Here I introduce the concepts of Form and Feeling, which can help us begin to understand the psychological physics of our everyday experience in the world. Understanding this idea allows us to untangle the mess of experience into puzzle pieces that we can work with. Understanding this phenomena, we may practice equanimity by remaining calm and aware in the face of our inner thoughts, feelings, and sensations. We may also practice breaking free of certain Form-Feeling adhesion by doing the opposite of what normally makes us feel good, to show ourselves that we can grow our stamina for being uncomfortable - and that we can expand our ability to experience love in the face of many different Forms.
To get involved with this work, you can join my weekly relational groups, work with me one-on-one, or contribute to my patreon. You can talk to your friends about relational work; you can forward these posts; you can comment on this post or message me with your own experiences, reflections, questions, and ideas. Are there things you’d like me to write about? I would love to hear what’s on your mind.
Below is the written version.
I've been wanting to write about the distinction between form and feeling for a while. Different people use different words for this phenomena; I'm using form and feeling because these words are simple and convenient.
Form represents the physical manifestation of something; a behavior, action, or changes in material reality.
Feeling represents your internal subjective experience, composed of thoughts, feelings, and sensations. These represent your meaning-making about a Form.
This distinction is important because we often experience the world as if Form and Feeling are inherently tied to each other. Someone says something about us that does not feel good and we characterize what they are saying as “criticism”. But someone saying something or other about us does not inherently cause us to feel a certain way. Someone hugging us does not inherently cause us to feel a certain way. It is the meaning we hold about the Form - the hug, the words someone said - that gives rise to Feeling (thought, emotion, sensation).
The challenge with believing that Form and Feeling are hardwired together is that we attempt to change all of the Forms, in hopes that we will get different Feelings. We may spend our whole lives trying to change around Forms in order to get the right Feeling. Often we will succeed only for moments, and the rest of the time we will be raging a battle against a changing world. This is exhausting, and it does not change the underlying issue that we are facing, which is ultimately one of not enjoying the Feeling inside of us.
So, there's another way to go about this. Practice breaking your Form-Feeling connections so that you can free yourself from the tyranny of your own inner world and inner meanings. You break your old meanings by allowing yourself and the world not to conform to your desires.
Maybe I'm feeling crummy because my house is a mess or because this person is acting towards me in a way that I don't like or because I don't like how my nails look today. Whatever it is, you can just feel the crumminess. You can be with that feeling, without needing to change the world to make you feel better. You can just take a moment and sit with your feeling. Sit with your crummy feeling. Be okay with that crummy feeling. This might sound silly; why in the world would you sit with a crummy feeling?
Well, here’s why. If you sit with that crummy feeling, you'll find that while you *thought* you hated the messy house or the thing your friend said/did or your ugly nails, it is actually the case that you can’t tolerate your own crummy Feeling.
Here’s the thing. For better or worse, we all have very important things to do in this lifetime. Necessary things that will make the world a better place. Forms we are called to enact. We'll have to stand up for what's right and speak out against what's wrong in ways that may make us feel very crummy. We may feel crummy while doing the right thing because of what other people may say to us or about us. We may feel crummy because of the challenges that we'll face. It is necessary to have a tolerance for feeling crummy if we want to live meaningful lives.
And so we can practice. We can practice being with the Feeling instead of reflexively either hiding from the Form that's causing it or reflexively trying to change it. We can practice being with the crumminess in order to increase our tolerance for it. This way, when we need to do something that may feel crummy, we know that we can do it and we're not going to run away just because we feel crummy.
That said, please feel very welcome to clean your house. Please feel very welcome to provide some feedback about how what someone says impacts you. Please feel free to trim your nails and keep them in the shape that you like. All of these things are also good to do.
The distinction between Form and Feeling is one of the primary concepts that I've been working with. I'm going to be diving more into it because it's really important.
It's really important to start learning to distinguish between form and feeling, to distinguish between the thing on the outside that is the trigger and the thing on the inside that we're having trouble tolerating. Because this basically starts to free us from the tyranny of being completely at the mercy of our surroundings, completely at the mercy of our own feelings.
That's it for now!
To get involved with this work, you can join my weekly relational groups, work with me one-on-one, or contribute to my patreon. You can talk to your friends about relational work; you can forward these posts; you can comment on this post or message me with your own experiences, reflections, questions, and ideas. Are there things you’d like me to write about? I would love to hear what’s on your mind.
Form and Feeling - Part I