There is a current belief that expressing our emotions is a good thing to do and we are more spiritual because of it. While confiding in another person is universally acknowledged as part of the healing process, the idea that overt expression of emotion is good for us, is mostly nonsense.
While suppressing emotions is not at all good for our psychological or physical health, their overt expression is also not of any real benefit.
The acclaimed Jesuit philosopher and acupuncturist Claude Larre´ wrote that ‘The problem with the way we think about emotions is that we believe serenity is the lack of emotions. This is not the case. Serenity is not being disturbed by emotions.’ (The Seven Emotions – Larre´and de la Vallee)
While you are less likely to develop cancer if you talk about your emotions rather than suppressing them, in terms of escaping the prison of our opinionated mind, it doesn’t help us. There is a line in the Taoist classic, Secret of the Golden Flower that states, ‘Pure thought (attention) is flight – pure emotion is fall.’ Emotions are an aspect of our consciousness. We have three aspects – physical consciousness, emotional consciousness and mental consciousness. When we are open in all these aspects, we are in union with everything. Physical consciousness is the awareness of matter and energy, and mental consciousness is the awareness of perception itself. Emotional consciousness is the awareness of emotion, while the emotions themselves are the unconscious reactive patterns of this aspect. Emotions are like karmic weather patterns that colour our lives. They help us to believe in our individuality, our separateness. Without them, we wouldn’t have the same three dimensional experience. The emotions that we all have are different, as they are the result of our experiences and reactions over many and various lives. If we lived and died in fear many times, that will be our reaction to many circumstances. If we were angry a lot over our perceived mistreatment in past lives, then we will respond with anger to many situations.
A client of mine really put this in perspective for me, many years ago. She came in for a session and said that she was sad. I asked how sad? She told me that she had just walked through Martin Place (one of the main open plazas in Sydney), and had seen a broken umbrella lying there. She told me that the sight of it had made her so sad that she cried. If she had had reactive patterns of anger, this would have made her angry and if she had been fastidiously tidy, she would have just put it in the bin. We all respond to situations depending on our own emotional weather patterns.
Although we try to control our emotions, this is not really possible. Controlling emotions merely represses them and as the emotions are the energy that flows through our whole body, this just represses energy in various ways, leading to illness. Giving vent to our emotions also leads to illnesses, so it leaves us seemingly between a rock and a hard place. How do we get out of the mess? Whenever we are in our thoughts, we are not in our hearts and our thinking patterns are the karmic patterns we have accumulated over lifetimes.
Even when we consider that our thinking makes us happy, the truth is that these thinking patterns will lead us to the same karmic emotional patterns which make us miserable. They are our prisons. When we live in our heads we are unable to pick the happy and exclude the miserable. If we want to get out, we need to be in the emotional consciousness of our hearts and not our heads. We need to learn to be really happy for no reason, because we are interested in how we are, more than how right we are.
The Sufi poet Rumi, penned a verse about this that went, ‘The mouse crawls around the cage, lookingfor an escape. The lion tears the cage asunder.’ The mouse is the mind and for the mind – there is noescape. The lion is the pure awareness of the stillness wisdom mind of the heart. We can escape the cage through the regular practice of meditations such as the Inner Smile, which teach us to live in our emotional consciousness and be happy and contented for no reason whatsoever. Unless we learn to feel and experience ourselves through meditation, we are pawns at the mercy of our merciless emotional patterns.
By Kevin Niv Farrow
Kevin is the Founder and Director of AcuEnergetics® as well as a Master AcuEnergetics® Practitioner and Teacher of AcuEnergetics®. Kevin has practised and studied meditation and the energetic system since 1974. He has taught since 2000 and his published writings, meditation CD’s and teachings have brought him worldwide recognition as a unique and practical meditation teacher and an expert in the field of energy medicine. He currently teaches in Australia, USA, India, Asia and Europe. For more information about Kevin, visit Kevin’s full biography.