I am not going to start yet another blog post with the pithy observation that our Western culture prioritizes thinking over feeling. Okay, well, I guess I did. That’s because this idea is so crucial, that it’s worth it to try to bring people’s attention to it, perhaps in a different way.
Believe it or not, I think about this blog daily, despite the fact that I have not published anything in months. This is due to many reasons, not the least of which is the fact that so few people now take the time to actually read and think deeply about anything on the internet. It’s become such a toxic mimic of engagement that I barely know how to insert anything of use here. But, ultimately, I have to hope that those who are interested will find something meaningful in it. I will attempt to aid this process by offering something new, some ways of thinking about and feeling into our experience that are rarely offered. I want you to walk away from this article with not just a new understanding, but a new experience that you can draw upon in the future.
Well, now I’ve set up quite a task for myself and feel a bit anxious. With this, I have just moved from the realm of thinking right into a feeling — a slight anxiety at how much I’ve promised you, my reader, a fear that I will not be able to deliver and will lose your attention or even invite criticism or judgment. Worse yet, I fear that I will have wasted precious minutes of your life that I cannot return to you This is relevant to one of the more salient points of this essay, which I won’t wait too long to share with you — it is that one cannot think and feel at the same time. If you are thinking, then you are not feeling, and if you are feeling, you are not thinking.
If you read the above carefully, notice your reaction to what I just proposed. Do you have a feeling about it?
Chances are, you have a kind of evaluative stance about it than any kind of feeling. It might be something like, “Yeah, I knew that”, or “That’s stupid, I can name a hundred instances when I was thinking and feeling at the same time”, or perhaps, “Hmm, okay, tell me your argument for it.” This is in part because we are in the realm of words as you are reading a bunch of text on a screen (ugh, screens! Yet, hopefully this current one is a little less “ugh”!). Having a feeling and noticing it, requires a subtlety in awareness that is not only culturally suppressed (massively so), but also difficult to do while reading (in the realm of thoughts). You might need to close your eyes and take a breath, while putting everything else out of your mind before you might become aware of a feeling.
I must offer empathy prior to continuing with my premise here, as I speak from direct experience. Even as someone who identifies as an “empath”, the pressure from my thinking mind usually drowns out at least 98% of my feelings, unless they are either quite intense, or I’ve consciously taken time to tune into them. My previous paragraph was meant to gently point out this very challenge and hopefully offer you a direct awareness of it right in this moment. We think more than we feel, or so it seems.
More often than not, what happens when you notice a feeling, particularly a strong one, is that you instantly switch to thinking about it. Where is it coming from, what is the important information related to it, how can I feel better, what has to happen, what’s unfair, whose fault is it, what do I need to do next, and what’s for lunch, anyway? That’s why it seems like we can think and feel at the same time. But if you pay careful attention, the moment you have a thought about the feeling, you are no longer feeling it. You may go back and forth between these — often this happens when the feeling is very strong and insists on being there — but they are still discrete states of being.
So, above, when I made that promise to offer you something different, to share something that would leave you with an experience that would have made reading this essay worth the time that I could never give back to you, I felt an instant, albeit slight, sense of fear and insecurity. If you go back and look at the 3rd paragraph, right after the word “anxious”, I switched into describing why I was feeling that way — and had therefore moved out of the realm of feeling back into thinking. If the feeling of anxiety was still there, it became muted, hidden from view because I got busy explaining it. Do not mistake talking about a feeling for the feeling itself. Feeling is pure experience. Words are only a mediocre approximation of that experience, should we try to name them (and I love words!) But again, since we are in the realm of words on a page, and I was attempting to convey something useful, I chose to switch over to ideas rather than staying with the feeling.
I hasten to add, that while I labor to lift the realm of feelings and their immense importance into our conscious awareness here, feeling is not better than thinking. They are equals, they give birth to each other, and they are parts of a whole. One way I see them is that feeling is the Yin aspect — pure experience, the realm of the body. Thinking is the Yang — the activity of moving something forward by the addition of a label, a direction, a question, or a defense. I am merely stating that our culture has been heavily weighted toward thinking and most of us have a tremendous difficulty staying with any feeling for too long before we bury it with words, symbols, metaphors, explanations, and all kinds of other burdens. I just did it myself after feeling that bit of anxiety! I told myself a number of stories about the need to move this post along, the need to appear “professional”, since I knew that if I sat with the anxiety, I might never have published this piece at all. So in that instance, thoughts helped me move forward, for dwelling in it would have been unproductive for my current purpose. The key here is that I felt it at all. Had I not, this post would have come from a defensive, performative place instead of an authentic unfolding of what I wanted to convey. For, I can never give these minutes and hours back to myself, either.
I leave you to ponder the premise that one cannot think and feel at the same time. This is not intended to be didactic or prescriptive, but an invitation to explore your inner world. Whether I’ve offered you something new or not (though I do hope I have), my sincere wish is for you to recognize, at the deepest level, that whether you are thinking or feeling, each moment of your experience is the most precious asset you have. Then again, I remember in my early days of therapy saying to my analyst, “I theel…” and the two of us bursting into laughter.
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