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time and again i hear my peers sharing about wanting to change the way they feel. i never ask them why, as i think i may know the answer. that answer? well for me, it is because i do NOT like to feel pain. it is not that a feeling is “good” or “bad” it is whether it is painful or not, that predisposes me to the desire to change them. it is true, that decades of using numbed me to all feelings, especially the painful ones, unless they were so painful they could break through my wall of being comfortably numb. those experiences were few and very short-lived as i knew that more of something stronger would return me to a state of neutral bliss.
without a doubt, l;earning to experience a full range of human emotions has been far from easy, and at times i have done my best to balk, relying on something else to replace that next dose. oops got distracted there by bills and FaceBook. see even writing about feeling painful feelings, wants to make me run and hide 😁. which brings me to my favorite bon mot: “i have never died from a feeling, not have i seen anyone else do so either!”
of course there are those who would argue that point, and to that i say, there are many who have died because they reacted or overreacted to a feeling, but the feeling in and of itself did not kill them. enough about others, i myself have felt like dying, because of the way i felt and a few simple Jedi mind tricks kept me from pulling the trigger, literally and figuratively. back when i had Santa God, a rapid flurry of many fevered prayers would be offered up, to take this or that feeling away, and it worked about 60% of the time, so it became my go to action.
now that i have grown up in my belief system, i find that was a superstitious act on my part, and that feelings are transitory. they come and they go, based on environmental factors that are mostly out of my control. they are my reaction to the events in the world around me, although some are delayed reactions to events in my past and some, like worry and anxiety, may even be a reaction to events yet to pass.what i am saying is this, feelings, for me, are unavoidable, now that i am clean. feelings are part of the human experience, which i have rejoined. i can either wail and moan that not all of my feelings are comfortable and seek to divert myself from feeling them, OR i can embrace them, allow myself to be swept away by them and move along to the next feeling coming down the road, and there is certainly another coming to my experience, very, very soon.
i do think that the final line of the reading says it best, that having TRUSTING the POWER that fuels my recovery, by experinecing this day, just as it is. no bells , whistles or fireworks need to be added by me.

∞ DT ∞