It’s difficult to talk about feeling, isn’t it? Language is a medium of concrete distinctions, and in the land of feeling, there are too few distinctions we can easily make. Our language falls flat, ineffectual. And scientists have never come up with a way to measure feeling explicitly. So we are left with a large gray zone in the center of our experience, with no way to share or investigate it.
Feeling State Mapping changes all that. The practice asks us to turn our attention to the actual, felt experience of consciousness. And it asks directly, “What does it feel like?” To help provide a rich base of description, it asks us to compare “what it feels like” to common reference points in everyday material reality.
- It asks where the “felt experience” seems to be located. Most of us can easily point to our gut, our chest, our head, or somewhere else where we feel a sensation of felt consciousness.
- It asks us to compare the feeling to properties of substance. It is also fairly easy to relate a “felt experience” to the common experiences of solid, liquid, gas, energy or light.
- It asks us to sense the temperature of the feeling, as if it were made of the identified substance and would naturally have a temperature.
- It asks us to imagine this feeling-substance having a color, and asks us to select from the infinite range of colors one that “feels right.”
- It asks about whether the “feeling-substance” seems to be moving, or whether there is an experience of force or pressure.
These questions asking for comparison between the actual, felt experience of an aspect of our consciousness with common, sensory reference points from our lifetime of experience in the physical world help us create a tangible image representing the felt experience. This tangible image holds a surprising amount of information.
- High fidelity.
- High confidence.
- High uniqueness.
Suddenly, with a few simple questions, we have made the implicit experience of feeling, explicit. We have given it the same status of our mental imagery and language. We have raised it to the same status as emotion. We have made it visible.
Wisdom and grace reside in the feeling mind. Both have been nearly abandoned in modern life. We have subjugated the feeling mind, stripped it of its central role by our elevation of thinking and preoccupation with emotion. Let us return the feeling mind back to its home at the core of a good life.
