Creating The Webbd Wheel: Feelings
In which we enlist our body rather than our brain ...
One of our defining characteristics as humans is our feeling experience. Sadly, modern Western culture does not teach us how to cherish and manage our emotions.
Feelings are distinct from thoughts. Feelings read like a kindergarten list: mad, sad, glad, scared, ashamed. The stories we tell others and ourselves about our feelings are thoughts about feelings. We’ve assigned the label “good” to feelings we enjoy and “bad” to feelings causing us discomfort. The discomfort we experience around a feeling of say, anger, is culturally created the minute someone teaches us it’s wrong or bad to feel angry.
We were created to experience feelings, anger included. Repressing, denying, and avoiding anger and other feelings are problematic, but the felt experience of anger is like standing in a thunderstorm. Magnificent. Potentially dangerous. Beautiful. Chaotic. Impermanent.
The awareness, control, and management of feelings is the definition of emotional intelligence. Feelings are data, giving us value-neutral information about our experience and our needs.
We all know people who refuse (or are unable) to acknowledge or discuss their feelings; such people generally have no interest or room for anyone else’s feelings. Other people never let go of their stories (thoughts) about their feelings. Because we’re not taught how to feel our feelings, most of us intellectualize them rather than feel them. We build stories, make assumptions, blame others for “making” us feel in such-and-such a way, though we are the only ones in charge of our own feelings. We hold onto bitterness, pain, grief, and rage rather than letting them move through us.
It's difficult to make effective, appropriate choices around our feelings when we have no teachers and no models. Emotional intelligence lies at the core of The Webbd Wheel series. The characters do have guides and teachers. Feelings are not invalidated, but accepted and supported.
But not by everyone.
Rose Red has a deeply disconnected relationship with her parents, neither of whom are the slightest bit emotionally intelligent. One of the difficult aspects of feelings is how complex they can be. Certainly, this character feels grief and pain over her emotional abandonment. She’s happy to have found a way into her own life. She’s ashamed because she’s been unable to please her mother.
And she’s angry. Rage is perhaps the hardest emotion for women to deal with. In our culture, women are allowed to cry, but not express rage.
The practice of sacred dance, as Artemis and Baubo teach it, is a healthy way to express emotion. All emotion. Physical activity is not about intellect, but returns us to our physical selves, simple, primal, and innocent. We breathe, sweat, move, and our feelings move through us the same way a thunderstorm moves across the sky.
Many people avoid dance, drumming, meditation, and other such activities precisely because they become aware of their feelings as they do so. If we live with repressed feeling, it can seem too big to let loose or even look at. We might do or say terrible things. Our hair might catch on fire. We might never stop weeping. We might never get out of bed again.
We might kill somebody.
We might become unlovable.
In post #41 of The Hanged Man, Rose Red is able to feel her rage through dance in the solitude of nature. In feeling it, in allowing herself to feel it, she releases it without violence to herself or anyone else. The storm leaves her spent and limp. It also clears the way for her female power, including her sexuality, as she helps the trees wake only hours later.
Our feelings are the gateway to coming into intimate connection with ourselves, and therefore others. They don’t lie down or go away because we throw words at them or resist them. They demand to be expressed, to be felt, and when they have gusted through us we’re left cleansed and peaceful, like the beach after a storm.
(This essay was published with post #41 of The Hanged Man.)