Feeling life isn’t what you think it is. It’s not all that bad. You fear it. Everything you do is done for the purpose of avoiding having to feel life. Yes. Your life, this life, exactly as it is with all the things you don’t want and all the things you do and can’t seem to get. Because you are intent on changing the flow, you set yourself up to quite naturally believe that feeling your life as it is, will destroy you, that it will submerge you in the depths of all that’s wrong and hold you under.

It will. In a way.

And it won’t.

Feeling the pain and suffering in the world is unavoidable, no matter how good you are at avoidance. Feeling is what you are. Whether you attempt to suppress, avoid or alter the experience, you still feel the suppression, the avoidance, the altered state and snuggled under them, like a snake in the crack of some rocks, is the reality you hope to avoid.

You cannot escape it.

It will always slither its way out when you aren’t vigilant, and you can’t live in vigilance. That’s not living. That’s life as fight or flight, freeze and fawn. There’s no aliveness in that. There’s only rigidity, leaving you totally unable to flex and bend, to meet life’s changing panorama. It creates callousness, extreme positions shrouded in obstinacy. It’s a pretty grim way to live.

That’s what you feel now and it’s painful.

Feeling life as it is takes away the added layers, softens the rigidity, opens you up so that presence tends you as you tend to life. It cuts through the defenses, rendering them unnecessary. It allows you to truly be alive, to discover that you are aliveness itself. Hence, you are destroyed. You discover that you were never what you thought yourself to be and ideas of protecting and defending yourself dissolve, mirages once thought real and required, now not even watery memories.

Most live lives in hiding, camouflaging life to avoid the need to feel. It doesn’t work. It never has. It simply cut you off from the beauty, the love that flows through everything, alienating you from the savings grace that heals.

It’s a paradox — to feel it all is to find yourself as love, to be truly alive, to be absolute aliveness. As life flows through us unhampered, it doesn’t eddy and pool, it simply flows. It is a swirling movement of images and sensations, thoughts and feelings. They don’t hang around; they simply spill through.

Undammed, open to feel it all, you are a sacred spillway spilling forth abundant life, feeling … loving … presencing … experiencing all that is. Through you, This That Is, life takes form. As you, the bodymind, life appears in form. To you, life returns once its course is run.

Feeling is not something to hide from. It is your superpower.