
Hello and welcome back!
If you’ve not already done so, I highly recommend checking out:
Part One
Of this series.
Today we’re going to dive deeper into how understanding pain and pleasure helps us to understand our emotions on a deeper level, and how this can lead to a deeper capacity to develop emotional mastery.
I know from reading last post we now have an idea of how complex the nature of our pain and pleasure perception is - and in this post I hope to bring some clarity to the whole thing.
So let’s dive in!
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Why Chasing Pleasure Isn’t WRONG - We Just Have To Be CLEAR About It
The ultimate truth in real reality is - when we are doing things that are nourishing to us, when we are in alignment with how reality works, when we’re getting our needs met and when we are in bodies and minds that are in good working condition - we are going to feel pleasure.
When we are experiencing something that is truly not good for us, when we are in a situation where our growth is being stifled, where we aren’t being supported, where we are being harmed in some way or other - we are GOING to feel pain.
If we had NEVER been conditioned, and ONLY had a one to one relationship with reality, we would be able to follow our pain and pleasure mechanisms directly into that which was best for us and away from what doesn’t work - generally speaking.
We would learn the subtle difference between TRUE pain that is letting us know we’re heading in a direction of destruction, and the discomfort and sometimes necessary pain of actual growth as well - because in real reality sometimes growth and change IS painful to a degree - but again there should be an UNDERLYING feeling of purpose in that pain. We would also learn to understand that too much of something that feels good ends up NOT feeling good - so we would be able to moderate ourselves with pleasurable things in order to avoid OVER doing things leading to that feeling of pain.
If we had never been exposed to anything totally unnatural and designed specifically to OVER stimulate our pleasure mechanisms, again, if we all had totally balanced brains and bodies existing in a one to one relationship with pure reality, there would be little risk of over-indulging in things, because there would be a clear connection to our moderation mechanisms - we would have that warning sign of pain show up when we are getting close to our max with something that feels good - and we would then WANT to stop.
But of course, this isn’t the actual reality any of us are living in - so we don’t have it so easy.
The idea that chasing pleasure and running from pain is WRONG, at its core, isn’t actually true - rather this is an idea that comes based on the fact that we are living in a VERY complex reality with lots of conditioning, lots of man made over stimulation devices, lots of resistance to growth and so on.
We are not living in direct relationship with reality, and thus we can’t just follow our pain and pleasure as they stand with our current understanding of them - but that doesn’t mean that we can’t LEARN to understand them in a new way, and use them as guides to GET to a place where they are better indicators for us around what is and isn’t real reality.
This doesn’t mean we can’t start to untangle the survival adaptations we made in our childhoods to fit in and try to be safe, from what’s actually good for us and learn to meet our needs in better ways that our childhood selves knew to meet them.
This is what emotional mastery is all about - learning to unpack our pain and pleasure perceptions as they are, so we can start to understand them and what they are actually saying and how they connect or don’t connect to real reality.
We just have to realize that our patterns are often deep, rooted in our bodies, that our perceptions have been built around them vs. being built around real reality, and learning to see through our conditioning and then learning to do different things while feeling the fear that is going to come from that and doing it anyway usually takes MUCH longer and requires WAY more patience than we might want it to.
Emotions And Feelings Are A Response To Stimuli
The very first and most important thing to understand about our emotions and feelings is that at their core, they are a way of reacting and responding to stimuli - they are showing us where there is pain and where there is pleasure in our internal and external world.
Emotions and feelings are RESPONSES to the stimuli of our world.
To understand this is to understand that our emotions aren’t the CAUSE of pain and pleasure - they are not the REASON we are having a good experience or a bad experience - they are the MESSENGERS ABOUT OUR EXPERIENCE.
Emotions and feelings are a response to both the stimuli of our environment - what’s actually happening in the 3D world, and they are also a response to our internal environment, and to what we are thinking, what we are making things mean, what we are assuming and how we are defining things.
Our painful emotions and feelings are letting us know where we are encountering a stimuli that is either actually harming us, or when we are BELIEVING something that isn’t in alignment with real reality.
Our pleasant emotions and feelings are letting us know that some part of us is being nourished, supported and given what it needs, or that our thoughts and perceptions are in alignment with what’s best for us and what’s true to reality.
Can we take that in for a moment?
