How much would you pay for a feeling?

#4 - Most of us play the "pay to feel something" game every single day...

“Now I see the secret of making the best person: it is to grow in the open air and to eat and sleep with the earth.” - Walt Whitman

How do you feel right now as you are reading this? Are you upbeat and alert, or are you still groggy from last night? Are you feeling wonderful, or like you could be in a better mood? Did you have some coffee to wake your brain up like I did today? In full transparency, at the time of this writing it is 6:34am on a Friday morning, and I have already spent some of my money to create a feeling today.

The feeling I paid for this morning was “energy”. I purchase the boldly roasted coffee that I brew at home specifically because I want to feel alert and inspired when I sip on it, and by golly, I absolutely love the taste of a nice cup of “hue-man cold brew” (or three) in the morning. I know full well that I can wake up and fully energize myself with breathwork instead of my jet black go-juice, and often I feel better at the end of a day of abstinence from caffeine.

In full transparency though, I have a very hard time motivating myself to do breathwork in the morning. It takes far more effort than I want to exert and that causes me to cut corners looking for an easier way to energize. I love the ritual of making my coffee, along with the taste and the effects that it provides, so the trade off at the end of the day is something I am willing to tolerate, and I willingly pay the price to enjoy my morning beverage. On most mornings my desire to use the “easy way” of attaining the feeling of energy prevails over the more challenging option, so I continue to pay for a feeling that I could create myself if I wanted to put more intentional effort in. Plus, I truly enjoy the stuff ☕

Think about why people purchase and ingest drugs of any and all kinds, from caffeine and nicotine, all the way down to heroin and crystal meth, and anything in between. What kind of feeling does each substance create within the user? What are these folks actually paying for, if you really think about it? Are they paying to “get high” and have fun, or are they actually paying for some long sought after relief from the pain and confusion of existence during a time on Earth that we all know feels unnatural and inhuman? Or something in between? Instead of trying to escape the ominously looming feelings though, what would happen if we dove right into them while committing to doing the work that we discover is needed as we dig inwardly? Think about it and take a Five Breath Break while you ponder these things.

Are you truly and consciously aware of the essence of the reason you are purchasing and using whatever your specific ”feeling generator” of choice is? Have you thought about whether you are trying to cover or uncover something within your mind? Are you trying to purchase a substance strong enough to temporarily overwrite all the other feelings you are currently experiencing? Are you looking for a little piece of paper that will take your consciousness on a ride out to see the Black Hole in the center of our Universe? Or maybe you choose to drink ten cups of blackout juice so bedtime does not feel like a spiral into anxiety-laced insomnia each night. Did you feel a radical shift in perspective during a well-planned evening full of flashing psychedelic experience, or at this point are you shamefully calling your friend for supplies more and more often, feeling guilt within your gut every time you pick up the phone because you know it’s gone too far? There is always a way out of whatever feelings we might be entangled in, and it always starts with changing our minds first. You and only you get to decide what’s best for you, and how to attain it.

What other feelings do you personally pay for each day / week / month / year? Consider this deeply.

I like the feeling of freedom, so I pay my car insurance to know that I’m covered if anything happens when I’m out exploring. When I toured the country on a bicycle I paid for several digital maps that helped me feel more confident in my ability to navigate the unknown territory all alone. I pay my heating bill so I can feel comfortable (and not freeze to death) during the bitter cold of deep winter on the Prairie. Sometimes I pay for convenience out of laziness by grabbing items from the corner store closest to home, even though everything is cheaper up the road with almost no additional effort to get there. I pay for a service that saves me time and energy by making it easier to bill my clients. I pay service fees for the victorious feeling that every new paid Substack subscriber gives me, as well as the “cha-ching” feeling that happens when I’m notified that someone has purchased my music via bandcamp. All of these feeling purchases are an exchange of some sort where I give away a combination of money, time, and energy in order to receive something that makes me feel how I want to feel - or at least come close enough. That said, we all know by this point in our lives that the most important long term feelings can never be purchased with money.

