Hello and welcome back!
If you’ve not done so already, I highly recommend that you go back and read Part One of this post.
It’s really important that we understand WHY we have such resistance to our emotions before we try to start forcing ourselves to feel them.
It’s really important that we remember that we are not just choosing to be ‘bad’ at feeling our emotions or processing them, and that we are all doing the best we can with what we were given.
From that place, it’s going to be MUCH easier to find our balance with all of this, so please do go back and read that.
Now onto today!
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
What’s The POINT Of Learning To Be With Emotions?
Again, our culture is deeply resistant to feeling emotions.
Our culture is set up in every way to make sure that we never slow down long enough to actually get a sense of what we’re feeling on a DEEP level - and is really only comfortable with us expressing and feeling the very superficial emotions that we all find comfortable and pleasant.
Which has driven so many of us into a deep state of pain due to the fact that we’re not able to properly connect with and feel our deeper emotions, and it’s created a lot of SHAME around our deeper emotions that has added even MORE layers of stress and pain to the mix.
But the reality is, that our emotions are deeply important.
Learning to be with them is incredibly powerful - and this is for many, many reasons.
- We Are Deeply Emotional Beings - The truth is, when we experience life, we don’t just experience it on an intellectual level. We don’t just experience it physically. Our emotions are always going to be a part of how we process this reality and so learning how to make space for that emotional processing is KEY to being able to adequately integrate the things we go through. As much as we may want to consider ourselves logical beings, we just aren't. We act emotionally. We behave emotionally. Our emotions drive our thoughts and they have a massive impact on the way we interpret information and the ways that we interact with other people and the world around us in general. When we aren’t emotionally literate, our relationships with ourselves is going to suffer, our understand of others is going to suffer and our capacity to fully understand our own motivations and the motivations of others is going to be stunted - and this has a MAJOR impact on how easy or hard life is going to be for us.
- Our Emotions Are Messengers - Our emotions are there to let us know when we are being harmed, when we are being helped, when what we are engaging in is healthy for us, when it isn’t, when our relationships are balanced and when they aren’t and when our thoughts are in alignment with reality. Our emotions are there to communicate to us information that our logical minds and our physical bodies may not be picking up on. This information is incredibly important for us as it helps us get a bigger, broader, more grounded understanding of the reality we’re facing and what’s happening in, around and to us.
- They Help Us Detect Lies - Most importantly, our emotions are there to help us discern when what we are believing is actually true and in alignment with reality, and when it isn’t. Our emotions are there to help us identify where we may be being misled, where ‘normal’ is actually harmful, where our thoughts are telling us one thing and reality is something else and our emotions are there to help us deprogram from conditioning that we may have never thought or known how to question before.
If you’ve been following the work I do around here for a while, you will know all of this.
If you’re new around here, the above may be news to you - and that’s TOTALLY ok! Don’t worry about having a deep understanding of all that I just laid out - rather I want for you to simply look at all that emotions do for us, to look at all the ways that we can use them to help us navigate reality, and to look at how vital they are in terms of our overall processing of life and our ‘digesting’ of our experiences so that you can understand WHY we would want to learn how to sit with and be with our emotions.
Emotions aren’t just inconvenient things getting in the way of us behaving logically or stopping us from being productive. Emotions aren’t there preventing us from being happy or feeling how we want to feel.
Emotions are trying to get our attention because they are VITAL for us.
When we don’t have proper emotional processing tools, we are going to suffer in this life - and that’s the main point here.
We don’t want to get good at feeling emotions just for the sake of it - feeling our emotions is a means to an end - processing our experiences or getting information that we need - it’s not an end in and of itself.
Where People Are Getting Confused/Missing The Point
All that being said, we need to understand that many people are truly missing the point when they talk about emotional processing and when they speak about the benefits of being with our emotions.
There are many spiritual traditions that teach us to ‘watch’ our emotions and thoughts as though they are clouds passing through the sky - clouds that come and go and have no real significance.
There are many spiritual teachers that teach that the ultimate emotional mastery place we should be striving to arrive at is one where we can have any emotion and simply not react or respond to it. Where we can be angry or sad or resentful or happy and remain ‘neutral’ in our expression and demeanor.
Some teach that the purpose of practicing emotional regulation is to get to a place where we literally don’t FEEL negative emotions anymore, or at the very least we get to a place where we don’t feel negatively about our negative emotions - if you will.
Now, while all of this may sound ultra spiritual or even like it may be a desirable state to shoot for - for the most part the above is a whole lot of mental and emotional gymnastics that will only land us in a place of deep frustration and pain.
When we attempt to detach ourselves THIS much from our emotional experience, we are effectively denying ourselves a massive part of our humanity.
