Dealing with Stress Properly - Part 3

Part 3: Reactive and Responsive Feelings

Here we arrive at a threshold between the natural world and the human world: two very different realms.

For today, let’s call our inner life the Soul. Whatever we experience that happens inside us, rather than outside in the sense-perceptible world, belongs to this inner realm. Thoughts, feelings, and sensations all live within the Soul, and there is an enormous range to what we can experience there.

One of the most basic aspects of our feeling life is what I would call the natural or reactive feeling life. These feelings are primarily reactions to what is happening around us. They have to do with sympathy and antipathy: we are drawn toward some things and repelled by others.

Something beautiful happens, and you feel good. Something unpleasant happens, and you feel bad. Someone treats you badly, and you’re angry. You see something disturbing in the news, and suddenly you’re anxious. It can almost feel as if your inner life is a mirror of the world around you. But what if being fully human means becoming something more than a mirror? This question brings us to something fundamental about our inner life: our feelings.

Something happens outside us, and something happens inside us.

And this is also where we tend to identify very strongly with our feelings. We call them emotions, and we often experience them as though they are us.

Whatever we experience inside ourselves: thoughts, feelings, sensations - belongs to this inner world. And there is an enormous range to what we can experience.

For example, I am much more likely to say, “I’m scared,” than to say, “I feel sensations of fear.”

There is a significant difference between those two statements.

In the first, I am scared. In the second, I feel fear.

The first statement identifies the self with the feeling. The second recognizes the feeling as something being experienced within the self.

We are no longer simply saying, “Fear is present in me.” We have become the fear.

That distinction becomes especially interesting when we consider another dimension of our feeling life.

The Human World of Feeling

Think about listening to the music you enjoy.

Can we really describe the experience simply by saying, “I feel happy,” or “I feel joyful”?

Sometimes perhaps, but usually not.

A great piece of music may contain happiness and sadness, tension and release, longing and peace. It can evoke memories, images, and feelings that are difficult to put into words. The experience is constantly changing.

It is more like all the colors of a rainbow or a changing sunset than it is like a simple choice between black and white.

And yet, somehow, we understand it.

This is an important clue about the human world of feeling.

The more natural, reactive feeling life tends toward polarity. We are attracted or repelled. We approach or withdraw. We experience something as pleasant or unpleasant, good or bad.

At its most basic level, this polarity is about safety and danger.

Is this something I should move toward?

Or is this something I should move away from?

That capacity is enormously important for survival. It is part of our natural organization as living beings. If something threatens us, we need to respond. If something nourishes us, we need to recognize it and move toward it.

But survival is not the whole of human life.

The human world of feeling is capable of something much more differentiated.

We can experience feelings that cannot easily be reduced to attraction or repulsion. We can hold contradictory feelings at the same time. We can appreciate something without necessarily wanting to possess it. We can experience sadness without needing to escape it. We can understand someone whose actions we disagree with. We can be moved by something without immediately having to decide whether we like it or dislike it.

In other words, the human feeling life moves beyond black and white.

It becomes many-colored.

Music and the Soul

This is one reason I have such a deep appreciation for music.

Music is not merely entertainment.

When we listen deeply to music, we enter a realm of feeling that is not simply about whether something is good or bad, pleasant or unpleasant, attractive or repulsive. Music can reveal an enormous range of inner experience without requiring us to immediately act on any of it.

We can simply listen. We can allow the feeling to move through us. We can experience complexity without needing to reduce it to a simple judgment.

In this sense, music can teach us something about the nature of the human Soul. It opens a space in which feeling can become more differentiated, more nuanced, and more alive. The symphony does not simply tell us, “Move toward this,” or, “Move away from that.”

It gives us an entire landscape.

And perhaps this is why music has such an important place in human life. It reminds us that feeling is capable of being far more than a mechanism for attraction and repulsion. Music touches something critical to human life.

From Reaction to Self-Mastery

This distinction has practical consequences.

If we remain primarily in a reactive feeling life, we are constantly responding to the world around us. Everything that happens outside us produces an immediate movement inside us.

We experience someone’s anger, and we become anxious.

Someone criticizes us, and we feel diminished.

Someone rejects us, and we experience ourselves as being rejected.

Something goes wrong, and our entire inner world can begin to feel as though something is wrong. It is almost as though we are taking everything personally.

But the more we strengthen our human, diversified, multi-colored life of feeling, the more capable we become of experiencing what happens around us without immediately being determined by it.

We begin to see events as events.

Stimuli as stimuli.

Other people’s behavior as belonging to them. And our feelings as experiences within us, rather than commands that must automatically be obeyed.

This is a movement toward self-mastery.

We begin to move away from reactive servitude to the environment and toward a greater freedom within ourselves.

Instead of simply asking, “Do I like this?” or “Do I dislike this?” our feeling life can begin to tell us something much richer.

It can tell us about other people.

It can tell us about relationships.

It can tell us about the subtle dynamics of human interaction.

It can tell us something about ourselves.

The Soul becomes less like a mirror that simply reflects whatever happens around it and more like an organ of understanding.

Freedom Through Strength

This is always part of the underlying goal when I work with people. It is not simply about making a symptom go away. It is about helping people become more free.

Free from automatic reactions.

Free from being completely determined by the environment.

Free to experience what is happening without immediately being swept away by it.

This does not mean becoming detached from feeling. It does not mean suppressing emotions or trying to become indifferent. Quite the opposite.

The goal is to develop a richer and stronger relationship with our feelings so that we can experience them without being ruled by them.

Instead of saying, “I am angry,” we can begin to recognize, “Anger is present in me.”

Instead of, “I am afraid,” we can recognize, “Fear is present in me.”

The feeling is real. We don’t have to deny it.

But we also don’t have to become it.

And in that distinction, something important becomes possible: freedom.

The more differentiated our inner life becomes, the more space we have to understand, to choose, and ultimately to respond.

We move from reaction toward response.

From dependence upon the environment toward self-mastery.

From being unconsciously governed by every stimulus around us toward a greater freedom of the Soul. This is, ultimately, what I mean by freedom through strength.

Not freedom from having feelings.

Freedom to have feelings without being ruled by them.

Freedom to experience the world deeply without being completely determined by it.

Freedom to allow the many colors of human feeling to emerge without reducing life to black and white.

Wishing you continued strength and good health.

Until next time,

John