Surrendering to vs. creating emotions

[A human Being]

Originally Posted by Gem

Sure, there's something within what you've said that strikes a chord. Its as though pain may be physical while suffering is psychological. I guess that's a starting point to keep in mind. There are events in life which are so traumatic that the full feeling of it has to be 'avoided' for the sake of carrying on. In that sense we notice that a hard feeling takes time to process and it keeps recurring until it's gone all the way, at which point we can be at peace with whatever it was that happened. More extreme things can become sectioned off by reusing the avoidance strategy again and again each time the pain rears up a little, and there becomes a continual unconscious activity of concealment that may appear more abstractly in lowered general esteem or shame or what have you. My guess is that most of us have some kind of darker secret we keep in shame that haven't yet come to light. The trick, as it were, is to bring it out and be OK with it.

That's it in a nutshell I think, yeah We tend to learn these avoidance strategies when we're very young and we haven't yet learnt to process those feelings in a healthy way - and more so when we don't have healthy support networks around us (maybe our parents are emotionally repressed, say) and/or we've experienced extreme trauma. So we tend to learn these coping strategies at a young age, but they take a cumulative toll and manifest, as you say, as neurosis in one form or another. And emotional maturity just means being able to allow those feelings to arise and be fully felt, though for a lot of people (myself included) it can take a lot of pressure to make the mental dam burst and release the feelings.

Originally Posted by Gem

The way I see it is simplified into what is being felt and what kind of reactivity there is. Like shame, since I used that example, is not 'the thing itself', but a secondary kind of judgment about it. I find this distinction very relevant to healing processes. I question, how is it we become aware of a feeling, not our thoughts about it, but the noticing of how it actually feels. I believe we have to come right to that point of noticing it, where we really exist, and instead of having adverse sentiments toward it, and employing the avoidance behaviour automatically, at least become conscious of how the aversion toward a feeling is secondary to the way it actually feels, and not the immediate experienced feeling itself. If a person can stay with the immediate, which is the way it feels, without being swept up into the secondary mental reaction toward it, aversion, judgment and so on, that is a skill which can have untold benefits.

Yeah that's basically it for me, too... interesting what you said about understanding how we become aware of a feeling, because we can slip into reactivity soooo quickly that it's very easy to overlook that aspect of the process, the actual noticing of it.
When I observe myself in moments of emotional upheaval, I notice a reflexive, physical shutting down, felt as a painful contraction, and then that's usually followed by a lot of frantic and pretty much useless thinking. And it can take a lot of mental self-discipline, especially in the beginning, to not get just lost in all that reactive mental activity - it's an ingrained habit, after all, and those habits can be tough to break at first (for me personally, meditation is invaluable for just that purpose). But as you say, it can be so beneficial to bring one's attention to what is being felt, potentially even life-changing.

[A human Being]

Originally Posted by boshy b. good

“top energy'd” out of compliment'd facts that show us we were brought by
something special be why we do, ( that to be special too. ). ( we undo buss off create'd emotion ).

Testify, brother!

(Eh?! )

Originally Posted by boshy b. good

“top energy'd” out of compliment'd facts that show us we were brought by
something special be why we do, ( that to be special too. ). ( we undo buss off create'd emotion ).

making room for creating that emotional keep up. not surrender.

facts squiss something.. yea what it is..

hi.