VBT – Meditation 70.3
Thinking About Feeling
I remember somewhere that a certain psychotherapist wrote about a patient, a woman. He was telling her to feel something, but the psychotherapist felt that whatever she did she was not feeling, but thinking about feeling – and that is a different thing. So the therapist put his hand on the woman’s hand and pressed it, telling her to close her eyes and relate what she felt. She said immediately, “I feel your hand.”
But the therapist said, “No, this is not your feeling. This is just your thinking, your inference. I have put my hand in your hand; you say you are feeling my hand. But you are not. This is inference. What do you feel?”
So she said, “I feel your fingers.”
The therapist again said, “No, this is not a feeling. Don’t infer anything. Just close your eyes and move to the place where my hand is; then tell me what you feel.”
Then she said, “Oh! I was missing the whole thing. I feel pressure and warmth.’
When a hand touches you, a hand is not felt. Pressure and warmth are felt. The hand is just inference, it is intellect, not feeling. Warmth and pressure, that is the feeling. Now she was feeling. We have lost feeling completely. You will have to develop feelings; only then can you do such techniques.
Otherwise, they will not function. You will just intellectualize, you will just think that you are feeling, and nothing will happen. That is why people come to me and say, “You tell us this technique is so significant, but nothing happens.” They have tried, but they are missing a dimension – the feeling dimension. So first you will have to develop that, and there are some methods which you can try.
You can do one thing. If you have a small child in your house, follow the child around for one hour every day. It will be better and more fulfilling than following a buddha. Allow the child to move on all fours, and you also move on all fours. Just follow the child moving on all fours, and you will feel for the first time a new life energy coming to you. You will again become a child. Look at the child and just follow. He will go to every corner; he will touch everything – not only touch, he will taste everything, he will smell everything. Just follow, and do whatsoever he is doing.
You were also a child once; you have done this. The child is feeling. He is not intellectualizing, he is not thinking. He feels a smell, so he moves to that corner from where it is coming. He sees an apple, so he tastes it. Just tastes like a child. Watch when he is eating the apple, look at him: he is totally absorbed in it. The whole world has dropped, the world is no more there – only the apple.
Even the apple is not and the child is not – only the eating. Just follow a small child for one hour.
That hour will be so enriching, you will become a child again.
Tags: Thinking About Feeling
