Emotions are an intrinsic and inevitable part of being human. You will experience a whole host of feelings, with some comfortable and others less so. When it comes to enjoying true emotional freedom and better health, you need to learn how to be at peace with how you feel.
Now, you may notice I didn’t just suggest that you must ‘get rid of your negative emotions’. This is because meditation goes beyond managing and controlling emotions to give you emotional freedom; whereby you can be in harmony with however you happen to feel.
Growing up, it is rare to be taught to feel emotions fully. Brought up by adults who were unwilling to experience the whole range of their own emotions. Usually told to tone down or turn away from the intense ones that are perceived as problematic.
Taught that some emotions were positive and others negative, it is common to be conditioned to avoid the ‘bad’ ones at all cost. This has lead to many growing up fearing their feelings, trying to constantly control them and believing that it is somehow wrong to feel bad sometimes.
Two years after I started meditating regularly I went to my spiritual teacher to tell him that I didn’t think the meditation was working. Knowing that it was only my expectations that needed some help, he enquired: ‘How do you know it isn’t working?’ I explained that I was still feeling anxiety. His response was nothing short of mind-blowing as he declared, ‘Peace is not the absence of emotions.’
At first, my mind couldn’t even compute the statement! Peace is not the absence of emotion? How could I experience peace, if I was feeling anxious? It made no sense at all. However, these seven words became one of the biggest things I’ve learnt during my meditation journey.
Without realizing, I’d picked up beliefs about what peace would feel like and what had to happen to experience it. Peace had always eluded me because I had assumed it was a state of no emotion. But because I was experiencing emotions all the time, I felt I was failing somehow at being peaceful. However, since exploring the possibility that peace is not the absence of emotions, I’ve discovered that I don’t need to make them go away before I can experience peace.
Learning how to be at peace with how you feel is achieved by being aware of the consciousness that’s observing your emotions. The more Self-aware you can be – i.e. aware of the aspect of yourself that is aware – the more you directly experience an unconditional calm that is perfect, whole and completely untouched by any temporary feeling.
Here why: Consciousness is aware of your emotions. Consciousness is already and always peaceful. Therefore, peace is aware of your emotions. Get it? I appreciate that you might have invested a huge amount of time, effort and money in the search and acquisition of ‘positive’ emotions. And now I am suggesting that you don’t need to wait a second more or spend a single penny extra because the peace you seek is aware of your mind.
Within you now, waiting to give you what you’ve always had. There is no need to wait for your negative emotions to go away before you can feel calm. So next time you meditate, I recommend playing with being confortable feeling uncomfortable. Doing so can completely change your relationship with your emotions and lead to true emotional freedom.
Written by Sandy Newbigging
Sandy C. Newbigging is the best-selling author of 5 books and the creator and award-winning trainer of the globally used Mind Detox therapy and Mind Calm meditation. Practitioners 15+ countries are trained in his methods and he’s been television in 30+ countries on channels including Discovery Health. Sandy’s meditation journey has included meditating day and night for 10 weeks on the Island of Patmos in Greece, followed by a further 14 weeks in the mountains of Mexico, and accidentally becoming a modern-day monk along the way! With countless hours of clinical Mind Detox therapy under his belt too, he has deep understanding of the inner workings of the mind, the hidden causes of common physical, emotional and life challenges, and is passionate about moving people from negative thining to beyond the mind altogether to experience present moment awareness. His new book, Mind Calm, is published by Hay House.
