Working With Emotion

The world in which we live has taught us to fear emotion. We tend to avoid people who are ‘too emotional’, which I believe has a lot to do with the fact that we do the same thing with our own emotions. Why would we want to work with other people’s emotions when we cannot even face our own? I have found that it is basically impossible to really help someone else even if you wanted to, if you have not worked through your own emotions. As John Welwood shares, “ It is discovering ourselves in our most basic sensitivity, from which all emotions and feelings arise” (p 144). However, in order to truly work with emotions it is important to understand the difference between emotions and feelings. Although the line between the two is fine there is a commonly misconceived difference. “A feeling of fear may lurk in the background of the mind without a specific object, whereas the emotion of fear or terror is an unmistakable reaction to something very specific” Welwood p 146).

We can begin to work with emotions with a better understanding of what exactly we are working with. The main culprit of the manifestation of suffering that we all live amongst is the idea that we need to rid ourselves of them. “Insofar as the vivid energy of emotion intensifies our experience, it can expose common fixations of the mind and psychological blockages” (Welwood p141). The notion of ignoring these emotions those come up and make us uncomfortable, or are simply unfamiliar, so they will eventually go away. Or the thought that we can turn to other things to distract us from feeling whatever comes up.

“By untangling the knots in one’s emotions and feeling, one may arrive momentarily back at the basic ground of one’s aliveness, which is the moment of both release and freshness” (Welwood p151). In other words, we need to stray from the inherent idea to run or suppress emotions and learn to face them in order to be free of suffering. Each of us may have our own ways of going about this work, we all work in different ways. Some people need to “vent”, to vocalize what is going on inside in order to break away from suppression. In my opinion though, sitting practice is the most empowering as it reconnects us to our basic goodness. Regardless of the practice we need to work with our emotions, through shenpa; “Shenpa is usually involuntary and it gets right to the root of why we suffer” (Chödron). When we begin to recognize the ways in which shenpa works its way into our lives, we begin to recognize the way in which we rely on emotion, consequently creating space to work with them. “We’re taught that whatever arises is fresh, the essence of realization. That’s the basic view” (Chödron).

It is necessary to begin to become more aware; it is in fact the gateway to realization. We do not realize how these habitual ways of repressing emotion truly make us suffer, even though that is the opposite of what we are looking to achieve. “Thus we have genuinely failed to discover how emotion can actually serve as an extremely powerful vehicle for developing new dimensions of personal and transpersonal self-knowledge” (Welwood p141). Obviously we cannot imagine what is beyond the blockage we have subconsciously formed within ourselves, but with commitment to practice we have the ability to. Rather than ignoring our actions and reactions, we need to learn to work through them if we want to understand ourselves, if we want to learn of all the potential we obtain. “Going through the emotion to the felt meaning underneath may ease emotional churning and generate new self-insight” (Welwood p149).

When we have the ability to see clearly, think clearly, than we begin to truly understand the skin we wear and the vast open space in which we reside. We come, with open arms, to accept prajana or clear seeing. “Prajana isn’t ego-involved. It’s wisdom found in basic goodness, openness, equanimity-which cuts through self-absorption. With prajana we can see what will open up space” (Chödron). Rather than carrying out our habits we begin to open up, shedding layer by layer.

References

Chödron, P. (2003). How We Get Hooked.

Welwood, J. (1979). Befriending Emotion: Self-Knowledge and Transformation. The Journal of Transpersonal Psychology, 11(2), 141-160.