Emotions Are Information
Emotions are information. Sometimes the information is relevant to today, and sometimes the information is old but somehow still directing our lives; either way, the more connected we are to our emotions, the more information we have about ourselves, and the greater control we have over our decision making. Fear, for example, is a really strong emotion. It has the capacity to stop us in our tracks, propel us into defense of ourselves, or to simply get us to run away. All of us are afraid of one thing or another, and if we don’t confront our fear, not by fighting it, but becoming intimately relational with it, the fear will always exist and possibly even grow; and whatever it is we are afraid of will continue to elude or control us.
Becoming relational with your emotions is as simple as sitting with them. I say simple, not easy, because it’s simple to understand, but not always so easy to do. Sitting with our emotions looks like sitting with the feeling that comes with the emotion. In the example of fear, you may feel a drop in the pit of your stomach. Sitting with the fear is sitting with the sensation in your stomach. The next step is then inquiring within yourself about the fear. Some questions you could ask yourself are, what am I really afraid of? What’s the worst thing that could happen? These two questions alone could reveal to you that you’re dealing with fear that’s rooted in your past, and no longer relevant to who you are, or the circumstances you’re in today. On the other hand, you may discover that what you’re afraid of is smaller in magnitude than the thing you actually want. Either way, it’s difficult to know what’s happening in you when you run away from the fear you’re feeling.
Typically, when we feel unwanted emotions (i.e., heart racing, tightness in chest, etc.) what we want more than anything is to make the feeling go away. The most logical way to do this is to give into the cries of the emotion, and in the case of fear it would be to fight the thing, run from it, or stop in our tracks. For many of us, the desire to push away our emotions is compounded by messages we’ve received from others to not feel whatever it is we’ve felt, if it wasn’t happiness. What many of us haven’t learned is that in the absence of a life-threatening situation, if we sit with the emotion and attend to ourselves in it, the feeling will pass and we have the benefit of the information we’ve gained that we would have otherwise not known about ourselves, enabling us to overcome fear or work through our emotions.
As I mentioned, this work isn’t easy. For some, sitting with emotions and feeling bodily sensations can be traumatizing; so please exercise caution and be compassionate with yourself if you find this to be difficult, or even impossible to do. For the rest of you, it will likely take some time to build your tolerance of your emotional experience and your focus to attend to yourself; patience and persistence is key. Awareness of your emotional experience is key to really knowing yourself.
