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View Full Version : Does inner strength mean siding with or defeating your negative emotions?


Fleur de Frost
20-10-2015, 02:25 PM
Do we push our souls into our higher selves when we accept and gracefully surrender to the negative emotions that arise, or when we confront them head on and strive for their opposite? Is the answer so black and white?

Lucyan28
20-10-2015, 02:29 PM
Sometimes we have to let them flow freely, sometimes we have to fight them back with courage, sometimes we have to understand them, sometimes we have to let them go.

It depends on the occasion and of course our spiritual development.

PS: All emotions are necessary for some purpose, even the "black/negative" ones.

Thunder Bow
20-10-2015, 06:03 PM
Understanding your emotions are better than judging them. Seek to understand your emotions.

Mr Interesting
20-10-2015, 07:27 PM
I can't really see much of a difference these days between what might be defined as negative and positive and I don't necessarily understand why except to say that defining one against the other or deciding if something is such or isn't almost seems to be that which creates the tension between them and keeps such alive.

That doesn't mean I'm not conflicted at times but there is far less need to register myself as one way or the other within the conflict and just see it as a passing thing which may very well have a residing unease at it's core but that over time it will arise and be assimilated when and where such will be most acclimatised to ease and simplicity.

I am at the moment discussing some Christianity with a very old friend who has become pentecostal to his very core and while there is a conflict that sits around the edges and would almost have me arguing my stance I have let that sit in itself and gone back into some study of Christianity and found some very beautiful things and this has found me compassionate to a degree I wouldn't have thought with this old friend.

So the need to define something as positive or negative as the instigation of an emotion rising in conflict is allowed to rest, as it were, off to the side maybe and resolve in it's own good time.

Actually I've just remembered how I came across these ideas and it was to do with music and what might be seem as complex chords that verge on what is called dissonance. It is not the opposite of assonance which might be called simple and pure, or positive, but an almost deeper vocabulary of speaking which allows a much wider range of discussion... I came across this when I drew parallels, which I'd discovered in art, between what might be defined as ugly and what is beautiful and why such is.

Whoa, I've just now realised this goes back even further to when my father was at his most troubled (which with hindsight was his own awakening being misunderstood completely by the medical profession he looked to for solace) and asked me to do a painting for him which he could use as a meditation. he asked me to paint the edges in conflict and harshness and all that other rough stuff and then cede into the centre, of the painting, with calm and ease and simplicity.

I tried for ages to do this but it never really worked because no matter how conflicted and nasty the edges were they always settled and became interesting and full of possibility once I'd worked my way into the centre where colours and shapes didn't collide and challenge each other. I think it was way back then that I kinda realised there's no such thing as negative so much as simply complex, many faceted.

Rokon
20-10-2015, 07:43 PM
Do we push our souls into our higher selves when we accept and gracefully surrender to the negative emotions that arise, or when we confront them head on and strive for their opposite? Is the answer so black and white?

I feel it's a mistake to push your emotions away because you don't like them. They are like charged particles and pushing them away is like filling your own Pandora's box that will haunt you later by returning to you in different forms. Pushing them away is also analogous to clipping off parts of yourself and reducing yourself in the long run. They need to be expressed, moved through, when possible.

naturesflow
20-10-2015, 10:07 PM
Do we push our souls into our higher selves when we accept and gracefully surrender to the negative emotions that arise, or when we confront them head on and strive for their opposite? Is the answer so black and white?

I am not sure about soul and higher self. From personal experience of letting go, I have done so with resistance and grace and either way I let go. Confronting and striving for the opposite I have simply created a shelving affect, where I have found they have arisen later.. I notice that at these times they have been emotions that I have wondered what on earth they were related too. Where as through my other process I was well aware of the connections in a more holistic way of understanding whilst walking through fully...

Process is process, we do it the way our process works for us.