Many of us are living in a place where we believe that our emotions and feelings are the problem. Where we believe that what we feel is CAUSING us our pain, is CAUSING us our trouble and if we could just shut our emotions down, if we could just make them go away, if we could just get rid of our anger, sadness, guilt, shame, anxiety, depression, fear, freeze, flight, fight responses, over thinking, shutting down, getting stuck, feeling lots of sensation in our bodies or going numb and so on, that we would FINALLY be free.
But the truth is, trying to GET RID of our emotions and feelings, is the same thing as trying to get rid of our physical pain receptors.
The Burner Metaphor
The way most of us are taught to interact with our emotions is similar to the following scenario;
Imagine that all of us are living in a world where it’s normal to have our hands placed on a burner that’s turned on.
Obviously placing our hands on a hot burner will cause us PAIN.
Our natural instinct would be to remove our hand - to take the hand away from the heat - because the PAIN is a signal that the tissue in our hand is being DAMAGED and if we leave it there, there will be more and more degradation until the hand is eventually destroyed.
But in our culture, we’re taught not to see the hand on the burner as the problem, but the PAIN that we are feeling in our hand as the problem.
We are taught to perceive that having our hand on that burner is normal, natural and how things ‘should be’ - and that if we are experiencing pain, we must do something to try to fix our hand or fix ourselves so that we don’t feel that pain anymore or so that we can tolerate the pain.
From here, it’s like we live in a world where everyone has their hand on a burner and it’s causing them pain to a certain degree because it’s causing them degradation. But the solutions to this pain that are being sold to us are all things that revolve around numbing the pain of the hand, trying to fix the hand, or trying to use our minds and spiritual practices to transcend feeling the pain and to transcend reacting/responding to the pain.
In this world, we’re being taught that there is something wrong with US that we are feeling the pain, that the pain is the problem, and that the solution to the pain is not to look for the cause of the pain and to change that - but to try to alter the pain and how we respond to it.
In this world there are millions of products on the market all being sold as ways to stop the pain - pain killers, numbing creams, ways of cutting off circulation so that we go numb and so on.
There are also countless products and services telling us how to mentally and emotionally ‘transcend’ the pain. Teaching us that it is some weakness, flaw or inherent lack of capacity in us that is causing us to be ‘victim’ to the pain, and that we need to learn to rise above it, to change ourselves on some level so that we no longer feel the pain - or at least so that we are no longer living in a state where we react to the pain.
We are being told that WE ARE BROKEN for the fact that we feel the pain, the fact that we experience the pain, and that the pain is a sign that we are weak, bad, wrong, guilty, shameful, ineffective and so on.
Along with this, we’re taught that the ways in which having an essentially useless appendage due to the fact that our hand is on a burner vs. being actually utilized by us, is another weakness.
We’re taught in this world that we SHOULD have full function of both hands, that we should be fully and completely able and willing to do anything and everything one would expect someone with two functioning hands to be able to do - and again if we aren’t that this is a flaw in US. Even though EVERYONE has a hand on the burner, we’re being sold an ‘ideal lifestyle’ image of someone with two fully functioning, available, healthy hands - and we’re being told that this is what we SHOULD have if we are ‘doing everything right and taking responsibility for ourselves.’
This leads us to a state where we all feel shame, guilt and like we’re failing as we observe that we aren’t able to function as someone who has two hands, because we have one hand on a burner, and that hand on the burner is being destroyed.
In this world we’re told over and over again that we must fix the pain, that if we fix the pain we will be fine, and that if we get rid of the pain we will then be able to live a life that matches someone with two functioning hands.
That we all ‘should’ be there - but we should be there without taking our hand off the burner, because the hand on the burner is NORMAL.
So we are getting the message that we ‘should’ be fully functional beings with two fully functional hands while also being told that we MUST keep our hand on the burner because that’s normal, and that the problem is the PAIN. We are all being taught to try to manage, transcend or get rid of the PAIN, being told that THIS is what will free us up to finally live those fully productive, two handed lifestyles that feel good and are the right way.
Why We Cope
With this, we are going to find that many people have developed a LOT of different coping mechanisms to deal with the pain they are experiencing and to deal with the lack of function that is coming from not actually having two functioning hands.
Some people have learned to drink alcohol and use other tools to numb themselves, distract themselves and stimulate themselves in order to mask the pain that is constantly there.
