Coming Home Meditation Tomorrow at 9am EST ~ Feeling Into It

Do you have the gift of subtle feeling/sensing? Do you want to feel it out?

Gurdjieff taught students the art of feeling, sensing and thinking through sacred dances called “The Movements.”

Dear friends,

Last week in Coming Home practice we worked with the subtle sense of listening and sound. Join me tomorrow rom 9-10:15am to play with the subtle aspects of the sensing or “touching” and feeling functions.

Have you ever said or heard someone say, when faced with a decision, “Let me feel into it?” I say it a lot because this is a primary way I navigate the world. I am keenly attuned to the subtle senses, especially the feeling sense. I trust my feeling senses more than my thinking much of the time.

Early in my spiritual journey I became interested in the 20th Century mystic, George Ivanovich Gurdjieff (there is a big story here, which I have eluded to before and I will begin writing about again soon). It was Gurdjieff’s work that first helped me understand and activate my own inner sensing and feeling. At the time, Gurdjieff’s description of these functions as distinct aspects of cognition and awareness appealed to me. I needed to pull them apart in order to receive the information in them consciously and accurately. Until then, I was a highly sensitive and empathic person who had little ability to manage, monitor and interpret the incredible amount of activity that was happening in my nervous system and subtle nervous system (nadis in yoga). Becoming conscious of what had been a largely unconscious process was a critical step on my path. It was like stepping into the driver’s seat of my own vehicle, whereas before I had been a passenger on what felt like Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride!

Here is J. G. Bennett, one of Gurdjieff’s disciples writing in 1949 about the distinction Gurdjieff made between sensing and feeling. Incidentally, Jung had much to say about these functions (along with Intuition and Thinking), but I want to keep it simple for now:

There is one thing I advise you all to work on persistently until you have mastered it, and that is the distinction between sensing and feeling. This is one of the foundations of the practical method which Mr. Gurdjieff is now giving people to help them in their work, and there are many things which cannot be done until you are able to make this distinction in your own immediate experience; he calls this the distinction between “je” and “moi”, between “me” and “myself”. By “je” we mean that experience of ourselves which comes from our feelings; by “moi” we mean that experience of ourselves which comes through our bodily sensation. Ordinarily, both of these are outside or below the threshold of our conscious experience, they both belong to our sub-conscious, and only affect what we call our conscious state indirectly through associations, or directly when there is a process of particular intensity, such as physical pain or strong, powerful feeling, and even then, we fail to realize that these things belong to kinds of “self” feeling which we do not ordinarily experience.

Basically, Gurdjieff presented to his students the idea of the three bodies, which he borrowed from yogic and tantric philosophy ( the five koshas). Roughly speaking, he pointed to the thinking body, the feeling body (which deals mainly with emotions and our preferences…the “je” or “I/me”), and the sensing or motor body, which deals with physical sensation and subtle sensation/awareness or movement.

In the illustration below the thinking body corresponds to the Manomaya sheath, the feeling body corresponds to the Anandamaya sheath (along with the Pranamaya sheath), and the sensing body corresponds to the Annamaya sheath (along with the Pranamaya sheath). The Vijnanamaya sheath here is a kind of witnessing function—a higher mind and intuitive knowing that allows us to move beyond identification with any of the thoughts, feelings and sensations we are having at any moment.

Back to Gurdjieff, because what helped me was the simplicity—almost mechanistic—of his teachings on the topic. For example, he instructed students to assign the functions of thinking, sensing and feeling to three fingers (i.e., thumb, index, middle) and then give a little wiggle to each corresponding finger when you notice yourself in that function. He recommended constant training of this sort. And you know, there was a period in my life when I did just this. I remember a trip to Lake Tahoe that included several hikes where all I did the whole hike was register: thinking, feeling, sensing.

Ah, sensing my feet on the ground…thinking about the argument last night…feeling remorse…sensing pain in my hip…sensing the sun on my face…feeling pleasure…feeling relief…thinking about a childhood memory…

To Gurdjieff, the ability to harness attention (which he felt modern people were grossly deficient in) to consciously discern sensing (what is happening in myself) and also feeling (how I feel about it) at any moment was the bare minimum necessity to becoming “an actor” or agentic/sovereign/self-authoring in one’s own life. His training was about waking up the sleepwalking masses and the key to this was making what is often unconscious inner process, conscious and then working with the energy to modify and shape…or in the Buddhist vernacular, CREATE, reality.

I began that work in 2009 and have practiced various forms of subtle body yogas, trauma healing, and inner awareness ever since. It’s my great passion because feeling and sensing are my gift and curse. I’m sure many empaths can relate!

For me now, the distinctions between subtle feeling, sensing, and thinking are less important. I don’t need to label them and in fact, the labels get in the way of the processing that happens beyond the limited world of mentation/thinking. I have become one integrated sensing/feeling/thinking function of a body/field of awareness.

My training in the subtle art of these functions also gives me access to feeling and sensing things and people in other times and places. Like clairvoyants with their gift of remote seeing, I have remote feeling. I can “feel into” things from afar (both time and space) as if it was right here and I was feeling it directly—maybe we call this clairsentience? Sometimes this function is online and working well. If I am contracted or tired or cannot marshal my attention effectively, I am less accurate and sometimes can’t feel much.

Healing and integrating my trauma, or transmuting the blockages in the energy body, has been central to my having greater precision and discernment around what it is I am sensing and feeling.

Why is this important?

Like Gurdjieff, I believe that attention is precious. Awareness must be cultivated and practiced. And the subtle senses are key to our becoming “live players,” in the language introduced by our friend, Peter Limberg at The Stoa. The soul is subtle. It communicates through the subtle senses. Being in touch with our own soul requires us to feel and see and listen and be with subtle sensations, feelings and intuitions.

We live in a very brash and not-subtle world. We are overstimulated and overrun by noise—auditory, visual, and sensorial. I believe this is mostly because we are checked out, numb, not embodied. We are not home within ourselves and so we yell at each other just to feel heard, just to feel felt. Taking some time to tune into the subtle realms refines our sensing and helps us know which way to go. It can help us “feel into” whatever situation we’re in. Join me tomorrow to practice.

Schuyler