Don’t Learn New Techniques, Unlearn Old Conditionings
You Already Know Much of What You Need to Know in this Life; It is Just Covered Over by Unskillful Conditionings
The Skill to Be Successfully Human is Thousands of Years Old
The modern homo sapiens model that is you today is at least 100,000 years old. You were born knowing how to do the ‘human’ thing. However, that micro-managing eight pounds of grey matter on your shoulders has many ideas of how to improve on the model due to information handed to you over a comparatively small number of years. Further, the teachings handed to you are often unexamined, and they are culturally bound and incredibly variable as such. Consider that if you had been born on the other side of the planet in a very different culture, you would likely have very different ideas on how to tinker with the idea of how to ‘human’ successfully. Further, the numerous conditioned ideas you have of ‘how to be human’ are not as solidly ‘true’ or trustworthy as you might believe. Finally, if you look at these imposed rules you have been taught that tinker with your natural mode of being, you may find that many of them actually interfere with your smooth functioning, mental health, serenity, and peace.
Ask yourself: Am I operating unconsciously as a slave to a socially imposed set of rules and strictures that I have never questioned, or perhaps even been fully aware of, and that do more harm (to both me and society) than good? To use a computer metaphor: Are there many commands operating in me that actually interfere with my originally sound and perfect software, and that make it harder to successfully move through life with serenity and peace?
Learning to Fear and Repress Our Emotions is the Most Damaging of All Our Conditionings
The most damaging of all our cultural conditionings are the beliefs that say that you feel ‘too much’, and that humans are too emotional, and that these feelings and emotions need to be ‘managed’ and ‘coped’ with in order to be a successful healthy human. It is as if we believe that we came into this world fundamentally flawed in our makeup from the very beginning, and we then believe that major restructuring is needed to do this human thing correctly. It is part of our Western cultural beliefs that our emotions are part of an inferior, original ‘animal’ nature, and as such are mostly negative in value and retrograde, and therefore these must be overcome and suppressed.
Privileging the Rational Intellect Over Emotional Intelligence and Intuition is an Historical Phenomenon…
…that needs to be seriously questioned. The Enlightenment in the West, and the Renaissances (both in the East and West at different times) and the development of mathematics and science along with the scientific method and the ascendant philosophical stances of Materialism and Positivism have all contributed to a bias toward seeing rational thought systems — channeled through mind and intellect — as providing the only way forward toward ‘true’ knowledge and ‘The Truth’. In many of these world views we have come to view emotions as an unnecessary animal hold-over that is inferior to rational intellectual thought; and in fact, we often see emotions as a barrier to understanding and clarity. We see emotions as an impediment to intelligence, rather than an important part of intelligence itself. We therefore have been taught that emotions need to be reined in, controlled, and blunted as much as possible.
Much of Our Intelligence is Non-Rational, or A-Rational
First, what part of our intelligence is rational? The thinking, logical rational mind located primarily in the head is a particular type of intelligence that is well suited, as a tool, to pragmatically create fictional but useful maps and models of world, in order to navigate life. These maps and models are fictional in the sense that all representations are — they boil the world and events down into simplistic terms that are easier to work with, but in the simplification they necessarily discard large pieces of data that are part of the reality the model represents. However, while these models are incomplete representations, they are rational in the sense that they have discreet, verifiable elements that we can identify and agree on, and that can be counted. Rational intelligence is the world of linear logical reasoning (like math for example). We can find flaws in logical arguments, or disagree with the data plugged into logical arguments, but rational arguments suggest the possibility of argument and finding possible absolute answers.
Now, what part of our intelligence is non-rational or a-rational? First off, let’s be clear: Non-rational or a-rational do not mean irrational. A-rational means something may well be valid and sensible, but that this item exists outside the realm of rational logic. With Non-Rational or A-Rational items in our intelligence, any elements in discussion have to be merely accepted and respected at face-value, and cannot be necessarily argued properly as ‘correct’ or ‘wrong’ elements for a logical argument. Consider values, preferences, wants, and desires, for example. What you value and want and desire in life are all important and valid concerns, but they are not ‘rational’ in the sense that you must or could prove them in any logical way. If you like broccoli, you like broccoli. There is not a rational reason…you just do. If you like looking at your lover’s face, you just do, there is no rational reason. Your liking of their face is not rational or irrational, it is a-rational. Our judgments of what is the good is an important value, but it is a-rational. To be clear, as a society we may have many important discussions as to what the ‘good’ is in our world, but these are a-rational arguments at their core, no matter how important and meaningful. (In this example, the good must be simply identified and accepted by agreement in a community, it can not be properly argued logically).
