Feelings are our `friends.' They encourage us to run from dangerous animals and speeding trains. They help us do appropriate things like crying at funerals and laughing at our father-in-law's jokes. They keep our little bodies very busy doing things like sweating and twitching. They also keep engaged couples from getting bored. Some feelings make our lives extra interesting ...feelings like claustrophobia, lusting after your best friend's wife, extreme fondness for animals, or paranoia around your plants.
`Owning feelings' can be fun...and much cheaper than sports cars or stereo equipment. You can sit around a fireplace for hours and hours just mulling over all the fine feelings you own. My feeling collection has grown tremendously. Just a few years ago I thought `ok,' `fine,' `tired,' `depressed,' and `ready' were all I could hope for; but now my feelings include gems like `purple' and `salty'.
`Feeling another's feeling' is also a great pastime. With practice I can now turn myself from cheerful to suicidal in just thirty seconds — all because I love somebody enough to get right in there and lose hope with them. This ability opens up a whole new horizon of `things to do on a rainy day'.
`Taking on another's feeling' needs practice to enable you to keep your feeling in check until the other's feeling has been tasted, seen, smelled, heard, and touched to his/her satisfaction. When it's your turn (if you can remember what you were feeling) the trick is to recapture the intensity of your joy after having digested the other's despair. If you find this impossible to do, perhaps it's because you are caught on a `hook'. Some amateurs (or low-down rats) decorate their feelings with hooks which scratch, tear and occasionally rip the heart out of the person taking them inside as their own.
`Feelings' survive in a nasty jungle of `thoughts', and only the most expert of experts can distinguish a genuine authentic feeling. The secret formula is to substitute the two magic words `I Am' before the feeling word. Only a real honest-to-Abe-feeling can stand this test. Using that formula, sneaky people, who say things like "I feel that you are rotten," can be humiliated by chanting back at them: "I am rubber, you are glue, whatever you say sticks to you."
Feelings are entirely different from thoughts. Thoughts buzz in and out of our heads and wind up at cocktail parties, aisles of a supermarket and bingo halls; but our friend, the feeling, lives inside our hearts, tummies, and gooey parts. We use feelings when we want to let somebody know who we really are. Sometimes this frightens people because they don't want to know who we really are; but we tell them anyway because we care.
When we've practiced sharing feelings for a long time, we learn how to do a thing called `accepting' (which means not running away from someone who has told us who they are, and it makes us sick or mad.) We grit our teeth together very tightly, smile, and say nice and slow, "thank you for sharing that." Then we quickly put it out of our minds.
Some feeling collectors put them in diaries or journals so they'll have them to re-read when they're old and can't remember who they are supposed to be.
So next time a person asks you how you feel, get right down inside yourself and pull out one of your little `friends'; dress it up as colorful and tastily as you can and offer it. Ask them if they would like to experience it with you. Ask for one of theirs in return...chase them all over the shopping center if you have to...or keep calling them back if they hang up. Write them a letter if they refuse to listen... Hire a sky writer.........