Excerpts from Chapter 6 Being Happy
Extreme sensitivity to the emotions of other people, and the spontaneous upwelling of compassion in response to their suffering, is part of spiritual openness. It can ripen into the unconditional love and compassion of spiritual maturity.
Children with this type of openness have not yet developed the inner strength to withstand the emotional intensity that they feel around them. Nor do they possess the perspective to distinguish another person’s emotions from their own. Their emotional sensitivity may even hamper their emotional development, for they may never find the inner peace or distance necessary to cultivate emotional resilience. Even as adults they are shaken and peirced through by the emotions that course through their environment.
Children with this gift may also be confused by the contradiction between the emotional vibrations that they feel emanating from people’s bodies and the verbal or facial expressions that deny these vibrations. This may cause them to become distrustful of themselves or others. Or they may become the confidant and/or the caretaker of the other family members. Their emotional depth and empathy make these children ideal receptables for the family’s sorrows.
They may also experience that their own emotional intensity is overwhelming for their parents.They often grow up seeing themselves as too emotional for anyone to bear. “I’m a terrible crybab,” they say of themselves, or “I’m fury on earth.” They may attempt to clamp down on their emotional life or conversely, to amplify their emotional responses as a desperate strategy to finally be heard.
As adults, these emotionally sensitive individuals often continue to suffer from their acute awareness of the pain around them. They ask, “How can I be content with my life, when so many people are unhappy?” …
These deeply emotional souls arrive in the therapist’s office because they are attuned to the misfortunes of the world and aware of their own powerlessness to change them. Life can become unbearable for them. They may also feel extremely lonely. It can be rare for them to meet someone who has the same depth of heart as themselves, so they often feel unmet in their relationships. If they do meet someone who can match them emotionally, it is sometimes difficult for them to experience a mutual exchange of feelings with that person. They may have been so habituated, since childhood, to being the givers of love and care, that they may not know how to receive them. They may also harbor a seemingly incongruous dependence on other people. If they adopted the parental role in childhood, they may yearn to be truly mothered or fathered. They may be in desperate need of caretaking and cofort, even as they push them away.
Tolerating the Pain in the World
… “That’s much too much for you to take care of,” I said.”I know, I know,” Kathryn answered. “But my father, the woman at work, the old woman in my building, my cats, I’m all they have. But lately I’m so tired.” …
One of Kathryn’s clearest memories of her childhood was sitting at the kitchen table alone, listening to the different tones of distress in the house around her. She heard her sister’s unhappiness in the timbre of the piano notes, her father’s unabated grief in his footsteps above her, her brother’s pain in the rejecting silence that issued from his room.
As an adult, Kathryn was still tuned in to the emotional pain in her environment. She felt it everywhere – at work, at the grocery store, in the subway – all of humanity seemed to be suffering. She was often more aware of what other people were feeling than what she was feeling. Her responsiveness to her environment obliterated her attunement to her own needs. Her emotions usually caught her by surprise, washing through her like tidal waves. …
Although Kathryn often found her emotional responsiveness painful, she enjoyed being “rocked to the core” with pleasure. … Kathryn knew that her emotional responsiveness was something to be protected, even though it often made life intolerable for her. I assured her that she would not lose any of her emotional depth, nor would she become dispassionate toward the suffering that she encountered around her. Rather, by uncovering the stable, spiritual ground of her being, she would be able to tolerate, or encompass, her emotional responsees. The more we know ourselves as the stillness of fundamental consciousness, the more deeply we can allow our emotions to move through this stillness, without feeling overwhelmed by them.
Developing Emotional Tolerance
… Although most people do feel a greater sense of contentment and calm when they embody themselves, many must initially confront more negative feelings that get in the way of this self-contact. Some feel, for example, that it would be dangerous to be fully present in their body, that this would make them too conspicuous, or that the sense of self-possession and individuality derived from embodiment would break some family taboo.
… Finally, Kathryn loked at me and said, “I know that this is crazy.” “Yes/” I asked. Practically bent double, and so soft that I could bearly hear her, she said, “It’s just that I’m so powerful. I don’t want people to be afraid of me.” This was Kathryn’s dilemma. Once broached, she was able to confide her long history of feeling older, wiser, and somehow more powerful than other people, especially the people in her family, but needing to keep this knowledge hidden. She now saw how she had played her assigned role as the lowest, craziest member of the family, while squashing her secret knowledge of herself down into a tiny ball in the pit of her stomach. … If she inhabiting her whole body, her secret would be out. She would lose her assigned place in the scheme of things, and she would be alone, cast out… Kathryn would have to relinquish her role in her family in order to claim her true abilities. …
I felt that Kathryn had held onto and even exaggerated the idea of her secret power as a protection against her family’s assaults on her self-respect. I saw my work with her as not so much helping her to accept herself as ordinary, but to accept herself as gifted – to know herself as a gifted human, rather than as either a superhuman or subhuman oddity. If she could acknowledge her gifts openly, to herself and others, then she would not need to protect them or exaggerate or apologize for them. She also needed to be able to tolerate the intensity of her emotional responses, so that they did not overwhelm her attunement to her own needs and limits.
The Feel of Being Human
As Kathryn found the courage to inhabit her body, her fear of her own out-sized power was gratually replaced by the felt experience of the richness of her being. …She felt gentle and powerful at the same time. … Living within our body means that we are always connected to the spontaneous source of our love and compassion.
