The Transformative Power of Your Negative Emotions (Why Feeling Them is Deeply Spiritual)

Why You Can Safely Enjoy Feeling Really BAD

We tend to assume that when a painful feeling arises, something has gone wrong. We interpret the feeling as evidence that we are not OK, and that it needs to be fixed or removed.

The mind steps in to protect us. It tries to push the feeling away, distract us, or solve it. But in doing that, it creates an identity: the one who is broken and needs fixing. The more we try to fix ourself, the more we distance ourself from the power and aliveness of our true nature.

The blasphemous solution

If the distancing of uncomfortable emotions is what keeps us separate from ourself, it follows that to reconnect with our power we need to be courageous and vulnerable enough to feel those difficult emotions. This can seem paradoxical and somehow blasphemous – it goes against everything we have been taught in self-improvement teachings and most spiritual teachings as well.

Am I really allowed to fully feel and experience our fear, anger, guilt, aloneness, alienation and agitation?

Yes, you are allowed to because they are already here – they are part of what is; they are just energy and appearance taking shape in the space of your awareness.

But won’t this mean I am giving in to these negative feelings … and aren’t I truly at fault for having them?

You are not at fault – you are simply human, and you live in a world of duality where pain follows pleasure and up follows down. You also have a biochemical body which generates emotions quite independently of your thinking. And speaking of thinking, you are ultimately not even in control of that. Thoughts arise, emotions arise, and you do not know where they came from. You have less control over your experience than you think.

But what you can control is your attitude to your experience. You can accept it as it is, or you can resist it, thinking that the resistance somehow keeps you pure. But it doesn’t – all it does is create an identity as someone who is broken. Welcome to the treadmill of self-improvement!

Feel the troubling emotions

To get off the treadmill, we simply stop and be with what is true for us right now. If what is true is that we are angry, sad or hurt, then this is what we allow ourselves to feel.

But what if I really don’t want to feel this – it’s too uncomfortable?

No problem, my friend. If you find yourself resisting the the emotions, just feel the resistance. You are allowed to be as resistant as you want. Sit there and be a solid ball of resistance for a while. Breathe into it. Soon it will relax and release.

Why does it release?

Because you have not rejected it, you have stopped fighting with it. When you fight with it, you set yourself in opposition and create an identity as one who is opposing this evil in your life.

But when you stop fighting and just sit and experience it, the whole drama dissolves.
Then you are left with your original self – the witnessing awareness.

You might notice a letting go or a sweeping sense of relief. Ah … I am not faulty or broken, I see this difficult emotion does not touch who I truly am, and I see that it does not define me.

The realization that the emotion does not define you means you do not have to fight it – you just let it be as it is. This is huge!

Now you can tune in to that relief or stillness that surrounds the experience. When you were fighting with the emotion you didn’t notice the causeless peace of your true being just witnessing and accepting everything. But now you have stopped struggling you can feel it. There might still be discomfort and agitation in the body and mind, but around it you might notice stillness, peace, joy, strength, truth, compassion or any other subtle positive quality.

These are not emotions – they are qualities of being, also known as essence qualities.

Your greater being knows what to do

The essence qualities bring you what you need to deal with the situation that triggered the strong emotions. Perhaps strength appears, and you know that you need to approach the situation from the strength of your true nature and stand your ground.

Or perhaps compassion arises, and you finally understand why someone has been behaving the way they do (or why you behave the way you do).

Now you have direct evidence that you did not need to keep those uncomfortable feelings at bay. You thought they said something about you but they did not. They were merely messengers, telling you there was something you needed to feel so you could reconnect with the truth, power and freedom at your core.

Why is this a nondual-friendly approach?

Because in allowing the emotion and any associated resistance, you collapse the ego identity of the one who has to achieve an outcome. You are no longer a person on a spiritual journey who has to tame their demons and achieve constant high-vibe bliss – you are simply the space in which emotions and sensations of all persuasion come and go. You are the witnessing awareness. This is not complete nonduality, but it is nondual in the sense of dissolving ego positions and revealing the non-conceptual presence-awareness of your being.