Painting by Christopher Lindstrom
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LIFE|STYLE Magazine
(in Swedish)
The Feeling Dictionary
How do you feel ... do you really know ?
As a general rule, we all take too many instructions from the outside about the meaning of our feelings. Sadly, a lot of people have a vested interest in how we feel , either for their own benefit or relaying what the "the culture" has "instructed us to feel" in response to situations regarding governing us i.e. that we all are expected to feel patriotism (almost regarding of what the top of power strata is up to). We are also expected to believe in imaginary beings to maintain the pretense of us all having a religion. So lying about your real feelings has not only become the social grease that makes relationships "easier", it has also become the proof that we are loyal, obedient citizens that accept the rules of the game that we as citizens are expected to play. Since the authorities cannot easily change how you really feel, they will try to tell you "what you should feel", especially if your true feelings reflect badly on them.
Then if people have power over us (being parents, teachers, employers), it will be very difficult to not let their interest impact you and over time, we might come to think that what we ourselves feel is "wrong". This is especially true when we are young and once we have taken that to us it can be very difficult to break a habitual stance.
Feelings are reponses to situations and carry information that we have words for: love, pleasure, pain, deceit etc. We carry meaning for these feelings in our DNA as "preferences for positive being values": we prefer pleasure to pain, justice to injustice truth to false, courage to cowardness, humor to frozen minds and normally we would orient ourselves accordingly by seeking out situations that give good feelings and avoiding what feels bad. And we do just that, as long as our feeling system has not been damaged and debauched by notions of how we should feel, rather than recognizing what we actually do feel.
The hope is that by understanding and maybe removing the "should feel" we will learn to connect our own real feelings with the real situations behind them -- that's the power we have to become aware and change. A second premise is that changing the situation effectively changes the feelings. Some feelings, like anxiety, are rooted in shame and frozen beliefs "that we cannot change the situation without wrecking our whole life". This is why anxiety is so extra powerful because it festers in a total denial that the situation even exists, never mind what would happen if we changed it ... if it isn't supposed to be there, how can we change it ? This is how it all started
The human feeling-system is a finely tuned neuro-chemical instrument for perceiving all sorts of complex situations. Sadly this system can be manipulated by abuse, of the kind that commands "how we should feel". These (mostly interest-serving) "axioms" of how we are supposed to feel in any given situation, can be implemented on a large scale and masquerade as "culture" ... see secrecy
This dictionary is an attempt to link basic feelings to basic life-situation that we can find ourselves in. The resulting feelings are intrinsic to our biology, just like our being value preferences are: we prefer kindness to cruelty, freedom to entrappment. If any of the definitions seem untrue to you, please let us know by writing info@websida.com.
This wonderful and moving video illustrates real feelings better than anything else we have seen ...
if all teaching was like this, our world would be transformed !