Where Did The Feelings Go?


By Denise Breton and Christopher Largent

Unity that unites the whole ball of wax—emotions too

One of the most common phrases hanging around New Age street corners is “the unity of mind, body, and spirit.” We have nothing against unity, and we know that spirituality has a lot to do with oneness. But when we hear the phrase, our immediate thought is, “Where are the emotions in this formula?”

Of course, we all know where the emotions are—shut down. They got shut down by parents telling us not to cry, by teachers telling us not to be so emotional, by psychologists regulating our emotions, by psychiatrists drugging us out of our emotions, by the culture praising rationality to the skies, and even by religious authorities showing us how to train our minds and bodies while being so emotionally dysfunctional that their religious scandals make Bill and Monica look like amateurs. We were told to fear emotions, ignore emotions, deny emotions, control emotions—anything but have and process emotions.

But if we’re going to have true unity—if there’s to be real spiritual wholeness—don’t we have to take emotions seriously? By now, most of us have heard of Daniel Goleman’s book, Emotional Intelligence, and we hear that the business community now values “E.Q.” almost as highly as I.Q., mainly because it’s experienced the chaos that unaddressed emotions can create in an office. We’ve also been told by pioneering psychologists and psychiatrists that emotions give us important information about our psyches, careers, and relationships. The 13th-century mystic poet Rumi even suggests that our feelings are there to guide us. In one poem, he says the God speaks to us through our loves, that our loves are “messengers from the Mystery,” and that we should do what “excites” us, not what feels deadening. Our emotions know what’s ours to do and where our life’s meaning lies.

Along with uniting mind, body, and spirit, therefore, we need to include our emotions in the mix. To do that, though, we must first find out where our feelings went. Literally. When we shut down all those emotions, what price did we pay, and where did they go?

Emotions as guides from beyond

The price we pay, according to Rumi, is inner guidance. By insisting that God guides us through our loves, he makes a radical statement about the value of emotions. In a poem, titled by his brilliant translators John Moyne and Coleman Barks “The Guest House” (see Love, Soul, and Freedom, p. 105 or their book, Say I Am You, p. 41), Rumi suggests that all emotions have a message for us, that they’ve “been sent as a guide from beyond”:

This being human is a guest-house.

Every morning a new arrival.

A joy, a depression, a meanness,

some momentary awareness comes

as an unexpected visitor.

Welcome and entertain them all!

Even if they’re a crowd of sorrows,

who violently sweep your house

empty of its furniture,

still, treat each guest honorably.

He may be clearing you out

for some new delight.

The dark thought, the shame, the malice,

meet them at the door laughing,

and invite them in.

Be grateful for whoever comes,

because each has been sent

as a guide from beyond.

Well, heck, we’ve put so much effort into trying to look holy that we barely know what Rumi’s talking about here. Really, what would our friends think if we took this advice? They’d think we’d lost our spiritual vision. Good grief, think of the lectures we’d get if we just embraced our emotions, the whole lot of them, including “meanness” and “malice”. The chorus of correcting we’d get would send us scampering back to the safety of no-emotion land. Emotional one-upping is a popular sport in control-paradigm spirituality—an oxymoron to be sure. Even so, decades of experience in that oxymoronic world tells us Rumi must be wrong.

Or is he?

The more we listen to emotions, the less we feel the need to transcend them

Maybe the trouble is that we’ve forgotten how to listen to our emotion guides and learn from them. We’re too quick to push them away, to “transcend” them. Inviting “malice” or “meanness” in doesn’t mean acting from those emotions; it means listening to them and finding out why they’re there. What do they tell us about how we feel about ourselves, others, and what we’re doing with our lives? How did they get there, and what truth are they speaking? For example, what pain lies behind them?

In Creating Sanctuary, pioneering psychiatrist Sandra Bloom talks about the role of emotions in human interaction. When we’re with other people, she says, we resonate with their emotions. We get onto their emotional wavelength---“entrain with them” is a term for it. If we’re open to processing emotions and learning from them nonjudgmentally, we can connect with ourselves and others at deeper levels. We engage together in an emotion-guided path of transformation, and isn’t that part of the oneness that the New Age movement is looking for?

Come to think of it, can we really experience oneness (the “love” part of spirituality) without profound, no-holds-barred, no-faking-it self-acceptance (the “soul” part of spirituality)? And isn’t honoring and learning from our emotions central to unconditional self-acceptance? Don’t we have to work through all of who we are to be able to accept ourselves—to accept our own inner truth, whether or not we or others find that truth pleasant? In short, don’t we have to accept who we are before we can BE who we are?