Sometimes I like to feel relaxed in a social setting, so I’ll walk over to the bar for a couple of beers on a Saturday night. But I always know that whether I choose to drink beer in celebration, or because I’m looking to cover up an undesirable feeling, I will always wake up feeling the same type of way the next morning if I overdo it. And the feeling of being hungover is one of the worst feelings we could ever purchase. A hangover is an energy tax that we pay to regain the mental and physical balance that comes only with clear-minded sobriety. It takes time to feel normal again after we drastically alter our body’s chemistry, and this is a big reason why moderation in anything is always key. When we responsibly enjoy whatever feeling we are paying for, it simply takes less time to get back to our natural operating baseline once the feeling is done with us.

When you think about it, this is exactly what the slow building progress of nature shows us, and perhaps one reason why Whitman suggests sleeping in the open air. The whole of the tree is contained in the seed, but the tree is not grown in a day. If we imagine a line that represents “feeling” with one polarized point on each end, naturally, we can only move the slider between the two poles of feeling by a little bit each day, just like how a tree slowly pushes up toward the sky over years of diligent daily growth progress.

Much like how it takes many years to develop from being a baby to an adult human being, or from a seed into a Redwood, the natural progress of intentionally steering how we truly want to feel takes time, energy, and daily commitment, and it helps to remind ourselves about this from time to time. It is incredibly easy to slip out of intentionally living in ways that benefit us long term, in exchange for short term pleasure. Often, despite having a sense of what we truly want and what we will need to sacrifice to attain it, temptation causes us to use internal “stories” to convince ourselves that it’s OK not to do what we know we need to do. We tell ourselves stories like, “I need this thing to feel better about myself”, or “I am nothing without this thing”, and we elevate whatever the thing is to a stature higher than our own long term well being in exchange for a dopamine hit. We create entire worlds built by stories within our minds for those hits.

When we strip away all of the other layers of “stories” that we have added to the essence of “I want to feel better about myself”, then the path to getting what we want illuminates itself brilliantly across the once dark and confusing landscape before us. When a person tells themself the story of, “I can’t because…” then they simply have not yet drilled far enough inward to reach the essence of the problem they are trying to solve.

That’s the tricky thing about paying for feelings that we could actually generate all on our own through the effort of “doing the work”. We each must ask ourselves, do we want to feel truly well 99.9% of the time? We are all quick to say that we do, but what do our actions say about what we truly want? Attaining a near permanent feeling of physical, mental, and spiritual wellness is actually quite simple: work out every day, eat clean, drink lots of water, meditate, and get good sleep each night. It’s really that simple, and I can tell you from personal experience how radical the shift in feeling truly is, especially since I ate like a trash can for the entirety of my old life, before learning how to eat to foster the true natural functionality and capability of my mind and body. I had to directly experience the shift myself in order to actually believe in my own capability to live a life I feel content with.

That said, a recent bout with serious food poisoning knocked me off of the high throne of Consciousness that I had clawed my way up to, and I spent a couple of grueling days in the “Hell Realm” trying to glue the shattered pieces of my mind back together while it felt like my guts were being shredded from the inside out. After having not been sick for two years, I completely lost the peaceful feeling of being that is normally my baseline, and I went into a dark mental survival mode where I truly just wanted to crawl into a hole to go die because of how I felt. However, my 3 month old Black Lab Puppy has constant needs that are my responsibility to meet, so despite the treachery I felt, I had to muster up my last remaining shreds of intention to give to him in the best way I could, and never for any reason could I take the atrocious way I felt out on him. I almost completely lost my mind as he chewed on my hands with his razor blade teeth while begging for my unbounded attention. I cried out to Tucker’s Great Spirit to help me manage myself and my new companion, and moments later I calmed down and took a deep breath as his memory filled my heart. I felt completely and utterly alone in the world, and I wanted nothing more than to have someone to come to take care of the puppy and me.

