Sweet Emotion

Dave Brisbin 6.26.22 If you’re serious about following a spiritual path, you have two major roadblocks to overcome: your mind and your body. Your mind, storehouse for the dualism of your egoic consciousness, constantly talks to you—comparing, contrasting, judging. Your body, storehouse of your emotions, drives unconscious behavior patterns with childhood conditioning, memories, guilt, shame. Necessary for survival, but left unchecked, mind and body keep us in a narcissistic bubble, apart from others and the reality of the moment. Admittedly oversimplified, the West has been in love with the mind, rational thought, for the past three hundred years since the Enlightenment, but in in the last fifty or so, has fallen in love with the body, with emotion. Emotion has become the sign of being authentic and in touch, empathetic and compassionate. Arguments now appeal to emotion, drowning out rational thought with feelings. Society needs a balance, but ancient wisdom tradition knows that true spiritual formation means intentionally detaching from thought and emotion, finding a deeper self and wordless connection to ultimate presence. Emotions aren’t bad; they must be deeply felt and used as windows to unconscious drives and fears that help guide us to growth. But if we identify with them, think they are “true,” we become lost, acting out emotional triggers, hurting people while feeling justified and virtuous the entire time. We literally don’t know what we’re doing. The goal of ancient Christians was to unidentify enough to become unoffendable to the threat of negative emotion and to graduate past the “consolations” of positive emotions into the “desolations” of a faith that needs no external support. In a society devolving into the chaos of pure emotion, that sees opponents not intellectually as misguided, but emotionally as evil, deserving disdain, hatred, and eventually violence, we start with what we can actually control—ourselves. To build awareness to the point we can see emotions for the tools to growth they are and choose what is loving regardless of what we feel.