10 Jun Emotions – Repression Or Expression?
Stop competing for your place in the chaos. ~Siraj
Emotions! They are powerful and, for many of us, the ruling influence of our lifetime. We have given our entire lives to the state of emotion constantly seeking to appease, relieve, indulge and gratify it in any way possible. When the state of emotion becomes the condition of our life, we find ourselves haplessly imprisoned.
The “one” becomes many very quickly when emotions are not understood for what they are and when they become urgent, anxiety is born and our life immediately turns away from living and toward seeking only to avoid fear.
Typically, many of these fears do not actually exist in our outer worldly life. They simply appear to exist due to our mind being linked to the many emotions that have been fortified through gratification from our childhood all the way through adulthood. This becomes the unnoticed and unquestionable way of life that the Buddha called Monkey Mind. Monkey Mind is the “verb” of our thinking and how our inner attentions move from one thought to another, mirroring the state of our many emotions that cause anxiety and fear to arise.
This formula of living, which demands that we maintain the preservation of emotion through gratification, causes emotion to become emotions. The one becomes many!
The most important moment of our life is when we arrive at the place where we impulse ourselves emotionally to believe that our many emotions are the state of love itself. This process occurs so swiftly that we simply do not recognize it is operating and influencing our thoughts. So to become “mindful” of this process is very important. We must be willing to slow down our reactions and simply watch what is really occurring within us in order to change the process beyond small and petty emotions.
What I want you to consider is how, by blaming, we create more anger; and how one emotion has led to so many others! The more emotions we can conjure up, the more of a lifestyle we have around all of our emotions. It is here that our minds do a twist. Instead of being used to serve our higher nature, they labor on the manufacturing of alibis that simply allow us to keep populating our psychology with more emotions. Eventually, our whole state of psychology becomes the management of the many emotions we have that are telling us that we are never at fault and that we are hapless victims, which in turn populate our attentions with even more emotions…to nauseam.
Practice breaking from your normal need for satisfaction through some indulgence you do on a daily basis that gratifies you - simply watch and see what happens as the emotions begin to react and scream at you
Whatever you do…do NOT talk to the emotions that arise in any way or form - simply observe how they act and react (you will learn a great deal)
What you do from here is up to you - if you are like most humans, you will go back to the habit of whatever you were separating from (but you will have a pebble in your shoe now, because you have seen what the emotions are doing)
Doubt is a pain too lonely to know that faith is his twin brother. ~Khalil Gibran
So…the bottom line is that our many emotions are not to be fought with. We can disengage from our many emotions by not talking to them, not arguing with them. All we need do is keep our focus upon the breath and become still. In these moments of sheer meditation, we begin to realize that our emotions will subside and the one true EMOTION arises within us. That ONE emotion then allows us to cross over to the other shore of our being as we realize that it was quite simply…pure FAITH.
Excerpt from the Commentary entitled: Samsara Karma – From Emotion to Emotions!
Vicki
Posted at 20:33h, 22 JuneI am amazed as I watch emotions at that labyrinth that has been built through years of emotional gratification. Once my body/mind starts down the path it is easy to get lost in so many side paths. This maze seems to be what I have called “self.” Your beautiful description helps me to step aside and watch the inertia that propels my thinking.