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“Finding Stillness in the Storms”

Sunday, January 26, 2020 14:09

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“Finding Stillness in the Storms”

by Christina Feldman

“We are emotional beings living in an emotional world. Stillness is rarely our first response to the waves of emotion that sweep through us. Feeling helpless within emotional storms, we come to believe that expression and action are the only means to alleviate the tensions of anger, fear, and panic. Even happiness and love appear to require action or expression for us to believe in their validity. The many forms of rage that scar our communities- road rage, supermarket rage, surf rage, institutional rage- all bear witness to the compelling power of our emotions. In the grip of an emotional storm, we feel we must do something to express it, but we are just seeking to rid ourselves of the tension surrounding the emotion. Catharsis is effective in alleviating this tension, but it is a poor substitute for freedom. We honk our car horns, shout at our colleagues, feud with our neighbors, and then feel a welcome relief, yet we must also live with the consequences of our actions. We feel despair as the temporary relief wears off and we revisit the familiar patterns of tension and conflict.

Is it possible for us to find that quality of unshakeable balance in the complexity of our emotional landscape? Can we question the assumption we carry that the world and the ten thousand things in it hold the power to enrage and depress us, or make us happy, and acknowledge that all our emotional waves begin in our own hearts and minds? If we do not question this belief, then we are a prisoner of those ten thousand things. We delegate to them the authority to govern our emotional life and freedom.

Someone told me the story of the gamut of emotions he experienced in the aftermath of being mugged. Rage, anxiety, feelings of powerlessness, and the desire for vengeance arose in a crescendo of intensity. After a time he realized that the mugger was in charge of his life. He thought about him, obsessed about him, feared him, and opened the door for the mugger to govern his heart. As he began to explore the depth of those feelings, to accept them and befriend them, he began to reclaim his heart and freedom. Vaclav Havel, the poet and statesman, wrote, “Hatred has much in common with desire. With both comes fixation on others, dependence on them, and, in fact, a delegation of a piece of our own identity to them. The hater longs for the object of his hatred, just as the lover longs for the object of his love.”

Probing beneath the Surface: The second step in discovering emotional integrity and freedom lies in our willingness to probe beneath the concepts we use to define the emotional process. We use the words “angry,” “sad,” “happy,” “jealous,” and “fearful” to describe a many-textured experience that is impossible to describe by a single word. It is akin to describing a painting by its title. Our concepts, imposed upon a fluid, unfolding process, refer to the past and serve to interrupt the quality of attention we bring to that process in the present. We are tempted to define our identity by the concepts we impose upon our emotional life. We might refer to ourselves as an “angry” person, a “fearful” or “anxious” type, and come to believe these definitions to be the truth.

Probing beneath our concepts and descriptions, we come to understand that emotion is not a fixed preordained state arising from nowhere. All our emotions involve our bodies, feelings, memories, associations, and thoughts in an unfolding interaction that is so rapid it takes remarkable attention to perceive. Some time ago, I was about to get into a taxi, when another cab roared up. The driver jumped out and began berating my cabdriver for stealing his fare. Within moments the two men were shoving each other fighting for my suitcase, and throwing racial insults, and ended up grappling on the ground. After the fight had broken up and I was installed in the taxi, the driver began to pour out the story of his life; the endless injustices he’d been exposed to, the insults he’d endured, his struggles to support himself. He told me, “I am an angry man.” Where was the beginning of his anger? It probably began before he was even born, an inherited legacy. Where did his anger live- in his body, in the feelings provoked by the encounter in his thoughts and perceptions? The anger passed and another wave of emotion began- hurt, fear, and anxiety- another unfolding process.

It is the very speed with which our emotions rise and overwhelm us that makes them so daunting. Feelings, memories and associations, thoughts, reactions, and words cascade upon each other, leaving us stunned and helpless. Into this process we learn to introduce interest, investigation, and mindful awareness. The closer we can come to the beginning of an emotional wave, the greater the degree of balance and understanding we will discover. We learn to bring an alert, calm presence to the sounds, sights, thoughts, and sensations that touch us, to sense the feelings that are evoked. We notice that small feelings lead to small thoughts that arise and fade away without effort. The intense feelings we describe as loneliness, fear, anger, and excitement lead to an equal intensity in our thoughts and the degree of imprisonment we experience.

The feelings we experience determine how we feel about the world, other people, and ourselves. In the same way that we insist on being “someone” through our self-definition, we are also prone to categorizing the world in terms of “friends” and “fiends.” If we feel isolated from the world we will tend to be hostile or suspicious. If we feel happy and secure within ourselves there is little that threatens us and we tend to touch the world with kindness. In freeing ourselves from the burden of self-definition, we also liberate others from the images we have formed about them. There is the possibility of seeing anew, approaching each moment of feeling as if for the first time, and each encounter with the willingness to learn. When we cease to conceptualize ourselves or others, healing can begin. Letting go of the concepts through which we attempt to define our experience, we can explore the interwoven threads of an emotion. Sensing the changing nature of our feelings, we have the possibility of stepping away from the extremes of succumbing and overcoming to a simpler relationship of exploration and connection.”

- http://www.livinglifefully.com/

Source: http://coyoteprime-runningcauseicantfly.blogspot.com/2020/01/finding-stillness-in-storms.html

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