Musing on Engagement with Feeling

In Welcoming the Unwelcome, by Pema Chödrӧn, she writes, “If we can go beyond blame and other escapes and just feel the bleeding, raw meat quality of our vulnerability, we can enter a space where the best part of us comes out” (p. 30). There is a quality of life that can appear in us when we begin to consciously engage with our interior lives. Simply sitting with all of our thoughts and feelings opens up a deeper reality of our existence. By taking the time for ourselves, to be with our inner lives, the experience of the fact of our existence begins to illuminate consciousness. The difficulty comes when we realize that much of this interior space is dominated by a repression of negative and uncomfortable thoughts and feelings about ourselves.

This quote by Pema reminds me of a passage in Ecclesiastes, “Better sadness than laughter: a joyful heart may be concealed behind sad looks. The heart of the wise is in the house of mourning, the heart of fools in the house of gaiety” (7:3-4). I don’t take this passage to imply that a person should seek to avoid laughter and instead only desire sadness. Instead, I see in this the capacity to turn the mind’s gaze inward towards the subjective life, and to connect with our ability to feel.

Oftentimes, I find myself laughing because of a paradoxical feeling–a contradiction between what is happening outside and how I actually feel about a situation, event, or joke. Without attending to this inner contradiction, the laughter becomes an evasion, a way to disconnect from myself–to disappear. 

On the other hand, when I am intimately conscious of my sorrows without a drowning attachment to them, an inner feeling awakens within me. When that inner feeling awakens to sorrow, and with enough time it also awakens to sorrow’s opposite–joy. The passage is about establishing an intimate relationship with suffering, and when that conscious suffering is awakened, we can begin to engage in the suffering of others to our own capacity. By relating to others in a conscious way, the experience of joyful-being-togetherness becomes illuminated within the heart. 

Failure, grief, sorrow, pain, tension, and discomfort are all ways in which life beckons a human being back to themself. When the planning and expectations of the thinking mind give way to pitfalls and run into thick cement walls barring the way forward, when an unexpected death happens, a job interview goes south, a rejection letter to the university is received, the car breaks down, the economy goes into recession, a breaking up with a lover, or anything else of the sort, there is a great opportunity to stop, come back, and just experience the difficult thoughts, feelings, and tensions inside. Entropy is inevitable. Death, the only certainty and so a true friend. But in coming back to the awareness of ourselves in the moment, we can begin to live our lives vividly and whole-heartedly.