What my Opening Clearly Showed Me
When I started mindfulness practice, within months my sensory world intensified and my subconscious emotions began to spontaneously be unleashed. I acutely experienced this for 4 years as I broke open. I had been taught by my parents & the adult world, that my emotions were a terrible place that can damage & destroy you & them. My only solution had been to bury my emotional world inside & pretend it never existed. In it reappearing I was re-experencing as here & now how an infant experiences its world.
Then my “self” fractured. I experienced something like ‘schizophrenia’, with a terrifying loss of any sense of who I am, for over 4 years. Was this something to bury & forget, numb out of with drugs, to get away from? Was it a bad person, to heal away from, to be destroyed or silenced at all costs? No it was just a child experiencing the power of parental indoctrination and the self he had built to bury hisfeelings losing their power.
My reasoning mind was not of much use here. What I learned very clearly in fact, is the reasoning mind is what we are taught as children to use to STOP THE EMOTIONS being expressed. At the threat of death, as the child experiences it. We so identify with the reasoning mind that when it begins to lose its power and hold, we feel like we are losing our-self. We feel in a way schizophrenic, like we are going insane
I experienced 4 years of screaming, crying, intense sensations, inability to work, or function at any kind of “normal” level. I had constant despair & terror. I felt my perception changing in ways I didn’t understand. Should one label this as mental disease, seeing ‘things’, “psychotic” “episodes? The shadow side? Something gone wrong? Something bad? I discovered it to be me letting out the held-in emotions, the totally appropriate responses of an infant & small child to its world and its parent’s behaviour.
And what’s a good way to deal with all this “stuff”, these childhood emotions and experiences coming out? To label them as schizophrenia, disassociative disorder etc? To stick pills in to make them go away, to shut them up, to label them as “evil”, “wrong”, to be “healed”, or “observed and not acted on” etc. etc? Thank goodness I did none of these things. I found letting go into, kindness, a bit of caring, listening & touch to be far more useful. And time.
So is it a good practice to observe the emotions and not act on them, as many gurus say? My awakened spaciousness says that to separate in this way is moving away from the experiencing of oneness and love. As well as being mission impossible when we start to increase our awareness & the emotions appear through the cracks of our mind’s defences.
Furthermore, my childhood was finite. So the emotions of my childhood are finite. So once I’ve cried and screamed them all out, & said its ok to them 1000’s of times, on my own curled up in a corner, they went. Totally. And I found myself floating in a space I had never realised was there. A spacious consciousness full of love, compassion and wisdom. That sees things as they are. Home. Where I was, and am, totally loved. Unconditionally.
So I realized something else… Emotions are totally safe. Lovable. Unconditionally. For real.
And it’s ok to let go of control. Totally.
Learning To Love Our Emotional World
How do we learn to bring love to our emotional world? By making it unconditional allowing into awareness of everything that’s there, without control. For real.
If opening/mindfulness is about increasing awareness of the here & now, we are going to see the here & now more. This includes what we see and hear and smell and touch. What we think. And what we FEEL. It doesn’t to take long, if you really are sitting allowing it all into awareness, before this rather large elephant starts to appear through the cracks our increased awareness has opened up… An elephant called the subconscious. And what is it? It’s all the experiences & emotions that we were taught to stuff inside, control and intentionally forget about.
Then we have a straight choice. We can let them out & begin to learn to love them. Or we can push them back in with reasonable reasons why, & use our minds to make something else more important. It could be something really obvious (I use Ebay) or it could be something a bit more subtle like “observe the feelings and don’t act on them”.
The thing is emotions by definition are not controlled. Who wants controlled laughter?