what feeling allows (a living room picnic)
on Monday, 11-Apr from 7:30-8:30pm EDT
“What Feeling Allows” is the section heading from a wonderful class I’ve been taking: Self-Guided Embodiment Basics Course, taught by Prentis Hemphil. Can’t recommend them enough.
So, as we began to look at “the incentive for feeling” —Prentis posed the question for us to come to with our own answers: “Why Feel?”—When it can be hard, painful, lead to, or back to, untenable experiences inside you…Why feel? Why not avoid it?
They gave their answer, from their body. And I’m working on mine. I’d love to do that in company with other women drawn to exploring what it is that feeling allows…
And allows might be — makes room for, gives permission for, enables, authorizes, facilitates, contains, exposes, brings ease to…
What would you say?
I come from a culture that tends to see feeling and thinking as two separate spheres. With thinking on top. Like being emotional is a controllable state, a choice, and there are good emotions and ones to avoid, not to mention norms around how and when to express emotions. Binary. Hierarchical. Missing the point, that emotional is how we are. Machines calculate. People think, and when we think, there is always an emotional aspect to it. That part of your brain, your mind, your memory, you meaning-making is ALWAYS involved (even if it’s being blocked, suppressed, sublimated - still involved).
The question is how well do you know — well, you?
Where I come from, we don’t say much about emotions, and when we do, it’s more about the person or circumstance understood to have brought it on than about what’s going on inside us. With all the rules and general rushing toward doing and thinking (as if they can happen without feeling), the conversation (with ourselves) gets stopped before it starts.
With the caveat that this is an offering of a conversation, not a teaching, I’m inviting fellow deep-thinking, change-seeking women to a living room picnic about how we experience the truth and history held in our bodies—as Brené Brown puts it, the biology, biography, behaviors and backstory (Atlas of the Heart, p.xxx) to explore what feeling allows —
Why go deep on what happens when you feel your feelings?
- to explore the value of emotions; it’s not that emotions aren’t so bad, it’s that they are integral to being human (this is one of those times when you really do want to read the manual)
- because when experience is filtered through the rational-vs-emotional way of characterizing how we think, we’re missing out on a source of knowledge and information, and we’re wrong about what’s happening
What do you think?
Does this sound like your kind of conversation?
Here’s more or less how it’ll flow —
We open with a question of some kind to get to know each other a little, then we take time to gather our thoughts (a brief private journaling session) and move into discussion time to unhurriedly think out loud together. When I haven’t cut it too close to the edge, we close with a moment to collect ourselves and cross back over to our respective worlds.
It’s personal, relaxed and non-performative. A small group of women interested in conversation and each other’s views, interests and stories.
… let’s talk 
when: Mon 11-Apr from 7:30-8:30pm EST
to attend:
P.S. If you’re curious about the course, pop over to Instagram where you can watch a glimpse of Prentis Hemphile teaching Module One: The Body at @the.embodiment.institute.
So much life-transformed, smiling gratitude for who what they bring to the world with their work, generosity and openness. — Alex