How Does It Feel?
The hidden shadow behind logic, reason, and data. Or, why we must reconnect with our feelings. Now.
This is The Pathless Path with Brad Wetzler (formerly Enlightened-ish), my weekly dispatch about how we can brave the wilderness of these tough, post-modern, hyper-capitalist times…together. It’s about storytelling, healing, adventure, the human heart, and the pursuit of the sacred and the holy, too.
Who am I? I’m a widely published writer on mental health, faith and ecumenical religion, and, previously, travel and adventure.
Hello Friend,
Let’s talk about feelings.
Not emotions, not the swift-moving winds of joy, fear, sorrow, and anger that blow through us every minute of every day.
Feelings.
They run deeper. They are related to what we value most. They moor us to our character, maybe our very soul.
Our culture is increasingly disconnected from these mysterious inner forces. Some of it is due to the disembodied way we live our lives, staring at screens and living from the head up on Zoom calls. Some of it involves how we've structured our society and cities, where we drive from our jobs in a glass building or strip mall where we stare at screens and back to home where we watch Netflix on screens and numb out on whatever substances we prefer. It certainly has to do with the way we worship numbers. Data. Information. Increasingly we have a bias that something doesn't exist—or at least it isn't essential–if it can't be quantified.
Well, I'm here to tell you that feelings can't be quantified, and the fact that we are disconnected from them might be the cause of everything from the climate crisis to our volatile politics to the increase in gun violence.
If you can't feel, you can't know what you value. And if you can't understand
what you love, then you aren't going to value maintaining society for future generations. You aren't going to respect your community or yourself.
I know. A part of my journey over the past decade has been recovering my sense of feeling, of reconnecting with what I value, with my soul. And as I did this, I've become critical of our hyper rationalistic culture and how religion, spirituality, and faith are dismissed as off the wall, a little crazy by the dominant thinkers of today.
I recently read a quote from a writer who believes himself to be an expert on and critic of religion. He believes that the logical extension of faith is fanaticism and violence. I don't argue that fanatical believers have behaved violently. But this writer seems woefully disconnected from how much violence is perpetuated by our blind faith in logic and data.
When we live disconnected from our feeling state and abide by what data, logic, and numbers tell us, we get comfortable with things we'd never abide by.
You might hear an expert say something absurd like this:
•a nuclear war would be destructive but it would be survivable by 80 percent of the world's population.
(And your point, sir?)
•You might think that the bottom line is the most critical aspect of running a business and not care that you are polluting the streams or, in the case of the pharmaceutical companies that make opiates, killing people living in Appalachia or your town.
(Where’s the ethics, let alone the humanity, in that?)
•You might, like Adolph Eichmann, rationalize one’s role in liquidating millions of people because you were merely making the trains run on time.
In my case, it wasn't easy to recover my feelings. And how I healed my feelings defied logic as well. I embarked on a weird pilgrimage based on a gut feeling, intuition, and belief that a trip to the Holy Land would somehow help me heal.
I wrote about this experience in my memoir, Into the Soul of the World: My Journey to Healing, published in March by Hachette Go. But I'll describe it here.
In 2012, I found myself retracing the path that a figure I held dear from my youth, Jesus, once trod upon, departing his hometown of Nazareth. This journey led me along the sprawling 40-mile path known as the Jesus Trail, a pilgrimage from Nazareth to the Sea of Galilee. Next, I embarked on a wild road trip through the stark, troubled desert of the West Bank. There, amidst the shifting sands, I underwent a spiritual recalibration as I immersed myself in the flowing currents of the Jordan River—a site inseparably woven into the narrative of John the Baptist baptizing Jesus. Later, I climbed the Mount of Olives and walked the labyrinthine alleys of Jerusalem.
Within the ghoulish sanctuary of the Church of the Holy Sepulcher, I found myself in Adam's Chapel—an underground chamber chiseled from ancient stone. In the quiet sanctum, I confronted myself and the battle I waged against depression and post-traumatic stress disorder. An earthquake said to have rippled through the earth during the crucifixion of Jesus had left an indelible mark—a visible crack in the chapel's walls. And in a poetic twist, this fissure seemed to mirror the fault lines within my psyche, encapsulating my struggles and my story.
Upon returning to my New Mexico home, I embarked on a different journey. I gradually reduced my reliance on the potent medications prescribed by a physician to counter the grip of my depression. These pills, though potent, had rendered me emotionally numb. As their influence waned, an awakening occurred—emotions, sensations, and the symphony of my inner world surged to life once more. And later, after I moved to Boulder, Colorado, on a gut feeling or divine inspiration–or who knows why?–I built an altar in my apartment and committed to sit in front of it and pray every morning, despite my not being part of any particular religion.
This wasn't a mere resurgence of feelings; it was a profound reconnection with my body and beliefs, a dance with my past, and a glimpse of possible futures. And above all, it was a newfound reverence for the present moment, a drink from the wellspring of self-discovery, and a step on the path to finding myself again.
Healing became more than just a concept. It became a tangible path I'm walking.
Today I'm dedicated to maintaining and cultivating my deeper feelings. While I don't tether myself to any specific creed, I dedicate moments each day to spiritual practices and respect for the sacred and mystery with habits like lighting candles, meditation, yoga, and walking in nature. These rituals, however small or insignificant they may seem to a green-eye-shade-wearing actuarial, serve as conduits to rediscovering my emotional landscape.
We lose something vital when we emphasize reason and empirical knowledge at the expense of emotions, the mystical, and the enigmatic. This, inadvertently, sets us on a path toward fragmentation–of being less than human.
Reconnecting with our feelings, or souls, is an urgent need, for failing to nurture this connection might herald the direst of circumstances.
If you haven’t bought my memoir, Into the Soul of the World: My Journey to Healing, yet, I hope you will.
Here’s what author Hampton Sides wrote about it:
“Brad Wetzler has led the very definition of an adventurous life, but in Into the Soul of the World, he gives an unflinching account of his interior adventures. Wetzler’s soulful quest, by turns anguished and transcendent, will resonate with readers around the world who struggle to find purpose and a sense of the holy in the ambient jitter of the digital age.”
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I love this post. So much of what you wrote resonates with me. I had an experience with psych meds (and throwing them away) when I was in my mid-20s. I felt numbed out by them and that rattled me. I need my feelings to guide me. I wrote this sentence last month regarding that issue: "The drug made me feel like I was in a bottle, closed off from the sharp clarity of the world around me and insulated from my own feelings."