How I learned to feel again

"But I want to be passionate," my friend said. "I get the whole search for Enlightenment, but I don't want to be disconnected from life and stop feeling."

We were sitting in a coffee shop, at a corner table discussing my practice. I had described, to the best of my then current ability, both the work I'd done and the results it had produced. I said that meditation in my experience, when practiced for some time, produces, at least, two results.

First, it teaches you just how little you control. Stare at a wall and try to hold everything still; it doesn't take long to see that there's nothing you can really control, not your breath, your heartbeat, and definitely not your mind. If you don't control your body or your mind, how on earth can you control producing XYZ result in your life?

And second, it creates a space between your Self and your thoughts. Between You and your emotions. With a quiet mind you get to actually see your thought patterns, and see the emotions running through you. And if you can see those things, then you by definition are not those things. You are the viewer, and therefore cannot also be the viewed. You are the awareness within which your thoughts and feelings arise.

It was the second realization that my friend took issue with.

"I don't want to disconnect from my feelings," he said. "I want to live, fully!"

It's a logical concern, but only from the perspective of one who has not yet experienced those things. Once you do the work to create that space between your self and your thoughts/feelings, you realize that actually the opposite is true.

"I do too," I said. "I didn't feel, really feel, for about 15 years. I got so caught up in what I was supposed to be, what I was supposed to feel, that I suppressed all of it. But now, I'm crying on airplanes."

I was referencing a time months ago when I connected so hard with the movie Rocketman that I had to compose myself in the airplane bathroom. But I could have just as easily been referencing today, as I write this on yet another airplane, days removed from Kobe's death, all nine of those people, three kids, and still tearing up. I've never met Kobe, and part of me feels selfish crying over something that other people are so much more closely affected by than I am, but I feel everything, now. In a way I never did before.

"You've got it wrong," I explained to my friend. "Once you realize your thoughts and emotions aren't you, they are no longer a threat to your sense of yourself. You stop resisting them, and you feel way more."