Angry, I lash out at someone. Depressed, I sink into a hole. Guilty, I beat myself up.
Negative feelings–what a pain they are. I’d rather not have them, though I don’t know what a life without them would be like. Heavenly, maybe. Unrealistic, most likely. For everyone I know has their share of them, and unless I start taking Prozac, which I don’t intend to do, I will have my share, fair or not, until my dying day. Can seeing Who I am help me with these negative feelings?
I don’t find this an easy question to answer, partly because I’m not very good at being aware of my feelings, and partly because I would like to get rid of the negative ones. The former means that I have had to learn how to focus on them. The latter means that I get distracted by looking for ways to change or eliminate the negative ones instead of simply seeing Who is having them.
In learning to focus on my feelings, I didn’t start with my feelings. (I didn’t even know what my feelings were, though I didn’t know that I didn’t know.) I started instead with what was more basic for me, my physical sensations. I had read an essay by Erich Fromm in which he said that most people could not pay attention to their breathing. When asked to focus on their breath, he said, people thought about it instead. I wondered if this was true of me, so I started meditating on my breath with my eyes closed, a simple enough task. It was simple, but not easy. Indeed, I found it very difficult to attend directly to my breathing.
My initial approach was to focus solely on my breathing. After a few weeks, however, I remembered that also I wanted to focus on Who I was. The most concrete way I could do that, I discovered, was to pay close attention to where the breathing was happening. Was the breathing happening in my chest, for example? When I investigated, I discovered something surprising to me. The breathing sensations were not inside my chest. In fact, they were not inside anything. I examined the breathing sensations closely and found that they were coming and going in Nothingness, in Awareness. No body enclosed them. No body was breathing. There was just breathing in the infinite Awakeness.
A surprising side effect of this discovery of the absence of a body was an increase in the intensity of the breathing sensations. When I was not trying to be aware of my breathing but instead attending to where the breathing was happening, I became more aware of my breathing. But as soon as I reverted to trying to attend directly to the sensations, a fog settled over them.
When I opened my eyes at the ends of these meditation sessions, I was surprised yet again. I looked down at my chest–or rather at my sweater–noticing its up-and-down movement. At first, I assumed my breathing was happening under my sweater. But when I focused again directly on the sensations, asking myself where they were, the refreshing answer was that they were not under my sweater. They were still in Nothingness, disembodied, afloat in Awareness. They were free! The sensations were released again from the idea that they were in my body. I no longer could assume they were on one side of the line that distinguished my body from what was not my body. Instead, I discovered that they came and went in the freedom of the Emptiness along with everything else in the world. It was as if they were children who for many days had been kept inside because of rainy weather but who had finally been allowed outside to play. They were jubilant as they enjoyed their new-found freedom.
It didn’t take me long to realize that something else of importance was also true. Just as my breathing was free of a body, so was I free of my breathing. I was not in my breathing. It was in me–not in me as a body but in me as infinite Awakeness. I didn’t depend on my breathing for my existence. Who I was didn’t need to breathe to be!
These were indeed refreshing discoveries. How did they lead me to discoveries about feelings? As I say above, I am not very aware of my feelings. What I imagine is obvious to most people about how I am feeling in various situations is not obvious to me. But as I became more attentive to my physical sensations, I began to notice my feelings. For my feelings appeared to be a dimension of my physical sensations, like an added flavor. When I was feeling down, for example, I paid attention to my throat and chest sensations and found a sinking feeling intertwined with them. When I was feeling angry, I noticed that my shoulders were hot or my jaw was tight. Here were my negative feelings–right in front of my nose, so to speak. While getting in touch with feelings may seem easy for many people, it was a major achievement for me.
But it wasn’t long before I asked the same question of my sensation-feelings as I had asked of my purely physical sensations of breathing: where were they? And when I investigated, I got the same surprising answer. My depression was not in my heart or throat. In fact, in direct experience, I didn’t have a heart or a throat. I had no body, only sensations coming and going in the Emptiness. My feeling of depression, as heavy as it felt, was just hanging there in the Emptiness along with all the other sensations. What did this mean to me? It meant that I was not in the depression. Instead, the depression was in the undepressed and undepressible Awakeness. It meant that at the same time as I was experiencing feelings of depression, I was free of them. It meant that I was fundamentally not depressed.
At last I breathed a sigh of relief.
And my feelings breathed a sigh of relief, too. For they also were released, freed from me into the world where they belonged.
