We must learn to feel what we feel. We must learn to be able to identify how we feel, what we feel. To "identify" in this way is not to "figure out," not to mentally analyze, but to know "this is joy," "this is grief," "this is fear," simply because the feeling is that clear and strong within us. If we do not know what we feel, we may readily believe others when they tell us what our feeling is. Or tell us why it is that we feel this way. Whether it is intentional or not, good or evil, our power is taken away from us. If we are angry or we are hurt, we must know this; it is specifically borne in us and is for us to feel and to see. It is not to be given up to someone else, nor is it to be judged to be "wrong" or "bad" or "evil," or even "misinformed." It is only when our action follows from our inability to know ourselves and is a reactive expression of it that it may become wrong, or bad, or evil, or it may also be right or good. To pretend that we do not feel, or to ignore our feelings and not recognize them, nor identify them, numbs us from ourselves, from our bodies and our beings, and separates us from each other as well, making us quite alone in the world and in our own life. We feel that we do not belong here in the world with other people. Some of us, because of trauma that we may have experienced in our lives, absolutely feel that we are separate from humanity itself and do not have a part with others in the world. And we may not even be aware of such a feeling and its accompanying belief and behavior. This is why it's so hard for many people to even be aware of themselves as feeling in the first place, for feeling for them may be a most painful experience, a most sorrowful and grief-stricken experience.
I was born six weeks early and kept in an incubator, a plastic box with a heat lamp like they use to hatch chickens, with very little human touch for another six weeks. I did not know human touch. After three months alone in this way, being touched was most intense, invasive and frightening to me; I recoiled from it in fear and pain, causing people who loved me to lose patience and label me as a certain kind of child. At that time it was called "childhood schizophrenia"; now it's "autism." My father was a medic in WWII and was present at Normandy Beach on D-Day and at the Battle of the Bulge. He was artistic and drew pen and ink drawings of the battlefield. They looked like a Bosch painting of Hell with my father standing right in the middle of dying men surrounded by body parts. This affected him deeply; he suffered from PTSD. When I was a young child with my inability to relate normally, he thought I was being defiant, came after me and beat me, terrifying me to the point that I could not even move. And I could see the images of the battlefield in his mind. He had no idea where he was or what he was doing; he too was terrified. The hardest part for me was to reconcile that this pain and violence came from someone whom I knew loved me. He was never able to talk about what happened or how he felt. There was no medical program available for WWII veterans to "debrief" or otherwise treat them. Their children, if they were fortunate, came to somehow understand why this was happening, though this did not diminish the bodily pain and shame, and the psychological terror. I learned to outrun my father; I could see the condition "coming on" and just got out of his vicinity and hid where I could. I never told anyone about it until I was in my twenties and my father never told anyone about either the war or about his treatment of me. He could never bring himself to identify with his pain and I think it did much to make him a sad man and to destroy his health. In retrospect I wish I could have "been there" more for him but I wasn't. I moved to California, three thousand miles away, to "feel safe," and this, as a grown man in my twenties. The hardest part is that I always knew he loved me very much but that he felt so bad about hurting me that he couldn't accept himself, nor could he ask me for forgiveness.
And so, we must be willing to know how we feel and why we feel that way. Sometimes I notice that I feel a certain way--sad, happy, angry, etc.-- though I cannot really see why or how I do. Usually the reason "comes" to me in due time. Sometimes it's not even so personal but almost a collective feeling, a social barometer, so to speak. I do see how people's emotions are manipulated by those in power as well as any social media, and that societies are highly susceptible to what amounts to propaganda. It is so important that we learn to know ourselves.
I was born six weeks early and kept in an incubator, a plastic box with a heat lamp like they use to hatch chickens, with very little human touch for another six weeks. I did not know human touch. After three months alone in this way, being touched was most intense, invasive and frightening to me; I recoiled from it in fear and pain, causing people who loved me to lose patience and label me as a certain kind of child. At that time it was called "childhood schizophrenia"; now it's "autism." My father was a medic in WWII and was present at Normandy Beach on D-Day and at the Battle of the Bulge. He was artistic and drew pen and ink drawings of the battlefield. They looked like a Bosch painting of Hell with my father standing right in the middle of dying men surrounded by body parts. This affected him deeply; he suffered from PTSD. When I was a young child with my inability to relate normally, he thought I was being defiant, came after me and beat me, terrifying me to the point that I could not even move. And I could see the images of the battlefield in his mind. He had no idea where he was or what he was doing; he too was terrified. The hardest part for me was to reconcile that this pain and violence came from someone whom I knew loved me. He was never able to talk about what happened or how he felt. There was no medical program available for WWII veterans to "debrief" or otherwise treat them. Their children, if they were fortunate, came to somehow understand why this was happening, though this did not diminish the bodily pain and shame, and the psychological terror. I learned to outrun my father; I could see the condition "coming on" and just got out of his vicinity and hid where I could. I never told anyone about it until I was in my twenties and my father never told anyone about either the war or about his treatment of me. He could never bring himself to identify with his pain and I think it did much to make him a sad man and to destroy his health. In retrospect I wish I could have "been there" more for him but I wasn't. I moved to California, three thousand miles away, to "feel safe," and this, as a grown man in my twenties. The hardest part is that I always knew he loved me very much but that he felt so bad about hurting me that he couldn't accept himself, nor could he ask me for forgiveness.
And so, we must be willing to know how we feel and why we feel that way. Sometimes I notice that I feel a certain way--sad, happy, angry, etc.-- though I cannot really see why or how I do. Usually the reason "comes" to me in due time. Sometimes it's not even so personal but almost a collective feeling, a social barometer, so to speak. I do see how people's emotions are manipulated by those in power as well as any social media, and that societies are highly susceptible to what amounts to propaganda. It is so important that we learn to know ourselves.
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