PART THREE
Emotional
toxicity keeps us stuck in the same place or moves us into downward spirals
that take us further and further away from emotional alchemy.
Without
grieving our losses, listening to our fear and despair, we become lifeless and
loveless, anxious and depressed, angry and destructive.
Through family conditioning and religious teachings, and in the
culture as a whole, we are schooled to endure, deny, bypass, avenge, and escape
painful emotions. These five common ways
of coping have their strengths and weaknesses, but for the most part they aren’t conducive to healing and
transformation.
Endurance
is the ability to withstand suffering without collapsing.
Denial
is unconscious detachment from emotion and the truth that emotion holds.
To
transcend suffering authentically, we must be willing to live it fully. To rise above, we must go through – without
any guarantees of what we’ll find on the other side.
In
visions of vengeance, we find some small relief for feelings that are
intolerable.
Americans
are the most addicted people in the world – and our primary addiction is to
feeing good.
We
learn not to feel through what we think, not to think through what we feel.
Conscious
awareness is not something promoted in our culture, while avoidance,
distraction, and escape are.
People
who chronically suppress their emotions need to have their emotions
artificially stimulated.
Without the free flow of emotional energy, we’re all deader than we
want to be, and like any addict, we want a fix that makes us feel better –
something that allows us to feel more alive and cellulary connected to emotional energy.
Emotional flow is the state in which one is connected to the energy of emotion yet able to witness it
mindfully. We ride the wave of emotion on the surfboard of awareness. When we
do this skillfully, emotional energy in a state of flow naturally moves toward
healing, harmony, and transformation.
To
attend to the dark emotions is to sense them in the body, focus your awareness
on them, and name them accurately.
The
dark emotions are attention grabbers, goading us into awareness.
Attending
to emotional energy is a bodily-grounded awareness. It means knowing how to
feel your feelings, as opposed to knowing how to describe them without feeling
them.
You can’t be emotionally flabby and expect to come to a place of
emotional transformation and
spiritual power.
To
befriend the dark emotions, your intention must be to get close to what you
want to run away from. You need to take
your time and give yourself permission to let yourself feel whatever you’re
feeling without shame, doubt, analysis, or condemnation.
You
surrender by moving into what hurts, with awareness as your protection.
Connected
detachment: staying connected to emotional energy mindfully. The detachment
comes from being mindful, not from disconnecting.