The perils of “transcending emotions”

As far as we can tell from observing ourselves and others, it doesn’t actually work to just transcend our ego and emotions. That’s using spiritual talk to justify self-rejection, and there’s nothing spiritual, healing, or oneness-revealing about that. But even if we could transcend all our stuff, until we’ve experienced our ego and emotions and learned from them, we have no idea what to transcend. We don’t know where to begin. And if there’s a message from the Mystery hiding there for us, we won’t pick it up.

Trying to be somewhere we’re not, we’re in danger of being neither here nor there—neither enlightened nor connected with whoever we are. How many religious teachers (in both mainstream and alternative traditions) have made the news by transcending their emotions and then fleecing or sexually molesting their followers, for instance?

Nor is it a surprise to anyone that this happens. When we “transcend our emotions” in a dismissive, hot-air-balloon way, we lose our inner gyroscope, which means we have no feelings left to consult about what’s right for us on our spiritual path. Granted, there’s more to identifying the spiritual than feelings alone, but feelings, emotions, intuitions, inclinations, instincts—whatever we call them—can give us a sense of what’s meaningful and what’s not, even when our reason fails us.

From years of both ignoring and honoring her emotions—experiences which she freely shares—therapist and author Anne Wilson Schaef says that every time she trusts her head, she gets into trouble. But every time she trusts her gut, she has a sure guide for her spiritual path. The price you pay for ignoring your feelings, she says, is losing your inner guidance and then your soul. And each time we ignore emotion’s message from the Mystery, it gets more expensive to pick up the message later on.

From inner ice chards to in-the-trenches oneness

Finally, there’s the bottom line of oneness itself. How can we talk about wholeness and unity and then decide that emotions don’t fit? Let’s look at what’s happened spiritually to a culture that was asked to do just that—our own. The folks who study trauma and compulsive behavior tell us that when we’re asked to shut down our feelings, we stop knowing what we know and feeling what we feel.

Consider, for example, some of the emotions we’d typically like to ignore, things like anger or grief. Granted, they’re not much fun, but they are packed with information about what’s really going on with us in relation to our world. Something is askew or in pain, and our emotions want us to notice. They don’t want us to go on with “life as usual.” They want change and healing, and not for us alone but for all the systems that affect us. Our emotions are our sentinels.

If we ignore or dismiss them, Anne Schaef says, we don’t heed vital warnings. We don’t challenge patterns that are harmful to us and probably to others as well. We lose our sense of what’s real, meaningful, and significant in our personal and cultural lives. As we become more confused and ever more out of touch with what’s essential, the culture becomes more destructive. How’s that for a lose-lose situation?

To make matters worse, our emotions freeze around this kind of treatment. That’s because we’re told not to have emotions not when we’re swinging in a hammock but rather when we’re confronted with traumas. We’re already reeling, and on top of that, we have to stuff our emotions about what’s going on.

Usually some authority figure wants to maintain control—or at least the appearance of it—and our emotions throw a monkey wrench into that agenda. With nowhere to go, our emotions plunk themselves into our subconscious minds like chards of ice. When enough ice collects down there, the consciousness energy slows and won’t flow. To thaw the frozen feelings out, our subconscious pushes them up to our conscious minds for processing.

Having long since buried the feelings—we don’t want to go into the pain again—we push them back down. But the subconscious, like an overwhelmed warehouse clerk, pushes the feelings right back up, only this time with more emotional force or in a more highly charged moment (thank you very much).

This volley goes on until we experience one of two options. Either we feel so much emotion (frustration, anger, depression, whatever) that we finally admit that we have to do something different—that stuffing doesn’t work. Or, our persistent refusal to deal with what’s coming up emotionally forces our subconscious to stage high drama: we act out what happened when the feeling was frozen. We do to others what was done to us.

Either way, emotions bring us to some life-changing awareness. We realize where the feelings have gone, and that they have something important to say. All too often, they tell us about how our inner lives have been silenced, crippled, frozen, or otherwise disabled by controlling demands.

Granted, that’s a scary message, because it means we have to choose between our emotions and whoever or whatever is imposing the demands to be emotionless (see our related article entitled, “Impossible Choices”). If we try to conform to the emotion-numbing demands yet again, we lose both our souls and our freedom to live them. How, though, can this be a good spiritual choice, given that the opposite of spiritual expression on this planet is alienation, conformity, and slavery? To find our way spiritually, we need our emotions to guide us, even if it means we must fly in the face of the false grail of holy appearances.

That’s the irony of factoring feelings out of the spiritual formula: we leave out one of the best guides we have on our spiritual paths. It’s time to reintroduce emotions as respected players in our spiritual journey, to honor our emotional life as a “guest house” for visitors from the Mystery, and therefore to talk about “the oneness of mind, body, feelings, and spirit.” That way, no one gets left out, and isn’t that spiritual, too?