Session 4: Stress & the Flow of Emotion

Your suffering is not you... but there is much you can do to heal it

Very much like physical pain, our emotional pain is also trying to tell us something. It, too, is a messenger. feelings want to be acknowledged, at least to ourselves. They are to be encounter and felt in all their force. There is no other way through to the other side of them. If we ignore them or repress them or suppress them or sublimate them, they fester and yield no resolution, no peace. And if we exaggerate them and dramatize them and preoccupy ourselves with their turmoil with any awareness of what we are doing, they also linger on and cause us to become stuck. 

Even in the tortured throes of grief or anger, in the gnawing remorse of guilt, in the slack tides of sadness and hurt, and in the swells of fear, it is stil possible to be mindful, to know that in this moment I am feeling grief, I am feeling anger, and feeling guilty or sad or hurt or frightened, or confused. 

Strange as it may sound, the intentional knowing of your feelings in times of emotional suffering contains in itself the seeds of healing. Just as with physical pain, that part of you that can know your feelings, that sees clearly what they are, that can accept them in the present, while they are happening, no matter what they are, in their full, undisguised fury is such is the case, or in their many disguises, such as confusion, rigidity or alientation, that awareness itself has an independent perspective that is outside of your suffering. It is not buffeted by the storms of the heart and of the mind. The storms still have to run their course, their pain has to be felt. But they actually unfold differently when cradled in awareness. 

For one thing, they are no longer just happening to you, like an outside force. You are now an active agent, taking responsibility for feeling what you are feeling in this moment because this is what is happening now in your life. These moments of pain are as much moments to be lived fully as are any others, and they can actually teach us a great deal, although few of us would seek out these lessons willingly. But relating to your pain consciously, as long as it is here anyway, allows you to be a participant with your feelings rather than serving victim to them. 

Mindfulness can allow us to see more clearly into the nature of our pain. Sometimes it helps cut through confusion, hurt feelings, and emotional turmoil caused perhaps by misperception or exaggerations and our desire that things be a certain way. When you next find yourself in a period of suffering, try listening for a calm inner voice that might be saying, "Isn't this interesting, isn't it amazing what a human can go through, amazing how much pain and anguish I can feel or create for myself or get bogged down in?" In listening for a calm voice within your heart, within your own pain, you will be reminding yourself to observe the unfolding of your emotions with wise attention - intentional attention - with a degree of non-attachment. You may find yourself  wondering how things will finally be resolved, and knowing that you don't know, that you will just have to wait and see. Yet you can be certain that a resolution will come, that what you are experiencing is like the crest of a wave - it can't keep itself up indefinitely - it has to release. And you will know as well that how you handle what is going on at the crest of this wave can influence what the resolution will be. 

Attachment/Non-attachment -or- Letting Go

They say that in India there is a particularly clever way of catching monkeys. As the story goes, hunters will cut a hole in a coconut that is just big enough for a monkey to put its hand through. Then, they will drill two smaller holes in the other end, pass a wire through, and secure the coconut to the base of a tree. Then they put a banana inside the coconut and hide. The monkey comes down, puts his hand in and takes hold of the banana. The hole is crafted so that the open hand can go in but the fist cannot get out. All the monkey has to do to be free is to let go of the banana. But it seems most monkeys don’t let go.

Often our minds get us caught in very much the same way in spite of all our intelligence. For this reason, cultivating the attitude of letting go, or non-attachment, is fundamental to the practice of mindfulness. When we start paying attention to our inner experience, we rapidly discover that there are certain thoughts and feelings and situations that the mind seems to want to hold on to. If they are pleasant, we try to prolong these thoughts or feelings or situations, stretch them out, and conjure them up again and again. Similarly there are many thoughts and feelings and experiences that we try to get rid of or to prevent or to protect ourselves from having because they are unpleasant and painful and frightening in one way or another.

In the meditation practice we intentionally put aside the tendency to elevate some aspects of our experience and to reject others. Instead, we just let our experience be what it is and practice observing it from moment to moment. Letting go is a way of letting things be, of accepting things as they are. When we observe our own mind grasping and pushing away, we remind ourselves to let go of those impulses on purpose, just to see what will happen if we do. When we find ourselves judging our experience, we let go of those judging thoughts. We recognize them and we just don’t pursue them any further. We let them be, and in doing so we let them go. Similarly when thoughts of the past or of the future come up, we let go of them. We just watch.

If we find it particularly difficult to let go of something because it has such a strong hold over our mind, we can direct our attention to what ‘holding on’ feels like. Holding on is the opposite of letting go. We can become an expert on our own attachments, whatever they may be and their consequences in our lives, as well as how it feels in those moments when we finally do let go and what the consequences of that are. Being willing to look at the ways we hold on ultimately shows us a lot about the experience of its opposite. So whether we are ‘successful’ at letting go or not, mindfulness continues to teach us if we are willing to look.

Stress & the Nervous System

Below is a diagram looking at how our nervous engages with day-to-day stresses (the wavy blue line), as well as how it reacts to heightened stress or perceived threats to our safety and wellbeing. When different parts of our nervous system are "running the show," we experience differences between reaction and response.