We’re supposed to get sad when someone we care about passes on.
We’re supposed to get angry when we’re harmed or when we’re in a situation of being taken advantage of.
We’re supposed to be upset when our needs don’t get met.
We’re supposed to experience joy when we get to be connected to people we love or when we engage in activities that stimulate us.
We’re supposed to experience release when we feel safe and nourished.
These emotions aren’t signs that something has gone wrong, they aren’t there to throw us off our path and they aren’t positive or negative - those are labels that WE have given them due to how they FEEL - but in real reality, these emotions are simply a part of our lived experience and they are always going to be a part of our human experience.
There’s literally nothing any of us can do to get rid of them, there’s nothing we can do to make them go away and there’s no technique that’s going to get us to a place where we NEVER have a particular emotional experience ever again.
We can’t spiritualize away our sadness, anger, rage, resentment, fear, joy, happiness or contentment.
These emotions arise as a RESPONSE to life - they aren’t the ‘cause’ of anything.
Often, when we’re being told that we need to learn to feel our emotions in order to heal - there’s a narrative that if we can just ‘be’ with an emotion and not react for long enough, that it will eventually pass through and we will be fine.
There’s a misunderstanding that it’s our responses to emotions that are causing us problems, and that it’s our inability to just ‘watch them pass through like clouds in the sky’ that’s holding us back from having an amazing life.
Rather, what we ACTUALLY want is to learn how to discern the difference between an emotion that IS just passing through as a normal response to a circumstance of life and an emotion that is very much there to help us ACT in ways that we NEED to be acting in order to make our lives better.
We aren’t supposed to just become stoic - there’s no point to this. We don’t want to learn how to deal with big emotions just for the sake of it.
We do our emotional work so that we can UNDERSTAND our emotions and so we can then LISTEN to them when they are leading us somewhere we need to go, and we can allow them to help us INTEGRATE what we’ve experienced in life.
The Actual POINT Of Emotional Practices
There is no actual inherent benefit in just ‘feeling’ an emotion and letting it pass through if we are going to then miss the message that the emotion has for us.
There’s no benefit in learning to be with anger when what we really need to do is take that anger and allow it to help us set a boundary where we need to set a boundary.
There’s no benefit in being able to watch an emotion from an outsider's perspective if that then drives us to ignore ourselves, our wants, our needs and our desires.
There’s no benefit in learning to be with emotions if we stop there.
We don’t want to learn to not react when we’re sad, how to swallow our anger, how to resist our happiness - all of this is only going to create misery and pain - even if it appears to make things easier or better at the time.
That’s all just spiritualizing the act of emotional bypassing.
What we want is to learn how to witness our emotions so that we don’t act on them INSTINCTUALLY. We don’t want to be ‘reactive’ in the sense that we allow our raw emotions to drive us without any critical thought or processing happening.
We don’t want to learn how to not react to situations where we’re being harmed and where we need to stand up for ourselves.
We don’t want to learn how to be unemotional in our relationships so that we never rock the boat or create a situation where we call for change that NEEDS to happen in order to make a dynamic healthier and more balanced.
We don’t want to suppress our capacity to cry when we need to cry, to shake when we need to shake, to EMOTE when emoting is the right thing to do.
Our emotions make us human.
Our emotions are a massive part of our intelligence.
Our emotions connect us to ourselves and to others.
We don’t want them to totally drive the ship, and we also don’t want to live a life of raw, unprocessed emotions any more than we want to live a life of repressed and denied emotions.
All this is to say, we don’t want to be torturing ourselves trying to get to a place where our emotions don’t affect us, where we can just ‘be’ with any emotion and watch it pass through and where we never react or respond to our emotions ever again.
That’s not helpful.
There’s no prize for being able to sit with pain forever and ever.
There’s no benefit to being able to just ‘observe’ an emotion if we’re not getting the information that emotion has for us and USING it to help us in life.
There’s no benefit in being able to watch our emotions if we’re not learning to understand why they’re there and if they are simply part of the human experience that WILL rise, fall and pass or if they are guiding us to ACT in some way.
The point is to get the information and to integrate.
So please don’t get this confused.
Don’t let this become something that’s turned into a new way where you feel like you need to be perpetually tying yourself into spiritual knots.
We learn to sit with our emotions as a means to an end - processing our experiences or getting information.
There’s no benefit in just BEING with an emotion if neither of these two ends are happening.
Let’s not get lost in the theory that is taking us away from actually improving our life experience.
<3
Are you sick of the self help roller coaster that leaves you constantly striving and never arriving?
Are you ready for a true spiritual path that connects you to yourself and reality so you can feel good about your life?
Then come check out the Mystery School.
