Episode 270
Embrace Our Emotions
There are certain strategies that people use to handle emotions, and some of them lead to more happiness than others.
We might try to resist the emotion, which in many cases results in the emotion continuing. As many have said, “What we resist, persists.”
Another approach is to suppress the emotion, pushing it down so we don’t feel it. Naturally the feeling will emerge in other ways.
A related approach is to “spiritually bypass”, putting our focus on positive things, evading the adverse feelings by putting a veneer of happiness over it. The emotions don’t get processed, and can fester within us.
When we feel certain emotions, we might judge them positively. For example, we might feel angry and encourage the feeling, thinking about the situation that inspired anger within us. The result is that we feel more anger.
Another strategy is “paradoxical intention”, deliberately feeling the emotion, perhaps even pushing ourselves to feel it a little more – without justifying it intellectually. In this case, we normally feel it fully, and it quickly leaves us.
Similarly, we can embrace the emotions, using patient love, similar to the love of a grandmother, to observe the emotions, surround them in love, giving them sufficient space to transform or dissipate.
Hosts & Guests
Kurt Robinson
Transcript
I was just thinking about embracing our emotions. A lot of people have different reactions to emotions, there’s all kinds of ways that we can intellectually judge our emotions.
It falls into a few categories. Part of it is the difference between judging emotions negatively and judging them positively.
What happens when we judge emotions negatively? Well normally we say emotion is bad, and we might resist it.
Of course as many of of you might have heard what you resist persists. It’s likely to continue.
The other strategy a lot of people will use is they will try to suppress it or try to distract themselves from that emotion saying they’d rather think about something nice or pleasant. So they think about love, happiness or joy.
Wonderful things which is cool but depends on the context, it depends on how we apply it. Because if you are using happiness to divert from negative emotions this is called spiritual bypassing and it means we don’t actually process the negative emotions we just paper over them and cover them with something pleasant to think about.
Those emotions do not get processed so they don’t go away so they can stay in there festering. I guess all of us have some of that inside of us. Little emotions we don’t want to think about, things we are in denial about.
Of course when they come up we all have the power to embrace them or not judge them and allow them space to exist. The other thing I was talking about was judging emotions positively. So if we have an emotion like anger or we might encourage it in ourselves and we might try to think about that thing more so we experience more anger.
Of course a lot of people will have this, some people handle it better than others. It can be a problem if you’re trying to bring about these emotions.
If you’ve been listening to the podcast for awhile you might ask this question, what about paradoxical intention? Paradoxical intention is proposed by Victor Frankl in Man’s Search for Meaning. He talks about trying to deliberately push or lean into an emotion even when its negative or adverse.
This is something a little different actually to judge an emotion positively. Judging an emotion positively, this is my experience or explanation of it, when we judge it positively we are using our intellect and our thoughts to encourage the emotion.
Now paradoxical intention is something a little bit different, is when we’re leaning into the emotion emotionally not pushing it or encouraging it with our intellect but in a sense we are giving a space for non judgement for the emotion to fully be felt.
It’s a little bit different. We don’t necessarily need to use paradoxical intention to fully experience our emotions but that is one valid path for doing that. We can simply allow the emotions to exist.
Or as I talked about before we use the strategy of the grandmother surrounding our emotions in love, allowing them the space to exist in their own fashion but at the same time we are embracing and giving them the space to transform.
Those are some ways we can know how we are judging our emotions and how we can decide to embrace our emotions.
Thank you for being aware of your emotional state. Thank you for allowing the bubbles to the surface and processing them when they do come out and have a wonderful day.
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