Choosing a better path in life
The word "path" has been adopted by people who are on an inner spiritual journey, but it has much wider implications. Everyone is on a path, even if they don’t always realize it.
There are two basic paths we take through life: thinking and feeling. To think your way through life appeals to rationalists, but they are fooling themselves. Feeling is always a part of every experience, every decision and every life choice.
Here are some examples of how the mixture of thought and feeling operates, often to our confusion:
? Think of a food you hate. See yourself putting a bite of this food in your mouth. It could be snails, a raw oyster or boiled cabbage. Try to taste it as if you loved it instead. You can’t because the taste is cemented with your feeling about it.
? Put yourself in the place of a homeless person living with small children on the street. Visualize the situation; no doubt you've observed something similar in real life. Imagine that a stranger walks up to you and hands you $1,000 in cash. You thank him profusely, but then he laughs scornfully and snatches the money back. Can you see the situation without any emotion? This is a dramatic example of how everything we see comes with an interpretation at the level of feeling.
? Imagine that you were on a long hike in the mountains and lost track of time. Now it is dark, the temperature is falling fast, and you must get back to camp. In pitch blackness you reach a drop-off, almost stumbling over it. You vaguely remember that the drop isn't far, maybe two feet. On the other hand, if you’ve gotten lost, the drop-off could be a hundred feet. There is no turning back. Can you deal with the situation without feeling anxious? Few people could.
The point of these different examples is that we all feel our way through life far more than we realize. We assume that we are thinking logically from one decision to another. In reality, how we feel is much more dominant. The ancients used to believe that the heart was the seat of intelligence, and in that, they really weren’t wrong. Feeling has its own deep intelligence.
It is limiting and often damaging to overlook that fact. Someone will say that they feel too much; they always lead with the heart, for example, and because of this they get their heart broken a lot. Yet as often as not, the opportunity to love is lost by overthinking and not paying enough attention to feeling with an attitude of trust. I think "heartfulness" is just as present as mindfulness.
Here is a practice in awareness that uses the feeling level of your own awareness to connect with your body in the present moment.
1. Find a quiet place where you won’t be disturbed for 5 or 10 minutes.
2. Close your eyes, and let your attention freely go to a place of discomfort in your body. If you have mental pain instead — a worry, for example, or any persistent feeling that is bothering you — let it come to mind.
3. Focus lightly on the discomfort or painful thought for a few seconds, then take your attention away from it. Focus on the outline of your body instead. Feel the air around you, the temperature on your skin, and the sensation of the whole body.
4. Return to your discomfort or painful thought, then once again expand your awareness away from that sensation to your whole body. Repeat several times.
5. Now expand a little farther. Feel your discomfort or painful thought, then expand your awareness to the room around you. Listen to any sounds, visualize your awareness expanding like a balloon to fill the room. Repeat several times.
6. Finally, expand your awareness everywhere. Feel your discomfort or painful thought, then sense your awareness going beyond the walls of the room, out of the building and steadily growing until it has expanded beyond all boundaries.
7. Sit quietly for a moment, then open your eyes.
For most people, the discomfort or painful thought that they began with will diminish, sometimes remarkably. Extreme, persistent pain and anguish can vanish. One session isn't a permanent cure, naturally, but this exercise is really about learning not to pay attention.
Any kind of pain demands attention. It is up to you whether to passively give in. If that happens, you will aggravate the pain, like the way your tongue will worry about a sore tooth or cold sore by constantly touching it over and over.
To get out of this automatic reaction, you can consciously move your awareness wherever you want it to go. That’s what you are learning to do in this exercise. It’s a perfect example of how to free yourself from a stuck response simply by taking control over your awareness.
In the end, learning how to feel your way through life offers the best hope of happiness and success. Feeling occurs in the whole body-mind, which gives us a practical reason to unite body and mind rather than trying to keep them separate.
DEEPAK CHOPRA? MD, FACP, founder of The Chopra Foundation, a nonprofit entity for research on well-being and humanitarianism, and Chopra Global, a modern-day health company at the intersection of science and spirituality, is a world-renowned pioneer in integrative medicine and personal transformation. Chopra is a Clinical Professor of Family Medicine and Public Health at the University of California, San Diego and serves as a senior scientist with Gallup Organization. He is the author of over 89 books translated into over forty-three languages, including numerous New York Times bestsellers. His 90th book, Metahuman: Unleashing Your Infinite Potential, unlocks the secrets to moving beyond our present limitations to access a field of infinite possibilities. For the last thirty years, Chopra has been at the forefront of the meditation revolution and his next book, Total Meditation (Harmony Books) will help to achieve new dimensions of stress-free living and joyful living. Time magazine has described Dr. Chopra as “one of the top 100 heroes and icons of the century.”
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