This may seem like a mere tangential philosophical discussion, but it is of grave importance, because it leads us to understand that a great deal of our intelligence that is important has a special place of origin in our body, and if we don’t know how to be in our bodies, we are cut off from a great deal of our intelligence. The important parts of our experience of life that are non-rational or a-rational can be developed and understood by the intelligence of the body at the heart and gut level. This is why it is important for our metal health for us to be grounded and embodied. The heart and gut (the body below the neck for simplicity’s sake) are the sites of intelligences that understand these aspects of experience that are a-rational. To restate what is not obvious to most of us because of our conditioning in this culture: Our personal values, and desires and wants are not located in the logical rational mind in the head, but will be found more in the heart and gut in the body. To return to the above example of the good, one could reasonably suggest that a community will come to an easy consensus that kindness and empathy are commonly shared values that all can relate to if members search the intelligence of their hearts (body).
Emotions Are Intelligence — Our Three Forms of Intelligence
In truth, we indeed have roughly three forms of intelligence in our bodies, and two of these are beyond the mere rational-thought-intellect of the mind (in the head). Emotional intelligence and Intuition are two forms of natural intelligence that we use when we are at our most fully intelligent and creative and aware. Unfortunately, we are taught to suppress, repress and negate these other two forms of intelligence at so many times in our lives. Below I briefly mention in general outline some properties of these three types of intelligence. (They deserve more detailed exploration and elucidation, and for that see other articles by me on these topics).
1) Head/Thinking Mind — Consider the head as the location of linear, logical, Rational Intelligence. This is also where your self-talk and narratives (both conscious and unconscious) live predominantly. Think of the head and its mode of intelligence as capable of approaching life as if it was a set of discreet, straight-forward math problems with discreet, absolute answers. Rational thought is a major aspect of this type of intelligence.
2) Heart/Emotional Intelligence — Consider the Chest (‘Heart Chakra’ in some Eastern body typologies) as the general location of much of our Emotional Intelligence. It is worth noting, for example, that many human cultures through time and space have located the human heart as the seat of emotions like love, compassion and empathy.
3) Belly/Gut/Intuition — The belly or gut (‘Sacral Chakra’ in some Eastern body typologies) is the site of Intuitive Intelligence. Most of us have some personal, lived identification with what intuition means for them. It is a type of intelligence that is holistic, creative/imaginative, speculative and a-rational. It worth noting that cross-culturally, there are many ways of saying that “I had a gut feeling about it”.
The above section for this article is necessarily brief and cursory, but note primarily that these two other forms of neglected intelligence lie within the body, below the neck, and what is germane to this discussion is that we have been conditioned to fear locating our awareness in our bodies where these intelligences operate. We have been taught to park the vast majority of our awareness/consciousness up in our heads with our rational thought, in our thinking mind. Therefore, the conditioning to be overcome is the fear of being embodied and inhabiting those parts of our bodies where emotional intelligence and intuition reside and operate.
Pain is Inevitable, Suffering is Optional
This is an old aphorism heard in many Humanist Psychology and Buddhist Psychology circles. Pain is inevitable, suffering is optional. Unfortunately, the first Buddha’s (Siddhartha) words on this matter are often mis-translated in English. He did not say ‘Life is suffering’ as is often mis-quoted in English translation. He did say that life has inevitable pain. At length his teachings pointed out that suffering came from not accepting, or attempting to run from the inevitable pain that does come in life. In short, he intimated that you will have pain, but you need not have inordinate amounts of suffering. And he certainly never taught that life is nothing but pain (or suffering).
Yet, we live in a culture that teaches us to run towards happiness and away from sadness. This is a fruitless exercise because happiness and sadness are two sides of the same coin. They define each other. Consider that you would not know happiness if you were never sad. To run from sadness is to also ultimately to run from your happiness and just invite suffering and disaffection. We become a dog chasing its own tail, wondering why we can never quite catch this thing just always barely out of reach.
It is nice to be sated by food because we know what it is to feel hungry. It is nice to be warm and dry because we know what it is to be cold and wet. It is wonderful to be calm and relaxed because we know what it is to have some anxiety and feel unsettled. Radical acceptance of all that we feel is the answer. We drop the conditioned belief that half of our emotions and experiences are ‘bad” and should be avoided at all costs. When we stop the running from half our humanity we discover states of being that we have forgotten from childhood.
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The forgotten states that are possible are a bedrock foundation of peace and serenity that lies untouched underneath the above ever-shifting tide of happiness and sadness. We find that underneath the roller-coaster wave of Happy-Sad is a foundational bedrock foundation of peace and serenity.
