Most of us have difficulty accepting our authentic feelings, simply allowing them to exist as they are. We try to control our inner experience based on our preferences and ideas about what we should and shouldn’t feel. We also have unconscious psychological defenses and engage in automatic patterns of avoiding certain feelings.
All of this means that we aren’t able to be present with what is going on inside of us. But our feelings don’t go away, they get pushed out of our awareness and shape our lives without our realizing it. Our bodies may become tense holding bottled up feelings, which can contribute to physical problems, such as disease and chronic pain.
In order to become healthier – 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 usually have lots of ideas about how we are supposed to feel. We admonish ourselves to be positive, or to not let ourselves be affected by something. 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. In fact, many “self-help” programs are based on the idea that we need to control what we feel, so that we can be confident and happy.
All of these attempts to control what we feel are at their core about avoiding uncomfortable and painful feelings. This includes not only the feelings themselves, but also the shame caused by our own internal judge when we feel things that we think we aren’t supposed to. Our core beliefs about what we should and shouldn’t feel stem from the conditioning we received in our childhood. 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 them 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 feelings 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. They have meaning and are often related to 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 uncomfortable and getting 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).
