Feeling with my body or feeling with my thinking

If I do not have direct access to physical “feeling,” if my feeling is rather thinking (sham feeling), then I walk on one leg, so to speak. Then I have a limitation. Whether I experience it that way or not. It limits my movement and works to my disadvantage in terms of safety and its assessment. Because my system does work around the constraint.

When I was younger, my “feeling” was too unilaterally developed, underdeveloped or even shut down for whatever reason. Often it was mainly a mental perception rather than a physical sensation experienced by me inwardly, physically.

No problem for my BodyMind. Which then deploys other senses to still make me feel good, to experience pleasure, to produce endorphins. So not through my body, not through an internal perception of an impulse, but through an alternative route, such as my eyes or ears. A smile on a face, a pat on the back as a gesture or a kind word from another are examples of this.

This, then, is an indirect way of “feeling comfortable. So not through an inner experience but through an external perception, interpreted through my Mind. Then I was happy because someone else became happy because of something I did. Nothing wrong with that, fine too, but it did make me dependent on others to feel comfortable. Behold the basis for pleasing, co-dependency and being a willing victim of narcissistic behavior.

The solution lay in reactivating my immediate bodily sensations. This (re)activated the pleasure center in my brain. Thus, both ways of feeling became available, with all the implications for both pleasure experience and my safety. And not only in relation to literally feeling with the sense of touch, but also in metaphorically feeling the whole world around me. My judgment of good for me cq not good for me became independent and more direct. And therefore safer.

 

And if I activate my direct feeling in one perceptual channel then it is quite possible that I then also experience differently in other perceptual channels, experience more directly.