THERE IS AN EVOLUTION TO OUR EMOTIONS
THAT DOESN"T MEAN WE GET TO LEAVE THEM BEHIND!.
One of the most important things we can ever do, in regards to creating more suatainable happiness, is to reassociate our relationship to our emotions. We will speak to sadness because this might be our most common culprit in regards to opposing our happiness, but anger would be a close second. In this, we could easily call this the evolution of our relation to emotion, but suffering often brings about sadness before it brings about our anger. so we will stick with the sadness notion.
Sadness is a universal emotion. In our best situations, it is an opportunity to purge a given suffering. We are not lost in sadness. We just allow to flow through us and we are the better for it. Situations that cause us conitnous emotional suffering take us to a place where we are revisiting the same sadness ovr and over again, until we can either get out of such situations, or we can find some sort of practice to manage or eliminate the source of suffering. So far, pretty obvious no? Then we have something we could call traumatic sadness and this is when we have sort of powerful event, maybe our entire childhood, which parks what seems like an unresolveable sadness in our system. It feels like somehwere in us there is a part of us that is always sad. There is a saying, which is that all states are eternal, when we are in the deepest throws of them. .When we are intensely angry or intensely sad, it is as if we cannot feel anything else. In our deepest unreolved anger, it is as if we have no memory of not being angry, and so too with our most profound sadness.
To this there is an evolution in how we relate to emotion tha someday, we must reconcile with. It is a most courageous passage and it is nothing we need to force our selves to accomplish in youth. However, our capacity to be angry or sad at people, or life in general, can become overwheling with all of the challenges and disappointments we face in life. We get to an age where we can be looking at road that is aging in bitterness and anger or perhaps self pity. This is an easy place to arrive at. There is another road. The other road, we would hope to be happiness, but no true happiness can come through denial of our inherent nature, or capacity to be overtaken emotion, or to allow anger or sadness to define our existence.
THE 3 RELATIONS TO EMOTION
In this, I will present something that is a practice amongst many who seek to overcome the power of negative emotion. To do this, we will uncover 3 stages of our realtion to sadness and suffering. The first is personal. This is where we begin. Our emotions are personal and why wouldn't they be? We are feeling them, no? And we can attach them to personal experiences. This person did this or sad that, or this happened to me. Makes perfect sense. However, this is where can get stuck with the sam eold tired and miserable relationship with our emotions.
The next level is impersonal. Which means we are starting to recognize a cause and effect to our emotions, and we are willing to step beyond this personal view of cause and effect. When people do certain things it makes people suffer and such a thing happened to me. Now I know what many others know. We have joined the club of humanity. And then we can dare to look at why people do things and why we do things. In this, we are less stuck. How many people grow upthinking they are the only ones to be traumatized by something or other, only to find out later, how many millions, yes, millions of people have had similar, or worse experiences? By making our emotions impoersonal, we can still feel them, maybe powerfully, but we have created a path not to get stuck in them. We have a connection to something that is just human and a reason why it comes and goes, and stays or leaves. Our emotions can brng powerful wisdom and insight, and summon sterngth we did not know we had. This is also a critical step for healing our pasts. We can have tremendous anger or sadness regarding our parents, but if we step beyond our selves, we can unwind a history of how they became who they wer, or are, our resonisibility by the way. And if we dig deeper, we will find a stroy of humanity, of people struggling to survive in dire times, and all the unfortunate choices people make, wther alcohol abuse, or perhas taking stress out on eahc other phsyically. We have a story, and it is an old and timeless story of humanity for all of us.
The final stage is quite a step. It is quite frankly a spiritual passage. To reach this final stage we must fall into the suffering of the world, the suffering of all things. When and if we should do this, or life should do this to us, which it can, we usually come out in one of two ways. One is we are forever saddened by the immense and endless suffering of the the world. It is all unfair. The despair we feel can be overwhleming to take in. Indeed, if this is what we are passing through, it is all consuming and overwhelming. If we leave this place in despair, it is becuase we hanging onto the despair and we have missed the lesson. To truly abosrb the depth of sadness and suffering in the world, which as we can imagine, is beyond comprehension can also lead us to the ultimate realization. That realization is that any joy we have access to is a tremendous gift. It is a thing that can be taken away at any time, and it is for many. Rather than focusing on our sadness, we embrace the opportunity to create whatever joy we can not denying, but accpepting that human suffering is beyond our comprehension. In fact, all of us will be taken a place in our lives when we pass through some form of suffering that we cannot comprehend nor exlain to another. To fall into the endless suffering of hmanity calls the strong and wise to ask, what can I do? Not how do I feel? Perhaps we can do something or perhaps we cannot, but we are asking our selves how do we engage as active and not passive force to suffering? It is a sort of uncomofortabke thing to admit, but there is without question something about knowing that others are suffering more than we are, that puts things in perspective. Not to syay that our goal is to get off on the suffering of others, or shamefully create suffering for others to make us feel better (hello?), but simply to remind our selves of the potential situations we could be in that we are not. One of the most powerful lessons ever given to me was this notion that if we are a position to heal our selves, to overcome a suffering, no matter how bad, or how much it takes do do so, we are among the lucky.
I must mention no one has to a be spiritual super hero and jump into the abyss of human suffering for giggles or to prove anything. It is an organic process and rite of passage that often presents itself to us ooner or later. Like diving into the deep of the ocean, we need to be strong and prepared to handle what lies at the bottom of the ocean. There is a time and a place for this, and simply getting past our intensely personal relationship to emotion into a place where we can forgive our selves and others, and pull on the strings of what we will find it is a very human story, that is a very respectable place to be.