is, when we reflect on it, a highly paradoxical one.

How could we lose touch with feelings that belong to us?

Where might they go?

And what might be driving their loss?

It seems we’re built in such a way that an understanding of much of what our minds

and bodies go through is in no way automatic; it is mediated via the acceptance and understanding

of other people.

We know well enough about some things: if, for example, there were to be a gaping wound

in our leg, or we hadn’t drunk anything for three days, we would know the truth soon

enough.

But many of our sensations are like bells that have no solid wire back to consciousness;

they ring at a peculiar frequency that isn’t picked up by our minds when these have been

attuned incorrectly.

This may, for example, happen around tiredness.

Our body may have grown extremely weary over many years but consciousness might simply

not be interested, because it’s been calibrated to respond only to an agenda which sets store

by the fast-paced pursuit of status and money.

Or we might feel hugely anxious or in a rage with someone but consciousness, might not

care because we have been ordered to be confident or extremely ‘good’.

Or there might be a profound sadness inside us, but the feeling might not earn our attention,

because we’re meant to be privileged people with nothing to complain about.

Why do we overlook our feelings like this?

Because we generally only notice those feelings to which other people, especially people in

our childhoods, pay attention to - and conversely ignore those which they sideline or belittle.

If no one especially cares that we are worried, if the grounds for our anger would be refused

immediately, if there’s a dominant assumption that tiredness is for wimps, then we’ll

follow suit and disdain bits of ourselves as much as others have done.

Knowing how to care for ourselves depends on having been cared for by others; we listen

to ourselves because people around us have listened to us.

Reconnecting with our lost feelings therefore relies on a new, expanded sense of what it

might be legitimate to experience.

We have to be given permission to give our attention to as much of the sorrow, anxiety,

anger or tiredness as may really be locked inside us.

Put another way, we have to be loved properly, and so allowed to register whatever we are

actually going through without being belittled, stonewalled or humiliated.

Love will allow us to enjoy what should always have been our basic privilege: to know what

we feel.