"When in Search of the Higher Self,

                                                  Follow the Path of the Feelings" -Billie Dean

           By Jay Ray

 Many years ago this sentence was said to me by a client as a way of summing up her work with me. The more I work with people as a therapist, the more I know this to be true for all of us. It has become the heart of my work to help people get in touch with their deepest feelings, because I know that without doing so they cannot touch the heart of who they really are. Without knowing that, life becomes a hollow shell, and depression the end result.

By the time most of us reach adulthood, we have largely lost contact with our feelings on a day-to-day level. We can shed a tear occasionally, often in private. We can get angry with the kids or the lover. But the bulk of our feeling nature has gone underground. Unfortunately we justify this as ‘growing up’. Truth is it is part of a slow internal death, that’s starts in childhood, as we are discouraged from expressing our true selves for fear of upsetting others.

In many ways, this was our parent’s way of protecting us from ostracism by the community. We know inside us, on a deep level, that we need acceptance within our ‘tribe’ to survive. But when acceptance within the community comes at the cost of the expression of the individual self, the community itself begins to die for the want of new blood. In many ways this is what’s happening to Society today, worldwide. It causes us to either accept Social ‘norms’ and suppress our true selves, or rebel against the community, doing the opposite to what is required of us. This is about going with or against somebody else. Usually those we see as the ‘authority’ in our lives. Neither way, however, is dealing with the problem, because neither of them is expresses YOU.

The problem lays in the fact that we don’t ‘know who we are’. That being the case, of course we don’t know what it is we need to express of ourselves out in the world. It is so easy to listen to others in the search of the missing ‘Self’. Satisfaction comes only by accident that way. Other people do not know what is best for us. They are not us. Their experience of life is unique to them. They are not, nor can they be, in our body and life to know what it is like to be us. Therefore they are unable to advise us on how best to live our lives. Let’s face it. If advice worked, we would all have had enough of it in our lives to be totally enlightened by now. Most of us are far from that.

So, how do we know how to run our lives? The truth is most of us don’t! The very skills that would allow us to do that have been expressly forbidden us: the use and expression of all our feelings: our emotions, sensations, intuitions, and inspirations. As a result of this conscious neglect, we follow others peoples direction. We go off course. Then we turn round at some point in our lives and wonder what we are doing here anyway. We run for a prescription, which is Societies only acceptable or understood way of dealing with, what amounts to, death of the soul.

At the heart of each one of us is a deep sadness. Anger at the loss of our purpose in life, and the expression of the Being we came here to be! Many of the things that we have chosen to do with our lives are worthy endeavors, but if they are not ‘our’ endeavors; if they are not coming from the heart of ‘who we are’, they are of no value in our life at all.

When we look to the thinking mind for the answers to these questions, we find that what is contained there is more of the same. Our mind contains all the beliefs and attitudes that others have taught us. It contains an accurate record of all our past experiences (whether we are conscious of them or not), but it contains nothing to tell us what to do with the unique experience that this moment offers us. This moment has never happened before. How can our mind know what to do with it?

Stuck? We often feel that way. But there is a whole other set of functions, relegated to the psychic basement that, given half a chance, can solve all these problems. Our feelings!

Covered up by layer upon layer of emotional trauma, accumulated as our true feelings were suppressed, denied and finally locked away, there lives a feedback mechanism that will always tell you what is right for you. Now note this. It does not know what is right for other people, even if it can sense much of other peoples needs, because it is not, ultimately, them. But for you, there is no doubt that it’s messages are directed towards your well-being every time. That energy is your own Self! Your own essential being! It speaks to you through your feelings on all levels. However most of us, until we begin the work of opening up the Pandora’s Box of unexpressed feeling from the past, bringing our experience into the present, can’t hear it. We don’t even know where to look.

After years of trying to help people clump around in the contents of their minds, I discovered, what I instinctively always knew, that healing comes after every expression of the deep pain that gets in the way of us being ourselves. It brings us closer, each time, to the ‘real’ person that we are.