Using your feelings

Feelings used in combination with cognition can be an extremely strong force within you. When both are allowed to exist openly, they speak truth and define the essence of the person you truly are. It is when they are held back that they speak falsely and take away the spirit of yourself.

The composite of all your self-growth can be tapped into quickly and easily through being open to your feelings in the moments they occur. Think about it. When you really get good at some craft or skill, having learned all the details and techniques, you begin to operate more by feeling than thinking. This is true even in a field that you would expect feelings to be useless, such as mathematics. A master mathematician takes a certain direction in solving complex mathematical problems not because that is the way he was taught, but because it feels like the right direction. If you haven‟t gotten to this point of excellence in any craft, you may not understand what I am talking about.

People who begin to master their craft begin to get a feeling sense which suggests directions. Look at the masters of different crafts and how they operate. One such genius was Einstein. Gardner proposes that Einstein developed the general theory of relativity and the special theory through using his intuition as a guide.6 Intuition is just a feeling about something. As you gain mastery in a craft, you are learning less so that the mind has greater freedom to operate in other ways. It is as if the mind can use an automatic pilot, enabling you to do other stuff while still flying. Because your mind is freed from thinking so much, it has energy to focus on other things. The noise of your thinking is turned down, allowing you to hear the fainter volume of your feelings. At the same time, the volume of your feelings increases within your craft through having experienced the pains involved in learning the craft. You become much more sensitive to nuances which previously would have been overlooked but are now highlighted from having felt pain of many mistakes made. You have grown from the mistakes so that your feelings are sensitive to greater detail. The littlest blemish, which beginners completely lack sight for, creates intense feelings within you. At this point, you have developed to a higher level than when you still needed your mind‟s energy to gain the basic knowledge of the craft. 

Your feelings are guides. They direct you to being yourself. It is as if we are masters of ourselves—not having to think about being ourselves, just needing to follow our feelings. There is a master of yourself inside you; after all, who else has been with you every single second of every single day of your life. If you allow yourself to be sensitive to your feelings, you will get invaluable clues. A blatant example of such guidance is the clue your body offers so that you do not starve: hunger, telling you that you need nourishment. A less obvious example is when you feel on-guard around a particular person (as if it is difficult to naturally be yourself). This means that the person is trying to control you. Controlling people want your life in their hands so that they can control your love because they cannot stand rejection.7 If your life is in their hands, it is out of your hands. So the feeling of being on-guard is correct. You are guarding yourself from their controlling behavior. 

If you have some old hurt that you have not resolved, it gets in the way of the guidance of present feelings. You have not been being a master of yourself. You have not been being with yourself. Your old feelings block messages that the new feelings want to tell you. Because two messages are trying to speak at once, you cannot hear any message. And when you do make something out of the jumble, until you untangle the jumble, it guides you in false directions.

Let‟s say you have not dealt with hurt from a controlling person in your past. The hurt directs you to meet a controlling person in the present. Because this person reminds you of the hurt you have been denying inside yourself, you feel a connection with him. This feeling of connection really has nothing to do with him, but is just a feeling of connection with the denied hurt he brings back out from within you. His controlling behavior, no matter how slight, will hurt and remind you of the denied deeper hurt. So you are drawn to him, naturally, as if guided by a feeling. You need to get back in touch with your old hurt, and accept its message that you were suppose to receive long ago. This will help you integrate the hurt to free yourself from the confounding effects it creates from mixing with present feelings. 

As a master of yourself, you are able to tap into guidance which present feelings offer. For example, when you feel pressure from someone to take control of him, you can almost be certain that you are dealing with a person who has a dependent nature.8 He wants someone to do things for him and take control. He acts in a manner that call out for someone to save him. This creates the feeling of pressure you feel to take control of him. You are feeling exactly the truth. Because the person seems so fragile, you may also feel as if you cannot speak freely. This is his dependency acting on you to control your actions from a passive position. You may feel somewhat suffocated and tied-down around him. Since a dependent person relinquishes control of his life, he needs to control others to give him at least some sense of self-control. In other words, he needs to expand his self to include other people as part of his self to feel complete. The feelings of suffocation and being tied-down may also come up with controlling people, but because they usually have more external power to use against you, you would also feel threatened. 

When you feel that your worth as a person is being tested, feel that you are being judged, or feel that you are in a competition, someone is needing to compare themselves with you. This is a competitive person who doubts his worth.9 He needs to know your worth to outdo it or to show it as lower than his. This way, he reasons, he is at least better than someone; thus, he masks his feelings of worthlessness.