Dealing
with Feelings
“What
I discover, again and again, is that feeling any one feeling deeply enough—that
is, thoroughly and completely—somehow opens me to the common source of all
feeling. And at the source, no one feeling can last by itself. So, through our
feelings, not around them, we come upon the unnamable source of all feeling
that can heal us of the pain of any one mood.”
Mark
Nepo (The Book of Awakening, p.159; Conari Press, 2000)
One
thing we Americans are good at is suppressing feelings—either by ignoring them,
or by numbing them, or by discharging them inappropriately toward the wrong
target. Granted, no one wants to feel sad and depressed for long, or
anxious out of their mind, or crying at the drop of a hat. Bypassing and denying
feelings, however, is not a solution because we simply pack them away for
another day—a day when our guard is down, or we can’t summon the energy, or
something simply pulls the trigger and there’s no stopping it.
If we
can allow the feelings to speak to us (before they speak to anyone else) and
give us a clue as to what is underneath them, then we stand a better chance of
not reacting in a negative way or exploding under pressure at the wrong time.
But that requires that we stay with the feeling—not just pour another glass of
wine or pop a pill.
The
problem with suppressing negative feelings is that all our feelings respond.
Just as Nepo says, staying with any feeling for long enough opens us to the
source of all feelings; so too does suppressing any one of them shut down all
of them. Suppressing anger or sadness also blunts our ability to experience joy,
elation, excitement, hope, confidence. To be sure, it is quite uncomfortable to
stay with sadness, or anger, or resentment, or jealousy without expressing them
and dispelling their energy. But negative emotions have one thing in common—their
source is usually something old, something that has nothing to do with the
current situation. Some old wound gets triggered; something that caused us to
feel humiliated or furious at a time when expressing either would have brought
more pain and suffering. Suddenly, we unload the entire content of that
suppressed emotional wound at the current target. I wonder whether you have had
this experience. I have. It’s not pretty.
The only
way to heal such a wound is to stay with it, to chase it back to its origin,
and make peace with that, whatever it may be. When that happens, the triggers
no longer work. We recognize them when we see them, we acknowledge their
presence, but we do not blow up or break down because we have incorporated
their energy. Instead, we greet them as an old friend and thank them for the
lesson. Then we can deal with them in an appropriate, maybe even a creative,
way.
In
the Spirit,
Jane
No comments:
Post a Comment