I’ve recently had the opportunity to sit with some challenging emotions, and I’m reminded of back when I was first learning about Buddhism, and I heard a teacher say that the state of “wounded pride,” when we feel unfairly victimized, is very beneficial to sit with. At the time, it seemed insane to me, masochistic. Vulnerability was terrifying to me, and I couldn’t imagine embracing it as beneficial. Now, eight years later, I understand: a willingness to sit with the deepest pain is not masochism at all, but love.
Mark Epstein wrote in his book, Open to Desire, about a patient he worked with, a woman who struggled with crippling loneliness, only three years into a seemingly-happy marriage. She recounted the ways she worked so hard to be close to her husband, weaving herself into his space to make him happy. Epstein writes:
“You don’t want to feel second, yet you always put the other person first,” I pointed out.
Kyra admitted that she had never thought of it that way before and then had as close to a breakthrough as happens in psychotherapy.
“The loneliness is being close to myself,” she said softly, her eyes opening wide in trepidation.
I’ve long struggled with repression, my tendency to submerge unpleasant emotions, sometimes so deeply I am completely unaware of them. The core of repression is guilt, shame, or embarrassment, a sense that the emotion is wrong or bad. “I shouldn’t feel this,” or, “It’s silly to feel this,” or, “Others will judge me if they know I’m feeling this.” And so for years I’ve worked with repression by coaxing-out, trying to convince myself that, no, it’s quite alright to feel the full range of emotion whenever they arise.
There’s a certain absurdity to that tug-of-war, though, that I see when I’m able to let all the struggling subside: Arguing with myself about whether an emotion is good or bad to feel is like arguing about whether it’s good or bad that the sky is blue. Under all the self-judgment and wanting-it-to-be-different is simple fact. Whatever I’m feeling, I’m feeling, whether I like it or not. If there is pain, there is pain; if anger, anger. If I feel joy, I feel joy.
This was Kyra’s realization. Before, like her, I believed that emotion was only there if I consciously felt it, and struggling with the unpleasant ones, I thought I was freeing myself from pain. In truth I was doing the opposite. Western psychology and Buddhism agree: “What we resist, persists.” By resisting the pain, I prolonged it, buried it, ensured it would be there forever waiting to be felt. Once I realized that the emotions are there whether or not I choose to feel them consciously, it dawned on me: feeling pain isn’t masochistic at all. It’s the very heart of self-compassion – Tara Brach would say, “choosing to love what is.”
I entered into my meditation and therapy practices with my identity, the grab-bag of things I call “me,” and all the ways I wished the contents of that grab-bag were different. “I want to be less afraid of intimacy and vulnerability. I want to repress less. I want to be more in touch with my heart and not just my head.” And so on. I had the idea that over time, I’d change the contents of that grab-bag, pushing some things out and pulling others in until I was happy with who I was.
To my surprise, I found that the contents don’t change at all. The bag does. The fear remains, the repressive urges remain, the analytical tendencies remain, but what changes is my relationship to them. The Buddha confirmed this long ago: there is no fixed “self” that exists. Experiencing that truth first-hand as my identity shifts and dissolves has been strange, often unsettling, and very liberating.
One particularly profound example is the steady process of separating my identity from the emotions I feel. In the past, I identified very closely with my emotions. Feeling strong emotion for me was like being set on fire. There was no distance. These days, strong emotion can still certainly overwhelm me, but much more often I’m able to see it not as something I am, but something I have, like I’m just a container with all sorts of things going on inside at once. And this enables me to hold conflicting emotions simultaneously in a way that would have seemed paradoxical to me in the past. Previously, if I felt sympathy for someone, I couldn’t also be angry at him. The dissonance would make me feel horribly guilty. Whereas these days I’ll just note whatever’s floating around: “I feel deep compassion, and also sadness and longing, and also vehement anger.” All at once. And I’ll acknowledge it all with a slight smile.
I used to worry, as many people first learning of Buddhism do, that this distance would mute my feelings, would insulate me a bit from the full vibrancy of my experience. What I’ve found is the opposite: the emotions are no longer “who I am”, but I still experience them all up close and personal. Free from the struggling and self-recrimination, I actually feel life more intensely, no longer so distracted, able to focus my awareness on my experience and let it wash over me.
While I’m still in this state of “wounded pride,” I’ve been seizing it as an opportunity to meditate and really look deeply at what’s going on. My practice the past four days has been profound – it’s been very challenging, a rollercoaster of emotion, but the more I’m able to sit with even the most painful experience, the more I see the deeper, pervasive sense of richness and joy that exists always, simultaneously, alongside even the deepest despair.
If you’d told me eight years ago I’d see this pain as such an exciting opportunity, I would never have believed you.
This is something that I have always over looked in life. I personally hide my emotions behind a cheerful face and have always done it, so it comes naturally. Lately (past 10-11 months) I’ve been trying to acknowledge my emotions more thoroughly, to understand them better. Everyone has heard that bottling things up is bad, but noticing that you do it, and trying to change it is much more, is much harder than just saying “don’t bottle things up”.
Reading this gave me a new view, or at least conformation, on my view, on this subject.
