@ecotrain’s question of the week this week is:

‘What does it mean to own our emotions?’

It's actually in three parts this week ... more about this at the end!

Now, if you know @riverflows at all, she’s an emotional gal. She wears her heart on her sleeve every damn day and she’s been, at her very very core, an emotionally reactive gal. Once, she felt shame over this, as if she was different from everyone else who seemed to quite manage their emotions quite well. I’m not sure why I’m talking about myself in the third person here – maybe because I don’t really want to own this version of myself.

I am changing, moment to moment, and I don’t want to ‘own’ anything about who I think ‘I am’.

Owning is all about ‘I’ – this is mine. So when we ‘own’ our emotions, what we are really saying is ‘this anger is mine’, this grief is mine, this frustration is mine. That might sound like a great step to taking responsibility for ourselves and to be aware of who we are, which essentially doesn't sound that bad (and for some us, that might be a good first step). Yet the more we do this, the worse our emotions can become - the more solid and the more they can have a dramatic effect on our lives.

Thus, my intuition with this question is that I don’t think we should own our emotions.

We should instead be aware of them.

An emotion is really just a strongly agitated sensation that occurs from physiological changes in our bodies and in turn can make this sensation of emotion even more dramatic – our faces might go red, our heart beat increases or we feel sick or cry. They can be incredibly intense, an end result of deeper processes related to brain functioning and deep conditioning that’s being going on since childhood (and some would argue past lives, too). They can be really hidden and trapped in our bodies too and seem to come out of nowhere. And they can be written deep into our physical selves, affecting our health on really deep levels.

I remember feeling so anxious and full of fear that I thought I was going to give myself cancer. Gosh, that makes me feel sad thinking about that time in my life, and I can't even imagine some of the hardcore emotions people experience.

Feelings, however, can be much milder to begin with until they blow up into a full on emotion. Think of these as sensations in the body – like when you feel a temperature change or have a flutter in the tummy. We need these – they are part of survival mechanisms. Some might even say they’re part of a sixth sense, a gut feeling that can help us follow our intuition (this is all related to the vagus nerve but that’s for another post).

For example, imagine that we’ve been walking in the wood and we see a dark shape which materialises into a bear, which chases us. Our heart rate increases and we’re flooded with adrenalin as we run for our lives. We survive, and maybe the next dark shape in the forest is just a shadow of a tree, but bam! There’s that sensation in the body – ready to protect us.

Sometimes, then, our bears are past experiences – being embarrassed, shamed, anxious. Whenever we get into similar situations, even though there’s no real guarantee that the same end result will eventuate, we can start to own the emotion that arises from this. “I am nervous,” we say, “whenever I’m in an interview situation” or “I really hate being in social situations, and I just feel sad and lonely because no one seems to like me”. That becomes the pattern - every single time, so much so that it ends up getting worse (as it did me) and even though there’s no rational reason for it because there is NOTHING to say that situation will happen again, I get so emotional I’m unable to function.

So should I be owning this emotion as part of who I am? Should I accept this as a truth of ‘me’?

In my view, no. What’s worked for me is gentle curiosity: ‘OH, that’s interesting – I am experiencing anxiety, or grief, or sadness, or love’. It can be useful, even, to befriend it, just as Buddha acknowledged the presence of the demon Mara. To be kind and compassionate to it – and then just notice it dissipate, or notice how you can function despite the presence of doubt or fear or whatever negative emotion you’re dealing with.

Because if we don’t, we become consumed by this emotion, to great detriment. That might seem fine if we’re consumed by ecstatic joy, or deep and powerful love – but we know that everything in this world is impermanent, right? So if we’re feeling great love or joy, what happens when that passes? Consider love – what happens when we lose our child? Our partner? Our parents? How do we deal with this? Do we run away, let ourselves be defined by it, supress it with drugs, alcohol, bad behaviour? Do I stop myself doing things that I want to do because I'm too scared of how it might make me feel?

Ideally, we should aim for a state of even temperedness where we’re not so affected by our emotions.

