An Often Overlooked Key for Quality of Life

Amsterdam,

October, 10, 2013 

Human beings look for happiness. The reason people go to work, the reason they engage in relationships, and the reason they take care of their health are all the same: people strive for happiness, they want to feel good. This may not be an astounding fact. The most common response to the big question “what do you want out of life?” is: “I just want to be happy.” But what does this mean? What actually gives us happiness and how can we enrich our experience of life? 

Let’s start with examining this feeling of happiness a little closer. What are generally the things and activities that people use to become happier? One obvious answer is buying stuff. A new pair of jeans, a sports car, or even a bigger house; happiness seems to increase after acquiring an object. Most people realize that the happiness of owning something new and exciting fades away. Obviously this is true, because if it was not, only the rich would be happier and those who hoards things. Take a new car as an example, it may be a few months, for a house it may be a few years, but what was once new, becomes the standard and with that, the added happiness is gone. A simple conclusion here could be that owning things does not lead to lasting happiness, but to most, that would not be news. The same goes for relationships. A new romantic entanglement brings lots of joy, excitement, and fulfillment. Life feels amazing for a while and happiness goes through the roof. But, it does not last. Many spiritual traditions have an answer for true and lasting happiness that goes beyond earthly goods and relationships, but as interesting of a topic that is, it is not the point of this article.  

What I would like you to think about is: what is this happiness that you are experiencing after buying a new toy or finding a new romance? Is it the toy or the person that carries this intrinsic happiness? The answer is no, of course. The happiness that you are experiencing in relationship to anything, person, or situation in your life is a visceral experience. It is a combination of the emotions you’re feeling, the energy that is running through your system, and physical sensations that you are aware of. It is not the thought about your car that makes you happy, although a thought may serve to activate the visceral experience. Instead, it’s the bubbling joy in your body, the excitement in your belly, and the smile on your face that gives meaning and depth to owning a new car.  So, the interesting question is: Can we improve our capacity to feel our emotions, our energies, and our bodies? Wouldn’t that make every situation in life richer, deeper, and more intense? Wouldn’t it make life feel simply more alive? 

Perhaps you can recognize the truth of this, but you may have already thought of the other side of this coin: doesn’t feeling more automatically mean that you feel more of all of life, not just the good stuff? Doesn’t it mean that you also feel more anger, sadness, and fear? Of course it does. Research has shown that human beings are not able to suppress one emotion and still feel other emotions to the same degree. So, if you are suppressing sadness, you are also suppressing joy. If you are suppressing disappointment, you are also suppressing excitement. Thus, by suppressing one emotion, you become numb across the full range of emotions. In other words, if you’re not crying regularly, your life is duller than that of those who do enjoy a regular cry. If you’re not shouting and waving your arms with anger every now and then, you feel less alive than those who do.

Although they may not admit it, for many people, feeling more is scary as hell. Feeling more is intimidating to most people because - consciously or unconsciously - they have memories of feelings that were too intense. Those feelings that were perceived to be too intense were the reason they stopped feeling more to begin with. In most cases, these intense feelings arose during childhood when the person still had a fragile and incomplete nervous system that was unable to handle these emotions. However, as an adult, the nervous system is capable of processing these intense emotions without having to shut down. The only problem is that there is still a trigger from the past that causes adults to shut down when emotions that have been labeled as unwanted at one point are about to arise.  

Fortunately, this process of becoming more and more numb is reversible. The most helpful step in regaining your full feeling capacity is recognizing that every emotion is intrinsically enjoyable. There is no such thing as a negative emotion! Perhaps you remember how deep life felt during a time when you experienced some intense grief or you might recall a moment were you felt extremely alive and invigorated after giving your anger full expression. Feelings give life juice, feelings make you feel alive. The intrinsic joy of being alive is hidden in every feeling that moves through you. So, if the message that every emotion is intrinsically enjoyable resonates with you and you recognize the importance of your feeling abilities for the quality of your life, there is a world to be explored.  

The journey towards feeling more starts with very simple practices. The purpose of these practices is to make your system familiar with emotions again. Your nervous system needs to learn that it’s okay to feel these feelings again. With gentleness and patience, it will become clear to your system that it’s safe to feel. And, the more you start to feel again, the richer, deeper, and intense your life becomes. After a while, you won’t need drugs, a “skydive”, or a fast car to make you feel that you are alive. Feeling more is the greatest gift you can give to yourself. It will dramatically enrich your experience of sports, relationships, and even a new car, because the depth of all these experiences is proportional to your capacity to feel. 

There is a simple practice I can recommend so that you can begin to feel more today. Every day, take five minutes for this exercise. Close your eyes and track what you are aware of. Start with just being in stillness for a minute. Then, move your attention to your physical body. How is your body feeling? Where are you experiencing tension or pain? Are you feeling the chair and the clothes you’re wearing?  After a minute, move on to your emotions. What are you aware of? Are you numb? Are you irritated, impatient, or content? Perhaps two or more feelings are present at the same time. Track all of this. Then, move on to your energy for a minute. Energy is the experience that allows you to know that you have hands when you close your eyes. Where are you aware of energy in your body? Where is it flowing and where is it not flowing? Then, move on to your intuitions. Is there any intuitive feeling or thought that comes in?  Stay with your intuition for a minute too. While you track all these levels, try to be aware of thoughts that come in as well. Just take note of them and let them go.

You can do this exercise alone, but it’s even easier to do it out loud with someone you feel safe with. If you add more people to do this exercise with, it becomes even easier. You can do this exercise in a group and take turns tracking the different levels, while the others just give their loving attention. You will see that it’s easier to feel when you receive the attention of other people. Finally, enjoy. This process is about enjoying and letting more of life in and shouldn’t be burdensome. 

In conclusion, most people understand that to fully achieve happiness, we ought to spend time or money or any other resource we have on experiences and not on material things. Embracing our various range of emotions allows us to enrich our experiences overall, which we can relive over and over again. 

Happy feeling and happy life.