Month: April 2010

Staying with painful emotions

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The more we practice, the more we are able to see our instinctive reactions to difficult moments, such as disappointments or inconsistency. These can provoke fear, annoyance or irritation in us. Because we practice, such emotions signal to us the places where we can grow.

Painful emotions are like flags going up to say, “You’re stuck!” We regard disappointment, inconsistency, irritation, and fear as moments that show us where we’re holding back, how we’re shutting down. Such uncomfortable feelings are messages that tell us to perk up and lean into a situation when we’d rather cave in and back away.

When the flag goes up, we have an opportunity: we can stay with our painful emotion instead of spinning out. Staying is how we get the hang of gently catching ourselves when we’re about to let resentment harden into blame, righteousness, or alienation.

Ordinarily we are swept away by habitual momentum. We don’t interrupt our patterns even slightly. With practice, however, we learn to stay with a broken heart, with a nameless fear, with the desire for revenge…. We can bring ourselves back to the spiritual path countless times every day simply by exercising our willingness to rest in the uncertainty of the present moment — over and over again.

Pema Chodron

Within

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Seek not the good from outside:
seek it from within yourselves,
or you will never find it.

Epicetus

Change

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Change of one sort or another is the essence of life, so there will always be the loneliness and insecurity that come with change. When we refuse to accept that loneliness and insecurity are part of life, when we refuse to accept that they are the price of change, we close the door on many possibilities for ourselves; our lives become lessened, we are less than fully human.

If we try to prevent, or ignore, the movement of life, we run the risk of falling into the inevitable depression that must accompany an impossible goal. Life evolves; change is constant. When we try to prevent the forward movement of life, we may succeed for a while but, inevitably there is an explosion; the groundswell of life’s constant movement, constant change, is too great to resist.

Jean Vanier, Becoming Human

Disappointments

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Life is a great teacher, and provides regular opportunities for us to grow. Somtimes these can come in the shape of things not working out or people letting us down. Our initial reaction may be to see these as negative, but the focus in our practice is how we work with what is happening:

When there’s a disappointment,
I don’t know if it’s the end of the story.

It may be just the beginning of a great adventure.

Pema Chodron

The real mystery

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People travel to wonder at the height of the mountains,
at the huge waves of the sea,
at the long course of rivers,
at the vast compass of the ocean, at the circular motion of the stars;
and they pass by themselves without wondering.

St. Augustine

Feeling Safe

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Many of us look outside ourselves for affirmation and some sense of worth, often turning to our careers or possessions to give us value. We can do the same in relationships, often expecting others to fill gaps we perceive in our self, which we can find hard to accept fully. This can be a well-established pattern by the time we reach adulthood. It can take the shape of us feeling we need to earn acceptance, or taking care of others at the expense of of own emotional needs. Freud wrote about a repetition complex, which is our need to seek out people who re-enact earlier emotional experiences, rather than necessarily people who allow us be loved just for our own sake.

It is only when we feel safe that we begin to relax with ourselves, as we are, and we can drop these early roles, or the ongoing commentary on how we are doing. Often this happens when we find ourselves with someone who accepts us or listens with real empathy. We find that we do not have to work to deserve love, we do not have to perform, but that we are lovable, deep down, before anything we do. A necessary prerequisite for growth is unconditional acceptance. Receiving such acceptance is like a gentle touch with a feather, warm and caring. It allows us reverse some of the patterns we have established and heals our inner self. It creates a safe haven from the storms of life.