Some people feel deep shame, guilt and blame about the pain, feeling that the pain is their fault, that they are weak, lazy, broken and in every way NOT RIGHT - and spend all of their time trying to fix themselves so that they will stop feeling the pain thinking that the pain is the thing that makes them shameful and weak. Believing if they beat themselves up enough, they will finally motivate themselves to ‘be and do better’, and that if they don’t they risk being ‘bad’ and broken (and rejected) forever.
Some people PRETEND that they have no pain, that they are fully functioning as someone with two hands, project that out to the world and secretly hide all the ways in which they are struggling and suffering due to the reality that they only really have a single hand. They project an image that everyone around them deeply approves of and believes to be true because they want and need to believe it for themselves - and this makes the people projecting that image feel amazing about themselves and temporarily does alleviate some of the pain of the hand - but at the end of the day, it’s all a facade and eventually we always see the truth come out and the wheels of that perfect two handed life fall of.
Some people try DESPERATELY to live a life as though they have two hands. They put in herculean effort on a daily basis to function like someone who has two hands - they over extend and over exert themselves as they do all the things someone with two hands would do with a single hand - and they can keep this up for a few days or weeks - but eventually the exhaustion of doing more than they are actually capable of doing WHILE in pain catches up to them and again, they end up ‘falling off track’ and not being able to keep up with all the pressure and tasks - which leads to more shame, blame and guilt and more looking for tools and techniques to try to fix themselves.
Others work really hard doing ‘internal work’ to try to transcend the feeling of pain. They believe the pain is all in their head, that they can learn to control it or eventually get to a place where they simply don’t feel it anymore if they do enough ‘inner work’. They are told by gurus and guides that maybe they won’t ever be totally ‘rid’ of the pain, but they can learn to just observe it, to just let it pass like a cloud in the sky. That they can learn to simply ignore the pain and carry on living a perfectly perfect productive, amazing life via just accepting the pain and carrying on. That it’s all a mindset issue.
Due to the reality that we are all in pain, that we are all suffering, that we all lack an appendage, what’s REALLY happening is we are all struggling. We are all in a state of getting deeply overwhelmed from trying to live a life that looks like we aren’t in pain or that looks like we have two hands. We are coping and managing in a myriad of ways to try to fit in by being what society says we should be AND not removing our hands from the burner.
We are hyper critical and judgemental of ourselves and others.
We are instinctively living in super selfish, self focused ways because WE ARE IN PAIN.
We are all in hyper ‘pretend we aren’t how we actually are’ mode, meaning we can’t forge genuine connections with others or ourselves because we are constantly having to pretend to be and feel a way that we don’t.
We are in a state of projecting our pain onto others - fearing those who don’t seem to cope with it as well as we do. We blame and shame others for their ‘bad behavior’ and the ways they cope, numb and stimulate as weaknesses and character flaws. We are more and more driven to the idea that there MUST be a simple solution because we NEED to believe that’s true in order to have hope to make it through another day.
We are mean to ourselves and others because we have a fundamental belief that WE are the problem vs. the hand on the burner being the problem. We hate ourselves, hate each-other, pretend to be people we aren’t, we have fake relationships and strive for fake lifestyles all in the hopes that doing so will save us from the perils of the pain.
Along with that, we live in a culture that continually blames the individual for the fact that they feel the pain, for all of their responses to the pain and chronically tells the individual to focus MORE on themselves, improving themselves, fixing themselves and changing themselves in order that they can turn themselves into a fully functioning, two handed, pain free person while still having a hand on the burner. We are taught that the image of perfection is still a person with no pain and two hands and that any amount of not living up to this is a personal failing that we must constantly be working to fix - which means we will forever be trying to fix ourselves because in no reality are we ever going to be people with two hands and no pain so long as we have a hand on a burner - and we are taught that under no circumstances are we to take our hands off the burner.
We are sold quick fixes, spiritual fixes, mental and emotional work - all about learning how to be that perfect person with two hands and no pain, while never taking our hand off the burner.
We blame ourselves. We numb and cope and feel shame. We feel shame for not being able to live a life of a person with two hands. We pretend. We manage. We project. We’re hard on ourselves and others - and we are perpetually in loops of over consumption and production trying to fix this problem of the pain and ourselves that is NOT the problem, always believing that WE are the root of the problem.
But the reality is, in this world, everyone is dealing with degradation because their hand is on the burner.
