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.
Most of the time, our effort to control what we feel is automatic and not something we think about. It’s natural to want to feel good and to avoid discomfort, so we all develop strategies to avoid emotional pain. The truth is, much of our society revolves around helping people avoid uncomfortable feelings.
Our deepest beliefs about what we should and shouldn’t feel stem from our childhood experience and the messages we received as kids. We probably learned that feeling a certain way makes us a good person, and feeling another way makes us a bad or unlovable person. For example, if we had a parent who needed us to be cheerful, we may feel that it’s wrong to show sadness or anger. If we were criticized for our emotions, as many children are, we probably feel shame about certain parts of ourselves. A religion may have taught us that certain things 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 we can’t just be ourselves.
As we go through life rejecting, avoiding, and controlling our feelings, we become disconnected from ourselves, less self-aware, and less present. We lose touch with our bodies and with our inner experience. Furthermore, even though difficult feelings may be pushed down, they unconsciously shape 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.
What I’m suggesting is completely different from letting 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 recognize that our emotions are connected to past experiences, which continue to influence the way we think and feel. This awareness provides the best basis for consciously choosing how we respond to our feelings, making us less likely to express them in harmful 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).
