What are your feelings?

In this post you will continue to learn things about yourself from the viewpoint of how you feel about yourself and the world around you. You are going to focus on the feelings of your being and pick values from three groups (triad) as you did in the last three posts. 

Please do not rush through the process because its important to know your self from all angles. In the last three posts we looked at three values: way of being, relationships, and doing. Each one of those values in turn had three sub-values, so there were nine sub-values altogether. For now you should have three sub-values, one from each value. When you are through you will have six sub-values from which you will form your own personal mandala.

The triad for feelings consists of pleasure, comfort and fear. All of us seem to have these three different kinds of feelings but in different ways. Similar to what you did for values in the last posts you will narrow each triad down to one that best fits you. Please take your time and have fun. 

Pleasure is strictly subjective and one person's pleasure may be another person's experience of shear boredom. Other activities and events like eating chocolate, looking at a sunset, listening to music, meditating, receiving recognition and accomplishing a task can also produce pleasurable feelings. The list of things that can engender pleasure is basically never ending. However, all aspects of pleasure can be lumped into three categories: stimulation, novelty and aesthetics.

If you are into stimulation, you love things happening around you and even to you. You like it when you are moved or affected. This might be lots of loud music, social activities, conversations, an exciting television program or movie, almost anything to fill an empty space of experience.

Sky diving, bungee jumping, base jumping, rock climbing, cave diving, big-wave surfing, bull riding and bull running are all stimulating activities but they don't necessarily mean that one who takes up the activity is into stimulation. A person might consider sky diving or cave diving peaceful and soothing for instance. On the other hand, if a person pursues such activities for the stimulation of it, then he/she is definitely into stimulation. 

It's hard to tell what another person's motive is for seeking pleasure. The only one who knows is the person who is doing the seeking.

If stimulation doesn't seem to be your cup of tea, then possibly novelty or aesthetics would be your pleasure. Stop here, for now, and allow yourself to think about whether or not you are into stimulation.  

In the next post you will examine the other types of pleasure: aesthetics and novelty. You can be rest assured that one of these three pleasures (stimulation, novelty or aesthetic) will be your
kind of pleasure.