Why you should not trust your feelings?
Within the spiritual world listening to your feelings (or heart) is often considered to be more important than thinking or mind.
Your feelings are more reliable and closer to who you are then your mind, is the statement. Therefore people who are in doubt are told to listen to their feelings and trust it.
But what is often not mentioned is that before we can trust our feelings we have to do some proper inner-work.
We first have to purify our feelings and distinguish if the feelings arise from a reliable source within us or not.
There are three ways how you can make decisions about what to do in every situation:
1.) Thinking or reasoning (logic)
2.) Feelings or emotion
3.) Inner knowing
Clear thinking or clear reasoning is also something we have to develop, but this post is not about that.
Inner knowing is instantly clear and does not need any more explanation, because there is none. Inner knowing means, you just know that you have to do something or not. Maybe later you can explain it better for yourself and others. Instant knowing does not bring in doubt. (However it is of course good to check later for yourself if the decision was really based on inner knowing.)
Making good decisions based on feelings or emotions and being able to rely on them, requires that you all the time also investigate your feelings and emotions.
During your spiritual-development everybody has to go through a phase in which feelings are not coming from a reliable source, but are based on past experiences, which are still active as old conditioning, old patterns in our mind and have not been replaced yet.
The more quiet our mind gets, the less conditioned we become, the more clear our feelings get. But again, first empty your mind and distinguish the source which the feelings are based on.
For example:
You are asked to visit a birthday party and your feelings are very positive to go there, so you decide to go. But when you arrive
you instantly feel that the birthday party is not fun at all and you start to feel negative about it.
Why is this?
After investigating the positive feelings you had to go there, you find out that they were based on your memories of last year and therefore maybe not a reliable source. Last year, when you visited the party it was fun and so you were conditioned (expectations) that this year would be fun to. So therefore when you tapped into your feelings you got positive feedback to go there.
However the fact that the party was fun last year, does of course not mean that this time it will also be fun.
________________
YOUR SPIRITUAL PRACTICE.
So should we not rely on our feelings and memories to make decisions? Yes and no 🙂
Just make sure that you investigate into your feelings and bring consciousness to it. Check what the feelings are based on:
memories, expectations, assumptions, ideal pictures etc?
The more your mind becomes quiet, the more clear your feelings become.
This is your spiritual practice and it is ok to make mistakes.
The end-result is your feelings become more and more reliable and therefore a good way to make decisions in life.
Photo by Scott Warman on Unsplash