We find ourselves understanding that sometimes: “Today I am sad and that is ok.” Or at other times: “Today I am happy, and that is ok.” Neither situation rocks our world foundationally anymore or feels as dire as it might have in the past.
Big Unwieldy Emotions Come from Not Accepting their Beginning Emotional Appearance
Nobody overly ‘enjoys’ anxiety or sadness as it first appears, but if one can accept them as inevitable parts of the human experience, and allow them to be truly experienced as they appear physically, phenomenologically in the body, then they resolve themselves as they move through us as they normally are meant to. However, since we are taught to fear even the beginning appearance of these feelings, we run to our heads/minds to attempt an escape by intellectualizing about how we don’t ‘like’ them. By being in our heads talking about emotions, we don’t have to be in our bodies feeling emotions. If it is anxiety, we are then spiraling up into an anxiety of anxiety, and this merely increases our anxiety. If it is sadness, we begin to get sadder about being sad, and increase this ‘sad’ into a possible depression.
The conditioning to drop is the reflexive move to always think about emotions (moving consciousness up into the head all the time), and the more skillful solution is re-learning to keep more consciousness in the body when emotions arise. In skillful practice this will ultimately mean keeping more of my awareness in my body all the time, as emotions are arising all the time throughout any day.
Acceptance Over ‘Coping’ or ‘Managing’ Emotions
When a client comes to me and tells me they are having trouble ‘coping’ with their emotions, I will often ask them: “How are you coping with having a left arm?” Of course, this brings a curious look and often a dawn of awareness as to why I have said this odd thing. You are supposed to have a left arm. You are also supposed to have emotions. And yet, from a very young age we are taught that emotions are problematic and unusual and something to be feared and repressed, and certainly not something to easily express outwardly, publicly, or even inwardly to yourself. This is where all the problems begin.
Because you believe that it is unusual to have emotions, you act within your psyche as if something problematic and frightening is happening — something to be fearful or anxious about — and so begins an upward spiral of anxiety/fear as you run to your head to get away from the physical, phenomenological experience of emotions in your body. Now while in your head as you perceive this emotional experience as an attack from outside against yourself, your mind looks for some outside source for this attack. Further, since the secondary emotion of anger is more culturally acceptable than the primary emotion of anxiety/fear (that underlies the anger), you are likely to rest in anger (or various flavors such as annoyance, grumpiness, peevishness, etc.). This is all because you were taught to not feel your anxiety/fear (or other perceived ‘problematic emotions’ like sadness). Acceptance is what is needed.
Narrow, Culturally Acceptable Places for Emotions
Do you ever listen to sad love songs? Or watch movies that you know will be sad? Why is this so, when in your regular day to day life you run from the feeling of sadness when it appears? Do you watch movies that are full of tension and fearful situations? Or do you only watch movies where all characters are smiling and happy all the time and no one is ever unhappy or sad or anxious or in fearful situations? Notice this.
In the arts we have created a culturally acceptable box where you are allowed to vicariously imagine into others’ lives and thus personally experience being human and have your own full range of emotions in the moment. But your conditioning has been such that in your ‘regular’ life you are expected to be rather flat and unemotional and strictly rational (head/intellect) all the time. Does this strike anyone as healthy? Notice that you gravitate towards having these emotional experiences through the arts. Some large part of you knows that you need to feel your feelings.
Children Come into the World Not Knowing that they are ‘Supposed to Fear their Emotions’
Little Tommy or Janey, running around on the playground, trip and fall and skin their knee on the ground. They scream bloody murder and cry for a few moments, freely feeling their pain in an uninhibited fashion. After a few moments, the sniveling stops as they examine the knee and see that they are not terribly damaged. In another few moments they are likely up and about and running around and laughing with their friends again. These children have yet to be fully conditioned to fear their feelings.
We teach our children that ‘big boys don’t cry’ (or big girls). Yet, these outwardly innocent teachings are adults conditioning the children to fear feeling their emotions fully; note that otherwise, if they were left unhindered, they would simply feel and move through them. It is a subtle training to repress emotion which therefore causes it to be stored and stuck in the body. It is worth noting, that since adults are often uncomfortable with their own emotions through their own conditionings, a crying or emotional child in their vicinity will cause the adult to resonate like a tuning fork and remind them (unconsciously) of their own trapped emotions, causing discomfort and anxiety, and they therefore may be all the more inclined to stop the child from feeling its feelings partially because of their own learned discomfort.
