refusing to feel

The biggest spiritual blunder, in my opinion, is refusing to feel. It's also the most popular. It's the place where spiritual life and personal psychology reach a crossroads. If you want to advance in the first, you have to get real about the second.

What would it mean to get real about your personal psychology? It would mean coming clean. You don't have to admit any deep, dark secrets, which confirm your worst fear that you are somehow less acceptable than others. Quite the contrary. What you have to admit is that all people are the same, and you're undeniably one of them.

In terms of coming clean, this approach levels the playing field. It makes room for common sense. It's amazing we have to remind ourselves of it. After all, if there's anything a human being can feel, and you are a human being, isn't it pretty obvious when you think about it that you are going to feel it too? It couldn't be otherwise.

If you think you can get through this human life without feeling any of the harder things that all human beings feel, such as anger, sadness, despair, or fear, you are wrong. No, you are wrong. You will have to feel them just like everyone else does. The enlightened sage is not immune to this bad news, but fully open to it. Fully.

You can be too. It's simply a matter of practice. It's simply a matter of reversing any present tendencies against feeling whatever comes up for you. At all times. If you generally close off to anger, you have to admit you feel angry whenever it is happening. If it's sadness, be sad. If it's anxiety, feel the anxiety. You don't need to stew in these hard areas indulgently. The point is to be aware of them whenever they set in. That's enough. That's a lot.

Over time you'll discover they aren't as hard anymore. Their difficulty drops considerably as you respond to them repeatedly with awareness and acceptance. If you're also willing to feel them, their difficulty bottoms out and may eventually go away altogether. The hard feelings come, the hard feelings go. You don't have to inflate them with drama and lose yourself in it.

It turns out that's what the difficulty was in the first place. It wasn't the feeling itself, which is perfectly normal and natural and occurs universally. It was something else that was difficult. It was something else and on its behalf you were seriously risking precious resources of energy and intelligence. Those are the price tag for sustaining the refusal to feel. You have to fool yourself ceaselessly that you aren't really fooling yourself.