Feeling (Rather Than Thinking) Your Way Through Life

In this track I discuss what I refer to as "feeling your way through life".
It's a simple shift in attention from absorbed in thought to noticing the felt sense.
It's about "coming to your senses". Coming to "reality" rather than being in imagination, and having a feel for the difference.
As you explore this yourself, you might notice a very distinct difference between attention automatically being in story, interpretation, and imagination and attention being in the immediate aliveness that is in the senses. There is no suffering, worry, or problems in this sensory reality. Those only live in and as thought.

Transcript

I want to talk a little bit about what I call feeling your way through life rather than thinking your way through life.

So it's really about attention and where attention is and where attention goes,

And to some extent kind of shifting attention,

But mostly just being aware of where it is.

So I think that for most of us,

For the most part,

A lot of attention is up in thought,

Meaning stories about what's happening,

What's coming up next,

A lot of time,

A lot of me,

Me and my life,

How it's going,

You know,

How I feel about things,

Opinions,

Judgments.

There's a lot of that sort of narrative thought,

Interpretation,

And I think if you look and look for yourself and see,

You'll notice that very often that's kind of front and center.

Attention is there quite a bit,

Nothing wrong with that.

That's just where it has tended to go and hang out over a lifetime.

So another place where attention can be,

And it's not an either or,

It's not like we shift attention and suddenly there's no light illuminating thought,

There may still be thought there,

But play with this a little bit or see if you notice how attention can also shift elsewhere.

It can shift into the body.

So you can do it right now rather than thinking about what I'm saying.

Just let your attention fall a little bit and check out what's felt.

So in what our mind calls the body,

In this area where there's a lot of sensation,

A lot of stuff going on,

A lot of energy,

You can let your attention sort of rest there and just check it out.

There's nothing to do with anything that you find.

There's no good or bad,

There's no right or wrong,

There's nothing in particular that you're looking for.

There's no agenda.

It's just having attention not so much in the conversation and noticing what it's like for it to be in the felt sense,

In the body sense in this case.

You can do this with other touch,

Not just internal body,

But touch the table that you're around,

Touch the computer or the phone that you're watching this on and feel the sensation right there.

You can feel it.

All we're doing is just shifting attention a little bit.

Now as you do this with attention in the body,

Attention on the sensations of your legs on the chair or your hands on the table,

There's a whole new world of stuff that's opened up just by doing that,

Just by shifting attention.

Nothing has changed.

Nothing has changed.

This was all here all along.

It's just that attention tends to be so much in thought form that we miss the sensory input that we're getting all the time.

We miss what else is going on.

So that's all this really is,

Is just noticing,

Wow,

There's a lot of other stuff here.

There's a lot going on here beyond what's going on in my thoughts and my head.

We can do this with other sensation as well.

Like the auditory field is a good one to play with.

Be quiet for a minute and listen to the sounds in your environment.

There may be several of them and you can kind of pick them out and feel different ones and that's fine.

You might feel the hum of your computer or the heater turning on,

Birds outside,

But you can also expand this and take it all in.

It's really all one sound.

I mean,

Thought wants to pick it apart and name it and say this is this and this is coming from that.

But when we really just fall into that sensory field,

We're just in this,

Without thought chopping it up and giving it names and labels and titles and categories,

There's just this.

There's no boundaries.

There's no real distinction beyond a mind,

Again,

Making some distinctions.

I love the expression,

Come to your senses,

Because we say that when we think someone is kind of off in who knows where.

Come to your senses,

Come back to reality.

That's what I think this is.

I want to say a little bit more about that because again,

It is sort of an addiction and I call it an addiction because it hasn't been there forever,

To where attention is very much in thought,

To where we're consulting thinking,

We're in our heads,

So to speak,

A lot.

And again,

There may be thought there all the time.

There's thinking happening.

There's also sensory stuff happening.

There's a felt sense happening.

It's all here.

It's all happening.

We're not controlling anything.

We don't have to control anything.

We're not making anything show up or not show up.

But it's interesting to play with attention and to see how much is here that gets filtered out.

And particularly when we're in thought form and we're in story and evaluation and me and time and all of that,

There's a lot here that on some level is still here and it is still here.

We're still aware of it perhaps,

But it's also being kind of pushed away or numbed away or disassociated from because the mind is just so busy and loud sometimes with all of its plans.

And the thing about come to your senses is it is this sense of like you shake someone and you say,

Come to your senses,

Like get back to reality.

And that's what I think is so powerful about this practice,

If you want to call it that.

It's really just an exploration.

This is what's so powerful is that what we're shifting attention to and waking up to is already here.

It always has been here.

It is,

In a sense,

The most immediate reality there is.

It is real and it is instant and immediate and in your face and felt,

So felt.

But again,

When we're in the addiction of the mind and we're used to the mind talking about things that are happening on the other side of the world or what you're going to have for lunch later or what happened yesterday,

There's a sense of that that's,

And I don't mean this in a judgmental way,

But it's kind of relatively dull.

If you conjure up a memory,

I mean,

Think about yesterday,

What you did yesterday.

It's kind of a flat,

Fuzzy,

Grainy,

Not very alive.

