BEFRIENDING
Befriending my Emotions
Some conditioning is useful or at least neutral, but conditioning that makes us feel bad, fearful, sad, angry, guilty, hateful, regretful, jealous, vengeful, shameful is not. We don’t need the thoughts that create those emotions, and we don’t need those emotions.
Life on this planet would be vastly improved without them. Because we can’t do away with a negative feeling once its there, the only choices for dealing with it are to reject it, act it out or to accept it. Accepting a feeling means allowing it to he there for as long as it’s there. Doing that weakens it and lessens its capacity to dominate us, either consciously or unconsciously. Rejecting a feeling, on the other hand, causes it to persist, if not consciously, then unconsciously. And acting a feeling out only reinforces it.
Acceptance allows the pool of negative emotions that we all carry to be drained. Where as, rejection or acting out a feeling maintains that pool and causes it to spill over. Accepting our emotions and allowing them to be there. Without telling stories about them helps them heal and evolve.
Eventually, we stop creating emotions with our thoughts because we see our emotions for what they are: programmed reactions to beliefs we hold, which are also programmed and automatic., like all conditioning. Our evolution requires that we become conscious of our thoughts and the emotions generated by those thoughts. Once we have become aware of and more objective (there is …) about our thoughts and emotions. We, become logistic free for the ego, and the ego stops functioning or functions only minimally. Until then, we will continue to experience negative emotions from time to time.
When negative emotions do come up, the thing to do is befriend them. “BEFRIENDING” is a good word. Because when a friend behaves badly, we treat him or her with care and curiosity because we want to support our friend’s growth.
If we take the same attitude toward an emotion, it will cease to be a problem for us. By bringing compassion and curiosity to a feeling and an intent to heal it. Our relationship to that feeling is changed, and as a result, the feeling changes.
Furthermore, such a relationship provides an opportunity to discover more about the feeling – what caused it and what keeps it in place – by dialoguing with it, just as we might dialogue with a friend. Such dialogues and inquires are not done with the mind, but with the Heart.
When we are a good friend, we listen to our friend.
Being a good friend to a feeling means listening to it, being present to it. Seeing what it might have to reveal. By listening, we give the feeling space to speak to us. What speaks is actually our own wisdom, or our Essence. Revealing to us intuitively what we need to know about that feeling. When we work with emotions this way, the results can be very rich.
Emotions become friends instead of problems. They are friends that help us heal and evolve our conditioning. It is up to us to befriend our emotions. However, because like an angry and irrational friend, emotions are not very like able at first. But its at those times, as with friends that our emotions are most in need of our compassion, curiosity and acceptance..