Feelings! Wanted or Unwanted Gifts!

We live with feelings from birth to last breath and take all the time in between to try to understand them! Toddlers, generally, have difficulty articulating the difference between hunger and tiredness as they are quite similar. The parent can know the difference in terms of understanding if either sleep or food is needed. Navigating the feeling world is difficult for adolescents and their parents as the expression of feelings often blots out the path back to the source, which is sometimes hormones or a straining at the leash towards independence. Going back to the cause of the feelings brings about an understanding and a possible solution.

As we progress into adulthood, the role of parenting the feeling world becomes our own. We all rest in and long for extending the feelings of love, comfort, joy, peace and excitement. However, as we are on a continuum of consolation and desolation throughout life the feelings that we desire most are not continuous. If we are lucky enough to be someplace in the middle most of the time, we are in a happy enough place to be mentally and spiritually healthy and at one with life and ourselves.

We sometimes allow burdens to sit long and hard on our shoulders and hearts if we don't reflect on what we are feeling and root down to the source or thoughts that are causing the feelings. Allowing anger, guilt, resentment and anxiety to lay too large a claim on our lives that wears us down or takes us away from the moments of joyful living that are ours to savour and nurture.

Guilt, anger, sadness, fear, loneliness are all feelings that may figure when in grief. Grief is generally associated with the loss of someone in death. However, grief can also be experienced as a thought and feeling when one, or one's loved ones, lose physical or mental capacity. Anger or sadness can arise when others can still do what you can no longer do. Grieving for a loved one who can no longer do with you what was previously possible can be a source of guilt, loss or sadness in the same possible measure as losing a person in death.

Feelings are gifts which help us to make sense of the world in which we live and to find a response that works best for us in the new. Feelings are sourced in some experience that sometimes need reflection or talking to understand in order to move one's foot off the starting block of life today. When our feelings are too heavy to carry, then it is time to stop and think or find someone to be the mirror we need to look in through a good chat. The feeling has a cause and a purpose. Feelings are gifts!

Cathy Burke
Catechist in the Partnership of Parishes in Lucan