The Hierarchy of Feeling
Feelings exist within a hierarchy. At the top of the hierarchy are the ultimate feelings of unconditional love, bliss, joy and happiness. At the bottom of the hierarchy might be considered murderous rage, suicidal depression, fear and sorrow. Between these two ends of the hierarchy are the everyday feelings we experience; feeling Ok, alright, bored, amused, orgasmic, excited, hesitant etc. Somewhere within this hierarchy of feelings we will find the feelings that describe our everyday life, our highs and lows, the best we have ever felt and the worst. Typically, an average day would not include the highs and lows but just a mediocre range of feelings.
Our primary connection to life is not through our eyes but through our feeling. Feeling includes our tactile sense of touch as well as emotions, the sensing of body energies and more subtle energy fields; it even includes our mind and thinking. Although we can completely loose our sense of sight and hearing we never completely lose our sense of feeling. Through practice of feeling-meditation we can explore the upper range of the hierarchy of feelings and more importantly learn to bring them into our everyday life.
Moving up and down this hierarchy is brought about primarily by relaxation and stress and by our reaction or response to disturbance. Until we learn to relax through meditation we are unlikely to be aware of exactly how stressed we are and how much scope there is for further relaxation. Being relaxed encompasses body, emotion and mind. Of these it is initially the mind that needs to learn to relax. The body and emotions will then follow.
Most of the time the activity of the mind is an unnecessary disturbance to life that is added to our existence in any moment. If you sit quietly for just a few minutes and observe the content of the mind you can easily see the truth of this. It is as if you switched the mind on a long time ago and now you can’t find the “off” switch. As you observe the mind notice how, not only it is a disturbance to a peaceful existence, but also how it is an unnecessary disturbance.
Many meditations are aimed at helping you regain control of the mind, thereby lessening its disturbance and also helping to connect to what is beyond or transcendent to the mind. What is beyond the mind is necessarily not disturbed by the mind.
Once the mind is relatively calm we can focus on the feelings that underlie the busy mind. Firstly, we must be aware of the feelings that we have in any moment, this can be new to some people, for although they always have feelings they are not necessarily aware of them. We can then explore this range of feelings, directing our feeling and attention beyond our current feeling. It is more helpful to think of feelings arranged not so much as a vertical hierarchy but more as a series of concentric circles. The smaller the circle the more restricted the feeling and the lower down the hierarchy. As we relax and allow a feeling to expand we move up the hierarchy. So the process is one of firstly feeling what you are presently feeling and feeling it as fully as possible, secondly relaxing and feeling through and beyond the present feeling, then thirdly communing with the new, expanded feeling until you become one with it. At this point it may be appropriate to do the whole process again.
The feelings that we work through are very real and can include every kind of feeling from the lowest to the highest. This exercise can lead us to confront some unpleasant feelings but in doing so we can transform them and therefore be free of the hold they have over us.