I was born with a rare gift. I think everyone has at least one gift. I happen to have extremely deep access to feeling. As a child, I would have rather been gifted with extreme skill as a basketball player. I could see how that gift was valued by society. I thought I got the short end of the stick with feeling. Now, I can recognize and better appreciate my aptitude for accessing feelings. This ability allows me to be very good at empathy with others. For me, empathy is the ability to open your heart and be in feelings with both another and yourself.
For me, I experience empathy through subtle and intense bodily sensations. I’m showered with a constant array of stimuli. Every tendril of my being is connected with every person I’ve ever met, every animal or plant I’ve had a significant interaction with, and all the heavenly bodies which shine down on us day and night. These connectors communicate through feeling. As a child, I felt connected to the insects my brother and father stepped on, and it hurt me physically. My heart broke everyday with the intense bullying at my elementary school. I wasn’t the target, but I hated it all the same. It’s difficult to paint with words how fully I feel every experience. It hurts me when a bug shatters on the windshield while I’m driving. When I see the stars shining in the sky, it warms my heart. The birds flying through the air inspire me. When I’m interacting with other people, I feel so much. It’s like I’m a live wire of feeling. And, the feelings give me so much information. I’m like a radio tower picking up the transmission of so many radio stations at the same time. I’m open like a sponge. I absorb everything around me and it goes directly into my open heart like a sponge.
Through sharing my personal story, I hope to inspire you and others about the importance of feeling. I believe that I’m meant to be a spokesperson for this ability. The ability to feel should be valued among any of the highest human virtues. It is my hope that this story lights a spark in you to recognize your own subtle and sensitive gifts of feeling. May we all learn together to feel more deeply and love more completely.
The Gift and Curse of Feeling
At times I thought I was born with a curse. Sometimes I wished I had never been born at all. This world was so cruel and it felt so harsh to me. I just didn’t understand why the world was this way. I couldn’t understand how people could treat each other the way they did at my elementary school and in the world. Even as a child I would often wonder to myself, “Why were they acting so heartlessly?”
My family made sense for the most part. They were loving. They were lost, too, but we all cared about each other deeply. In general, the world just felt so wrong to my young, open heart. For a long time I wondered in confusion, ignorance, and pain about how this could be. How could life be so abysmal on planet earth? Yet some strange optimism carried my sails like a kind wind blessing a stranded ship with the grace of forward movement toward my destiny. In spite of all the unreasonable pain and stupid, pointless cruelty, I sailed calmly on while feeling it all. The seas got very rough in many spots and yet there was an inner knowing that sustained me through all the terrible and immense changes which would come. Thank God for this profound peace amidst the chaos.
Awakenings
It was in early 1996 when the first inkling of an awakening began. It felt like a splash of cosmic cold water in the face which invigorated me with new life. This culminated in an experience I had in 2020 during the Winter Solstice which I call the “Great Awakening.” My Great Awakening was like a cosmic, loving scream which made everything within me shake, tremble, and realign with love from the foundation up.
Even as awake as I am, I’m still just waking up little by little every day. Each moment I wake up to a slightly deeper layer of feeling. Every day I feel a little more free from the collective trance and slumber I believe we’ve all been under.
In 2020, I started to have a tiny inkling of the immensity of this gift and curse of feeling which I was born with. It took until 2021 for me to have an idea of where this was all going. In the days and months after my Great Awakening, I began to realize that my ability to feel is a superpower. I can’t fly like Superman or turn invisible like the Invisible Woman, but I can feel when someone is lying to me or judging me in the most minute way. I can feel when someone is lying to themselves. I can feel when someone turns against me from several miles away. I can sense when someone moves away from what is true to their heart and soul, the split second they leave themselves. I’m nearly always dead accurate because I can feel it.
My Superpower
These sweet sensations and feelings in my body give me all sorts of gifts. They tell me when people are lying to me and tell me when they are lying to themselves. When they are lying to themselves, their words sound flat. Their tone doesn’t resonate. They feel thin and hollow. This feeling helps me to discern whether I’m off the mark or on target as well. My feelings show me when I’m lying to myself. I ask myself, “Is this the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth?” This way of feeling helps me to tune to the environment and love all my relations. The discernment my heart has here is quite beyond anything I ever thought was possible. I was extremely skeptical of my heart sensing capacity for a long time. I even kept doubting it until I repeatedly experienced what I discerned was actually very accurate.
This gift of feeling has been a guiding light. It’s a north star to my heart which shines among all other things. Feeling has been my guardian angel, carrying me through the intense soul darkness of this weary world with a protective, angelic light. This shining star of feeling helps me to love others with deep and profound empathy everyday.
In our society, my capacity to feel has in many ways been a curse that has brought about intense alienation. When I have sensed things inside of others that they didn’t want me to know about or couldn’t face themselves, they have gotten angry and intolerant of my honesty. Many people have denied my truth and been unable to recognize it as accurate. They believe I can’t possibly know the things I know about them. They think I’m full of myself, deluded, insane, or just plain wrong. And yet, those who know me understand how I really am.
