Feelings – The Very POINT of Everything!

For Me Feeling is the Very Point of… Well, Everything!

Last night Kris gave us an exercise to discover our dominant modality. Is our preferred mode of perception visual, auditory, kinesthetic, or gustatory?

He said this modality would be the primary method of communication between ourselves and essence. Once we know that we prefer to communicate visually, we can not only be alert for visual messages from essence, but we can bridge to our Ma’at state more easily through this primary sensory modality. [The Ma'at state is the closest to essence we can get in our focal awareness.]

During the course in hypnotherapy that I took before Christmas I discovered that my dominant modality was kinesthetic or feeling. Understanding that feelings is the primary way that I communicate amongst myselves has been very illuminating for me and has created an automatic ‘true north’ for me in every new situation. All I have to do is ask myself, “How does this feel?’

In only half a day of applying this, I have really begun to enjoy this life changing idea that how I feel is not only the most salient point of any moment within my nows, but the living resonance in my awareness of my larger self. Like bells ringing in neighboring valleys, my feelings are the evidence of my continual mergence and reemergence of myself as Essence.

I must say, it is so freeing and powerful to realize that how I feel – bodily sensations, surface emotional mood, deeper feeling tones. These are the heart and key of what I should pay attention to in my everyday moments.

What I realized immediately that evening, was that for most of my life, I have been intentionally setting aside my primary mode of communication with essence. If you had asked me what my primary modality was a few years ago I would’ve said ‘visual’ because I’ve been a visual artist most of my life.

But that course in hypnotherapy demonstrated that my primary modality was strongly kinesthetic. [appreciating that the dictation program miss-typed the word ‘kinesthetic’ as ‘skin aesthetic’ - lovely!]

Ever since I was a child I have blocked, denied, or undervalued my feelings. I have always put this down to the reserved English background of my parents, where Father shook each of my brother’s hands, and mine, and kissed my sisters on the forehead, once a year on Christmas morning, otherwise hardly ever touching anyone, even my Mother.

No one ever said to my young self, “Oh Johnny, your feelings are so refined! So appropriate and revealing!” When I was growing up I was praised for my intellect and also for my artistic abilities, but never for my sensitivity and responsiveness to how I was feeling.

The atmosphere in my family was that feelings where somehow an unavoidable weakness of being human, and that being a ‘man’ or even a ‘proper’ woman meant that you ‘did the right thing’ regardless of what you were feeling. [Feelings were a necessary evil, to be ignored if possible, and resisted if necessary.]

But thank heavens, I was GAY [how odd to see this as a gift now, when back then I thought it was a curse!] and this allowed me to duck under a lot of this indoctrination. I would say to myself, “Sure, that may be true for them, but it doesn’t necessarily apply to me.”

When I got to university I got more and more comfortable touching other people and myself. Touching physically that is to say. It was years before I learned to relax and enjoy “touching” others emotionally by consciously engaging and sharing feelings. I had always avoided this kind of activity because it seemed so feminine and weak.

In a funny way ‘the penny dropped’ for me around all this during this recent session. I accepted the idea of reaching out emotionally to myself, using the repertoire of tools and techniques Kris has taught us. Reaching outwards and inwards towards the feelings I am sensing more and more, within me and around me.

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After doing this practice for just half a day I am totally sold. Paying attention to my feelings in any given moment as the lead indicator, so to speak, of the meaning, value, and deeper processes involved in that moment. Or better, it suddenly makes sense that feelings are the phonographic needle, the stylus, carving a pathway of meaning through that unique stream of moments I call being me in the now.

My question, though, is about the metaphorical meaning of feelings. In my decades masquerading as a visual and auditory person, I became quite adept at identifying and working with the symbology and metaphorical meanings behind visual images. But I admit to being a little out to sea about how to interpret feelings. What might a feeling be a metaphor for?

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The thought occurred to me as I was writing this, what do visual, auditory, and (now this could be interesting) gustatory people need to focus on? If you are primarily visual, do you get your messages from essence through visual images? What about the auditory person? Is their primary channel for communications with essence sound?

Does this work differently for each modality? Does the auditory person feel that the soundtrack of their nows is the primary thing, just as I regard the feeling channel to be the one that carries depth and meaning? How does the visual person see things?

Kris made a couple of interesting points in this last session. First he pointed out that our sensory preference will play an important part in identifying our Ma’at state. Then he said that the Ma’at state was different for the different modalities. Some follow up on these two issues seems indicated

My last question is about the role of feelings in everybody’s life. I feel [sic] that it is not only kinesthetic people who need to value their feelings more. Visual and auditory and, bless them!, gustatory individuals all need to pay very careful attention to their feelings too.

I am guessing that we ALL get to learn from our feelings, along with important insights [visual], amazing music [auditory], and let’s not even talk about the inestimable pleasures of our gustatory faculties! [This IS a family newspaper!]

For me now though, even more than ever before… How I am feeling is the very point of everything!

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