Tibetan Buddhist teacher Galyon Ferguson quotes from Shakespeare's King Lear. King Lear speaks to Gloucester, who is blind, "You see how this world goes." Gloucester replies, "I see it feelingly."
*Welcoming Beginner's Mind.
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In Irina Tweedie's diary of her training in Sufism, Daughter of Fire, her Sufi teacher Bahai Sahib speaks of "feelingly." He tells her that detachment without love is a great burden.
Bahai Sahib's words caught my attention vividly, for as a practitioner of Zen Buddhism, detachment is a key teaching of the path. I have experienced how detachment can be a burden if misunderstood as separate from welcoming the feelings common to humans. Detachment becomes repression and denial, even distrust of one's capacity to work positively with what we call negative feelings.
Some of us start meditation or a spiritual path thinking it is the escape route from afflictive feelings. We want a straight, no detours, route to perfect peace. We find there is no escape. For example, meditation invites the feelings we meditated so as not to invite. I often refer to this as the basement door opening up and these feelings crawling out. We may want to be feelingly about the feelings sitting with us in the living room but not about those locked up under the floor. A true spirituality unlocks the lock.
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Love itself is before feeling, while love manifests in feeling - so we speak of loving feelings. All intangible heart-qualities are like this. These qualities, arising out of source, do not manifest with a static, consistent tone. Such as, joy has a range of feelings.
In spiritual training, we learn to include all feelings. We learn detachment includes in a specific way to relate with feelings: nonemotionally. We include and practice detachment. We can call this learning to befriend our feelings.
Feelings arise in the vast spaciousness and dissolve back into it. We do not hold tightly to feelings. We do not keep spinning with either what we call positive or negative feelings. We are open to explore these feelings.
We can be unheathily attached to three feeling-states, Buddhism teaches us. These states are positive, negative, and neutral. Yet, we can accept these feelings and be curious about them, exploring them. We know how we can move quickly from one to the other.
Accepting all this as being-human is sanity. We do not have to treat feelings so seriously. We need a light touch, one of compassion and kindness toward ourselves. In gracious acceptance we welcome living life feelingly, becoming more human, not less, due to this inclusive embrace.
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In silence practice, we sit with the feeling of unease, discontent, and the urge to run off in the pervasive habitual neurotic speed. We do not run off into entertainment, which we do to avoid this subtle sense of dissatisfaction - what Buddhists refer to as suffering: this is like a pervasive, underlying unease walking with us all the time, even appearing in our dreams. We are willing to explore the slight feeling and be curious about the feeling-energy behind our grasping for more and more experience.
We also sit with positive feelings. We might see how we resist a positive state, feeling unworthy or having learned not to trust it. We might feel a nuanced but profound peace, joy, or love. We can be curious about these, too. We can notice another feeling arise - seen in the wish for this pleasurable feeling tone to continue. We want to maintain the pleasantness, but we cannot. When we try, we push it away. We can notice the feeling when the temporary positivity has passed again.
We learn to trust these basic qualities when they appear absent, knowing they are not; we learn to sense more subtle expressions of them, too. If we inquire, we might find a feeling of joy, for example, we had not recognized before. We had only noticed the apparent manifestations. Yet, joy was always present, only manifesting or not, and when manifesting, to different degrees from very subtle to very apparent.
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A key is to realize we are not any of these feelings, but we are the basic openness. We learn to trust this incessant feeling-transiency. We suffer less, for we soften and release push and pull. We become more relaxed, living with a sense of equanimity, which has a tone of unhurriedness, quiet, and gentleness.
This posture we can call welcoming - another word for this is basic openness. Our fundamental, intrinsic nature is to welcome. We are like a story from the Jewish mystical text The Zohar. Abraham and Sarah sit inside their tent. There are four openings: north and south, east and west. Openings in the four directions - a symbol of welcome for any to enter.
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Last, we are challenged by the feeling of boredom. We relax into this dullness. We feel its texture. We stop running from it. Boredom has a legitimate place. Boredom lessens through not running from boredom. To practice silence is to work positively with boredom. We see it has different degrees and comes and goes. The blahs show us how attached we are to sensation and our resistance to resting in basic openness. Relaxing in openness, sinking into ourselves, we find a wonderful, rich spaciousness - the space of our fundamental healthiness, our joyful heart, our innate quietness.
