How to Use BEING to End Emotional Pain

When someone says something to me and "hurts my feelings", I am BEING a person who has hurt feelings. The hurt feeling seems automatic to us and most of us think that we don't have any control over the emotion that is felt. When we can identify WHERE the emotion came from--like when a person says something that hurts us--we say that the feeling came from this particular source, but we still think that we don't have any control over how we feel.

Often times we start feeling depressed, or angry, or guilty, or even joyful, and we say we don't know why we feel that way, we just do. These emotions seem to spring up out of no where and we often try to figure out WHERE they came from (not the joyful feelings, but the negative ones).

Conventional psychotherapy attempts to help you try and figure out WHY you feel the way you do. It often takes the person back in time to when they were a child to try and find out where these feelings stem from.

I want to look at the emotions from a different angle. If we hunt for and eventually determine a specific emotion stems from something that was "done" to us in the past (either from childhood or any other time in the past), then our minds try to make some reasonable adjustments and we can sooth ourselves by knowing "why" we feel the way we do.

But, is it really "true"? Do these things that happened in the past really make us "feel" these specific feelings, or is it our minds trying to find some reason why we feel the way we do?

I want you to try an experiment the next time you have a negative feeling that has popped up out of no where. I want you to immediately ask yourself what it was that you were thinking.

I'll give an example. This past week-end I fell asleep when I was reading a novel. When I woke, I felt bad emotionally. I couldn't put my finger on it, but I felt down. I sat up and tried to figure out why I was feeling so bad. I went and ate something, I turned on the T.V., I called a friend, all in order to "get out of the feeling". I couldn't for the life of me find a "reason" why I felt bad. It just popped up out of the blue. Right?

There was nothing of interest on T.V. and my friend wasn't home to talk to, so I sat and asked myself what it was that I had been thinking right before I felt bad. I was sleeping, so you'd assume that I wasn't thinking at all. However, I was half asleep and half awake before I woke fully, and I remembered that I was scolding myself for falling asleep and wasting several hours of one of my precious days off sleeping.

Now, what if I instead of scolding myself for wasting time sleeping, I had instead said to myself, "Oh, it feels so good to be able to take a nap in the middle of the day and not have to worry about any deadlines." Do you think I would have felt down, or bad? I doubt it.

With the first way of thinking I was BEING critical of myself. The second way, I was BEING supportive. These ways of BEING happen so quickly and they are based so much on habit and what we are told, that we mostly don't realize that we are indeed causing ourselves a lot of needless suffering.

Part of the grieving process, if we do it with compassion, is to BE gentle with ourselves and not judge how we grieve. But, we are often not even aware that we are BEING hard on ourselves. I am here to remind you again and again that we do not have to suffer as much as we do. By allowing ourselves to BE in mourning, or to BE human with human emotions, helps use work through the emotional pain quicker and we suffer less.

So, once again, it's really about going towardthe pain, and not resisting it that causes the healing and growth. I'm talking here to everyone who is in emotional pain, for I know that there is much comfort for you here when you can stop resisting and BE with the emotions.