Many practitioners are curious about working from a good feeling. They want to know if there are any telltale signs that they’re teaching from the right place, and what to do if they find themselves in a bad feeling.
This is the second in a five- part series for practitioners. In this series, George and Linda Pransky answer questions frequently posed by other Three Principles practitioners. This post features Linda’s thoughts on being in a good feeling.
What does it mean to be “in a good feeling”?
When you are in your wisdom, you're beyond your personal mind. Everybody's had that experience, whether they know it or not. You just have to see and feel the difference. I used to live in my personal mind a lot, and thought it was a good thing. I thought it was a really good idea to think about things a lot, particularly things I didn't understand or felt bad about, or problems that I couldn't solve. I thought that the more I thought about it, the faster I would come up with a solution.
I had the experience of a very busy mind. When I first learned about the Three Principles I started going back and forth between my busy mind and being in a good feeling. It's like going back and forth from cold water to warm water. It’s like the difference between being in a feeling of a clear mind with a deeper feeling and going into a feeling of personal thought. It's just a different vibration in your experience.
What if you can’t get in the right feeling?
It can get a little confusing for people if they start thinking they have to get in the right feeling. That's not going to work. When I first started teaching, I would start to think like that, but I knew it wouldn’t work. I thought I might as well just give up and be in the wrong feeling because if I tried to force myself to be in a good feeling, it would make things worse.
What I did instead was look to stay within my insights and what I knew was helpful to me. I would just talk about what I knew. For example, what I knew when I first started teaching was that thought was mood. That would keep me in a really good feeling, and it kept me in my understanding and in my grounding. If I wanted to be in a nice feeling, all I had to do was ask myself what I knew to be true and helpful. The other thing I knew that was true and helpful is that you can't fix yourself in order to get happy. You just have to get happy in spite of the fact that you're not fixed. I loved that.
It gave me a fabulous feeling, because it was true for me. The next insight I had was that to have a nice relationship you have to enjoy it, rather than spend your time criticizing it. If you spend your time criticizing it, you're going to ruin it. You have to have more of the enjoyment and less of the criticism. As I shared from those insights, I stayed in a good feeling when talking with people. From the good feeling, more things would occur to me to say.
Instead of thinking about how to get into the right feeling, it is better to look at your insights rather than worry about your feeling. For me, now, I don't care what feeling I am in because I know if I'm in a bad feeling it's just a matter of time that I slip into a good one. It's when you try and force it that it becomes more difficult.
