How to deal with difficult emotions?
Video transcript: How to deal with diffucult emotions?
Every person faces difficult emotions. Some have them more often, some less, some deal with properly torturous feelings, some a bit less. But everyone faces them. How to deal with them? That means, how to deal with those emotions as they arise and how to transform their tendency to arise?
What makes a feeling unpleasant?
It’s important to first understand what makes a feeling that arises to be unpleasant. Is it objective? Is it like a dish of unpleasantness which is being served to us, or do we have something to do with the ingredients that bring the result of it being painful?
The negative label
Things happen to us all the time in the form of external events and in the form of internal events, which are our thoughts, emotions, and whatever our senses perceive. If you notice, you immediately attach a label to them. You judge them to be good or bad and anything in the middle. Is that label objective? Even more tricky question, is that label compulsory?
Let’s say you lost your job. You then label it as very negative for various reasons. Maybe everyone around you would agree. What would happen if you didn’t label it that way? Never mind if it is totally justified to do so. Let’s say you lost the ability to do it. Either you lost your memory and just forgot about it, and then there’s nothing to label, or for some strange reason you just do not label it as bad. Is it still bad in your eyes? No, right?
Do you still suffer from it? Why would you, it is no longer a negative event, so it doesn’t generate unpleasant feeling.
Can you see that what causes you to suffer, what brings rise to the unpleasant thoughts and emotions is not something that happens to you, but your reaction to it? The label you put on it?
Three levels of dealing with the label, the negative interpretation
Now that we understand what is the element that causes the suffering, the label, let’s focus on it and see how we can work with it.
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There are three levels to work with it. All three are important.
Level 1 – dealing with the symptoms of a labelled event
The fact that we understand the mechanism of how we end up with unpleasant thoughts and emotions doesn’t mean we can change it easily. So you put in the label. At this stage you can’t help it. An unpleasant feeling hits you. What can you do to soothe the symptoms of the situation at hand.
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By itself it is a limited level of dealing, but still, you can take a lot of the edge already. The 3 key elements are:
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Watching
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Accepting
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Beathing
Watching the unpleasant feeling
The power of the unpleasant feeling is mostly through your reaction to it. You have labelled something as negative and now you feel bad about it. Perhaps a mood just took you over. You can notice how much things go south by how you react to it, how you resist it and respond to it.
We want to change that. First of all, become aware of your feeling. Watch it. Change it from you being angry or anxious, to you having anger or anxiety in you. Watch it. Already some distance is created between you and it. The more you witness it, the less it takes you with it down the storming river of reactivity.
Accepting the unpleasant feeling
The magical tool to follow this is to totally and truly accept the unpleasant feeling. The power of acceptance is miraculous. Experiment it. You’ll discover that without your resistance, nothing can truly cause you suffering. Play with it and see. Be like a Teflon pan. Nothing sticks. Let it wash you and move on in its way. Whichever emotion you have is there to appear, show itself, and move on. The ability to let it complete its cycle won’t just make the experience of it so much easier and shorter, it also carries a profound healing effect.
Deep Belly Breathing
The last tool is another magical one. Deep breathing to the belly has like a superpower in rounding up sharp edges of feeling. Try it. The correct way to breathe is to the belly and through the nose.
Contrary to what you might be accustomed to, when you inhale your belly should expand, and when you exhale it should flatten. Breath calmly and deeply. Allow the inhalation to be long, and allow the air to expand your belly, and feel your hands rising with the belly. When all the air is in, don’t rush to expel the air. Give it a moment. Don’t hold it tensely. Just let your lungs be full for a moment.
And then let the air out slowly and gradually, not in a burst. The belly slowly gets flat, and your hands are gently falling with it.
When all the air is expelled, again, don’t be quick to inhale. Rest at the end of exhalation for a moment. The end of exhalation is a very important space in surrender. It’s the calmest point in the cycle of relaxing through the breath.
And gently allow a new exhalation to take place, starting a new cycle. That’s the natural breathing.
You are not trying to push that emotion away through breathing. Let it be and pass. You just enjoy the pleasure of deep breathing.
Combined this is a very powerful team to deal with the event itself. Eventually all those tools used regularly will take you far deeper than just dealing with the symptoms. Which takes us to level 2.
Level 2 – healing the psyche – changing the content of the label
A deeper level, which is in direct congruency with the first, is to work on your database, the label factory. Meaning, to transform the way you, which means your psyche and the subconscious, label situations. Your labeling is the result of your conditioning and the way your personality has been shaped, as well as your position and relationship with the mind as a whole.
In this level you work on transforming your psyche so the reaction, the label, will be different.
That can be done through many ways and methods. You can find what works for you. I came to see that continuous application of what I call the sequence of release brings significant transformation. It is very similar to level 1 but more systematic.
The sequence in short is to identify that you have a painful emotion, identify the pain it creates in you, and then instead of the habitual way of resisting and reacting, you remain totally uninvolved. You accept it 100%, you contribute nothing to that emotion, I mean nothing. You don’t argue, you don’t contextualize, you don’t negotiate, you don’t suppress, you don’t distract yourself. You don’t resist and you don’t help. You just let it be and accept it. Not as a psychological mindset, but existentially. You simply let it be. It’s as if it has nothing to do with you.
Next, you watch it. You position yourself as the uninvolved watcher, and you watch it. You witness it. Ideally, you take another step and alongside watching the feeling, you watch the watcher. You become the presence who is watching. It’s like a double arrow. You watch the feeling and you embody yourself. I will elaborate on it another time.
As you do all that you may breathe to the belly and relax, and you allow that feeling to complete its cycle and move on. When done repeatedly it allows the storages of pain situated at the floor of psyche to get released. Like stones in the pool, with each time there is one less.
But there are other systems of therapy and healing you can find yours. Another one I found extremely helpful is EFT, the tapping technique.
As you go on healing and purifying your psyche the messages written on those labels become more harmonious and pleasant, and the emotional situation you deal with is much easier.
Level 3 – transforming the relationship with the whole labelling system, with believing the mind
We talked about dealing with the label as it arose, and then about how to make the text written on the label less unpleasant. The most important level of dealing with painful emotions is the fundamental tendency to believe the label given and live your life through it.
You take that label to be true. You have no other way. That label is your own analysis, after all. How can you not believe yourself? But is it?
I used to have very strong anxieties for years. I’ve improved my relationship with them, and found a deeper place in me, but they went on coming. Until I had a profound awakening that changed my life. I realized something amazing – that label is essentially unneeded. I used to label every single thing that happens. Everyone does. And then I realized that these labels are entirely optional. They are not needed to experience life. To my amazement I discovered that life is actually absolutely and exclusively silent. That was the end of years of my anxieties and the beginning of a life in heaven. Of unconditional peace and freedom.
Conclusion of the question: how to deal with difficult emotions?
That is the deepest and ultimate answer to how to deal with difficult and painful emotions. All three levels are very important to learn and apply and you can start applying them all today. The first level needs no preparation, the second level is indeed a journey but one you can begin today, and the third, well, that is a funny one. It is a journey but to just where you are already now. The third one is the one that brings liberation. It is achieved through skillful and dedicated practice whereby you disentangle yourself from the mind by watching it, discover your true identity and embody it more and more, and finally break the contract of belief in it.
It is entirely doable for the simple reason that what you realize there is nothing other than what you already have and are. All you do is see that life doesn’t need the mediation of the label. It’s that simple. It requires a certain journey of cultivation and evolution to be ready to see that reality, but nevertheless, what you realize is nothing new. You don’t acquire or reach some new land or state. You just wake up from the dream of the label. That is what is called spiritual awakening.