When ecstasy turns to agony in the blink of an eye

Greetings and Salutations — I hope this holiday season finds you well!

Anyone with a spiritual practice that brings you into a high state of consciousness has experienced the anguish of watching your hard-fought bliss go up in flames at the sight of an email or text from that person in your life who has the magic key to all your triggers.

When I was a monk, I used to marvel sometimes at how quickly sparks could fly in the ashram right after a meditation session.

We’d be in the temple room from about four thirty am until nine am doing prayer, meditation, and study of the scripture. Our temple was on the second floor of our building and our living quarters were on the sixth floor. I can assure you that those four flights of stairs provided plenty of space for you to torch all the bliss you spent the morning building up.

We were like timber that had been thoroughly dried.

Honestly, I didn’t make too much of that scenario when I was a monk. I mean, we lived on top of each other, spent all of our time together, and most of us would not have selected each other as roommates under other circumstances. Conflict was inevitable.

Still, the shift from ecstasy to agony was sometimes striking. and always brutal.

The problem was that while our meditation did an amazing job of bringing us into a state of aloofness from the struggles of the life, the real world was waiting for us as soon as we exited the temple room.

When I left the ashram, therefore, I developed the Self Salutation, a method of using the powerful space created in meditation to resolve negative emotions.

That last sentence is a bit of shorthand, however. You see, the question of how to resolve what I call core negative emotions like fear, hurt, and shame is actually the easy part. You lather them with love.

The bigger problem—and the fundamental challenge of psychological integration as I see it—is that these core negative emotions are not easy to get to. They’re buried in the heart.

We have an entire subconscious structure that protects us from feeling unpleasant emotions. A large part of the Self Salutation process, therefore, is devoted to excavating those feelings, learning to cut through the noise in the heart to get at what is really going on.

One of the important ways to cut through that noise is to understand why we repress negative feelings in the first place. So today I want to share with you my Top Five Reasons we repress negative emotions.

Reason 1: Negative emotions suck

Really_, the flight from negative feelings should hardly be surprising. Who wants to feel anger? Who wants to feel fear? Shame, anyone?

Get me out of here!

At least with anger there is a little satisfaction and sense of power. But fear? Genuine fear is one of the worst possible things to experience. And just forget about shame.

And yet who does not experience all of these from time to time?

So the first and most basic reason we run from these experiences is simply that they suck. And down to a cellular level we’re hardwired to seek pleasure and avoid pain.

Reason 2: No one else wants to see it either

A second reason we stomp unwanted feelings down is that just as they stink for you to experience, they’re no fun for the people around you.

Is there anyone in your life who is totally fine with you being genuinely angry at them? Anyone who would be okay if you just shouted and screamed whenever things don’t go your way?

Of course not. Nobody wants to see it or deal with it.

But it’s not just that people don’t want to see your fear or anger. Despite the fact that we all have such feelings, we see them as moral failures.

It hurts our own self-image to recognize them within us. We want to be better than having such feelings.

This problem is especially strong in spiritual or religious communities, where there are very high ideals around personal behavior.

When you aspire to be enlightened or saintly, recognizing such feelings within is not only unsavory, but it’s also bit of a defeat. It means you’re not as advanced as you thought we were—or as you need to be for your salvation.

Now that’s a recipe for repression!

Reason 3: God only knows what’s down there now

Because of a lifetime of repression, most of us have all kinds of unresolved negative emotions that have been stored away, buried in hidden chambers of the heart.

That creates yet another strong reason not to open the hatch: there’s way too much down there. God only knows what you might find if you start looking.

It seems better to just keep it all under lock and key.

Reason 4: They make you do crazy things

A fourth challenge of negative emotions is one that actually results from the act of repressing them.

You see, when you process and resolve negative feelings as they surface, they aren't a big problem—but repressed emotions become like powder kegs.

When all the pent up feelings get ignited by a small spark then who knows what could happen? We do crazy things. We say things we don’t mean. We do things we later regret.

No wonder emotions have a bad reputation.

Unfortunately, what we don’t realize is that not tending to them has it’s own consequence. If a negative feeling is lodged in your heart, it won’t just sit there. It will fester away, coming out sideways and sabotaging your happiness.

Reason 5: We never learned how to deal with negative emotions

In one sense this final reason is really the ultimate issue. We repress emotions because we’ve never learned a better way.

We repress negative emotions because that’s how we learned how to deal with them from our parents and the people around us.

Fortunately there is a better way.

It takes time and work to learn the art of emotional fluidity, but you have everything you need within you to accomplish it.

There is nothing that’s been lodged within your heart that you don’t have the power to resolve—though you may need to summon your courage to get there.

Well, those are the top five reasons that we repress negative emotions as I far as I have understood them. Are there reasons you expected to read here but didn’t? If so, I’d love to hear about them. Please reply to this email and let me know what they are.

Peace,

Simon

P.S. I share components of the Self Salutation in this weekly newsletter, but if you want to get an understanding of the entire process, please check out An Introduction to the Self Salutation via this link here.