What Feeling is For
How being stuck in the rain changed my life
Good morning and evening wherever you are,
I hope you are doing well. This week, I want to share an Aha that seems so small yet is profoundly changing my life.
It's about what feeling is for.
It is the rainy season in the highland part of Vietnam where I am staying for the past week. It rains every afternoon and sometimes even morning, which makes me rather depressed. I hate being wet and immobile. It keeps interrupting with my habit of walking!
(At Dalat University. Super scenic places here if only it doesn't rain as often! )
In the least enlightened way against what my ideal self would have hoped, I blame the darn weather. I mean, isn't it obvious that the rain makes me depressed? There is such a thing as Seasonal Affective Disorder (SAD)!
Something shifted a few afternoons ago when it began to rain again. Unable to go for a walk, I found myself indoor listening to a podcast by Michael Neill about how our feeling is foolproof feedback for our state of being. The claim is radical: my mood has nothing to do with the external world. Yet it is extremely accurate feedback about what patterns of thought are going through my mind. Crappy feelings are ONLY saying that the same kind of thoughts are running over again like a bread getting stale in a damp, unventilated room. Happy feelings are ONLY saying that fresh new thoughts are coming in. Clear feelings are ONLY saying that we are enjoying the spaciousness of the mind without many cluttered thoughts.
That moment dawned on me. I'm feeling crappy only means that my thinking has been stuck in this stale loops of "rain is not good for me, I can't go out, it is depressing, I hate it"! Such thinking has NOTHING to do with the rain. It's a little bit silly to realize such an obvious fact, but boy did it land.
For the first time in a while, as I looked at the rain outside while jumping for joy with such an Aha inside, I felt quite elated.
That's all there is to the story. Its implication is vast though.
First, no story is final, especially if it’s a story about ourselves. If we are our thoughts, then we are a lot more malleable than most of us would like. Once we see this truth, there is much less need to hold on that tightly to any self-narrative or belief. As David Whyte once says, "the first step to change is to stop the conversation you are having right now with yourself". To full stop, not half-assed "I'll loosen the grip but still hold on to this until there is a better one comes by". As any of us would know whenever we feel stuck, without clearing the space by stopping there is little space left to welcome the new.
Does it mean I stop hating the rain? No, but I don't have to take that belief "I hate the rain" so seriously. It may just come and pass like any other thought. Only when I get lost in that loop did it become painful, annoying and problematic. As George Pranksy once wrote, "problem is painful thought taken seriously."
If every thought that comes is like a train, I don't have to jump on all of them. I can stay at the station, which is what most sitting meditation trains us to do or jump on some seemingly fun, inspiring or productive ones to go for a while. Better yet, I can always jump off when I realize it's no longer so.
Second, it is not that useful trying to change mood.
If our mood is telling us about our internal state and the patterns of thoughts we are having, then trying to change a bad mood is like trying to paint the red light into green. That may work if you like green BUT that's not the point. The point is to observe traffic light so we can travel smoothly and safely!
It doesn't mean you cannot make yourself feel better by going for a run, eating some comfort food or talking to people. But remember that they all might be placebo effects and personal rituals rather than any direct cause-effect. You can literally sit still and feel better after a while. Apparently, that's what many forms of meditation do 😃. In other words, we all need a reminder that “no feeling is final”, as my friend Sarah-Marie wrote a while ago.
Third, THIS IS NOT POSITIVE THINKING. You don't have to think positive thoughts, because thoughts are not even in our control. Don't believe me? Try sitting still for a minute and notice what comes up.
You can try all the way to manipulate yourself with those self-help techniques like visualization and affirmations and the likes, and they may work to some extent. Yet what really works is that you notice, like the Aha I had, what thoughts are passing through and see them for what they are: the ephemeral magical thing that doesn't have to be taken seriously all the time.
With that, you will naturally lighten up. You will discover what has always been there: a state of clarity and lightness, unburdened by those beliefs and stale thinking loops.
Every time we touch and are touched by that default clarity, it is as if some cataracts on our eyes melt away. It doesn't make that much sense anymore to hold on to anything or push away anything. We say welcome when a moment comes, goodbye when it goes, then welcome again to the next moment. This is not a capacity reserved for the monks and mystics with years of training but all of us.
What does a feeling tell us then? How we are thinking about certain things. The fact that I feel upset about you reveals that I think what you did wasn't right. It has less to do with what you actually did.
One last note for those skeptics like me: it's not about what's true or false but rather what's practical. How do you know that your feeling has nothing to do with the outside? Isn't it so obvious that the rain / my parents / my lousy job / my decreasing bank account / the messed up system of global injustice / this darn pandemic thing makes me upset?
The truth is nobody knows. Yet we can all try as if our fleeting feeling is 100% reliable barometer of our thoughts, not of the circumstances.
Bringing this back to our small talk about the weather, we can argue till no end about how whether you like rain or not is relative to how much sun there is and genetic differences and personal variations and so on. If such an argument is stimulating, go ahead. But if it begins to get a little bit tiresome and brings you into a foul or jittery mood, perhaps it's time to notice how the argument has gone nowhere.
That's the invitation for you all this week: what if your feeling is ONLY telling us about the state of mind you are in? What if you can trust it as the perfectly accurate barometer rather than trying to change it? How would you live differently?
Cheers from a rainy place,
Khuyen
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