One of the ways that it’s possible to do this is to practice moral discipline, which is common to many religions, and thus perhaps can be part of a faith (whether that's organised or not is up to you - organised doesn't work personally for me as it stands). For Patanjali, the father of yoga, there were five yamas or moral disciples – non harming, truthfulness, non stealing, chastity and greedlessness that were central to a good spiritual life. If you want to know more about these, try reading about the yamas here. It’s incredibly demanding of course – just ask yourself if white lies are okay, or if you really want to tell your wife that her ass looks big in that, or if you accidentally kill an ant, or if you make a decision to eat meat. Whatever it is that helps us, it's clear we need some kind of map that enables us to work our way through emotional responses so we can stay in a state of calmness, harmony and peace - and who doesn't want that?

Thus to live well means to be aware of our emotions and not necessarily act upon them, which can only create harm.

Let me give you an example. What if I slept with another man that wasn’t J? Now, I’m all up for polyamorous relationships if all parties are totally okay with that and acting from a place of pure love, but if I didn’t tell him I was going to sleep with another person, that would be untruthful and dishonest. I’d be certainly harming and hurting him, because he loves me deeply and would feel betrayed. I’d be stealing from him too – his thoughts, his energies, his time – as mine as well. The emotional upset would be quite damaging – perhaps guilt, shame, self-reproach, and so on. Sure, I might be tempted, but I’m far better off recognising the temptation, understanding and being aware of the sensation, and acting in the most morally sound way I can think of.

I can also examine it from all angles, carefully, calmy, and quietly. Where does this desire arise from? Is it from feelings of rejection? Of discontent? Unhappiness? Is some basic need of mine not being met in this moment? Why is it that I'm feeling this desire? By mapping out the territory of my emotional life, I can act reasonably and with great care rather than impulsiveness, which might cause harm.

Even by examining it in this way, the sensation may pass, and then I will move on, likely feeling a whole lot better about myself and thus more able to function in a calm, harmonious and peaceful way that will in turn affect all my relationships.

The Ekman Atlas of Emotions is quite a nice visual representation of this awareness of triggers and end results if you'd like to check it out. It reminds us that we have choices too, but we can only choose if we're aware of them in the first place. Complicated, huh?

So what can we do when we notice these sensations and perhaps emotions arising in the moment? Something that’s worked for me, and is a tried and true mindful practice, is loving kindness. Think about when we’re angry at someone. We can try to direct love and compassion toward the object of our anger rather than identify with this emotion. Sometimes we might recognise this anger toward ourselves and direct compassion at our own hearts: ‘it’s okay darling, I know you’re frustrated. You’ll be okay. Just wait for it to pass’ rather than ‘owning it’ completely – as in “I’m really angry” and allowing yourself to be inherently and completely angry, for whatever reason we think might justify this!

Because in the end, all really strong emotions do is harm us and those we love. If we own them, we tie knots around them, wrap them up tight and glue them to our hearts. Then where do they go? How do they dissipate?

Saying that, I’m not saying we need to repress them either – this is equally unproductive. There’s a lot of studies that suggest boys who are told to not cry end up emotionally disabled men, and prone to anger and frustration. But if we can find techniques to balance our mental states, then we’ll do much better. There’s plenty of yogic strategies for that, but I don’t want to go into it here as this post is getting far too long as it is.

Emotions are a central part of being a human being. We can’t expect to get rid of our emotions altogether, but we can certainly work to be more aware of why and how they arise, and refine our emotional lives so we can feel greater harmony and peace, and in turn, extend this outward onto the world.

This was a hard question for me, and my emotional mapping is a work in progress. However, I suspect that it's that way for all of us, and we're all trying our best!

I'd LOVE to hear your response to the question, so if you want to have a go answering it, make sure you use the tag #ecotrain in your post and I'm sure I'll find it and read it.

@passengers the qotw this week is .

What does it mean to own your emotions

The QOTW this week is part of a three part series this week...

1. What does it mean to own your emotions?
2. How open are you about your emotions?
3. Do you appreciate others to be open about their emotions?

I will talk about the other two in a separate post ... for now, enjoy a GORGEOUS Sunday! ❤

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