I found much insight in your words, keep posting,
anonymous
What a brilliant and deeply emotive post. I don’t think I’ve ever read such an excellent description of the effect of the changes you undergo on a spiritual path like Buddhism. I’ve had the same kind of relationship with my feelings – repressing them as hard as possible – and I’ve come to the same realisation. It is the relationship that changes, not the actual thing itself.
anon – Yes, absolutely. And (part of the motivation for the post I just made after this one), we have to understand that repressive habits are like tight knots in a rope, or a heavy wheel we’ve been spinning faster and faster – we put a lot of energy into building those habits, and it’ll take patience to gradually dismantle them. It’s tempting to get frustrated and think, “Well, if I’m FEELING angry, why can’t I just FEEL it?”
But that’s just not how it works. My psychoanalyst frequently reassures me: change is slow. It took me 29 years to get to where I am; why would I think I could undo the habits overnight?
For me the acceptance that emotion I refuse to feel doesn’t just vanish was the huge insight. That shows that repression isn’t a compassionate act, but actually very self-aggressive. And inversely, feeling pain isn’t masochistic, but deepest compassion.
And then it’s just a matter of sitting with it for as long as it takes.
How exactly did you notice that you held things in? Did you just wake up one morning feeling angry, but not expressing it? Or was it more subtle?
The actual trigger for me was noticing an absence of even positive emotion.
What I’ve realized is that, for me, and others I’ve talked with have echoed this, is that repression is more like a sledgehammer than a scalpel. It’s not very precise. When I got really good at repressing, it was pervasive. Everything felt numbed. My joy was muted, my happiness was muted.
I also found that sex (and intimacy, generally) was a great barometer for repression, because it really interfered for me. I think humans are very fortunate to have their sexuality because it’s one of the few aspects of our nature we can’t fake our way through. If you’re fabricating your emotions, you may not realize it when you’re at work or chatting with friends, but you’ll notice it when you’re trying to actually be truly intimate with someone.
It makes sense, right? A fully intimate relationship is one where there’s freedom to have the full range of experience, so I think when you encounter blocks there, it’s a good clue.
I understand, it does make sense, how can you feel completely connected when there is a block. It’s sad coming to that realization, feeling something that used to feel intimate and right, feel empty and meaningless.
Anonymous
Yeah, and then the thing is to sit with that sadness. I think the body gives us little openings, glimpses to stay with. And if you sit long enough with even the emptiness or the meaninglessness, it changes – everything changes, eventually. Sitting the other day with a sense of total resigned, depressed bleakness, that familiar sense of “The world is bleak, there is no reason to live,” I tried to hold even that in compassionate awareness and then it shifted and glimmered a bit and I saw it instead as strong anger.
The psyche does some crazy gymnastics, but the good news is that just holding it in compassionate awareness is transformative. We don’t even need to intellectually understand what’s happening. A lot of the time when I meditate, I feel very much like a parent lovingly watching a child playing. And just that, watching and loving without meddling with the child, is the most powerful healing I know.
Your words truly are inspiring. Everything you say is a mirror to how I feel. I don’t find myself doing a traditional meditation, with incenses and being cross-legged. I more just find myself laying there listening to my mind quiet as I envision a smoke going in a clear path passing through obstacles. “I’m not even sure if that is a proper way of explaining it”
Oh, there’s no right or wrong way to meditate. My understanding is, there are two basic types of meditation: awareness and concentration.
Concentration is when you narrow the awareness to a subset of reality. Stare at a candle flame. Chant a mantra. Focus on the breath to the exclusion of all else. Concentration meditation is the practice that tends to produce states of rapture and bliss, but the Buddha rejected as leading to liberation because when you come back from your concentration, you’re right where you were. It’s very good mind training, though, and is often taught as a precursor to awareness meditation, so awareness meditation isn’t utterly overwhelming right off the bat.
Awareness meditation is kind of the opposite of concentration: you just sit there, or lie there, or whatever, and let everything that is happening in the present moment happen. Hear all sound, see all light, feel all physical contact, taste whatever the tongue is tasting, feel all sensations inside the body, observe the thoughts as the mind streams them out, and feel all emotions. Eventually I believe it’s even said that the dharma, the truth, becomes evident in the moment, that you can just observe it like you do sound or light, it’s a deep intuition that eventually becomes accessible.
Obviously awareness meditation is a process – I don’t know anyone who claims to be able to hold all of that in their awareness all the time.
It’s like one of my yoga teachers always said: the work was to try to fill the body with awareness while holding triangle pose, but in practice, you notice your foot is turning, and you press it back down, and then you notice your shoulder is sagging, and you draw it back, and then you notice your foot turned again.
So you just keep doing it over and over. The mind is drawn away by thoughts, you notice, gently bring it back, and hold whatever you can in your awareness until your mind is distracted again, and then you bring it back.
And over time it changes.
Different traditions have their own specifics, ways of sitting, eyes open or closed, cushions, chairs, walking meditation, eating meditation – the Buddha himself listed off a ton. “Breathing, know that you are breathing. Eating, know that you are eating.” Etc.
But he also said that all his teachings were just a finger pointing at the moon, not the moon itself. Different paths.
From the naked eye, pointing at the moon, but in reality, pointing at the blank space in between that no one sees.
I find myself practicing awareness meditation more so than concentration meditation. Because I like to feel. I like to know what’s going on with my body. I do both, or try to. But find myself getting distracted, I guess that’s what the concentration meditation would come in handy.
I understand my breathing, and everything that I hear. And that helps me in my meditation, or just plain old focusing.
Have you ever had a moment where you were so at peace with your surroundings and where you were in life that you lose a big chunk of time doing nothing. In the end not noticing you did nothing for that chunk of time?