“Wholeness does feel good, but it usually isn’t euphoric or ecstatic.”
Melissa writes:
Thank you for last week’s tip about positive feelings bringing us more into wholeness. However, I have experienced times when excited, happy almost euphoric feelings don’t seem like wholeness. There can be almost a manic, “has to be this way,” feeling about them. In contrast, the positive feelings that are like wholeness feel open to whatever is. To me wholeness is does feel good, but it usually isn’t euphoric or ecstatic, more like a neutral “warm.”
Dear Melissa:
Thank you so much for bringing in this discernment. You are reminding us that we can’t just classify “positive feelings” as one category.
As always in Focusing, it’s not the category that guides us, but how the actual experience feels.
Some enjoyable feelings are accompanied by a tone of desperate “got to hang onto this,” with a kind of pushing away of anything difficult. That, then, would be acknowledged as “something in me that feels I have to hold onto this…” and can be the opening for a Focusing process.
When we are Self-in-Presence, our enjoyable feelings have a welcoming quality: there is a welcome to anything in us that doesn’t feel this great, like a generous host whose doors are flung open to the less fortunate.
When we are Self-in-Presence we are unafraid that challenging feelings can take us away from Self-in-Presence. We enjoy our enjoyable feelings, and we turn toward our less enjoyable feelings with compassion.
When we are Self-in-Presence we can say, as Barbara McGavin taught me to say, “I am the space for all that arises in me to be as it is.”
