I get “Google Alerts” on the word “emotions” and each day there’s a variety of news articles and blogs, with the word emotion in the title.
Often I blow through them, but a couple of months ago, I came across one that had an engaging title. Much to my delight, I found that what the author, Shakti Durga, was saying mirrored my own views. While the article had a lot of captivating points, here are a couple of paragraphs I found beautifully articulated why we avoid our emotions.
“Because we live in a polar universe (one in which we have pairs of opposites …) we are going to experience emotions that are nice and emotions that don’t feel so good. Everything has an opposite, like happy and sad, and to appreciate life fully we need to experience the entire range of [emotions]. Being able to do this cleanly and in a healthy manner, with good internal support structures and a good mental attitude, will help us to master life on Earth.”
“… emotions are all good… To the ego, there is a natural tendency to want to avoid unpleasant emotions. We try our hardest to cultivate life circumstances that make us feel pleasant feelings.”
“When we are scared of our ‘negative’ (unpleasant) emotions we have to adopt strategies to avoid them. The first of these is to become incredibly controlling. By becoming controlling we are trying to stop the ocean of feelings from entering our life. We think we can insulate ourselves against feeling any pain or difficult emotions.”
Attitude Reconstruction’s translation of this profundity:
Because we are afraid of our negative (unpleasant) emotions [sadness, anger, and fear] we adopt strategies to avoid them. And said another way: our fear of emotions leads us to adopt strategies to avoid them. To manage our fear we attempt to control.
To read more about what Shakti Durga has to say, check out her book: Empowering Relationships.
