Entertaining the feeling

According to Rumi (world renowned Sufi and Poet),

“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”

Can’t be said any better, but I will try to explain some more.

“Stay with your feelings” this phrase was key in our classes with Munira Nusseibeh, anyone who studied with her will smile when hearing it, however it took us a few years to really understand what this -seeminly- simple sentence really means”

Staying with the feeling, is an invitation to really delve into the “scary” emotion, whether this emotion is anger, sadness, fear, anxiety or restlessness… however this doesn’t necessarily involve expressing those emotions the way we usually do (for example calling friends to talk and talk is a form of running away from the feeling).

Staying with the feeling, is an almost meditative approach, where we focus on the feeling, either by writing about it, or by intentionally focusing on it while we go on with our day, with the purpose of feeling it through once and for all instead of investing our time and energy in hiding it from ourselves and others…. you know you are doing it right when:

1. You are not waiting for someone to help you get over this feeling (by replying to you, reacting to what you said, or saying they are sorry).

2. You are aware that this feeling is not really related to whatever is going on in your life right now (feeling guilty for not being around when your four year old hurt her leg is not really related to this specific incident, the guilt is being carried over from our own childhood, and by avoiding feeling it, it keeps showing up in situations like this, the situation brings OUT the feeling rather than causes it, read more about this in the “vicious circle”).

2. Positive feelings start replacing the negative emotion (as opposed to depression and feelings of despair which follow the suppression of negative emotion. In the process of defending against the negative feelings, we suppress all feelings positive and negative and depression results). All emotions are waves and waves have a high and low point, if you allow the initial wave to pass (instead of defending against it) the low will follow and the following waves get smaller and smaller… building walls to defend against those waves transforms them into emotional “Tsunamis”.

3. You have more energy. Laziness and boredom (the desire to do nothing) and feelings of being trapped (life seems to be blocking our goals and desires) is a result of stagnant energy. This stagnant energy is the results of feelings that have not been fully experienced or expressed, and when feelings are not experienced, understood and expressed, they accumulate and stop the flow of the life force in us (we become heavy with the feelings).

“Over and over again, you are entrapped in the cycle of reproducing the past in one way or another…you cannot come out of these repetetive cycles, no matter how good your intentions are and how much effort you use in other ways, unless you really fully experience your feelings” Eva Pierrakos

4. Improved memory and dream recall: The dimming of memory is a by-product of denying awareness and refusing the experience of what you have lived through. The more we avoid our feelings, we are avoiding being completely in the moment (now), and when we are less focused on the now, our memory recall is not as sharp as it can be .

5. Spontaneous creativity and a general improved ability to feel pleasure and fully experience life.

6. Note that when you are authentically with your emotions, the emotion passes quickly, according to Brandon Bay developer of “the journey” approach,  “All pure emotions simply come and simply go. The only thing that makes an emotion stay is telling yourself a story about it, or wasting time analyzing it or listening to your mind talk about it. No emotion can last more than a few moments if you are truly authentic, have you ever noticed with babies? One moment they are crying, then someone shakes a rattle and the next moment they are laughing and gurgling. They don’t feel the need to hold on to the previous emotions, in order to be consistent. They don’t need to prove to themselves how important or significant the emotion is. They just feel it and move on to the next moment.”

 

Examples of counter-productive (defensive) actions we might be taking to avoid feeling:

1. Calling someone who refuses to answer over and over (we are not staying with our feelings of rejection for example)

2. Stuffing our mouths (even with healthy food), could signal we are trying not to stay with feelings of anger or boredom.

3. Watching an episode after episode of tv series (we are avoiding staying with the feelings in our own lives)

4. All kinds of obsessive/ addictive behaviour signal an ”avoidance” of a feeling.

How do we deal with negative feelings then?

According to Eva Pierrakos “the only way is in and through” and “meditation/prayer is a requirement without which the way becomes unnecessarily difficult” :

1. Realize our illusionary fear, that going “in” will “kill” us, or that  true health and a full life can be achieved without realizing our true feelings. Avoidance of feelings always creates both false doubt and false hope.
2. Commit to going “in” and not “around” ourselves: Movement stirs up what lies stagnant. By fully understanding this, we can direct our inner “WILL” and intent towards this self-induced protective stagnation and muster the courage to feel what is there to feel, stating this in our meditations and prayers.
3. Allow ourself to fall into the apparent “bottomless abyss” of our blocked feelings (the painful, frightening feelings), which requires the necessary faith that the ultimate nature of our humanity is good, strong and empowered and not bad, destructive and chaotic), if we recognize we actually do doubt this truth, we need to examine this belief.
4. Awareness of  our patterns of avoidance (example above).
5. Awareness of the real reasons behind our fear (denied pride and shame), which result from the idea that it is humiliating to have certain feelings or be in certain vulnerable states, and a misconception that the childhood pain existed because of our personal inadequacy which we are too ashamed to expose. Crossing these barriers will often dissolve fear.

All these feelings will seem like bottomless pits, but once we jump into them we are bound to find that there is deep inside of us that divine nucleus and of which we are an expression. It is a light, a warmth, an aliveness and a security. All these are stark realities but can be experienced only when we go through the denied reality of avoided feelings.

“Through these gateways of feelings you will arrive at the truth, through the gateway of feeling your weakness lies your strength, through the gateway of feeling your pain, lies your pleasure and joy ” Pierrakos, (and same goes for our fear vs security, our loneliness  vs companionship, our hopelessness vs our justified hope…)