Melany comes to her therapy session miserable, and has for many weeks. She is cut off from the fullness of her being, she worries about everything and nothing, feels stuck, is getting nowhere in her life, in the session, and is unable to connect with her therapist in a meaningful way.

After twenty or so minutes, I ask Melany to focus on her breathing and, as she does, to become aware of any sensations she is having. As she begins to slow down and ease up on herself, moving out of her head and into her body, I invite her to make eye contact with me, while staying with her breathing and her sensation focus, not to lose connection with her breathing in the process, but to stay connected by looking into my eyes and being with herself at the same time; in her body though, and not so much with her thoughts and complaints: just breathing, sensation, connection, for a moment at a time.

“...developing the precept of non injury, we attempt to make nothing other than it is... When there is anger, there is just anger. When there is fear, there is just fear. And when there is joy, there is just joy. We have room for it all. We take life as a blessing instead of a curse.”

At first Melany feels herself tensing up and she wants to turn away. But she chooses to stay with the connection, moving more and more viscerally into the experience of being present with me and with herself, and as she does this she begins to feel differently: things loosening up in her body and her head clearing a bit, then a little bit more, starting to feel scared but alive and better and clearer. I too can feel what is happening since I am also experiencing an increased sense of presence.

After a few more moments of heightened silence I ask Melany how she is feeling.

Melany says she isn’t sure exactly how to characterize the feelings she is experiencing, but she uses words like “light, tingly, free, open, and full” to describe them; and it’s obvious now that Melany is beginning to experience the fullness of her feeling experience.

After another moment or two of silence Melany says, “You know, I spend a lot of time in here telling you how I felt, under the pretense that I am telling you how I feel. Now I am just feeling...and it’s a completely different, completely satisfying experience for me...I don’t even have a desire to talk about it right now. I just want to be with it.” 

Two key components made it possible for Melany to be present to her subjective experience in a way that affected her mood and brought her into deeper connection with her own authenticity. These two components were: 1. a return to the simple processes of her body (breathing, sensation), and 2. connection with another person, namely me. From this position of clarity and emotional attunement Melany and I were able to explore her feeling experience with much more openness and truth.

It is important to stress that even though these two components made it possible for Melany to enter her subjective experience, her experience should not be reduced to these two components. In other words, it is not the case that Melany was merely experiencing a heightened awareness of physical sensation coupled with the feeling of my presence and positive regard. Rather these two components made is safe for Melany to enter hersubjective experience and to begin a different sort of journey in the session. To reduce her experience to the components that made her journey possible would be like confusing the front door of the mansion with the mansion itself.   Indeed even the words I am writing now fall short, as all words must, of the experience itself. As Dr. George Atwood once said to me, “Subjectivity always overflows the categories we create to try and capture and define it.” And so the rest is left to silence, as the transformations that occur during such experiences become the stuff of epiphany and conversion. 

“We emerge from what was essentially a sleeping relation with phenomenon into a waking one...confident that, once that has been effected, the fact that nature is essentially one with the intelligence is us, will no longer seem a wild and incredible speculation, or a pathetic fallacy, but will become self-evident fact.”

Because our culture generally lacks a deep appreciation for the work that is required to exercise the muscle of our true selves and develop an ongoing connection to our feeling lives and feeling needs, I offer a few preliminary injunctions as the merest beginnings of an outline toward a technology of feeling:

Focus on your breathing, sensation and perception.

Give yourself over to these basic body processes until you begin to notice changes, and identify feelings (perhaps, at first, as sensations) in your body.

Consciously practice this subjective mode of being with someone else, until you feel yourself sharing a subjective, feeling-space with the other person.

Don’t worry about managing the experience.

Read more from: “The Feeling Life: Reclaiming Your Emotional Vitality and Purpose”

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