Sunday, May 27, 2012

Understanding Strong Emotions

I received an inquiry from someone whose child had died many years ago.  Her feelings then were intense and overwhelming.  Recently she has been learning the Principles and wonders how she could have used the Principles to "manage" her thinking and feelings in order to "cope" better.  This is how I answer her:


I recognize how strong our emotions can be around loss, especially loss of a child.  All of us have had very strong emotions at times that seem to completely take us over.  The point of learning the Principles, as far as I can see, is not to learn how to manage and control our thinking and feelings.  And believe me, I tried very hard to do that for years when I first learned them.


When we have feelings and emotions there is no need for our egos to get in there and judge them as good or bad or right or wrong.  If we understand that every feeling is created from Universal Mind then we don't have to see it as our job to fix, control, or manage our feelings.  If we understand the nature of a feeling we know that it is being created perfectly from the Principles.  We realize that our feeling is simply a temporary experience created from our own thinking and is not caused from anything outside of us.  We can then realize that our feeling is not a permanent reality.


My favorite metaphor to illustrate this is the weather.  We don't delude ourselves into thinking we can control or stop the rain or wind.  We can understand it and factor it in so that we accommodate it in our lives.  And it is not as if ultimately the rain is bad and the sun is good.  The Principles are the creative force behind our human operating system.  They create our experiences and they are working perfectly.  We can trust the intelligence behind this system.


We have all kinds of feelings and emotions.  Understanding that they are always born from within by the creative energy behind life allows us to simply experience them as a little child does.  Children often experience strong emotions without complicating them with analysis and efforts to manage them.  Understanding allows feelings to go through us in a way that allows us to be resilient.  All of the feelings and emotions that you have been having are normal and natural.  These thoughts come into us before we have any say over them.  Understanding allows us to have these without resistance, struggle, guilt, or judgment.  Understanding leads us to thinking less about ourselves and our experiences.  Understanding leads us to greater resilience, and we become more comfortable and accepting of all of our emotions.


My heart goes out to everyone who goes through the loss of a loved one, and I hope that this is helpful.