Using Feelings as Navigation, Not Decoration

Show Notes

Saying trust your feelings sounds like a motivational poster. Brian is making a more precise claim: the emotional content underneath your MacGuffin is not the destination, it's a filter — a way of being in the world that you can access right now rather than after you've collected enough checkboxes. Moving the felt experience from some future conditional state into the present moment is where agency actually lives.

The practical shift is from asking how do I get more of this into my life to asking whether this present moment contains it. Fun, authenticity, freedom — none of these are destinations you arrive at. They're qualities you apply as a filter to what's in front of you right now. The Treasurer's apron enters here as the analytic function that evaluates whether indulging a particular feeling serves your longer-term objectives, creating the distance between feeling everything and being run by everything.

• Emotional content as a present-moment filter rather than a future destination
• Practical examples of moving desire from conditional to immediate
• The difference between informed feelings and poor impulse control
• The Treasurer function as an analytic check on emotional experience
• Building an instant feedback loop through embodied awareness

When you start putting officer aprons on your emotional experience rather than suppressing or obeying it, you develop the capacity to move your whole self toward meaningful change.

Thanks to our monthly supporters

• Tim Dedman
• Jorge

★ Support this podcast on Patreon ★

Creators and Guests

Host

Brian Mattocks

Host and Founder of A Mason's Work - a podcast designed to help you use symbolism to grow. He's been working in the craft for over a decade and served as WM, trustee, and sat in every appointed chair in a lodge - at least once :D

What is A Mason's Work?

In this show we discuss the practical applications of masonic symbolism and how the working tools can be used to better yourself, your family, your lodge, and your community. We help good freemasons become better men through honest self development. We talk quite a bit about mental health and men's issues related to emotional and intellectual growth as well.

[00:00] So yesterday I said that your feelings are better sort of navigation instruments than
[00:05] your numbers, that your dashboard, the signals your body is sending you all the time and
[00:10] in real time are what's actually working and more reliable than the kind of roadmap of
[00:16] objectives you wanted to achieve that you drew back in January during your resolution.
[00:21] I want to make it more practical today because I know that trust your feelings sounds like
[00:27] Star Wars and it belongs on a motivational poacher with a cat or something.
[00:33] This is actually serious though.
[00:36] The feelings that you have are really the driving force underneath the MacGuffin that you set up,
[00:46] the goal that you put aside to gain weight, lose weight, gain muscle, lose muscle, make
[00:54] money, change jobs, whatever.
[00:57] All of those wantings that you had, all those feelings got translated into a goal and the
[01:04] feeling isn't itself even the destination.
[01:07] We've talked a little bit about this.
[01:09] The emotional content that we're shooting for, the kind of place you wanted to go isn't a
[01:15] destination.
[01:16] It's a filter.
[01:17] It's a way of being in the world.
[01:20] Here's what that means in practice.
[01:21] So let's say you do the work of getting underneath your MacGuffin and you find something you like.
[01:27] Let's say you want more fun in your life, like real fun, whatever it is, the funny stuff,
[01:32] right?
[01:33] The feeling that maybe everything shouldn't be taken so seriously.
[01:36] That's a legit desire and it's specific enough to work with it, right?
[01:41] The old way of solving that problem would be to try and convert it into a trophy or an
[01:46] object, sign up for something, go take a class, whatever.
[01:51] But here's the thing about fun, right?
[01:54] It isn't like just a destination.
[01:58] It's an experience.
[02:00] So instead of saying, how do I get more fun into my life?
[02:06] You say, will this be funny?
[02:09] Will this present moment that I'm in right now, is there humor in it?
[02:14] Does this decision that I'm making, does this planning that I'm doing, is there fun in it
[02:21] in the moment?
[02:24] And that moves this from a desire that someday off in the future that you'll have and into
[02:32] the right now.
[02:34] And when you move stuff into the present moment and allow the feelings to modify what you're
[02:41] experiencing, it changes everything it touches.
[02:44] So let's go through that in maybe some other ways, right?
[02:48] Because this translation isn't always the easiest thing to do.
[02:53] Let's say you have this genuine desire to be more authentic, whatever that means.
[03:02] One version of yourself might have been the person, you know, before you heard the series
[03:07] of podcasts, you might've been like, well, I need to go find myself.
[03:10] I need to figure out who I am or what that is.
[03:12] When in fact, the better question is what's more me right now.
[03:19] When you move these things into the present moment, you gain agency and autonomy right now.
[03:29] It's not conditional.
[03:31] It's not this identity.
[03:32] It's not a virtue signal.
[03:33] Later on, where I've collected the checkboxes and all of a sudden I'm now permitted to feel
[03:39] a more authentic.
[03:39] Right.
[03:40] You get the results, the benefits, all of it in an instant feedback loop that sitting with
[03:49] your emotions provides.
[03:51] Now, just like in the Star Wars reference that I'm trying to not tell you about, there's
[03:59] an important truth to this, right?
[04:01] You, you're allowed to take these feelings to inform your decisions and allow them to
[04:06] do so.
[04:07] But if you allow them to govern your actions completely, you lose autonomy.
[04:11] It's in a different way, right?
[04:14] If you're always the victim to what you're feeling in the present moment, you're not in
[04:17] charge.
[04:17] You're just doing whatever feels good.
[04:19] That's poor impulse control.
[04:20] That's a bunch of other stuff that leads to its own set of problems.
[04:24] So when you sit with your sort of emotional content, then you can put on that treasure's
[04:33] apron, the one that evaluates whether or not the thing you're doing right now is going
[04:38] to help you achieve the objectives that you have long-term and use that treasure's apron
[04:44] to analyze your emotional content right now.
[04:47] Will, you know, there are times, for example, when you're in the middle of exercising or you're
[04:51] like, I feel like giving up.
[04:53] Well, does indulging that feeling put on the treasure's apron does indulging that feeling
[04:57] get you the objectives that you're looking for?
[04:59] If the answer to that question is no, then you don't get to let that one be the boss for now,
[05:03] right?
[05:04] Same thing's true throughout the entire range of your emotional experience.
[05:08] And when you start taking on these officer aprons to evaluate the emotional content you
[05:13] have, you begin to develop this capacity to not only feel the emotions that you're having,
[05:19] but you create this analytic distance that lets you drive the entire organism, your entire,
[05:25] you know, being towards a meaningful change long-term.
[05:30] You move from analyzing and creating these what kind of goals, these objectives, and move
[05:36] into the how of being.
[05:38] You become more yourself.
[05:40] You get more sort of of a flowering into the present moment by using your emotions as an
[05:48] instant feedback loop.
[05:49] And tomorrow we'll get even more into kind of what that means and how to work it more effectively.
[05:55] .