Most of us grow up without ever learning what an emotion is, how to honour it, or how to feel it successfully. In fact, we get harmful messages to the contrary about "counting to ten" and bottling up our powerful feelings.
The truth about emotions is pretty straightforward. They're messages from the brain that are delivered in the body. To receive these messages we need to feel them where they arise.
If we're lonely, for example, the message might show up as a stab in the heart, a tug in the stomach, a welling behind the eyes, or all three. Counter to this it may seem, to feel a painful emotion fully, at the site of its delivery, is the best way to help it diminish. Not feeling the emotion, on the other hand, causes it to grow stronger, remain longer, and mess up our lives in many ways.
Often the message an emotion sends is unhelpful or just plain wrong - like buy this! Or be afraid of that! If I pause to feel such emotions fully, aren't I just encouraging them?
No, the opposite is true. To feel an emotion you must become aware of it. With that awareness you're best able to assess its soundness. Without it, you're only able to respond to the emotion unconsciously.
Let's say you're afraid of disability in what the relationship that is attached in the minds eye. We can't make our self-unafraid by trying not to be. But letting our self-experience the fear will reveal its origins from the past. You'll then be able to address and heal those earlier events. In the process you'll literally retune your emotional response. You'll become less fearful going forward, and only when appropriate.
Whenever you're not willing to feel an emotion, our choices and behaviours stem from our avoidance of that emotion. Our resistance then runs our life, and is directly contrary to our overall best interest.
Take the case of a person who's unable to feel inferior. This resistance is likely to make him sensitive to criticism. They’ll go out of their way to avoid criticism, or to deflect it, and will therefore deny themselves the chance to hear potentially crucial feedback.
Through a glitch in evolution, our brains are wired to perceive challenging emotions as life threatening. We respond the same way to loneliness, for example, as to footsteps in a dark alley. This then has issues to how we interact with people from different strand of equality, e.g. age, sexual orientation, gender, disability, race, and religious belief, what is your glitch in evolution within our brain on the subject equality.
But emotions are inside of us, so we can't actually run away from them. All we can do, therefore, is attempt to stuff them down or numb ourselves to their affects. In doing so we'll use anything at our disposal - alcohol, cigarettes, joining hate groups, violence, keep our self from knowing others, creating myth about different groups within society. Emotional suppression is a million pound industry with countless tensions reaching deep into every corner of our culture.
In truth, however, it's not really the substances and activities to which we're addicted. What we're addicted to, at our core, is emotional resistance of what equality means to what view of and what connections in our minds eye on the subject is it positive or negative.
- What do you think?
- Does it matter about this?
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