Feelings Do Not MeanAnything
Feelings are not in the realm of meaning. Weather, for example,
doesn’t mean anything, either. Feelings can be thought of as inter-
nal weather—sometimes stormy, sometimes rainy, sometimes windy,
and other times calm, tranquil, and pleasant. Like the weather, your
feelings show up without invitation, leave without saying good-bye,
and defy prediction. In other words, you have no choice about your
feelings. Despite efforts to control them, they occur whether you
like them or not. If there were an earthquake where you are now,
everyone present would feel afraid whether they wanted to or not.
We have no choice about this increase in energy. The choice we do
have is how our feelings affect us. Remember, feelings are nothing
more than feedback. It’s how you choose to use the feedback that
makes the difference.
You are the one who gives meaning to your feelings. On their own,
they don’t mean anything. The first step to understanding this idea is
to recognize that, since feelings are simply energy, there are no good
feelings and no bad feelings. There are simply feelings; we judgethem
to be good or bad. Once you judge any particular feeling to be bad,
you begin a struggle to change it to something better, by ignoring it,
hoping it will go away, ingesting a substance from an external source,
or stuffing it down someplace where no one can notice.
We waste a great deal of effort suppressing our feelings: The en-
ergy that our bodies give us to deal with the challenge is wasted,
and the energy used to suppress the original energy is wasted. No
wonder people feel stressed. This push/pull of energy is similar to
driving on the freeway with one foot flooring the accelerator and
the other flooring the brake pedal. By doing so, you will wear out
your car very quickly, and your gas mileage will be terrible.Feelings Are Not OK in Our Society
There is an essential conflict about feelings. One side of the con-
flict is that we all have feelings, they are OK, natural, and normal.
The opposing side is that we live in a society where feelings are not
OK. Most people are afraid of their feelings. Discomfort and
shame about feelings is learned in childhood from parental admo-
nitions such as “Big boys (girls) don’t cry,” “Don’t be a scaredy
cat,” “It’s not OK to be angry,” “If you can’t say something nice,
don’t say anything.”122 Stop Wasting Your Energy