Feeling-Awareness
Compassion is the natural arising of that love. Around the time of my sixtieth birthday I had an uprush of the feeling to give back. What was it I could give back? I was not wealthy, so I couldn’t finance some charitable cause. I had no specialist organizational ability, so I couldn’t rally resources for a worthwhile project. My inner guidance moved me to offer a series of online lectures and through this endeavor I was severally blessed. As I sat to “compose” the talks one thing became apparent to me over all others. There would be no struggle, no resistance, no internal censorship or manipulation of thoughts… all I had to do was write! And as I wrote so I had the experience of the Divine speaking through me… What a gift! The initial lecture series led to another, and then another and another… Not counting the initial discourses, seven series in all comprising 42 lectures emerged. The basket of blessings didn’t stop there. I met some wonderful people who took part in the lectures and contributed to the seminar portion of the events with their presence, questions, and wisdom. I also met Robert Meagher who offered to serve my work and who subsequently became the co-founder of the Center for Human Awakening. One act of compassion, moved by love, without thought of what I might get from it and look at how much I received! And neither did it stop there. Robert and I began to “shadow” the 42 lectures with a series of 56 online video interviews in which we discussed the lectures in detail. Many people today have found their way to our work through these interviews alone.
In one of the original, and I think now lost, early lectures preceding the 42 lectures, I spoke on what I called feeling-awareness. Feeling-awareness is a response to both spiritual distancing and emotional “fluffiness.” Both have arisen out of the rise of psycho-spiritual practices and philosophy and each is a corruption of the true intention of such practices. Spiritual distancing is the attitude that favors spirituality over psychology and the human condition. A person who distances spiritually rejects the human circumstances of suffering and adopts a superior stance based on the “greater truths” of the spirit. Spiritual distancing is an emotional defense. Through detachment and aloofness the person avoids the present possibility of relationship. Emotional fluffiness does the same thing, but from the other direction. Holding authentic emotional response firmly at a distance the ebullient, fluffy emotions take up much energetic space and keep experience shallow and unreal.
The practice of feeling-awareness gives you the opportunity to balance clarity with emotional responsiveness. I ask you to bring feeling into the field of your awareness. When you notice awareness becoming cold, increase feeling; when you notice feeling becoming too warm increase awareness. Sit in the middle with the two balanced in you, so that you engage through feeling-awareness with what is presently arising.
Richard Harvey is a psycho-spiritual psychotherapist, spiritual teacher, and author. He is the founder of The Center for Human Awakening and has developed a form of depth-psychotherapy called Sacred Attention Therapy (SAT) that proposes a 3-stage model of human awakening. Richard can be reached at [email protected].