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The Emotional Aspect of the Sacred

Posted January 2nd, 2009 by Michael McAlister

Miriam Greenspan’s article, The Dark Side of the Sacred, comes to us from integral praxis.

Emotions live in the body. It is not enough simply to talk about them, to be a talking head. We need to focus our attention on emotions where they live. This willingness to be present allows the emotion to begin to shift of its own accord.

Her three step process shows us how to free ourselves from their grasp:

  1. “Paying attention to or attending to our emotions is not the same as endless navel gazing and second-guessing ourselves. It is mindfulness of the body, an ability to listen to the body’s emotional language without judgment or suppression.”
  2. “Befriending follows from focusing our attention and takes it a step further: it involves building our tolerance for distressing emotions.”
  3. “The third skill, surrendering, is the spiritual part of this process. Surrendering to suffering is usually the last thing we want to do, but surrender is what brings the unexpected gifts of wisdom, compassion, and courage. Surrendering is about saying yes when we want to say no — the yes of acceptance. This is what really allows the alchemy to happen. We don’t “let go” of emotions; we let go of ego, and the emotions then let go themselves.”

All good, and only slightly different from what I’d recommend. If emotions are essentially the meeting of mental activity in the body, step three should take care of the whole thing? In other words, meeting whatever is arising without moving (neither into nor away from) offers us Freedom. This is letting go not only of any emotion, no matter how dark, but it is also letting go of the ego that gives birth to the emotion in the first place.

What do you think?

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feeling our way through

Posted January 3rd, 2009 by Jerry Sherwood

Hello Michael,

Resisting feeling things fully is at the root of so much of human suffering. I am very pleased to see that more and more spiritual teachers have begun to address this conditioning. Mental clarity can become rapidly clouded when emotional reactions take over and that is far more likely to happen when we try to manipulate our feelings rather than be with our feelings. As with all other facets of our being if we are not fully aware of what is going on we will be the victim of our own unconsciousness.

You may wish to check out a blog I posted here at I-L on this topic about six weeks ago. Its called "Feeling Fully"

Thanks for posting this here

Jerry

--

It is in the clarity of Conscious Awareness that Truth is revealed.

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tolerating emotions versus tolerating physical pain

Posted January 3rd, 2009 by Ruth Henriquez Lyon

Your blog makes sense to me, especially this:  Befriending follows from focusing our attention and takes it a step further: it involves building our tolerance for distressing emotions.

I'm still not always at the point where I can easily tolerate distressing emotions, but I'm at the point where I know how to work at it when they're happening.  In other words, I get that.

However, all this wise counsel you write about completely falls apart for me when it comes to physical pain.  I cannot even begin to do the practice of tolerance. I am someone who goes for the pain killers pretty quickly after pain starts to arise.  Pain, in varying degrees, intersects with the emotions, but it is experienced differently (I'm talking about raw physical pain).

I used to work from "The Handbook to Higher Consciousness," which helpfully instructed to label your desires as preferences.  But when it comes to not wanting pain, I just can't make that into a preference.  If I were a person with chronic pain, I'm not sure I would want to continue to inhabit this body.

I'm not really asking for advice here, although I'm interested in hearing your perspective.  How do you deal with physical pain?  Is it different from how you deal with emotional unease?