What Are Feelings?

Mysteries of the Feeling Realm

To enter the feeling realm we need to slow down, relax and open our bodies and our hearts. As we soften the boundaries of our identities and what we think is going on, we might have more of a chance of meeting these ancient energies that are the very fabric of our existence ... the vibrations of love and divinity.
But this isn't quite how we relate to our feeling bodies. For starters, we don't quite like the feeling realm. Our psychological approach, and even when we're doing somatic work, has a foundational belief that they're something we need to heal. That something must have gone wrong in our childhood. or even more generally, as we see in our spiritual traditions, which believe that feelings are the root cause of our suffering.
What if there ISN'T anything wrong with our feelings, but it's the way that we meet them, the way that we judge them, the way that we move away from them or grasp into them, that creates the problem?
So how do we shift this attitude, this judgement and this fear towards our feelings when they feel so painful? We can't do it with the mind, because the intensity of the feeling realm just keeps us believing that something is wrong.
Cole and I are lovers of the feeling realm. We come from different traditions, have wildly different approaches and feeling bodies ... and yet have discovered very similar terrain.
In this podcast we're sharing not just our journeys, we're sharing the quality of our relationship to this dimension of experience. As we do this, we hope we open doorways into unseen and unfelt realms. We hope to ignite your curiosity and your heart. This is a paradoxical journey, a 180 degree turn, from moving away from feelings, to welcoming every single drop. But to do this, we need to lower our gaze, let go of our minds, sit quietly, spaciously and openly in the depths of the darkness of the ocean of our being ... and wait for them to settle, to feel the sincerity of our welcoming ... and allow them to come towards us once they can feel our cellular and heart-felt receptivity.
~
A LITTLE BIT OF BACKGROUND

Cole finds himself in a body that is polarised in the mind. So for him, he became aware that he wasn’t able to feel his feelings. Through a journey of deep inquiry, he began to see how much judgement he had towards his feelings. Through this process, he began to notice that not only did he judge his feelings, but he also had judgement towards his judgement! This inquiry began to open a completely different relationship to feelings and life itself.

Lorella, on the other hand, is polarised in the feeling realm. Being swamped by feelings from her early twenties, she had no choice but to immerse herself in the study and practice of Buddhist meditation and somatic psychotherapy. After 18 years, she lost all faith and hope, as neither of them had managed to shift the core intensity of her experience. She went into the wilderness, exploring psychedelics, sexuality and accidentally stumbled into a Vajrayana Tantric lineage. Here the somatic practices gave her the paradoxical and profound guidance of meeting the subtle realms of the feeling body: training the body to become a truly kind, welcoming and receptive field of awareness into which these vibrations could finally breathe.