This week I’d like to relay a concise piece of wisdom said by my wife.
“There’s a place for every feeling.”
That’s every feeling – sadness, anger, rage, depression, hatred, terror, guilt, shame, contempt, despair, grief, numbness, jealousy, pleasure, lust, superiority, excitement, exhilaration, gratitude, joy, wonder, euphoria, ecstasy, hope and the rest. There is a place for all of it.
Of course this is not a truth that any of us can act in line with all of the time. It is perfectly natural that we regard certain feelings as undesirable or to be avoided and cast them out, whether acutely or chronically. But still one’s fundamental attitude towards feelings and any lack of understanding around them can lead to all kinds of problems—in our development, shadow work and every kind of daily experience.
That’s also why such understanding is needed—to hold us through the painful work of reconciliation when we inexorably fall, and our current beliefs, understanding and approach cease to hold true.
Even wisdom itself must be partial. Traditions and frameworks around the world and throughout history all contain falsities—whether religious, spiritual or psychological. When performing well they understand this about themselves and keep moving. When they don’t they build denial into their very structure and teachings.
Attitudes towards feelings, both explicit and implicit, vary greatly between people and philosophies. Stoicism and some sects of Buddhism for example overlap in their attitudes towards most feelings, regarding them as failings of the mind through one mechanism or another. Still, we would all do well to remind ourselves that there is nothing in our minds or world that exists without reason.
Ancient wisdom traditions knew that feeling has its rightful place as one of the four modalities of consciousness, alongside will, intellect and sensation. To be alive implies feeling. Feeling is how we experience energy in motion—of wholeness breaking into partiality, and transforming back.
When someone doesn’t experience feeling—or doesn’t allow themselves to consciously—they aren’t engaging in a dialectic or growing. To deny feeling is to deny movement and the very conditions of their own existence. No one can transcend feelings as long as they live, and to wish to do so is to abdicate your duty as a human in moving spirit forward. There’s work to do here. This is not a duty imposed by some external entity but by your own existence and what it implies and entails.
There is a common error made by many that conflates merely having an emotion or feeling with being controlled by it. This can be said about any and all feelings, including all of those mentioned above. There is also a major difference between any feeling that is welcomed and embraced vs the very same feeling when it’s denied. Our attitude towards feelings changes their very expression, leading many to judge certain feelings merely by their quality rather than by their direction or the intention behind them.
It is often suggested for example that being angry means being out of control, or that you can only be made angry through your own permission. But what this suggestion reveals is an unconsciousness about anger itself; one conflates anger with being controlled by anger because they’ve never developed a conscious relationship to it. So they declare all anger to be unconscious or unwarranted to justify their own suppression of it.
But undesirable feelings are not a glitch in the universe. Metaphysically speaking, the thesis that one ought to eliminate or transcend certain feelings is partial and incomplete. Why otherwise would such feelings exist? You can’t deny anything in this universe without immediately setting up a contradiction.
While feeling always implies some degree of dynamic between conscious and unconscious, feeling when well-attuned aligns not merely to what you egocentrically want but what is needed from the perspective of spirit itself—and the potential coming into realisation is something beyond yourself. It is not for any individual to decide alone what that is, but to engage in the process—through an openness to feeling on one hand, and reflection leading to insight on the other.
So being willing to feel is not the same as being controlled by feeling. In practice the opposite is often true, and the way forward is not in following through on the condemnation of certain feelings, whether explicitly or implicitly, but in recognising, accepting, honouring and understanding them.
A more integrated response to any feeling is to be open to it and develop a conscious relationship to it, including cultivating a respect for your own freedom and the autonomy of the unconscious. Where you no longer seek to control feeling, you will no longer be controlled by it, consciously or unconsciously.
This willingness to feel is otherwise known as empathy—including empathy for yourself, which implies empathy for others and vice versa—and falls under Habit 2 of my Seven Habits of Individuation model. This is an essential inner work habit for people of all personalities, men and women alike. Yet it is so often overlooked, avoided and misunderstood.
All too often we double down on what looks like the ‘hard’ thing—of persisting in our current mode and driving out feeling. But what looks like the hard path is often actually the easy one, and the truly hard path is the one we fear will make us look weak or vulnerable. Not in the sense of ‘looking tough,’ but in a way that is more true and meaningful.
If this all sounds daunting, or you would like some guided practice with working through feeling, there are several active imagination exercises you can try, available on the Make it Conscious YouTube channel. I recommend completing them in order:
- Bare Attention – https://youtu.be/2qMG6WyF8zk
- Facing the Feeling – https://youtu.be/oohHqPdqgnQ
- Emotional Integration Meditation – https://youtu.be/61SE-FBlxOY
