Stingray gave you a splendid answer, and it is hard to add much to what he had to say. But I thought that I would throw in my two cents just to emphasize his points about the connection between feeling bad and the use of weed (or any drug). You may not have realized it when you started smoking way back when, but perhaps that is where you should begin in your quest to reconnect with your feelings.

I happen to know a few people who claim that weed is harmless and so on, but I guess I cannot agree, simply because weed can mask how you really feel, as you have discovered. It doesn't just mask the bad feelings, though- it also masks the good ones, too. You just go through life on this sort of mid-range numb hum, and after a while, it does take a toll. Nothing feels like much of anything at all. Perhaps the only thing that you do feel is the desire to be stoned, and that is a strange thing to want day after day.

I congratulate you on wanting to feel, though. It is a really, really good starting place to a much better life. It sounds like a contradiction, though, doesn't it? It is like I am saying, "Hey, yeah, bring on those bad feelings, boys!" But..to use Stingray's analogy...it would be better to stop the house from burning down than to just tinker with the smoke detector all day.

I cannot emphasize enough that you are stifling your good feelings as well as the bad. That is what will pull you through getting off the weed. You will have to work hard though. You will have days that tempt you beyond endurance...but when you discover the beauty of the Earth, the joy of being alive, the satisfaction of really being productive- then you will see that the weed was not your friend after all. It is not just numbing you to your feelings- it is numbing you to being alive!

I am glad you posted this question. It took courage, and I admire that. Use that courage to taper off the weed, and get back to life. +1 for being honest!

Blessings,

Jai

The "problem" with emotions is we are taught at a very early age to deny what triggers our emotions, and so we stop expressing them appropriately. Then these intense emotional experiences that do not get expressed appropriately remain "stuck" in our amygdala, waiting to be fired off in response to anything that even resembles the original experience. The problem is our natural ability to integrate our experience, both emotionally and thoughtfully, gets hijacked at a very early age, therefore it remains undeveloped. We tell someone when we are three years old that something hurts or that we are afraid or we ask our parent why he or she is angry and we are told that our perception and experience is totally off when, in fact, it is not. Some people go on to respond inappropriately in many situations, some people "shut down" emotionally.

So that is the beginning of the split between our emotions and our thinking. The problem is not the ego, it is the split between the thinking brain and the emotional brain. When we reintegrate our thinking brain with our emotional brain, our emotions will always serve us well, no matter how intense. We will also be able to distinguish between an appropriate response to what is actually happening in the moment, or if it's a "programmed" response left over from some programming in the past. This is how our brains are supposed to work, with us recognizing our emotional indicators correctly, and thinking the correct thoughts in response to our perceptions.

Prior to civilization, when we lived in hunter-gatherer societies, properly interpreting emotions and translating them to logical thought was crucial to survival. We had "coming-of age" rituals which were designed to guide us from childish emotional responses and thoughts into adult ones. When humans formed larger groups, our leaders found that keeping us in the dark was better suited to keeping us "under control." It's no wonder so many of us are lost.

But we can change that.