At about this time I came across a psychological technique called ‘focusing,’ developed by Eugene Gendlin of the University of Chicago. There were significant parallels for me in this technique to what I had discovered through Seeing about my feelings. For example, the first step in focusing is to ‘clear a space,’ which Gendlin describes as “the inner act of distancing yourself from what is troubling you, but still keeping it before you.” Admittedly, in Seeing I don’t have to clear a space, only notice it. But the rest sounds the same. The feeling that I find no longer in my heart is not tied to me anymore, and yet I don’t lose sight of it. In fact, as I noted above, I am more aware of it than when I thought it was in my body. Furthermore, Gendlin writes clearly though briefly about the nature of the space: “you can sometimes come to an opening out, to a sense of a vast space. Under all of the packages each of us carries, a different self can be discovered. You are not any of the things you have set aside. You are no content at all.” Focusing certainly held possibilities for me.
Gendlin’s technique, however, does not emphasize this content-free Space. Instead, it uses it most often as the first step in a process that enables people to release psychological blocks and so to become free of them. I was, nevertheless, very much interested in this feature of moving through stuck places, for while I had seen that my unhappiness was not in me and that I was free of it, I didn’t appreciate the full significance of this fact. I was still suffering from my suffering, and I still wanted to get rid of it.
Focusing did prove effective at releasing blocks and relieving suffering as it occurred, and I was grateful for this. But the most useful aspect of focusing for me was not the releases from specific problems but the shift that happened in my perception of the problems themselves. This shift happened in the same way as the shift in my perception of my sensations and feelings had happened while I was meditating, and I think it happened for the same reason: I simply took an extended time to observe my feelings and at the same time to see Who was observing them.
The result was surprising to me. As I observed my problems and feelings using the focusing technique, approaching them and yet not sinking into them, and as I noticed that I was the Space in which the problems and feelings appeared, I was shocked to realize that these problems and feelings, which I thought I knew so well, were strangers to me. I did not know them. They were the ‘other,’ the ‘unknown.’ I had to look at them very closely to learn their texture, their temperature, their color. And each new moment that I looked at them, they were different. They transformed constantly in the Emptiness, revealing new aspects of themselves or changing into completely different feelings–anger to sadness, depression to hurt. And yet it was a hurt that the hurt knew and that I didn’t know, though there was a distant familiarity about it, as if it concerned someone I used to know. The hurt in the end wasn’t about me–the Me that recognized itself so firmly in these moments as the totally empty and awake Space.
At times, I wasn’t even sure that what I was feeling was hurt. ‘Hurt’ was like one of so many dark blankets I had thrown over what I was afraid of and from under which was emerging, in the safety of the Space, a living, moving, expressive, nameless energy. It was as if I had found myself to be a clearing in a dark forest, and into this clearing, slowly, shyly at first, moving from the shadows of the trees into the light, appeared an animal I had never seen before. In the stillness of the space, the animal began to speak, softly, gently, in a strange yet familiar language. And I, empty and awake, began to listen, not with my usual fear but with the compassionate ear of Who I really am.
Unfortunately, these were special moments. Most of the time, my feelings still seemed to be my feelings, and I still knew depression or anger as just that. My daily challenge was not–and is not–so glamorously mystical as when I am focusing. It is simply to apply over and over again the basic step of noticing that my feelings are not in a body but are instead in the Emptiness. This step, however, still has the greatest significance. It reminds me simply that I am free. And how valuable this Freedom is! For it offers the deepest relief from suffering. Who I am is fundamental Safety. As the Psalmist sings: “Yea, though I walk through the Valley of the Shadow of Death, I shall fear no evil, for Thou art with me. Thy staff and Thy rod comfort me.”
While this continued stepping into freedom from pain appears to be the end of my story, I’m not sure that it is. Perhaps I am mistaken to think this way, misled by some religious literature to nurture the hope that one day I will no longer experience negative feelings, that the winter of my discontent will be followed by a perpetual springtime of spiritual joy. Wouldn’t that be nice! I suspect, however, that this hope is unrealistic. And yet there is another way to look at it. Maybe the negative feelings will never cease to come and go, but as freedom becomes the norm, the negative feelings may not appear to be such big deals–so threatening–as they do at present. I may become less and less intent on getting rid of them. Instead, I may find room to appreciate not just the bare Truth of my freedom from pain but also the wild Beauty and loving Goodness that I have at times seen flowering in the heart of Who I am. But we will see…