A pattern I’ve noticed in myself and others is that most of the time, when we look for advice or guidance, what we’re really looking for is something else:
Certainty.
Or more accurately, faith.
Because, as you probably know, certainty can not be given by anything.
Yes, we can do many things to positively increase the odds of our favored outcome. But underneath it all, life is still inherently unpredictable.
This is a fact of life that, depending on how well we’re currently handling it, can feel either exciting and adventurous, or stressful and overwhelming.
Life is always life-ing, we can’t control that much, and our task is to remain decisive in the face of it regardless.
And to understand that even though nothing is certain, all our actions and choices make an impact on the next reality we live in.
But when that responsibility feels like a burden, or we’re worried about doing the wrong thing, we look for guidance. Someone’s wisdom to put our faith in. The wisdom of a person, who, in the end, just like us, can’t predict or control much.
That’s not to say that we don’t all know a bunch of stuff the others don’t, about different things.
But the reason we learned them is because we took risks and dealt with consequences that enabled learning. Everything else is second-hand knowledge. Everything else is pure faith.
It doesn’t matter if your faith is in something holy, something scientific, or the words of a charismatic influencer. Faith it is.
There’s a catch though:
Whatever we put our faith in can’t point the finger back at us or the obvious—and the most accurate advice often does.
I give this example often, because it’s an easy way to illustrate it:
“How do I tell [person ] that I feel/did/think [ thing]?”
The answer is, of course, “you just tell them”.
But that feels unhelpful, because there’s a hidden secret part to the question.
“How do I tell [person] that I feel/did/think [thing] in a way that ensures [outcome I want] and avoids [outcome I don’t want] ?”
…and the answer to that is: You can’t. You can’t fully control life’s uncertainty.
Again, this doesn’t feel like the advice one would be looking for. Because what we’re looking for is not advice but faith. Faith that things will turn out in a way that we’ll be okay with.
(Side note: This is why “top 10 secrets” and “special hidden ingredients” marketing works so well. They play exactly this angle: “Have you tried the obvious and failed to control life? Don’t worry, I know something nobody does. Just give me your faith and money.”)
Something “we’ll be okay with”. That’s what’s underneath.
Because if you think about it, the fact that life is inherently uncertain and we can’t control isn’t a problem: It’s what makes it worth living.
If we could bend life to our own will, then it would lose all appeal. Might be fun for a week, but in the end, it would just be nothingness. You’d be in a reality where you can do anything you ever want, instantly, and nothing ever responds to you with any personality or aliveness.
In fact, nothing ever responds to you at all. Because for it to respond, it would have to make some sort of choice. But in order for you to have certainty, it can’t do that. You could poke your surroundings but they won’t respond, unless you specifically make them do the specific thing you want.
But why would you still want anything? Because the only reason to want something is that it’s not here.
Quick little philosophical detour there, but the point is:
Life’s uncertainty is good. We don’t want that gone.
What we want is to have a “break” from it. To be able to control a specific situation in a way that we “feel okay” with.
Now, the situation is something we ultimately have no control over.
But “feeling okay with” lives in our relationship to it.
This is at the root of everything:
“Do we currently have the capacity to handle the emotional impact the next, unexpected outcome may have on us?”
If not, that’s when we’ll try to force one. That’s when we’ll try to seize control. Or put our faith in someone else who promises it.
All the virtues we strive for, or things we know would be the right thing?
They all fall to this level of capacity.
We will only be honest about things when we believe that revealing them—and the consequences of it—is something we can handle emotionally. Something “we’ll be okay with”, even if it’s hard.
We will only shake our addictions when we have the emotional capacity to handle what we’re running from.
A lot of affairs could be prevented if the people involved had the capacity bask in the tension of mutual attraction and enjoy it like a warm bath of feeling without acting on it. But if the energetic charge is higher than our capacity to do that, we are pressured to release it.
For all these reasons and many more, one of the most useful skills you can cultivate in life is building the capacity to feel.
So many issues across life are downstream of low feeling capacity that I think this should be core curriculum in schools.
Things like avoiding rejection, avoiding doing the rejecting, premature ejaculation, panic-selling your stocks, triple-texting before they respond, or ghosting—never responding at all.
All of these are things we do to prevent or escape the potential emotional overwhelm of an unpredictable outcome.
We all have patterns to deal with this in one form or another and the mechanism behind them is simple:
Each moment offers sensations our senses can perceive. If the sensations feel too intense, we do something to release or escape them. This can be as simple as looking at our phone (or refusing to look at it, when we’re anxious about a message).
While often labeled as bad, I think there’s nothing wrong with escaping or numbing feelings.
It’s better to face them in sustainable amounts than to be chronically overwhelmed.
That said, life gets easier as your capacity to feel increases, because anything you remove yourself from, you lose agency towards.
When our capacity to feel is very low, we’re vulnerable to addiction: Dependence on external sources for either numbness (escaping sensations) or stimulation (strong enough sensations to bypass our numbness).
When our capacity to feel is very high, few things can trigger us. We are nearly unhookable.
