We don’t often step back and observe the way we relate to our feelings and inner experience. However, it’s essential to do this in order to better understand ourselves and to be able to process our feelings in an authentic way that supports growth and healing. In particular, we need to recognize the ways that we reject, judge, manipulate, and try to control what is going on inside of us.
The reality is that most of us reject parts of ourselves and feelings that we don’t like. We don’t leave ourselves alone and allow our inner experience to be what it is. Instead, we seek to control what we feel based upon our beliefs and preferences; we try to make ourselves only think and feel what we approve of, or more accurately, what our judgemental inner critic approves of.
We have an innate drive to feel good and avoid discomfort, so it’s understandable that we try to get rid of uncomfortable feelings. In fact, our society is highly oriented towards helping people avoid these feelings. Even popular “self-help” messages reinforce the idea that we need to control what we feel.
In addition, we hold deep and often unconscious beliefs about what we should and shouldn’t feel that are rooted in our childhood experience and the messages we received as kids. Most likely, we learned that feeling a certain way makes us a good person, and feeling another way makes us a bad or unlovable person. We were deeply impacted anytime we were criticized, rejected, or punished for having our feelings. For example, we may believe that it’s wrong to show sadness or anger if we had a parent who disapproved of these 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. We learned to regulate our inner experience in order to please others and get what we needed. This created a pattern of self-rejection, in which we came relate to our own feelings through the lens of good and bad, right and wrong.
If we want to become more authentic and connected to ourselves, we need to adopt a new inner attitude: 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 compassionate 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 our 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).
