Emotional Flow

Excerpted from
Setting Your Heart on Fire; Seven Invitations to Liberate Your Life
By Raphael Cushnir

Once you've identified emotions in your body, and brought sustained attention to them, one further step is required. You need to greet them with real willingness. This means creating as much openness for your emotions as you're currently able.

Earlier, we used the metaphor of rain to understand the varying degrees of openness. Now, to help explain what openness means in this context, let's employ water again. Only this time, rather than using your imagination, perform the following experiment. As long as it's not a sweltering day, prepare a steamy hot shower or bath. Step in (without the book, of course). Once you're immersed, let the sensation of heat penetrate all the way through you. Bring your full consciousness to the endeavor. Dissolve yourself into the water as though you were actually melting.

In regard to your emotions, true openness feels almost exactly the same. It's as if you relax yourself to be two times bigger, then coax your feelings forward and encourage them to flow freely throughout all that extra space. While opening in this way to a pleasant emotion can provide a real treat, doing the same with an unpleasant one is much more challenging. Once you summon the necessary courage, however, the emotion does all the rest. Unimpeded, it never tails to move, shift, and change. It stays only as long as necessary, and eventually departs.

If a painful emotion persists or intensifies, and you're not exaggerating it in any way, that merely means there's much to he felt. And when you doubt the wisdom of remaining so open-perhaps to grief, shame, or gloom-remind yourself that the only alternative is shutting back down. In that case, as we discussed, the emotion is forced to stay put.

Opening to long-held emotions entails not just courage but also patience and will. As a general rule, the older emotions are the longer it takes for them to resolve. In some cases you may already be well aware of these emotions, working through them on your own or with a counselor. But just as often you will encounter them by accident.

Typically, a small matter produces a huge emotional response. At first you may be confused. You may exaggerate the matter to make sense of your response, or, on the other extreme, judge yourself for overreacting. But if you manage to let all that go and stay focused on the emotion itself, it often triggers associated memories. Suddenly you may be catapulted years backward, facing a reservoir of old feeling. When this happens it's best to proceed slowly, according to your own inner timetable. Almost always, however, the process is much easier than you first imagined. Often big releases happen right away, creating plenty of motivation to keep going.

What are you feeling right now? Where in your body are you feeling it? Keep your attention there for a few moments. If the emotion moves or changes, just follow wherever it leads. Do nothing except encourage the emotion to take all the space and time it needs. Whenever your mind roams, don't get discouraged. Instead, reel it in calmly as soon as you notice. If calm is all you're feeling, stay with that. If you feel nothing, find the greatest point of physical sensation and see whether anything else surfaces.

Keeping close company with raw emotion is an inherent skill that many of us have unlearned. Once relearned, it can be done under any circumstance, even amid chaos or when bombarded by the emotions of others. Sometimes, unwittingly, we bog down the process by talking excessively about our emotions or struggling to understand them. Both of these approaches, even if well meant, can divert our attention from the actual feelings themselves. We can easily become one step removed, attempting to dissect our feelings instead of fully allowing them.

Think of it this way-your feelings can't happen without you. Lack of direct attention, therefore, is a form of shutdown. This doesn't mean that you have to focus only on your feelings, or that you can't gain insight by discussing or analyzing them. What it does suggest, however, is that you need to stay aware of, and connected to, your ongoing emotional flow.