Procrastination, anxiety, indecisiveness, worry, emotional unavailability are all experiences that become less frequent with increased capacity to feel.
Because even though it seems like it, we’re not avoiding certain outcomes at all. We’re avoiding the feelings we think they’ll bring (based on how we estimate our ability to handle them).
In other words: If we could imagine the worst case scenario and feel okay with that, we wouldn’t worry. We’d still hope for the best, but we would collaborate with reality instead of avoiding it.
Confidence is, in essence, faith in your ability to handle a wide variety of possible scenarios (and your ability to emotionally handle the times they get the best of you).
It’s interesting that in many religious traditions, the opposite of faith is called “temptation” or “evil”.
While low-capacity doesn’t lead to evil, evil does stem from low capacity.
We can observe the most minuscule seeds of this inside ourselves.
When are we less kind to people than usual?
When we are under high stress.
And what is stress? It’s the energetic load of an experience exceeding our capacity.
Where an intrinsic faith in life is an expression of high capacity, the opposite of that (an intrinsic belief that life can’t be trusted, isn’t good, and should be forced) would be the part of the spectrum where evil resides.
What is evil and how are we moved to engage with it?
Evil is low-capacity hiding from itself, pretending to be strength.
This why evil so often despises weakness, punishes it, or obsesses over power for its own sake.
It’s an unwillingness to recognize reality as a power even the strongest of us ultimately have to bow to in humility.
Evil exploits our insecurities by inspiring us to do things which we believe can force the positive outcome we’re insecure about, and normally wouldn’t do, but still falls within the behavior we don’t have scruples about.
This is why most evil doesn’t look evil, and intention changes the meaning of our behavior.
When our capacity (and thus) our faith is low, it can feel like we live in a world that actually rewards evil.
But the thing is, it can’t be any other way.
If good intentions would give immediate worldly rewards, they’d be inseparably enmeshed with self-serving ones.
The benefits of goodness are nonlinear & not always observable. That’s the point of faith. It’s choosing the right thing and trusting that somehow, we’ll be okay.
The temptation of evil is that inverts this dynamic. It says “you won’t be okay, but if you stop caring about anything and put your faith in force, I can give you short-term rewards at a cost that will only be revealed over time, nonlinearly, not always observable from the outside, but you will pay just the same”.
How to Get Better at Handling Emotions Without Going Into Overwhelm
We just made a case for how much of our behavior, both towards ourselves and others, is determined by our capacity to be with our feelings without going into overwhelm.
But what can you do to get better at this?
The good news is, there are many things. So let’s go over some you can start practicing right away.
Most of them (but not all) are focused on feeling more of your body, because that is exactly where feelings are felt.
1) Embodiment practice
When I was a kid, my mom used to take me to this man.
He’d have me lay down and stare at the ceiling. Then for an hour he’d try to get me to concentrate on my pinky toe or something. “You gotta be in the toe. Be in the toe.” I mostly remember the ceiling, but the instructions were spot on:
Instead of “being aware of the body”, can you be aware from it?
Exploriment with unhooking awareness from the mind entirely.
What’s it like to let awareness arise from your belly button, your skin, or your heart?
I wrote a more in-depth article about embodiment practices here.
2) Notice situations when you lose bodily awareness
When do you not feel your body?
Common examples are during arguments, or while doomscrolling.
See what happens when you allow yourself to feel more of your body during the activity. Which feelings come up?
You can do this without formal practice. Just go through the day & make it a game to feel as much of the body as possible during each activity.
3) Expand your window of tolerance
I wrote an article about the window of tolerance here.
If you read it, you’ll learn to understand the difference between being in a high capacity state, or one that is dysregulated, what the different forms of dysregulation are and how to treat them.
4) Exposure therapy
Expose yourself, in low doses, to the exact things that trigger you into dysregulation or disembodiment.
Now slow down. Feel how being in that situations impacts your body.
Can you relax 5% more without taking your awareness away from it?
The moment you go into overwhelm, step back out and do something soothing.
5) Embrace an emotion.
When an intense emotion arises, try this: Lay down. Do nothing.
Stay conscious of as many parts of your body as possible, for as long as you can.
Notice you can handle it.
Repeat this to build stronger feeling capacity (it’s just like going to the gym: put the reps in and increase the weight).
When you reach the point of being able to feel extreme or intense emotions without having to act on them or release them, you may come to surprising realizations that permanently shift your relationship to them, like this story about feeling intense anger.
6) Learn and practice Authentic Relating
Authentic Relating has many functions, but underneath, what we’re really doing is building stronger capacity to be in connection with each other.
To be with all the things, pleasant or unpleasant, that can arise between us and speak truth to them.
Of everything in this list, I’ve found it the most transformative.
Because it doesn’t just help us build greater capacity in an abstract sense, we do it by encountering real situations with real people and learning to handle anything that happens.
7) Bathing in the pleasure of being alive
If feeling your body comes somewhat easy to you, you can try finding pleasure in each moment by focusing on what your sense of touch is interacting with—from physical surfaces to sunlight or a soft breeze.
Folding your clothes or doing the dishes get so much more pleasant when you connect to the stimulation of all the nerve endings in your hands.
