another. Young mammals attach to their parents in a way that other species don’t. It’s one of the things that separates us from reptiles, birds, insects and other creatures.

    We can feel the texture of our relationships, in the moment.

    “I feel really seen by you” is not about literally being observed with the eyes, it’s feeling understood. In other words, you and I are connected, and we’re both feeling the mutual understanding that we’ve created.

    Relational feelings are the felt experience of being connected with another human being.

    “I feel you.”

    6. Shadow Feelings

    There’s a bunch of stuff that we think we feel, that aren’t actually feelings. Or they are feelings, but they’re masquerading as something else.

    We’re now into the territory of language games.

    Language births consciousness. But it also warps it. We can say things in language that are impossible to actually experience in reality.

    The philosopher Alfred Korzybski was one of the first to write about this. He pointed out that in language we can talk about the distinction between our bodies and our minds. And yet, if you really look, you can never find the split. It’s always a body-mind. You cannot actually experience one without the other.

    “I feel like I have to work harder to succeed.”

    It’s not a sensation. You can’t find any sensation in your body that’s labeled “I have to work harder.”

    It’s not an emotion either. Or a desire. It could be an intuition. A calling to work harder.

    When I ‘feel’ this feeling though, it’s not an intuition. It’s an assessment.

    Some part of my mental map of the world says that the level of hardness with which I’m working is insufficient.

    And yet if I try and experience the scale of sufficient and insufficient I can’t find it. I’ll discover that my idea of ‘sufficient’ is completely arbitrary.

    This is a shadow feeling.

    And this particular one is simply a ‘belief’. It doesn’t rest on anything true. If you follow it down, you’ll discover that it’s simply a concept, resting on another concept, resting on another concept. There is no solid ground under it.

    There’s no feeling there at all.

    We’re misreading our feelings

    We’re making category errors. We’re mistaking one kind of feeling for another. A lot.

    We misinterpret emotions as intuitions. I feel fear at the prospect of starting a new project (which is utterly inevitable), and yet I misidentify that as an intuition that I’m not meant to be doing it.

    We misinterpret relational feelings as sensations. I experience disconnection with someone close to me, and then ‘feel’ that person has ‘pushed me away’.

    We misinterpret beliefs as emotions. I get pissed off in relation to you, but I then tell you that “I feel you shouldn’t have said that thing to me.”

    We’re confusing our feelings. It gets us into trouble in our relationships, in our businesses. It warps our connection to reality.

    It confuses us, as we walk the winding path toward realizing our work in the world.

    I don’t feel like it

    I was taught that “if it feels too hard, I don’t have to do it if I don’t want to.”

    Which is true. I don’t have to. I don’t have to do anything if I don’t feel like it.

    The freedom to ‘trust my feelings’ growing up has probably given me a much higher level of emotional awareness than many men of my generation.

    But what I’ve had to learn is that the momentary “I don’t feel like it” always contradicts and obscures a deeper feeling.

    I love to write.

    I love the feeling when I can birth something new, and say it in a way I’ve never thought of, or heard someone else say. I love discovering who I am, through writing about what I see.

    It gives me such a sense of fulfillment. Soul deep fulfillment.

    When I imagine myself in 10 years, I imagine a man who’s a recognized writer. The author of published books and the speaker of new ideas.

    That’s something that’s important to me. I want it. I desire it. I feel called to it.

    Yet each morning I wake up, and I don’t want to write.

    “It’s feels too hard” the voice inside me says.

    “You’re not good enough. You won’t write anything good today, better to not try.”

    If I trusted my ‘inner feeling’ I wouldn’t write that day. I’d wait until I felt better. Which is what I did for years. I waited until I felt ‘in the mood’ to write. It meant I wrote occasionally.

    Now I write every morning. Whether I feel like it or not.

    Because I’ve learned to recognize that I’m just feeling afraid. I’m afraid of stepping out of my comfort zone, because I don’t know what’s out there, and I don’t know myself in that unknown place.

    It’s fear. Not intuition. Or desire.

    So I’ve learned to ‘not trust’ that inner feeling.

    Which feels like a much better strategy.

    Ewan Townhead

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