The one thing you can start doing today that will change your life

The hardest thing to do isn’t achieving success, it is to feel. Really, there’s no physical or intellectual feat that’s more difficult than opening enough to feel life’s energy. Climbing Mt. Everest is nothing compared to fully feeling the fear and doubt on the way up.

What do I mean by feeling? I mean opening your mind and relaxing your body enough to feel the textures of an emotion. I mean releasing the tension in your gut so that you can feel love’s raw energy coursing through your body. I mean being brave enough to feel how big and intense your resentment towards your father can get.

You don’t need to climb Mt. Everest or make a billion dollars or fall in love to practice feeling. In fact, dreaming up big goals — how your life should be — is yet another way of hiding from feeling the present moment. Try staying put and doing nothing the next time you feel bored. See what happens if you feel loneliness rather than run from it by getting lost on Facebook.

By practicing opening rather than closing, you’ll start to notice your particular patterns of escape. Some, particularly those with male bodies, have been gendered into repressing emotions, either by intellectualizing (“mansplaining”) or stuffing them. Some try to smooth over tense situations by pleasing or fixing others. Others fight, flight, or freeze because the color of their skin has made them a likely criminal in the eyes of those with power and property to protect. Then there are all the ways we literally numb our bodies, like drinking alcohol or getting high, and the ways we try to force our numb bodies to feel, like smoking or masturbation.

To start chipping away at our patterns, we can’t keep running away from the feelings that set them into motion. We’ve got to turn towards the emotion. It’s like drowning in water — the water is choking us but if we can just change our relation to it we can also use the water to swim.

Per usual, Buddhist master teacher Chögyam Trungpa makes it sound easy: “The highest forces of energy, any kind of extraordinary energies there might be, become absolutely workable rather than take you over. This is because, if you are not offering any resistance, there’s nothing to take over.”

But sometimes an emotion can be too overwhelming. It’s too hot — we’re too close to the trauma that caused us to feel it. That’s okay. Talk to a close friend or therapist about it when you’re ready. Dull its edges so that you can eventually lean into it. If you notice that you’re beating yourself up for not being able to handle the emotion, imagine what a loving friend would say to you. We need each other — no one can be brave completely on their own.

I’m starting to think that as simple as it sounds, feeling is the point of life. Success or whatever you’re after is fleeting and relative. Truly opening has no reference point — who knows how big and intense a feeling will get? Our role is to see where the water takes us and be brave enough to ride the wave.

Ready to get serious about meditation?

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