Same for eating. The tongue is full of pleasure receptors. What if you tune into them?
What if you try dancing without moving? Having all the movement happen internally?
Or if you focus really deeply, can you feel the cells touching each other inside the body?
It’s like taking a bath in your own skin.
If yet to find the limits to this. But it’s an interesting way of practicing, because it turns out, “pleasant” feelings are subject to the limits of your capacity as much as “unpleasant ones”.
Joy is one of the emotions most commonly avoided.
8) Notice where you brace in the face of (potential) sensations.
Ever tried going for a run in the rain?
When you try to fight the feeling of the rain (bracing against it), it feels terrible.
When you embrace the rain, it feels exhilarating.
This applies to many, many things.
The pleasure and pain is often not a result of the sensations we feel, but of whether we brace against those sensations or brace them.
9) Find the tension and realize it’s you
Try to spot the tension between multiple options or outcomes inside decisions, social situations, financial challenges, etc.
Where is it? Can you point to it?
This is shockingly effective for me.
Nearly everything I describe as “tension” is an illusion; a projection of how I hold my body in relation to it.
For example:
In one of my journals, I noticed a recurring theme where, in the morning, I was describing a tension between possible choices:
- Multiple urgent matters to address
- Different paths I could take that day, which I feltequally excited about
- Deciding whether to do the thing that leads to long-term results, or the one that takes care of short-term needs
Many mornings, I outlined these different paths on a piece of paper, describing the tension between them. Each one felt like it was pulling me in a different direction, with equal force. But is it really true that there’s a tension between all these different choices and decisions? Not really. How could there be? None of those paths exist yet. They’re just potential. So what’s actually tense? Not the decision. Not the options. Not even the consequences. What’s tense is how I held myself while approaching the choice. The actual process is simple: 1) Two timelines appear 2) Choose one 3) Step into it and make it real That’s only question we have to answer: “Which response do I choose?” Over and over again.
Any other tension we perceive is a result of our own relationship to the unknown.
10) Pause to notice you’re okay.
Sometimes, when emotions are surging through us, it can feel like you’re in a heap of inescapable trouble.
But if you slow down and pause, you’ll often notice that in reality, you’re okay. That nothing in this moment is physically threatening you. That what feels so overwhelming is your relationship to the moment, not the moment itself.
While it sometimes takes some effort, if you can bring your back to this very moment, you often regain capacity.
Other Ways Building Capacity to Feel Can Benefit You
1) Greater empathy
If we can’t be with our own feelings, how can we expect to have some “extra space” left to feel those of others?
A typical manifestation of this is unsolicited advice:
A person comes to us with a story or feeling we perceive as a problem (because while trying to empathize with it, it feels stressful to us), so we rush in to fix it or give advice, even if that person never asked for it or even mention it was a struggle for them.
You could see unsolicited advice as the premature ejaculation of empathy.
2) Stronger leadership
This is an obvious one given what we just discussed:
If increased capacity to feel means making decisions more easily and bing less likely to get tempted by evil, it makes you a better leader.
The capacity to make tough decisions responsibly is directly tied to the capacity to feel grief.
Because every decision cuts of a potential future.
And leadership decisions often come at a cost or require sacrificing something you love.
Grieving well is a leadership skill.
Additionally, since anyone feeling low on capacity will want to put their faith in some form of authority, becoming a strong leader helps the people you serve relax and restore their capacity too.
3) Co-regulation.
In group situations, we look to each other for cues (panic or stay calm?) and operate like a shared nervous system, distributing emotional “charge” so no one processes it alone.
Every high-capacity person is basically a grounding chord.
4) Increased competence
We’ve already seen that the capacity to feel our feelings is the limit of our capacity for truth.
Our capacity to speak the truth falls to the level of our capacity to feel, because the main motive for lying is the subconscious belief that we couldn’t handle a possible consequence of (speaking) the truth.
Additionally, if we aren’t aware what we feel (because we repress it), we can’t honestly express it.
And that’s where the connection with competence lies:
If we can not face a truth, we can not intelligently respond to that part of reality.
But if we can face more truth, and the impact it has on us, without going into overwhelm or reactivity this allows us to act on it, increasing our overall competence.
5) Deeper capacity for connection
When your capacity to feel is high, you can be vulnerable, take social risks and bond with people on things most wouldn’t dare to talk about (which of course, are precisely the areas most of us feel unseen or alone in).
The issue with desperately seeking connection is that if we cling to every chance of it, we don’t allow space for disconnect.
But if disconnection isn’t a possibility, connection isn’t either. Because you can’t discover what connects you unless you’re willing to know what wouldn’t.
If we allow ourselves to feel the possibility of disconnection, we allow for the possibility of deeper connection.
This last part applies to connection with anything. With others. With yourself. With reality. That’s why this work, the work of expanding your capacity, is really the foundation of everything.
Whatever the most authentic, capable, effective, loving, spontaneous version of you looks like: That’s the one that naturally comes out when your capacity to feel is high.
Whatever the opposite of that is, the lower our capacity gets, the more we start to resemble it.