When in doubt, feel

I stole this Personal Commandment right from Jon Bernie's wonderful teachings:

"When in doubt, feel. That’s all.

"Mental torture happens because something hasn’t been felt. It’s the surface siren, the car alarm. That annoying thing that goes off when you’re trying to sleep (if you live in San Francisco, you know exactly what I’m talking about!). So instead of going out and smashing that car with the alarm, go in and feel. Because the torture is a mental alarm; the obsessed, unhappy mind is the result of emotional energy that has not moved, like a weather system that’s been trapped. It’s dangerous; it can cause physical illness, can cause all kinds of destruction. So, when in doubt, feel."

You can find the whole teaching here.

For me this process is really aided by physically feeling my body. Feeling my feet on the ground (preferably on a wonderful walking trail like in the picture above) and feeling my breath going in and out. After years of acting like I didn't really have a body, the second half of my life has been a process of getting reacquainted with it. We're so lucky to have these amazing bodies! It reminds me of these lines from Mary Oliver's beautiful poem, "Wild Geese":

"You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
For a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves."

Ah!