This contact with herself also helped Kathryn to experience her limitations, to feel when people were needing or asking for more than she could give. As she allowed herself to value her emotional gifts, she began to use them with more awareness and with more kindness toward herself. In the following months, she discovered that she was actually quite outgoing, that she enjoyed the company of other people, and that they usually welcomed her passionate nature. Her emotional depth did not set her apart from other people as she feared. It contributed to her pleasure in connecting with them.
Letting Emotion Flow Through the Stillness of Fundamental Consciousness
Kathryn continued to practice the exercise of inhabiting her body and attuning to the clear space of fundamental consciousness pervading her body and everything around her. Gradually, she was able to distinguish the movement of her emotions from this ground of stillness. She could then feel that her emotions passed through her, as intense but transitory states. This meant that she was no longer overwhelmed by her emotional responses. She could remain presence as they flared up and subsided within her body.
When we know ourselves as fundamental consciousness, we are also able to distinguish clearly between the movement of emotion in another’s body and the movement of emotion in our own body. This means that although we may respond emotionally to another person’s anguish, we do not mistake it for our own. … We can experience other people’s suffering without “taking it on.” We can read another person’s emotions without mirroring them in our own body.
The Acceptance of Suffering
One of the biggest challenges for Kathryn was to allow herself to feel content. Whenever she would begin to relax and enjoy life, she felt guilty…
“I believe that our basic nature is pure joy, and that the more open we become, the more we can feel that,” I said. “But being open means letting go of our grip on ourselves. And part of letting go of ourselves is accepting life, just as it is. That means accepting that there will probably always be loss and anger and fear in the world, and in ourselves.” “You mean not to try to make things better?”
“No, I think it’s good to try to help people as much as we can. But we also need to accept the suffering around us, and our own suffering as well. We need to encompass suffering in our love for the world.”
Kathryn then said, “I think that I have been anger at life for being so hard…. But I know it’s true, everyone suffers, and everyone dies, no matter how much someone loves them or needs them. I guess I can sit with this for a while – accepting the suffering, so that I can also accept the happiness.”
Becoming One’s Own Caretaker
Like Kathryn, Felicia also described her reason for beginning therapy as her inability to take care of all the people who needed her. … She felt acutely the one-sided-ness of her relationships with people…. Felicia described her desperation, as a small child …None of the family’s problems were ever spoken of… Felicia found her life so emotionally compelling that she never had the chance to live anywhere else in herself. She inhabited a whirlwind of feelings that gave her no rest. But psychological healing requires the ability to reflect on your situation, to see the big picture and make your peace with it. It requires balancing emotion with awareness.
Balancing Emotion with Awareness and Physical Sensation
I taught Felicia the exercise for balancing her emotional depth with awareness and physical sensation. As Felicia experienced the quality of awareness for the first time, her body took on a lightness and clarity that I had never seen in her before. Her red curls glowed around her head.
As Felicia attuned to the quality of emotion, and as she felt that her whole body is made of this emotional quality, the anger and grief that had weighed heavily in her heart began to dissipate. Instead, the deep well of love that was her spiritual gift spread its subtle warmth throughout her whole body. I was so moved to find myself sitting with this beautiful buddha, made of love. … It was a new experience for Felicia to feel physical sensation pervading her body and environment at the same time. “It’s like everything is somehow made of touch.”
With practice, Felicia’s response to life became more balanced. Her emotions were just part of her experience, rather than her primary focus…. She still found her relationships with other people frustrating and confusing. “I am so hungry for something,” she said, “but I don’t seem to be able to get it.”
This deep hunger for connection is often felt by spiritually sensitive people. It is sometimes expressed as a hunger for the divine. It comes, I believe, from an intuition of the oneness that we can feel with all other life, even with the cosmos. To know ourselves as the one, unified luminous ground pervading everywhere and filling everything finally satisfies this underlying sense of separation.
Relating in Fundamental Consciousness
I began to focus our sessions on the practice of attuning to fundamental consciousness pervading her body and environment at the same time. This was difficult for her to feel. Like many people who are very fluid and expansive energetically, she could easily leave her body. and extend herself into the room. This had been her way of relating to other people all her life. She merged with them, rather than actually experiencing the contact of her own being and another person’s. This merging with others is an energetic movement outward. It means leaving oneself and entering into another person. Felicia knew that many people found her invasive, but she had never known how to change this way of relating. …
Attuning to the stillness that pervades everywhere is a more subtle level of experiencing than extending oneself outward with one’s energy. Rather than an outward movement, it feels as if we are settling into the space that is already there, without any effort on our part. In fact, we can only find this pervasive space by settling more deeply within our own body. Once we have found this space, we can stay in our own body, connected to our own being, while we experience contact with another person….
Fundamental consciousness is the basis of our universal kinship and equality with all other life. As Felicia and I continued to sit with each other as this unified, pervasive space, our contrived relationship of teacher and student (or doctor and patient) became secondary. We had a felt sense that we were made of the same essence, the same transparency. Although we each had our own history and perspective to communicate to each other, this could now take place in a context of ongoing contact between us. As fundamental consciousness, we knew, felt, and touched each other across the distance between us.