It's a representation of sorts,

Of some sort,

And it may be more or less alive for some than others,

But it isn't.

It's removed.

It's a representation,

Right?

It's a representation of some thoughts and feelings and behaviors and all of that from some other time,

And it may be even hard to bring that up and remember as opposed to coming to your senses right now,

Right here in this moment.

What is here and alive right this very instant,

And it doesn't need thought.

It doesn't need interpretation.

It doesn't need to be narrated.

It doesn't need an explanation.

It just speaks for itself.

It is just what's here,

And the reason I think this is so important to play with and explore is that we are feeling creatures first.

We,

As a species,

There has been feeling and the felt sense and sensory input and emotion and all of that longer than there's been addiction and identification with thought,

For sure,

In a really big picture,

But even each of us has a sense of that.

We weren't born thinking,

Thinking,

Thinking,

Who am I?

What time is it?

When's my next feeding going to happen?

Why do I feel this way?

That was all learned.

That came online later.

That came online at two,

Three,

Four years old.

It's added.

It's extra.

It's learned.

It's conditioned,

And amazing that it is,

So there's nothing bad about what's conditioned.

It's all perfect,

Right?

It's all perfect.

It all has this perfect function,

But it is not essential.

What we're looking at when we feel our way through life is really kind of a return to what is absolutely natural,

Default,

Innate.

What I've found in doing this is it's shocking,

Honestly,

How much is here begging to be seen.

That's how it feels to me,

Begging to be seen and felt and acknowledged,

And when my mind is busy thinking about life,

It's missed.

It just feels like it's missed in some way,

And maybe that's not exactly accurate to say.

Maybe it isn't really missed,

But I don't know.

That's just kind of how it feels.

It was really,

Really shocking to me to feel the amount of physical energy that is here,

And the extent to which I can just kind of melt into that and fall into that,

And life is just unfolding,

And my mind is not needed.

It's fine,

Again,

That thought is there.

It's wonderful that thought is there much of the time,

But that narrative thought,

That interpretive thought,

That everything coming back to you,

Self-referencing,

What this has to do with you and your life and what all of that means,

There is no accuracy in that.

That is the mechanics of the mind.

That's just kind of a process that happens.

It's this mental process that happens that has us feeling like a me,

And I'm identified,

And I can live a life based on these things.

Great,

But what else?

Great,

But what if we don't have to hold that as gospel?

What if we start to feel our way through life,

Come to our senses,

Be in reality,

Like what is actually here right now,

Not representations of what was or might be,

And live in that place?

Again,

I don't say this to dismiss thought or create a hierarchy that one is better than the other.

It's just that I don't believe one is better than the other,

But I do believe that we're all addicted to thought for the most part,

So we've been hanging out there and suffering,

A lot of suffering.

That's where suffering happens.

In fact,

It's the only place that suffering happens as far as I can see.

It behooves us to play with this a little bit,

Let attention move,

Watch attention as it moves,

And see what it's like to feel your way through life rather than think your way through life.

Reviews

Great idea, thanks

I didn’t realize how much I was out of it until I got back to my senses!

Thank you! 🙏🏻

LOVED this. SO incredibly true and spoken so simply and easy to listen to. I can’t wait to see what else she has! Inspiring❤️. Everything she said just hit home for me🥹

Excellent! Well said. So well said I t actually dropped in. Now to practice!
Thank you.

This was perfect timing for me to have heard this. Even as you were speaking, I listened to the sounds around me on my walk. It was fascinating to imagine all the sounds I was hearing entering my ears at the exact same instant as one beautiful sound. I just had surgery last week, and my thinking mind plots ways to reduce pain. I just tried paying attention to the sensation, being with it, and as I did this, I relaxed and the pain seemed to lessen. Thank you for this short teaching 🙏🏻 ❤️

I love this, thank you

I needed this reminder . So simple But so easy to ignore.. :) Thank you

So true and powerful! Definitely need to do this more often.

Loved this practical and potent conversation about feeling vs thinking. I teach a women’s program called Sensual & Sovereign and this is one of my main talking points and how healing sensuality is, and how it simply boils down to being connected to your senses and everything grows and goes from there. Thank you!

SO incredibly profound and helpful! This is going into my Daily Listening playlist! Thank you for this gift ❤️🙏🫂🐚💎

Very helpful, thank you. You touched on what’s been kind of percolating for me for a while and brought it into focus. I appreciate this so much. 🙏🏻💚

I LOVE your work Amy. I listen to your podcasts regularly. 🙏 So happy to have discovered you are on Insight!

I enjoyed the reminder to feel and be aware rather than get lost in my head. Thank you!

Thank you for this reminder. I have worked with chronic pain which seemed to flare when I am stuck in the mental realm. It seems unexpected that one would feel better when focusing on the felt sense when in pain but it does indeed reduce suffering as you point to here. 🙏

Such a simple and yet profound place you pointing us to in this track Amy. It’s so liberating to recognise how addicted to thought we are, and how this is valued in our society (for the most part). I also love ‘come to your senses’, that is such a helpful reminder to help break the ‘spell’ of being lost in thought. Thank you!

Such a powerful teaching! Suffering doesn’t exist when we “come to our senses.” Thank you for this reminder, Amy:)