Everyone is coping and trying to manage - trying to get rid of the pain, transcend the pain, fix themselves so that they don’t feel the pain - because the option to take the hand off the burner isn’t an option - the hand on the burner is normal and that’s what everyone is expected to do.
Taking The Hand Off The Burner:
Emotional Mastery is a lot like the following situation:
With emotional mastery, we eventually get to a place where we see the pain in the hand as a messenger that something is out of alignment with reality.
Carrying on with the metaphor from above - in a world of true understanding, what we want to do is first stop and allow ourselves to acknowledge and validate the pain we’re feeling.
The hand hurts. It hurts a lot. We don’t actually have function in the hand. It’s causing all sorts of responses and reactions that we think are the problem - the pain, our way of trying to numb the pain, our ways of trying to normalize the pain, the ways in which we’re managing the pain - all of it is looked at as innocent attempts at trying to make ourselves feel better in a situation that doesn’t feel good.
This is the HARDEST part about emotional mastery.
Taking a step back and not blaming ourselves for the pain that we’re in, not blaming the comping strategies we’re using to manage the pain as the problem, and no longer vilifying our innate nature via trying to ‘overcome’ our natural responses and reactions to the pain. Not trying to transcend the pain.
But looking at the pain, looking for where the pain is coming from and then doing the REALLY hard work of questioning whether what’s ‘normal’ is what’s BEST based on its actual OUTCOME.
So we stop blaming ourselves. We look at our ways of coping, numbing, stimulating, distracting and trying to ‘fix’ ourselves - and we dig deeper - if there isn’t something wrong with me that I’m doing these things, what’s CAUSING me to need to do these things?
With this, as we stop blaming and shaming ourselves, as we look into the ways that we run away, cope and numb, we will be led to the ACTUAL pain.
We will be able to eventually say ‘well, my hand hurts and I can’t actually use it.’
That’s actual reality.
My hand hurts and I can’t actually use it.
Then we will see that having the hand on the burner is ‘normal.’ It’s what everyone around us has always done, it’s what we’ve always done, it’s what everyone else is doing. We will start to recognize that everyone is in the same kind of pain - we’re all just reacting and responding to it differently. We will start to have compassion for ourselves and everyone around us - because of course! How else are we supposed to behave when we are in a situation of constant pain and degradation that we’re being told is how things ‘should’ be? How else are we supposed to react and respond when we are in an impossible situation of being expected to live a life as though we have two functioning hands, when we only have one?
From there, if we’re brave enough, we can then start to question the legitimacy of having the hand on the burner.
Why do we have a hand on a burner?
Who is this serving?
What are the actual outcomes?
We may be able to start to question the entire idea that having a hand on the burner is good, and we may be able to question the theory that we should have the capacity to use the hand and to function as a two handed person when in reality, we only have access to one of our hands.
We may start to see that we are not broken, wrong, bad, shameful or in some way needing to be fixed or changed - but rather that we are in pain due to having our hand on a burner - a burner that’s CAUSING US PAIN. That’s the root of what’s happening. It’s not that we’re messed up - it’s that we are being HARMED.
We may be able to notice that the hand that ISN’T on a burner doesn’t hurt. That we don’t need tools for coping, numbing, stimulating or distraction to not feel that hand, because feeling the hand that’s not on the burner isn’t painful! We may notice that the hand that isn’t on the burner has perfectly fine function. We don’t have to pretend. We don’t have to act. It just…works. In real reality. We may notice that all the other parts of our body that aren’t on the burner are the same - they feel good, they function and we don’t have the same reactions to these parts of the body as we have to the hand on the burner.
Our pain and pleasure mechanisms are working.
From here, we may be able to, if we are really brave, start to take our hand off the burner. Which goes against our DEEPEST survival program - to be the same so that we can be accepted and thus safe. This is why this work is so hard, it’s almost always going to ask us to go AGAINST our deepest programming that to us, is just REALITY. It’s SO hard to see and SO hard to take actions in a new direction. Because the body literally believes we will die if we do something different - no matter how destructive what we are doing is or how much it doesn’t work to get us what we want.
We may be able to start to do what we have possibly never seen anyone around us ever do, what we have never experienced ourselves, but that we figured out and discovered via listening to our pain and pleasure signals.
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Let’s take another break here, and come back next week to finish off this metaphor and dive deeper into what it all means.
Have a fantastic week and I will see you in the next one!
<3
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