We don’t often step back and observe the way we relate to our feelings and inner experience. But it’s essential to look at this in order to progress on our journey of growth and healing. In particular, we need to see the ways that we reject, judge, manipulate, and try to control what is going on inside of us.
We usually don’t accept our authentic feelings, allowing them to simply be whatever they are. Instead, we try to control our inner experience based upon our beliefs and preferences; we judge it and try to make ourselves think and feel only what we approve of. Or, more accurately, what our inner critic approves of. Deep inner work, including some forms of psychotherapy, has the potential to help us recognize what we are doing to ourselves when we judge and reject our own feelings. And when we see these patterns it allows us become more present with ourselves, in an authentic way.
It’s natural to try to avoid discomfort, and much of our society revolves around helping people avoid uncomfortable feelings. Even popular voices in the world of “self-help” and personal development promote the idea that we need to control what we feel, telling us that we should strive to be confident, happy, or grateful.
Our deepest beliefs about what we should and shouldn’t feel stem from our childhood experience and the messages we received as kids. We usually learn that feeling a certain way makes us a good person, and feeling another way makes us a bad or unlovable person. For example, we may believe that it’s wrong to show sadness or anger if we had a parent who disapproved of these feelings. We were deeply impacted anytime we were criticized or punished for having our feelings. Furthermore, a religion may have taught us that certain parts of us need to be repressed in order for us to be accepted by God.
Whatever the specific experiences were, at their core was a sense that we had to be different than how we were, in order to please others and get the love we needed. This created a deep pattern of self-rejection, which manifest in the way we relate to our own inner experience.
If we want to move towards our potential for inner development, we need to adopt a new way of relating to ourselves: simply accepting our feelings, no matter what they are. Rather than avoiding, rejecting, and controlling what we feel, we need to learn to let it be what it is, as we mindfully experience it. We need to approach ourselves with curiosity instead of judgement.
This doesn’t mean letting our emotions control our behavior or dominate our perspective. Being present with our emotions, and interested in understanding them, isn’t the same as acting them out or believing that they are the truth. When people’s feelings control them, causing them to behave irrationally or impulsively, they are not really present with themselves, consciously observing their feelings.
When we mindfully experience our feelings, we don’t act them out. Instead, we turn inwards, using curiosity and awareness to understand what is happening for us. We become explorers of ourselves, seeking to learn the meaning of what we are feeling. For example, we may come to recognize that our emotions are connected to past experiences. This awareness provides the best basis for consciously choosing how to respond to our feelings, making us less likely to express them in harmful and impulsive ways.
However, we can’t understand the meaning of our feelings when we aren’t open to them. Whenever we judge them as bad or wrong, or try to avoid having them, we are rejecting our actual experience, and we can’t learn anything from it.
Healing and growth don’t occur by trying to make ourselves feel good all the time, nor by trying to control our inner experience based upon our beliefs about what we are supposed to feel. Authentic personal development can only come from an accepting and mindful relationship with our real feelings. We must learn to welcome all of them with curiosity and compassion, and use them as a gateway into deeper understanding of ourselves.
This attitude of inner openness is expressed in a poem called The Guest House, written by the 13th century 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).
