Most of us have difficulty being present with all of our emotions and we use various strategies to avoid feeling them – oftentimes without our conscious awareness. There are many reasons for this, having to do with our personal histories and the environments we grew up in, as well as our culture. At a more basic level, the difficulty we have tolerating emotional pain reflects our natural tendency to move away from discomfort, which is a useful thing for biological survival.
However, disconnection from our feelings has significant costs. When we can’t be present with ourselves we don’t know what is really motivating us or what we really need. We stay locked into patterns of defending against our emotions, and this unconsciously shapes our lives. Our unprocessed emotional baggage makes it harder to relate to others because it limits our authenticity and openness, and distorts our perception. It also creates physical tension and disconnection from our bodies (which hold our feelings), and this contributes to disease and ill health.
In order to know ourselves and heal ourselves psychologically, spiritually, and even physically, it requires us to change our relationship to our inner experience. This is one of the aims of deep psychotherapy and an important developmental task for becoming a psychologically mature adult.
This 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 in order to understand them and reconnect to ourselves.
When we judge our feelings and try to get rid of them, we are engaging in self-rejection. We may do this because we have internalized the negative way that our feelings were responded to as children; we all learned that certain emotions were bad because they were met with rejection, or they were simply not safe to have. We also may have decided to reject certain emotions within us because we saw others act them out in a harmful way. Our experience in our family and in the larger society causes us to develop beliefs about what we should and should not feel, and we try to make ourselves comply with these beliefs, e.g., stay positive, don’t show weakness, being angry is wrong, it’s OK to be angry, but not OK to be sad.
The problem is, if we decide some of our feelings are not OK and try to shut them down, this doesn’t address why they are there or help us understand them; we miss out on the opportunity to work with them and to understand ourselves. Actually, 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. On the other hand, allowing ourselves to have our real feelings fulfils the deep need we all have to get to be ourselves.
Experiencing our feelings doesn’t mean letting ourselves be taken over by them and acting inappropriately. If we are mindfully observing 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 were 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 one’s feelings is beautifully captured 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).