My heart bleeds everyday for the people who have cut themselves off from me. Some of the people I love the most have brutally and coldly cut the strands which connect my heart to theirs. My former fiancee is out of my life now, as is my greatest mentor, many of my seemingly supportive work colleagues, and numerous people who I had counted amongst my best friends.
I love in an unusual way. This is an understatement. I love in a way that I feel hasn’t ever been seen before on planet earth. This is not because I am any better than anyone else. In fact, I’m no better or worse than anyone else. I am, however, more intense than anyone else I’ve ever met in the commitment to feeling and opening the heart. I’m radical and I go off roads and I entertain possibilities that most people would dismiss or be afraid of.
There have been many great lovers of all of humanity. The way I love rests upon the great teachers of humanity like Jesus, Buddha, Lao Tzu, Mohammed, Rudolf Steiner, Carl Jung, William Shakespeare, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Martin Luther King Jr, Fredrich Douglass, Terry Tempest Williams, Greta Thunberg, and Alanis Morissett. I owe so much to all these great teachers. I would not be where I am today without all the great human beings who have walked this wisdom path of the heart. I continuously strive to be as profoundly loving as they were and are. I do not care about fame or being remembered, I only care about the earth, humanity, and all of the universe. I keep learning and never close my heart to anyone or anything. I don’t put myself above or below anyone. I simply keep loving.
My Wish for All of Humanity
Sometimes in the past, I’ve wished I could close my heart and not be cursed to feel so much pain. Now, I celebrate this gift of feeling as a profound kind of open heartedness which I want to share with every human being on the planet and with all the other relations both on this earth and beyond. I’m open to every being I come into contact with.
I’m deeply honest and defer to anyone who knows more than me in any area. I’m not an expert in many things. My spatial awareness skills are shaky at best. I’m not great at spelling. My handwriting leaves much to be desired. I wish I was a better musician than I am. I’m not a great singer. My organizational skills are moderate at best. There are so many more things I could learn more deeply.
My abilities to feel, open my heart, and do empathy are truly exceptional compared with most people on this planet. When I played sports growing up, I always knew who were the best basketball, football, and frisbee players when we were picking teams. I was masterful at honestly assessing my skills. I always practiced assessing as accurately and objectively as possible. I carefully assessed the skills of all those around me and rated myself along with them. Sometimes I was the worst, and other times I was the best depending on who I was playing with. Most of the time I was somewhere in the middle of the pack. I was a good athlete, but not a great athlete.
In terms of the heart-centered skills, I know that I could be better than I am currently at all of them. I have already learned a lot, but I continue seeking to be more open hearted, empathic, feeling, and loving everyday that I live. So far, I’d say that I’ve developed roughly 5% to 10% of my capacities. In my assessment, most people I encounter are at about 1% to 2% of what they are capable of. I seek to continue learning the way of feeling with each passing life experience.
It’s so sad that many of us have closed our hearts to our feelings. I understand it, though. Feeling is a double-edged sword in this society. Sensitivity to feeling can give you amazing access to your intuition. This awareness will also makes you painfully aware of all the cruelty and lies that exist in this world. The gift of feeling has not always been easy for me, and yet I believe it is the greatest gift I could have ever asked for on my particular life path. If my hypothesis is correct and possible, then together we can restore the heart and soul to humanity.
I believe the hidden potential in feeling is the carrier wave for a change so profound and deep that it will one day reach across this globe and save humanity. When every human heart on this planet is open to feeling, the joy of living will erupt throughout the whole world. The force of the miraculous lies hidden in the power of unfelt feelings. All life will be an eternal celebration of this joy that has no opposite. When everyone has their life the way they really want it, we can have a true heaven on earth.
My charge to humanity is really quite simple: accept everything you feel and you will be able to accept everything that everyone else feels. Another way of coming at this is equally simple. Just accept everything you feel in your heart and cut the crap. It’s time to wake up! We don’t have much time to waste. If you truly care about existence, join me in this Great Awakening. Sometimes I feel like an unheard voice crying in the wilderness. That’s the literal translation of “Vox Clamantis In Deserto,” and the motto at my alma mater, Dartmouth College. This quote also feels like my motto. My hope is that this cry which has begun in the wilderness will serve as an inspired awakening call to rouse us all before it’s too late for our species to awaken and change the current feelingless trajectory.
We live in days where we have to believe in miracles or we will face the doom of the human race. My gifts can open the doorway to the miraculous for you and all of humanity. If you follow me on the path to learning how to love feelings, your life will be forever changed. Everything you’ve dreamed of is hidden in the potential of your heart. When you feel, you unlock the door to your heart. So many treasures await you here.
Come! Join us on the journey!
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