More Than a Feeling
What we experience, we alter.
We all have emotions. They make up much of our sense of being alive. Popular contemporary thought posits chemical impulses in the brain as the root or cause of emotion, and such thinking has even filtered into common language. We might say, “I felt so much adrenaline,” or “I need to get my endorphins moving.” It’s clear that what we feel is reflected in the brain (we know that there is evident correlation between experience and brain activity), and that brain chemistry is one focus through which to understand emotion. But emotion has a more direct manifestation in us as “energy,” which we can come to understand through inward attention.
When we turn our attention inward and let ourselves observe and feel whatever is there, we may notice an indiscernible variety of sensations, though some stronger feelings may be easier to name. Some people, for example, notice that they feel great sadness, while others notice anxiety. In my own experience, while we can to a certain extent name our internal sensations, it’s something like naming a landscape. The reality of internal experience is complex, organic and subtle, like the true contour of a jungle, for example. Every jungle is different, and so is every sadness, when we observe it intently. This is not to sound poetic, but to point to the real “formations” of our emotions and the depth of subtlety with which we can learn to look within.
When we first notice such internal formations, they often startle. We all have an internal, energetic (emotional) “landscape,” but most of us are fairly out of touch with it. Almost all of us notice the tip of the iceberg — acute experiences of anger or happiness, for example — but we’re not constantly aware of the intimate contours of experience. In that sense we keep some distance from ourselves. We keep distance from what we feel and what we are. When we come into more direct contact with our experience, we see the real presence of so many emotional “formations” that had been the unconscious backdrop of our worlds. Instead of a vague and unsure sense of feeling, we observe a clear and acute reality.
So, for example, many people with the classic “Type A personality” are constantly motivated to control and achieve. They may be aware that they are “Type A,” and in that sense be able to name their experience broadly. They can name the jungle, but they can’t see the flowers and trees. When they start to look within, they may start to notice sensations in more detail. Anger, fear, anxiety, and a whole variety of emotions that had always been motivating their actions and forming their apparent personalities suddenly become real sensations rather than unconscious backdrops of experience. The same is true of those experiencing depression, generalized anxiety, a lack of agency, or many other broad experiences of dissatisfaction or emotional difficulty. When we are out of touch with ourselves, we see our internal landscapes from a distance, and can only give them general names. When we regularly look within and come into ourselves, we are instead “on the ground,” in the midst of so many experiences we had previously perceived from a distance.
While this can be startling, it gives us the opportunity for engagement. From a distance, there’s not much to be done about our experience. We can go to doctors or take medications, for example, trying to manage ourselves and keep our emotions “in check,” but at a distance we are relatively alienated from healing and awakening, and in that sense disengaged. We can choose, though, to look inward and move into our unconscious experience, becoming active agents in the discovery and resolution of the burdens within us. We don’t have to manage ourselves as though we were foreign objects (which suggests a level of alienation) when we are ourselves.
Emotions are, essentially, formations or distortions of the consciousness that everything is. This is difficult to express, but when we notice repressed, stagnant or distorted energy (emotion) within ourselves, we only have to move into it and experience it in order to release and resolve it. Because our experience is our application of consciousness (we experience whatever we are conscious of at a given moment), our experience of an object acts upon that object. That is to say, when we experience something, we alter it. Our experience of something is the application of consciousness to it, and consciousness is transformative. So when we attentively notice and let ourselves feel stagnant or distorted energy (emotion) within ourselves, it is gradually resolved through the transformative effect of our consciousness.
All of this may be difficult to understand (it is difficult to explain), but it is exemplified in the classic transformative power of catharsis. Catharsis is simultaneously the intense experience and release of emotion. So perhaps we allow so many underlying feelings and thoughts to surface (come to our conscious attention) and cry or yell, and afterwards feel a deep sense of resolution. Our conscious experience of unresolved emotion is itself resolution. In catharsis, there is often a certain satisfaction even as intense negative emotion is expressed. That is our experience of the resolving activity of our consciousness. That is why we can have the experience of “wanting to cry.” We may experience something difficult and hope to be able to cry, to engage a burden and so release it. Intuitively, we know that catharsis and release are healthy, even if they’re painful or uncomfortable.
Conversely, we know that denial and repression, or the refusal to experience or attend to our internal landscape, are unhealthy. We can block our stagnate ourselves internally if we don’t want to (or in extreme circumstances, simply can’t) experience something as it naturally arises. By refusing to feel something, we refuse to act upon it with consciousness to resolve and release it. But what we don’t resolve remains in the background of our experience, and in our “energy field.” That background emotion unconsciously conditions and distorts our perception of reality, keeping us out of touch with deep internal resolution and authentic connection with others and the world around us.
As we move deeply inward and resolve distortions with consciousness (understandably a highly abstract idea until it is personally experienced), we come to realize that a simple but intensely vibrant, resting awareness, or being, is our underlying nature, and in some way the underlying nature of everything. Because that simple, resolved consciousness can be sensed as, in a certain way, the deeper essence of all things, as we resolve our own distortions and come into ourselves we are more able to connect with everything and everyone around us. The more aware we are of the simple ground of consciousness within us, beyond distortion and unconscious heaviness, the more we notice it in other beings. Noticing and connecting to that simple consciousness is the basis of unconditional relationship. When we sense that basic nature in others as we sense it in ourselves, we are able to connect in that shared consciousness regardless of the external or emotional circumstances of any given moment. We see through heaviness and dysfunction in others and connect with them as they most essentially are. This is the meaning of the popular yogic greeting “namaste,” which has been translated from Sanskrit as (literally) “I bow to you” or (conceptually) “the light in me bows to the light in you.”
So each of us has the simplest and most powerful potential to be what we are, and to feel everything from which we keep unconscious distance. When we look inwardly and intimately at our emotional landscapes, we can find traction in engaging our heaviness through conscious experience, and resolving it into the light that we are. As we do so, we come to realize an essential unconditionality in ourselves and all things, and, beyond the heaviness and dysfunction in ourselves and the world, find release and connection in what is.
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