Most of us have difficulty being present with our emotions, simply allowing our feelings to exist as they are. We try to control our inner experience based upon our ideas about what we should and shouldn’t feel. We engage in various strategies to avoid our feelings, often without awareness of doing it. These strategies usually developed to help us survive painful and overwhelming situations as children.
Because we can’t allow ourselves to experience our true feelings, we become disconnected and lose touch with what is going on inside of us. This doesn’t mean our emotions go away; they are just pushed out of our awareness and shape our lives without our knowing it. Our bodies may become tense carrying around bottled up feelings, which can contribute to disease and chronic pain.
In order to become more conscious and healthy – psychologically, spiritually, and physically – we must develop a new way of relating with our inner experience. The work that is required of us is both simple and difficult: to learn how to allow our feelings to be whatever they are while being a conscious observer. Rather than avoiding, rejecting, and controlling what we feel, we must develop the capacity to mindfully experience it. We need to put aside our judgment and simply observe with curiosity.
We are used to deciding how we are supposed to feel. We admonish ourselves to be positive or to not let ourselves be affected by some experience. We might think that it’s bad to be angry, or that allowing ourselves to be hurt would mean that we are weak. We believe that feeling a certain way will make us a good person, and another way a bad person.
Our attempts to control what we feel are at their core about avoiding pain. We don’t want to experience uncomfortable emotions, or allow ourselves to be hurt in some way that we were before. We also don’t want to experience the shame caused by an attack from our own internal judge, which happens when we feel things that we were taught are bad. For example, maybe we had a parent who needed us to always be cheerful, so now we feel shame when we are angry or sad. Or maybe we are a man who was brought up to believe that boys shouldn’t show any feelings at all. A religion may have conveyed that parts of us need to be repressed because they are sinful, and now we feel shame if we don’t live up to this ideal.
However, when we judge our feelings and try to control them, we are rejecting ourselves and creating conflict inside of us. Emotions are natural reactions that need to be allowed to occur. Trying to deny them creates unresolved tension that builds underneath the surface, often finding expression in unconscious ways, which can be harmful to ourselves and others.
It’s true that acting on our emotions without awareness can be harmful, but mindfully experiencing our feelings doesn’t mean letting ourselves be taken over by them, or allowing them to control our behavior. We can observe our emotions and feel them fully, without acting them out or believing that they are the truth. When people’s feeling make them irrational, or cause them to act impulsively, they are not being mindful of what is happening inside of them.
When we are present with our inner experience, we can come to understand what our feelings are really about. Our emotions have meaning and are often related to deeper issues, including difficult experiences from our past. Bringing awareness to our feelings, and recognizing their true significance, will actually help us have more control over how we act. Acknowledging the origins of our emotional pain allows us to heal old emotional injuries, instead of avoiding them or inflicting them on each other.
People usually decide to start therapy because they want to feel better. Paradoxically, being able to feel better often involves becoming more in touch with our emotional pain. This is because we have buried feelings that we need to process, such as grief over an important loss, or anger towards an abusive parent.
True healing and growth doesn’t occur by trying to make ourselves feel good all the time; it requires developing an accepting and mindful relationship with our authentic inner experience. We must learn to welcome all of our feelings with curiosity and compassion, and use them as a gateway into deeper understanding of ourselves.
This attitude is captured in The Guest House, a 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).
