Most of us have difficulty allowing our emotions to exist as they are, and simply being present with them. We use various strategies to avoid feeling them – oftentimes without being aware of it. This frequently has to do with how we were conditioned to relate to our feelings by the family and culture we grew up in. It also reflects the natural human tendency to avoid pain and discomfort.
However, disconnection from our feelings has significant costs to our lives and well-being. When we can’t be present with ourselves, we don’t know what is really motivating us or what we really need. Instead of experiencing the freedom and relaxation of being ourselves, we stay locked into patterns of defending against our emotions. Unprocessed emotional baggage shapes our lives without our knowing it, affecting how we see things and how we relate to others. It also creates physical tension and disconnection from our bodies (which contain our feelings), and this contributes to disease and ill health.
In order to heal ourselves psychologically, spiritually, and even physically, it requires us to change our relationship to our inner experience, from one of disconnection and rejection, to one of acceptance and awareness. This is an essential developmental task for becoming a psychologically mature adult.
The work that is required of us is both simple and difficult: to learn how to be present with ourselves in a non-judgmental and curious way. Rather than avoiding our emotions, or acting on them impulsively, we must develop the capacity to mindfully experience them.
When we judge our feelings or try to get rid of them, we are rejecting a part of ourselves. We do this because we have internalized the negative way that our feelings were responded to as children, when we learned that certain emotions were bad or unsafe for us to have. We also may have come to reject certain emotions because we saw others express them in a harmful way.
Our experience in our family and in our larger society causes us to develop beliefs about what we should and should not feel. These may be in the form of unconscious memories, such as “my mom won’t like me if I’m sad,” or “I’ll get hurt if I get angry.” We also have conscious prescriptions for how we should feel, such as “stay positive, be strong, put aside your own needs,” etc.
If we grew up in a religion, we probably were taught that certain thoughts and feelings needed to be repressed because they were sinful. Unfortunately, the behavior of many religious leaders demonstrates the limitations of this approach. When we try to deny a feeling it just makes it more likely that it will build up underneath the surface, causing us to act it out in an unconscious way.
If we decide that some of our feelings are good and some are not, we end up in conflict with ourselves and we miss the opportunity to understand what we really feel and why. In order to not feel, we have to disconnect from ourselves and dull our awareness. On the other hand, allowing ourselves to have our real feelings is how we can come to truly know ourselves.
Experiencing our feelings doesn’t mean letting ourselves be taken over by them and acting inappropriately. If we mindfully observe our emotions, we can allow ourselves to feel them fully, without acting them out or believing that they are the truth. When people become blinded by their emotional reactions they are not actually being present with their feelings, nor trying to understand where they come from.
Our emotions have meaning and are often related to experiences from our past. For example, we may have a strong emotional response to something because we are reminded of a difficult event from our childhood. Often this is unconscious, and bringing awareness to our feelings can illuminate these issues and help us understand the true significance of what we’re experiencing. Being present with our real feelings is how we start to heal our emotional injuries, instead of avoiding them or inflicting them on each other.
When we have a healthy relationship with our feelings we don’t reject them, assume that our emotional reactions are the truth, or act them out on others; we welcome them with curiosity and mindful awareness, and use them as a gateway into deeper understanding of ourselves.
This attitude of openness towards all feelings is expressed in this poem, written by the 13th century Sufi mystic, Rumi:
The Guest House
This being human is a guest house.
Every morning a new arrival.
A joy, a depression, a meanness,
some momentary awareness comes
as an unexpected visitor.
Welcome and entertain them all!
Even if they’re a crowd of sorrows,
who violently sweep your house
empty of its furniture,
still, treat each guest honorably.
He may be clearing you out
for some new delight.
The dark thought, the shame, the malice,
meet them at the door laughing,
and invite them in.
Be grateful for whoever comes,
because each has been sent
as a guide from beyond.
-Rumi (translation by Coleman Barks).
