Care How You Feel
The main practice that I am living life by at the moment is one I call “Care How I Feel”. This is a phrase I picked out of a workshop I went to a few months ago. This phrase in particular “Care How You Feel” that was shared felt like it was spoken directly to me (indeed I believe it was). I have since built it out into a practice that I use to guide my decisions.
To understand how to use this principle for decisions, or any other guiding principle that is deeply important to you, we must first come to the understanding that a decision is not a decision until it is accompanied by action. If you decide to jump off the high diving board into the pool far below, when is it that you truly make the decision to jump? Is it when you are contemplating it and mulling over the options and then say “Yes I think I will jump”? No, since nothing has changed. We could say it is when you start climbing the ladder up to the high diving platform. But the real decision actually happens when you step off the platform. That is when you are committed, and have made a true decision. Decisions are only real decisions when accompanied by committed actions.
If there is a cause that we care a little about, we may perhaps say something to someone about it , we complain or question or discuss it. Perhaps we click some likes on Facebook and share an article or two. If we care a little more, maybe we donate some money towards someone acting on that cause. Maybe we go to a protest. We care more, perhaps we organize a protest ourselves. All the way up to standing in front of a tank in Tiananmen Square as it rolls towards you.
So, along this scale of decisions, what is our own level of commitment to ourselves, to how we feel? Is it at the level of sharing a Facebook article about how we feel – a meme, and then we’re done for today? Maybe we donate some money occasionally, we splurge on a massage for self-care. Perhaps we spend a few hours discussing with our friends at the dinner table or the bar about not feeling so great about our job? For a very long time this was my level of commitment. I remember literally spending years and years standing in my local bar at the end of the street, talking to my same friends about the same topics – my job not being fulfilling any more, wanting to work on something with purpose, wanting to leave the city, wanting to spend more time outdoors.
If we care enough about how we feel, if we are to truly make decisions based on how we feel, the level of committed action will be commensurate. What level of action are you willing to ascribe to caring how you feel? What is your commitment, and what is your commitment *to* – is it to you or is it to something else like someone else’s company, money, a partner’s perceived needs, practicing staying stuck or so many other things that we put up as barriers to avoid looking closely at our level of commitment to ourselves.
