Rooting in Sentience
A Retreat with Danny
 
Guiding Thought with feeling 
Anything and everything that we feel is experienced through the senses and therefore is not "real" reality. But paradoxically, there is a huge tendency not to feel, and the energy caught up in that denial captures one in body consciousness. What we resist persists. The one solution is to first feel everything and then in that allowing, become aware of the changeless background behind all feeling. It’s important to first have some intellectual understanding that one is not one’s feeling but one is  the Witness of them. 
 
Conflating feeling and thought
Conflation happens when we confuse the characteristics shared between two phenomena so that the difference between them is lost. This results in a meaningless and bewildering mess that is almost impossible to unravel while aspects of the two elements are mistaken for each other. Clarity becomes impossible. For example; imagine you are at work and have a headache. It’s not too bad, but in an effort to get on with things, you bury the feeling and try not to give it any attention.
 
This succeeds for a while until a co-worker says something insensitive that upsets you. Now you are suddenly cast headlong into the denied somatic reality of feeling bad from the headache—which is now compounded by the co-workers unkindness. The sudden discomfort of feeling awful now seems like it was caused by the co-worker and a disproportionate blame-game ensues which can last for a long time. 
 
Here,  conflating feeling and thought has produced a confusing mish-mash of pain, emotions and mistaken conclusions which makes life miserable for all involved.
The difference between a real feeling and unexamined thoughts about that feeling is totally lost in the ensuing mélange.
 
The example above is fairly easy to understand and maybe even controlled in the moment by a little examination of things. But there is a pandemic of denied feelings throughout mankind and the result is a confused thinking about them is not so easy to spot.
 
We can never arrive at a successful resolution of feelings by thought. It’s like trying to understand fire by examining water.  
 
Disturbing thoughts are very often brought on by an unwillingness or inability to feel disturbing feelings. But if we were able remove the thoughts for a while and go straight to the raw data of Feeling, everything would become instantly clear. we find something very wonderful and liberating. But when we go straight to the Feeling, what Eugene Gendlin calls the felt sense, we discover that the pure sensation itself is really not that big a deal. The fear of feeling takes place mostly in the mind as it mixes up its fearful conclusions with the feeling.
 
So this practice of rooting is sentience will help us separate the “story” from the Feeling.