The Life Cycle of an Emotion
“Your task is not to seek for love, but merely to seek and find all the barriers within you that you have built against it, and embrace them.”
-Rumi
How do we be in touch with our Heart, or our own knowing? Whether that’s intuition, a new transcendent perspective, when a knowing strikes us in a moment, or the quietly dawning preference or desire. The Heart isn’t loud or demanding (like the Liver in Chinese Medicine), but whispers. To be able to hear the Heart we must be still, quiet, receptive, and present. The Heart is oftentimes guarded by our fears of the unknown - naturally, to be open-hearted is to be vulnerable to the possibility that we will encounter a discomfort that we cannot bear, which could lead to an unsurmountable pain. Yet, if we are always trying to manage what we do or do not encounter, we end up living small lives.
How do you resist experiencing difficult emotions? It’s natural to put a difficult emotion aside, to be dealt with later, when you have more bandwidth. In other words, how do you cope? With substances? With work? With exercise? With food? With productivity? With socializing? With scrolling? With achieving? When we cope or distract ourselves from facing a difficult emotion or experience, we are blocking our own connection to ourselves as well as to our inner knowing. In Chinese Medicine, we look at suppressed emotions as Internal Pathological Factors (IPFs), which means emotions that are suppressed become internally stagnated energy, which creates blockages, and thereby alters and compromises the integrity of your internal landscape. From a physical health perspective, stagnated emotions sooner or later will lead to difficult digestion, poor sleep, and increase the burden on the cardiovascular system. It’s no surprise that unexpressed emotions become a burden on your Heart and cardiovascular system.
The full cycle of an emotion in Chinese Medicine Psychology starts with encountering an emotion, and sooner or later making time to allow it to be felt and thereby move through you. The definition of ‘emote’ is: to give expression to an emotion; ‘expression’ is not static, it implies movement. Expression doesn’t necessarily mean something dramatic, but requires pausing to feel everything there, without boundaries on time or what feeling looks like. An emotion requires us to feel to complete its experience in you. To feel is to allow for internal movement to occur. Just as our bodies require external movement in the form of exercise, our internal landscape can also get clogged up, which no amount of external movement can touch. (I’ve tried.) The problem isn’t that we put the emotion away to process, when we have more bandwidth at a later time; the problem occurs when stashing away our emotions, or distracting ourselves from feeling, becomes the way we deal with difficult emotions.
In Chinese Medicine, the Heart-Kidney Axis is the axis for manifesting one’s Destiny. The Kidneys, which contain our ancestral gifts, communicate our Destiny and gifts up to the Heart to be able to manifest in this lifetime. When we are coping and distracting, rather than experiencing all of life, this axis becomes blocked at the level of the Heart, and we will struggle to continue unfolding our destiny, evolution, and essential selves.
The Gift of Boredom: Psychic noise - aka busyness, is how we cope or distract ourselves from experiencing the full range of all our emotions. Next time you find yourself reaching for your phone, food, exercise, or whatever you use to numb out the unpleasant, pause and ask yourself what you’re feeling; be still, quiet, receptive, and feel what’s there without limits. This process accelerates the more you practice embracing the full cycle of an emotion. I was surprised by Thich Naht Hahn’s definition of mindfulness: “Mindfulness is the act of stopping and becoming aware of what we are thinking or doing.” Embrace the full experience of a difficult emotion, it may be the key to unlocking the next step in your own personal evolution.
This post is inspired by practitioner/teacher Tim Sullivan