“But there’s one thing you can’t lose / And it’s that feel” – Tom Waits
I love Tom Waits. His broken, crooked and raw beauty hits me in a way that makes my masculine core resound with fiercely deep heart beats. One song that touches me so deeply is his crooner “That Feel” from the album Bone Machine. The song is an old gem, and its broken beaten up beauty is rocked and rolled into being with the loose and soulful guitar of none other than Keith Richards. You can feel the ancient lineage of song in this recording – in the voices, the rhythm and percussion in the tune.
Like all great art, one can (and must) make their own interpretation. One must find their own connection into the world of the art. Not unlike a dream. In that song, Waits talks about our essential nature – our deepest sense of self.
“But there’s one thing you can’t lose / And it’s that feel / You can pawn your watch and chain / But not that feel / It always comes and finds you / It will always hear you cry / I cross my wooden leg / And I swear on my glass eye / It will never leave you high and dry / Never leave you loose / It’s harder to get rid of than tattoos”
He gives his heartfelt oath that it is the one thing you can’t lose, and in the very same instance you hear him talk about how it never leaves you. It’s wild and lovely. Mysterious and it couldn’t be clearer.
The Feel That Never Leaves
All the clients who come to see me – whether for therapy, facilitation or coaching – come with their own feel. Their own essential nature. Their relationship to the church of their own soul or their spirit is something that perhaps is in question. There is perhaps a kind of crisis of faith? A disconnection with their capacity to “go on being” (Epstein, 2001).
In other words, people experience symptoms, conflicts, crises and feel and think in some way that they are lost, or damaged or broken, cheated. Most people come into therapy feeling on the side of defeat or against some inner or outer tyranny. People feel a kind of threat to their existence.
Things feel bad enough that somehow they need someone to help them find their way. Again. In reality we all get lost. It’s our ability to find a return that weaves us back into the fabric of our deeper life process.
When the Feel Becomes Obscured
What I love about this song is that Waits is reminding us that you never lose the feel, you never lose your deepest self, but your relationship to your deepest self is perhaps altered. You reach an edge. A limit in your identity: your skills, your knowledge, your sense of community. Your ability to regulate and roll with or rock against the challenges in life becomes limited. You are stuck. Overcome. Overwhelmed? Caught, blended or fused with a part. Your sense of wholeness is temporarily – or for some, much longer – lost.
This reminds me of something my teacher Arnold Mindell writes about. The “process mind” (Mindell, 2010). There’s something in us that’s always guiding. Always trying to help us unfold into who we’re meant to be. Like Waits’ “feel,” it’s always there. Even when we can’t sense it. But sometimes our relationship to this deeper intelligence gets clouded over. By the noise of daily life. By trauma. By the demands of a world that often asks us to be someone other than who we really are.
Voices Across Traditions
But “that feel” isn’t just about our inner world. Aboriginal elder Bill Neidjie, in his profound work “Story About Feeling,” speaks to something even larger. That our feeling, our essential nature, is intimately connected to country. To land. To the living world around us. As he says, “That tree now, he pumping… You feel it… because your body in that tree” (Neidjie, 1989). The church, as he puts it, is bigger than the gospel. It’s the whole living world. The earth itself breathing through us.
This wisdom echoes across traditions. The 13th-century Christian mystic Meister Eckhart wrote about what he called the “divine spark” – that indestructible essence of the divine within each person. “God’s ground and the soul’s ground is one ground,” he taught (Eckhart, c. 1300). Like Waits’ “feel,” this divine spark can never be lost, never be taken away.
The 13th-century Persian poet Rumi, in Coleman Barks’ luminous translations, speaks to this same truth: “The divine nature and my human nature came together” (Rumi, trans. Barks, 1995). He writes of moments when ordinary consciousness dissolves into something larger: “When the soul lies down in that grass, the world is too full to talk about. Ideas, language, even the phrase ‘each other’ doesn’t make sense any more.”
Even in the face of unimaginable darkness, this essential nature persists. Elie Wiesel, who witnessed the worst of human cruelty, maintained that “each individual soul contains a unique spark of the divine, and that this spark could never be extinguished, even in the face of the most horrific circumstances” (Wiesel, 1982). Despite experiencing the Holocaust, Wiesel held that “there was something indestructible within the human soul that could not be destroyed.”