My work out progress screeched to a halt for a week while my gut-brain and mind-brain were rebuilding themselves, and then during the following week I ate my feelings, whatever I wanted, to try to make myself feel better about the negligence I displayed to myself in the kitchen that day in early January. I was truly scared to cook for myself for a few days despite the fact that cooking amazing food is one of my passions. After several days of “anything goes eating” from the only restaurant options in my town, I clearly showed myself that the spirit of my inner fat kid was alive and well, but that his old tactics to “eat sugar to fill the gaping hole inside” no longer did anything to make me feel better at all. In fact, eating garbage only made me feel worse. I remembered that the only way to actually feel better was to forgive myself for allowing this episode to happen in the first place. I used my training to “focus on what I actually want” and to “let it go to move the F on”, I forgave myself, and started cooking again.

Now that I’m back on track with the diet that works best for me, working out every day, and feeling the way I am supposed to feel again, I feel a newly inspired sense of empathy for anyone making the conscious effort to intentionally grow from the experience of life. No matter how high we climb there will always be something to knock us back a step or two. Yet if we want to know what we are truly capable of, we must keep climbing the mountain of life experience no matter what setbacks happen along the way.

Buuuuuuuut — the lifestyle one must live to create the feeling of true freedom is not easy to get started with because it takes a significant amount of up-front willpower and effort to build momentum into. It’s not easy to detox from sugar addiction, habitual drinking, and eating bread whenever we want. It’s hard to physically push oneself to the limit each day, especially for the first two weeks, so most individuals avoid doing it at all costs, even though every single one of us always knows exactly what we should be doing to live up to our true potential. Yet almost every single one of us cuts corners from time to time, myself included, and ultimately the person who reaps all the repercussions is… you guessed it, each one of us, individually. However we choose to act always ends up coming full circle, and we must face the re-action every single time, whether it’s tomorrow, next year, or in our next lifetime (if needed). We are always paying the taxes that are accrued with each decision we make, hopefully weighing the opportunity cost against the benefits before deciding. If we want to go out and drink ten beers, then we know exactly what is going to happen to us the next day. If we want to eat clean, never skip leg day, and hit the punching bag for an hour to let it all out, then each morning we wake at 5am in peaceful spirits, ready to dive into the day, with a nice cup of coffee of course 😇

How often do we trade feelings for other feelings? Most recently in the world we’ve been trading freedom for the guise of safety. Yet things have only gotten worse as depicted by the spiking graphs and “life threatening” language that the news constantly shoves in front of us. We should always consider who paid for the programming we are absorbing, and what their goals are before using their words to make decisions. After all, the handful of “too big to fail” companies who fund and own all of our news sources steer their messaging to create feelings within us that they want us to feel. Why do you think it’s called “tell-a-vision” “programming” anyway? Seriously.

Ask yourself, in the current situation in the world, are we trying to use pills and other short term remedies to cover up the truly unhealthy but profitable lifestyle problems that collectively affect our psychical and mental health? Or are we actually doing the real individual work that it takes to solve these things long term? And which pathway are big $ interests using the news to steer us along? Which route is better for the creation of big profits for big business, and how does that actually compare to what is right for the people.

Are we looking for permission from the painted anchors on TV to feel “safe” again? Are we truly doing the most important daily individualized work needed to feel and be the best we can? Or are we “too tired” at the end of each busy day to make the effort to grow like the tree, even just a little bit? How much daily effort is each one of us actually willing to commit to help ourselves over the long term? With our goals as our primary focus, what other people do matters much less to us because we are focused on what truly matters - what we are doing and how it will elevate our experience in life. With that said though, I do recognize that it is much easier for most folks to drink and play video games while deflecting their problems onto others, rather than meditating to experience the tear-infused anointment of communion with self as we heal our deeply seated traumas from an openly blazing heart.

When we focus on the long term, together, everyone benefits from the collective feeling of peace that naturally emanates from within when we actually do the personal work that we know is necessary. When we stop claiming other people as the source of our pain, we then realize how to relieve it.