Stop Running to Your Head to Avoid Feeling Your Emotions in Your Body
Let us look at anxiety as an example of one emotion, to understand how we unskillfully amplify it by avoiding it. When anxiety first appears in the body, either belly or chest, it is a signal that something in the world needs us to attenuate to it. It is a warning of a potential problem outside of us the organism. This initial ‘jolt’ of attention is not in itself uncomfortable as it first appears — think of it as a mere ‘startle’ response. Wake up. Pay attention. If we were not conditioned to fear anxiety as it first appears, we would merely look around and see if something needs our attention. But since we are so conditioned to fear this emotion, when it first appears we very quickly run to our heads to get away from it physically in our body. In the head we start a spinning dialogue (unconscious) of how much we don’t like this emotion. We now start an upward building spiral of anxiety about anxiety. This upward spiral can build in intensity, and can even culminate in a panic attack if taken far enough. What is really needed alternately, is the ability to just be with the initial physical experience of anxiety as it first appears in the body. This is all our natural being wants. If this emotion is felt experientially, physically, phenomenologically, it moves through us and resolves and dissipates.
The same can be said of other emotions that we have been taught to fear, like sadness for example. We learn to be sad about being sad. In other words, when sadness appears, as it should throughout any day in any life, we often don’t feel the initial emotion fully, but run from it, up into our heads, and begin asking ‘Why am I sad?’ The best real answer should be ‘Because I am human and some things in life elicit that natural response.’ Instead, our conditioned fearful movement is to run to the head to ask the question ‘Why am I sad?’ with the implicit believed subtext: ‘I shouldn’t be sad…it is bad to be sad…I must not be sad…sad is not good…’. Further, by asking this question I can be in my head instead of in my body with this feared emotion of sad. Again, the healthy alternative is to return to the body and simply feel what sad feels like completely, physically, experientially. Sad is an experience you are having sometimes. It is not a problem, unless you turn it into one. Embrace it, accept it, and resolve it.
Feeling Your Emotions is Not the Same as Talking or Intellectualizing About Them
Unfortunately, psychology in the twentieth and twenty-first century has often unwittingly helped people get trapped in intellectualizing about their emotions, rather than feeling them directly and completely. Conversing about ‘why’ you feel some way is not the same as actually feeling that emotion. Further complicating things is the fact that intellectualizing about how outside people/forces are causing you to feel a certain way is building a belief system that robs one of agency as it creates a sense that outside forces actively, directly cause one’s emotions. This is never true. We do have emotional responses to the world, but we create those responses within ourselves. They do not happen at us.
Somatic Solutions
By now I hope I have made a convincing case that so many of our problems around mental health and emotional discomfort are caused by a learned non-acceptance of our emotional states. Further, I hope it has become clear that so much of this acceptance problem is solved by learning to reinhabit our bodies with our awareness. While some of what is discussed here may sometimes sound a bit mystical, strange, or too “wu wu” at times, this work has basis in science as you know it, and your consciousness/attention/awareness is an energy that you do move around in your body. In fact, perhaps your greatest source of agency in your life is where you direct your conscious attention/consciousness/awareness. So, moving your consciousness back into your body in order to accept your emotions is not as challenging as you (your head) might think.
How do I learn to inhabit my body with my awareness more? Again, this is easier than you’d think; and I’m certain you already do it in many activities. Let’s start with some ways you ask yourself to inhabit your body and vacate your head in order to relax and reduce suffering (by slowing the mind), but don’t realize that that is why you choose this activity: Taking a hot shower or bath. Taking a long walk. Eating a snack (when you’re not really hungry). Engaging in physical intimacy with another or yourself. Calmly engaging in a practice that engages our attention and hands and body in the fulfillment of some tasks, like knitting, gardening, model building, or any type of arts and crafting, etc.. Each of these cause you to move more of your awareness into your body, and since your awareness/consciousness is a finite energy, much of your consciousness drains out of your head to accomplish your task. We then experience a lessening of the anxiety and suffering that had been caused by a spinning mind that was attempting to avoid the feeling of our emotions.
More proactively, we can take up formal practices that focus on ways to move our awareness to our bodies in that moment of practice, and that further help us to keep our center of awareness located near our core throughout the day outside these practices. Here I am speaking of things like belly-breathing meditations, and simple traditional Hatha Yoga practices.
Conclusion
If what I have argued here makes some sense to you, I would suggest it is because it resonates with truths that you came into the world knowing, and that a large part of you would like to accept again a part of you that you were taught to reject and repress. If this makes sense at this time, then you have enough intellectual ‘buy-in’ from the head to see that the head and its intelligence is not everything. You have a beginning that says you now have some allowed wiggle room from the mind(head) to travel south from the mind and see what other vast intelligence awaits you in your body. The access to this intelligence is not intellectual, but experiential and felt physically — so try some belly-breathing, some meditation, some yoga, some nature walks with your senses alive, and see what opens up.
