Feeling Matters (PDF)

As long as feelings are second-class citizens, people will be second class citizens. Experience is an endangered species. An important function of psychotherapy is to make time for experiencing.Psychic taste buds really exist and rarely rest. They feed us each other, gauge states of being, states of spirit. We taste each other's feelings and intentions. An important aim of this book is to build psychic taste buds, not put them down or pretend they don't exist.A positive feeling runs through this book, a love of life, an affirmation. Yet we discover many feel they do not have an impact. A sense of helplessness and impotence in face of awesome forces seems to be increasing. Health is a broad term with many dark threads. A creeping annihilating sense varies from pockets we try not to notice to soul murder that must be addressed. Yet individuals do try, in their private struggles and in the larger social sphere. We see in the depths of private lives forces that get magnified in the larger world, and in our secret beings we find magnified hints of forces that go undetected in the social sphere. Social reform is not enough without working on oneself. Feelings matter in private life and in the public sphere. Failure to do justice to living experience, in families, business or governance, is to fail to do justice to life.