Kirkepiscatoid

Today’s readings are about “feeling”--she describes their absence as “Without feeling, living becomes one long bland journey to nowhere that tastes of nothing” and feeling’s connection to God as “Feeling leads us to love the God we cannot see and see the God around whom we have yet come to love.”

Reflection questions:

1. Meditate on how your deepest feelings have helped you grow in your spiritual life.

Sometimes, I think my feelings have been a compass, in which sometimes I’m off base (often when there is inner conflict) but usually I’m right on in terms of the direction I need to go. I think a lot of my spiritual journey in the past couple of years has been as a result of listening to my feelings.

Sometimes, I think my feelings have been a source of confusion. It is hard sometimes to sift out a true feeling vs. a “desire”...what is really the right, true, and good thing to do vs. “what I want.” Part of the “sifting process” is to spend time alone with God and time in God’s word.

Sometimes, my feelings have helped me to be better attuned to the needs of others. I can truly empathize vs. sympathize.

2. Write about some time when you ignored your deepest feelings. What were the consequences?

There was a period of time, when I was in my early 20’s, when I had come out from under the pain of a violent childhood, that I simply chose “not to feel” for a few years. I like to joke that I spent the first 30 years of my life “learning not to feel, and getting pretty good at it” and now I am stuck spending the next 30 re-learning how to feel. It was handy to be self-absorbed in my 20’s—I had to be focused to get through medical school as an older person, prior to that I had to be focused to get through college. It was very utilitarian to shove my feelings to the side.

But somewhere in my 30’s I started feeling the fallout of this. A lot of my life was “mechanical”. I was working hard, and a lot of hours, and it was easy to ignore the pain that was starting to bubble up about my repressed feelings and bury it in work. My life was very mechanical and predictable. Work all week, sometimes up to 12-14 hours a day, go home, crash, get up do it again till the weekend, then every Sat. and Sunday play golf with the same people. I could hide in my routine and avoid dealing with it. My work felt “mechanical”, my recreation felt “mechanical,” and my relationships felt “mechanical!”

When I moved back to Kirksville, my work demands were not as big “hours and time wise” but in some ways, the personal responsibility was greater. Now instead of being part of a 16 person practice, I was part of a 3 person practice, and soon afterwards, a 2 person one. So “fewer hours/more call/more responsibility” led to a situation where I could not longer just hide behind hours of work to push my feelings aside. I had to play catch up in a big way!

The scary part is I have this huge realization that in this new place in my life I am incapable of going back to the way I was, even if I wanted to, or tried. Sometimes I grouse to my best spiritual friend, “I remember now why I quit feeling, dammit! Sometimes I think I oughta just go back to the way I was!” but he knows I am blustering and knows it is impossible for me to go back so I think mostly he just rolls his eyes and ignores me when I say that.

3. In what ways are your feelings suppressed? In which situations are your feelings given expression? Journal about the difference and its implication in your spiritual life.

I still am tremendously bad about suppressing my feelings when I feel someone is going to disagree/argue/fight with me, or get ready to say something that will hurt me, or abandon me, or cross-examine me to the point of where I think they are being inappropriate. In those situations I like to think, “I’ll be damned if I will let you see me get hurt by you.”

The situations in which my feelings are given expression are when I feel totally “safe”, like in my circle of my most trusted friends, and I think behind a keyboard I become freer and more open with my feelings. I had two friends encourage me to start writing again—something I had literally put aside from age 18 to 46—and it has opened up a new world for me with my feelings. I am not really terribly willing to let everyone see them for “me”--I mostly write openly only to my most trusted friends, or behind my nom de plume on the blogosphere, so it is my “bloghandle” writing, not “me”--but recently I have started to allow a few of the “faithful blogfriends” to see my real identity on Facebook. It did take a while, though, for me to get that brave!

Something I recently learned from reading the book “Soultypes: Matching your personality and spiritual path” that both my dominant personality type and my “shadow” personality type need feedback in fairly intense, one on one, trusted spiritual friends. I am very grateful in that I have a few, and one in particular (although I know sometimes I have to be a bit of a drag on him, because of our difference in energy levels and the fact I can have runs of “insatiable spiritual appetite” and he has to help guard against me being a glutton and eating myself sick!) I am still afraid of some of my feelings, but far less so than I was even a year or two ago.