Dolf's Blog
Integral thoughts about development, humanity, spirituality
What do you wish you'd learned earlier?
22
Easy question today: I wish I had learned earlier to get in touch with my feelings. I have been raised in a family where emotions and feelings were rarely expressed or discussed. Everything was rationalised and at best, feelings were expressed explosively, once they really needed to be released.
I was never bothered by this, really. I only discovered what I had missed when I learnt to get in touch with my own feelings - first as part of normal psychotherapy, then as part of my NLP and Counseling classes.
Discovering my feelings opened a whole new world for me. Not only did I discover this new and unknown side of myself; more importantly, I discovered the same thing in other people. On a certain day, I walked through the city and noticed that so many people were smiling at me. Only then I relaised that it was me who was smiling all the time and people just reflected my expression of my feelings. That was the great miracle I discovered: communicating through emotions, the fact that no words are needed to interact with people and, finally, empathy. Empathy was probably the most impressive thing to learn for me. Feeling what other people are feeling, feeling for other people in their situation and expressing your understanding of those feelings. Empathy requires you to understand your own feelings first. Once you know your own feelings, you can allow yourself to be touched by other people's feelings, words, expressions. And that leads to empathy. It is there where human understanding begins. It is there where real relationships begin.
