Where Is the Love Behind the Pain?

Every emotion is trying to guide you to something — even the painful ones. The challenging states, it’s not easy to feel them, and it might take you time, yet they will lead you somewhere.

They are vital to understanding more of your Self. Your experience of life can unfold.

Any part of yourself that you try to control or suppress will lead to unhealth. There is equal merit in misery, as there is in joy.

Having compassion for yourself is essential in this aspect. If you’re feeling challenged by something, you have two choices: Accept it, or challenge it.

Challenging these emotions might look like telling them to go away; it might not look as polite as that! That would be a form of repression. The other way is to suppress, where you don’t even get a rational glimpse of the emotion before it’s told to go.

The challenge with this is that it doesn’t disappear. It’s held somewhere in the body. A great example of this is telling boys not to cry.

If you notice a boy around the age of five, he’ll begin to try to suppress the urge to cry — a story that is told in The Power Of Vulnerability. He’s doing this because of social conditioning; he gains approval and credit from his peers and family. If he can keep it together, be a big and strong boy, he’s promised he’ll be successful if he learns it.

It’s true. He will be more successful in business if he controls the urge to feel. The only industries that celebrate feeling are the creative ones, where emotions can be felt and utilised to make great art.

The way that the boy suppresses the crying is to create tension; in the eyes, chest, shoulders. The waves of energy are held in that tension. I remember the shaking that my body would endure when I tried to suppress the crying; this is where the sobbing state comes — trying to hold back the natural waves of emotion.

Equally, as adults, the tendency is to shame ourselves around emotion:

‘I shouldn’t be feeling this way’, ‘I wish it was different’, or ‘I should’ve chosen something better in the past’.

All of these famous sayings are ways to convince yourself that what you’re feeling is not welcome.

Research says that most arguments that we have centre around a secondary intent, that lies underneath the conflict and pain that we might reflexively communicate.

For example, if I lose my job, and my partner challenges me around if I’m doing enough to get a new one. I might defend myself to show her that I am capable of getting a new job, that I’m not a deadbeat loser. The health of the relationship depends on how I decide to do this.

Conflict is natural in these ways, and it can lead to a bridge of higher understanding of each other.

Too often, in these scenarios, we fly into old patterns of raising voices, or pointing fingers. The things that we learned to do as children to get attention. To survive in a situation where our needs weren’t being met.

You’re not a child anymore. There’s a better way.

The flip to this is to recognise that all emotions have messages for us. The realm of the Somatic Descent traditions, the link I’ve provided is an audio CD by Reginald A. Ray. He recognises the Tibetan tradition of Vajrayana as the foundation of his work. This tradition draws influence from Chan Buddhism-which later evolved into Zen, and Taoism.

These traditions recognise that the body holds it’s own intuition and information, which guides the mind.

Indeed, the bulk of the information that we process in life is sensory. Reading Blink, by Malcolm Gladwell, will show you that we aren’t as rational as you thought, which in itself holds an irony!

I’ve been grieving recently; grief is such a fascinating state of being because it cannot be controlled; it is one of the most potent forces a human being can understand.

If we recognise and accept our emotions, we can see that they have insights and intuition behind them, there are sensory and interoceptive messages in all situations.

As a highly sensitive person, I feel my inner world very strongly, and viscerally.

Have you ever had a scenario, where a feeling in your gut tells you to do one thing, which you dismiss, and do something else, only to find later that the gut feeling was right? Of course, you have, because that is the nature of the relating between body and mind.

Western culture encourages this relating to be underdeveloped, and that is changing the more that we realise the benefits of these signals. Like any relationship, it takes intentional work; practice, anchoring in ritual behaviour, and a trust.

Interpretation of the signals from your gut, heart, or even more subtle parts of your energy, you can begin to find importance, and gratitude, in the more challenging feelings.

The more that we ignore our feelings, the more tension builds in our bodies, and the stronger those feelings will get. There is communication.

If you do ignore the body, you will find that you have to venture into some undesirable places to suppress, repress the emotion, and to maintain that state. That’s curious, because those undesirable places are way worse than the original emotion ever was, and it elongates the painful experience.

You can’t feel every challenging emotion, at all times. There needs to be discernment and discipline, as well. However, you can realise that the emotion is there to guide you somewhere, to teach you something. You can start to see that emotion with love, clarity, and welcome it into your life.

This scenario doesn’t guarantee that the process will be pleasant, but it does ensure that you’ll be living in a real way. That you will know your unique human story, and be able to show up authentically and honestly; in your truth, in each moment.

There’s unique confidence that springs from showing up in truth. You know that no one can take your understanding of your life away from you. Even though you’ve experienced many hardships, those hardships taught you lessons that make you more able to be compassionate, loving, and kind to others.

Remember that empathy is not about ‘fixing’ someone else, it’s about hearing someone, and being able to understand how they’re feeling, by feeling it in your own body.

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The more experiences of life I have been through, the more able I am to show up in empathy for another.

You can cultivate a deep and loving warmth around challenging experiences. You could even employ the noticing of the fact that you are experiencing a challenge.