Feeling

.
In a sense we can divide people in two groups. Those who are more mentally oriented, and those who are more ‘feeling’ oriented. And while each group has their own pitfalls, one isn’t any better than the other. They just have a different way of experiencing the world around them.

Because of the different ways of relating to what is happening in their lives and in the world in general, it turns out that both groups can have a really hard time to get their point across to each other.

When a more mentally oriented person has reached a coherent, logical conclusion he or she wants to share; a more ‘feeling’ oriented person may not be able to translate that logical conclusion into a feeling they can comprehend.
And the other way around, when a ‘feeling’ oriented person has a strong and clear sense or feeling as to what is happening; a more mentally oriented person may keep asking ‘well, what does that mean?’, ‘what is the reason?’.

To confuse things even further, ‘feeling’ is a word used for both experiencing emotions, as well as for sensory perception. And yet ‘feeling the love’, while wonderful, doesn’t necessarily have anything to do with the sense of touch…

The feeling of emotions, whether they are ‘positive emotions’ like love, pleasure, joy, etc. or ‘negative emotions’ like anger, or frustration, are things we feel inside of us, independent from how we experience the world around us. And while these emotional feelings can have a huge impact on our lives as we can get totally caught up in them, their transformation is an ‘inner job’ we can only do ourselves.

Feeling as is connected to our sensory perception, the use of our (inner) senses, has everything to do with how we interact with the world around us. They are usually experienced from a much more detached perspective; more like a signal we may pay attention to. For instance when we have the feeling something is about to happen. That feeling may result in us paying just a little more attention in traffic, and as a result we ‘feel’ we are better off taking an earlier exit than we had planned. As a result we may have avoided an accident just a bit further up the highway…
(The mentally oriented way to do the same thing might be to decide to take that earlier exit after the traffic report talks about an accident just a bit further up the road. It is a conscious, logical, perfectly reasonable decision…)

Feeling, as in using our (inner) senses, is just another path to get where we want to go.
.
.