WHEN NOTHING FEELS BODILY

"Before I could learn to focus," someone said to me, "I had first to discover how the ordinary emotions were really in my body. I used to feel fear and anxiety and excitement, of course, but I used to feel them all around me. Like they were in the air, sort of. It took me some time to realize that they were in my body, like my heart pounding, or a sinking feeling in my gut. I had to learn this first about the ordinary things everybody feels, that they were inside. Only then could I look for a felt sense inside."

If this report fits you, give yourself a week or so in which to catch yourself whenever you feel any ordinary emotion strongly. Notice what your body feels like. You will find that your body feels the emotion inside.

Test yourself now. Can you put your attention inside your stomach? If you can, you sense a distinct feeling there, perhaps warm and fuzzy, perhaps tight and tense. If you cannot get such a sensation in your stomach, then you need to work on this. Put your attention in your left big toe; wiggle it if necessary. Press it down. Now you feel the sensation in it. Now come up to your knee. This time don't move your knee, just see if you can find it from inside. Then move to your groin, and from there move up into your stomach. There you are.

This is quite new to many people, but it does not take long to learn. Most people can put their attention in their stomach or chest, and if you work at it a little, so can you.

IF YOU FIND YOUR MIND WANDERING

If you find yourself drifting off on some irrelevant train of thought when focusing, bring yourself back gently. Say: "What was I focusing on? ... Oh, yeah, that. And what was I trying to do with it? Oh, yeah, feel the whole thing. What does that whole thing feel like?"

To bring yourself back, you need to be gentle, some­thing like dealing with a small child, whose attention is wandering. You put your arms around the child to attract its attention, and you gently guide it to whatever lesson you want to teach.

So when your mind wanders, gently put your arm around yourself, to so speak, and guide yourself back. It doesn't matter how many times you have to do that.

IF YOU HAVE FEW FEELINGS

Some people find it difficult to make contact with their feelings. Nearly everybody has this difficulty at least sometimes. A friend might show you a favorite painting, for example. You look at the painting, aware that the friend expects a meaningful comment from you. But the painting arouses no response in you—or, if it does, you can't quite get in touch with those feel­ings. You stare at the painting and finally you have to say, "Well, it's -- uh -- nice."

It may seem to you that you are simply not very complicated inside, that you don't have that complexity of feeling strands that I am describing in this book. But you do have it. You are human. It is there.

We are so accustomed to the simple patterns—if someone cheats us we are mad, if someone ignores us we are hurt—that many people don't look beneath these simple patterns to their own unique complexity. But it is there. When at first I might ask how you feel about being ignored, you might say, "Bad ... how would you feel?" This would indicate that all people would feel "bad" or "hurt" when they are ignored, and indeed that is true. But just how and where it gets me is not the same as just how and where it gets you. This "just how and where" is beneath the simple feeling that is patterned and universal. To make touch with that could take a little time.

You have to say to yourself, "Yes ... that's right... I feel hurt, and that's natural, yes, of course I know why. They ignored me. Sure, that's it, but... let me sense all that which is involved for me in this. It has to do with all-about-that person and all-about-me-with-that person, and all-about-what-it-means-to-me-to-get-ignored-anyway." Soon you will feel that mass of things not yet clearly known. Then you can focus on that felt sense and then on its crux.

If you find it hard to get in touch with your more complex feelings, there are several things you can do. It may be just a question of practice. Some people check their own feelings regularly, day by day, hour by hour, but perhaps you have never done this. Try it for the next few days. Identify feelings as they go by. As you interact with others and go through your daily life, stop inwardly once in a while and ask in a friendly way, "How am I now? What am I feeling now?" Don't tell yourself the answer. Wait. See what comes.

It feels good to do this, as long as you receive what you find inside. Don't say bad things to yourself and insult yourself over what you find. Just be pleased that you have found it, that it is clearly felt. Come to know your inside space.

If someone is often with you, it may help you make contact with your feelings if you ask that person to tell you when you clearly display a specific feeling. "You look angry," the person might say. Or, "I can see you're happy now." Other people will often be right in guessing that you have a feeling—though they are not likely to be right in guessing what that feeling really is. When your friend says you have a feeling look, be grateful, but don't take the friend's word as to what the feeling might be. Check inside. Your friend's assessment, "You look angry," may be quite wrong. You may find, instead, that you feel upset, worried, annoyed, impatient, disappointed, apprehensive, or per­haps some odd way that has no name. Go further into sensing what is in it.

If it has no name, that may be the best result of all. When you casually apply one of those well-worn unit-labels to a feeling -- angry, scared, bored -- the tendency is to think you now know everything there is to know about that feeling. You have given it its unit-label, you have identified it, and that's that. But there is always much, much more to know, for there is an infinity of possible ways to feel any labeled feeling such as anger. My "angry" right now sticks up from a different mass of things from another "angry" I will feel in a different situation tomorrow or next week. That is why you need not stop with feelings that seem to come with ready-made labels. Welcome especially those that come with­out names. When a feeling has no name, pause, listen, and let fresh words flow from it: "I feel... like I ought to be able to do something about this, but... I'm walled in, or something."

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