Feeling After Reeling

Etched into the woodwork of the heart, resonating through the soul as if by an eternity of memory in the instant, that reality placed and processed through the mind (far too much!); so difficult to escape from, can feelings be trusted?

Music breaks through the soul’s silence and it speaks in ways to refresh us by being our feelings. Sad music and threads of melody swoon. Feelings are too much for the mind, but quality music and words of truth echo through the crevices of the heart to give meaning. Oh, this pain is palpably real.

Let’s feel our way into the numbness but we cannot bear to venture in the foggy places of the bleak personal history. How do we feel so salubrious when at one with the tunes and words, yet so averse to those closer felt experiences that haunt?

Questions become, for the numb, a vague mystery and the enigma seems helped by things that do not help, but make things steadily worse. A meld of frustration and shame brings the vessel to vacillate anxiously, violently; but to feel is beyond us.

When we are asked by the counsellor, “Don’t tell me what you think; tell me what you feel!” we want to wring their neck. If only we could feel. Feeling of itself becomes the improbable conquest of our being. We feel inadequate because we cannot feel, in a world that would often put us down for feeling. Yet, we know we must feel. It is torment otherwise.

Confusion abounds, and, if we haven’t already given up (yet, how can we?), we borrow upon our already pitiable strength and mortgage those weak threads of hope; a gamble for the virulent strength and hope we need.

Reeling is the state of remaining in suspended animation; completely awash for what to do or where to go and how to take the ensuing felt moments, and paradoxically, how to entreat feeling to make it a home.

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Feeling is the key to life in a world that abuses, negates, and denies feelings.

Feeling, for the one who is reeling, may seem an impossible task. The reality is it’s captured in the moment of surrender – which is chucking our self-protection away. Feelings can only be employed if we venture upon reality and take it face first, with no sedation and no medication.

At the end of the day, a cold and unchanging light bears down in truth:

Being real

Is being able to feel.

That is to feel

Reality’s deal.

There is nothing like feeling reality at full force to augment healing.

© 2014 S. J. Wickham.