In-house #14: Our gastric verities

 

If my body – my “felt sense” (referring to Gendlin’s Focusing process) – contains a dis­turbed, bad physical feeling, I may either follow it by thinking nothing, thinking some­thing positive or satisfying, or thinking something negative. Each alternative will leave me in at least a tem­po­rary different “existential” state. Example: the thought, “I’ve neglected to do my federal taxes for the past two years.” Presently I’m at work and feeling pretty good. The thought – “I’ve neglected to do my federal taxes for the past two years” – doesn’t affect the sanguine physical-emotional sense. The feeling is a sturdy bland “I can handle it.” However, awakening and lying in bed in the morn­ing, there is typically a recondite feeling of emotional weakness, undeniably “bad.” The thought may then appear: “I haven’t done my federal taxes in a couple years,” and the distress will quicken, with other negative thoughts piling in, and more concretizing of bad feeling.

The morning’s weak, caved felt-sense can, with a little brute force, be accompanied by no thought (unlike many clients, I am able to have a quiet mind, which has never “raced”). If I extend this quiet until I’m up and engaged in my teeth and shower routine, I will bypass any anxiety that’s attendant to failing a major obligation. Until, that is, the next morning. Were I to foist a positive thought upon the feeling, I would experience a kind of canceling of opposites: an inscrutable feeling and a thought that dissipated to nothingness.

What is the truth? Which feeling should I trust, “believe” in? Is my financial irrespon­sibility objectively bad or OK for me? Are the emotional conclusions of my life as arbi­trary as the blind vicissi­tudes of my gut? Is there no truth but the feel­ing-and-thought combination? One thing is sure, in my case: Cognitive therapy is wrong. A primary negative thought will not create or influence an emotion. It’s the bad feeling – gut, chest, neck – that renders a thought good, bad or neutral.

What is the cause of the body feeling? Life. All moments of our history. One notion is that when we are asleep or – my experience – still waking up, our defenses are largely disabled. More authentic feeling may then emerge from the deeps. Dreams contain real feeling, richer than most of our life. I’ve noticed consistently that a thought which deeply disturbs me – creates indelible verdicts on my life – during the hyp­no­pompic state will instantly turn effete or completely tolerable once I am vertical and moving about.

I guess there is no emotional truth except as the stomach turns.*

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* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=du09FfHdVJE. (Based on: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bmLQa63kQCI.)