Whether we call it “that feel,” the process mind, the divine spark, or the indestructible soul – it points to something eternal within us that remains untouched by life’s storms.
This collective and perennial wisdom reminds us that “that feel” isn’t separate from the natural or social world. We are part of the same life force that moves through rivers. Grows trees. Cycles the seasons. Shapes societies and civilisation. When we lose touch with our essential nature, we often lose touch with this larger creative force.
The Symptoms of Disconnection
When I see clients at this point, they are typically experiencing painful somatic tensions, tightenings, heat, or coolness. There are incessant echoes in cognition (rumination), images or challenges in relationships that repeat. Repeat. There may be a sense of not being able to connect with others. Shame, sadness, anger, frustration, loss of joy or overwhelm. Spacing out, not being able to concentrate.
There are also behaviors – First Attempts In Learning (FAIL) that show up. These behaviors, perhaps in one context, worked. But they are not working now. Think of addictions, and “acting out”.
All clients have a theory, more or less, about why they are where they are. No matter what their age. Not all can articulate the theory, but their symptoms, their behaviors, their stories, their relationship to themselves shows me the echoes of their past. In such signals, one can see the gestalt of their relationship to the whole that surrounds them and is within them across time.
Often, I notice, there’s also a disconnection from the natural world. People spend their days in artificial environments. Under fluorescent lights. Breathing recycled air. They’ve lost touch with the rhythms of day and night. Seasons. Weather. This disconnection from the earth mirrors and amplifies their disconnection from their own essential nature.
The Collective Nature of Individual Struggles
People’s personal struggles are not only individual, they are also collective. All symptoms are connected to some kind of internalized oppression. And yes, we all experience some kind of internalized oppression, no matter how you identify or how you are located socially (class, gender, race, sexuality, age, body size, cognitive style, etc.).
This is where both Mindell’s Process Work and indigenous wisdom converge. Our individual healing is always happening within larger systems. Family patterns. Cultural conditioning. Our relationship to the land itself. The process mind doesn’t just guide us personally. It’s also trying to help us understand these larger forces. Including how our disconnection from nature contributes to our personal suffering.
Finding Your Way Back
And yet, as Waits reminds us: “It will never leave you high and dry / Never leave you loose / It’s harder to get rid of than tattoos”
That sense of following and flowing from and with your life force – what Mindell calls the process mind, what Neidjie calls feeling the country through your body, what Eckhart knew as the divine spark, what Rumi experienced as the union of divine and human nature, what Wiesel recognized as the indestructible soul – perhaps becomes less certain. It feels obscured. An abstraction. But it’s still there. Still guiding. Still available.
The therapeutic process is often about helping people rediscover their relationship to this essential nature. Not creating something new. But remembering something that was always there. Like tuning into a radio station that was always broadcasting. We just needed to adjust the frequency.
Sometimes this means literally getting back outside. Feeling soil under bare feet. Breathing unfiltered air. Sometimes it means learning to listen to the subtle signals our bodies are always sending us. Sometimes it’s about recognizing that our personal healing is part of a larger healing. That includes our relationship to the living world.
In my work, I see this happen again and again. People arrive feeling broken, lost, disconnected from their essential selves and from the world around them. Through the therapeutic process – whether through EMDR, Process Work, or other modalities – they begin to reconnect with that feel. That deeper intelligence. That essential nature that Waits reminds us we can never truly lose.
The beauty is in the remembering. The relief is in the recognition that you were never actually broken. Just temporarily disconnected from something that was always, always there. Something that includes not just your inner world. But your place in the larger web of life.
“But there’s one thing you can’t lose / And it’s that feel”
References:
- Eckhart, M. (c. 1300). Sermons and Treatises
- Epstein, M. (2001). Going on Being: Buddhism and the Way of Change
- Mindell, A. (2010). Process Mind: A User’s Guide to Connecting with the Mind of God
- Neidjie, B. (1989). Story About Feeling
- Rumi, J. (1995). The Essential Rumi, trans. Coleman Barks
- Wiesel, E. (1982). Souls on Fire: Portraits and Legends of Hasidic Master