Are Feelings a Tool?

Feelings might be the hottest topic of our time.

Everywhere you turn, someone is asking: How do you feel? How did that make you feel? What are you feeling right now? And there's something beautiful in that, we've finally given ourselves permission to pay attention to our inner world.

But here's a question I've been sitting with for over twenty years, and especially since I started studying Access Consciousness: what if a feeling was never meant to be the final word?

When I began that reeducation around thoughts, feelings, and emotions, one idea quietly rearranged everything for me. It was this, feelings are a lot like the weather. They tell you something is moving through. They report on what's happening around you and within you. But weather isn't a conclusion. Rain doesn't mean something is wrong with the sky. It's just… what's passing through right now.

Most of us do the opposite. We reach for a feeling to tell us what is true, to define reality, to conclude something about ourselves. And the moment we treat a feeling as a verdict, we get stuck inside it.

a feeling lives in the body. you don't.

By definition, a feeling is a sensation in the body. And your body, bless it, is magnificent at simple, honest sensations. Hot. Cold. Hungry. Full. The pleasure of touch. The body just is.

Think of a cheetah out on the savanna. Its body isn't happy or sad. It isn't depressed, and it isn't anxious about next week. It simply is, most of the time. That's how our bodies are too, underneath everything.

But you are more than a body. You're a being, a soul, an infinite being who came here to grow, to evolve, to keep learning and to receive more. And here's the subtle thing we do: we take the senses and perceptions of the being and we push them down into the body, and we call the result a "feeling." The body doesn't actually carry concepts like I'm stuck or something is wrong with me. Those aren't body sensations. They're perceptions we've squeezed into the body until they feel solid and permanent.

And once something feels lodged in the body, it becomes so much harder to shift.

the turn: from conclusion to question

Without the right tools, evolving is hard. It's difficult to move from where you are to the next version of your life when feeling is being treated as fact.

So here's the tool. The next time a feeling rises, especially one that keeps you stuck, don't buy it as a conclusion. Pause, and ask:

What am I sensing here? What am I perceiving?

That one question changes your whole relationship to it. A feeling is a lower harmonic of a perception. The moment you ask what you're perceiving, you step out of the body and back into the being, because your body actually lives inside your being. And your being is vast. It can reach three or four feet around you, or as wide as the whole planet.

So when you meet a heavy feeling with what am I sensing?, you start to see that it isn't lodged inside you at all. It's energy in your being, something outside that dense, fixed place you thought it lived. And energy in the being can be moved. Played with. Explored. Transformed. It gets lighter. More spacious. Less significant. It stops being a part of you and becomes something you can change.

why this month, of all months

We're about to enter the month of Cancer, and there may be no sign more attuned to this conversation. Cancer is water through and through: a water sign with a water nature, double water. And water is endlessly perceptive. Touch it and it responds instantly. Drop a single stone and the ripple travels until the whole surface has felt it.

That's what this season can do to us. We become more porous, more feeling, more aware of every ripple. Which means we'll have more to work with than ever, if we hold it as a tool rather than a verdict.

Because here's what tends to happen: you feel "bad," and you decide something's wrong with you. You feel stuck, and you assume you've done something wrong. But if you meet that same moment with what am I sensing? what am I perceiving? and how could I use this? you take it somewhere entirely new. You turn it into a doorway and a possibility.

This month can hold an extraordinary amount of joy, fulfillment, and lightness, as long as we really receive this one awareness: feelings and emotions are not the end of the story. They're awareness arriving. They're information. They're just like weather.

So here's what I'm inviting you into this Cancer season: what if every feeling that moved through you could become fuel for your own spiritual and conscious upgrade?

What might be possible then?

Have so much fun and lightness this month!!

If you'd like to explore this with me live all month, the Conscious Momentum membership is open. We meet around the new moon, the full moon, and every week in between. Come join us.

— Michael Ocher · michaelocher.com