We don’t usually 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 ourselves for having certain feelings, and try to make ourselves feel only what we think we should.
Popular “self-help” messages promote the idea that we need to control what we feel, tellings us that we should strive to always be confident, happy, or grateful. However, 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 feel that it’s wrong to show sadness or anger if we had a parent who disapproved of these feelings. If we were criticized or punished for our emotions, we probably still feel shame about having those feelings.
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 unconscious belief that it is wrong to be ourselves.
Most of the time, our effort to control what we feel is automatic and not something we think about. It’s natural to try to avoid discomfort, and we all develop strategies to avoid emotional pain. In truth, much of our society revolves around helping people avoid uncomfortable feelings.
As we go through life rejecting, avoiding, and controlling our feelings, we become disconnected from ourselves. We lose touch with our bodies and with our inner experience. But even though difficult feelings may be pushed away, they continue to exert power over our lives because we never deal with them.
A much more helpful way of relating to our inner experience is simply to accept our feelings, no matter what they are. Rather than avoiding, rejecting, and controlling what we feel, we let it be what it is and we mindfully experience it. We approach it with curiosity instead of judgement.
I’m not suggesting that we let our emotions control our behavior or dominate our perspective. Being present with our emotions, and interested in understanding them, doesn’t mean 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).