How much would you pay right now for life to feel “normal” and somewhat “sane” again like it once did? Well, if you’ve come this far down the rabbit hole with me then I suppose you already know this, but I will write it here anyway… It is your job, and your job alone, to make yourself feel how you want to feel at all times. Period. It is no one else’s responsibility to make you feel any type of way, ever, and the sooner you accept that completely, the faster you will become exactly who you actually want to be through your own will and inspired effort.

Listen to the world around you right now - do you hear what the collective of all Humans is saying through the totality of our combined action over time? You are here with me on Earth, so of course you feel how it feels to be here right now, and yes it is intense. That looming feeling is the re-action of our collective action up until this point. That feeling is the voice of the collective consciousness, and feelings never lie. But that doesn’t mean that we have to be burdened by them forever either.

It is time to take responsibility for our own individual feelings, and to do the individual work needed to improve them. Only by doing this individually will the collective rise together. As long as we outsource our feelings of safety, sanity, health, and readiness to the lowest bidder with the biggest bank account and most life threatening tone, we will continue to suffer. The only way to attain peace is to create it for ourselves within our own worlds. We recognize the essence of the old problem now, so the path to a better life is a lot easier to discern from the core of our observations than it was from the outside looking in.

Life is a lot like a video game. We start as a novice, learn some moves, navigate the world while building experience points, and we level up as we go, gradually tackling more challenging tasks. Over the course of the game, the smartest and most passionate players end up realizing that each one of us is the “final boss” at the end of each level, as well as all the minor bosses and foot soldiers that we have to defeat along the way to victory. All of our wins and all of our losses always come back to the decisions we made while playing.

Some individuals pay actual money to fast track their level ups at a quicker rate than other “natural” players in the game, and this gives them a short term edge over the competition. But how does this strategy truly affect their accrual of experience points over the course of the entirety of the game?

Other folks burn the pain of their previous losses as fuel when facing each following challenge. Their limitless mindset transforms each of them into an unstoppable force. Which type of player would you rather be?

Only you can decide and act on this. And while you will directly experience the re-action of your action each and every time, your ongoing life experience will also evolve your character and candor which continuously evolves how you treat the world. We are all living within conscious feedback loops of continuously cycling action in this game. I will ask one last time since it’s really important - what kind of player are you? Do you use cheat codes, or do you put in the work? Don’t answer me - answer yourself in the mirror, and then act however you see fit.

Imagine standing in your bedroom with the lights off after the sun has gone down. Since it’s pitch black, you can’t really see anything or go anywhere because you are effectively blind with no way to illuminate your path to bed. But when you use your cellphone flash light, you can suddenly easily navigate the path to bed without falling over. The unobserved mind is the dark room, and we often spend the most on feelings when we consciously keep ourselves locked in that dark room for extended periods of time. Turn your flashlight on, friend. You and only you can find your way out, and you will if you earnestly try.

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This week’s practice has us focused on our birthright superpower of self observation. Since we are thinking about “feeling” this week, we will spend some time each morning in observation of how we feel, while checking in with ourselves throughout the course of the day to see how we are maintaining against the baseline. Each time we feel whatever we feel, we will strip away the layers of stories we built to shield our minds from the essence of whatever is going on, so that we can properly observe the true motivations of our actions. We will come to discover that it’s hard to get anything of substance done from our dark bedrooms and that whatever we shine our lights on, we can work with.

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If you’ve made it to the end here, then I sincerely thank you for taking the time to think about this with me. If this thought exercise has benefited you, I invite you to subscribe monthly to get email updates about next week’s writing and all that follow as well. Smash that heart button down below, and drop a line in the comments if you don’t mind, because a small bump from your end will greatly help in serving this content to a wider audience. My last ask is that you would please share this with a friend who you always have great conversations with.

Want to know about who I am and why I’m talking with you about this? Read my first post here.

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This guy gets it…

Tyler Todt @tyromper

-Fast food is poison for BODY. -Politics is poison for your MIND. -Pornography is poison for your SOUL. -Cable news is propaganda & destroys your PEACE. Give them up & watch your life go to places you can’t even imagine!