How To Utilise Observation Of Emotions?

[Magic]

Emotional twirls happen to us all the time, it's good to learn from them. This is seldom easy - as for me, most of the time I can only observe and I want to be able to do more.

Let me use an example: You are going through an emotional breakdown, serious but still not pathological; say a break-up or a relative's death. You meditate, focus on your emotional centre, see your emotions very clearly how they twist and hurl from one side to the other. You can't control them and presumably you should not try to. Sometimes you don't understand them as they are unreasonable and / or illogical. Over time, you see how this gale calms down and you start seeing sun rays of a new day.

If you do meditate and observe your emotions,  you should know what I have in mind.

So the question is: What more than sole observation one can do to get out of an emotional crisis as much as possible? To grow stronger and more conscious?

PS.
I associate this topic to the ideas Leo describes in his videos of exploiting others to grow yourself and that observation itself is curative. (I can't recall now which videos exactly.) Maybe that's a trail to follow?

[faith]

Hi Magic,

Thank you for your reply on my topic!

Do you cry during meditation?

[MIARIVEL]

@Magic Sometimes we need to take moments out in our life to just cry or to just sit with our emotions and figure out why we feel the way we do. But one thing we should never do is feel sorry for ourselves and take responsibility. Sometimes we have to forgive ourselves for making bad or silly decisions and learn from our mistakes or situations that have happened. 

For example, Break ups are complex, there are so many thoughts and emotions that go through our mind, we can blame ourself, we can cry so much hoping tears will bring them back, we can keep calling and texting them hoping they will save you from your misery, or we can take whatever has happened to us a learning experience and develop a plan on how to grow from here. 

It is okay to grieve and cry and let out anger and frustration (so long as your not harming yourself or anyone else). Meditation helps with addressing our emotions and why we may feel certain things but, I suggest not to stay in a stuck place or a place that doesn't serve you for too long. I always tell my clients to give themselves a time frame to grieve, be sad, cry, can be a day, a week, a year but after this to promise yourself from that day forward you will do just that... move forward with your life. Make a plan on how you can improve, write a list of things you love doing, the point here is to focus more on things we can be grateful for and that bring us joy and happiness and spend less time being stuck trying to figure out emotions. 

You may not always understand why things happen or people or even yourself for that matter, but you have control on what you focus on now going forward. I have wrote a post on some tips on how you can develop mental toughness http://www.miarivel.com/8-tips-on-mental-toughness/

[Magic]

13 hours ago, ashashlov said:

Do you cry during meditation?

It happened to my just once or twice: I am down and I allow myself to cry during meditation. At the same moment when I allow it, the need to cry disappears and I start to feel brighter emotions. Then I don't shed a tear. Don't ask me why it is so, I have no idea how this works :D. Please tell me if you have a clue :).

11 hours ago, MIA.RIVEL said:

I always tell my clients to give themselves a time frame to grieve, be sad, cry, can be a day, a week, a year but after this to promise yourself from that day forward you will do just that... move forward with your life.

@MIA.RIVEL, wise words, thank you! They remind me of this:

Quote

(...) let your tears flow, but let them also cease (...)
Seneca, "To Polybius," XVIII.6

And I have also a great question I ask myself when troubled: "Who or what compels me to grief?" Of course, the answer is always: "I".

11 hours ago, MIA.RIVEL said:

But one thing we should never do is feel sorry for ourselves and take responsibility.

I agree with not pitying ourselves, but I think we should always take full responsibility for out deeds and consequences, especially the emotional ones. What do you think of the attitude of "Never regret"?

[faith]

Hi Magic, 

I am glad you allow it,

Because yes, crying is the ultimate way to crack open those wounds and bring light into them, and personally, before I cried during meditation and after I started to cry during meditation, I have seen a huge transition in my consciousness. It's a very important experience. And I think it unties the knots you have created through your beliefs and values. 

For example, I have had a belief that I am unworthy and need acceptance from others to feel important. A belief I have had for all my life, and only recently, now that I welcome crying and allow it to seep through me, I have noticed that I am my own person, meaning that I do not worry about what others think anymore, and at the same time, I know that without others life cannot be joyous and grateful. These kinds of dichotomies or dualities become not a conflict of the mind but become acceptance and forgiveness. And I have always been a whiny baby, so it seems to me without the essential awareness of meditative experience, crying on its own does not untie those knots.

 

[Nahm]

Thought happens first, emotions follow. 

If your emotions are not feeling good, it is because you are looking at something (thinking) from a lessor perspective than you could be. If you didn't know better, it would be impossible to feel bad.  Put your focus on just what it is that you know better.

From your examples:

A break up: If you get dumped and fall into despair, realize you are the chooser of how your life unfolds. Stop thinking you need someone else to make you happy.  Ironically, if you do this, you probably wouldn't get dumped.

A relative dies: What are your thoughts on what they are experiencing now? What are your thoughts on how your life will be terrible now that they are not here? Choose better thoughts. Cry about it, pray if you are religion or if it helps, but pick better thoughts. 

To get rid of an emotional crisis, realize there is no crisis. You were not looking at the situation to the best of your abilities to begin with. Pick better thoughts. Self reliance, if at all possible, is most helpful preventitivly speaking.

If someone is paying you money to tell them that ultimately it is their thinking causing their suffering, then I suppose you should not be so forthright as this, as it would offend them in that setting. If someone thinks it's a good idea to pay someone for this, they inherently don't accept that their own thinking is the root of the suffering. At the very least, the person getting paid, IMO, should suggest they look into Buddhism. 

Looking to the emotions brings more of those emotions. 

Realizing your thinking has been bringing your emotions, brings new thinking, and new emotions.

A belief is nothing more than repeated thinking.

Edited March 31, 2017 by Nahm

[Joseph Maynor]

Chronicle and integrate within your past.  This is kind of counter-intuitive, but it worked for me.  Everything I say here I do myself, so none of this is speculative theory, this is how I actually practice.  I do an exercise every night where I think about a piece of my past in detail for 10 minutes every night.  And this is after I re-chronicled my entire past by outlining all my key memories, good and bad, putting the memories on 3x5 cards.  Every night I take one of those cards and contemplate that memory, or year, or persons, or situation, etc.  I do this for like 5 to 10 mins at night.  Experience all those events again, including all the negative emotions.  Paradoxically you want to both integrate within your past and drop your past.  This will allow you to come to peace with your past, and you will not be as emotionally triggered by events in the present.  I notice a lot of my suffering came from being triggered from my past.  Leo's videos on emotions really helped me.  I don't try to bury emotions anymore.  That doesn't work.  Paradoxically the way to rid yourself from emotions is not to run from them, but to lean into them, and observe the thoughts that are triggering the emotions and be mindful of the connection between the thought antecedent and then the emotional response.  Practice releasing thoughts and emotions too, but the best place to get to is when your mind can think about a piece of your past history that used to trigger you but the negative emotional vortex is no longer there.  That way you can practice do-nothing mindfulness, let your mind wander at will over that old terrain, but the painful emotions are no longer there.  You have kind of de-programmed the emotion out of your psyche.  That way you don't keep re-stabbing yourself with the same arrow over and over and over again.  We all know what torture we put ourselves through when the monkey-mind does that.   This is working for me.  We might call this "the integrating within your past technique".  I discovered it works in my life, and kind of discovered it by accident.

Edited June 9, 2017 by Joseph Maynor